Behold Things Beautiful Read online

  “So what do you consider yourself now, Canadian or Luscanan?”

  “Both.” Or should she have answered, neither? Alma hovered in that in-between state. She felt affection for the refuge Canada had provided, but over the distance of time and geography, she’d come to identify with Latin America. Many of her students were born to parents from Peru, Ecuador and Colombia as well as El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala. Teaching them, she’d witnessed their transformation, pride edging out immigrant embarrassment as they learned the literature of their roots. She tried to convey to Roma how Canada’s gaze was directed to the U.S., followed by Europe, the Middle East and Asia, and how insignificantly Latin America figured in people’s minds. “They notice my accent in English or French and ask where I’m from. When I answer, their attention drifts or they say, ‘ah, you must speak Portuguese.’ It’s as if Luscano is an imaginary country I created in a dream world.”

  Roma laughed. “If they only knew!”

  To some extent, Luscano had become illusory during her absence. Aside from the weekly phone calls with Hannelore, not much had tangibly connected her to Luscano. The place largely existed in her mind, occasionally Neverlandian in the context of her childhood memories, mostly threatening, an enclosure with the trappings of conspiracy. It was an effort, almost dizzying, trying to match the hallucinatory country to the one her senses now perceived, to reconcile memory with truth, two overlapping circles edging closer.

  They passed the naval officers’ club, which had been transformed to a boutique hotel with its name, Hotel Colonial, displayed in neon over the arched entrance. Alma remembered skirting the building every time she’d walked to the old market. A plaque on the hotel wall mentioned its history but did not refer to the dirty deeds hatched inside. Two porteros in blue uniforms with brass buttons and epaulets leaned against a luggage rack, sharing a smoke. The older one, eighteen at most, flicked ashes off his blue sleeve and grinned as the younger one whistled at the two women. Roma turned back. “In your wildest, chico.” To Alma she said, “Better to be working as a hotel porter than a recruit in a boot camp.”

  They crossed the Plaza de los Marineros, walking around the sculpture of sailors brandishing swords. A few skateboarders huddled on the steps of the monument, the smell of marijuana drifting across the plaza. This would have been unthinkable during the junta, when possession of half a joint was enough to solicit a beating, or worse, a night in a cell. “Take a deep breath,” Roma said. “It’ll steady you for the party.” And for Flaco’s sake, Alma did, consciously invoking her Montréal demeanour, self-effacing, neutral and light.

  Inside El Barco, Alma was kissed and embraced by people she vaguely recognized, as if they’d been waiting for her arrival. There was nothing livelier than a Luscanan party, even early on when the heated chaos was fresh with possibility. A DJ played “Los Desaparecidos,” the heavy bass beat vibrating the wooden floor, as guests milled around a long table. The restaurant’s marine decor extended to this separate room with photographs of the old port hanging alongside fake brass portholes and nets strung from the ceiling among buoys and wooden traps.

  Waiters dressed in striped shirts offered trays of empanadas. Roma handed Alma a glass of wine and led her to a group of musicians. The conversation wasn’t limited to formalities of self-identification or tepid exchanges. From Emilio Rodriguez, a violin student of her father’s, Alma learned that Luscano’s symphony orchestra had survived. They didn’t tour anymore, no money for it, but the OSL played a season every year in the concert hall and in smaller venues in the countryside. She told Emilio about her father’s composition without revealing it had been inspired from her poem. “I play piano but the piece needs a violin.” Emilio immediately offered to accompany her. “Call me at the faculty. We’ll schedule some piano time in the studio.” On her second glass of wine, Alma encountered professors from the university who’d heard that she was planning a book on Agustini. They promised her names of contacts in the Uruguayan cultural institute and the national library where the poet’s writings and letters were preserved. Later a young woman approached, introducing herself as Aurora. Attractive but sullen in a strapless green dress, it took Alma a moment to realize that she was Flaco’s second wife.

