Cities of Refuge (35 page)

It was Rodrigo who was gone. Rosemary had put something under Harold’s head. She was kneeling over him, with a hand on his face.

“He thought you were threatening me. He misunderstood. I’m calling an ambulance. You can say you were in the park. You were in the park and you were beaten. Do you understand, Harold?”

Did he understand Harold? He had never much understood him, no. Except he was a talker and you could never trust a talker. It was an early affliction that had never left him. His father in a hospital bed, waking and finding him there sitting by, and his
first words were, “Don’t you say a thing,” to bend him from his nature. And sure enough when the old man died Harold talked his way through school and on into higher learning, higher culture. And he had never stopped talking. He could never be the still point in a room of people. Only when he forgot himself was he quiet. He had never just shut up.

He told Rosemary to call him a cab. He said if he felt any worse he’d get to a hospital himself. She took no convincing. The pain was almost unmanageable through the cab ride, the arrival at the condo. He went straight to the bathroom and stripped with the short, deliberate movements of the old man he would soon become. He stood before the full-length mirror. There were cuts on his forehead, on the bridge of his nose, and at the top of one ear, and the makings of a shiner of his own, but his bad body looked mostly like itself. To the eye, the damage was less than he’d supposed. The bruises would look worse tomorrow but he was hardly a specimen of abuse.

How had this day begun? Yesterday had never ended. Deep in the night the phone had sounded once. Sleep had finally come as the window reported first light. Then the clock radio had woken him with the morning’s humidex reading and a prediction of heavy smog. He missed the old mornings of the knife grinder. They’d rented the bottom floor of a house. Kim had just been born and nobody slept and he’d walk the west-end streets in the pre-dawn with Kim in his arms and old men leaning on wrought-iron porch railings and Italians with scarred workboots and dented grey lunchpails squatting at corners awaiting their rides, smoking and looking meditatively before themselves in attitudes of faint recall. In the early hours the place was a village, people nodded to one another, and him
with his baby girl, strangers stopping to talk to him, acknowledging a value in the easy transaction. He imagined some corrective measure in the mind’s design that the best part of the day should follow so close upon the worst part of the night.

He’d spent much of the morning composing a letter to Kim. It was time they talked, but not until he’d said in print precisely what he wanted to. There was no room for misunderstandings. He needed to be exact and direct. There was a responsibility to the record, and to the real people on it or affected by it. They both knew the record took you only so far, but only one of them respected its limits. He pictured them walking across an open plain, coming to the outer edge of the last mapped, marked territory, standing side by side at the end of solid ground. Beyond them, air or water or the dark unknown, some element that generated only illusions. She stepped forward. He turned back.

He ran a bath with Epsom salts, walked naked into the kitchen and poured a tumbler of Scotch, returned to the tub with his drink and set about soaking the dull chords and sharp notes of injury. The phone rang and he let it go, but when a minute later it rang again he got out and walked dripping onto the floor and missed it anyway. Standing there, naked and sopping, he checked his messages. An automated voice named Lisa tried to pitch him a financial service until he deleted her. Then a hang-up from Marian’s house.

He returned to the water. The pain was now in his ribs and on his phone. In future he would be able to retrieve the pain in his body just by thinking of Kim’s refusal to leave a message. A word or two from her seemed to go a long way.

From so little, she had imagined his days in Santiago so well. She’d conjured them from his posture, the set of his face, things
he was unaware of. Her letter was a cruelty. She must have been in great pain to have written it. Of the pain he was certain.

Today he had felt certainty. Upon a certainty, he had lost his bearings, and would still be without them if Rodrigo hadn’t beaten them back into him. It was in the balance of things that the beating would have consequences. He was a simple kid, Rosemary’s Rodrigo. He might never understand what was about to happen to him.

