Not, at least, in this letter. You see, she is married to a robust, red-haired barkeep and bodega owner named Antonio Montaraz, who appears in his boisterous way to dote on her. She must be approaching the change of life, but she has had at least nine children by this man, the youngest a babe-in-arms whom she suckles between stints as a barmaid in Señor Montaraz’s dingy but prosperous hole-in-the-wall tavern. The children also help their father, and although there is a lot of public bickering and noise, the barkeep’s regime seems to be popular even among the older siblings. This is a tight-knit family, with both Antonio and Encarnación in stolidly traditional roles. It looks suffocating to me—pardon me, my slip is showing—but your mother seems to be more than content with her lot.
The principal question now in your mind is probably this: Did I talk to her? Tell her about you? Trot out my own maternal experiences as a counterweight to your mother’s? The answer to this question—these questions—is No, of course not. You see, Johnny, to the cheerfully busy Montarazes I was a dowdy/doughty Englishwoman, with a phrase-book command of Spanish, who had stumbled off a tour bus disastrously misrouted out of Córdoba. I did not try to correct this false impression.
Suppose that I had blurted out my story to Encarnación. Would she have recoiled from me as an evil messenger intent on destroying her present life with lurid tales of her past? It’s quite possible. Or suppose that my mentioning you, out of the hearing of her husband, had afflicted her with a terrible anxiety about your whereabouts, your safety, your happiness. Because I still cannot completely reassure myself on these points, I could not have reassured her, either. So I pretended to a tourist’s illiteracy and spoke only a little.
Do you, there in exotic Zarakal, remember your Spanish? Even a little? Well, the surname Montaraz means “wild, primitive, uncivilized,” and to some extent this is a perfect characterization of your little half-brothers and half-sisters. None is as dark as you, John-John, and I doubt seriously that any of them ever suffers cripplingly vivid dreams about prehistoric East Africa, but, in many respects, they are nevertheless a feral crew. Their mother signals them with rapid-fire hand gestures, which, even though they can all speak, they relay to one another with remarkable deftness, cutting their eyes for emphasis.
They communicate as effectively without words as with them, but they are noisy for Antonio’s sake. He is a raconteur and yowler who cannot keep his mouth shut.
I don’t think this is a milieu you would find especially compatible, but one day you may want to visit the Montarazes and decide for yourself. The address in Espejo is 17 Avenida de Franco. I caution you, however, to think about the likely impact of such a visit. The ramifications go far beyond the mere satisfaction of your filial curiosity.
That Encarnación is alive and happy in a world such as ours strikes me as a miracle, and miracles are their own justification. Although hope, faith, optimism, and the formidable power of what the late Dr.
Peale liked to call “positive thinking” are clearly essential to the progress of our species—toward what? toward what?—only a fool ignores the potential wartiness of both circumstance and the human heart. As a matter of fact, I approached my search for your biological mother as something of a fool’s errand, expecting from the outset to learn that she had hanged herself in an abandoned building, or suffered a fatal beating at the hands of a psychotic client, or surrendered to the ravages of venereal disease, or maybe even walked beneath a construction platform from which a scuttle of bricks had just fallen. I did not like to believe any of these possibilities, of course, but until my search ended, each seemed as likely as what has actually occurred. More likely, in fact, given your mother’s unpromising background and the prejudice against her as a bruja morisca. So cherish this miracle, Johnny, and think very carefully about your biological mother’s present happiness.
I also know what happened to your biological father, Lucky James Bledsoe. No miracle here. The bad news is that as a member of the Army’s First Cavalry Division he was killed twenty-one years ago in the Ia Drang Valley in South Vietnam. He had just turned eighteen. I discovered his fate by tracing his parents’ whereabouts through the Air Force locator service at Lackland.
The Bledsoes live in Little Rock, Arkansas. You would probably be a welcome visitor to their home, should you decide to approach them. Photographs of their son in his Seville Dependent High School Basketball uniform, his letter jacket, and his senior cap and gown—from a segregated civilian school in Montgomery, Alabama—decorate the walls of the Bledsoes’ paneled living room. I visited them five years ago, when I still had no inkling where you were, on the chance that you had somehow contrived to find them before I did.
Because LaVoy, Lucky James’s father, remembered Hugo from the days of their professional relationship on the flight line at Morón, the Bledsoes accepted me into their home. Neither LaVoy nor his wife Pauline believed that I had sought them out solely to renew an acquaintance that had never been very close to begin with. When I told them of Hugo’s death, they commiserated in a touchingly heartfelt way—but, while Pauline plied me with whiskey-and-7-Up cocktails, LaVoy asked harder and harder questions about the trouble I had gone to to find them, and I finally confessed that their dead son had a living heir.
This news did not shock or upset them. I think they were almost grateful for it. Which is why I believe you could step into their lives without wounding or discomfiting the Bledsoes. They are your grandparents, Johnny, and that night, when they asked me where you were, I had to confess my ignorance, my guilt, my sorrow. I wept unabashedly for ten to fifteen minutes, and Pauline—bless her—wept with me. We have written each other or exchanged telephone calls at least once a month ever since my visit, but I have not yet told them you are alive and presumably safe in another country. (Anna, after all, was not supposed to tell me.) That remains for you to do, if you believe they deserve this small consideration. To my mind, they do.
Lord, look how long this letter has grown. I’ve been working on it for three straight hours—while the streets of Madrid seem to be washing away under a heavy April rain. Después de Juan Carlos, el diluvio. The reign in Spain, I fain would claim, is not mainly on the wane. Nor the rain, either. But I am growing giddily weary of writing, as my prose shows, and I had better close. Scratch this entire paragraph, Johnny.
—Eden in His Dreams.
See how stubbornly I resisted writing those words, how tenaciously I delayed the inevitable. Between writing “Scratch this entire paragraph, Johnny” and the next four words, nearly an hour passed. The sky is perceptibly lightening, the rain slackening. And I have finally written the phrase upon which this entire epistle teeters, even if that four-word fulcrum seems more than a tad off-center.
Johnny, forgive me. You will never fully understand how much I regret what I did, nor how dearly you have made me pay for that error. I am sorry for the pain I caused you, sorry for the pain I have reaped myself. If we should ever see each other again, I will probably not be able to speak of some of these things. This is why I have written about them at such stupid, even stupefying, length. You have an immense extended family, but though I have hurt you with one ill-considered act, and bewildered you by evolving from one sort of person into another (as I had to do), I hope that you will not exclude me forever from a place in this family. I belong there, too. In spite of everything, Johnny, I belong there, too.