Behold Things Beautiful Read online

  The bus rolled past his stop, obliging Gabriel to jump to the curb, an arabesque from the bottom step of the moving bus that went off beautifully. He didn’t catch his briefcase on the railing, didn’t stumble into pedestrians on the sidewalk in the plume of black exhaust. He took the success of his personal leap of faith as an omen, the only disappointment being the absence of witnesses. On the days he stumbled or tripped, there was always an audience.

  Gabriel zigzagged through traffic on the avenue and hurried towards the cemetery gates. Breakfast at La Loca had made him late. He was trying not to eat there every day but his mornings still began with a list of promises-to-self: eat breakfast at home, arrive at the cemetery on time, go to kick-boxing classes at the gym twice a week. And if he could only quit smoking, cut back on the drinking and find a woman to make him forget about Aude…the list went on and on.

  As he rounded the gravel road, he spotted Castillo carrying something into the office. Outside the building was a fair-haired guy in a white shirt, tie flipped over his shoulder. Someone about a burial, he assumed, but then he noticed the black convertible, a dead giveaway. Gabriel’s first impulse was to turn back and hide among the pine trees flanking the gravel road. But Ernesto spotted him and came running.

  Gabriel forced himself to trudge up the hill. It was the worst possible way to start a day. He’d much prefer a burial.

  “Gabi!” The guy lunged in for a rib-crunching abrazo. “How long’s it been?”

  Gabriel stepped back and pretended to contemplate the question. He knew precisely the last time he’d seen Ernesto. November 1998. Gabriel had gone to the Pindalo house for help and this idiot had shrugged him off. “A while, I guess.”

  “You look well, in shape, a little less weight. How’s your mother?”

  “Surviving.” The false politeness prompted vicious fantasies. Gabriel imagined delivering two deft blows, a jab on the nose, uppercut to the chin, the crunching sound of the neck as the guy’s head jerked back on impact.

  Castillo started up the tractor for his morning rounds of the cemetery grounds. Ernesto waited for the tractor to pull away. “I’ve brought you some documents. For safe-keeping until Thursday.” He smoothed his tie down.

  “There’s no way — ”

  “You won’t believe it, Gabi. I’ve done something right. You can trust me, I swear. Keep the box locked in your office and don’t tell anyone.” Then he jumped into the car and drove off, the tires churning up pebbles and dust.

  There was something off-kilter about Ernesto but Gabriel couldn’t pinpoint what it was. He entered the building, made for his office down the hall. The morning sun slid sideways through the windows onto the mahogany desk. In making room for the box on the corner, Castillo had carefully pushed aside papers Gabriel had neglected to put away yesterday. More importantly, Castillo knew enough not to let Ernesto into the office. Never trust a Pindalo, a rule that ought to be entrenched in Luscano’s constitution. No hope of that.

  Gabriel opened the box. Inside, a jumble of folders, yellowed papers sliding out, the letterheads glaring at him. Policía federal. Ejército de Luscano. Servicio militar. A memo stamped “secret” from the office of General Galtí. He dragged one of the visitor’s chairs to the door and jammed it under the knob. Then he dumped the files onto his desk.

  The cathedral bells chimed for noonday mass. Hannelore covered her ears. “Infernal.” Her green eyes blinked until the ringing stopped then she grasped Alma’s forearm. “Tell the truth, daughter, will it be heaven or hell for me?”

  Alma pondered the question, if only to ease that grip on her arm. Outside the bedroom window, the sky lured bright and clear. “El Cielo es nada más que el cielo,” came to her in the crisp cadence of her mother’s former voice. “Didn’t you always say heaven is nothing but the sky?”

  “I never cared about what happens after death.” Hannelore wheezed. “But it matters now.”

  “Maybe it’s just a long sleep. The lights go out and — ”

  “The curtain falls, the drama ceases. I used to believe in Sartre. ‘L’enfer, c’est les autres.’ Hell isn’t other people, it’s oneself. And I’m receding from that, all my certainties called into question, the circle of my life getting smaller and whatever’s waiting for me looming larger.”

  “A peaceful calm? Nothingness?” Alma dug deep. “‘Je veux choisir mon enfer.’”

