The Origin of Species (31 page)

“Fuck! FUCK!”

How had he got to this place? Any minute María would be at the door.

“Fucking Christ!”

He pulled out a cigarette and fumbled to light it. Surely it hadn’t been like that: she would never have come here then, she would never have stomached his presence. But then he knew Liz, how her mind reworked things. How she would soften it all in her memory to try to bring it back within the realm of the normal, of the bearable.

The apartment, he suddenly realized, was blue with smoke. Not just cigarette smoke: something more savory. His paella. He rushed to the stove to discover he had somehow set the oven to broil rather than low, a cloud of smoke taking the breath from him when he opened the oven door. The paella, he could see, had not fared well—it had taken on the scorched look of a crème brûlée, the mussels he’d carefully spread on the top open-mouthed as if caught in their death throes. Alex opened a window to air the place out, but such a bitter wind blew in that he had to narrow it to a crack for fear of losing what little heat there was in the place.

In the kitchen he carefully prized away the more cauterized bits of his meal until it took on a look that could almost pass for intentional. He felt a bit calmer. Gradually his mind eased back from the precipice it seemed to have come to: in a couple of days, he thought, he would call Liz and arrange to speak to her. Who could say what had actually happened between them? Who could know?

He still had his bed to make. Instead he poured himself several fingers of the rotgut Crown Royal that had survived Jiri’s stay and took it out to the balcony. He couldn’t believe the cold out there. The wind, though, had abated, giving way to a stillness that had something familiar to it, some dim hint of promise. Then while he stood at the railing a fleck fell to the back of his hand, then another. Snow.

It seemed a cosmic joke. After the first few flakes a flurry of them burst out of the sky, so that for a moment it was just as Alex had imagined it, the lights of the city and the veil of white, the darkling blur where the mountain was.
Snow was general all over Ireland
. What was it that made the heart soar at the most unlikely things? It was too much, he felt tears coming up, in a moment he’d be blubbering like a child.

Down at street level the snow hadn’t made any impression, maybe already vaporized by the time it had passed through the last clotted layers of atmosphere. Then, as quickly as it had started, it was done. A moment later Alex saw what seemed a familiar black head rounding the corner from the direction of the metro: María. She had come after all. In a matter of minutes, she would be at his door. He downed the last half inch of whiskey in his glass, butted his cigarette, and hurried back into the apartment to make ready a way for her.

M
aría was talking. Alex had never really heard her go on like this before, so volubly. The conference had energized her—somehow, amidst all the boring white men and the splinters and factions, she had been in her element.

“I had the same feeling from my own country. From the beginning, you know, before the killings.
Everyone
was in the street in those days, everyone. Was almost a festival then. Of course, here is different, is more serious, but still you can feel it.”

Alex was trying to take heart from her new openness, even if it had very little to do with him. He was waiting for the moment when the debonair side of him would kick in, the one that felt it was normal for him to be alone with a beautiful woman, but it hadn’t happened yet. At least the heat had actually come on at some point, wonder of wonders, and he hadn’t had to resort to keeping the oven going or burning the furniture to warm the place up. As for his paella, María had had the one reaction to it he hadn’t anticipated: she had hardly noticed it. He could have cooked rice and beans, for all it would have mattered; that might at least have sparked some glimmer of familiarity from her, some comment like, “So you have learned our national dish.” Instead, she had made a few distracted stabs at the paella as if it were some food substitute he’d served up—but how foreign could it be, really? it had rice; it had seafood; it was Spanish—then had seemed to lose all interest in it.

“I always wondered why you got involved with an environmental group,” Alex said, not entirely innocently. “I mean, of all the possible things.”

María gave a dismissive shrug.

“Is not so strange.”

Alex was searching his mind for a layman’s term for
sublimation
.

“It’s just, I would have thought you would have wanted something more political.”

“More with killings, you mean.”

“Not exactly.”

“You think after five years of war that I still want to hear about killings.”

Alex had foolishly been looking forward to a little moment of glory on this subject, to showing María how he understood her better than she understood herself.

