1
WAS IT January or February? The coconut fronds waving, shining like green hair in the sun, gave no clue. I sat in the window of our thatched house in Yelapa, not even a dot on the map below Puerto Vallarta, staring out through puffs of tiny afternoon flies. I patted the turquoise cloth draped over my seven-month belly, feeling the baby move within, revolving now like a restless planet. This hard compact ball was comforting—a rubber bumper to protect me from the world.
Now it grazed the underside of the tabletop. This used to mean it was time to redo the legs, which were of coconut stalks, the only wood available in Yelapa. Every three weeks or so, John would throw out the shriveled brown sticks and start all over again with fresh green ones, lashing them together and setting the hardwood top back on. He’d just done it again that morning, chopping the legs longer this time with the machete, so the table would be higher. But my belly was growing too fast—like everything here in the tropics, growing so fast, and rotting away before you knew it.
I was sitting there, marveling at the renewed solidarity of the table, a heap of Mexican pens before me. I had just finished a chapter of the novel John and I were collaborating on, a fairy tale account of drug trafficking and romance in Manhattan, called The Influence. On thirteen pages of children’s composition paper, I had gone through five pens. One had died in the middle of the first sentence. Perhaps the jungle humidity had something to do with it. With a sense of accomplishment, I peeled gold paper from a bar of chocolate. Carlos Cinco, Estilo Suizo—my reward for the day.
At first it had been terribly frustrating, struggling through with the defective Mexican pens. But now we were wise to them and made sure to buy at least ten for each chapter.
Today John was out fishing from the black rocks. He used soda bottles like all the men did here, with line tied to the neck and wound around and around. I had tried it once; holding the bottleneck while I tossed, releasing my hold on the hook at the last minute, letting the line spiral out. Wonder if he caught any? Be nice to have something besides rice, tomatoes, and onions. . . .
I pushed back my chair, automatically checking below for scorpions before I moved my feet, and looked up at the gray thatch, imagining with a shudder how many must dwell therein. The roof was another thing that needed changing every four months or so. Before the rains come, the men will have to tear it down, shielding their heads with umbrellas from falling scorpions. . . .
The floor was littered with colorful jungle moths and giant flying bugs of all kinds who’d pattered themselves to death on the kerosene lamp chimneys at night. I swept them up off the tile (most huts had dirt floors) into a big pile and out into the papaya trees. Shuffling out onto the steps, I stood swayback a moment and pondered the sun; it seemed to rise in the south and set in the southwest every day, making a small arc on the horizon. But how could that be? We were very close to the Equator, twenty degrees north anyway, and they were long, hot days. Have to ask John, I bet he knows. . . . A tiny lizard, terrified in the extreme, had cornered himself by the doorjamb. I could see his heart throbbing wildly, shaking his entire torso. I backed away, afraid to frighten him any further, and put the broom somewhere else.
There was Don Ponciano, the man who lived alone in the hut nearest ours, returning from the hills. He’d caught a cold and gotten delirious. Earlier that morning I’d seen him wandering around with a frying pan full of wet cement, kneading it with his bare hands and mumbling, “Para las chanchas . . . las chanchas son malas.” (For the pigs . . . the pigs are bad.) His pan was empty now, and I feared the worst for the pigs. He must have had a wife once. Probably lived there in that hut all his life. Now there was no one to look after him. I wondered if he’d taken any of that cough syrup, jarabe para tos, I’d brought him.
some mail—that would certainly be a miracle. Letters took two weeks to get to the States and two weeks for a reply, if they arrived at all. I grabbed the purple- and green-striped bolsa and padded on rubber flip-flops down the hill, first crossing the river carefully under a huge ever-present spider whom we’d christened Seymore. He or she was waiting patiently in a yard-wide web in a mango tree. I walked over slippery rocks past women washing clothes in the water, singing as always, their bare-bottomed children by their side. Soon I will wash down here like them, with my own brown baby—half-Portuguese he’ll be, probably look just like Robert. . . .
Into the pueblo, past chickens and goats in the sunny dust—popular Mexican songs booming from the empty cantina. To the general store first—tienda de Juan Cruz. Ah! A letter finally! From my mother. Strange markings all over it . . . must have been upriver a hundred miles before it arrived. I tore it open right there. My mother was back with Harry again . . . glad to hear that, but couldn’t picture her living in Brooklyn. And then, inside was my monthly support check—the minimum of fifty-two dollars, autographed by the famous wino himself. Someday maybe I’ll go back and see him, be drinking buddies together. . . .
