Most of the streets in the barrio were narrow, one lane of potholed asphalt, and forked at odd angles between dilapidated four- and five-story buildings of whitewashed stone… old colonial-style dwellings with vented French doors opening onto ironwork balconies, and bands of faded blue and green painted along their bases like stratifications. It was the rainy season, and every day began with drizzles and ended in downpours. Swollen gray clouds passed so low overhead that their bellies appeared to be sagging between the roofs; and this, along with the extreme overhangs of the roofs, produced a claustrophobic effect, making it look that the buildings were leaning together, being pressed down by the heavy skies. Faint traffic noises could be heard from beyond the barricades, and occasionally a jeep would pass, bearing a clutch of Madradonas or Sotomayors. But there were no babies crying, no radios playing, no matrons leaning on the balcony railings to gossip with their neighbors. The apartments were empty, as were the little stores with murals on their pastel facades depicting disembodied shirts and hats, sparkling kitchen appliances, floating loaves of bread, and sewing machines the size of mastiffs.
One afternoon Mingolla ate his lunch on a stoop facing a store in whose windows and along whose aisles were arranged dozens of mirrors; ornate lettering on the facade proclaimed that within one could buy items of religious significance. He’d seen similar stores in Guatemala. Hotly lit windows thronged with golden crosses, gilt-framed Madonnas, Sacred Heart lockets… the gold flashing in the mirrors, brilliant images duplicated over and over, creating a dazzling maze of faith and nowhere for the eye to rest. But the only image held by these mirrors was that of his face: an infinity of gloomy young men, their expressions resigned, empty of conviction. The barrio had done this to him, he thought. Had planed away the extremes of his emotions, making him slow and dim like the members of the Sotomayor army who ranged the street, some moving hesitantly about, but most lying motionless in the drizzle that pocked the leaden puddles. Not far away, an old woman in a widow’s shawl squatted by the curb and peed. Just beyond her, a haggard gray-skinned man walked with the gait of a somnambulist, stopping to touch a wall, to stare, then stumbling on. Their clothes were ripped and stiff with grime, their eyes dark and shapeless-looking like holes worn in rotted fabric. They were armed with clubs and knives and garden tools, and many bore wounds that had gone untreated. Little black receivers like drops of ebony were affixed to their ears, and it was through these that they received orders to fight or disengage. Gauzy shadows appeared to be collecting around them as if they were decomposing, adding their substance to the air. Mingolla wished he could puke, have some overwhelming reaction, but he only felt numb.
The woman sitting at his feet began to hum. A slovenly thirtyish plug of a woman, with heavy thighs and pendulous breasts and jaundiced skin. Clad in a dress that might once have been blue. After he’d finished working on her, she had told him her name was Irma and that she missed her babies.
‘How ya doing, Irma?’ he asked.
‘I’m singing,’ she said, gazing off down the street. ‘Singing to my babies, putting them to sleep.’
‘That’s good.’ He held out half his sandwich. ‘Hungry?’
She rocked an imaginary child in her arms, smiled and hummed.
It might not be so bad, Mingolla thought, to keep growing slower and slower like the people in the armies of the barrio, to wind up inhabiting shreds of memory. Lots of normal people were no different, and they seemed content.
‘Pacito, Pacito,’ Irma crooned, and chucked the invisible baby under its chin. Faint Madonna smile lighting her doughy face.
Mingolla turned away, hollow with the sight, yet at the same time pleased that a human smoke still fumed inside Irma, that she had love to rely on… something he could no longer do wholeheartedly. He remembered one of his father’s salesmen, an old earnest huckster with gray hair and a face like a rumpled dishrag. He’d played uncle to Mingolla, delighted in imparting to him anecdotes of his days on the road, the lore of insurance and selling. ‘First thing,’ he’d said once, ‘you give ‘em the bad news. The premiums, the payment schedules. Then you work around to the benefits, just the ordinary stuff. They’re not impressed. Fact is, they’re disappointed. They were hoping for something better. So you let ’em stew a minute, and then you tell ’em. “Now here’s the beauty part.”’ The salesman had been referring to some hidden investment potential, but to Mingolla his words had had the musty resonance of a universal constant, and he had taken from them a different meaning, a belief that the world—going on and on with its routine turnings, its unremarkable miseries and joys—could suddenly unfold to reveal at its heart a luminous principle as full of serene significance as a Christmas star. Making love with Debora had always seemed to disclose this kind of beauty, but since arriving in the barrio, though their lovemaking was as good as ever, too much else had changed for Mingolla to derive anything from it other than release. Debora had changed most of all. She was caught up in the process of the peace, passionate about it, and even her ordinary conversation smacked of an ingenuous idealism that dismayed Mingolla and caused him to look at her in a new light, to wonder how she could be such a fool. Like the night before, during a pause in lovemaking, lying on their sides, still joined.
