The Ground Beneath Her Feet (74 page)

The seismic moment of an earthquake is measured by multiplying its area (the length of the fault times the width), the amount of slip, and the stiffness of the local rock. The strength of an earthquake is usually characterized by using the logarithm of moment—known as the
magnitude
—rather than the moment itself. Thus all earthquakes, small to large, are ranked from one to nine, each unit of magnitude representing a tenfold increase in strength. A quake of the ninth magnitude is one billion times more powerful than a first-magnitude shock. This system of measurement is named after the American seismologist Charles Richter. Additionally, the intensity of an earthquake, defined as an index of its destructive effect, is classified from I to XII on the so-called Modified Mercalli scale. The monster quake that hits the Pacific coast of Mexico in the early evening of February 14, obliterating the Villa Huracán, the nearby hamlet of Aparajitos, the towns of Puerto Vallarta to the south and of Mazadán to the north, and much else
besides, measures a full nine on the Richter scale, which is to say: as bad as it gets. Also, XII on the Modified Mercalli, meaning complete destruction. Seismologists report the creation of a gigantic new fault, approximately one thousand kilometers long and one hundred kilometers wide, and running more or less exactly along the coastline. The worst earthquakes occur in subduction zones, where tectonic plates collide and one plate is pushed beneath the other. In 1960 a quake with an eight point five magnitude smashed up a big chunk of Chile. For the international seismological community, the 1989 Aparajitos quake signals the sudden, devastating extension to the north of that mighty subterranean war, the crunching encounter of the great plates. It is a major event in the geological history of the earth. A rift along the eternal frontier between the dry land and the sea.

Another possibility, of course, is that it is the first great calamity to be caused by the collision of worlds described by Ormus Cama in his much-derided worldwide bulletin; the beginning of an unimaginable end.

She is alone when it happens. Perhaps she stands on the breakfast terrace beneath a giant fresno ash, drinking a margarita made with tres generaciones tequila, thinking about an old novelist’s exposed genitalia, or about Ormus Cama and his eye patch, his headaches, his prophecies. Or about the future; about me. Imagining her, I have again shrouded her in photographic silence. If the birds shriek, if the wind suddenly howls in the trees, if, as on Prospero’s isle, the jungle behind El Huracán is filled with noises, I know nothing of these. A tempest is coming, but I am not interested in spells or usurpations.

Or, she is not alone. Some Caliban emerges from the jungle to reclaim his birthright. She is menaced. Or, she is not menaced. She struggles. No, there is no struggle. There is no Other. The pilot lied to seem more responsible than he was, to save face; that’s all. The Other is a phantom, a figment. She is alone, with a margarita in her hand, there is a beautiful sunset. In her last minutes she is bathed in the beauty of the world. Perhaps she sings. I want to think of her singing, against the orange and purple sky.

Though I hear nothing else, yet can I hear her heroic voice raised in song.

Then the ground simply opens and eats her, like a mouth.

A great sweep of Pacific coastline is similarly, simultaneously, devoured. The slip of the earthquake is eleven meters: huge. The ocean boils in and fills the gash in the earth, the tear in reality. Water, earth, fire belch high into the sky. The deaths, the
disappearances
, are measured in the tens, the hundreds of thousands.

The earth closes over her body, bites, chews, swallows, and she’s gone.

I cannot rightly organize my thoughts.—
I fear I am not in my perfect mind
.—O, she’s rubble, and at the bottom of th’abyss!—Vina, the joy of life, the sign of our humanity—disappeared!, in this century of the disappeared, of disappearance—so many people missing from the record—the human race offers the earth god its greatest prize, Vina!!, and the deity, instead of being satisfied, feels its appetite whetted beyond all endurance and restraint, and gulps down a hundred thousand more—Ormus, she’s lost to us both, crushed in that muddy embrace—you said it, Ormus, they’re your words, the earth learns to rock ’n’ roll—Madman, shall I blame you or embrace you?—by singing it, did you will it into being?—Then can you sing her back to life, for yourself, for me?

