Our Father (61 page)

“And much of nature works this way. If you want to talk about the nature that is in us, and from which we arise, you should think about how the nature outside us works. You know some botanists—guys—the guys are always looking for signs of domination in nature—tried to make out that the fungi are dominant in lichen, because they’re more conspicuous and have greater volume. But they concluded that the fungi are utterly dependent on the algae, maybe even more dependent on the algae than the algae are on them. Things are not the way they seem. Consider your father, my mother. There’s no comparison between them in terms of power, fame, wealth, you can’t even discuss them in the same breath. But I doubt, if your father had died, my mother would have had a stroke—assuming she wasn’t already dead. My mother seemed to be completely dependent on your father. But the truth was otherwise. …”

She paused, lighted a cigarette, continued in a calmer voice. “Your vision is a male vision, a capitalist vision, well I suppose today’s communists have it too, it’s the vision that justified the changes in economic structure from feudalism to industrialization. It’s taught to us to keep us in line, but it isn’t necessarily the truth about human nature. They want us to believe it so we’ll go on fighting their wars and dying for them, dying to bolster their power, so they can increase their wealth and only give the dead medals.

“You have to believe this stuff so you can go on working for that administration, go on believing in the economic principles you learned in school. You have to believe it to justify your life. But we don’t.”

Elizabeth sat erect. “That’s nonsense! You are all simply willfully blind. Naive. Well, I don’t know why I should expect more from you than other people. Few people are willing to face unpleasant realities. They’d rather console themselves with a hot dog, a beer, and the tube. Like animals!” she snorted.

“Well, we are animals,” Alex murmured. “Rather sweet ones, I think, at root.”

“Oh, like the torturers of El Salvador?” Elizabeth asked sarcastically. “Or Chile, or Peru, or Argentina, or Algeria, or Vietnam? Do you really think your clinic is going to make a significant difference, is going to affect the problem?”

Alex frowned, considering the question seriously. “I think opening a clinic can ease the pain of some people—maybe hundreds of people. That’s all,” she concluded.

“And suppose the government decides your clinic is subversive, then what? Suppose they send death squads to shoot you and the nuns, rape you first maybe. Have you considered that that very well may happen, that it happens often where you’re going?”

“I do know that,” she answered softly.

Elizabeth looked at her, and her eyes filled with tears. “Don’t do it, Alex. Don’t go! It’s asking for trouble! Don’t go!”

“Oh, Lizzie.” Alex got up and went to her sister and embraced her. Elizabeth sobbed aloud into her cupped hands.

Mary took a deep hit on her joint. What a shock, Lizzie sobbing like that, I can’t remember her sobbing ever, ever, even when she dislocated her elbow when she fell out of a tree that time we were climbing in it. Father was so angry, said young ladies don’t climb trees, we never did it again, it was so much fun I really loved it, it was too bad.

Was that what it was all about, fear for Alex? I’m afraid for her too, Lizzie’s right, she has no idea what she’s getting into, I wouldn’t go to such a place for anything, not for anything. Not anything. But she … who can fathom her?

Such an outburst, is that how she really sees life, how can she bear to go on living? You hear men talk that way, but I always have trouble believing they mean what they say, I always think they’re just saying that to justify some particularly vicious business deal, something that harms other people … dog-eat-dog world, they say, but only when they’ve just done the eating. Tough world, they say, you have to be tough, hardheaded, which means not feeling anything. And they do it, I know they do it, but then don’t they go home and unbend somehow, ease into a different mode, enjoy their kids, their wife, their dinner? Even Paul, and he was the hardest of my husbands, he could be really tender with me at times. Those were the times when I liked him, when he relaxed and sat in the sun and swam and had a gin and tonic and smiled and let himself enjoy just being alive. …

Ronnie’s right, she has to believe that stuff to justify her work, which is after all her life. She hasn’t had much of a love life I don’t think, she has no kids, I don’t think she has any friends. …

Poor Lizzie. So lonely. I never saw it before. Begging me to move down there, really that’s what it amounted to, I never thought I’d hear her beg, when I think how I used to beg her, please please Lizzie, play house with me, swim with me, you want to roller-skate on the terrace?

