Hunger's Brides (187 page)

The police reaction was this: While the airing of a half-drunk ramble might make for sensational news, it contained in fact no evidence unknown to investigators, and no evidence contradicting the subject's own statement to police.

Two blood types were indeed found, but Professor Gregory had been kneeling in glass. The first officers arriving on the scene reported a suspected ritual assault. However, every piece of evidence gathered thereafter tended to disprove this. Fingernail scrapings and a rape kit were, in fact, routinely used to gather evidence in cases with ritualistic overtones. Although the victim was found naked, there was no conclusive evidence of sexual activity. Meanwhile Professor Gregory had not made even cursory attempts to wipe away his bloody fingerprints from all over the bath area. His tissue was found only under the nails of her left hand. If not the only explanation, convulsions were one that could not be disproved.

What reviving the story would accomplish, they assured her, was to embarrass Detectives Curtis and Green before a new police chief hungry for publicity.

The day after her report aired, Petra Stern was informed by a stone-faced Detective Curtis that Donald Gregory had checked out of his hotel two hours after her call and had taken the next flight to Mexico City.

What the detectives could not know was that April 17, 1995, was the three-hundredth anniversary of the death of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. A day earlier, Donald Gregory had been reminded of this fact at the British Museum where a display had been set up to commemorate the event, thereby drawing the attention of museum patrons to the passing of a great figure perhaps unknown to them. It now appears that Dr. Gregory, with no set itinerary for the foreseeable future, had the idea of prolonging the day of April 17th with a ten-hour transatlantic flight across eight time zones to Mexico City, where a month-long cycle of international conferences was underway.

What Detective Curtis did know, however, and took pains to stress to Petra Stern, was that Mexico City was one of the best places in the world in which to disappear.

A print version of Petra Stern's radio story was picked up by the Canadian Press wire service for national and international distribution under the headline, “Quiet Flees the Don—Again.”

The only other item of note is that when these facts later became known to Professor Donald Gregory on his return from Mexico, Petra Stern's personal and professional discomfort gave him no pleasure.

This in itself should have served notice that things were no longer quite as they had been.

S
ERPENT
L
ITTER
        

[16 Jan 1995]

I T
HOUGHT
MAKE IT HERE
, the last verse on loss. Draft the lost canticle of the three-chambered heart. For weeks in the cities, in the mountains—say the word, say them both out loud. Laughable….

I hoped
.

Coatzalcoalcos, ‘abode of the serpent litter!' From here the FeatherSerpent sailed on alone to the land of knowledge and death, where even failure ends. Out onto the Gulf he stepped, and the sea matted with serpents risen numberless to bear him up, to carry him.

And he said he would come back—promised his dwarf retinue, told us Wait and gave us each a treasure map.

Horizon blot of supertankers twisting on chains. Styrofoam cups Jumbo cokefloats, bubble wrap, bottles of engine oil tapered like dunce caps. Even I could walk out there now—up and out on this litter of plastic. Stinking port of holy oil—mockery of the past. Of me. Oh look how far I've come from Calgary—straight to another oil boom.

Al estado de la Veracruz …
to the true state of the cross.

And even so I still
believed
—I had everything I needed to finish this work—how could I fail? How hard can dying be? Every necessity in this hotel cell above the bus depot—cot, orangecrate nightstand, rough wooden cross, pitcher of Deuterium. Shutters for the window, darkness, a little desk—to light my path a Gideon's Bible, the traveller's friend in Spanish, English and Nahuatl. Nights of diesel in the sheets, in the dampness in the pillows in the dark. Rank solvent tang in the water and air. Does the whole city smell like this or just in here? in my
claustridium dificile
—abode of the cloistered insomniac starving for dreams. R.E.M. clockcrawl—I close my eyes on the blackness of shuttered day and see points of light beckoning…. If I could dream, just this one mercy—

But
no!
no quarter asked none ever given, sit tight little soldier hold your position, here in this Black Room above the steambath busdepot of holy Coatzalcoalcos, sit before these shuttered windows hapless barricade against the noise and smoke of endless motorcades. Refuse to rise! Hold fast against this CIA music treatment—mariachi brass from the
lobby, speakers bolted to the
ceiling right under my desk
—give up give up little Noriega come out of there! Submit, surrender.

But no, I cling and cling to my numinous embassy.

So I work faster think harder look at the calendar can't you see the time? so little left the cursor blinking blinking its frantic mockery and I curse BACK. Laugh? I try I try—oh how I should
love
this irony that annihilates me:

Silence was once an agony; now I am drowning in noise.