  “He used to talk about you all the time,” Aurora said. “I was jealous at first.”

  “Flaco said you have a son.”

  “I wasn’t even eighteen when Beno was born. Flaco tried to do the right thing but our marriage was a disaster. We’re still friends. How can anyone stay mad at Flaco?” She shrugged her bony shoulders.

  Roma sidled up and Alma introduced her.

  “Encantada,” Aurora said. “I was just telling Alma about my three-year-old. Beno takes after his father, can’t sit still, talks a mile a minute — ”

  “And bosses everyone around.” Roma laughed. Then she spotted someone in the crowd. “What’s he doing here?”

  Alma turned around. “Who?”

  “Gabriel Seil! I can’t believe it.”

  Gabriel stood by the sound system, conversing with the DJ.

  “You’ve had a thing with him?” Aurora asked.

  “Are you kidding? No, he used to work at the bookstore with me.”

  Encountering Gabriel at the cemetery last week, Alma had found him oddly endearing. “What’s the matter with him?”

  “He’s morose. I mean, he’s a good guy, just not at a party. Gabriel had a fling with an older European woman, married apparently, but she left Luscano abruptly and…well, ever since, he’s taken to coming to the bookstore to cry on my shoulder.”

  Flaco squeezed through the crowd. “Here’s trouble,” Roma said.

  “Aurora, don’t let these women corrupt you.” Flaco placed his hand on Roma’s shoulder. “If you don’t behave, Roma, I’ll trash you in my speech.”

  “Jesus, Flaco. You lure us here on the pretext of seafood to stick us with one of your lectures?” Then she asked how he knew Gabriel.

  “I don’t really. Is he a friend?”

  The code, Alma remembered, for distinguishing opponents to the dictatorship.

  “Absolutely,” Roma said. “He never got over what happened in the junta. It’s one of the reasons he works at a cemetery, my theory anyway.” She looked at Alma and without saying a word, her dark eyes behind the round glasses conveyed compassion. Roma wasn’t one to mention La Cuarenta directly, but her look told Alma, if you ever want to talk about it, I’m here.

  Flaco began seating the guests, directing them to specific places around the table. Yes, he was bossy and controlling, but Alma could forgive him this one night. The anger she still felt after he’d come to the house was relegated to a corner of her mind for now. She was well practised in this ability to compartmentalize, but she’d have to have it out with him at some point. When everyone was seated, Flaco took the last remaining place at the head of the table. Alma counted thirty-nine guests. Unlucky, Hannelore would have said; a party should always be even-numbered. But her mother would have approved of the distribution, men exceeding the number of women, and Alma drank a silent toast to her.

  The waiters relayed platters of seafood, paella, salads and baskets of bread. They replenished wineglasses, left sparkling water bottles on the table, brought bowls of lemon slices and salsa. Flamenco music played in the background, the Andalusian lament a little too low for Flaco’s liking. Turning forty, he’d outlived Lorca, which entitled him to howl and dance and celebrate life. His worries about combining his friends and random acquaintances seemed unfounded. To his right, Alma conversed with Luis Corva across the table. Lalo Martín and Gabriel, both on the subdued side, were deep in discussion. The musicians, Emilio and the DJ were being entertained by the antics of the gang from the finca, the stable and farm hands, true gauchos with whom he’d explored the fields and forests and worked the harvest. They’d all brought wives and novias, dressed up with bright lipstick and flashy na
ils.

  One woman stood out, her eyes as round as castanets. She caught him staring and Flaco winked, raising his wineglass. What the hell, it’s my birthday. He pried open a crab claw and extracted the pink white flesh, caught sight of Aurora and Roma laughing at the other end of the table. Bless her for coming, that Aurora. He’d not invited his first wife or any of the children. They’d be at the family party Eduardo was planning, a second celebration at the finca. Flaco transmitted a telepathic message to Roma, restrain yourself. Aurora’s too frail a soul to handle a taiko player, let alone the ardency of a woman. Flaco chewed the crab with a sense of satisfaction. Not a shared drop of blood with any of them, but they’d all come simply because he’d asked. He was itching to make a speech, tie up the frayed strands of his life into one elegant knot. Maybe tonight he’d sleep without a sedative, forty years old and alive, if not at peace.

