Left at the Mango Tree (12 page)

“Where to, Mr. Stan?”

“I’m going to look for my past,” he told her.

“What for, Mr. Stan?”

“Betty, do you know what a polynomial is?”

Betty shook her head. “Is that what you’re looking for?”

“Not exactly. Some parts of one, maybe.”

Betty stood leaning on a rake in the middle of her garden, her head tilted upward to meet his, her eyes locked on his eyes while she waited for an answer. “What for, Mr. Stan?” she repeated.

“I hear songs on the wind, Betty. Songs from my past and I’m going to find them.”

Betty laughed. She laughed so hard that from each of her eyes seeped two large droplets that she wiped away with the hem of her long, tattered, berry-stained apron. When she recovered her composure she said to him, smiling still, “It’s the leaves, Mr. Stan. What you hear are just the leaves.”

Mr. Stan Kalpi croaked an “Aah!” and gave her a dismissive wave, as if he were batting a tsetse fly. Then he left. What did silly old Betty know?

In fact, silly old Betty knew her fair share. She was old after all and had spent years amassing the kind of knowledge a woman of her lowly position and means could amass. She didn’t know about polynomials, but she did know about things like turnips and tea
leaves and trees. And she was right about the leaves. Almost. The leaves were responsible for what Mr. Stan Kalpi heard, true, but for him they sang a special song, a song for which lucky old Betty had no need (she knew her past like she knew the crevices of her tired hands and feet), a song that Mr. Stan Kalpi was right to seek out.

The sketchy directions supplied by his aunt proved too skeletal even for Mr. Stan Kalpi’s mathematical, musical mind. They turned a weeks-long trip into a months-long trip, leading him on an elaborate series of wild-goose chases in the process. But the road that burrows into the heart of one’s past is never immediate or well paved, I can assure you. It climbs and plunges, pulls first in one direction and then another, each zig and zag a hope to be dashed, a theory to be undone. It prods the pilgrim along its gritty surface, deposits its sand between the traveler’s toes, then steers him (or her) at last homeward, a fortified soul on broken heel. So it was with Mr. Stan Kalpi.

En route to his native village he crossed a desert, a river, and went up a mountain and down. He met chiefs and fools, the wise, the sick, the weary. He learned the medicine man’s cures and the wiles of the wanton. He found adventure at every detour, detours too numerous and too great for me to report them all here. It is enough to tell you that he was still Mr. Stan Kalpi by the time he arrived, but a much richer and more sapient one indeed.

The road to his past deposited him finally at the village gates on the morning after a long night’s rain. Spilled out before him, the moist flora shone in brilliant hues of purple and green, in tones of yellow and blue that had escaped him his whole life, but that now appeared before him familiar as the color of his own skin. He had acquired an air of importance and wisdom on his journey, a visible testament to his trials, that sent word of his presence coursing like
fire and brought the villagers from their dwellings, bowed over in respect. But despite his lessons and his triumphs, Mr. Stan Kalpi remained a humble man, a humble mathematician-musician who simply had yet a few more variables to define. He bowed in reciprocated respect and begged the villagers to rise, then introduced himself, son of Isla and Matik.

Though the couple was long dead, there were aunts and uncles and cousins who ran to embrace him. One lit a fire, another fetched wine, and soon the air bristled with the crackle and tease of a roasting goat stuffed with onions and herbs, and snippets of laughter and song. They ate, they drank, they danced. In thanks, Mr. Stan Kalpi serenaded them on his mandolin-guitar, his voice and his strings a perfect fit among the other sounds and scents that filled the space around them. The variables had been defined and totaled and Mr. Stan Kalpi was a polynomial no more. He was a sum, of his schooling and his aunt and old Betty’s coffee, of Isla and Matik, of the gritty zig-zagged road, of the faces and the speech that from every direction now set upon his eyes and his ears. He was he.

Mr. Stan Kalpi never returned to the small house his aunt had largely purchased, and he never returned to the Sacred Heart School for Boys. He stayed in the land where the songs and the onions spoke to him, where he recognized his past clearly enough to understand his future. He married seven wives and had seventeen children to whom he taught mathematics and mandolin-guitar. He lived out his life as the wisest man in the village, considered so for his knowledge of polynomials and for the extravagant experiences of his journey, which he would happily discuss with any who would listen.

