Travelling Light (15 page)

“I know nothing about cars,” she said. “I wouldn't be any use to you.”

“Tomorrow, ten o'clock?”

“I don't want to.”

He stopped at the first taxi in the rank. “I shall meet you at York Mills subway station, tomorrow morning, ten o'clock.”

Tears were scratching her eyes and she realized that she was crying. She told herself she did not trust him: spoiled and domineering, a raptor, his life catered by women.

The taxi's trunk lid flew open and the Sikh driver got out from behind the wheel to help Roberto load his plastic bags of groceries. The Sikh wore a tie and a pale blue sports coat and no gloves.

“Will you accept a ride?” Roberto asked Fiona as she stood raising first one snow boot, then the other, off the freezing pavement, where snow had hardened in blue-grey moraines.

“No.”

The Sikh slammed the trunk lid and a chunk of hard slush fell off the car. The Sikh got back behind the wheel.

“No matter, I will take you,” Roberto insisted.

In his flimsy shoes, thin clothes, smiling, Roberto stood holding open the taxi door until she gave up and threw herself inside.

When they reached her aunt's house across from the golf course, she agreed to meet him Saturday at ten o'clock at the subway station.

Alun had owned a car once. A rusted Cortina without a back seat. It had run out of gas and they'd left it under the motorway in Leith and forgotten about it.

They met in a suburban subway station on Saturday morning. Toronto a city of silent crowds and restraint, the only savagery was weather. Roberto found her a seat and rode clutching a strap, studying his list of used-car buys culled from classifieds in the
Toronto Star
. The train shunted evenly from station to station. Muffled passengers waited on clean platforms. At each stop the crowd allowed riders to exit before boarding the train. Soon the subway car was packed and hot, but no one spoke.

Fiona asked about Isabel's husband. He had been assassinated by Communists. The Communists had accused him of stealing a truck full of liquor, but Roberto insisted his brother-in-law was not, had never been a criminal. “No, no. In Salvador the criminals are the Communists! Or the police.”

She couldn't tell if the other passengers, faces set in the grim appetites of cold, were listening.

“He was very good. A good man. Now I, I am the father,” declared Roberto. “But maybe in the summer she can meet another. Someone else from the Salvador.”

Fiona sat crushed between two drab women with large paper shopping bags. Roberto swayed in front of her in his belted leather overcoat with fur collar, grey flannels with permanent crease, black boots with zippers and hideous two-inch heels. His gloves were very new.

The train slid south, mostly underground but sometimes out in the open, through one of the snowy ravines.

I have a past, but it doesn't interest me anymore, thought Fiona. I have a future just because I haven't the courage to kill myself.

The first car they inspected was a rusty Subaru in a driveway on Palmerston Avenue. Roberto walked carefully around the car while the seller, a young Portuguese man in a bomber jacket, watched him warily. Roberto kicked the tires politely, but she knew from his chilly smile that he wasn't going to buy.

The next car was a massive yellow station wagon parked behind a house on Euclid Avenue owned by some kind of sect. She could see pale white women in saris, puffy down vests, and snow boots playing in the yard with white children who wore little turbans.

The seller wore a white turban, narrow cotton trousers, and a down vest. He had freckles, blue eyes, and a fringe of orange beard, and his accent was relaxed, American. “Not so great on gas but real steady,” he told them. He sounded like an American university student. Fiona watched Roberto prowl around the car like a predator sizing up its prey. He had brought a rubber sheet with him and a flashlight. After spreading the sheet on the frozen slush, he crawled beneath the car and remained for a couple of minutes. “Ball joints no good,” he called softly.

“Fifteen hundred bucks,” the American boy in the turban said. “Those tires are like new.”

Roberto slid out slowly from underneath the car. He shook his head and smiled. “No. It is not the one I want.”

They walked down Harbord Avenue to a bakery café, where he bought her a cup of coffee.

“You are very secret,” Roberto said, sipping his coffee. They were at a little round table. There were pools of water on the floor, damp sawdust, melted snow from boots. The plate-glass window was steamed up. Fiona could barely see the traffic outside.