This was the woman for the love of whom
more lamentation burst out from one lyre
than from the throats of all lamenting women
since the world began. Whose mourning
made
a world—brought all things back again
,
the forests, valleys, roads and villages;
their cattle, fields and streams; a world like ours
circled by sun and spanned by stars like ours
—
but set quite differently within
those other heavens. So beloved was she
.

The scale of the emergency dwarfs individual tragedies. So many dead, so much damage both structural and infrastructural, such a hammer blow to the country’s soul, and more: to the human race’s sense of
ease upon the earth. Roads, bridges, airstrips, whole mountains lie in ruins, or beneath the encroaching sea. A gargantuan relief operation is under way, and access to the devastated area, for all but military and relief-agency personnel, is denied. A few television news crews and stills photographers are given accreditation and taken in and around by army helicopters. International aid requires pictures. We can be of use. My Nebuchadnezzar Agency card—I never did get around to quitting formally—gets me a ride.

So I am deep in the heart of ruination when the Vina photograph goes boffo on the planet’s front pages; when she becomes the face of the catastrophe. I am looking at scenes out of Bosch—the decapitated heads of children hanging from the branches of broken trees, women’s naked legs sticking vertically upwards, like twin swords, out of “solid” rock—scenes that trouble even a war photographer’s stomach. I have no awareness of having helped to create a myth. Even when the colonel in charge of press operations goes out of his way to arrange an over-flight of the site of the vanished Villa Huracán, I understand nothing. He is pandering to the Western world’s cult of celebrity, I think. He’s probably right: it’s good for a few extra column inches, which, translated into dollars, makes this part of the itinerary a real money spinner. As pictures go, this one’s no different from the others: the torn land, the intruding ocean, the uprooted trees. Standard disaster imagery, not a palapa or swimming pool or dead starlet to be seen. I am thinking these hard-bitten thoughts when unexpectedly I fall apart. I weep in my bucket seat until the thick marrow-snot comes down my nose. I weep like a howling dog on the grave of his fallen mistress. In the end one of the tv-crew sound engineers asks me to shut the fuck up, I’m louder than the rotor blades, my misery is wrecking the goddamn shot.

These fallen boulders are her tombstone, this brokenness her grave. I shout her name aloud. Vina, Vina.

When we land, back at the Guadalajara army strip, the colonel, a man my own age, comes up to me. You knew her, I think?—Yes, I say.—Then is it your picture? He takes out his wallet and there, folded up, is teetering Vina in the tequila-flooded street. I stare at the badly reproduced image on the worn and smudgy newsprint, while the wind
tries to tear it from my hands. Señor, it is a sad time for you, the colonel says, and for sure I have much respect for your personal grief, but please, you can give me on this picture your amiable autograph?

Dazed, I sign my name.

Ormus Cama arrives in Guadalajara in a black linen suit and matching velvet eye patch, leaning on big Will Singh and tiny, antique Clea, with a phalanx of other Singhs to defend him from the world. He has taken two floors of the giant Hyatt on the Plaza del Sol in the modern, yanqui-style Zona Rosa: one entire floor for himself, the other for the Singhs. Clea comes looking for me in my humbler old-town abode. Please come, she says. In all the world it is you only he wishes to see.

Clea’s grave, narrow face seems overly burdened by its cargo: a pair of outsize spectacles with clear plastic frames and lenses so thick that, without them, she must be all but blind. I can’t guess at her age; she could be anywhere from sixty to a hundred. At her efficiency, her iron loyalty to Ormus, her indefatigability on his behalf, there is no need to guess.

It’s been a long time, I say. (Meaning, what can I say to this bereaved and damaged heart? I, of all people. Should I tell him the truth? Where does honesty end and cruelty begin? What matters more: my need to be known as her lover, or his need not to know? Let him live in ignorance. He’s got enough to worry about, what with the imminent end of the world and all.)

Clea is pursing her lips, smoothing her long, belted skirt, faintly shaking her head. My answer has not met with her approval.

Once you were friends, she says, as if that settles it. Meekly, I follow her down to the waiting limousine.