Mother used to buy tea, ravioli, and fabric on First Avenue with the check. Now what did I buy? Bags of rice folded in brown paper half-moons, Nido powdered milk, Primavera jungle margarina, sometimes a warm soda at the cantina. And yes, a bombillo for the lamp. I’d broken one the other day—what a mind-splintering crash it had made on the tile floor. Have to be more careful with this one . . . I carefully eased the delicate crystalline bulb into the straw bag.
Coming home with the groceries and full petroleo bottle, a long line of people passed me on the narrow manure-paved path, each one saying, “Buenos tardes,” without fail. A fixed custom, it must have been uttered more than twenty times—ten times by me, as we ducked through fuchsia bougainvillea and banana leaves, avoiding pigs and the cliff’s edge . . . far beneath which was the azure sea, shimmering just like it had when we’d first arrived—networks of golden sun playing on the sand floor underwater. I could get away with wearing a bikini then, but not now. The Mexican guys always stared so much even then. John and I had lain on the beach down there before we found our house and he’d hacked open coconuts with the machete while I bobbed along with grayfuzzy old-man pelicans. I could float right up to them, buoyed by the fruit of my womb. Maybe we could do that again, only I’d wear clothes like the native women do when swimming.
Under the darkening canopy of the sky I passed Seymore quickly—darting away, feeling like I used to when little, scaring myself with thoughts of monsters under the bed. As I ran up the hill I heard, “Wow, look at the hair on that one, George!”. . . Unmistakably an American woman’s voice. A tourist couple had mistaken me for a native. I was flattered. My hair was past waist-length, but I hadn’t realized how dark I’d gotten, and the handmade turquoise dress I wore probably had Yelapa written all over it. It certainly did have genuine bat shit on the shoulder from leaving it out to dry one night.
In October, when John and I had gotten here, the temperate clothes we’d brought were all too warm. So we bought fabric and thread and each sewed something to wear—he a green sleeveless shirt and I two dresses: a turquoise sleeveless maternity dress, and a red dress with sleeves for the rainy season after I had the baby. We had spread the fabric out on the floor, cutting from sheer logic, and cursed the cheap thread which bunched and tangled every other stitch. He wore his green shirt every day with cutoffs, and my turquoise dress was the only thing I ever wore. The northern clothes were packed away indefinitely in a box—probably teeming with scorpions by now, and my red dress hung alone in the closet, waiting for the rains.
The black star tattoo Paul Orlov had done on my hip two years before was now beginning to stretch ever so slightly with the growing ball. I checked its progress every day. Lucky it wasn’t right on my navel, or I’d be an illustrated balloon.
John had been gone a long time. The sun was almost eclipsed now behind clicketing frond fingers. Before I filled the lamps, I wanted to take a look at the giant flower behind the house. Crunching warily through the underbrush, past the place where I’d buried my city shoes, where pigs grunted around at night, I stepped softly to avoid sleeping scorpions. That flower was of the lily family, I was fairly sure. It had a huge purple stalk (the color I imagined an umbilical cord must be) and a massive bud that just yesterday had been about to burst open, sending out a few long shreds of maroon and white petals. By now it must be in full mad bloom . . . but where? I searched for the spot; someone had chopped it! The purple stump oozed with white
droplets of sap from a recent machete slash. My head reeling with vague rage, I turned back toward the river again. The women’s clothes-washing songs were getting louder. I went up to a clearing from which I could see the beach. John wasn’t on his rock fishing anymore.
From the edge of my vision, something came shaking; a mad jerking movement entering the sandstage below. It was the retarded fellow in baggy white shirt and pants, walking spastic as always, with that screwy brown smile, so sublime. Haywire mass of black hair. But what was that, something almost obscuring him, like a sudden growth—a huge spray of white and purple clutched tightly instead of his gnarled walking stick . . . the flower!
