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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810151215 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/30/2001 |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 245 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Nebucchim Jacinto felt the filigree of the pocket watch with his fingers as he lay supine on an iron cot in a room in a hovel in the pampas. His thumb palpated the notch where the bullet had struck before glancing off and penetrating the space between his father's ribs. The watch didn't work any longer, but he could always flip open the front of the case to confirm the exact hour of his father's murder, twenty years ago to the day. There was no mystery there. He knew who had done it, and how, and when.
It was midafternoon of the summer solstice, and not propitious for movement of any kind. Nebucchim had spent seven months away, laboring underground in the tin mines in the rusty mountains above Jujuy, not minding the back strain or the cold rations, instead appreciating the anonymity, as he waited in vain for the deadline to pass. In the cavity of the earth, he'd felt a voice, ever stronger, calling him out. At the last possible moment, he had laid down his pick, forfeited that week's rations and pay, and made his way back down to the broad lowlands. Since his return to the village of his birth, he had spent the past week in the neglected hovel that he used to call home without any great enthusiasm. Nebucchim was in temporary hiding from the nephews of the ranch hands who had killed his father, and so had remained at the hovel exactly long enough to make preparations for the inevitable.
Now the preparations were finished, his grave dug in the noon light with his own calloused hands, and he had rinsed away the sweat on his body and freshened himself with a bucket of waterand a scrub-brush. His raw skin tingled as tatters of a sirocco blew through the bars of the room's sole window. Nebucchim opened the leather book containing in its pages his deceased ancestors' names, crossed out one by one with different tints of quill and ink. Although each stripe was as different from the previous one in length and shade as the signature it marred, each stripe was alike in that it ended abruptly with an inkblot, as if the person covering over the name had been surprised in the act of scratching. The stripes were opaque and solid semaphores, like the freshly planted telegraph poles, their wood still green, that studded the endless stretches of cable crossing the pampa on their way to distant cities. The hum of the power lines, more than the prospect of death, had kept Nebucchim awake these seven nights. He ran his eye up the list of half-obliterated ancestral names. The Duarte brothers had murdered his father when he had run afoul of them, and their uncles had done the same to his grandfather, and the uncles of those uncles had done likewise to his great-grandfather.
Tomorrow, Nebucchim would be forced to seek out the nephews of the Duarte Brothers and find a way to provoke them, so these nephews could serve up the same punishment to him. Yet they threatened to break the transverse line of succession. Peaceful, easygoing sorts that they were, it wouldn't be simple. They hadn't inherited their forerunners' disposition. Instead, they were known to be lazy, and liked to drink and carouse, then sleep the ruckus off through the hot Argentine afternoon, to hoard strength for the next night's carousing. They didn't hold grudges, so he'd heard, and in their ample good nature held nothing against anyone. They were more inclined to buy a drink for a stranger than to pick a quarrel. But there was nowhere to hide, ultimately, on the pampa. The spaces between one place and the next were large and took time to cover, but on the other hand, little density existed between one object and the next to occlude one's view.
Nebucchim knew with a deft certainty that, on horseback, he would find the pair of them soon enough, if for some reason this latest set of Duarte brothers had indeed stirred from their lethargy sufficiently to hire themselves out for a day's work as hands on a ranch or had improvised sleeping quarters outdoors as they prepared to pass out at the break of dawn from overindulgence. Nebucchim would hunt down this latest set of brothers, stir them from their torpor, and find a way to rankle them enough that they would draw their guns on him.
He felt a little bad about his plan, knowing there was an off chance they might be jailed afterward, but there was nothing to be done about that. He imagined himself lying in dry dust in a pool of thickening blood. Guns were crude and errant instruments. He only hoped their combined aim would be accurate enough to kill him instantly. There would be no sibling to bury him, as there would be for whichever of the Duartes went first, when the older or younger brother eventually passed away from cirrhosis of the liver, heat stroke, or simple old age. Never from gunplay. The Duarte clan was as famous for its longevity as for its killing.
