Our Ecstatic Days (30 page)

Brontë has no idea why it’s important to get to Chicago. Actuallyshe doesn’t think it’s important at all, Chicago’s just the place the train happens to go to. She doesn’t really suppose it will make any difference to Lulu. But this hotel seems to her an intolerable placefor someone to die—better the Chateau. On the pay phone downstairs, she tra cks down a doctor in the territory who drives in

the gondola where I came from, when his answer to my call came bubbling up

two days later. Half Indian, half white, he’s never diagnosed someone dying of sorrow, dying not of physical dissolution or even a fatigue of body and spirit as triggered by sorrow, but sorrow itself: Isn’t there somewhere to take her, Brontë asks, a hospital or rest home? The doctor answers that there’s something about this dying that’s beyond the peace of hospitals and rest homes. When she tries to call him again a week later, the phone is out of order.
The weeks become months. Outside, the storm is unmoved by the change of seasons, and the arrival of spring.

Brontë discovers a television one afternoon in one of the back suites on the first floor, but as she might have expected, there’s nothing on it except a faint broadcast from Flagstaff, buzzing out of the clouds to the west. Constantly awakened by trains taunting her, constantly gazing out the windows for signs of a light coming up the track, at night she takes to drifting through the dark hacienda and cold cinderblock foyer, past the bare newsstand and forsaken gift shops and faded Indian murals and the bar lined with tequila bottles and cracked martini glasses drunk on their own dust. She scours the stray pieces of hotel literature as well as the volumes of local lore on the shelves; after a while she knows more about the pueblo and the families that built it and lived here than she does her own life. When the storms originally came, the first part of the hotel to have been closed was the dining room, once the finest in the territory. Now for the pueblo’s rare guest Wanda cooks in the hotel kitchen a traditional soup half spicy black bean and half sweet corn, sending it up to Brontë along with lemon slices.

Boarded up after the dining room was the cavernous ballroom, its once-blue ceiling that’s flecked with silver now gray like the overcast sky outside. The small tadpoles of silver flicker like the

from the bottom, so in the same way the night I miscarried him I splashed

lightning’s stray offspring. One night Brontë peeks past the slabs of wood that barricade the ballroom entrance and pulls one away, stepping through; because of how the silver flashes in the dark ceiling, there in the black of the old ballroom she can almost believe there are no ceiling or walls, that there’s no pueblo at all. She can almost believe the massive Navajo carpet across the ballroom floor is a great rooftop floating high above the earth.
Actually tottering a bit where she stands, she reaches for the wall to steady herself; before her, a quadrant of the world is ablaze with lightning. It curves in an electric white arc against the black of space. A lake glitters far below to the west, lunar gales howl in the sky below, and pacing the eye of the storm Brontë contemplates the shimmering suture of the northern mesas. For a moment she can almost believe that here one sleeps above her dreams—for good or ill, depending on the dreams.

Lately Brontë has been having dreams of a small boy. Only after she found a crumbling old book on a remote shelf did she learn the story that the official literature of the hotel doesn’t tell: that on the afternoon the great great grandson of the Spaniard who built the pueblo walked out its porticos into the desert, he left behind a sole inheritor of his ruin. This was a three-year-old child who he so refused to acknowledge as his own son that the forsaken mother, a local Indian woman, died giving birth in a ravine just beyond the western garden. Even when the infant boy was taken in by the hotel servants, his cry was regarded by the father as simply a stray sirocco blowing through the abandoned ballroom. Thus three years later, with the hacienda empty of everyone else, on his nonchalant stroll into the desert the newly destitute patrician walked right past the child as though he was invisible, and for hours the little boy stood in the open doorway first watching the disappearance then awaiting the return of the father who had never

myself with him then, splashed him on my face and neck and breasts until I

held or kissed or spoken to him.

Brontë goes back through all the other old books of the hotel to try and find out what happened to the son left behind. But as the forbidden history of the pueblo would have it, he’s still standing in the doorway waiting for his father, and at night sometimes Brontë wakes to his small sirocco-cry from somewhere in the hotel.
She presses her ear to the walls listening for him, convinced the brown-haired brown-eyed child scampers up and down secret passages between the rooms looking for his father who’s hiding from him, as though his abandonment has been only a game. Outside, the storms seem to stop moving over the mesas, rather it’s as though the earth continues turning its way into a single endless storm that rolls on and on and on into the coming years.

