The Return: A Novel (24 page)

10

By that afternoon, there were two Templo trucks at the foot of the causeway, and when Marder drove his pickup out, they fell into formation, one in front and one behind. The Las Palmas Floridas Hotel was smaller and dingier than Marder remembered, but whether that was time, or neglect, or the absence of the bright varnish of youthful romance, he could not say. The flame tree at the entrance still stood, but now without its pool of bloodred petals. The fountain that had played and sparkled in the front courtyard was now dry and littered with food wrappers and plastic cups.

The lobby was dark and cool, as he remembered it, but there was a musty, greasy smell that his wife’s parents would not have tolerated when they ran the place. A fat youth sat behind the desk with his feet up on a crate, reading a
fútbol
magazine. He looked up without interest when Marder walked in, then returned to sport. The tables in the little restaurant were the same, even in the same positions on the floor, but what he recalled as a softly glowing polished hardwood floor had been covered with cheap tiles in an annoying chemical blue. The brass wall sconces were still in place but bulbless, smeared with greasy cobwebs, their light replaced by a long fluorescent fixture screwed into the plaster ceiling. The dining terrace was deserted except for some small yellow birds picking crumbs off the unswept tiles.

Marder went in and sat at what had been his usual table. The plastic tablecloth had not been wiped in a while. He looked to the doorway where he had first caught sight of Soledad d’Ariés. Suppose it were possible, he thought, to return to this very spot on the earth’s surface, to insert into the consciousness of his former self the history of the years that followed that first blast of infatuation. Would the youth he’d been divert his course? Probably not. He hadn’t been able to greatly affect the lives of his own children, or so it seemed to him. No, if Marder now had appeared like the Ancient Mariner to Marder then and prophesied disaster, if he had appeared to the two of them in their passion and said in the thick voice of experience, Don’t do it, kids!, they would have laughed.

Or, no,
he
would have laughed; she would have looked at the old specter with that wonderfully limpid look she had, deep seriousness in her eyes with that clear spirit shining out, and she would have said, Yes, I believe you, it will be a disaster. I believe my father will never speak to me again if I run off with this penniless gringo; I believe I will never see my mother again if I do, but still I do it. If it is my fate to die for love, prepare the grave! She could, in fact, say things like that, things that sounded right in Spanish but that no one would have believed if spoken in the English of America, that sensible, dispassionate, calculating tongue; and she did say such things, in her native language, throughout her marriage to him, and he had learned that language too.

So he never understood that he had torn her out by the roots. She kept that knowledge from him, and she made him believe that when she went mad in New York—which was not that often but violent when it came—it was because he had failed in perfect love, and he strove always to do better. He thought that to be flogged into passion was better than not having passion at all, better than being slightly dead, which was what he’d felt like when he came back from Vietnam and married in haste to poor Janice, then drove off south on the Harley.

And it had not been an illusion; it had not been a frosting of romance on ordinary life. No, the romance had gone down to the core; their life had been an opera—a comic opera, perhaps, full of transcendent emotion, ridiculous from the outside, but not from within. He’d developed the grand gesture; he brought her flowers and jewels he couldn’t afford, vacations at the beach—ditto—and trips to Europe and Asia, to every place but Mexico. The point was the extravagance, the absurdity of a guy on a salary buying his beloved such things, a dozen gardenias in the dead of a New York winter because she’d mentioned that she missed the odor of gardenia that used to float through the window of her room when she was a girl.

Which was why, when the Apple fortune came in, he’d kept it from her, so that those gestures would retain their extravagance. It was his only secret from her, except for the one sad little affair.

Her secrets from him were more serious than that, as he knew now. He hadn’t known about the drugs, that she’d been treated for depression for years. She’d never told him, she’d taken that secret with her off the snowy roof, and he’d had to piece it together later. There was a hidden journal, used infrequently, mere jagged impressions set down at odd moments amid the translated poetry. The hideous shame, for example—he hadn’t known about that; the ache of exile, the insults borne. Because in New York, when you see a Latina woman with a couple of obviously American kids, she’s a nanny and treated as such in our great democracy. He hadn’t understood the hope that her father would relent, that as he aged he’d mellow, that he would call for his daughter to be at his side and they could return to Playa Diamante, that she could one day care for her parents as a daughter should. He’d had no fucking idea about any of this.