  “Inès in ‘Huis Clos.’ Well done. But Alma, we choose how we live, not how we die and what happens after. It makes me nervous, the prospect of dying…will anyone else be there, or will it just be me? That’s the worst scenario. Like going to a party and you don’t know who else, if anyone, is invited. And you know how I used to love parties…”

  The alarm clock on the night table ticked off the seconds in loud lurches. Before leaving for the market, Xenia had said, “Be patient, m’hija. Time goes very slowly with the very young and the infirm.” The clock stood among pill bottles, a water glass, photographs in tarnished silver frames; the absence of books most telling of Hannelore’s condition. Deprived of books, what else was there? Music. “What about Papa? Don’t you think he’ll be waiting for you if heaven exists?”

  “Really, Alma. You think your father’s gained access to paradise? That he bides his time playing his violin for the dead in his parents’ Russian village like some figure in a Chagall?”

  Alma picked up a silver frame with the wedding photograph taken outside a church in Buenos Aires. “Look at this! His face, that’s how he always looked at you.” Her father’s expression almost delirious, his hair on end and that look of surprise as if he’d never imagined marrying a woman as beautiful as the one in his arms.

  But Hannelore was off on another track. “What are the criteria for entry to heaven? As lapsed Catholics, we’d all fail. Yes, we were baptized, showed up for mass at Christmas, weddings, the odd funeral. But the dogma never made any sense to me and the priests, a bunch of hypocrites cowing the faithful with fear! Except for a few exceptions who adhere to liberation theology, the rest are co-conspirators delivering superstitious nonsense. Your father, in his quieter way, claimed music as his faith and was rewarded by an easy death, while my life progressed into agnosticism and I’m paying for it now with this slow disintegration. On theological grounds, the only person in this household who’d pass the test is Xenia.”

  “She’s always been religious. I remember when — ”

  “During that terrible time, Xenia went to the cathedral every day. Irony of ironies, she went to that place to light a candle and pray for you. At night she burned those weird herbs in her room while chanting some Bolivian mumbo-jumbo. Your father and I, our nerves were shot, and there was Xenia, carrying on with her prayers and incantations.”

  “It’s her way of coping. She — ”

  “You think her rituals saved you? Please.”

  “I meant that her hardships — ”

  “I knew you’d defend her.”

  “— strengthened Xenia’s faith.”

  “To live is to suffer, Alma. You know that. And suffering has a way of sorting people into those who say I survived, there must be a god, some greater good that looked out for me. But I say no God would allow such suffering: there’s no mercy in imagining what they did to you. God did not save you and neither did Xenia.” Hannelore coughed. “Still, if a passport to heaven…requires a life of goodness, I agree that Xenia qualifies. The criteria…being honest, charitable, not hurting others, respecting nature and human beings…loyalty, that’s a big one. Your father, was he faithful to me at all times during our thirty-three years together? He was so easily charmed, there was an innocence to him. I forgave him. He always returned home, and he — ”

  “What about you? You flirted with all my friends.”

  “Like Flaco? Who could resist him? I never understood why you two didn’t…well, maybe you did and I never noticed. The point is, yes, I loved
men but I never acted on my impulses. I couldn’t have looked you in the eye. Such an observant child. But you didn’t see that when your father returned from his concert tours with gifts, jewellery for me, books for you, he was atoning.

  “Alma, you’re old enough to see things clearly now. I told you this many times on the phone: don’t be blind, learn to see your past with clarity. I told you to see a therapist and you promised me you did. But I see you now and it’s obvious you have put a wall up around yourself. Alma, don’t gloss over things. You’ll waste your life in a fog like your father did…music saved him and there’s beauty in that. But dead, he’s just a granite etching at the Cementerio Real.”

  “Are you saying he’s not in heaven?”

  “I’m saying that if he’s in heaven, I’m going there too.” Hannelore closed her eyes. “Let me sleep.”