When she didn't say anything, he sighed and took another sip of his coffee. She had been about to ask him about the scars chipped into his neck, but she decided she did not want to know that story. She looked at the Canadians in the room, students, the university was nearby. Such healthy faces, glowing, blooming. Husky college boys with lank hair. Pretty, honey-coloured girls with silver rings in their eyebrows.

“It's unreal,” said Fiona.

“Perhaps I am in love with you,” said Roberto.

“Oh, bother me not,” she said angrily.

He looked wounded. She felt a sense of drift and helplessness. They finished their coffee and went back outside. She had spent her life in climates that were assaults. The steady rain of Scotland where male bodies smelled of must, neglect, coldness.

They crept along the sidewalk, bodies bent, faces white and creased by the ferocious wind.

In neighbourhoods from the Danforth to Kensington Market to Dufferin the used cars they saw that afternoon were huge, rusty, forlorn, the cars of immigrants.

They were inspecting a thirty-year-old Cadillac convertible with a damaged roof when Fiona told him that her boyfriend had died in Scotland.

Roberto had been trying without success to start the Cadillac. He listened calmly, gazing at something through the cracked windshield, shaking his head, then patting her hand, his glove to her mitten, saying nothing.

It was getting dark and they toured through cramped used-car lots on College Street. The shiny cars were packed in under strings of lights and the skinny salesmen — Italian, Portuguese, Asian — were impatient, and probably freezing, and eager to get home. Red and yellow streetcars grinding along College Street were crowded, the shops beginning to close.

“I will find the one I want. It always takes a little time.”

Roberto was not discouraged.

They went into another café, in Kensington Market, and he bought two cups of Cuban coffee and a sweet roll, which they shared.

“For you to come with me is a wonderful thing I appreciate,” he said.

Perhaps it's some form of mental hysterectomy, Fiona thought. I've been spayed, emotionally.

She had taken off her mittens to eat the roll. He took her raw pink hands and started massaging them. She watched his face. She didn't want to hear stories of what he had done, why he had come to Canada, or what had happened in his home country. Immigrant stories were all the same. If Alun were in Toronto what would he be doing? Sitting on a radiator keeping warm his skinny arse and firing heroin under his tongue? Had he died in Toronto, how would they have got him into the ground, when the ground was like iron?

“I think you are very beautiful,” Roberto said.

He finally released her fingers and she crammed a piece of sweet roll into her mouth then pulled off another piece and fed it to him. She licked the sugar and the flakes of crust from her fingers.

“It is all right,” he sighed happily. He looked tired but seemed confident again. “Say nothing. It is all right.”

Then there was a thaw. Patches of yellow grass opened in the snow. There was an afternoon of sombre rain. But the following morning it was sunny once more and getting colder — the satellite weatherman warned of a high-pressure front from the west — and she was sitting in her aunt's big, soft car, waiting for her aunt to finish shopping at the discount drugstore. She noticed Franco across the street, in the alley behind Café Roberto, unloading supplies from a rented truck, wearing a T-shirt and work boots with the laces untied and tongues flopping out. She got out of the car, crossed the street, went into the alley behind the truck. Franco told her Roberto had gone to Buffalo with friends to go shopping. When she followed Franco into the storeroom, he seized the belt of her jeans and made a taunting, tearing gesture as if he were trying to tug the jeans down, tear them off her. She kicked him hard in the shins and he yelped. She punched the side of his neck using plenty of knuckle, then fled outside, down the alley and across the street to her aunt's car. The motor was idling, the heater gushing warm air, and the door locks snapped shut with the touch of a button.

On Tuesday night Fiona stood at the picture window in her aunt's living room, watching the sky darkening. It went purple as a bruise, then black. She put on her parka, snow boots, elk-hide mittens and watch cap, and went outside. The air was sour in her nostrils, a tang of pickling salt, cold and withering. In
National Geographic
she'd seen photos of long-lost Arctic explorers in long-lost Arctic graves, flesh leathery and black.

She followed a ski trail over the golf course, turning off onto another, narrower track that switchbacked into the woods before braiding into side trails and animal tracks through underbrush. With the thaw no skiers had been out for days. She soon lost her sense of direction. Her boots rattled on the crusty snow. Maples, tamarack, and silver birches made tortured noises. Fiona peered between the gaunt trees, trying to identify street light. She clapped her hands and decided to keep going in one direction, orienting by the moon. Certainly much less than a half-mile away were restaurants, shops, churches, petrol stations.