And it might have worked out, had Esteban de Haro d’Ariés not been a proud man, a descendant of
peninsulares
, Spaniards of the purest blood, or had he not lived in Michoacán during that particular historic juncture, when the mafia peace was broken and the drug wars blossomed in the streets, or had he not refused to sell his hotel to a certain
jefe
of La Familia. But such in fact was his fate. Therefore, one Sunday morning, he and his wife had entered their modest sedan—modest, for Esteban d’Ariés had refused the silver of La Familia—and had driven off to church.

On the way, a car had forced them to the curb, and Don Esteban had been dragged out at gunpoint. His wife had bravely attacked the kidnapper and been shot down for her pains. Silver or lead, as they say in Michoacán, and he had chosen lead, which had been duly delivered. Some of that lead, metaphysically speaking, had flown north of the border, an invisible illegal immigrant, and entered the heart of Maria Soledad Beatriz de Haro d’Ariés Marder, killing her too, also metaphysically speaking.

This Marder believed, for when she returned to New York from the funeral (and she’d insisted on going by herself, for how could she bring him, the gringo demon lover, the
cause
, when you came to think about it, of this disaster), she was a changed woman. At first he thought it was the shock of losing both her parents to the violence, but months passed, then years, and he discovered that he was married to a different person. It was just the two of them by then, the kids off at college, and the evenings of silence were exceedingly long. She stopped working, she watched television—American television, no less—she stopped cooking, or dressing. He urged therapy; she refused. But then she did go, secretly, for the drugs. She took them; she became calm. But as far as he could see, she was no longer Chole, the love of his life.

Marder caught a movement in the corner of his eye and there she was, dressed in the pale-blue dress with the white apron she always wore when she served. He thought: Mr. Thing has popped; blood is flowing into my brain and I’m having hallucinations, and now she’ll come over and kiss me and take me to heaven, where it will be explained what happened, why she left me with a living corpse like she did, and how much of it was my fault. Or maybe not to heaven, considering the events surrounding her death. For a second or two a smile spread on his face, and then reality focused its malicious lens. The waitress was a thin slattern with a sour expression, and her apron was not perfectly white, crisply ironed, but limp, stained. She asked him what he wanted, and he ordered a coffee and an empanada to get rid of her.

She came back with muddy, thin coffee and an industrial pastry still glowing from the microwave. After a bite and a sip, he shoved a hundred-peso note under his plate and left. It was clear one did not come to Las Palmas Floridas any longer for the cuisine or the service, and he wondered how it managed to stay in business. As he approached the front desk, he found out. A gentleman, clearly drunk, clearly a foreigner (red-haired, chubby, middle-aged), was checking in with a young woman teetering on four-inch platforms; she wore a halter top made from a silk scarf and a skirt that barely hid her round, high buttocks. Marder watched them depart, swaying, clutched together, with giggles in two languages.

He asked the clerk where he could find Angel d’Ariés. The man shrugged and picked up his
fútbol
magazine. Marder snatched the magazine from his hand and asked the question again and was embarrassed by the brief look of terror that crossed the poor man’s face. He stuck a hundred-peso note in the magazine and gave it back, and the man made a movement with his head toward a door marked
OFICINA.

Marder was no stranger to this room. In his day it had contained an old-fashioned rolltop desk with pigeonholes, a glass-fronted bookcase, two wooden filing cabinets, a swivel chair, two bentwood chairs seconded from the bar, and a horsehair couch, upon which the young Marder once delightedly, clandestinely, rolled with the girl of his dreams.

This couch was now occupied by Angel and the two chairs by a pair of young louts,
ni-nis
without question. They were watching three people fucking on a large wall-mounted screen, which hung in the place Marder remembered had once been occupied by a glassed and framed representation of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The room stank of marijuana smoke and stale tequila.