  Alma left the bedroom and went down the hallway to the courtyard. The door slid open with rusty resistance. She dragged a wicker chair from the corner, whacked dust and dry leaves off the cushion and sat down, her sneakers resting on a low table. Overhead a bird cawed, acá, acá, as if intent on marking the house with its ample wingspan, ‘here, here’ is the next destination. She watched the circling bird and tried to make sense of Hannelore. The taking stock was new, but her mother had always railed. An article on longevity Alma had once read maintained that feistiness was the one common feature of people who’d lived for more than a century. Her conclusion, that Hannelore would live another twenty-five years, was negated by the sight of her. It struck Alma that her mother wanted to hear that she’d been good as a mother, a wife, a human being. Like Flaco yesterday at La Loca, she was seeking absolution.

  Alma tried to escape into the practical, mentally listing all that she needed to do in Luscano. Visit Roma at the bookstore, register at the Canadian consulate, check out the university library for her Agustini research. She kept circling back to her mother’s revelations. What difference did her father’s philandering make at this point? She suspected a malicious intent, Hannelore’s misguided revenge for Alma’s long absence and jealousy over Xenia. It was true that Alma worried for Xenia. She was old, too, and here in this courtyard there were signs of neglect. Hibiscus plants wilted in their clay pots, the long table was coated with dust, the chairs stacked in the corner were covered in leaves and dirt. It had been years since her parents had thrown one of their parties lit by shimmering lamps on the stucco walls, Eugen playing his violin, Hannelore swirling among the musicians and guests. Even more years had passed since the scandal erupted over one of the plays staged in this courtyard.

  During her summer holidays, when she was ten, Alma had written “Todos Santos,” distilled from Xenia’s bedtime stories about her pueblo. Act One: the wedding and fiesta in which Alma’s character, more than loosely based on Xenia, marries Mauricio, played by a giggly neighbourhood kid. Act Two: the action moves from the town square to a house, Alma depicting Xenia’s dead babies by burying dolls in a clay pot, a humble cemetery of stick crosses. In her deepest misery, the outlaws arrive. Doctor Reveres Guevara and his guerrillas, including Roma, deliver hope to Cochabamba province, hiding by day, teaching the poor at night. Flaco in a red beret, fourteen years old and taller than the rest of the cast, wearing a real holster and gun, plays Che brilliantly until his execution by Bolivian federales, two kids with American flags sewn onto their shirts. Act Three: inspired by Che’s teachings, Mauricio and his co-workers stage a strike to denounce conditions in the tin mine but Mauricio dies in an accident attributable to the indifference of corporate owners, chortling as stage hands toss fistfuls of dirt and stones onto his writhing back. The grand finale, Alma’s solo scene as she packs her bag to escape further tragedy in Todos Santos for salvation in Luscano. Applause to Flaco shouting, “¡Hasta la victoria siempre!” into the sky above the courtyard.

  A few neighbours in the audience took issue with the glorification of a communist. So the true drama testing Hannelore’s courage lay in the repercussions that October 1977, ten years after the real Che was killed in Bolivia. Hannelore was accused of corrupting Barrio Norte youth, and Eugen faced threats of being blackballed from Luscano’s symphony. Hannelore took on the oligarchy and triumphed because she was beautiful, articulate and feared, because she spoke seven languages and without her tutoring, too many Barrio Norte students would have failed their baccalaureate. Flaco’s grandmother was the first to capitulate, with a precedent-setting invitation to a Sunday asado, and the others followed suit, caving like sandcastles in a rising tide.

  I should have learned from all that, Alma thought, but at ten, what she’d taken from the experience was that casting Flaco in a play guaranteed he’d steal the spotlight and that the Barrio Norte oligarchy could be taken on with impunity. Both absolutes, the first a truth, the second, a fallacy with one exception: Hannelore could take on anyone.

  When Xenia returned from the market, Alma helped her prepare the promised lunch of humitas. They shucked corn, chopped spicy peppers and onions. Xenia hummed a Bolivian folk song to the rhythm of her knife scraping kernels from the cobs. Then she stirred grated cheese and milk to make a paste with the vegetables. She laid out the husks, filling them with handfuls of the paste, and showed Alma how to fold them like envelopes and tie a twisted strand of husk around each humita. “In Todos Santos, we baked them over a wood fire. M’hija, when God takes your mother, I’m going back to where the humitas taste right, made from the corn raised by my nephews, grown men I’ve never met.”

