By the Light of My Father's Smile Page 12

  When we make love, she said, we have two places to start: my hair and your throat.

  Two weeks later, that is what we did.

  Myrrh

  Dear Favorite Tourist, the letter began. It was written on the thinnest tissue paper, blue, with a thin, nearly transparent red line running along one side. It smelled of myrrh.

  I am writing to you because you were so kind as to give me your address and also because it is true: of all the tourists who have come to visit the Greek dwarf over the years, slyly poking their noses into a misery they do not comprehend, you are my favorite. Is it because you are so brown and so tall? Because your hair coils on the back of your neck like that of a Greek goddess? Or is it because you were someone from far away who joined herself willingly to the unknown, to my poor country, and to my poor country folk? That you came to see me not once, or even twice, as real tourists do, but every day until you left to go home to America? That we became friends?

  America. Is it not where everyone wants to be? And is it not paradise?

  At this, Susannah sipped her Campari, kicked off her slingback pumps, allowed her silky black dress to slip off one deeply browned shoulder, and said to herself, as she settled on a wicker chair in the sunroom: No. No, America is not paradise. This sun-room is, though.

  I am writing to tell you stupendous news, the letter continued.

  I have left my home, the church! It happened in a way never imagined. Do you recall how I was daydreaming about Gypsies? Pygmies also, but Gypsies, definitely. Well, as life would have it, all of my brothers, to whom my father left his immense fortune, died. Well, they were old men, and it was time. Nothing was left for me, chained as I was to the church. Only after all of them, seven, had died, would I inherit. I wasn’t expected to live so long. But live I did. And so, there I sat one day, lolling on a pile of money, when a Gypsy caravan came by. Caravans of this sort, a long line of small, brightly painted wooden houses on wheels, had of course come by my dwelling before; but that was during the years before the war. During the war it was as if Gypsies simply disappeared. Remembered for their tinkering and music and bright, exotic clothing, or for their thieving, lying, and treachery, depending on whom you were talking to. I had the same fear of Gypsies that everyone else had, because their wandering, disorderly ways were regularly, when I was a girl, denounced in our church. So for years I would duck inside my room, lock my door with a beating heart, and peek at them from behind my red curtains. This time, though, I did nothing of the sort. I am by now so old, I thought, what difference would it make if they stole my dinner, stole my money, or even if they stole me? I listened to the little bells that jingled on the red-tasseled reins of their horses; they seemed to be calling out an invitation. To tell the truth, I was beginning to be bored. Learning languages and reading people’s faces on television can be done in any prison. Placing my tiny derringer in a holster that fitted my armpit, I leaned out to meet the most colorfully dressed people I’d ever seen. The men wore fuzzy black hats and embroidered velvet vests. The women wore long flowery skirts, and gold coins in their long hair. They did not seem too surprised to see me, actually. They explained that they were on a pilgrimage that reenacted their former way of life. That they had built and painted the wagons of the caravan themselves, and that they were still practicing the songs and music of their ancestors that they had but recently learned. The older women, some of them professionals—schoolteachers, doctors, and so on, in the city—and I were soon telling each other’s fortunes, the men were whittling wooden spoons and drinking plum wine, a cup of which was offered to me, and the children were running wild through the cemetery and drawing cartoons on the white stones. As my old eyes began to take in all this unexpected experience, new life began to stir in this elderly frame. I found myself swaying to the most soulful Gypsy music; I began, tottering at first, then finding my own rhythm, to dance. When you have never danced before, especially if you have never danced before with others, it is like beginning to fly. Taking my red curtains, which the Gypsy women liked, and just a satchel of my small clothes and a belt of money, I locked the door of the church and went off with them!

  At last I was a tourist myself! And traveling with those who have been tourists for thousands of years. They explained to me that they were no longer to be known as Gypsies, but as Roma. That they, like other Indian tribes across the earth, were beginning life anew, from the ground up, by giving themselves a new and different name. But I will miss the name “Gypsy,” I said: to me it has always meant romance. Yes, they said, but to most people it means being “gypped.”

  I understood. Each night we traveled across the land, each day we settled long enough to cook, to wash clothes, and to tell fortunes in the town square. This went on day after day. Until I began to perceive a certain relentless quality to it. Why not settle down somewhere? If only for a season? I asked the men and women leading us. And that is when I learned that settling down, for Gypsies, has almost never been allowed. They move on before they are driven on. This was about the most sobering and disturbing thing I’d ever heard. I became morose, rattling along in my red-curtain-covered bed. Listening to the beautiful songs my new friends sang as they trod along the familiar way. They were not at all like birds, as I had thought, free, and forever flying in a new direction, but more like hamsters, always tramping the same long, well-remembered track.

  I watched the faces of the villagers through whose streets we passed. Some, the younger ones, were delighted to see a band of people so fabulously dark, colorful, and strange. But the faces of the older people frightened me. It was as if they were looking at ghosts. Many of them surely remembered they’d sent “their” Gypsies to the concentration camps.