Deep within the woods a pack of dogs began barking with full, delirious throats. Fiona slipped, her feet skidding out from under her, and fell over backwards, cracking her head on the hard-packed snow. She lay on her back and fought down terror. The fierce music of the dogs rose to a howl. They were after something. They were chasing something through the woods. She scrambled to her feet and looked about for a weapon. As she seized a stick, she thought of her boyfriend Alun smashing into a parked car on a dripping, freezing night in Scotland. A muffled crack after he swung the brick, and clumps of safety glass hanging in gluey strands from the window frame, and Alun reaching in and snatching someone's handbag off the front seat.

The trail switched down the side of the ravine. Clutching her stick she began to hike, treading warily. She could hear animals behind her, eager and sinewy, paws scratching on the icy marl of snow and mud. When she reached the bottom of the ravine, there was a clearly marked trail through a glade of rough-barked trees. The woods ended abruptly at an open fairway sprawled under the moon. She saw street lamps. The dogs' barking faded away.

Roberto called on Thursday and invited her to the restaurant for dinner the following night, with her aunt and uncle and her young cousins.

“All of us? Are you sure?”

“Of course.”

When Fiona arrived at Café Roberto with her family, little candle jars were burning brightly on each table. Her uncle wore his tweed jacket and brown tie, her aunt wore a fussy peach-coloured dress, and Fiona wore a short skirt. There were only six customers when they came in. Isabel, pale and plump in a tight black dress, stood near the cash register, self-conscious, gripping menus. Fiona introduced her aunt and uncle and cousins. Isabel nervously shook hands with everyone.

“Where's Roberto?” Fiona asked.

“Trouble.”

“Is something wrong?”

“Franco.”

“What is it?” Fiona stood up. “I'll go back and see.”

She pushed open the door of the kitchen. Roberto and his mother were beside Franco, who slouched on a stool at the sink. The tap was running and his mother was cleaning Franco's face. Roberto turned and saw Fiona. Franco leered at her. The front of his shirt was spotted with blood. One of his eyes was dark and swollen shut.

“Salvadors at the mall . . . Stupid Franco, he get in a fight.” Roberto cuffed Franco on the side of the head. The scars on Roberto's throat, wrinkled and pink, looked like deep clawings.

Franco defended himself in Spanish, sounding indignant while pulling on his coat. Roberto began pushing Franco and his mother out the back door. When they were gone he flung the wet washcloth he was holding into the sink and stepped up to Fiona, wiping his hands on his jeans. He placed one hand on her shoulder and kissed her on the cheek.

She stepped back, but he stayed with her. The floor was wet. The kitchen smelled of steam and cilantro and coffee. There was a pile of chopped cilantro and knife on the counter. Roberto took Fiona's arm in a hard grip above the elbow and kissed her forcefully. As his tongue tried to probe her lips he forced his pelvis against her and backed her against the refrigerator, still trying to work his tongue inside her mouth. She felt nothing.

Finally he had to let her go. He was smiling but she could tell he was confused. She could have picked up the chopping knife and slashed him. The thin, strong reek of cilantro scented the room.

Instead she turned and went out through the swinging doors and sat down with her family. A few minutes later Roberto served the meal. He was relaxed and dignified, the perfect host, and her aunt and uncle were impressed. They hadn't eaten out since they'd come to Toronto. Now they ate
pupusas,
seafood
sopa,
and plantains. They ate
yuca frita.
They had Pilsner beer and Salvadoran coffee. Her uncle smoked his pipe with the coffee. Her aunt spooned ice cream.

She next saw Roberto in the neighbourhood branch of the Toronto Library. He was sitting at a wooden table in the room where foreign newspapers clipped to sticks hung like flags in lifeless air. He was studying
Auto Trader
. He sprang out of his chair and followed her downstairs to the vending machines, where she bought a cup of sour coffee. She felt no fear though they were alone. The basement was lit with dim green fluorescence. The air smelled of photocopy chemicals.