How I hated it. But only at first. Because I didn't understand yet. I came for stillness and surcease. Now I tilt my face back in the cursor-lit darkness and suck at this noise so thick I can taste it
SONIC OILBOOM engine backfires cherry bombs, traffic whistles shrilling—flatulent blat of airbrakes jaunty hornblasts of pilot tugs pulling their silver ships into port under me. The pitcher on the nighttable quivers its welcome its gratitude / its bent-kneed meniscus under the cross by the cot—for each safe slide into dock
.

And I
am
grateful. I came for peace but have stayed for the din that drowns out the engine in my head. I have learned to submit. To everything here. To bank these my internal harmonics / combusted symphonies of white noise blasted to ash.

And I do submit—so cheerfully—to every sound but one. One sound drives me in the end from my Black Room. For an hour. For a little air. For a stroll down by the sea….

I walk out through the depot lobby, past the fat
taxista
, bloat-lip toad:
Oye muchacha
, I can take you to Lake Catemaco for thirty American dollars, okay twenty—ten—okay I
pay you
how much you want? Every day you say no. You are not here for the Tuxtlas, then why have you come to this hole?

Don't you think I wonder, stuffed Taximan, don't you think I ask?

I walk sticky-sided, sweat-slabbed, down to the running shore. Eyes stunned in sun … face slicked with salt grime, lids cloaked in the pumice of moth wings, each blink a salt fan, folding. And each sticky step stokes this simmer of exhilaration that I can't prevent. Near the water, high winds toss and glitter in the fronds of dwarf palms—jesters dancing in silver-fringed jerkins.

At the sea a hot stink of brine, wet socks and rot. The wind blows faint relief in mirthless gales. Teases long windward plumes of tawny spindrift out over the waves till an agitate surf pounds out its brown
foam like a fulling mallet. I tuck my boots under the same sandy bush, so good to be home. Stand in socks and glory at this my uncharted prospect! All along the grey-lipped shore a thin moustache of froth stashed by this Tropic of Cancerous tide.

Down barefoot now—over the burning grey sand—my fakirflail a hopped simulacrum—shallow flap / kneedip / heel and toeroll over hot grey coals. Each day the same grey fun. Bloodwarm surf embalming my soles.

Knee-deep in surf I walk up the beach to the broken jetty, a swayback skeleton gutted on surf. Lashed pilings of grey bone raked from an ash pit. Standing in its shadows the old Cuban man of the sea watches my sub-aquatic goosestep—lurching into potholes scooped in swirling sand. Lo the sea's ephemeral roadwork in progress eternal. How he shakes his white cotton head now to see the SeaCow pitch forward, clutch at her gluesoft hoof.

There—cunning-hid in sand is a rotted ship's plank … spiketips bated in rust, rust-wavered shanks. See the red rime dissolve at the wondering touch. Dull cold throb in the arch, I lift the plank to him, my show and tell, pedestrian.

It break the skin? the coolly curious fisherman has come for a gloat. Probes the arch redness with the sharkbit digits of a gnarled hand. Smile at the tickle of this stumpy nuzzling. I answer with a wisp of blood, its tiny thread fans into coral lace. You should get a shot—
una injeccion
—he doesn't say To the back of the head, but see its minnow-flash in his cataracted eyes.

What are you doing back here,
muchacha?
I told you one hundred times. No boat rides. No going out in this wind. With you, not ever.
Nunca, ¿me oyes?
No tourists.

He glares a cloud of marble down at my squat blur in surf. Call this yoga pose twenty-three: crane with punctured arch. Ask the old Hemingway cadre where else is there for me but here? Ask and hope for something oracular. Ask him is it alright if I cry, while he smokes and glares blunt daggers down. Hear his dislike in every chopped syllable:
Mira, m'chach
, I am going to try one time to make you understand.
De'pue,' no quie'o ve'te nu'ca ma,' ¿'ntiende'?

Understood, old man tell me a fish tale, then I go off for good. Study him, my fishy exegete: black wattle of turkey neck, corded arms, the stumpy spread of a scaly claw ups the smoke for one last draw—who rolls your
smokes for you, stubfisher? I ask. One last glare—his glaucous skysearch for the story god, please give him strength to explain to this
gringa idiota
.

Go on old man, gonna tell me or not?

He smiles a white fence, three pickets kicked in.

You see
la piroga
—ahh, pause to admire the charred dugout dragged up, the battered visor of a raised outboard. When I got it from my father's dying hand there were twenty here. When he first got that boat—fifty. Coming home each night boats so full more underwater than over. Now I bring in one or two little fish—
¿te das cuenta?
Sometimes one has an extra eye or cheek. Fish cheeks in soup, this is a fine meal. But I have the easy job. My wife has to clean these. Then feed to our grandkids. She sits outside till they run out to play. We cannot look each other in the eye till then. She wonders if they have eaten even numbers or odd, of cheeks—each time, she cannot help asking.