The Origin of Species (54 page)

Blip. Blip. For an instant the monitor dipped an entire degree, then righted itself.

She wouldn’t have been Sarah, not really, or at least not the phantom adventurer Sarah he had imagined. In Spain, she had told him, she had stayed in the nicest hotels, had gone shopping, had met Spanish boys in the tapas bars. Not for her the rough-and-tumble of backpacks and roadsides, of crowded local buses leading off to mud villages. She had gone on a holiday, that was all. It had taken her two years at Jean Junction to save for the trip. In Montreal she had put in her hours at the shop, had spent the nights on Crescent Street, had dated this one or that. No plans. She might have gone on like this, become a manager, perhaps, married a Jewish boy and moved back to Côte St. Luc. Might have been unremarkable. Maybe it was just a way of wringing hope from despair to think this way, that it was her illness that had marked her, that had made her stand out, as if it were a gift.

For Alex’s money, she would have been better off marrying the Jewish boy.

There was a sound at the door. He turned, expecting Rachel, but instead felt a flash of disorientation like a whack to the head.

“Alex. It’s you.”

It was María.

A
lex hadn’t exchanged more than half a dozen words with María since their ill-fated dinner at his apartment. He had seen her often enough, across crowded rooms or through the window of the café where she worked on St. Lawrence; he had even got her on the phone once or twice when he was calling Miguel, back when they were still living together. But since the dinner it had seemed understood that there wasn’t much point, really, in their continuing to have anything to do with each other. For some stupid reason he had kept following Miguel around to Salvadoran fund-raisers and solidarity nights, maybe to prove to María that his intentions had been honorable, but if he actually saw her at any of these he would just smile stiffly from across the room or turn his back to her, pretending to interest himself in Miguel’s inscrutable friends.

At the sight of her in Esther’s doorway he rose up so abruptly he practically knocked his chair over.

“María!”

“So you are here,” she said, without batting an eye, as if running into someone expected but disappointing.

It was a moment before Alex was able to gather his faculties. She must be visiting a friend, he thought, a sweatshop colleague who’d lost a finger to some machine or maybe a wounded guerilla who’d been medevacked here by supporters of the cause.

“Are you looking for someone?”

“Not looking, no.” She was dressed in tight black pants that held her backside like a taunt. “I am come to see Esther.”

“You mean—Esther? This Esther?”

“You can remember, no? It was in your house that I met her.”

Of course he fucking remembered. The image was etched in his mind like a woodcut, of the strange triumvirate she and Amanda and Esther had formed in his living room. But he had had no idea they had ever set eyes on each other again.

“It’s just—she’s sleeping,” he stammered.

“I will sit with her. You don’t mind?”

Without waiting for anything like permission, she took the chair he had vacated and started pulling things from her purse, a Bible, then a rosary, setting them in her lap like an old village woman come to say her novenas.

All this had the air of established routine.

“Have you been coming here? Have you come before?”

María put a finger to her lips.

“Shh. She’s sleeping.”

He was stuck standing there at the foot of the bed while María fingered her beads and mumbled her prayers. It was too strange, all of this, that she was here at all, that she was whispering her Jesus prayers over this Jew as if in some death-bed conversion. He hoped Rachel didn’t walk in. It was hard to believe he had ever pursued this woman—she seemed so alien all of a sudden, from a different century.

“You must give this to her from me,” she said when she’d done, setting her rosary on the bedside table. “To remember me.”

It took him an instant to process this.

“Are you going somewhere?”

She put a finger to her lips again.

“Come. We will take a coffee.”

