The Widower's Tale (7 page)

After the day's work was over, Dr. Lartigue often invited Raul and a few others to his tent. He wanted to hear what he called "local tales"; in exchange, he gave lessons in English and archaeology. He showed them large books of photographs--the pyramids and temples of Mexico, Honduras, and their own part of the world, El Peten. They learned how to mark off excavation pits with stakes and string, how to use measuring tools, how to tell fragments of pots and statues and buildings from ordinary stones. Dr. Lartigue explained how projects like this one attracted thieves, how it was important to be careful when strangers showed up. He kept a gun in a locked box under his cot.

Dr. Lartigue's wife was one of a few women who came along with the foreign men, though she would come for only a few weeks. She would help Celestino's mother and aunt do the shopping and cooking. Sometimes his family shared their noon meal with the archaeologists; once he was in school, Celestino could translate from his mother's tongue to Senora Lartigue's Spanish. By the time he was old enough to sit still, Celestino was welcome in Dr. Lartigue's tent along with his father.

"You will learn English, too," Raul told his son, "and you will do this work, too. We are lucky. We work with men who use their minds. Men who use reason as a muscle." He had squeezed his thick arm to demonstrate.

Celestino took for granted the dependable cycle of work, just like the changing of seasons for those who grew coffee or mangoes. Five months of orderly, well-paid work were followed by seven months when the project slept. During the rains, there were occasional visitors, often in the company of Dr. Lartigue or a government official, but mostly the village returned to a slightly modernized version of its former simple self. Raul and a few other men patrolled the site. A locked shed held the most valuable tools, the maps, books, and other papers sealed in plastic tubs. Celestino was too young to understand that the excavation gave their village invisible protection from the war, from the military raids that had stretched by now far into the mountains and jungles.

He joined the excavation crew when he was twelve. But Dr. Lartigue had other ideas for Celestino, ideas beyond the slashing and digging, the sifting of the clay they dried in wide trays, in the sunlit clearings. The year Celestino turned fifteen, Dr. Lartigue told Raul about an exchange program for Spanish-speaking natives ("indigenous peoples") that would permit his son to go to the United States for four months and attend an American school. An immersion program, Dr. Lartigue called it. One of the schools that sponsored the program was near his house; Celestino could live with Dr. and Senora Lartigue and their two children. "My daughter is just a year younger than you are," he said to Celestino. "She'll show you the lay of the land. She knows her way around,
ma fille."
He'd laughed. "Perhaps too well."

Raul could not believe their good fortune. He had dreams that Celestino would beat a new path on which his sisters would follow. What a life they could have--all of them--if Celestino went away with Dr. Lartigue.

As Celestino's train made its way toward Boston, it would pass one or two trains on the outbound track. They were filled, you could tell as they hurtled by, with people dressed for office jobs. Some of these people were hurtling toward the gardens he'd spent his day watering, weeding, and cajoling into bloom. Would the man in the huge white house, the farmhouse that no longer sat on a farm, notice that his peach trees had been trimmed today, the rotten fruit discarded? Would Mrs. Connaughton's husband see that the sunflowers had been straightened, secured to wooden stakes? Celestino had never met these men; he could only imagine their existence.

Was he praised? Hardly ever. But that wasn't what he aimed for. What he aimed for was a life of not working for Tom Loud or anyone like him. Yet it became increasingly clear that Loud, or someone like him, would have to be the one to help Celestino break free. He would have to have a sponsor; he would have to become valued, indispensable. Perhaps this was the humiliation God would exact from Celestino; it was only fair. That he would have to become like a loyal, skilled hunting dog to the
hijo de puta
.

He would have to be nicer to Loud; he must make himself do this.
My stubborn one
, his mother called him. Also
my quiet one
. Stubborn and quiet: these were not qualities that married well if you wished to find favor. They were qualities you had to mold:
quiet
into listening and learning,
stubborn
into work.

Celestino was more frugal than Loud's other workers ("your
compadres,"
Loud called them when he spoke of them to Celestino). He did not have a cell phone. He did not gamble on cards or buy lottery tickets. He'd found free clothes, decent clothes, left in bags behind a church on the block where he lived. He often wrapped and saved for later the sandwiches he was given by the women whose gardens he tended; once in a while, Mrs. Karp gave him a dish of leftover chicken or lasagne. If she traveled to visit one of her children, she told him to take food from her refrigerator, to keep it from spoiling. He drank one beer, or none, each night. Every so often, he went to Mass.

