Blue Woman Burning--, page 5
The family’s panic over their missing child did not prevent Eustacia from taking a deep breath and declaring with a sense of rightness and finality, Children, we have come to the right place at last, I can feel it. The holy grail is just around the corner.
“What are you looking for,” young Ovid, only eleven, had asked.
I have no idea, my pretty boy, but I’m sure I’ll know it when I find it.
Eustacia aspired to be an inventor like her father. She stood for hours in her various laboratories across the world, wherever her husband’s job or her intuition took them, thinking very hard. She intended to invent the single most brilliant thing ever to have been invented.
For now, however, they would have to wait for their car and wooden packing crates to clear customs and for their youngest child to be returned to them, as they were sure he would be. After a few hours, their car cleared customs, but they were told that the crates were being held indefinitely. Still no child. Finally, as the sun was setting, the captain of the ship delivered Terence, wearing the captain’s hat. The elderly man shook the parents’ hands with a disapproving look, spoke some words in Spanish that no one understood as he smiled at Terence, took back his hat, bowed, and left.
Where have you been, you naughty boy? Eustacia said, smiling. Did I pack you by accident into our wooden crates?
“No,” Terry began, but was interrupted.
You know, it’s funny, Eustacia said, slapping her thigh, when I was packing the crates, the job seemed endless. At several points I had the distinct feeling that I was packing the same things over and over again. Little Brother was hovering about, I’m almost sure.
He had, in truth, been hovering around his mother as she packed. The crates were the size of double-wide coffins. He’d been taking all his toys and valued possessions out of them each time his mother put them in. She hadn’t noticed what was happening, though she had shooed him away several times as one would an annoying idea. The phone rang, and she left to answer it.
I know what happened. He must have crawled into the crate when I was called away to the phone. He must have lain down with his toys so as not to be separated from them forevermore. When I came back you had already nailed the lid on, Walter. You must have shut him inside! How did you survive, you little urchin? she asked, pinching his cheeks.
“Why, it must have been the ketchup you packed in the same case, Mother,” Ovid said, jumping between them.
“No, I—” Terry tried to argue.
Fallon vaguely remembered playing with Terry over the two weeks aboard, but she was too tired to sort it out.
“See how red his cheeks are?” Ovid argued.
Indeed, I do, Eustacia laughed. A brilliant deduction, my boy. She clapped him on the back.
Fallon’s memory of Terry gallivanting around the ship shimmered and faded until he disappeared before her eyes. Walter smiled faintly and shook his head. Eustacia spoke, and the story was made manifest. She was pleased with what she saw. And that was their first day.
If Eustacia was negligent, it was benignly so, and there was some sort of dubious comfort in the fact that they were named after her body parts. Eustacia was so amazed and fascinated by the fact that her skinny body could produce entire beings, she wanted to canonize the organs which made it possible. Thus, she was ready to write Ovum down on the birth certificate when Walter intervened and begged her to name him Ovid, after the poet. By her second child, a year later, she came to understand that the whole process did not start there, and she was delighted to discover the mystical timing of her descending eggs. She wanted to name her daughter Fallopia, but Walter suggested Fallon. It was an Irish name, and her mother was Irish. It meant “grandchild of the ruler” and Eustacia liked that. Her third child came three years later. She would have named him Utero but Walter suggested Terence, or Terry for short.
Walter was an amiable man, easily confused by the emotions of others. He was tall and good-looking like his wife, with a well-developed jaw and shapely nose; together they made a handsome couple. But unlike the pinball speed of his wife’s mind, his mind was slower and more methodical, brilliant in a different way. Walter’s profession as an urban planner made it possible for them to travel. He liked nothing better than to devise suburbs where people stayed neatly in their houses, and cars were directed, through skillful signage and street curvature, to flow smoothly and unimpeded. The family had lived in many countries, but always returned to their house in Upstate New York.
Reunited with their errant son, they drove their Dodge Dart to the outskirts of the city to find the earthquake-proof house Walter had rented for them. The development sat under the protective, circling arms of Manquehue, a brown foothill at the base of the snow-crested peaks of the Andes, which had hosted an ancient and superior civilization that built terraced gardens and temples only on the highest and steepest mountaintops.
At first the house looked to be nothing but a drab, flat-roofed rectangle, squatting among other rectangles. But they were impressed by the river-stone patio and drive. Carved double front doors opened into a red-tiled hall that wrapped around a glassed-in garden. A full wall in each room consisted of a sliding glass door that opened onto a backyard on one side and a stone patio on the other. It was vastly different from their colonial farmhouse in upstate New York.
Walter’s workplace had left a note about the international school the children were to attend, so after the family dropped off their luggage, he drove them immediately to the school, to register them. The school, Nido de Aguilas, or Nest of the Eagles, was perched atop another foothill of the Andes on the other side of town. Because they were halfway around the planet, the seasons were reversed. What was summer in New York was winter in Chile. The children, lulled into a stupor by too many new sights, too much distance, and seasonal reversal, barely saw the few landmarks Walter pointed out to them so that they could take the public bus to school the next day.