  “You can stay here, where you’ve lived for…” Alma wanted to say, “as long as I’ve been alive” but this was untrue. After a revolving door of muchachas, Hannelore had settled on Xenia when Alma was almost two.

  “This has been a good home, but I want to die where I was born and be buried with my children.” Then she instructed Alma to set the table in the dining room and open a bottle of wine. “Your mother wants a fiesta.”

  The three women occupied one end of the dining room table. Hannelore, listing in her chair, jabbed at the humitas, then pushed her plate away. “Really, Xenia, what were you thinking? They’re far too spicy.” She drank her wine greedily. When Alma suggested the alcohol would interfere with her medication, Hannelore laughed her off. “You think wine will kill me? Put some music on.” Alma found a 1974 recording of the Luscano Symphony Orchestra and placed it on the turntable. Paganini’s Cantabile filled the dining room and there was consolation in the scratchy strains of her father’s violin accompanied by guitars.

  After the meal, Hannelore returned to her armchair in the living room. Alma sat cross-legged on the sofa, leafing through El Día. She recited the headlines to her mother. Local stories on traffic deaths, flooding from Monday’s heavy rains, the shipping news, and the season’s bullfighting schedule. Alma stopped at an article on Iraq. “Luscano’s finest stationed in Basra.”

  “They can stay there as far as I’m concerned,” Hannelore huffed.

  The article described Luscano’s contribution to the “coalition of the willing,” strangely translated as El club de los voluntarios, and the platoon of soldiers, tanks and a frigate dispatched to the region. A photo depicted the soldiers waving the blue and red flag atop a tank. “Our boys are used to the heat,” some commander was quoted as boasting. He did not mention their lack of familiarity with actual combat, Alma was about to point out, when brakes squealed on the street outside. A vehicle door slammed shut. Heavy footsteps approached through the front gate, up the lane and stairs. The doorbell chimed.

  “Me voy,” Xenia called from the kitchen.

  Alma stopped herself from shouting “Don’t go!” and turned to peer out the window. A white van, obscured by iron fencing, idled on the street. She went to the front door, where a man handed Xenia a bouquet of flowers and left.

  Xenia unwrapped the cellophane and brought the white roses to the living room. “Your mother has a secret admirer.”

  Hannelore sniffed
the buds. “Divine! Quickly, Xenia, put them in a vase. Who knows how long they’ve been in sitting in the delivery truck.”

  “You don’t know who sent them?” Alma asked.

  “I have my suspicions. You were afraid just now, weren’t — ”

  “Who do you think he is?”

  “Are you surprised, a woman my age and in this condition? Well, let me tell you, daughter, love is possible anytime, anyplace and usually happens when you least expect it. So never give up. On men, I mean.”

  Alma forced a laugh. She sat down and picked up the newspaper.

  “But seriously, are you still fearful? Your father used to jump every time the doorbell rang. ‘Eugen, don’t do that,’ I’d tell him, ‘it scares me to hell and back.’ They don’t bother with a doorbell. Xenia said they banged on the door that night. You can still see the dents in the wood!”

  The newspaper slid to the floor as Alma rose. She went to the entrance and opened the front door. The wood was scratched and weathered. How could a fist dent this door? They didn’t have a crowbar, guns surely, although they never brandished them. Xenia had opened the door to the persistent pounding, then tried to block their entry, the tiny woman no match for the two thugs. She returned to the living room. “No dents, Hannelore.”

  “I meant it figuratively.”

  “You were embellishing. Don’t you think it was bad enough?”

  “Worse than bad, a nightmare. We shouldn’t have been out that night, Alma. We thought we’d lost you. Whenever I see Patrón Pindalo, I never fail to thank him.”

  “Who?”

  “That night when we came home, I contacted everyone I knew, called in all my favours. I begged. Patrón Pindalo, when I finally got hold of him, promised to help.”

  The facts of her release rearranged themselves. Alma had always assumed bribery but the question remained, with what? Her parents’ savings had never amounted to much. “Isn’t he a banker?”