Raoul liked the book of Mr. Stan Kalpi so much that he read it at least once a month. Everything about it pleased him, the author’s
style and the story’s detail and even the book jacket’s front, a stark white background on which the dark, faceless silhouette of, presumably, Mr. Stan Kalpi, with pointed chin and prominent nose, hovered. But mostly the character of Mr. Stan Kalpi himself pleased Raoul, that and the happy ending. Not that Raoul wanted seven wives and seventeen children. One wife had proved too much to keep under his roof, and one child was proving just as challenging, if in different ways. Raoul admired Mr. Stan Kalpi’s accumulated wisdom, envied the lessons he had derived from his adventures with wayfarers and women, with tribesmen and thieves. Surely it was only by keeping such company that one could really hope to learn about life.

Secretly, the humble Raoul indulged in but a single vanity: to be as worthy of some author’s time and trouble as the formidable Mr. Stan Kalpi had been. Raoul had confessed as much to me when I was a baby, or so I’m told, every time he read to me from the mathematician-musician’s story at bedtime. But then I grew old enough to talk, and the humble Raoul, who resignedly saw in himself an unlikely Mr. Stan, silenced his vain confidences lest I should repeat them and his secret be revealed.

But that was a long way off. I had yet to utter my first words on that Tuesday that found Raoul in the library polishing his specs and feeling a bit like Mr. Stan Kalpi on the day he awoke and didn’t know who he was. Things were out of sorts. Raoul’s shirt was tight, his breakfast strange in his stomach, and echoes of threats (from both Pedro and Gustave) vied with the bluebottle inside his head. It was a decidedly different Tuesday from the kind Raoul relished at the end of a long week’s work.

Miss Lila, too, saw that things were out of sorts. It wasn’t like Raoul to dirty his hands on the Sorcery shelf, or to get to his corner table so late in the day. But she had read the article about Puymute’s pineapples in the
Morning Crier
and suspected Raoul was shaken by the prospect of demystifying the mystery of the disappearing fruit. It never dawned on the librarian that Raoul might be researching a magical matter of a different sort.

It wasn’t the missing pineapples that had Raoul so upset. He knew that the only mystery surrounding their disappearance was how Gustave had pulled it off, a feat that Raoul would get to the bottom of, sooner or later. The real reason for Raoul’s dismay, in addition to his ruined Tuesday routine, his tedious trek with Pedro, and his unpleasant exchange at Puymute’s, was still me. Nat had summed it up nicely: of course Raoul knew where babies came from, generally, just not this particular one. Where had
I
come from? I belonged to Edda and Wilbur as near as Raoul could tell, but I looked just exactly like Gustave. And Raoul’s now week-old ad had yet to produce a witness who could place Gustave at the scene of the crime or implicate him in any way in Edda’s pregnancy.

Gustave had still not even seen me then, the baby that allegedly resembled him so. Maybe if he had, he would have been as interested as Raoul in bringing the truth to light. Or maybe not. Gustave and Raoul were different men. Raoul needed answers to the questions that crossed his path, while Gustave, well, his past had taught him how unfair and unyielding both questions and questioners could be, and he had learned it best to turn his back on both. The questioners would believe what they wanted. They always did. And Gustave found lonely truth more painful than persistent mystery.

Poor Gustave. Raoul almost (almost) felt sorry for him. He was a victim of sorts, not of the magic of Oh (the existence of which Raoul still intended to disprove), but of the islanders who chose to see in Gustave the proof that appeased their superstitious curiosity and satisfied their magical appetites. And they discriminated against him accordingly.

Raoul couldn’t shake the feeling he’d felt that day at Gustave’s house. Could it have been the pineapple wine that dulled his senses? Or had he really smelled fear and befuddlement in Gustave’s not-so-nonchalant denials about my mother? Raoul tried to remember. He had definitely smelled something, yes. He had heard something, too, that unspoken awful word. It couldn’t really exist, could it?

