Louisa Meets Bear (28 page)

Andrew makes a little snort. “As though that were necessary. We were already training the Guatemalan military.”

At these times, Marnie wishes she had known Andrew when he had hair to his shoulders and hippie paraphernalia. Had the cynicism been there even then? Once, she'd asked Sam, who said that Andrew had always maintained a hairsbreadth of ironic distance from whatever he did. “His jeans were faded but never frayed. His backpack was made of leather.”

“Did you know that then? That the CIA was there?”

“There was talk—particularly around Todos Santos.”

The waitress arrives with a plate of oysters. Looking at the gelatinous bodies, Marnie feels a new wave of nausea. She raises her hand to cover her nose. The waitress catches her eye, and places the plate as far as possible from Marnie, with a basket of bread in front. “Thought you might like something bland,” she says to Marnie. “Anything else?”

Marnie shakes her head no. She wants to say thank you but fears that if she doesn't stay perfectly still she'll be sick. “I'll have another,” Andrew says, pointing to his drink.

Marnie closes her eyes and inhales cautiously. In the past, when Andrew has talked about Todos Santos, it's been about a mountain village reached by roads too rutted and steep for his van to navigate. To get there, they'd had to take the bus—unheated with baskets on the roof and animals everywhere. There'd been only two buses out each week, leaving at some ungodly hour like three in the morning so the Indians could get to the market in time to set up their goods. Now, “doing a Todos” has become a joke between them: the way that Marnie occasionally cajoles Andrew, whose hand will shoot over his head to hail a cab before he's two steps outside, to rough it by taking the subway or bus.

The queasiness about the oysters lifts and Marnie opens her eyes. Andrew has a shell at his lips. He sucks the salt water and blue-gray body into his mouth, swallows, and then washes it down with his drink. With the vodka in his bloodstream, the corrugated lines in his brow have begun a pale pink dissolve.

“Todos was the Guatemalan version of the Wild Wild West. The men drank like fish. They were small even for the highland Indians: short legs, hunched shoulders, nasty tempers. On festival days, they'd hang live chickens from ropes at each end of the village and race back and forth bareback on their horses through the streets and alleyways, betting on who could pull off the most heads without falling from his horse.”

She spreads her hands wide and flat over her stomach. If her baby can hear already, she does not want him or her hearing this story.

“I saw it once. It was gruesome: drunken men howling and blood pouring onto the dirt from the necks of these decapitated chickens.”

In Andrew's photos of Todos, the men had feet callused as mule hooves and cropped pants like the pedal pushers American women wore in the fifties. There was only one picture of a woman—a tiny figure with long braids, a stiff embroidered blouse, and a face that looked sixty but, Andrew said, had probably been barely thirty. Widowed, with children to feed, she rented cots to travelers, a dollar per night with a quarter extra for each blanket. Everyone, the travelers, the woman, her six or seven children (one died that year), slept in the same one-room thatched-roof hut.

The waitress arrives with Andrew's second screwdriver. Andrew reaches immediately for the glass, and then, as if sensing Marnie's scrutiny, waits a moment before taking two long sips.

The biggest problem, Andrew had told her, was food. Because of the altitude, they could only grow corn. For months on end, the only food in the village would be eggs and beans and tortillas and cans of juice so supersaturated with sugar it left grit on your teeth. When there were travelers in the village, the widow's sister would set up a table outside her stall in the marketplace and cook whatever she had. At night, the men who lived nearby would gather there to drink.

“Would you drink with them?” Marnie asks.

“Not during the festival. But sometimes at night, sitting with them in the market, I'd have a shot of quetzalteca.” Andrew sucks on an ice cube. His eyes, usually darting from place to place, are now still, almost glassy. “Most of the men spoke only K'iche', but there'd usually be someone who could translate into Spanish for me. After a while, after I'd bought a lot of the woven bags from them at a price higher than they could sell them at the Huehuetenango market and then started to talk with them about how to form a
cooperativa
, they began to almost trust me.”

Andrew pats his shirt pocket as if searching for a cigarette. Marnie watches him and wonders if he has forgotten that he stopped smoking before their wedding or if he has continued smoking in secret. It occurs to Marnie now that Sam and Andrew had probably smoked together.