“I guess I meant more to do with human rights.” But he was entirely on the defensive now. “I just figured something like this would seem beside the point.”

“Is because you don’t know. Is only one thing they fight for in my country, is the land. People don’t eat human rights. If there is no land, then there is no food, no freedom, no country. So you see is very important.”

He was floundering. Here she was in his apartment, finally, the whole obscene fullness of her sitting in one of his chairs and her blue-jeaned knees practically wedged between his own beneath the table, and he was picking a fight. By now the kiss from that morning seemed a fantasy he’d had.

“I saw your friend again after,” María said. “Félix.”

“Oh?”

“Is a homosexual, yes?”

Alex felt blindsided.

“I don’t know,” he sputtered. “I’ve never really asked.”

“But he is your friend.”

“Well, yes. My student. But yes, I think of him as a friend.”

“But you don’t know if he is a homosexual?”

Alex felt his color rising.

“It’s not a big issue.”

“You don’t think about it?”

“Yes, I’ve thought about it. I mean, it’s crossed my mind.”

“So, such an important thing but you don’t ask him. Is strange, no?”

Somehow, though he ought to have had the high ground on this one, she had managed to turn the tables on him again.

“Like I told you, it’s not a big deal,” he said, but then he added, rashly, “Maybe in El Salvador it’s not the same.”

María stiffened.

“Yes,” she said. “Is not the same. In El Salvador, if someone is your friend you know what they are eating, what they are thinking, what they believe.”

He had crossed a line.

“I didn’t mean it that way.”

“No.”

“I just thought—”

“Yes. That we are backward.” But she seemed to relent. “Is okay, is the truth, is very macho in my country. On the right, if you are homosexual, maybe they kill you. But on the left is more accepted.”

A better man than him, more debonair, say, would have taken this rare concession from her as a chance for good grace.

“But people still hide it.”

“Yes. They hide it. Like your friend.”

They sat silent. By now María had pushed her food to one side, as if to be spared the sight of it. Alex thought of the work that had gone into it, of the expense. She hadn’t even bothered to pick out the bits of seafood, though Alex had left his own behind as well, piling them discreetly at the edge of his plate.

He got up to clear the table.

“I guess the meal was a little burned.”

“Yes,” María said simply.

He scraped the remains of their plates into the garbage, quickly, trying not to think about the waste. He couldn’t believe now that he hadn’t planned any side courses or backups, not so much as a salad or bowl of chips.

“Can I get you anything else?” But a furtive scan of the kitchen had turned up only a bit of pumpernickel left over from Jiri and a few slices of browning Hungarian salami. “I could make you a sandwich or something.”

From somewhere the thought rose up in him unbidden,
If only she would just go
.

“Is okay. Just son’ bread, maybe, is good. And son’ water.”

Water and bread. It almost brought tears to his eyes, the thought of all his misplaced hopes.

He set two slices of Jiri’s brick-heavy pumpernickel in front of her, liberally greased with Fleischmann’s, and a glass of tap water.

“Do you know his company, your friend Félix?”

Alex felt his bowels fist up again. So they hadn’t finished with Félix.

“How do you mean?”

“What they do. Their work.”

He figured he should play it safe.

“I’m not sure, really. I guess they make aluminum. They must mine it or something.”

“No, no mines. Is from the soil.”

“Oh.”

“They just have to take it like that, from the top. I know, from my country.”

He didn’t like the direction they were headed.

“You have aluminum?”

“Not so much, I think. But your friend, his company was there.”

Ah. So this was the rub. He expected some horror story now of ruined farmlands, polluted rivers, of cattle dying off or children coming down with rare cancers.

“So that’s why you don’t like him,” he said.

But María waved the suggestion off.

“Was only some months they came, to dig some holes. Then there was the war, they came home.”

Alex had actually been ready to use phrases like
foreign investment
in Félix’s defense, though María would have made mincemeat of him.

“Tell me the truth,” María said, in an ominous teasing tone. “You play with him, don’t you? With Félix. Because he is a homosexual.”