In a daze, they were interviewed by the principal of the school and registered for classes. Maria Ester, a new co-worker of Walter’s, met them at their house that night to teach the children some Spanish so they could manage the bus by themselves in the morning.
Sitting with them in carved-wood dining chairs, Maria Ester, a dark-skinned, high-boned woman, taught them how to say “permiso” when they boarded the bus and “pare, por favor,” when they wanted to get off. Schoolchildren rode for free. Pare, por favor. Stop, please. Pare, pare. The words reverberated in the children’s collective mind.
The next morning, Eustacia laid out their navy-blue national school uniforms, Walter forced them to eat a huge breakfast, and the two parents loaded them up with gigantic sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, rolled them out to the local bus stop on Las Condes, and wished them the best of luck.
Standing at the bus stop surrounded by mist, they did what they had always done when their parents brought them to other countries. They stood close together, tangled their fingers in the hems of each other’s garments, and moved like one organism, an amoeba, now one edge leading, now the other. They filled their heads with fog so they thought nothing, felt nothing, feared nothing. When the dark green bus roared out of the mist and ground to a halt before them, sighing fumes of gasoline and oil, they boarded without question.
Other school children in navy uniforms with clean faces and wet, combed hair crowded the bus, along with a few adults holding chickens in cloth sacks. Once aboard, the smell of gasoline and some other musky animal scent engulfed them. They squeezed into one seat together and hooked their sleepy stares straight ahead. The bus passed beneath cool eucalyptus groves with sickle-shaped leaves and overpowering scent, drove past pink and blue stucco shops, crossed bridges spanning the churning Mapocho River several times, and wended its way through cardboard shantytowns and upscale suburban developments. With all the fog, they recognized little from the day before, and as more and more children got off at different schools and the bus climbed higher into the hills, they floated further and further out into mental space, like astronauts cut loose from the mothership. Finally, Ovid spotted a bright yellow newsstand shining in the mist like a beacon.
“This is the stop. I know it,” he shouted, reeling them back to earth. If they could have articulated thought, they would have felt grateful to their all-knowing leader, but they were beyond thought.
They staggered to their feet and worked their way up to the bus driver.
“Pare, por favor,” said their elder brother.
The bus driver glanced over his shoulder. The brakes screeched like a dying animal, and the driver pulled back the door lever.
After the bus growled away, they stared at the paved road opposite the newsstand, curving up the hill into a gray cloud.
“Are you sure?” asked Fallon.
“Completely,” Ovid answered, shoving his hands deep into his pockets.
They tucked their gigantic sandwiches under their arms and began to climb. The fog gradually cleared and the sun burned hotter. Olive green hills, dotted here and there by dark green bushes, surrounded them, but there was no sign of the school. The sun climbed higher into the sky as they climbed the hill. They shed their matching sweaters and kept walking. Finally, when the road petered out into a red dirt path that wound under a barbed wire fence, they knew they had either taken a wrong turn or gotten off at the wrong stop.
Looking down at the ground, Terence began to cry.
“What are you crying about?” Ovid asked, irritated.
“We’re lost and we’ll never find our way home. We don’t even know where we live.”
“Mom and Dad will find us,” Fallon offered.
“How can they? We don’t know where we got off.” Terry’s nose ran as his tears escalated. “I’m hungry,” Fallon said.
They all sat down and unrolled their sandwiches, which consisted of a few slabs of ham between hard rolls that had only gotten harder as the hours had passed. With the first bite, they realized they were famished. They became so absorbed in the gnawing of their sandwiches that the world faded. When they looked up from lunch, a gaunt man stood over them. His face was dark and wide-boned. His slanted black eyes regarded them with an expression that combined wariness and barely restrained laughter. He silently motioned for them to follow.
He led them from one cow path to another. Finally, he stopped and waited for them to catch up. He raised his right hand and pointed to what they realized was a soccer field, nestled between gently sloping hills. They could just see the roof of their school beyond the next swell. By now, heat rippled up from the field, and as they stared, another movement distinguished itself. Reddish brown tarantulas dotted the field, slowly raising their hairy legs and planting them in the olive grass like disembodied hands on a piano.
They looked at the man in fear. His jerked his chin up slightly, the lines around his eyes softened, and he pointed them forward with his lips. They stepped toward the field, working their way delicately through the tarantulas, which turned out to be harmless. By the time they remembered to turn back and thank the man, whom they ever after referred to as the Tarantula Man, he had vanished.
6
BREAD AND CIRCUS
Fallon awoke in a panic. Had she missed her stop? The bus reflected only the interior. She sprang from her seat and lurched up the aisle gripping one headrest after the other.
“Have we passed Kingston?”
“What?” said the bus driver. “No, no, next stop, in about fifteen minutes.”
At the Harriman stop, as she stretched her legs over the worn linoleum and pondered the junk food in the vending machines, Chile superimposed itself so that she now inhabited two times simultaneously. She had not allowed herself to review that period in her life for a long time. In the first year after the family returned from Chile, she had craved the very things she’d formerly found strange, olive and brown countryside, misty mornings, tarantulas, and she somnambulated through school. But at boarding school, those memories nauseated her, and she fended them off whenever they arose.