“There was a weaver who lived outside of Todos, a man named Teofilo who spoke pretty good Spanish and interpreted for the others when I bought their goods. He'd told me that the year before, one of his cousins who'd sold some corn to a guerrilla band had been found with his throat slashed. Someone had painted the letters for the revolutionary party on his jacket with blood.”

Marnie wishes her mother could have met Andrew. With her admiration of the people-first politics of Rivera and her idol, Kahlo, she would have enjoyed Andrew's stories.

Andrew plays with his now empty glass. His eyes drift to the bar and then back to Marnie. “One night, maybe the fourth or fifth time I came to Todos, I was sitting outside the market stall with Teofilo and about a half dozen other men. It was a few days before festival week, and they were drinking this liquor they made each year for the festival from corn—beginning the bacchanal early. Some of them had skipped going to the Wednesday market in Huehuetenango so they could drag the vats of this stuff up from the storage cellar, which was—they saw no contradiction in this—under the church.”

Andrew takes another oyster, his Adam's apple bobbing in his throat as he swallows. “It was about ten o'clock, and a boy, maybe fourteen or fifteen, came running into the market. He was the son of one of the men and he began talking, more yelling than talking, in K'iche'. When I asked Teofilo what was going on, he told me the boy had spotted the villager they thought had ratted on Teofilo's cousin. The morning before Teofilo's cousin was found murdered, this man had left with the others for Huehuetenango and had then never come back. Now the boy had seen him get off the bus and head across the square to the path leading to his mother's hut.”

Marnie looks at the clock on the wall—an hour still until the plane to Oakland. “What happened?”

“They all got up, with the boy following behind. Two of the men unhooked the machetes that always hung from their belts. Another took a tarnished pistol from under his jacket. I was surprised since I'd never seen any of the Indians with a gun. I'll never forget the way he blew on the barrel and then spit into his palms.”

Marnie feels her brows squeeze together. “What happened?” she repeats.

Andrew laughs. “What do you think? They killed the guy.”

“You
saw
them?”

“I heard screams, probably while they were hacking at him with the machetes, and then, after a while, two shots.”

Her hand moves from her belly to her chest, where her heart pounds wildly. “You didn't try to stop them?”

Andrew looks at her coolly. A bead of salt water lingers on his lower lip. “The man was a
gusano
, a worm—he'd ratted on one of his
compadres
.”

“You don't
know
that. You don't
know
that
for sure
.” Her voice is thin, almost shrill. On Andrew's face—disdain, as though she's beneath being called an idiot.

“I should have chased after half a dozen Indian men, all of them with machetes, at least one with a gun, only one of them able to understand a word I spoke, and tried to convince them not to kill a man they thought was responsible for the death of their friend?”

Marnie feels like a car whose idle has suddenly shot too high. Her ears are ringing and she is afraid that she is going to do something out of control: scream or slap Andrew. Only once, the night they learned about Alan's suicide, has she ever done anything like that. Her parents had called Sam and her into the living room. Her father was unable to speak. When her mother told them, Marnie lunged at her, batting her fists at her mother's chest.
Liar, liar, liar
.

Yes
, she wants to yell.
Yes, you should have
. But her stomach saves her. Her gurgling stomach rising into her esophagus, her stomach that remembers the four oysters Andrew slurped whole and the two that still float in a cloudy fluid behind the bread basket. She stands, pressing on her breastbone, willing the contents of her stomach to stay below her palm until she makes it to a bathroom.

*   *   *

While the others had rolled like billiard balls from their senior years of high school into their excellent colleges, Marnie, in her first act of defiance (of all of them, she had been the most compliant, trailing behind Sam, bringing home report cards with only As, rarely ever even getting sick), had the June before she was scheduled to start Barnard refused to go. She'd told her father first, one night after dinner when the two of them sat together with Thomas's gin and tonic between them. Her father had reacted in the only way he knew: to insist on a kind of corporate obedience, to remind Marnie that the deposit securing her position in that September's class had already been sent.