  At my age, and with my life, you would think a loss of the romantic vision of life would be welcome. It is not, Favorite Tourist. I think the human spirit needs to believe that someone has escaped the general pressing down of life that passes for the male notion of civilization. I had hoped the Gypsies had escaped. But no. One day I was talking to the Jewess writer who has risked so much to bring their story into the light of day; she had friends among our caravan, and she said to me: Ah, nobody knows this, and those who might have known chose to ignore it, but the Gypsies were slaves in Europe, for four hundred years. Bought and sold, humiliated and beaten, killed even, for sport. Forced to work until they died. And I thought, as she spoke, this wonderful young scholar: Just like the black people of my Favorite Tourist! And that is why, this woman said, they are still so cut off from everyone else in Europe, more cut off than the Jews, even after hundreds of years. So insular and so lacking in trust, where outsiders are concerned, that they think all people other than themselves are horribly unclean. Because the behavior of others toward them has been, in fact, unclean and almost always has meant their ruin. The treatment of the Gypsies and of the black people in America, Favorite Tourist, it has been the same, no?

  Susannah laid the letter on her thigh, sighed, and looked out the window. A pink damask rose grew close to the sunroom wall. There was a delicious fragrance from the garden. What made the difference between them? she wondered. Between black Americans and black Gypsies? Or between Gypsies and the Nunga (aboriginals) of Australia? Or between the Gypsies and the completely exterminated indigenous population of Tasmania?

  Since I have left them, Susannah continued reading, inhaling the myrrh, which I did after a couple of months, I have lived on a yacht, the very one my father used to pick up women from every continent. I do not pick up anyone, but I myself go ashore. I have pressed my nose into every country that lines the seas. I have lived for six months with the little people of the rain forest of Africa, who are just my size, although, in fact, physically they do not really resemble me. Even so, they choose to see me as a grandmother, or maybe a great-grandmother, returning now to them.

  But where have I been? I ask through my translator.

  I love to ask them this because they cannot begin to imagine my life. They enjoy the photo
graphs I brought along of my boat, but it is difficult for them to imagine me traveling on it; besides, they have never seen the sea.

  They say: You went to dig tuturi root, far in the farthermost corner of our forest. There you were spotted by the king of nightbirds who needed a helper for his wife. Perhaps your job was to help her gather leaves with which to make aprons, like the ones we wear. Or to help her build leaf houses.

  No, I would say, I don’t think so.

  Then they would shake their heads and shrug. We would all laugh. I might be holding a tiny baby who smelled sweetly of the aromatic herbs tied around its neck, and all around there would be the rustling of leaves and, far in the forest where the women were digging roots, the sound of singing.

  This, I thought, was paradise.

  But it won’t last. How do I know it won’t last? Because when you leave the boat to begin the trek into the interior you are surrounded by soldiers. And these people care about nothing but raping young girls and eating food. You are surrounded by refugees, and these people care about nothing but being able to stop, anywhere, to rest. You must wade, literally, through a sea of trash. All of these unhappy people are being pushed toward the forest, where the small people, who so remind me of myself, live. Then there are the sawmills, some of them hundreds of years old. They have been walking about the forest, these sawmills, going from place to place, cutting down the trees with which the little people have always lived. How do I know the future? The devastation I see before me already, everywhere, is how I know.

  But you are not devastated, Favorite Tourist, [the letter continued] even though your people, about whom I read—I study them—always seem to be on the very brink of defeat. You are so soft, one feels, and yet perhaps it is the softness of that which bends to the ground and does not break. I imagine you right this minute stretched out somewhere in the sun, thinking of your troubles, yes, but also perhaps savoring a fig. This is the right attitude, I think, Favorite Tourist. Let nothing stand between you and the dance of life. This is what the Gypsies with their everlasting music have tried to do. In the concentration camps where they were killed by the Nazis in vast and scary numbers of which the world has rarely heard, what did they leave to the Germans, aside from the long black hair shaved from their heads for mattress fillings and suit coat linings? A huge collection of harps and violins!

  Perhaps I will come to America! My boat is sturdy. It is big and somewhat grandiose, as my father was. Maybe I will come where you are, dock my house in the local harbor, and sail off with you.

  Yours,

  Irene (E-reen-e)

  The Story You Were

  Telling Us

  The Story you were telling us, Señor Robinson, was strange. Each Sunday you would tell us a little bit more of it, and that very night my father and mother would sit by the fire, pondering. First of all, it was a puzzle why the sun was not worshipped on its nameday, Sunday. Always the Mundo worshipped the sun; it is the god, next to Nature and Earth itself, that is most obvious to everyone. But even though your Story had a day named for it, the sun itself was never mentioned! This was to the Mundo very odd. My parents would repeat what you had said to them, practically word for word, because in our world each speaker is closely listened to. Relatives and neighbors would come to share our fire; the children would use this time to play together, while the grown-ups mumbled and muttered amongst themselves. It seemed too large a story for our parents to handle, is what bothered us. They sat by the fire, poking at it with sticks and regretfully shaking their heads.

  While you had run on ahead to introduce them to a hovering god in the sky, which they could only visualize as cloud, they were still worried about retribution from the neglect of any mention of the Sun.

  But now, said Manuelito, time is short. I will just talk to you of what to expect from this point on.

