Cities of Refuge (34 page)

Her face had hardened by the time she’d dressed. She gathered Rodrigo’s clothes in her arms and presented them to him
and he got out of bed and tried to kiss her, just to calm her, but she pushed him away.

— I’ll talk to him, he said.

The channels were changing every few seconds, then stopped on an ad for an exercise machine people bought for their homes. The voice in English said “see the difference in just four weeks.” A minute or so passed before he and Teresa both jumped at the sound of something thrown hard against the other side of the door, and then falling and rolling, empty beer can, and crushed underfoot.

— Who’s in there? Luis was at the door.

Teresa stood back, near the window. Rodrigo still didn’t have his shirt on. He unlocked and opened the door.

When Luis saw Rodrigo he seemed not able to make sense of him. Rodrigo nodded slightly in greeting but Luis did not acknowledge it. He wore black jeans and a frayed blue shirt Rodrigo had seen dozens of times. His feet were bare, and this made Rodrigo aware of his half-nakedness, so he pulled his T-shirt on, and in the second it took to duck his head and look up again, he saw that Luis had settled on a meaner expression.

— I let you into my life, he said. I help you out. And this is what happens.

— This has nothing to do with you.

— You drink my beer and you fuck my wife.

— Don’t talk like that.

It was too late, Rodrigo knew, but in that moment he understood that the three of them were different because of the ways they were mistaken. Every day Teresa in her fantasies was beautifully mistaken. He himself was mistaken to believe he was too young and ignorant and out of place to fully trust
his knowledge. And Luis was mistaken to believe his life could be different if he took it in hand and bent it to the shapes he saw in his dark thoughts.

— Teresa only pretends she’s your wife.

— Yes. And she pretends to do the cooking and cleaning. And she pretends to fuck me when I want her to. She pretends very well.

Then it was Teresa flying up at him and Rodrigo holding her back with one arm, finally turning to push her onto the bed, with Luis laughing at them. He turned back then and hit Luis even before forming a proper fist, a clumsy punch in the face, without much force, but enough to satisfy Luis that he’d led them where he intended. They crashed to the floor and up again and wrestled without clear advantage until again they fell and Luis was on top and throwing elbows into his face. The blood and pain didn’t scare him. What scared him was that close by were new arrangements, like a sudden light that broke through to dreams and woke you into some strange, closed place. He had seen men die, boys too, no one he had known, but like him just the same.

Luis lowered his form and head-butted him on the brow. When Rodrigo found his senses, Luis was standing over him, telling him to get up, and Teresa was somewhere crying.

He got to his knees and then his feet and stood before Luis, seeing him with one clear eye.

— What do you do? Hit me? Luis laughed at him. I’ll call the police and they’ll send you back to your jungle. Get out of here.

Rodrigo turned to search for Teresa. She was framed in the bedroom doorway. She seemed to have blood on her too, on her hand and across her shirt, and he knew it was his blood. He
started towards her but she shook her head. She disappeared into the bedroom and then came and gave him a wet towel and he mopped his face. Then she took it from him and went to the kitchen. She found scissors and cut a strip from it and tied it around his forehead. Luis had gone to the window and turned his back on them.

He reached out for Teresa but she backed away.

— Come with me.

— No. You have to leave.

She walked to the door and he followed, and she opened it and took hold of his belted waistband and tugged him past her. He stood in the hall. She kissed her bloody hand and touched it to his cheek, and closed the door.

I
t would be an early bedtime. Marian got into her nightgown and sat with Kim on the sofa. They were both slightly drunk. They’d gone with Donald to a Shakespeare in the Park production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, and then on the way home, with the car windows open and in clear violation of the law, passed around a bottle of Pinot Grigio and took in the noise and nighttime improvisational spirit of Bloor Street West.

“Who knew dying could be so much fun?”

“Jesus, Mom.”

Marian hadn’t expected to make it to the end of the play but surprised herself.

“I think I’m through the hardest part. And I can’t stand moroseness. Is that a word? Morosity.”

“Morosery.”

“Gloomism. Blueyness.”

Kim smiled. Marian brought her feet up onto the couch and rested them in Kim’s lap.

“Maybe I’m mostly faking it at this point, but the faking feels real. It’s a way of waiting. I want to make the best of each day. And not say too many banal things.”