As Barbrasita gets bigger, she begins lumbering slowly up and down the hall snarling at the growing child inside her in ever blacker language. Even to someone who doesn’t understand the Spanish, it’s awful. In her sleep Lulu hears the girl cursing her unborn baby and murmurs for someone to make her stop. Bronte stands at the window staring for trains and thinks that between the dying woman in the bed behind her and the pregnant girl outside in the hall, perhaps she’ll go insane: Perhaps I will. Then what willthey do, she rages silently, what will they do when I’m crazy. As her belly grows in the passing months, Barbrasita curses it more and Lulu curses back, and this exchange continues until the night Brontë finally wakes to find the Mistress sitting straight up in bed, streaked with the electric frost of the storm outside, eyes wide to the sound of something Bronte can’t hear through the cracked euphonium of the storm, until it trails off in a baby’s cry.

Brontë rushes into the hall of the darkened pueblo. Searching for

couldn’t distinguish the tears of my eyes from the discharge of my uterus, until

the sound of the crying, she finds Barbrasita who, like a cat, has taken her labor into the linen closet, producing a bloody baby between her thighs, umbilical snake singing between them; the young Indian mother seems in shock. Down the dark deserted halls Bronte runs knocking on doors until Wanda appears. Calmly taking a flashlight hanging from a hook, grabbing from the kitchen the knife used for slicing Brontë’s lemons, she follows the crying
to its source and, with a single swipe, slashes the cord. Its song howls into silence. Bronte reels. “Can you warm up a pot of water, miss,” Wanda says, “not too hot?”

Barbrasita doesn’t curse her baby anymore after that. In the days after that, she sits in her bed so rapt at the sight of the little boy that she almost has to be reminded to feed him, his small hands pawing her breast. Trying to explain it’s not a good idea for the two to sleep together, Wanda has to gently pry the child from the mother’s arms: You could roll over on him dear, she says, wedging the baby on his side in a small makeshift cradle a few feet away. Commissioned to keep an eye on the infant while Barbrasita sleeps, Brontë fumes. It’s very convenient for everyone isn’t it.It’s very convenient that a train abandoned me here so I could baby-sit a dying woman
and
a newborn. Brontë feels no affinity for babies. She believes she has a man’s sense of privacy that doesn’t accommodate babies. But as more weeks pass and she tires of watching for trains in whose arrival she has no more faith, she finds herself looking in on the baby anyway, even when the mother is awake. “Just thought I should check,” she tells the Indian girl. “Force of habit.”

Later, almost four hundred days after coming to the Pueblod’Elektrik, standing out on the station platform one night and seeing at long last, long after faith’s exhaustion, the small distant

both had seeped into me and I was bone dry, profoundly unmistakably empty,

light of an approaching train, Brontë will note it’s not so much like a full moon at all. But one night a few months before, before she can even imagine let alone know what’s to happen, out on the station platform one night she sees a globe of light emerge down the line over the far ridge and for a moment thinks it’s a train before realizing it’s the moon growing larger and larger like a plummeting airplane, its nose a burning bomb. That’s when she
doesn’t believe in trains anymore. That’s when she thinks that she and the Mistress have as much chance of riding the moon to Chicago—assuming the moon ever traveled from west to east. But of course this moon like all others travels from east to west, back the way they came from. There in the pueblo station, what Brontë doesn’t yet know is that, as the four hundred days of the Pueblo d’Elektrik tick down, the two women come nearer their destination than she thinks: the end of the lie that they can or ever could leave the lake, or live beyond it.

Enthralled by her child, Barbrasita is paralyzed. In the weeks after his birth she can’t even bring herself to name the little boy, so afraid is she that her first maternal act will be a mistake, setting everything thereafter wrong. What if I name him something bad? she asks Brontë in broken English. She’s consumed with guilt about having cursed the baby when he was inside her. She’s convinced he heard every word, so now she pets his brown hair and begs his small brown eyes to forgive her. She seems to Brontë in a trance. One night when lightning strikes one of the railway cars outside, the reflection of the flaming mausoleum through the window makes the Indian’s face appear on fire, ecstatic, purged by love; that’s the night Brontë checks in one more time on the Mistress three doors down, turns down the lamp by Barbrasita’s bed, closes Barbrasita’s door behind her, and then takes off her clothes. Is the look on the Indian girl’s face just a variation of the

and then it was after that that I dreamed, for the first time in my life, not

one she always wears now as a mother, or a response to Brontë’s naked body next to her? Never with another girl before huh,Brontë whispers, careful should the wound of birth still be tender. Vixen, Bron të accuses herself, I’m no better than Rollin. Afterward, as the young Navajo woman sleeps in her breasts, wrapped in her long gold hair, out of her sleep Brontë reaches over in the dark and slowly rocks the cradle.

