Authors: Colum McCann
Rolando brimmed with a toothless grin – he saw the gaps as some sort of autograph now and he chugged his way beside my father. A picture was taken of Rolando, his finger pointing at his mouth in pride, the other hand clenched in a fist, a hat askew on his head, his face a field of stubble.
But the greatest pictures were not the ones of the copper mines, or of the people in the town. They were the ones of Mam’s body. My father had taken them in their bedroom. She was nude, not flagrantly so, but her stomach was smooth and dark, it held no creases, her legs curved softly, white sheets exposed small tufts of hair. Some of the shots were hazy beneath mosquito nets, so they took on a Victorian attitude of lounge and lust, as if being peeped at through a curtain, black and white photos that never even suggested colour, a cheek propped up on a hand, the body a streambed running down from it, cavorting through bedsheets and a canyon of desire, once or twice a suggestion of quiet lechery, a tongue held out against a lip, fingers in a V around a dark nipple, a sideways shot of her by the washbasin with her hand bellied on brown, fingers spread out; a hazy portrait of her wearing panties and stepping into a long white dress, hitching up her chest into it, the eyebrows raised in an attitude of impishness. When I first saw them – years ago now – they made me sick to the stomach. I hardly even realised it was her at first, and unlike the ones of the women in Spain, I never again looked at them in the attic, never found myself part of them. I knew what they had done to her and I couldn’t understand why she had let them be taken.
She almost seemed to leaf her way into the lens, a brooding silence of body, an acceptance of danger, an ability to become anything that he wanted her to become – and never once the feeling that she didn’t want to do it. The photos revealed a peculiar fascination with a beauty mark on her lower right hip. Even now I shudder to imagine her with her head thrown back in laughter, in some dark room sealed to mosquitoes and Peeping Toms, light reflected off a cheap umbrella, licking her lips at the camera, her dress in a formless puddle at her feet, while outside white hydrangeas closed their petals in a row underneath a woodwormed window.
Just before they left town, José with the Sewn Lip broke into my father’s darkroom and found some of the prints, somewhat underexposed. He ran around screaming – he finally got his voice back, the people said – flinging the photos of my mother around the town courtyard like so many pieces of confetti. A picture of her was found – impaled on a hitching post – down by the courthouse steps, and the joke was that there was a new candidate around for mayor. But the poppyseed priest wasn’t happy, and the women in town weren’t happy, and although the drunks and the men in the poolhall were delighted, they all pretended that they weren’t happy either, so my parents left next morning, very early, before the café was open, before truculent rumours jumped out from the white-shuttered windows and the thick walls. They didn’t have a lot to leave behind – a few wooden chairs, a couple of hair clips, the red geraniums, vats of photographic chemicals, a few chickens pecking at the ground as they cranked the front of their car, poultry feathers flying up from the back seat, dirt filtering off the wired-up runningboard as they drove, birdshit still patterned on the roof.
* * *
He dribbled egg down the front of his chin this evening at dinner. I made sure they weren’t ‘sunnyside up’, cooked them on both sides so he’d eat them. The yoke was still soft inside, and it streamed down amongst the stubble. Wiped it off with the edge of his sleeve. He says the tops of his fingers are a little bit numb. Every now and then he pinched his thumb against his forefinger to bring them back to life. The fork slid through them anyway, and it took him an age to push back his chair and pick it up from the floor. A clump of dust and hair stuck to it. ‘Not too hungry,’ he said to me, putting the fork back on the plate beside the eggs. He looked down at the slick of yellow drying on his sleeve. ‘I’ll suck it out later.’ Then he cracked the edge of his lips in a smile. At least his mind is still there, churning away in the skinhouse. He sat back in the chair and lit a cigarette, smoke rising up to the ceiling. But his fingers were jittery around his mouth, all sorts of liver spots moving in a blur. He sat in silence and gave me one of his old winks. Left his cigarette in the ashtray to burn all the way down to the filter again.