Donald entered and announced that the news on the internet described Russians rattling their sabres again up at the Arctic border.

“You see,” said Marian, “it’s not a bad time to be leaving,” at which point Donald seemed to flinch. He turned and left the room.

“I guess that’s a border I can’t cross with him.”

Kim was the last one up. She sat alone, wondering how the play’s comic energy had so easily influenced her mother’s mood. It was possible that, as her days ran out, Marian was more often cheery than she had been before her illness. Absurdity counted for more at the end.

On her way to bed she heard Donald’s radio in the study. She went in and caught a few seconds of the
CBC
overnight service, another Radio Netherlands documentary about the international sex trade. When she turned it off, the new quiet held her, and she thought of Harold. She hadn’t heard from him since sending the Santiago letter. It struck her that she might have made a mistake.

In her room she found an envelope on her pillow. Inside was a yellowed page in Harold’s hand – fifteen names, most Spanish, some partial – and a note in Marian’s: “The list I mentioned. I stole it years ago to free him of it, but I couldn’t throw it away, with all its mystery and weight. I produce it now inspired by the
Bard, like a prop in a play. You can give it back to him, your choice – I’m letting go of these things. But you’ve inherited this territory, wherever it is.”

Before she dropped away minutes later she tried to think about what it meant, the list, Harold’s silence, but instead it was the radio documentary that carried her to sleep. She felt her heart freely given into capture and then she was flying, falling into some impoverished hill country where parents sell their children into labour or prostitution and she sees it all, sees the kids sold away, sees maps of their journeys with arcing lines like cinnamon routes or advancing campaigns and the rest of the world lays indurate, watching, as their hearts and hers travel by.

R
osemary’s door opened before he reached it. She must have seen him coming across the park. She stood behind the screen door.

“Why are you here?” She turned on the foyer light. She looked a little rough, as if she’d not slept. “I can’t invite you in.”

He tested the door. It opened. She stepped back as he stepped in. Then she went to an armchair and sat. He closed the inside door and looked around. The small front room was dominated by a tall, old standing stereo cabinet with wicker speaker covers. Set along the top were a white china fish and a propped image, a golden detail from some iconographic painting. The only other art was a small colour photo of a horse grazing in a field at sunset. The poor taste of the thing jarred him. The horse didn’t belong with the woman as he thought he knew her, but it fit the room.

“I’ve come to apologize to you.”

“Then you should have called.”

“I’m doing what I can face to face. All of it.”

“All of what?”

From outside, the electronic chime from an open car door warning of keys in the ignition. He recalled the bell of the knife grinder going down the street he used to live on with his young family, his two girls.

“I want to meet him. This man you shelter.”

She looked off towards a table lamp as if reading something on the stained shade. Her face looked malarial. There were things this fearless woman didn’t really want to confront.

“He’s none of your concern, Harold.”

“Maybe you think of us the same way.” His voice was rising. “Do you see me like one of your charges? Am I in need of saving, is that it? He and I and all your undocumented semi-literate bloodstained young monsters.”

She looked at him in a kind of horror, her mouth open and wordless. There were times when he would fall into himself, down a long darkness, tumbling beyond language or control. He would come to rest for only a moment in a state of unendurable clarity, and then the words would find him and like that he was back on the surface, in the falseness of things. Kim’s letter had stranded him far from the surface. But the deep order was all around him if only he’d be granted light to see it. There were, at least, one or two answers he could bring to his possession by force.

As if he’d conjured him by will, he heard the young man begin up the basement stairs on the far side of the kitchen. He appeared, paused momentarily to look at him, and then came straight across. Rosemary stood as if to come between them.

“It’s all right, Rodrigo.”

He stopped and stood under the archway to the front room. From the park this Rodrigo had appeared handsome in a boyish way. Smooth and young. No doubt Rosemary would see the divine in his beauty. Showing the so-called path, being the way, she would think the way was shown back. But up close he was something else, his features harder, older. And today he had a fresh shiner and a cut on his brow.

“Go back downstairs. Everything’s fine here.”

— Where did you get those wounds?

“What are you asking him? Speak English.”

— A man hit me. A friend. A man I work with.

— Which answer should I accept?