“I'm not going,” Marnie said, shocking even herself with the quiet certainty with which she delivered these words. In the morning, when Marnie told her mother, Raya lifted her hooded eyes, looked squarely at Marnie, and then said with neither bitterness nor disappointment, “Fine.” Marnie had felt an empty, hollow feeling. She sputtered explanations: she wanted to defer for a year, her friend Janyce had told her about an organization that would arrange for her to work as an au pair in Paris … She started to cry, her first tears in front of her mother since Alan's funeral. Raya pulled her close and although neither of them said so, Marnie was certain that her mother was thinking that perhaps if Alan hadn't tumbled off to Amherst like the shadow of David he'd always tried to be, he wouldn't have three months later hung himself from a tree.

In Paris, she'd lost her virginity with a Polish photographer named Wojtek—a huge man with coarse hair, a belly that hung over his belt, and a booming laugh that Marnie imagined must put at ease the birdish runway models he spent his days shooting for a showroom off the Place Vendôme. At first Marnie could hardly understand his Polish-accented French. His voice would tickle the inside of her ear with what sounded like
mon petit, shhh.
It took her two weeks to summon the courage to ask him what did he mean. Sitting cross-legged on the bed like an oversized Buddha, he laughed and laughed, pantomiming something that looked like a beach ball, finally getting up to find a piece of paper on which he wrote,
Mon petit chou
, my little cabbage. At other times, he'd pat her bottom and tell her,
Il faut que tu gardes la ligne
, you need to watch your figure, and then, as if unaware that her
ligne
had anything to do with the mounds of food he loved to prepare, would insist that she stay under the covers while he lit the water heater that stood in a corner of his drafty studio and, dressed in a red tartan bathrobe, scrambled eggs with a kielbasa he bought at a charcuterie on the Rue d'Odessa, as good as any in Kraków, he'd say.

In bed, Wojtek would sweat and grunt and Marnie would catch herself curiously watching—as though he were letting her see something very important about himself. Although she knew from her high school class in human sexuality that she was supposed to feel something more than curiosity and that Wojtek should be more concerned that she didn't, these thoughts seemed to belong to a different universe than Wojtek, who at sixteen had left a small town west of Kraków where his parents, whom he'd not seen since, still lived with chickens in the yard.

In the third month that she'd known him, Marnie, finding herself late one Saturday afternoon on Wojtek's street, rang his bell. Wojtek answered the door with the red tartan bathrobe wrapped like a towel around his prominent middle. “Not now,
mon chouchou
,” he said, kissing her on the forehead as Marnie, hearing a girl's voice,
Qui est là?
, froze. The next day, he came to get her in his old Renault. He squeezed her arms and hugged her and called her his pudgy baby and pointed to the back seat and the bags he'd prepared for a picnic in the Bois de Boulogne.
Du pain, du vin, du fromage, du saucisson
, he boomed. In the Bois, he unfolded a blanket from his bed and laid out the food. He stroked her hair and explained that she needed to know other men, that having slept only with him, she was like a soup made with only one vegetable.

It all seemed very sensible, the way Wojtek put it. Whereas Marnie knew she wasn't—had never been, would never be—beautiful or sexy in Sam's way, she was nonetheless eighteen with clear pale skin, large breasts, and a pensive expression that suggested something mysterious and undiscovered inside. For months she'd ridden the Métro, walked through the Jardin du Luxembourg, read in the cafés on the Boulevard du Montparnasse with her eyes downcast, fearful of catching anyone's gaze. Having been able to count the dates she'd had before Wojtek on one hand, raising her eyelids was dizzying: Francisco from Mexico City, who followed her from Le Drugstore on the Champs-Élysées and worked at a factory in a
banlieue
; Hans, a Norwegian student reading philosophy at the Université Paris; Benoit, an engineer from Belgium with two children in Bruges and a lot of ideas about free love; Anouar, a wealthy Egyptian working for a few months in an uncle's import-export business on the Avenue de Wagram. They took her to restaurants, to the nightspots their meager or in some cases not so meager salaries would allow, to meet cousins or brothers or friends, and inevitably to their walk-up apartments with stopped sinks or their chic apartments with glasses that clinked. Marnie followed, driven not by her body (that she wouldn't understand until years later with Ben) but by a greed for experience, not just the experience of men and how their machinery worked—erections that came too fast or left too soon or woke them in the middle of the night or as light filtered in through venetian blinds, lace curtains, garret windows—but also the experience of herself unbound, an apparition broken free from the self, the self she'd patched together from the pieces left after her siblings had grabbed all the goodies from the box of character traits, leaving her with only the scraps.