T
he online profile revealed that Eduardo Jofre worked in a northern suburb for a self-proclaimed “socially progressive” investment company called Rahv Ashbaugh. He’d come to Canada from Santiago. He held a degree in Social and Political Thought. He spoke three languages. He researched and wrote reports, translated documents, advised the people who designed the portfolios. He knew a lot about factory farms and leather dyes and the economic ravages of global warming. He was available for presentations. There was an email address and a phone extension.

There was also a photo. It was the man she’d known years ago in university. He didn’t look much older. He was smiling. His eyes were a shade too dark, maybe, and his features a little softened, but he was the same halfway handsome she’d always preferred.

Another site, in Spanish, said that he worked from abroad in the Chilean reparations movement.

The traffic would be murder so she didn’t take the car. His office was ninety minutes distant by transit. A last subway stop, two buses, a long walk across a hot parking lot, medium office towers in every direction portioning out the lower sky. Suburban
business park nowhere. You looked and saw nothing, stunned wordless. She walked past a copy shop, dry cleaners. A massage parlour with a Thai girl reading a magazine at the desk. Kim knew no one who lived or worked up here, not even among the clients at
GROUND
. These lives were unimaginable. That seemed to be the point of the place.

On the eleventh floor the view from the reception area was a little deadening, expressway traffic clouding off to the west. The receptionist took Kim’s name and gestured to the empty seating area. The decor’s only concession to the outer world was a framed photo she knew from somewhere of workers in an open-pit mine in Brazil. They climbed ladders. They were covered in mud. Guards stood over them like centurions. It was like a photo of hell from the fourteenth century.

She looked up and there he was. He didn’t seem to recognize her. Standard greeting, practised handshake, and then her face, though altered, came to him, and he smiled a killer smile.

They took lunch in a so-called bistro at the foot of a neighbouring office complex. By the time they arrived she’d told him all she could remember about their three or four meetings. He remembered her visits to the music store. They didn’t account for her being here. When they were seated, the sun on an opposite tower was in her eyes so he adjusted the blinds and sat across from her in louvred light. He seemed to understand that she didn’t know how to explain her presence, so he spoke for a while about the company, as if she were a potential investor.

“When Rahv Ashbaugh started up, it was a struggle. There was more money to be made off of people with no conscience. That’s not the case now, necessarily, but we wouldn’t have entered into this business unless we meant it. We try not to deal with
those companies who borrow against the future. Or those who ignore the past.”

“Do good-guy companies exist?”

“They do. Often in unlikely settings, countries trying to get clear of some dark period. And we find some business with good labour practices, that monitors health and safety and wages and vendor compliance, and that can’t be blamed for the tanks in the streets.”

She wanted to believe that capital could have heart, or at least a clear conscience. And beyond that, she wanted to believe him. He seemed a slightly shy man of substance. No matter which of them was speaking, he looked Kim in the eye, but seemed to be receiving her in some way. He thanked the waitress for everything she brought to the table, and he looked at her too, and she was pretty, but didn’t glance at her when she walked away. He was present.

“How well do your clients know the histories? They must rely on you to know it for them.”

“It’s my view,” he said, “that Canada has won itself a great naivety. This is the most naive country in the world. Which is why it’s the most compassionate.”

“Well, that puts us in our place.”

“It’s my place too. Coups and revolutions don’t happen to nations, they happen to people, one by one.”

“One of them happened to you. Your September eleventh.”

“Yes. Five months before I was born.” He explained that the troubles became his about ’77, when he was old enough to attribute the absence he sensed to a cause. “I grew up into a kind of obsession about the events in the months after I was conceived, and about my father’s murder. When I began university I had every
intention of continuing my life at home. It wasn’t as if we were all in shadow all the time. But one day I was out with a girl and her friend – these are young people, students, in most respects idealistic, I thought – and it came to light that they wanted to know nothing more about that period. They had chosen to avoid the subject, to let it go by. It was a small moment, but right then I knew I had to decide, either to stay and devote myself to sharpening this national memory or to leave the country and choose a different life.”

“That’s a lot to let go of.”

“Less than you might suppose. I ended up choosing both. The country’s still with me.”