But in the ensuing days, the fire that’s been cast in Barbrasita’s face doesn’t die, rather ecstasy burns down to the diamond of a fixed notion. In her heart, her nameless little boy has opened the door to a vast plateau of fear, stretching out beyond her young years when mortality is supposed to be so inconceivable. In the beginning, perhaps her dread was attached to nothing she could name but now she can name it, pyre of the railway car outside flaming in her face: it’s the way she cursed him made manifest that’s coming for him. Like it was a thought wandering the desert waiting for her to rescue it, she’s come to know in no way she can explain even to herself that it doesn’t matter where she goes, it doesn’t matter how far she tries to get her little boy away,the lightning outside will keep coming for him, moving through the labyrinth of railway cars ring by outer ring, striking closer and closer, and that she can’t be paralyzed anymore. Out in the storm, out where the sky curses the earth in sound and light, lurks her son’s doom and she must stop it. She has to shake herself loose of the love that holds her down and find inside her the love that will save him. She has to go to war with the sky that would take him.

In the room three doors down, Brontë is alarmed by Lulu’s moans in her sleep. Oh jeez she’s going to die now, Brontë thinks to herself; she sits on the woman’s bed holding her, trying to calm her, but Lulu’s rant—stop her no no no stop, stop her, stop (in

realizing at first I was dreaming since I had never had a dream and didn’t

dreams of red)—grows from the depths of something else.Finally, not knowing what else to do, Bronte hurries from the room in search of Wanda only to find Barbrasita standing in the dark hall with her unnamed baby in her arms. Brontë can no longer see the fire in Barbrasita’s face but Barbrasita can, it’s right there in frontof her eyes, getting closer: “What are you doing?” says Brontë. She pulls the young mother back to bed. Then she starts back
down the hallway knocking on doors like the night the baby was born, but this time Wanda doesn’t answer: “Where is everybody?” Brontë actually says out loud in the dark at one point. When she turns back to the room, Lulu’s ramblings growing louder and more agitated, Barbrasita is in the hallway again, with her baby in her arms again.

Brontë takes hold of the girl’s shoulders. “Go to bed,” she says.

Barbrasita answers, in what sounds to Brontë like remarkably good English, “I know what I know, and I must do what I must do,” and with that shoves the baby boy into Brontë’s arms. “Hey,” Brontë says, Barbrasita striding past her, and in the porticos of the pueblo the Indian girl pulls open the doors that then seem to blast apart in the storm.

“Hey, hey!” Brontë calls again, holding the child and running in confusion after the other woman, who stops only for a moment in the doorway. Only for a moment in the doorway, everything about Barbrasita’s ravaged life comes to a halt. She’s riveted by a calm that’s still secret to her. She’s riveted by a resolution beyond rationality, by some wisdom forgotten as soon as she’s seen it;’for a second, she lives in the red gazebo of her heart, standing at its placid center where her life surrounds her like a diorama. Brontë can hear her say very clearly, very calmly over the sound of the

know how to identify one or distinguish it from consciousness, rather in that

thunder, “Give him a good name,” and then the young mother runs out into the lightning.

“No!” Brontë screams after her. But Barbrasita runs for the burning railway car, not to meet the fire but to head off the storm’s advance and conduct up into her, between her legs, through the place she gave birth, all the sky’s electric rage. Just outside the
blowing, slamming doors of the hacienda, ëronte is pelted by rain and wind, stopped in her tracks as she turns her back on the wet and cold to protect the baby; at her side Wanda has finally appeared, eyes wide, and Brontë goes on crying “No!” over her shoulder at Barbrasita now far beyond earshot in the dark distance splattered with wet light—until there streaks from the black sky a bolt that suspends the girl in a momentary glow. Then she’s gone. She’s stepped through a white rip in the sky to some other desert on the Other Side where mothers don’t fear for the loss of their children. Brontë thinks it’s her own cry that she hears until she realizes it comes from the other end of the pueblo, Lulu sitting up in her bed in her room tearing at the sheets around her.