He was shivering wildly with each spasmodic step, and the blossom seemed welded to him. His smile was even a touch wider now. He made a detour, going for the shrubbery—the whole quaking organism of him with the gargantuan blossom, like an extension of his crazy soul. I watched, gladly amazed. The flower couldn’t have landed in better hands. His footsteps made strange etchings in the sand, zigzagging to invisibility behind a wall of green.
I turned to go after a moment, and there was John, right behind me, dangling three beautiful fish. “Oh, you did catch some! Great!” But he was smiling at something else. “Did you see that?” He laughed with mischievous glee. “Aha, it was you who gave it to him!” I laughed with him, telling of my initial trauma at the chopped stalk. We embraced in the shared vision of hilarity, wondering what would eventually become of man and flower. Then on the way to the house I picked a skirtful of wild limes.
We made ready for night . . . lampwicks trimmed, bombillos glowing. I fried fish in aceite de algodón, cottonseed oil, while John squeezed the limones, and bats and dragonflies began their angular swooping and dipping outside the window. We ate at the celery-legged table as termites sawed away at the plaster wall. After a spell, one of our favorite creatures came out to entertain us. The Fred Astaire spider, we called him. He was brilliant orange with a large pad on the end of each foot—they looked like actual shoes. Right into the pool of lamplight on the floor he would leap, take a sort of bow, putting four of his legs together on one side, and lean over. Then the spider would do the most frenzied, intricate footwork, twisting, hopping, kicking with just one leg, then another. There should have been tiny taps made
to order for him! Then he would do another bow and skip away into the darkness, leaving us doubled over with mirth. Who knows? If we had applauded maybe he would have come back for an encore.
Next the moths did their nocturnal death waltz around the lamps, and howling dog choruses echoed in the river valley. I made sure there were no scorpions in the bed, then climbed under the mosquito netting, which was really more of a scorpion net. Their sting could be fatal to a pregnant woman. We’d found fifteen in all since we’d lived there. The machete gleamed by the bed, awaiting the sixteenth. I hoped it wouldn’t appear tonight, it was such a grisly spectacle—John holding the knife a few inches away and then CRUNCH, as it curved its tail, trying desperately to sting the blade. I had sent a dead one to Charlotte in a matchbox. I wonder if she ever got it? Once we saw a whole swarm of tiny scorpions running across the floor. They must have just hatched—all perfectly formed, but small as ants.
Confident that the netting was insect free, I settled back to read Mountolive, from the Alexandria Quartet. But my mind was straying. Someday maybe I’d be in a northern city with libraries again, crisp autumn in the air, a tweed suit on, and I could look up that marvelous flower in a botanical book. Have to remember the description—thin leaves starring out at the base . . . huge sanguine bud . . .Yes, maybe I’d live in a cool, temperate place again with dry bright corners in a house—nothing more dangerous than a little ant or spider, and now that I’d met John, I would no longer have to play my little library game of closing my eyes and picking books blindly. Now I would always seek out Beckett, Durrell, Kafka, Joyce, Dostoyevsky—all introduced to me by John. What wonderful gifts they were!
Languorously I gazed at him through the amber netting. He was still at work on a chapter, drinking Ibarra chocolate and cursing intermittently at the pens. I thought of all we’d been through—the terrifying close call in Guadalajara, where soccer players shouting “Pelo, Pelo!” had jumped him with kindergarten scissors, symbolically threatening to cut his hair, but instead kicked him in the chest despite my impassioned pleas, “No moleste mi esposo!” We had escaped, clinging to an overflowing bus, and recuperated for a night at flooded Lake Chapala. And then there had been the Federales who called on us that first night in Yelapa. Finally satisfied by my mother’s notarized paper, they’d lumbered out of the hut and left us alone
with our hearts in our throats.
Just then, through the woven bamboo door came a sound which roused me from my reveries—a kind of cackling. “Quién es?” asked John, but the voice just cackled in reply—unintelligible—a demonic rasp. I sat up, truly scared. What was this? “Buenos noches. Quién es?” I called, louder. Silence. Then more rough cackle, so near. “Could it be an animal, John?” I whispered hopefully, adrenaline coursing in my veins. And I saw that he too was afraid. Neither of us made any move to open the door. People came around rarely after dark, but then usually to sell things.
John came to bed and held me, so intense was my fear. Finally it went away, silently. I had the feeling that it was just gone suddenly from the door. A Mayan spirit looking for something in the mad Mexican night.
