Love Enough (6 page)

Why, why did she always end up with some frightened person in her bed? June had decided not to think too deeply about that. After all, sex was just sex and there was no need to double think it unless you were Catholic or born-again Christian, and June despised these ideologies. If not for the paranoia, and perhaps because of it, Beatriz was the only one June considered keepable. Beatriz had her own life and her own thoughts and wanted nothing from her. Assigned to international work, the Sandinistas called her “undisciplined in the field.” The fifteen thousand bombed by Somoza in Estelí had turned Beatriz’s blood to adrenaline. That would drive anyone mad, June reasoned. She was so fierce she had become a liability to Ortega.
She had been decommissioned to diplomacy. Beatriz disappeared, naturally, leaving cigarette burns on the floor beside the bed. She was going to finish the Somocistas off, she said.
Quien, Quien te mandó?
Who sent you to me?

When Pinochet was eventually deposed, and this was seventeen years later, Isador appeared on her doorstep. He arrived at the Women’s History Archive where June worked, and she did not recognise him. He looked like a placid man, his cheeks had puffed out, his mouth opened to an avuncular smile. Not the half smile he’d had to the dangerous left side of his face, not the tight jeans or the tight body. Maybe that was all fear back then. It makes some people skinny, the nerves eat away at fat then at muscle. This Isador looked well-fed and happy, content. He said he was going back to Chile, taking his children to see where he was born. He hoped it hadn’t changed and he hoped that it had changed. He came with a little bunch of roses. How sentimental, June thought, then restrained that bitter side of her and thanked him. And why did you find me, she wanted to ask, and what on earth would we have to talk about now?

June, despite what she thought of herself, was simply utilitarian. She could not understand the finer sentiments
of regular people or a concept like friendship. And so, especially when she’d had sex with someone, the warm seconds of human understanding that the other person may have added up, the tiny affections for inclined heads and dimples, the expressions of love, these nostalgias escaped her. So when Isador referred to their time together, which did indeed amount to seven months, and his gratitude to her for helping him through the first months of his life in the country, June was embarrassed. She would never have taken her Chilean for this kind of man.

“I wanted to see you before going back to Santiago. To thank you.”

“No need, Isador … it was the struggle … you know,
la lucha continual
.” June tried to laugh it off but Isador persisted. Obviously he had created a story where she, June, was some kind of heroine.

“
Pero
June,” he said, still pronouncing June with an “h” sound at the beginning, “
Pero
June … you saved my life … I loved you.” In the face of this declaration, what could June do? She thanked him kindly. There was another uncomfortable moment when she did not follow her gratitude with a reciprocal declaration of love. Even love past. His love hung in the archive. June didn’t know what to do with it.

It was not that June was not a warm person, or a generous person, or a kind person. Her love was simply bigger than the personal. It was bigger than the love individuals have for each other. Not to put too fine a point on it, if she did love Isador, it was not Isador personally but the revolution Isador represented that she loved. She loved the idea of people rising up against injustice and political terror, and insofar as Isador did this, she loved him entirely. This impersonal love, this political love was for June a deeper love, a more democratic love, the ethical love.

“
La idea es
, June,” he added, and she recalled learning this from him. “
La idea es
 …” meaning anyway, whatever. “Would you like to come to Chile with us? You are my family too.” June had to put an end to this. He was going too far. Imagine she, his wife and children going to Santiago together—how awkward. Ridiculous. Not because there was anything between them, but on the contrary, they were strangers.

“Isador,” she said, “my work here is very important,” sweeping her arm in a gesture that took in the shabby office of the Women’s History Archive. “I cannot leave it, we have a crucial campaign coming up.” She said this to be kind to Isador and because his request had made her remember
why she had taken him in, apart from the sex. Of course there was no campaign, June’s political actions had become smaller and more personal. Her only activity now save working at the archive was a youth Drop-in, in what they called an at-risk neighbourhood. Maybe, she’d thought, maybe with kids, she could begin the process of human liberation sooner. Though actually kids did not need liberating except from normative training. So it was an anti-colonial project of a sort to defend children from the state. The state was merely a dominating machine, anathema to the whole idea of a liberatory life. So Emma Goldman had said, and June was reading Emma Goldman’s
Living My Life
, more closely now.