The kitchen seemed to have been sunk in formaldehyde, laid down in some vast tub of years. The black and white linoleum was as cold as ever, the copper pots hung on the same nails, and even the wall was still streaked above the stove from the time Mam set the pan on fire. A jamjar – one from the sixties with a picture of a golliwog on the front and mould flowering on the inside – sat in the cupboard above the sink. ‘How about we open a museum?’ He nodded and smiled, although I’m not even sure he heard what I said. I walked around the kitchen. The black skillet all sloppy with grease. The jar of flour. Mam’s woollen cosy with embroidered trees all out of proportion, the upper limbs fatter than the trunk, a sewn picture maybe reminiscent of her world, always about to topple. The teacups with all sorts of stains near the rims. One or two tins of cat food. A slab of bread and a box of tea in the pantry. A couple of slices of Michelstown in the fridge. I moved them around on the shelves to make the pantry look fuller, but it didn’t matter. It’s no wonder he is so thin. I suppose he just eats bits and pieces, although he told me that Mrs McCarthy brings him dinner some days.
I set about cleaning the place when he went down to hunt out his big salmon. ‘Going to catch that bastard, tonight,’ he said. Off he went with the rods on his shoulder after he fluffed out his flies in a stream of steam from the kettle, rejuvenating the hair and feather dressings.
Some spiders were living in the mop when I got it from the cupboard. Took it outside and ran it under the spigot. They scuttled away. Strange to feel the drizzle settle on my hair. The wind blew it in from the bog as I rinsed out the bucket. That’s a smell that has always lived inside me – the pungent black earth all slashed through with turf-cutters, although I could smell the factory belching out its slaughter, too. It left a scent of offal in the air, fanning out over the land.
It was when the factory came that the old man and I stopped our swimming in the river, our dawn race against the current. One morning we were out there shivering on the bank – I was eleven years old – when bits of offal from slaughtered cows starting floating down past us, blotches of blood in the water, stringy ligaments and guts spinning away on the surface. They came in spurts, a punctured vein on the river. The old man stared at it and ran his fingers along his body, walked away from the river, disgusted. Mam collected some pieces in a bucket and went up to the factory and dumped them on the factory floor. We never went swimming anymore after that. Mam got up in the early mornings and walked down to the water’s edge by herself, sat and watched the pieces flow by. She was silver-haired by then and I suppose much of the bitterness had settled in.
But they’ve cleaned up their act these days, and I don’t see any scum on the river, although the gates have slowed the water down to its pathetic trickle.
I saw a few men in their blue uniforms moving down past the end of the laneway on their bicyles, back from the meat factory. I went and got one of the old man’s cameras with a zoom lens to get a closer look, couldn’t make out any of the faces. They were trudging along. A few kids were out playing, too. Every now and then their heads bobbed up above the hedge. Four boys came down along our laneway and stopped to pick up conkers from under the chestnut tree. They were all fighting with each other, fooling around, throwing big punches that missed. From the distance one of them looked like Miguel’s son – hair in a black ramble on his head. I moved away from the window into the kitchen, put some washing-up liquid in the bucket, swirled it around with the handle of a wooden spoon, started cleaning the floor while the evening rolled on. Otherwise this place’ll be swimming in filth and he’ll just wade through it for the rest of his days. Swirl the mop in a circular motion. Let it glide through your hands.
* * *
That was a hot summer morning, four years ago, walking with Miguel through the town, looking for their old house. I was nineteen years old, just arrived from London, stupid with hope.
Miguel’s son – another Rolando, named after his late grandfather – held on to Miguel’s hand like it was glued there. Little Rolando wore a sailor’s suit and scoured his finger up his nose. He was scared of all the strange words coming from us. I had only a smattering of Spanish, picked up from a phrase book I’d bought in London, and Miguel’s English was useless. We walked slowly down the street, in the gathering heat; through the market, where the ribs of pigs dangled in the air on hooks and men in overalls with splatters of blood cried out as if they themselves had just been butchered; past women with sun-dried faces as they sold bananas and apples and reams of boxed vegetables, impervious to the flies that were buzzing around them; out to the street where a lorry coughed fumes; beyond a giant white adobe house with roses growing in the courtyard, a hipheavy woman out watering red and white geraniums; past a café advertising tamales; alongside some slum houses, a dog slinking through dustbins; the sun flailing down as we skirted the edges of a dry-soiled park where two old men played chess. Children were out on bicyles – they were raggedy but there were no open sewers for them to negotiate. The town had changed from the one Mam and my father told me about. Underneath the Mexican flag in the plaza the Star-Spangled Banner fluttered. A boulevard in town had been renamed to welcome American business.