Now, like a phalanx of inexorable ants, memories colonized her mind.
At first, they found Chile drab, the hills too brown, the dirt too red, the trees too short. Tall iron fences and cinder block walls with broken glass mortared along the top surrounded every house in their development. At the end of the street stood a recently abandoned farmhouse, with stucco walls, curved doors, and a tile roof. Narcissus still bloomed along the front walk.
Every weekend, Walter and Eustacia took them out to explore the city and surrounding countryside. All the tiny differences lifted them up and set them afloat like a boat without an anchor, the only comfort in sight the warmth of the Chilean people: a tiny penguin pacing the fish counter at the Persion market, fish sold with their heads still attached, thread spooled on long cardboard cylinders, roofs tiled in red, and stinging caterpillars falling from trees. The names of the streets and rivers—El Alameda, La Barnachea, El Mapocho, El Arrayan—flavored their every move.
Their parents fed them food they had never eaten before: stewed peaches, bread toasted over gas flames, live sea urchins nestled in the ice of a street vendor’s cart. The vendor cut the top off a sea urchin, squeezed lemon inside, and carved the red flesh from its spiny case. They swallowed it raw like oysters.
Often the walks were too long, and little Terry lagged behind, sniffling with a foreign virus, and limping because he somehow lost a sock. The plumbing in the house occasionally baptized them with spontaneous jets of water from the kitchen sink or the children’s bathroom (el baño chico). The mornings were cold and the afternoons hot. One night, as he helped Walter start a kerosene heater, Ovid accidentally swallowed some kerosene as he was siphoning it. He burped kerosene all night, and the house smelled as if plastic toy soldiers had vaporized. Thereafter, when they needed warmth, they built a fire in the fireplace. Some mornings as the tectonic plates shifted beneath them, they awoke to find their beds buzzing across the floor while glasses clinked in cabinets.
Like their mother, Chile was long and skinny, and at the end of the world. The Pacific to the west, the snow-covered Andes to the east, and the high desert Altiplano to the north protected the country from the rest of the world. Its southern tip, Tierra del Fuego, or Land of Fire, was the last bit of land before Antarctica. At some places, Chile was so thin they could almost touch the Andes from the ocean, the way their mother could almost touch her back through her bellybutton.
Chile means the land where the earth ends, children, Eustacia told them in her not quite present way. Come out and see the stars. We are almost the same distance below the equator now as we were above the equator in New York. See how the constellations are different? There is Centaurus and the Southern Cross. We can’t see them from our home. And from here we can’t see Polaris. As she looked up at the sky, the tiny brown mole beneath her right eye might have been their north star. When it’s winter here, it’s summer there, and when it’s summer here, it’s winter there. Everything is opposite and upside down. Even the cyclones spin in a different direction.
At the international school, where classes were taught in English, but Spanish was spoken in the breezeways, their history teachers proudly shared that Chile’s history was the most stable in South America because of its geographical isolation: “In Chile, we all speak the same language, Castellano, not Spanish. The indigenous Araucanians mixed with the Spanish long ago, and to symbolize that, the Araucanian star graces our flag. The blue represents the sky, the white represents the snow of the Andes, and the red is for the blood we spilled gaining our freedom.”
One day after school, noticing the cadre of kite flyers on the broad Avenida de Las Condes, Ovid begged a kite from Walter. The thermals in Chile buoyed them higher and sustained them more steadily than he had ever seen before. The three children launched their own kite. At first, they were confused when the Chilean children guided their kites so that they crossed paths with their own kite. To their amazement, the other children’s kite strings cut through their own, and the kite spiraled out of sight. The second time it happened, Ovid ran off to recover it and returned with a black eye, a patch of hair missing, and a valuable piece of information. If you dipped your kite string in glue and rolled it in ground glass, you could use it as a sky knife. From then on it was war.
Slowly, however, the Chilean children made friends with the Kazan children, and the land wrote itself into their souls. The plants spoke to them in a lexicon of leaf and stem. Pursed mouths of color sprang from arid hillsides, rose bushes billowed over high walls, and mimosa leaves folded shyly to the touch. In the backyard, avocado and lemon trees bore fruit. The brown hills became changeable but familiar faces, and the black, snow-capped Andes heightened their dreams.
Even before they came to Chile, they were never sure if Eustacia could tell the difference between the food and its wrapper, and they would surreptitiously remove fragments of plastic from their meals and push them under the seat cushions so as not to offend. But now, Walter took over the job of cooking, and what he lacked in artistry he made up for in quantity and consistency.
The problem was, Fallon thought as these memories marched before her, Eustacia could not distinguish her children from herself. She loved traveling the world, so she assumed they did, too. They had been to Israel, Germany, Italy, Morocco, Greece, England, Switzerland, and many places in between. Wherever they landed, Fallon and her brothers merged to cope. And because their parents were unpredictable, they had grown so adept at reading the tilt of a head or the twitch of a finger they often knew what their parents were thinking before their parents knew it themselves and could deliver the saltshaker before Walter or Eustacia so much as looked up from their first bite.