Alex’s blood froze.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean maybe you like that he is a homosexual. How he looks at you and so on.”

Alex couldn’t quite pinpoint the exact nature of the horror that had risen up in him.

“His being gay doesn’t have anything to do with it. He’s my friend. Like I said.”

But María laughed.

“I could feel it. How he didn’t like to see you with a woman.”

Alex still wasn’t sure if what she was accusing him of sounded true because it was so or merely because he was always inclined to believe the worst about himself.

“You’re just not used to men being friends with homosexuals.”

“It doesn’t matter to me, what men do. But is true men are different here. Is very strange for me.”

She had taken on the air of someone looking on at something that had nothing to do with her.
You never had a chance with me
, she seemed to be saying.

“How, different?”

“Different. Maybe is better I don’t say.”

It was like a challenge now.

“No, go ahead. It’s interesting.”

“Yes. Maybe so.”

María shifted in her chair with what looked almost like pleased anticipation.

“The men here,” she started, “I don’t know. They are like boys. They don’t know what they want. They don’t know what it means to be a man.”

Alex took the blow directly.

“Ah.”

“Look at you, how you live. You have everything, you have education, a nice house, you are safe. In El Salvador, there are no people like you, who are so free, only the poor, who have nothing, and the rich, who are always afraid of the poor. But you have freedom and you don’t use it. You’re with a woman, you don’t know what you want—you are polite, you don’t ask a question, you don’t say what you feel. Is true, in my country is different. The men, the good ones, are men. Is not macho—is because they must choose. Not like boys who want one thing on one day and a different one on the next.”

Alex sat silent. He felt like a rabbit caught in the blaze of María’s headlights.

“You are upset,” María said, laughing.

“No, it’s fine,” he said. “It’s fine.”

It felt unseemly to make any attempt to defend himself.

“My Alex,” María said, in a maternal tone that seemed truly to spell the end of any chance of carnal involvement. She rose from the table. “Thank you for your supper. You are a very nice man.”

He was getting his wish: she was taking her leave. He would never be able to face her again, if they ended like this.

“You’re going already?”

“I must meet with someone from my group. For the conference.”

He stood by in a daze while she gathered her things. At the door she kissed his cheek lightly as if saying goodbye to some nephew or cousin.

“Maybe you can still come to the Salvadoran parties, yes? Or my brother will miss you.”

When she’d gone he collapsed on the couch. This was the worst, to feel infantilized—he would rather be a prick, an asshole, a cad, than a boy. Who was she to lord it over him, coming from her two-bit banana republic with its few thousand acres of hacienda and bush and its politics out of the Dark Ages? Yet she seemed to have more sense of herself in a single toss of her hair than Alex did in the whole edifice of his pathetic life.

He turned on the radio, unable to bear the silence in the apartment. Gzowski was just announcing the lineup for the morning show repeats: a regional report from New Brunswick; a piece on Thanksgiving turkeys. In El Salvador, the rebels ran a radio station that was like the nation’s lifeblood: the entire war they’d managed to keep one step ahead of the enemy, moving transmitters, generators, aerials, on their backs in the dead of night, surviving carpet bombing and special forces assaults and U.S. signal-location equipment to go on the air every evening at six for their regular broadcast. These were María’s role models back home. Alex, meanwhile, had Peter Gzowski, reaching out to the nation’s housewives for their secrets on turkey basting.

Ingrid had never made him feel this way, so dismissible; she had made him feel her equal, an adult. Everything else, her religion, her age, all the things he’d imagined were unworkable between them, seemed to grow small next to that. He thought again of the snow the last time he had visited: one day it had draped all the trees of Engelström in a mantle of white that afterward had glinted and dripped in the sun as if in a wonderland. Then once they had taken the ferry to the island of Ven, where Tycho Brahe had had his observatory, the island an eerie, enchanted place dotted with thatched-roofed farmhouses and smoking chimneys, seabirds forever wheeling overhead.