All three looked up when Marder entered.

“Hello, Angel,” said Marder.

“What do you want?”

“I want to talk with you. Could you turn that thing off and ask your friends to give us a few moments?”

Angel did nothing, only stared at the screen. His face was colored by the reflected writhings, a sickly pink like a skin ailment. Marder moved to block the screen and addressed the louts. “Gentlemen, if you would?” he said, and made a courtly wave of his arm that swept back his jacket and showed them the butt of his pistol. They looked to Angel for direction, and he made a gesture and said a few words that enabled the two to rise and strut out without loss of their pathetic honor.

When the
oficina
door closed on them, Marder pointed his finger at the porn and Angel lifted a remote and made it stop. Marder said, “Angel, do you know who I am?”

“Yeah, you live in the big house on Bird Island. I heard you were connected and we’re going to do business with you.”

“I don’t mean that. I mean I was married to your sister.”

A puzzled look appeared on his face. “To Juanita?”

“No. To Soledad. She left a long time ago, with me. You were a little kid, maybe five or six. You’re looking confused—you never heard anything about Soledad? I mean from your parents, or neighbors, or relatives?”

A shrug here. “No, not really. Oh, I get it—that’s why you asked about my father when we were at the Guzmán house. I wondered about that. Yeah, Soledad—I sort of remember her, but she was a lot older, and there weren’t any pictures, and my father got pissed whenever anyone in the family mentioned her name. I guess I thought she was dead a long time ago.”

“She is dead, but recently,” said Marder. He wanted to get out of here, away from this obscene parody of a place that had lived in his mind for nearly forty years as a kind of gateway to paradise, like the place where Dante first caught sight of Beatrice.

Angel shrugged again. Marder asked him, “How did you come to work for the Templos?”

“It’s in their zone, you know? Before that I was in La Familia.”

“Even though they killed your parents?”

“My mother was an accident. The guy that did it was taken care of.”

“And your father?”

“He made his choice.”

“And you’re comfortable with this? Running a hot-sheet hotel for gangsters? This is your life?”

“What the fuck do you care? You’re a gangster yourself, from what I hear.”

“I care because you’re my
cuñado
. Family is supposed to be important. And also, when I look at your face, I see part of her. You may not remember her, but she remembered you. She sent money and packages for your birthday and Epiphany. She never got anything back.”

Angel’s face grew more tender when he heard this, as if a lost person was trying to come out from behind the thick shellac of the thug. “Truly? Shit, I never knew that,” he said. “You know, come to think about it, I found some pictures after my folks died. I got them here someplace.”

He got up, rummaged in one of the file drawers, and drew out a flat black cardboard box. “Here’s the only one with her in it.”

Marder took it from him. It was a large-format studio photograph of the whole family, in the formal pose favored years ago by Mexican families of a certain status. There was Don Esteban seated in a large chair, with Carmela, his wife, standing at his right side, their children Juanita and Angel stood on either side of their mother, and on the other side of the father’s throne was the eldest daughter, Maria Soledad, glorious in her innocence.

Nasty animals clawed at Marder’s gut and raked his throat. He said, or croaked, “Angel, can I borrow this?”

A final shrug. “Fuck, you can have it, man. The Templos are my family now.”

*   *   *

“So, old home week didn’t work out, I see,” said Skelly when Marder returned.

“Is it that obvious? I remember him as a bright, pretty little boy and now he’s a skanky thug running a whorehouse. He gave me this.”

Skelly looked at the photo. “Ah,
la familia d’Ariés
. That is one pretty miss, my friend. Although, in fairness, I’d have to say she was not a patch on our Lourdes.”

He started the truck and they began the drive back to the house.

Marder studied the photo some more. Yes, her nose was too large for perfection, her face had not the perfect oval, the eyes were smaller than they should have been. And yet even in this photograph you could see the living poety there, the perfect integrity of a wonderful soul. Which Lourdes, he thought, did not have, and which was what had wrenched his heart when he’d first seen it; he thought it still would have, whatever the size of her nose.