Private House (16 page)

“It's like a market,” said Mathilde.

“Aren't the flowers lovely?”

“Why don't you buy some when we come out? You have sun in your room—you could put them in the window.”

“I might,” said Lorraine. “Those are gladioli—I don't know why I'm surprised!”

“We can look around, you know. We're ten minutes early.”

The facade of the church, and the doors, were plain: and as they passed through, they were diverted by a simple wooden screen that divided the traffic going in and out. Stepping around this, they were looking down the full length of the nave. Domes, arches, and columns rose and soared in a conventional way, but there, above the altar, very high up, was Our Lady, in a long white dress like a little girl's doll, the Virgin, but a Princess, a vision of heaven dreamed in the black depths of the slum outside, blackness that had to be clothed in glorious white. She was lit by candles and hundreds of tiny light bulbs—and the light
bulbs, as much as anything, created the folkloric effect, their modest, primitive means perfectly suited to the carving. There was nothing wrong with the statue ecclesiastically or doctrinally; it must have been perfectly proper. But it was hard to stand there and not feel something out of the ordinary. For She was more than a statue, and more than a figure of veneration and devotion. She was a god. It took them a while to understand this, but they both felt it at once; instinctively—they didn't say a word—they turned and walked slowly down the aisle on the left, falling in behind a couple all dressed in white. Mathilde whispered, “Novices in Santeria.” Lorraine knew this, in fact; they had to wear nothing but white for their first year in the faith. The woman, a very large black lady, wore chains of beads around her neck, which swayed and shone as she walked. Her companion was much thinner, and he carried a flat white cap, which, with his white shoes, gave him the air of an elegant man in an old movie about to play golf. It made a comic effect: but not quite. Laughter would have had to include, as well as his ensemble, the totality of his surroundings, of which he was clearly a part, and that wasn't quite possible. In Catholic churches, Lorraine always suffered slightly from an inferiority complex; she was flying under false colours; and although her Protestant hackles might rise, and the words
vulgar
and
ostentatious
find a place on the tip of her tongue, there was always the fear that their faith was more complete than her own, more profound—certainly
more
. She felt that keenly now, because this
was
more . . . though more of what was hard to say: but the Catholic faith raised to some new power. Mathilde felt this too, but in a different way. It was fascinating. She was alive with curiosity. She was an anthropologist. Here were “natives” with their amazing practices, customs, and rites. And yet, as they followed along behind the Santeria couple, she began to feel self-conscious, as though she were the one being observed. Once, as they passed before an altar—and a great bank of candles—the black man with his absurd cap turned his face, and Mathilde was able to see his features more clearly. He didn't look at all like Bailey. But he was a black man. Now Mathilde felt her own whiteness in a different way. She was coloured, too. She was just a different colour, that's all. She now ceased to be the standard, in her own eyes, by which others were measured, but became another face in the crowd. This thrilled her—and she allowed herself to feel the soreness between her legs, the stretching along the inside of her thighs.

But by this point they'd come up to the altar, and were again confronted with the figure of Our Lady of Mercy. For Lorraine, things became clearer. She felt God in a number of ways. Usually, He was quite remote, at the other end of a very thin, infinitely long thread. At other times He was watching her, not necessarily critically—though sometimes that—but close by, so she could talk to Him in a quiet voice. But at still other times—and this was one of those times—she did not feel apart from God at all, but a part of Him, one of His expressions, so she could directly feel God's power passing through her. That was what she felt now, looking up at Our Lady, in her long white robes and crown. But as the feeling poured through her, she realized that Our Lady was also Obatalla, that she was a great god, but only one god among many: and now she was feeling this god's terrible pagan power, deep, black, mysterious,
beyond
—and, instantly, she made the sign of the cross and turned away. She was shaken. But she tried to stay calm. “Do you see him?” she said then.

Mathilde leaned toward Lorraine. “I think so. Over there? On the far side. Sitting by himself.”