Miguel had a puffy face that pillowed itself into silence. He must have known all along – it was as if he was trying to stall me – but the house had been replaced by a clinic that was run by a young man from Italy, a rainbow of freckles across his cheeks, his hair shiny and black around his ears. He had knocked the house down, darkroom and all, and built the clinic, a low white affair, where he gave his services free of charge. I looked through the gate and foot-scuffled at stones. Miguel ran a hand across the top of his brow, where beads of sweat had settled.
A row of scraggly kids waited with their mothers outside the house, where the chickens used to peck. The Italian was wrapping a white bandage around a teenage girl’s leg and he was humming some tune, maybe something about his own mountains far away. He saw me, with the backpack huge on my shoulders, and beckoned me over with a tug of his head. ‘Come,’ said Miguel, taking my arm, ‘meet Antonio.’ But I didn’t want to meet Antonio. I didn’t want to meet anyone. Little Rolando was screaming at the top of his voice. Miguel slapped him on the bare legs and he stopped. We went back along the road, great silence between us.
‘Did she ever come back?’ I asked later, in his house.
‘She no return,’ said Miguel emphatically.
‘Are you sure?’
‘You ask many questions,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s okay. You will have
una cabita?
She come again no.’
His wife, Paloma, prepared glasses of rum and Coca-Cola for us. Maps hung on the walls. They dotted the hallway, light coming on them from a fancy glass chandelier. Miguel had grown artistically. Now he made faces from contour maps – geological and ordinance surveys with eyes from history staring out of them. All sorts of Mexican revolutionaries were drawn within the valleys and the troughs, the towns sometimes used for eyes, hills for hair, the rivers for arms. He located Riley for me, a tiny figure drawn from the contours of a hanging valley. His head was leaning against the knee of Santa Anna who was slumped beneath the shoulders of Emiliano Zapata. The strange thing was that Miguel didn’t have to distort the lines – he had stayed true to the contours and the faces were fluid within them. He made a good living from it, sold them to galleries all over the country. Someone had commissioned a portrait of Salinas. Miguel was working on it. He said his art had nothing to do with his politics, but the face of Salinas looked chubby and wobbly, and it seemed as if there was an American eagle on his shoulder with television sets for eyes.
The drink was served in cut glasses with gold around the rims. I sat and sipped. The day’s heat pushed us down. Paloma held her glass with her little finger extended daintily. An emerald ring bobbed on it. Her fingers caressed the air as she spoke. She sounded as if she’d been sucking on helium.
‘You stay?’
They offered me a bed on their porch, mosquito screen all around so that it made something of an outdoor room, an old army cot with the cleanest of sheets standing in the corner, a Bible on a bedside table, candles in silver holders beside it.
But I moved on – wanted to be on my own – and booked myself into a hotel down near the courthouse, in the old part of town.
The hotel stonework was arthritic. Bits of it crumpled down into the street. The hallway carpet had cigarette marks on it. Soap operas rang out from neighbouring rooms. In the back of the hotel there was a pool of water in a blue tarp that hung above the patio. The mosquitoes gathered in the tarp as if in communion. At dusk they would enter my room, even through the smoke of a mosquito coil. I swatted them with a towel, leaving marks on the wall, along with thousands of others from previous tenants. Even the ceiling was splattered, a collage of red spots. A cleaning lady came in early one morning, when I was sleeping late. Hipheavy in her uniform. She looked up at the wall, counting the fresh stains.
‘Te la pasaste matando moscos anoche, verdad?’
she said to me. You spent the whole night killing mosquitoes, true? A fat brown finger wagged in the air and she laughed. She came over to my bed and ruffled my hair, ran her fingers along my cheek, and for a moment I thought she was going to climb in beside me. Instead she dipped her cloth in a bucket and wiped a few of the marks on the wall away, said she’d be back later to make the bed. I went down the corridor to the broken urinal down the hall, where the water was constantly flushing, wet my bandana in the sink and came back to the room to wipe the spots off, but fell asleep in the heat instead.