Nebucchim had made his own funeral arrangements in advance, a simple casket, a wreath fashioned of dry twigs, and he had written a brief, rude homily for himself, enumerating his short list of virtues and defects, cowardice not among them. He had used straightforward words, penned in a careful hand, to help the nearly illiterate undertaker perform funeral duties in this godforsaken place, where there was neither rabbi nor priest. Born. Hard. Slow. Dirt. Work. Hurt. Done. Nebucchim Jacinto crossed out his name in a page of the worn leather book, letting the quill linger only long enough, at the end, to form an inkblot that would punctuate his existence. As the ink began to harden, he heard the sound of a pair of boots behind him, scraping the threshold of the doorway, making their way across the plank floor, and then another pair of boots, the same size as the first, not for behind, repeating the identical sequence of sound.
Kelly laid aside the book. Facedown, no bookmark, even though this would further crack the fragile spine. The pages would end up out of order, and she'd have to reassemble the story herself. She, the scourge of libraries, owned lots of bookmarks, made of embossed leather or decorated with tassels of yarn, but could never find one when she needed it. Besides, it was Clay's book, one he'd left behind when they split up, the only possession of his she still had on hand, and it had somehow made its way from apartment to apartment with her for the last seven years. The cover of the book was mottled with mold. God knows in what secondhand bookstore he'd unearthed this one—probably the Black Swan.
She thought she'd heard the telephone ringing. It was ringing, in fact (except telephones didn't ring anymore—what did they do?), but she decided to let the machine pick up. That's what voice mail was for, and there was no sense twisting her knee, as she had once upon a time by thinking it was him while she showered, hopping out onto the tile soaking wet so she wouldn't miss his call. Tonight, there wasn't any reason to obey a mindless reflex, one that invited trouble, when it would probably turn out to be a telemarketer or at best a friend who would hang up before Kelly reached her outdated, stationary, corded phone. Then she would have to wonder what might have been.
Everybody else except her was out somewhere for Valentine's Day. Chandra had school tomorrow, and it was tough finding a babysitter, though, well, it was true her mother had offered to sit if she did land a date—her ever-expectant, ever-hopeful, ever-disappointed mother—but Kelly was going to have to rely on her mother plenty when tax preparation time came and business picked up to night and day. She didn't want to use up that goodwill now on the off chance of having a good time.
Besides, nobody had asked her out—well, Dale at the office had approached her but only because they were lunch buddies, he was just being nice, he wasn't really her type anyway, and if he was seriously interested in her she most certainly didn't want to know about it. Then she'd be forced to puncture his niceness, and it would create an awkward situation between them at the workplace afterward, Dale knocking himself out with false hilarity to create the impression that everything remained exactly the way it had been before he'd made the mistake of trying to get romantic. She couldn't stand that extra stress right now. Her reluctance to date Dale had nothing to do with the interracial thing, because God knows Clay had been plenty white, as were several of the men she'd dated since that time. Black or white, Spanish or Asian, they were all equally irresponsible in the end.
No, that wasn't entirely fair. Clay had kept up his child support for Chandra, never missing payments, though there was no telling where he got the money, earning as little as he did. Not that she would have sent the law after him; she was too proud for that. He'd offered nervously to move back in with her a couple of times, over the phone, afraid she'd take him up on his offer, before they got to the point where they stopped talking. Like him, she was hardheaded and willfully stupid, and she'd rejected his overtures, making him feel stung in the process. At that time, it had felt good to hurt him, she had to admit. He always used to ask her, in the middle of an argument, Do you want to be happy or do you want to be right? She'd never answered that question, because she'd wanted to be right; that was the plain truth of the matter.
She had been prepared to fight hard to ensure that she alone got custody of Chandra, but it had disappointed her that he hadn't tried to fight back, as she'd been ready to hunker down and duel him with all her might for their only truly important mutual possession. He hadn't put up much of a struggle, and she held that against him as much as anything. Yet even though she had been awarded sole custody, Clay had exercised his visitation rights often, in the beginning, coming back from Chicago to Kentucky every few weeks and calling as often as he could afford. Each visit was an occasion for bitter words, and finally, he'd gotten to where he would call seldom, even then hoping Chandra would, by some miracle of protocol, pick up the phone herself so he wouldn't have to talk to Mommy. He hadn't been back to Kentucky in a year, despite Chandra's pleading. Kelly wouldn't let her go up there for a visit no way, and Clay had barely telephoned, whether because he had grown tired of feuding out of mere habit or because he thought Chandra was better off not having to serve as an item of contention.
