Most days she would dictate to me, like a classically trained thespian improvising. We were writing a biography of Joan Miró, a man she admired for his ability to stay in touch with his poetic soul and be nourished by nature, like a pagan (she was highly ecumenical, though not into New Age). She also saw his life as a parallel to the twentieth century itself, the century of modernity, the century where we recognized evil and yet were still unable to avoid it. In that way it somehow came to represent the culmination of her life’s work as a “ghost” writer, Louise’s secret autobiography.
I was more interested in her than in Joan Miró, and when I could get her talking about her own life, I was happy. A good biography, Louise would tell me, should read like a detective story. I could tell she was more comfortable with Miró’s chaste terroir flavor than a lot of the detective stories that had been written since she’d stopped reading detective stories. She told me that she’d hoped to become a priest, although the way she said it, it seemed more like an answer to an interview question than a burning ambition. She always came across as feisty and brilliant and adorable in interviews. “I see no reason to marry and have children — Cordelia did that for me” was another of her stock quotes. I guess at eighty-six you are lucky to still be able to perform the greatest-hits version of your life for an impressionable young woman, even if she is often vaguely hung over. I enjoyed my role in the daily matinee show.
“Good morning!” she’d chirp each weekday when I called her, first thing. Every day my response, which I believe she scripted, was, “What’s good about it?” The lawyers call this grooming. There was a lot of repetition. One of Louise’s bits of advice I’m still mulling over was this: “When you are reading your colleagues’ books, make a list of all the mistakes you find. And when you’ve finished, throw away the list.” At the time it made me wonder about my failed marriage, about the lists of peeves and scars we all compile, and that are so hard to release. But then maybe divorce is just a form of throwing away the list. I guess murder is another.
Behind me, when I sat in front of Mac, was the fireplace hearth. Sometimes Louise would have me pick up a Duraflame log on my way over to Spruce Street, and we would burn it over the course of the morning. Sometimes she would invite me to a thimbleful of sherry. It was on a day when those two things combined that she told me the story I will now relate to you, to the best of my memory. Her tone was prophetic. Her drawn-on eyebrows were well arched. The dim light given off by the various lamps and the log made her eyes gleam. It was a damp day, and she was obviously in one of the rare moods where I could artfully pry some details about her life from her.
It’s been more than two decades since that day by the Duraflame when Louise briefly stepped out of character. Mostly, when we weren’t drinking tea — “so strong it could walk!” — or making our lunch of chicken soup — “Do you know why Chinese food tastes so good...? It’s cut up into little pieces!” — she was all work. Her conversational gambits were efforts that seemed directed at convincing me to take up the task of continuing on in her irreplaceable place. But on that damp day, she opened up a little more to me. She was likely feeling the weight of outliving so many people, including, just the year before, her twin sister Cordelia. “We used to be identical,” Louise would say, “but we lived such different lives that the point came when no one would ever confuse us again.” Cordelia had married a Paraguayan and had three children, and painted her eyebrows on in more of a parabola. When she’d died, Louise said she knew what death was like.
On that day, the fire was reflecting in her cornflower-blue eyes. She stared into it and sighed. Usually she would intellectualize her emotions, convert them somehow into a pithy fortune-cookie aphorism. But instead of that sigh being a segue into an interfaith interpretation of vishwaprana, the cosmic breath, she inhaled deeply through her nose and blinked as she looked into the log, which was like some flambé version of a large Tootsie Roll, a California architect’s description of the primeval campfire around which humans have always told stories.
The soundtrack in my mind to this scene is “In Your Eyes” from Peter Gabriel’s So album. As I believe I mentioned, I have a soft spot for little old ladies. I just want to help them across the street, if you know what I mean. But really, what I saw in her eyes wasn’t a flicker of crypto-lesbic romance. What I saw in her eyes instead was pain, tempered by the years. “Times aren’t what they used to be. And they never were.” I could tell that Louise was done. Done playing it safe, done being a vessel for other people’s mistakes. Louise had lived a little bit in Cordelia’s shadow, like she had to toe the line, not have her own problems, not add to her mother’s concern.
It turns out those pat interview answers of hers are much easier to quote as the years pass, but I’m going to do my best here. In the hope that this will be the last time. Louise began by describing, as she had conveyed to me before, the holy trinity that was her relationship with Cordelia and their mother, also named Cordelia. Their itinerant lives as journalists, memorably in Mexico City in the early thirties where they were able to watch Diego Rivera and Orozco simultaneously at work on their murals on opposite walls of the Palacio de Bellas Artes, “a nonexistent competition between a millionaire communist who stood talking in front of his neat geometrical lines, and a stocky, unattractive one-armed man bending forward on the solitude of his scaffolding to paint his soul in living fire.” She did have a way with words.
“Oh, Louise,” I interjected, in my best jaded American accent, “what broke up your triumvirate?” My English is very good, but marked by Latinisms. I could see she liked my usage of the word triumvirate. I knew the twins had had a very intimate upbringing à trois. Their mother Cordelia Slade was a writer too. And had lived with Louise in that very same storybook apartment until her death. But the younger Cordelia Slade became Cordelia Zenarrutza, when she married a Paraguayan military man from an old family, who was twenty-two years her senior. Of course, Louise informed me, the midthirties was not a great time to be from Paraguay. At the time I’d barely even heard mention of the Chaco War, and certainly never heard it referred to by its nickname: the Green Hell. When Cordelia Zenarrutza, Mrs. José Félix Zenarrutza-Sánchez, set sail for the Southern Cone, Louise and Cordelia Slade Senior would have to wait at least ten days for an airmail update. The Chaco was sparsely inhabited, a vast region of virgin jungles and deserted plains burning under the tropical sun, with rumors of oil wealth, and access to the Paraguay River, something the landlocked countries of Bolivia and Paraguay both very much wanted to control.
José Félix’s military victories in the conflict would later buoy him to the presidency. Six months later, he dissolved the legislature and suspended the constitution to write his own, granting himself sweeping powers. Six months after that, almost to the day, he perished in a plane crash en route to his summer residence. José Félix’s constitution remained in effect until 1971. But this wasn’t the story Louise told me that day as she stared into the fire. No, the story she told me was a story of Green Hell. The price Cordelia Zenarrutza paid to become First Lady of Paraguay, however briefly.