  While the waiters cleared the table of plates, the DJ put on some dance music. Half the crowd rose to work off the main course. Flaco moved to a chair next to the sculptor. Luis Corva always intrigued with his perspective from crossing many borders, or as he himself called it, the perennial refugee.

  “No matter how tired you are when you arrive,” Corva was saying, “you get a buzz from the motion and energy of Manhattan.”

  Alma liked his strange accent and agreed with his take on New York. As soon as she’d received a Canadian passport and saved some money, she’d taken a train for hours, far longer than the journey from Luscano to São Paulo. Only then had she appreciated the dimensions of the continent and the features of its towns. Rouse’s Point, Schenectady and Saratoga Springs, names as rhythmic as the rattling Amtrak train. Stepping out of Penn Station had been like entering a movie set, the landmarks familiar from books and films she’d seen at the cinema in Barrio Norte. With all the Spanish overheard on the streets, New York connected her back to Luscano more than Montréal had ever done.

  “I was there on 9/11,” Corva said, “working on a commission. The friends I was staying with had no television, so we went to a bar to find out what was going on.” Luis Corva searched the eyes of his audience, the blue of his eyes sharpened by his thick glasses. “I emptied an aspirin bottle and went out on the street to collect the ashes, down on my knees, ambulances and fire trucks screeching nearby.”

  His scarred face contorted. “The aftershock of violence. I can hear it through anything, the flamenco music, the conversation at this table. It’s the soundtrack of godlessness.”

  “What did you do with the ashes?” Flaco asked.

  Luis Corva looked at his hands. “What possessed me to collect them at all? Ashes, you know, cannot be represented in sculpture. Too ephemeral. Like the wings of a mayfly, insect of the genus Ephemera with its miniscule life span.’

  “Can’t you imply them?”

  “I’ve thought of that. Suggest a fire, an oven or a smouldering aftermath, but attention is drawn to the agent, whereas I want to attest to the effect, the ashes themselves. The arson of humanity, disaster’s outcome.”

  “You could allude to ashes in the work’s title,” Flaco suggested.

  “That’s the cheap way out,” Luis Corva said.

  Alma understood the essence of his preoccupation. Every assault on humanity left scars; the worst were those that left only ashes. Luscano’s nightmare began with the burning of books. Not an original strategy to silence resistance, the military had copied the Argentines in the seventies, who had learned from the Nazis in the thirties and forties.

  “I need to do research,” Corva said. “The inspirational kind. When I come to your cemetery, Gabriel, I’ll look in on the crematorium.”

  “We don’t have one.” He explained that cremation was the exception in Luscano because of the church. “Anyone who wants to be cremated is sent to São Paulo. The corpse, I mean. It takes a good ten days, and the paperwork to go in and out of Brazil is ridiculous. I’ve spoken to the owner, suggested he construct a crematorium on an adjacent piece of land he’s acquired.”

  “I’d love to do the facade. A crematorium, imagine that. The business of burning bodies.”

  “The dead,” Gabriel said. “Dead bodies. Who chose, or their families did, cremation.”

  A lull ensued, typical to the topic, the weight and privacy of death turning each of them inwards. Except for Gabriel, whose immunity to abstract notions of death was an occupational side effect. He wondered how to accommodate the sculptor. His boss insisted all the cemetery contracts involve his Italian network of artisans, stone masons and iron mongers. They were good craftsmen, it was true, but Luis Corva’s interest in the cemetery had him considering how to make the grounds more artful and interesting.