He sent half the money he saved to Marta and Adela, who lived with their mother. Because of pain in her back, Mama could no longer work at the hotel. She could not lift the thick mattresses on the fancy beds or carry stacks of linens, bath towels the size of blankets, down the endless halls (once the halls of a monastery). She could not walk all day on the hard stone floors that the tourists found so charming. She could not bend to clean a bathroom tub--or get up again once she had. From what his sisters had told him, during the phone calls he made every few months, Mama sat in their apartment and watched soap operas all day long--while claiming that her Spanish was too poor for any job not requiring exertion. Sometimes she made weavings that Marta and Adela took to the hotel shop, where tourists bought them to lay across their dining tables in London or Miami Beach.

When Celestino thought of Dr. Lartigue, he felt rage as often as pity. It was not right to be angry at someone for dying, especially dying too young, but this was how he felt when he was awakened at night by the teenage boys who played ugly music in the street or cruised noisily back and forth on their skateboards. He would lie awake and imagine his way through Dr. Lartigue's house in Cambridge: its winding stairs with the beautifully carved railings, the silver kitchen with its long green table where Senora Lartigue arranged every meal so artfully, fancy or plain (every meal delicious, served with wine or juice she had squeezed from fresh fruit). Dr. Lartigue's study, filled with so many books that they overflowed the shelves and stood in stacks as tall as a school-age boy; stone sculptures, frayed textiles, paintings of pyramids and tattooed gods that leaned against the towers of books. The porch surrounded by Japanese maples. Celestino's room on the third floor the first time he stayed there: a small room, like a bird's nest. Later on, the larger room on the second floor, the room left behind by Etienne, Dr. Lartigue's son. Isabelle's room, next to Etienne's, her white bedspread with the blue-flowered squares. Isabelle's voice. Isabelle's eyes and hands and feet, everything between.

If not for Isabelle. If not for Dr. Lartigue's heart attack. If not for Senora Lartigue's anger. If not for his own childish fear. If not, if not, if not. How useless these words, these dead-end wishes. His sister Marta, who knew about these wishes, told him they proved he'd been tainted by his time in America. People with too much money bought themselves regret along with big houses and cars, she said once. Regret was a disease, a fever. (But the money that went with the illness--this she liked, didn't she?)

On his way from the station in Lothian, Celestino bought eggs, an onion, a potato, and a pepper. The fat green ones tasted raw, unfinished, but they were the cheap ones. Mrs. Marsh, whose vast vegetable garden Celestino weeded and watered twice a week, had told him to help himself to her tomatoes that morning. They were spectacular tomatoes, some purple, some striped like flames, others yellow as taxis. When he shook his head, she said, "Don't be ridiculous. All I did was plant them. You're the one who keeps them growing." He had carried the bag of tomatoes with him to Mrs. Connaughton's, his afternoon job, but then, stupidly, had left it beside the kitchen sink of the man who'd let him call for a ride. He should have walked to the train station, to hell with Gilberto. He had been lazy.

In his kitchen, he turned on the radio--the volume low. He was careful to keep Mrs. Karp happy, to jump when she needed him and otherwise to intrude on her life as little as possible. She was kind enough, but she could raise the rent at her whim--or decide she didn't need him. And what if she should sell the house? Would he be forced to join his
"compadres"
in Packard?

He listened to the news while he cooked. The war, always the war in Iraq. More suicide bombings. Children blown up on their way to school. I could have family
there
, he thought. He enforced the habit of reminding himself how his life could be so much worse, how Guatemala was said to be peaceful now, no more soldiers burning down villages, raping and killing the women. Even in the city, his mother and sisters were safer now. Mrs. Connaughton had insisted on showing Celestino her photographs from a tour she took the year before. "Your country is divine," she declared. "I have never seen people who have such an exquisite sense of
color."