There was no reason Kelly should be thinking of Clay tonight, as whatever anniversaries had passed between them had ceased to be meaningful. Her thinking of him had happened almost by chance when she, promiscuous and insatiable reader that she was, couldn't sleep and started scouring the bookshelves for something she hadn't read, anything, and had come across this odd book, which had fallen down behind some others on the shelf. When she saw its title, Death North of Patagonia, she had mistaken it for a thriller, which at least seemed promising, Clay's tardy, unintentional little sedative for her lifelong insomnia, but she should have known, with his reading habits, that even something of this nature would have its philosophical twists.
He couldn't stand to read a book if it didn't break your brain in two. He'd refused to go to college, in that perverse, heel-digging way of his, but he still had to be the smartest damn boy on the block. That quality, more than anything else about him, had piqued her. Not that she didn't want him to be smart, but he wouldn't make anything useful or worthwhile out of his mental capacity. He had to be a boxer, because God (in whom he didn't trust, except when it was convenient) had caused him to be born with the body and the constitution for boxing. For all the good boxing had done him, and for all the puny success he'd had. One of her digs, when she got in a vicious mood, had been to say that God had been able to make a man from clay, but he hadn't been able to make a man out of Clay. She chastened herself that the only thing her religious leanings had done was to sharpen an already tart tongue.
But beginning to read one of Clay's peculiar and accidental books had cast a spell on her, and she had to admit it, she was missing the bastard, for the first time in a long time. Still, she wasn't going to let herself be lured by impossible emotions, not on Valentine's Day. Knowing that she was in for a night of insomnia, she plucked from her shelf one of the romance novels she knew Clay would revile had he been lying in bed beside her. He would have taken the book from her hands and read a few choice passages aloud, in a playful but mocking tone. Well, to hell with him. He didn't know the first thing about love anyway. In the book of Clay's life, everybody had to be a loner, grinding himself down into dust, like that Nebucchim character. After checking on the sleeping Chandra, pulling up the covers around her daughter, and stoking the fireplace in the living room with the steel poker, Kelly burrowed into the chenille bedspread, set Clay's book on the nightstand, and opened hers with an aggressive snap.
The pouty set of her mouth had always attracted him. He knew she wasn't going to be easy, and that's what got him going. She was spoiled, used to having her way, and he wanted her to learn that there was also such a thing as him having his way. But that could wait. He was a patient man. If the truth be told, he liked the fact that she was so spoiled. It gave her the confidence to feel that whatever she was doing was the only game in town. Now showing, her and her alone. Nothing else mattered except what she decreed. Her "to do" list was the Constitution of the United States of Miranda. When she insisted he go shopping with her (in spite of his comment that shopping was for women and he couldn't stand boutiques), and he declined, she threw a royal fit to get her way. As punishment, she made him stand directly outside the dressing room and talked to him across the half door all the while, with her bare legs visible. Then she'd pop out, modeling different outfits. She made him express a detailed opinion about how each outfit suited her, made him approve or disapprove, then scolded him for guessing wrong and pouted gorgeously when he tried to finesse the question by saying they all looked good.
When she had made her selections (most of them against his choices, just to taunt him), she proceeded to heap the costly bounty into his arms, as if he had been appointed costume master for Mardi Gras. And somehow, he had ended up paying for it all, even though she and he were "just friends" and weren't officially dating yet. But he was content to play his part in the hope that soon she, without any of those pricey clothes on whatsoever, would be filling his arms instead.
Kelly slammed this book on the bedspread, bearing down without mercy on the spine, which rebounded against her palm with an impertinent spring. Even worse. It was bad enough that you could hardly find a romance novel with a black protagonist (okay, only her father was black, not her mother, but she wanted a handful of black or mulatta heroines all the same, so she wouldn't always have to make that imaginative leap of putting herself in the shoes of a damsel who wasn't quite her). This writer had violated rule number one of genre romances—put the story in the mind of a woman! If they couldn't give her black, the least she could expect was female, for pity's sake. "He was a patient man"—what was that all about? What happened to "She was a patient woman"?