  The lights dimmed and the waiters marched in shouldering a big platter. Everyone belting out, “Que lo cumplas feliz…” as Flaco blew out four candles on a chocolate cake, quite massive and baked in what was clearly, if not entirely accurately, the eccentric shape of Luscano. This prompted shouts of “I want downtown!” and “Give me the beach!” as the waiters laboured to cut up and serve semi-egalitarian chunks of cake.

  Gabriel was given a wedge of Barrio Norte, prompting him to chortle at the thought that he was literally eating Pindalo real estate. He felt Alma looking at him from across the table and tried to come up with a brilliant line. Small talk was not his forte but he managed to ask about Montréal, admitting he’d been there once. “Made the mistake of going in January, ruined my shoes in the snow.” He did not reveal the rest of it, the week in the hotel room with Aude, trying to save their relationship.

  Alma laughed. “It’s a strangely big deal, coping with winter footwear when you first arrive. We come from a place where only gauchos and fishermen wear boots. But in Montréal, a good pair gets you through the winter.”

  He was burning to ask about her time in La Cuarenta, assuming the entry in the ledger Ernesto had brought was correct. Except the DJ turned down the music, Flaco rose from his place at the head of the table and bellowed for silence.

  He thanked his guests for coming and tried to convey the meaning of having all these arcs of his life joined in one room. As he warmed up, others interrupted with loud toasts. His finca friends, the musicians and academics, and Roma, who raised her wineglass shouting, “Never grow up, Flaco!”

  Calls for refills from the waiters, then more interruptions and impromptu toasts until Flaco succumbed to the obvious. He’d never hold their attention for a longer speech. They were itching to move to the samba so he grabbed Alma and danced her around the room, felt her body resist his and knew that she’d yet to forgive him. Then he found the beauty he’d been eying. The woman claimed she was married to a stable hand, but she agreed to one dance. Flaco took her in his arms, and they crisscrossed the dance floor as sweat curled his hair and soaked his shirt.

  After Flaco’s wildness, dancing with Gabriel felt easy, his movements a vague attempt at shadow boxing. He tried to compensate with conversation, lost in the melee of sound. Alma couldn’t see what Roma found offensive about him, overly earnest maybe, but well meaning. Then, after dancing a number with Emilio, she was ambushed by Roma for a tango.

  Later, when Roma was spinning Aurora inside a circle of dancers, Alma went to the bar in the corner of the room. She drank a glass of water while examining the framed photographs on the wall. Black-and-white shots of ships moored on long wharves, stevedores stooping under loads of trunks and containers alongside greasy coils of ropes. Port scenes from the twenties that could have been taken anywhere. She tried to discern what, if anything, made the scenes unique to Luscano.

  Lalo Martín sidled up and pointed to a corner of one of the photographs. “You see that group?” Alma stepped closer and noted the huddle of people, men in hats and suits carrying bundles, women in shawls holding children, their eyes conveying a panicked disorientation. “Refugees from Europe, earmarked for quarantine, most certainly rejection. Buenos Aires didn�
�t want them, neither did Uruguay or Luscano. Some made it into Paraguay. Most starved to death. If I had to come up with a caption for this photo, I’d call it ‘Luscano, the last hope vanquished.’” He turned to Alma. “History is ugly…I don’t have to tell you that.”

  Throughout the dinner, Alma had managed to avoid this conversation. Flaco, of course, had seated her next to the man. She tried to catch Roma’s eye across the dance floor.

  “I’m hoping you’ll come to my office sometime soon for a private talk. I want to hear everything that happened to you, every detail.”

  “It’s been so long, I doubt I can — ”

  “I heard your mother’s ill. If it were my choice, I’d wait indefinitely. But I’m losing a battle with time. Please make it sooner rather than later. If you want, bring Flaco for moral support.”

  Roma came barrelling towards them. Watching from a distance, Flaco tried to intervene but she pushed him off to drag Alma back to the dance floor.