There had been three revolutionaries: Isador, Eliazar and Everado. Dangerous as they all seemed, only Isador had looked her completely and freshly in the eyes. This she’d always taken as a sign of his honesty, even though she came to learn and despise his sloppiness later. The women who took Everado home ended up being beaten. Some had mused at the time that Everado had been brutalised so much that he thought it was common manners to do the same, but June thought this kind of justification was bullshit. Eliazar had a wife in Germany and perhaps that might have been the more economical choice to make given
that any encounter would definitely be brief, but Isador had had the clearer eyes.

Isador was placated by June’s explanation and June invited him to lunch to shore up the notion that she was not being harsh and inhospitable or ungrateful of his gesture. Lunch could only be a half hour, she said quickly, forestalling the possibility of a tedious time. Half an hour took two hours all together as Isador went through photographs of his family and his life. June was genuinely interested, marvelling at the great change in him. In the end it was as if she had never known him.

Sometimes people are so utterly different from one year to the next. If June had seen this Isador years ago, she would have fled also, admittedly. Still she would have been more sympathetic maybe. Perhaps, she thought, perhaps it is not so complicated, seeing that human beings themselves are not complicated, just their ability to discern is complicated by all the signals they have to receive and send. Some prehistoric June was always in the process of calculating light, and flight, the sensory information necessary for surviving. And so easily one sensor or one feeler can be off. And June’s sensors were invariably off a degree or two. So back then she only received a certain signal from Isador, the way one receives, through light, the colour yellow, but
not its ascending colour orange or the descending colour green. That is, she had seen him from a particular angle, as if she were standing at the angle of thirty-seven degrees and Isador at forty-five. She saw his flat underside but not he himself. Isador was in a similar position yet of course different. So he would return years later with a small bunch of white flowers and a placid face. And June at thirty-seven degrees still, would gesture to the shabby office and decline. But perhaps if they had seen each other from all angles none of this would have happened, not even their first meeting. We do what we can with what we have at the time, even when we believe we are trying to break the angles.

Beatriz would never show up with flowers, June thought. Beatriz was serrated, another geometry.
“Olvidate que me conocias,”
she’d told June. That could not be mistaken for anything but what it was. Forget you knew me. Perfect. Though June felt slightly imperfect at the time, slightly miffed that she wasn’t the one telling Beatriz this. Of course that was ego—but perhaps it was love too. Because, after all, isn’t love absence? Like the absence of a limb makes you notice where it was and what it did. Beatriz had been very obtuse and suspicious. And there were reflexes to her that June did not want to travel. The nights Beatriz didn’t wake up from sleep violently at her throat, she had
insomnia and lay there smoking beside June. She was the type of woman you should ensure leaves you, rather than the other way around. That way she would not hunt you down.

S
ome young men your age are making jihad, look at you. Nothing. Gangster, what is that? No faith, no nothing. I wish you would wear a vest with bombs rather than being a thug. You waste my life and you are a shame in the face of the prophet. I waste my life here for you
.

“You want me to make jihad? Eh, Dad? You making jihad doing taxi?”

To tell the truth this is a city built for winters. In the summers Toronto sits disconsolate, humid in its thick pink fibreglass insulation. This is what the father, Da’uud, thinks and he thinks this is how his children have become, built for winters, thick and with a rough, abrasive inside. They
are dull against his words, his barbs. He is not even a religious man. At times he is harsh with them, he says things he doesn’t mean. He cannot make that Bedri do anything. He has invoked the worst curses against this winter boy,
ciyaal baraf
, this boy who grew way beyond the height of the doorway and the width of Da’uud’s hand.