He had thought of María differently since their dinner. Less charitably, mainly—it might have been simply her dismissal of him or the dark screen Amanda’s death had placed in front of everything, but more and more he’d felt that she and her people were just spinning their wheels, that even those freedom fighters down in Chalatenango or wherever, the men he didn’t measure up to, were just boys with big toys. That might have been the real reason he kept going to those fundraisers, merely to feed his own cynicism, to get some sort of bitter revenge. María, he began to notice, now that the fog of infatuation had lifted, wasn’t quite so above it all as he’d first imagined—she had her
enemies, her detractors, her cliques. He could see the battle lines now at these events, the slow drifting to one side of the room or the other, the huddled groups, the burst of laughter in a corner at which a head would turn in the corner opposite. The big earthquake in San Salvador in the fall had brought people together, but after a few weeks of stoic solidarity all the old controversies had surfaced again.

There was a big split between those who favored negotiation and those who opposed it. María, Alex knew, he had his informants now, was a negotiationist, which put her at odds with a lot of the men, so that almost by default it was to the men’s side of the room that Alex gravitated, wanting María to see him there amongst the enemy yet feeling like a fraud. He would sit listening for the umpteenth time as the world was divided neatly into peasants and imperialists, the vocabulary so familiar by now he didn’t need a translation, and the whole while he’d be hearing a little voice at the back of his head saying,
Bollocks
. It was the voice of Desmond: more and more now, in fact, Alex found himself infected by these Desmond-like epithets.
Evolution, not revolution. Down with the dialectic. Make the genes pay
.

An
FMLN
organizer who was based in Copenhagen came through in the winter and gave a talk at a Guanarock night. He spoke forcefully and with an easy fluency, but had the stylish, well-fed look of someone who had long been out of the trenches, wearing his hair in a ponytail like the Latino street musicians you saw on Prince Arthur.

Afterward he picked Alex out of the crowd and made him his special friend.

“
Gringo!
So how do you like our Salvadoran rock?”

He plied Alex with beers at the bar, talking the movement up. Fernando, he went by. No surname, as if to make clear he was undercover.

“You know, it’s not just about some bit of land you give to people to shut them up. People say negotiation, but what does it mean? You have to change the way people think. We go into towns, the first thing we do is education.”

It made Alex uncomfortable to be singled out like that. He asked about Copenhagen, trying to steer the conversation to more neutral ground, but Fernando wasn’t interested.

“You know where most of our money comes from? From Americans. Millions of dollars they send us, just people like you, and then their government talks about Russia. The Russians give us nothing. Sometimes
I have to carry it in a big suitcase like that, five, ten million at once. It’s a joke, isn’t it? The right hand doesn’t know about the left one. Then we can’t even say anything, or Reagan will stop it. Anyhow it’s better for us—the Americans are the enemy. No enemy, no war.”

At the end of the night Fernando took a group of them to an Italian restaurant nearby, a big barn of a place decked out with fake grapevines and old wine presses. An accordion player went around doing old standards like “Santa Lucia” at people’s tables, though when he came to theirs, Fernando, busy holding court, waved him off. There wasn’t a single woman in the group. Alex was glad that Miguel had stuck with him, shadowing him like a bodyguard the whole time he’d been with Fernando.

“So I leave them at the airport in West Berlin and send them off to Managua,” Fernando was saying, telling how he’d got a group of European journalists into one of the guerilla camps, “but who’s there to meet them in Managua when they get to their hotel? I am. After that I make the arrangements to go into El Salvador and I put them on the plane.
Adiós
, it’s too dangerous for me, I say, I’m staying behind. Then they get to the camp, and who’s the first person to see them? It’s me. You should have seen their faces, like it was magic. Bombs falling everywhere, borders closed, soldiers stopping every fucking peasant, and I move around like it’s nothing. We wanted them to see that, you know, that we could go where we wanted. That we were in control.”

There was an appreciative silence.

“So how did you do it?” Alex said, not sure if he was needling him or just playing the straight man. “How did you get into the country?”

Fernando took a sip of his wine.

“That, my friend,” he said predictably, with a satisfied grin, “I cannot tell you.” And he got his laugh.

Fernando picked up the check, peeling a wad of bills from his wallet. There had been several courses, half a dozen bottles of wine—it all must have run to a good three or four hundred dollars, probably more than the night’s fund-raiser had taken in.

“
Muchas gracias
,” some of the men mumbled.