Rodrigo looked briefly to Rosemary, the warning in her expression.

— We’re good people.

“What’s he asking you?” she demanded.

— Have you ever gone to an organization called
GROUND?

“Don’t answer, Rodrigo.”

“No need to,” said Harold. “I’m calling the police.”

“To tell them what?” The tone was measured, her eyes level on him. She was used to drama. Voices raised, hands flying up. “That I rejected your advances and now you want my tenant arrested?”

She was saying he didn’t know what he was doing. She wasn’t seeing the long view. Whatever he did or might do made sense from a distance. Kim had tried to find the distance, to look back at him. Whomever she’d seen, not him exactly, but someone he seemed to know, she’d seen with a clarity that changed everything.

“There are criminals among us. Here. I’ve found one.”

“This is how you apologize?”

He was sorry for having kissed her but not for wanting to. The attraction was unknowable to him. Through a window he saw a small group of racing cyclists glide by in their glossy forms. He thought of a night river sheen. An image of himself standing with his father in the wilderness dark on a shore somewhere. It may have been a memory.

“Conviction,” he said to Rosemary. “Loaded word, isn’t it?”

“What does he ask?”

— I’m asking for your story, whatever it is. Convince me.

“Don’t listen to him. Go back downstairs.”

— I’m no harm to you. I’m no danger. I don’t make trouble for this country.

— You can barely speak English. I doubt you can even read your own language.

Rodrigo leaned slightly against the archway without somehow relenting his readiness to advance. Something in the line of him suggested an ease with his space. This was his home, after all.

— I can read. I can work honest work.

— You sound Colombian. So you were with one of the paramilitaries, no doubt. What have you been trained to do in a circumstance like this?

— How do you know me? You don’t know me.

— I know your kind.

Fuck them both, Harold thought. Exactly that. He wanted to fuck them over, fuck up the kid’s pretty face, fuck Rosemary’s brains out. Fuck them bloody.

“I won’t have this.”

“You don’t get to call every shot, Rosemary. I’m here. I want his bogus story. I want you to watch me hear it and judge it. If I like it, maybe I won’t turn him in.”

His breathing was short. He’d never been aware of it before. This was all a charade, their little drama with its presumed stakes, the imagined echoes of distant conflicts, his very breaths. He was caught up in a mockery of the real world, with its events of scale, its oceans of misery. He’d made actors of the three of them. All he could do was bring them to the end, or if the end wouldn’t come, to somehow
make
them real. He’d walked out into the day still trailing Kim’s letter, in a spell brought on by the persuasions of fiction, its magic dust. But the spell broke upon anything of substance. The only dust that mattered was the pulverized earth of history. He recognized it by kind wherever he went. He collected it now and then in his travels, kept it in his pockets, the names of the killers, the numbers of the dead, the manners of deaths, and spilled it from his fingers to season the air on pleasant, forgetful days.

“Your issue with me has nothing to do with him,” said Rosemary. “Or with your daughter. You’ve been rejected and you’re behaving like a child.”

“And what about you? What are the sources of your passion right now? Are you playing mother to him? Or is it something else? Or both? What good work you do, making murderers into motherfuckers.”

They both came towards him and at first it wasn’t clear who was intercepting whom. Then it was Rosemary stepping between them. Rodrigo put his hand on her arm to move her aside and Harold took his wrist in hand and wrenched it away to free her.

— Do you like hurting women? Is that it?

And then before he could make further calculations he was hit and down on the floor and the kid was kicking him in the ribs. The pain was astonishing, he knew instantly he’d never before felt its kind. He covered up with his arms and his elbows were driven into him and so he rolled a little to and fro and the blows were general. They hit him as proofs in his favour. He looked up once to see Rosemary tugging on Rodrigo and screaming to no effect. There was no wind in him to stir the least of events and it seemed there never again would be. The intensity was focused and unfiltered and it made nothing of the crying and chaos so that the sounds seemed not entirely human as if the thing upon him had never known him, had nothing to do with him. The three of them connected only through his breaking body. He felt what he felt and he thought he detected some good in it and then all-that-was cracked into his skull and the darkness came up and he was gone and he said so to himself and kept saying it until he knew he was not gone at all but instead present in a new way.