As he chopped the pepper, he pictured the tomatoes he'd left on that kitchen counter. Mrs. Connaughton's neighbor--Percy--had reminded Celestino of Dr. Lartigue. He was tall, his eyes the same silvery blue. But more than these features, he had that scholar's air about him, the same clothes: khaki shorts and a thinly striped cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the same shirt you could wear with a tie and a suit. As if such men must always be prepared to dress up at a moment's notice for a party or a business meeting. The first time Celestino had gone to live in Cambridge, Dr. Lartigue had bought him some of these clothes.

The rooms Celestino had passed through, on his way to Percy's kitchen, were old in a vain sort of way. The dark rafters hung below the ceilings, and the floorboards slanted this way and that. The rooms were stuffed with old things, decorated with flowery patterns the sun had faded long ago. You could not have fit in one more stack of books or historical picture: so much like Dr. Lartigue's study. There was a portrait in a gold frame over a fireplace, the paint so crackled and darkened by smoke that all you could really see was the man's moonlike face, its attitude grim, and a white patch of shirt inside a black, or blackened, coat. Throughout the rooms, a lime-colored dusting of pollen lay across every surface, from books to sofa cushions.

That part, the dustiness, wasn't like the Lartigues' house. Senora Lartigue kept the rooms as clean as could be. Her conscience, though--could that be clean? Did she think of him, ever? Wonder where he was? Probably not.

Celestino tried so often to bury the fantasy, stale by now, of returning to that house as a man with his own business--not the archaeologist he'd dreamed of being when he was small, nothing so far-fetched, but a designer of gardens, even parks--and seeking Isabelle. But surely Isabelle was living elsewhere, possibly married. She would be twenty-five.

Celestino was twenty-six. He had not been back to Guatemala in seven years, not since before Dr. Lartigue had died, not since Senora Lartigue, two months later, had guessed correctly that he and Isabelle were sleeping together under her roof, had coldheartedly ambushed them in bed. How stupid that had been, how reckless. It did not matter that, as Isabelle had shouted to her mother, they were "old enough!"

In a panic, certain that in her fury Senora Lartigue would have his student visa canceled, make sure that he was sent back to his country, his village, forbidden ever to set foot here again, Celestino had run. He had taken a bus to New York, where an older cousin drove a gypsy cab. For two weeks he had stayed in the cousin's apartment, hardly going outside, as if Senora Lartigue might descend from the open sky, a scornful black eagle, swoop him up and deliver him to his punishment. One day his cousin told him he had to leave or work. So he'd worked, a few months here, a few months there: busboy, night clerk in a bodega, janitor in a dress factory. Finally, he mowed lawns in the Bronx, for Spanish-speaking families who'd made enough money to buy houses. He worked almost mindlessly for two years before he realized that this, too, had been stupid and reckless.

Some childhood vision of Senora Lartigue as an all-powerful goddess--like the Aztec goddess who ate warriors whole, the one in the stone relief on Dr. Lartigue's desk--had blinded him to reason. She had been free to kick him out of her home, but could she really have taken away his chances at finishing college? Even though Dr. Lartigue was no longer around to help with his tuition, wouldn't the school have taken pity on Celestino, helped him stay, given him work to pay for his classes? All this had not occurred to him until it was too late. And when he thought of Isabelle, how his fear of her mother had outstripped his desire to be with her, he had to wonder whether he'd deserved all his good fortune in the first place. Maybe Dr. Lartigue had been a poor judge to see Celestino as "a boy with potential."

In the Bronx, there was a fancy estate on the river where people went to admire the flowers and picnic on the lawns. A woman whose grass he mowed had told him they taught classes in gardening there. By that time, his cousin had found a girlfriend and had two babies. Celestino had moved into a place of his own: small, sooty, looking through a fire escape onto the roof of a dry cleaner. The smell from the vent was stifling, the fumes of hell. He could not afford the classes at the estate, but sometimes, on weekends, he went there and walked around, studying the labels beside the plantings, watching the gardeners do their work. A few of them were friendly, so he forced himself to speak up, to ask questions. He learned how to test soil, how to deadhead roses and divide tubers, how to train a fragile vine, how to deepen the roots of saplings so that they would grow tall and hold fast against the wind. He learned about slugs, earthworms, nematodes, aphids, about blights and beetles that threatened the strange northern trees with which he'd become familiar.