In the morning I woke with strong cramps, like severe gas pains, and soon realized that I was in labor—and only seven months along. This was February 2, my brother’s birthday. Now I wouldn’t be able to get to Guadalajara and stay with that woman by the hospital. I’d written a formal letter in Spanish and it was all arranged; I was to leave a month ahead of time. But this changed everything. I couldn’t run out and hail a cab like my mother always did in New York. There were no cars, or even a road here.
John ran and fetched the midwife, hoping that it was only a false alarm. But it kept on all day. The midwife arrived, a tiny ancient Indian woman who chewed tobacco and spat constantly on the floor by the bed. Everyone in the pueblo could probably hear my screaming. It went on for hours, with the old woman holding my legs open and commanding, “Empuje—empujese, Señora!” PUSH! I was convinced my pelvis was going to crack in two, and begged John to try and find a doctor or some kind of painkiller, even though I knew he’d already combed the whole village. Through my red blur of pain he looked so worried in the sun-filled doorway. I wanted to comfort him . . . it wasn’t even his baby. He ran out again in a panic, hoping to catch some American doctor on vacation when the tourist boat came in, but just after he left, there was a tremendous pressure, and something that sounded like a water balloon popped from my loins intact.
The straining was over, and my mind went blank. It didn’t even occur to me to ask about the baby. The hoarse voice of the old
woman came to me from far away, “Es niña. . . y no vive. . . su bebe.” A girl . . . she doesn’t live . . . your baby. I lay there insensibly, with no energy to react.
“Estás triste, no?” She assumed I’d be sad, but I only shrugged and smiled weakly. All I felt was strange relief. As the sun began to set I got up and wandered around in John’s old kimono which was way too big for me; the sleeves dragged like wilted petals. I was aware of my acute emptiness, and an odd pain in my pelvis which made it hard to walk. I discovered the baby, which the midwife had placed in a roasting pan, the only container at hand. I stroked the soft skull covered in lanugo, and examined the tiny toes in a reverent trance. The face was similar to my own—a Kerouac face, half-Portuguese though. While I’d been sleeping, someone had left half a giant papaya for a gift. It was larger than the fetus.
At twilight, a long procession of little boys filed solemnly up to our hut. The first carried a tiny empty coffin on his head. I was lighting the lamps as they stared at me in awe and whispered to each other. The sepulchral hush was shattered as John reluctantly drove down the nails. Then they carried her away.
When the rains came I got sad for the first time. I thought of my poor baby in the ground being inundated, under the banana palms where she was buried. With the rains came also an aching flow of milk, and the name Natasha, but it was too late for that. There were no breast pumps to be had, and for two weeks after the stillbirth John drank my milk. In hour-long nursing sessions every afternoon under the mosquito net, we would both fall asleep to the lull of women singing as they washed clothes down by the river . . . and the roosters crowing . . . dogs howling . . . a wild menagerie of souls all mourning my Natasha, and the rain fell in torrents, a deafening din pounding on every broad leaf and fern.
On February 16, 1968, I cut John’s hair for the journey north. It was my sixteenth birthday. I swept the mass of curls out into the papaya trees.
2
UP THROUGH California we had come, clinging to each other and living a secluded existence in various apartments and shacks along the way. We had been twin hermits for a year in Haight-Ashbury, remaining intentionally apart from the social tumult of the ’60s. Then by car we traveled up through the surrealistic, twisted oak hills near Ukiah, past the stunted pines of Little River and Mendocino, where the coast looks like a matching jigsaw piece of Japan, to Kittitas, Washington.
Our self-sheltered relationship formed itself steadily as we listened to nothing but obscure foreign music and fed ourselves yams and lentil patties. Since our return to the States, John had studied occult secrets at his desk (in his own room when he had one), surrounded by pictures of Oriental people (mostly women) that he had scissored out of the National Geographic. My realm had come to be the garden and bursting shelves of herbs for every conceivable ailment. We had a very special rapport and rarely disagreed. Our love was a cuddly lukewarm sort. We slept in separate beds. But now it was late August of ’71, and our three-year-old marriage was coming undone.