  He meant, this point of death.

  You unfortunately did not make the transition while singing and so a feeling of self-assurance on the path of death is not promised to you. What you are required to do, though, is the same as what I am required to do.

  What is that? I asked.

  The dead are required to finish two tasks before all is over with them: one is to guide back to the path someone you left behind who is lost, because of your folly; the other is to host a ceremony so that you and others you have hurt may face eternity reconciled and complete.

  But Manuelito, I said, I never heard of such a thing!

  You never heard because you never listened, Señor, said Manuelito. You have said you came to learn from us, but the sight of us in our poverty sent you straight to your black book. You thought it had all the answers for our situation, when in fact it had none that we could accept without feeling like backward children. Did you really think we did not know we should love one another; that the person across from us is ourself? That stealing is bad; that wanting what other people have is hurtful to us? That we are a part of the Great Spirit and loved as such? What people does not know these things?

  We do not believe in heaven or hell, Señor; we do not believe in eternal damnation. We believe only in the unavoidable horror of hurting others and of likewise being hurt. Being sorry and not being sorry. Forgiving or not forgiving. Our Story is one that continues only for as long as it takes us to do these things. We do not know what happens to people after they have forgiven. We do not know what happens after they have proved they are sorry. It is a mystery that we Mundo are happy to leave whole. What we do know is that each of us will have a little bit of time, a window of opportunity, so to speak, in which to make amends, to say goodbye, to bring love back to a love-forsaken heart. And then we are gone, and no one even thinks of us anymore.

  As Manuelito spoke, I was thinking of my literal haunting of my younger daughter, Susannah. To her surprise, she was dreaming about me constantly. She was “feeling” a presence lounging and lurking about her house. She was wearing black more and more, as if in imitation of my bogus priestly frock. She was wearing onyx on her finger, jet about her throat. When she slipped into her black car on her way down the mountain, it was as though she were entering me, her dark father, of whom she had once been so proud. So trusting, and so unafraid.

  And I, my nose pressed now against the window of her love life, and especially her sex life. Trying to have a place in an area I had nearly destroyed. Was this natural? I asked Manuelito.

  It is completely natural, said Manuelito, though perhaps for you it is sometimes very embarrassing. On the other hand, what could possibly embarrass the dead? When you used to tell us in church that God saw everything, we of course thought of him as one of the dead. The recently dead are known among my people as the ones who return to spy on the confusion they have left.

  But that would mean that your people believe in ghosts! I said.

  Manuelito smiled at me. He was such a handsome boy. Still young; in death, unbroken. Radiant. Not pale and shadowy like me.

  To us, Señor, perhaps there is no difference between ghost and angel, angel and spirit, he said. Señor Robinson, he continued gently, do not despair. We understood maybe only one thing about your Jesus Christ: that he was what you call a ghost. That he came back to spy on the confusion he had left. That he stayed only long enough to sort things out. To tell his people not to worry; to absolve them from blame. We were glad to hear he had returned from the dead; this made perfect sense to us. And also we liked him. He resembled a Mundo! Though we never believed he had a physical body that could actually be seen.

  The Mundo’s Story likewise was created to help us heal the wounds we make while we are alive. Do you know that to us the purpose of Story is to connect the two worlds? We believe your story is what you take with you when you die. And you complete it shortly thereafter. There is a logic in this, I think. We understand that the dead do not vanish at the moment of dying, but continue to talk, so to speak, to weave their story about them, for a while longer. How could this not be so?

  You have, though without
singing, made it to the other side. I believe I am here to guide you, and I will.

  First of all, he said, it is both Magdalena and Susannah who have always needed your love. Of the two of them, however, it is Magdalena who is frail. Her obesity is designed to hide this. Susannah, for all that she seems docile and pliable, an innocent, is a woman determined to have whatever she wants. She is destined to experiment until she finds it. And she is determined most of all to possess her own mind. What this means is that it is in the experiencing of life itself that she finds what she needs. Susannah will survive anything, with the tenacity of a flowering weed. It is my Magdalena, more faithful and more vulnerable, who is dying right this moment of a broken heart.

  As he spoke, I could see Magdalena. In fact, I was standing just by her bed, on which she sprawled, mountainous and grotesque. A hunk of chocolate cake in one hand, a can of beer in the other.

  What is she watching? asked Manuelito.

  But she was not really watching anything. The television was doing a flip-flop and making a droning static-fuzz noise.

  I looked closely into her eyes, which were wide open. She seems to be in a coma, I said.

  Manuelito sighed. At that moment men in white coats entered the room. They took away her beer and her chocolate cake, drew a sheet over her head, and stood around discussing how to remove her body from the house. They marveled at her weight, and even more at her height. One of the men said something about a horse, and laughed.

  I turned to Manuelito. Will she be coming to join us now? I asked.

  Not just now, Señor, he said. At least I don’t think so. I think she must first pay a visit to her mother, Señora Robinson, your wife.

  My wife! I said. Incredibly, I had forgotten about her. Ah, Manuelito, I loved my wife so much, but would you believe, since coming to the other side, I have rarely thought of her!