It was too dark to be sure. He was sitting at the end of a row of pews, but in a chair—chairs had been set out at the end of all the pews on that side, presumably to handle some special occasion; he was about halfway down.

“We'll have to go all the way around,” said Lorraine.

They walked back, toward the entrance; as they came level, they both glanced across at the figure Mathilde had picked out as Almado. He was slumped in his chair. When they'd circled around, and started down the aisle on that side, Mathilde whispered, “He seems to be asleep.” They came up behind him. When they were four or five rows away, Mathilde said, “Would you like me to wait here?”

“Perhaps you'd better.” So Lorraine approached him by herself. She stood behind him. Now she could see that his hair had been dyed, though whether it had started out blond or dark was impossible to tell, it was so washed out. He was wearing a long-sleeved purple shirt but he was wearing it open, like a jacket, over a white T-shirt. And Lorraine was certain that these were the only two shirts he had in the world, and he had nowhere to stay, so he had to keep them both on.

She cleared her throat. She always felt ridiculous, doing that, like her mother. The young man didn't respond. Then, trying to keep her voice low and level, she said, “Almado Valdes?”

He turned abruptly, looking over his shoulder. For an instant his face was naked, like a child, just waking up. And did he look very young, a tough, pretty boy with a grubby face and his hair in his eyes. He said nothing for a moment, only looked at her; and she almost felt that he couldn't speak, that he was dumb or feral. Then he said, “Mrs. Stowe?”

“That's right. I was a friend of Murray's. I got your message at the hotel. Thank you for coming.”

His eyes settled somewhere, not quite on her face. “Is it true that he's dead?”

“Yes. He said that he wrote to you.” His eyes, very dark, were impenetrable in the dim light. “You did get the letter?”

“One letter.”

“Didn't you believe it?”

“It doesn't make any difference.”

“No. I suppose it doesn't . . . Hugo found you?”

“He said, call you at the hotel.”

“Did he tell you why?”

But his eyes flickered away; he had seen Mathilde and so Lorraine added “I hope you don't mind. I brought a friend of mine. She wanted to see the church.”

He looked toward Mathilde for a moment, and Lorraine couldn't see his expression. Then he stood up. He reached, and pushed one of the chairs from the row behind him toward Mathilde, and then pushed one in Lorraine's direction. As he did this, Lorraine was reminded of Enrique, for a gold cross on a chain swung against his chest, and a gold signet ring flashed on his finger. He had a gold earring in his left ear but it didn't make him look effeminate—on the contrary, very hard. His hardness, though, was different from the hardness of Enrique; it was not polished, but rough. He was, or had been, a boy who lived on the street. Mathilde sat in one chair, and set her bag on another beside it, and Lorraine sat down too.

Lorraine, because she'd noticed it, said, “That ring you're wearing . . . it's like Hugo's.”

He looked at his hand. “That? He gave it to me.”

She tried to smile. “It's nice that you're friends.” Almado looked at her out of the darkness of his eyes, his face making no sign or expression: and she thought that was a talent, to hold your face so still. But it was disturbing, as if he was waiting to leap out, from inside himself. “How did he find you?” Again, it looked as though he didn't understand, or hadn't heard. “Hugo,” she repeated. “How did he find you?”

“In a club.” Now, for the first time, really, he smiled, a lift of lips; and she thought this, rather like the ring on Hugo's finger, had the
effect of making him look slightly older, less boyish; it came from a different dimension of his experience. “He said it was easy. We look almost the same.”