It was only when they were on the sidewalk that Fernando finally asked Miguel who he was, as if he were merely some servant who’d been attending to them.

His face darkened at Miguel’s response.

“
El hermano de María?
”

Miguel didn’t flinch.

“
Sí
,” he said. “
Es mi hermana
.”

All Fernando’s expansiveness seemed to leave him. At the curb, climbing into the cab he’d hailed, he said to Alex, his voice low, “That boy is your friend?”

“Yes,” Alex said, though it might have been the first time he had ever admitted this.

“Be careful,
gringo
. You don’t understand our politics. Things are not black and white the way you think.”

All this had been months ago, but that parting shot still rankled with Alex.
Asshole
was what he’d thought at the time, puffed-up power monger, using the war to stroke his own ego, and yet he hadn’t been able to put the exchange from his mind. For one thing, it had seemed to justify all his unease over Miguel, whom even María had abandoned by then to move in with a fellow Salvadoreña. What kept coming back to him, though, was how Miguel had looked the man straight in the eye as if he saw right through him.
She is my sister
, he’d said simply. There had been something so undiluted in that, something that stood outside all the politicking.

He and María were waiting for the elevator. María was a little ahead of him and he had to stop himself from staring down at her nether parts.

“So you kept seeing her?” he said.

“Of course.”

“She never mentioned it.”

“You know all her friends?”

“Pretty much, yes,” he said tersely. “Or so I thought.”

The elevator doors finally opened in front of them.

“Now you see she has secrets,” María said. “Like everyone.”

They were packed into the elevator like sardines by the time they got to the lobby. María, inevitably, had drifted away from him and he had got trapped behind an old geezer trailing his IV on a stand, a flash of pasty inner thigh showing through the slit in his hospital gown. Probably off to have a cigarette, Alex thought.

He glanced at his watch: only ten minutes before his session.

“We must be quick,” María said. “I haven’t so much time.”

They grabbed a coffee at the dingy snack shop still operating down
the hall. When they were seated María said, without preliminaries, “In three days I will return to El Salvador.”

Alex was floored. Miguel had said nothing of this. She was landed here now, her claim had gone through; she had her café job, her work at the sweatshop.

“Is that wise? Is it safe?”

She shrugged.

“Safe, no. But that is my country. Now they talk peace, the Americans make them talk, so there’s a chance.”

“You trust the Americans?”

“It’s not a question to trust. They do what’s the best for them. Maybe peace is the best.”

They were still fishing bodies out of the garbage dumps in San Salvador, women who’d been impaled on broomsticks, men who’d been eviscerated or cut in half. He didn’t know what María had done, she had never talked of it except in the vaguest terms, but he knew how little it took.

“Look, it’s none of my business,” he started. “I don’t know, it seems stupid to me. It seems pigheaded.”

Already he had lost his cool. She hadn’t the right to saddle him with the thought of a broomstick up her, of her tossed out like nothing. It seemed to make a mockery of him, of his little life. It made a mockery of everything. People went along, they went to work, they did their groceries, they watched TV, and in a flash it was all beside the point.

“Maybe so,” María said. “Maybe stupid. But there’s no choice for me, to stay here.”

She had a look on her that he’d never seen, that might have been fear.

“What was it you did? At least tell me that.”

“It’s not what you do. It’s what they think.”

It was all just evasion, this sort of sermonizing, though it had taken him a while to see that. Instead of pushing her, he waited.

“There was a boy who was killed,” she said finally. “How do you say it. My fiancé. He was working with them in the city, with the guerillas, getting the guns. There were many like that. Secret people. They did the normal things in the day and then at night they helped the guerillas.”

It had cost her an effort to get it out. In a minute she’d said more to him that was real than in all the months they’d spent together.

“So the army found out,” he said carefully. “The death squads.”

“Yes, I suppose.”

“And you thought they’d come after you.”

She played with her cup.

“There was a letter,” she said. “It told me to go or to die. So I’m here.”