Besides, women should just in principle write from a woman's perspective, and men should write from a man's. There was enough misunderstanding between the sexes in daily life as it was, without bringing it over into her one chance at escape. How had this one slipped through? Maybe the author was indeed a man; because they all used pseudonyms you could never know for sure who had actually written the romance. That was one of those philosophical problems Clay would have gone crazy over, keeping her up half the night talking about it. Worse still, the book had literary pretensions that any self-respecting romance editor would have killed in the birthing stall. "Costume master for Mardi Gras." She might as well read Death North of Patagonia, for all the escape this one was going to provide.
She wondered what Clay had been up to in the past year and where he was tonight. Probably having a quiet dinner with some hanger-on girl from the boxing scene. If he had walked in Kelly's door right then, she wouldn't have minded having a meaningless little toss with him, make an exception, just to satisfy herself (he could see to his own satisfaction), as long as he'd promise to keep his mouth shut while on the premises. But there was no chance of that—of him showing up, first of all, or of him keeping quiet, even if he did. The boy loved to talk. He wasn't one of those strong, silent types. Strong and garrulous, more like. If she'd had a disposition to write, and free time in which to do it, she would have tried to set down his story. Their story. It had always been too hard to get inside his head, though, in spite of all the words that came pouring out of him. Because he loved to talk about everything except himself. Analytical, but not that introspective, when you got right down to it. All the same, if Clay's story were ever told properly, it would have to come in his own words. She wouldn't know what to say, how to put it, when it came to the crunch. If she'd been able to second-guess him better, they might have stayed together in the first place.
Against all expectation, a drowsy tingle began to steal over her. Almost before she could fall asleep, she was in the nightmare. Two men locked together in a room, one of them him. No doors, no windows. Somehow she could see into the room but couldn't get inside. Then what came next. What always came next. She knew. She snapped herself back into consciousness before it could happen. She'd only drowsed for a few seconds, the way you fall asleep at the wheel of a car for an instant.
Kelly scooped up both of the discarded books, cinched her robe, and walked into the living room in her bare feet. The heat of the fireplace greeted her entry, its warmth concentrated all in the one room. She considered throwing the romance novel into the fire. Then again, Death North of Patagonia was the true talisman. Something in her soul didn't discount the possibility of black magic, even if she was only half playing, out of peevish and restless boredom. Didn't nonbelievers pray all the time, just in case? And what was it Clay used to say? "Something starts out as a joke and becomes the rest of your life."
Whispering "Bring him to my doorstep," and shielding the skin of her face from the blaze with her romance novel, Kelly cast Clay's book into the fire, the last piece of him, besides Chandra, that she possessed, and was repaid with the smell of mold burning off before the flames began to eat into the pages.
"Who is it?"
"It's me."
"Me who?"
"Me Clay."
I should have known better than to say "me" through an intercom. It would only make my wait longer. Kelly used to lecture me that it was conceited to expect that my voice would be recognized through a door by a bare acquaintance. I kept forgetting that I was anonymous.
"Clay who?"
Claymation. Cremation. One nation under Clay. Without warning, I was in a knock-knock joke taking place in hell.
"Clay Justin. Balboa's friend." There was a dubious grunt, and all I could do was wait, the iron fence high and spiked, the big house an acre away. So I waited outside the back-door gate by the intercom for the Jamaican housekeeper to buzz me in. The wind off Lake Michigan had picked up, and I hunkered down in my unlined denim coat, too light gauge for this time of night. After seven years in Chicago, I still hadn't gotten used to the cold. People kept telling me I'd adjust, but I knew I wouldn't. I was missing an internal thermostat. I needed redbuds and dogwoods in bloom on a hillside, playful breezes, heat, perfume. God intended it that way. But Chicago had no hills, so another dusting of snow came instead or a freakish blizzard backed up by a wind that had had a couple of hundred miles' running start before it walloped.
It made me nervous to stand outside one of the biggest mansions on one of the nicest streets in Hyde Park. This place even had turrets. Balboa—yes, that really was his first name—Balboa always said to me when I complained about having to trek down here to see him, "Clay, this used to be a righteous white boy's house. You should feel right at home. Pork tycoon, Spam sultan, Sir Francis Bacon, meat-eater like you, lived here in the nineteenth century, and you know damn well who slept back in the carriage house. Lackey like me." Balboa was better educated than me, not to mention significantly richer, but he liked to exaggerate his slang, a gumbo of Superfly, Malcolm X, and Jimmy-Cracked-Corn, when he was around me so I'd never forget that he, too, came from the streets. But when he treated me for shoulder bursitis, I had to come all the way to Hyde Park, to his oversized eighteen-room villa, instead of to his office in Edgewater, closer to where I lived, at God knows what hour of the night, so that he could show off the palace to me yet again, with its mahogany mantelpieces and walnut wainscoting, and remind me that he'd made it, he'd clawed his way out of the West Side projects and through med school by his own smarts.