She sensed he’d keep going if she prompted him. He’d release the obsession like this, in tellings, again and again, as he needed. This expert in progressive investments.

“You told me when we first met that you were in the resistance movement.”

“Did I? That’s embarrassing. I would have been trying to impress you.”

“No. I was peppering you with questions. You finally just mentioned it. But because you did, you’ve come to mind, now that I’m researching the coup.”

He looked at her somewhat searchingly, then smiled. “I guess this isn’t a school project.”

“I have a list of names. I’ve typed them out.” She produced the list and slid it across to him. “Fifteen names. Seven are in the Rettig Report. I have a kind of picture of what happened to them, how they might be connected. Of the other eight, I know about these two – they’re Americans – and this German, but not these five. I don’t know where to look to find their stories.” She was trying not to sound too intent.

“I know where to look. But it might involve disturbing people’s memories, and that’s no small thing, especially if it goes beyond what’s already on the record. Why do you want to know all this?”

How to answer? Because she’d entered a city. Because she was afraid for her father, as if it was all still happening, he was still there, and her actions could get him out, or trap him. And because in her new world everything seemed to ride on her willingness not to back down from her fears.

She told Eduardo it was about her father. She said his name. She said he was down there in ’73 and she wanted to know what happened to him.

“How old was he?”

“About twenty-three.”

“Is he Canadian? Was he then?”

“Yes. He was a student.”

“But he won’t tell you what happened.”

“A little. Not much. The seven in the report were arrested from the same address. Two were murdered and accounted for. The rest were all disappeared. The last line on them is the same in every instance. They’re ‘presumed to have died as a result –’”

“‘Of the violence prevailing in the country at the time.’”

“Yes.” This man’s country was haunted. It must have ghosts on every street. Harold had been there for only a few months and he was still haunted. It was only human to feel responsible for your bad luck.

She watched Eduardo fold the list and put it in his shirt pocket.

“There’s a story somewhere for every name, but not all the stories get told. I’ll see what I can find out. As long as you’re willing to hear what I learn.”

She nodded. She was very close now to the hard fact of who she had become.

The topic then shifted to the one person they had in common, Renner, whom they’d both lost track of, and it wasn’t her father or Eduardo she thought of now on the way home, but Renner, as she and Eduardo remembered him. Renner had had a crush on her and trailed around doing impressions of everyone they met. The diminuendo of the shy girl serving them beer in a pitcher, the professor’s stentorian address, the stutters and pauses of the campus radio news reader. He did them everywhere, the impressions – do him, do her, they were always saying – before class, on the phone, at parties, and Renner would always add an incongruity, a misfit word or two in the wrong diction, and make them nearly fall over laughing. Cathectic, adamantine, educe. She’d been inspired to write down the best-sounding words and look them up later. He would never say where he got them from or if he knew what they meant. It was the only mystery that attached to him, and she almost fell for it.

Assuasive, unregenerate, inexpiable, effeir.

They’d hang out in the music store, and who was she then, so full of words and music? And the store had led her to the rest of her life because of Eduardo’s co-worker, what’s his name, the Mozambican, Armando. He was the one who’d first told her about
GROUND
, which she’d remember a few years later.
GROUND
had gathered the evidence to prove that a rich family in Maputo had tried to kill him. That was the what but she couldn’t remember the why. No doubt he’d asked the wrong whats and whys.

And upon this thought, Harold came back to mind.

H
e had spent the mid-afternoon at a farmer’s market for the purpose of later being where he now found himself, chopping herbs for his soup in a rich, transporting haze. The hour of preparation was better even than that of the dinner itself. The ritual and pleasure had the authority of goodness. One of the ways of discerning goodness, as Richard Hooker had it, was through “the observation of those signs and tokens, which being annexed always unto goodness, argue that where they are found, there also goodness is.” Hooker hadn’t been thinking of garlic and fennel, but André added him to the air anyway and found the mix agreeable.