…it’s funny… she’d said.
…what’s that…
… I was thinking how I’d like to live with you, and what I decided I wanted was green places, green solitudes… green…
The word green became a chord sounding in him, binding him to her, and for a split second he had a kinesthetic sense of her body and his, how she felt having him inside, the nerveless warmth and comfort of being filled.
…edens, she said. Places without strangers, without rules, make our own rules, our own reasons…
Her intensity made him aware of his own growing ambivalence, but he tried not to let it show.
… why’s that funny…
… I’ve always hated them, jungles, mountains… my father was always dragging us off into the wilderness… he loved it, loved the emptiness… and then after I got out of prison, I was in the jungles and mountains so much… I hated them… but with you, I want a clean place, a place no one else has ruined or touched…
Troubled, wanting to shut her up, because everything she said was causing him to lose faith in her good sense, because how could she be so glad and hopeful in this terrible place, he moved inside her.
… David, oh God, David…
He clutched her ass with both hands, grinding against her, squeezing out feelings.
… I want you to come in me, David… now… but in my mouth, I want you in my mouth…
The words honed his arousal, and he thrust at her for a few seconds, then stopped, feeling distracted. Seams of light through the vents of the shutters, her skin gleaming palely in blurred stripes…
… what’s wrong, David…
… tired, that’s all…
… we can stop, it’s all right…
… maybe…
… we’ll make love in the morning… I want that, I want to walk out and feel you still warm inside me…
He held her as she drifted off, brushing the edges of her thought, their minds engaging like gears in a slow mesh, and he suddenly saw an expanse of smooth-grained golden wood, and had a sense of her personality, her anxiety and the calmness that underlay all her moods, and he heard a chirpy woman’s voice gabbling about a customer she’d had to deal with, knew the woman to be his… or rather Debora’s Aunt Juana, going a little senile now, and Debora was studying the grain of the wood, noticing how the flow crested into dark slivers like stylized waves, and looking up at the glassed-in shelves with their lumps of pre-Columbian pottery, and she wished Aunt Juana would be quiet, those same stories over and over, and if Juana kept it up, Papa would lose his temper, and then she’d have to spend all night soothing him, and she glanced at him, a heavy bulbous man, his impassive face not unlike the faces on the lumps of pottery… and then Mingolla was himself again, marveling at the contact, wondering at all his attempts to fathom her, because there she was, locked in her memory of another time, that mixture of poise and concern and naïveté that was the base compound of her soul, and beneath that, the frail inquiry tinged with hope that we, every one of us, are even before innocence begins. Then another memory, one so brief that he could retain only a sensation of agony and harsh radiance, and he was spinning in the stream of her memory, in a ruddy glow that was like the light of her blood coursing into the past, and memories were slipping by so quickly he could scarcely differentiate between them, and then the stream slowed, entering a region of dusky light, murky darks, dusty, ancient memories, creaky old things, and he had an image of yellowed lace veils, webs of memory lifting from brassbound chests and shaking loose dust that sang as it fell, the singing translating into a whining like the circuit of the blood, then into voices and visions and thoughts, and he was walking in a garden with a young man, the sun making an embroidery of shadow on the stones, and the duenna close behind, coy whispers and signals, and later the pain of a child being ripped loose, and later yet the heartsick perception of the sick old man a lover had become, and then a clangor of steel, shouts, the silver armor masking the horse’s head gone pink from a rinse of blood bubbling from the slash on its neck, and the passage of memory speeding up again, voices and images blending into webs of golden light that wove an endless pattern, binding blood and time and history into a knot, a sexual twining… Mingolla surfaced from this immersion feeling as if he had fallen a hundred floors and landed in feathers. He was sweating, his heart racing, and he was amazed to find that Debora was still asleep. He tried to put together the experience with the intimations of magical connectivity he’d had while working on Major Cabell; but he was reduced to supposition, to vague theorizing, and the only thing that seemed apparent was that the contact had spoken to the character of his relationship with Debora, that they were all flash and dazzle, and no real substance…