I didn't know why he bothered with me. It wasn't because I was white. Balboa had lots of white friends and lots of friends, period. He moved more easily in all circles than I did in any circle. But when I first met him, we hit it off, and when he found out I was from Kentucky, that sealed it, as if we were a couple of Freemasons. His grandmother had migrated to Chicago from Corbin or some other Southern pile of sticks, her husband had a barbershop and played the fiddle down there, and so Balboa formed a sentimental attachment to me. When he treated me for pain, I kept telling him that his bills never showed up on my insurance, and he always answered that his billing service must have misfiled the papers again. He had no intention of billing me, then or ever, and at some point I became complicit in that bargain, because I let my health insurance lapse, because I really couldn't afford it. I only enrolled in Blue Cross in the first place to make him happy, because he was always harping on how a person these days couldn't walk around uninsured. But of course he wouldn't ever cash in on my policy.
It wasn't white or black that made me uncomfortable waiting to be buzzed in by the Jamaican maid. It was money. Money gave me the jitters. I made my living, fitfully, by serving as a sparring partner, or whipping boy, for boxers in a couple of city gyms. I'd won the Golden Gloves competition once upon a time, but that's as high as I ever went. I didn't claim to be an unusually quick counter-puncher, but I could dance all right, and I did have one hard left hand when I managed to connect. Only I never really got to use it properly, because once or twice, when I did knock out the up-and-coming-pro-of-the-month in a practice bout, the trainer scolded me for damaging the goods, and I was docked part of my pay. I wasn't supposed to win. I was supposed to almost win, then take a lot of punishment, which I did quite well. In spite of the coincidence between my first name and his last, I didn't have much in common with Cassius Clay, by then Muhammad Ali, my fellow Kentuckian, my almost namesake, as far as speed was concerned. I'd slowed down, I could tell. The fastest thing about me was my tongue. In that, he and I were alike. He was the first rapper, and I always had dug his singsong, his patter, the way he used to talk poetry at his opponents before his mind faltered. The one thing I remained good at was protecting my head in the ring. My body had taken a lot of hits, but my skull stayed more or less intact. I nursed a deathly fear of ending up like Ali, unable to speak or think properly. Thinking was one of my biggest pleasures in life—that is, when I wasn't tormenting myself.
The most famous fighter I'd sparred with was Tadeusz Virkowicz, who had migrated to Chicago a few years before and who was basically a gifted bar brawler. He really wanted to kill people and had an incredible spout of rage inside him that he could barely keep wraps on. He could have been the heavyweight champion by then—at least that's what the pundits said—except that he kept disqualifying himself by hitting opponents below the belt. Including me, several times. Not to mention that he kept making racial slurs while we were in the ring, in his limited English, talking about how he was going to murder such and such a nigger, how there were too many niggers in boxing, knowing that his patter got under my pale skin.
The first time it happened, Balboa had moseyed over to watch me spar. His line was sports medicine. He had been over at the Mid-Town Gym checking on a couple of the name boxers who had contracts with him, and my bout caught his eye, so he sat down to watch. I didn't even know he was there, but Tadeusz did. Tadeusz made his remarks loud enough for Balboa to hear, then craned his neck that direction to put a punctuation point on his taunt, and that's when I knocked him to the ground. And of course the manager cussed me out about it. Afterward, Balboa introduced himself, asked me to get a cup of coffee with him, and offered to take a look at my shoulder, because he could see my extension wasn't all it might be.
(Continues...)
LOVING PICASSO
The Private Journal of Fernande Olivier
By Fernande Olivier
Translated by Christine Baker and Michael Raeburn
Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Copyright © 2001 Gilbert Krill.
Translation copyright © 2001 Christine Baker and Michael Raeburn. All rights reserved.