“Aah!” Raoul pounded his fist on the library’s corner table in response to a tsetse fly that droned inside his head. From her altar in the center of the hall, Miss Lila looked at him crossly, her gaze a cocktail of rebuke and surprise. Raoul was out of sorts, he was. She wondered if he was drunk.

Miss Lila Partridge was a clever chickadee, but she couldn’t have been more wrong. Raoul was as sober as she. (She did slip into the Belly for a tipple from time to time—vodka tonic—but was sober as a librarian that day, as was Raoul.) His malaise had nothing to do with bourbon or beer. And he wasn’t drunk on Puymute’s finest the night he confronted Gustave at his home. His senses, olfactory and auditory, had functioned as they should. Possibly, they said, Gustave had been duped along with the rest of them.

And yet.

How innocent could Gustave Vilder be, Raoul asked himself, if he had swiped two acres of pineapple and pinned it on a phantom in the press? Phony magic existed on Oh, but how to distinguish it from the real thing, if there was a real thing? How to prove
which kind was responsible for me, his mysterious granddaughter, and Gustave responsible for the bogus burglary at the plantation?

Raoul was mixing up his flies. He had started this unfortunate Tuesday investigating one crime and now he found himself contemplating another. The mathematical Mr. Stan Kalpi would never have approved of this. One polynomial at a time was all that Raoul should ponder. His process must be logical and his calculations orderly, if he was to harbor any hope of defining his undefined variables. Would Mr. Stan Kalpi have found his native land had he wandered willy-nilly on the road to his past, and navigated its contours in random dribs and drabs?

Certainly not. When the detours confounded him and the curves cut too sharp, he stopped to line up his variables. With a stick in the sand, his toe in the mud, or even a finger in the air, he marked them down, and then he stepped back to have a look. He closed his right eye and looked with his left, then he tried it the other way round. He guarded his eyes from the rain or shaded them from the sun, then rubbed his chin and started all over again. Always it would surface, in the sand or the mud or the sky: an error in his arithmetic or the solution’s next logical step. “I see it now,” he would say. “I see it very clearly.” Then Mr. Stan Kalpi would put down his stick or put on his shoe and continue on his way.

“Well, there you have it,” Raoul concluded. “Easy as pineapple pie. I just have to line up my variables.” He was talking to himself, or to Mr. Stan, or maybe even to his tsetse fly. Miss Lila shook her finger at him, sending another stiff glance his way. He pretended not to see her and busied himself lining up the articles that lay collected on the table. There was the notebook in which he had noted Gustave’s story and the ballpoint with which he had done so, the honey-dewed hanky he had used to wipe off his specs. Nat
had given him hard candy en route to the library in the cab, and he aligned the shiny transparent yellow rocks with everything else. From the Sorcery shelf he had extracted a number of works, on witchcraft and voodoo and telekinesis, and a dictionary of spells with a meaty Appendix on potions and herbs, from Agrimony to Zinnia. These too he put in a row.

Hmm.

Raoul closed his right eye and looked with his left, then he tried it the other way round. He guarded his eyes from Miss Partridge’s reign and shaded them from the afternoon sun, then rubbed his chin and started all over again. No error surfaced, no suggestions sallied forth. Had he forgotten a variable when he lined them up? He patted his thighs and felt the contents of his pockets: cigarettes, house key, a few rainbow bills and some coins. Chewing gum, paper clip, pencil, and a tiny plastic shoe (a doll’s, presumably, and rescued from the gritty airport floor). Stopwatch, lip balm, bookmark, plum. Can’t hurt, he said to himself, and arranged the items with the others. He looked again, right, left, reign, sun, chin. Still nothing. Raoul drummed his fingers on the wooden tabletop and wondered if he hadn’t gotten Mr. Stan Kalpi all wrong. His mathematics worked in books, but not in real life. On Oh, Mr. Stan probably couldn’t find his way from the Crater to the Post. And if
Bang
had never come up with a mandolin-guitar, then no one had. Raoul’s favorite book was a bunch of lies.