Ormus’s floor of the Hyatt is like the
Marie Celeste:
uncannily still. A five-star ghost town at the top of the city. He has had it redecorated in accordance with his minimalist tastes. Almost all the furniture has been removed, all of the pictures and ornaments, and many of the doors. White sheets cover the walls, and the carpets too. There is a small sign by the elevator asking that shoes be removed. This is an unshod, segregated world.

I pad about the soft moonscape in my socks, looking for the great
man. At length I hear the sound of an acoustic guitar emanating from a room which still boasts a door. It’s an old song, but I know it at once, even though the words are new.

All my life, I worshipped her. Her golden voice, her beauty’s beat. How she made us feel, how she made me real, and the ground beneath her feet
.

And now I can’t be sure of anything, black is white, and cold is heat; for what I worshipped stole my love away, it was the ground beneath her feet
.

She was my ground, my favorite sound, my country road, my city street, my sky above, my only love, and the ground beneath my feet
.

Go lightly down your darkened way, go lightly underground, I’ll be down there in another day, I won’t rest until you’re found
.

Let me love you true, let me rescue you, let me lead you to where two roads meet. O come back above, where there’s only love, and the ground’s beneath your feet
.

Maybe in the otherworld she isn’t dead, I’ll have to look for her there, he says, seeing me standing flummoxed and trembling in the doorway. So this supposed alternative reality of his has become a version of Rilke’s mourning-created world, a lamentation-cosmos
like ours, but set quite differently within those other heavens
. A world of grief made real by song, by art. Whatever. I shake myself out of the music’s spell. She’s dead, and these fancies are of no use to me.

She was right to trust in nothing, I say aloud. Even the ground betrayed her. Yet, trusting nothing, she was prepared to gamble on love, and that was heroic, nothing less. I stop there, not specifying: love of whom, or how many. Let it be.

He’s sitting cross-legged on the floor of the empty room with a twelve-string country guitar across his knees. He looks terrible; his hair is almost white, and thinning. His skin is gray and ill. There was never any surplus weight on him, but he has lost a lot of pounds. He looks old. He is just fifty-two.

Was it you, he asks, without looking at me. At the villa, the other person, was that you. The photograph, et cetera. I need to know.

No, I say. The picture was before. I wasn’t there till later, with the press corps.

A silence. He nods, slowly, twice. Okay. This, he accepts.

I always knew there were others, an other, he says, dull-voiced, still
staring at the guitar strings. At my request she provided no details. All she said was, he was completely unlike me.

(I remember something else she said.
The two of you are more alike than you know. Only he’s going down … and you’re on the way up.
)

All she said, Ormus goes on, is it was a physical attraction, whereas what we had was the whole thing: love. (His mouth twists, bitterly. So, as it happens, does mine.) This was simultaneously hurtful, because obviously I was not fulfilling her needs, and comforting, because it told me she would stay. But now they’re saying in the papers that the other person, whoever he was, looked exactly like me. In fact for a minute there they thought it was me, they called to ask if I’d been in Mexico. Clea and the office had to deal with that. It’s pretty funny, right. I first heard about her death because people wanted to know if I was a corpse myself.

It’s just speculation, I say. As far as I know there’s no trace of any other person, let alone any description of him. Or her. It’s just garbage in the papers.

When she was alive I managed not to care about him, he says. Now I need to know who he was. He’s my gateway to her, you can understand that. To her underworld, her other reality. He, whoever he is, can help me find her. He can bring her back. Shall I tell you who I think it is?

My heart bangs. Who, I ask.

Gayo, he replies. Gayomart, my twin, who escaped from my head. It makes perfect sense, don’t you see. She was fucking both of us, she needed to know both sides of that story. And maybe he died with her, but maybe he’s still out there. I have to know which.

I see now that he really is not sane. His is a consciousness that surfaces intermittently, between long, damaging hibernations, and is no longer capable of seeing things as they are beyond his shrouded walls. You’re wrong, I tell him. This is useless, stupid. Just sing your song, Ormus, sing it and say goodbye.