I pulled up in the black Ford station wagon, sliding right into the grassless tire patch by our house with an unusually fast lurch. John emerged barefoot in his worn kimono to greet me and see what the post office had yielded. His lizard-green eyes ignited at the sight of the big tattered box with its ragged stamps and the Yucatán postmark. It was from his friend Hilary. We tore it open together on the back porch, and the first thing we saw was a fine-coiled pile of rainbow netting, heaped like sleeping snakes. It was handwoven cotton hammocks—one in a red-blue-purple scheme, and the other orange-green-yellow. I seized the first, and he the second . . . the color combinations fit our personalities like gloves.
We tied them to the willows in the backyard, where we would spend most of the remaining summer sprawled on them, swinging into each other . . . sometimes even sleeping in them at night.
Also in the package was a letter from Hilary—three pages of scribbly turquoise ink, closing with the usual Islamic inshallah—God willing. He said he would be up to visit us soon—a visit we both welcomed for different reasons. John because he wanted to see his best friend and traveling companion after so many years of estrangement, and I, who had met Hilary only briefly four years before in New York, because he fascinated me, and because I had a vague plan of revenge brewing for John’s recent involvement with Jenny, a pretty blonde whose horoscope he’d been doing.
At that point it was already over. He had lost interest in the girl, and I knew he felt sorry about the whole thing. But my mind was set with a cruel conviction in that direction. It was too late. If for no other reason, I wanted him to know the feeling.
I too had been involved with someone else—a photographer who’d taken me out to the Yakima River and done a series of color shots of me half-nude in various diaphanous negligees billowing in the wind. One twilight we had shut ourselves up in his car to escape the mosquitoes, and wound up staying there for over an hour, oblivious to more than the mosquitoes. He had been a married man from the college, and I had found it flattering to have my physical form appreciated again after a steady diet of mainly mental love. But I had kept that rendezvous a secret to avoid hurting John.
His version of extramarital activity had been much more up-front. One night—the most beautiful of summer nights it seemed, jasmine filling the air sweetly—after one of John’s astrology lessons I had heard whispers outside my bedroom window as he supposedly walked Jenny to her car. Then silence. Straining my ears in a morbid masochism to catch suspected sounds of passion, I had watched the curtains flutter in the balmy, cruel breeze. A faint moan reached my ears from the darkness.
In desperation that night I had put on an album of Arabic love songs. A song called “Dalamouni Habibi”—unfaithful lover—blared out the windows as I paced the floor, fuming. I hoped it would distract them
at least from their sickening fondlings. I had thrown clothes and books, broken two coffee cups, and finally had gone out for a long walk, ending up at my mother’s house next door.
My tears were already drying as my oldest friend pulled up a chair for me amidst the cozy, familiar clutter, brushing off the sawdust.
“What’s the matter, Jan?” my mother whispered in genuine surprise.
“John’s out on the lawn screwing some girl.” No sooner had I said it, than it started to seem kind of amusing.
“He’s what? That doesn’t sound like John,” she said between bangs, splitting a piece of tamarack into small pieces for the stove.
“I know. . . .” I shook my head and laughed sadly. “Right under my window, too. Such an awful feeling, you can’t imagine—”
“Oh, yes, I can, Jan, I’ve had it myself.” My mother smiled drily. “Well, this calls for some coffee, don’t you think?” She moved the blackened blue enamel pot to a hotter spot on the woodstove and began to roll a cigarette.
The coffee was starting to sputter and I sat down—already feeling better—on a studio couch by the row of Britannicas covered with a decorative layer of bobby pins, pennies, and tobacco. She fished a cup and saucer out of the hot water in the canner and poured in some extremely strong coffee. Then, without bothering to remove the protruding spoon or the cold residue in the bottom, she filled her own handleless, brown-stained mug. She drank hers black; I took mine with evaporated milk. As I sat there, shaking the last droplets out of the can, the movement unsettled a tower of boxes next to the couch and several slid down on top of me.
“Oh, Jan, I’m sorry, I should move those, really,” she apologized with a sigh.
“That’s okay, gives me something to lean on,” I replied, pushing against them with my shoulder. It annoyed me when she apologized for things—hers was a unique and special way of life and I wanted her to be proud of it.
She finished rolling her cigarette—leaving a little mound of Bugler tobacco on the table as always—and lit the raggedy end. ...
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