“You do.” And they did, especially if you combed his hair and imagined it dyed properly. Yes, they were the same. Hugo was ordinary, Almado was rough. But it was the same regular beautiful face underneath. It was difficult, since he was sitting down, to say how tall he was; but not too tall. And he was slim, too, as Hugo was. “I'm very grateful to him. Perhaps we can all get together. We could have dinner.” He looked at her, again without much expression. She wondered if he understood: she realized that only when he actually replied was she sure that he'd understood what she'd said. There was a gap between her expression and his comprehension, and again the word she thought of was
feral
. And now, at least in her own mind, Lorraine placed him, but in a surprising way, for her mind circled back to Coppelia. Almado was also anachronistic: he was a “juvenile delinquent,” a “JD” from 1958, like so much else in this town. And everyone had been so frightened, back then, of JDs. The tough boys, the rough boys.
She
had feared them, certainly. Hugo was Fabian or Dion—Almado was . . . Sal Mineo? Who had been knifed to death in a parking lot, she seemed to remember. That's what happened to boys who looked like this, they died . . . or they killed. And you were afraid of them, even if you weren't exactly sure what frightened you. So again she tried to smile and said, “Will you tell him?”

“If you like.”

She said, “He
gave
you that ring?”

“Yes.”

“You make friends easily . . . ? Friends like Murray?”

“Yes.”

“He wanted to bring you to Canada.” Almado looked at her, and though his expression hardly changed, she took this as skeptical. “He
did
. It wasn't his fault if he couldn't.”

Almado said, “People say things . . . to get what they want.”

“He wanted to help you. He wasn't just
saying
things.”

“He was a nice man.”

“He was nice to you, I think.”

As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Lorraine knew how priggish she must sound. And she realized she was in over her head. Murray had certainly wanted Almado's body, and would have said things to get it. He had never pretended that “man love” was spiritual or pure, and Murray, contesting Don's choice of Robert Graves, had championed Cavafy—“The only real rival to Eliot in the twentieth century”—and Cavafy's loves had all been male prostitutes, so far as she could see. Had Murray bought Almado with a promise to get him out of the country? Even if Murray had loved Almado, how else could Almado have taken it, except as a bargain? He had nothing, like those people out on the street, so everything had to be for something else. She had no business making judgments. Whatever she thought of Almado, all she had to do was fulfill Murray's instructions, and she'd better get on with it.

And that's what she was going to do, except Mathilde began sneezing, and then started to cough. It was dusty in the church, as everywhere else, and candle smoke eddied through the dim light. Overcome, Mathilde stood up and moved away from where they were sitting, but kept coughing and Lorraine reached over to Mathilde's bag and found her bottle of water and brought it over to her.

Mathilde gulped some down, and gasped. “I don't know what happened to me.”

“It's the smoke. My eyes are smarting.”

Mathilde said, “He's a tough one, your Almado.”

“I know.”

Still, when she went back, Lorraine fully intended to explain about the money and make arrangements for getting it to him. But because she was standing up, and because of his rearrangement of the chairs, she now saw that a backpack was pushed under the chair next to his, jammed against the end of the pew. It was black; but even in the dim light of the church, the Canadian flag—the red maple leaf against a white ground—stood out plainly. And she knew where she'd seen it before: on the pack of the girl going into Coppelia, the day she'd been talking with Hugo . . . his girlfriend. And now she looked again at the gold ring on his finger, and she said, “Perhaps this isn't the best place to talk, it's so dark and dusty.” She was trying not to give her suspicions away, but to her own ears that was all she seemed to be doing. “We have business to discuss, you know. It's important.”

“Business?”

“Will you see Hugo?” But she didn't give him a chance to answer, taking the note he'd left at the hotel from her bag and scribbling the Raquel's phone number on the back of it. “I think I gave him this, but just in case. Ask him to call me. We'll all have dinner and work everything out.”

She handed him the paper. He now understood what was happening, that she was leaving. “If you don't want to stay here—”

“This was wonderful. We had to meet, didn't we? Now we have. You speak to Hugo and we'll all get together.”

Mathilde, over her coughing fit, had grasped that something had happened, and that they were going. They walked back, toward the entrance. A black woman with nappy grey hair was on her knees before Santa Barbara, as haughty as a queen or Shango, the black god she represented. As they passed, Lorraine made the sign of the cross.
She looked back quickly then, but if Almado was there, he was now lost in the gloom. Then they came blinking into the sun.