“In this city you have to keep your belongings with you,” Da’uud tells this to a woman in his taxi. He tells her everything about the boy and everything about himself; how he was an economist, how he trained in Switzerland in 1978. How many languages he speaks, Italian, English, Arabic, French, Somali. How he went back home and how in 1994 he fled. The whole country fell apart under the men who knew everything. The military men, the religious men. The hard men. “You’ve heard this story?” he asks her. “Before you know it, you’re trapped. Five languages, Miss. Five.”

She is looking out the window along the lakeshore. “No, that’s terrible,” she says. Why do men force their lives on me, she thinks.

“Yes, terrible,” he says. “So I tell him all this. He doesn’t care. He can’t understand.”

“Hmm,” she says.

Da’uud picked her up on Eastern Avenue and he’s driving her along the lake as it wanders in and out from view. “So where are you going, Miss?”

“Nowhere, really,” she says. She’s vague. But the man she is meeting has told her she is beautiful.

“No, Miss, I mean the address. Where you call the taxi for to go.” He drives past the island airport with this red-haired passenger. Does it matter who he was before this? No, it doesn’t. The day he stepped into this cab it ceased to matter who he was. The day he set foot in this cab his life, so to speak, changed.

“Sunnyside,” the passenger says.

“Sunnyside,” he repeats. “Sunnyside,” he repeats again. The woman is brooding, so he is quiet. Every six months there’s an inspection on this car, he has to do this to keep the plates, then there’s the gas, then there’s the other driver, who is always crying about money as if Da’uud doesn’t have enough children of his own. Of course this is not what he would have done if there was any other way but there was no sense thinking about that. The heart is sore. Before you know it you’ve been driving a cab for ten years. The cab flies along the lake at the south of the city to Sunnyside.

“Where in Sunnyside?” he says when they are near to Parkside Drive.

“Just here,” the passenger says.

“Here?”

“Yes, here. The parking lot,” she says.

He pulls into the parking lot. There are geese crossing the lot going toward the lake. Da’uud waits, the geese cross. He wishes he could come out of this cab and walk with the woman. She pays him, he sighs. It would change his life again to go walk with her. She waves to a man near a statue. Da’uud glimpses the man’s face. He doesn’t like it, it tears a sliver in his chest. He thinks, that man can kill someone. He has seen the faces of people who can kill people. The woman flutters toward the man. Da’uud leaves, saying to himself maybe he’s wrong, the things he knows are not useful. None of the things he knows has helped him to recover Bedri as a son, an obedient son whose life would redeem the choices a father makes.

The lake oscillates like green-blue wet glass. What is in that lake, the woman leaving the taxi wonders. She wonders this the second after she sees the man’s face. After the taxi pulls out she walks towards him. She’s dyed her hair red for this meeting and she hopes he likes it. She’s met him here before. He always seems furious at seeing her even though he’s called her and begged her to come. Once
she sees him she always, for an instant, regrets coming. But now she sees the lake and understands her attraction to him. She thinks, there is something turbulent there but she can’t see beneath the surface. Like looking in a mirror.

The geese go about their daily life.

The woman and the man walk toward each other expectantly, and then they turn together along the boardwalk toward the Humber bridge. All that they each had rushed to this appointment to say has evaporated. It has become inaudible or unspeakable. It walks between them, a slim column of molten air. They cannot reach through it to hold hands or embrace, its particles are prickled like small spinning blades. She has nothing to say to the man and the man has nothing to say to her. What is in that lake, the woman wonders again. She wishes she could see through its billowy green. A bird, red under the wings, flies across their path and the woman says, “Look!” She wants their meeting to be full of wonder so again she says, “Look!” She wants him to see the red underwings as an omen. But he ignores her. He doesn’t want to see anything beautiful. She tries to touch his arm, the spinning blades sting her and she withdraws, then she turns again, gripping his arm this time so that he stops, turns toward her grimacing, feeling the blades cut his wrists and his forearm
muscle, feeling himself a casualty of an event, though of what event he doesn’t know.