Truth is, I don’t have any friends either, not real friends, not friends like Ronnie has, and Alex with those nuns, the way she talks about Sister Evangeline, nun in a business suit flying all across the country raising money, things have certainly changed, and Sister Bernadette with the freckles and the humor drinking Irish whiskey, she really loves them. …

Lizzie and I, we got the worst of it. Alex was removed early, Father never treated Ronnie as part of the family, we got the full blast of his contempt and the manners too, the rules, so many rules. …

Mary stubbed out her joint and placed the roach in her little cloisonné case. She rubbed her hands up and down her arms, feeling chilled, alone. The night sky was starless and gray as if a dark dull blanket covered the heavens. She rose heavily and moved toward the bed, not tonight relishing the pleasure of getting into it, sliding her immaculate body between the cool clean white sheets. She didn’t, tonight, feel immaculate.

All games I play with myself—white foods, white night clothes, white sheets, white rooms. An illusion I create for myself daily, over and over in rituals, to create the illusion of cleanness, purity, to feel immaculate. But I’m not. Not. I am as corrupted, corrupting, as any other human on earth. Look at what I did to my children. What is wrong with my daughter, my baby? What am I going to do? What can help her? Is it possible that Father …

Lizzie is right: we are a cruel selfish predatory race.

Tears squirmed sidewise down her cheeks as she lay there. She didn’t wipe them away.

Her poor heart torn up like that, believing such things, well of course she’s right to a degree, but the degree makes all the difference. What do I mean by that? Still, I know I’m right.

Alex carefully hung up her dress, smoothing down the silk folds lovingly, such a lovely soft silk, so wonderful to feel. So many wonderful things in life, she leaves all that out of her accounting. Economics she calls it, a science she says, it’s a peculiar science if it leaves out half of existence, more than half, but maybe all sciences do that, certainly medicine does, I watch the doctors at St. Mary’s, they forget the spirit, they forget how important it is to be held and touched and consoled. Also they forget nutrition, at St. Mary’s at least. The terrible food they serve patients, don’t they think they would get better faster with healthier food? All they can see is medication and surgery, well my clinic will do a better job, we’ll have fresh food there for patients who need that more than they need a pill. Fruit, vegetables, rice and beans, and there will always be a pot of soup cooking in my clinic.

She brushed her teeth and washed her face, barely seeing it in the mirror over the sink, seeing instead a parched plain, the sun beating down on the tin roof of a low white stucco building surrounded by trees and ferns. A canvas canopy extended its shelter all along one side, where people sat in the shade, cups of clean water in their hands, their bodies cooled by the surrounding plants, waiting patiently for a kind, attentive nurse who would know exactly how to help them.

She got into bed and switched off the lamp, but her eyes were wide open. She saw people lying on cots, their faces radiant with the quiet happiness that suffuses the very ill when their pain abates. She heard crying babies quiet down as water and food calmed their agony, saw skin ulcers on thin brown legs cleaned and bandaged, saw faces of people who could not be healed untwist into calm as their pain at least was relieved. Her own face was radiant.

But a frown slowly lined her forehead as another image supplanted this one, an image of men in combat boots and uniforms made of camouflage material carrying automatic guns, invading the harmonious scene. They raised their guns, they spattered shot. The waiting patients fell over, blood spurted like a bouquet of flowers on their pale clothes. The men stormed inside the clinic, dragged out the nuns and Alex in her light blue jumpsuit, threw them on the ground. …

No.

Don’t think about that. It’s unlikely. We’ll do everything we can to pacify them, we’ll stay miles away from anything political, we won’t provoke them. …

Of course Lizzie’s right, that is the way things are. It’s possible it can happen. But not necessarily. There are lots of church clinics where such a thing has never happened. But she’s not right about human nature. No. She’s blindsided, one-eyed. Look at how she herself, the exemplar of toughness and discipline and she can be harsh, we’ve all seen it, yet she wept for me, begged me not to go.

Alex’s eyes filled.

How sweet, how loving that was, her plea. Lizzie loves me. I love her too. And I don’t want to die. But I have to go.

Jesus H. Christ, who would have imagined such fury, such heartbreak in Elizabeth, all that stuff steeping down in her insides while she walks around like a fucking general inspecting the troops. What a way to see life! No wonder she carries herself the way she does. I wonder what her insides feel like. You’d think she’d give up those ideas for the sake of her stomach if nothing else.

Ronnie turned on her side, closed her eyes, but her mind was racing.

So unnecessary. She takes the political philosophers of the last couple of centuries, the males of today because it’s always guys who preach this stuff as if they had a handle on absolute truth. When anyone with half a brain can see that this notion that humans or anyway men are innately and utterly aggressive is just a justification for all the power shifts of the last couple of centuries. Anyone who raises little boys knows how sweet and loving they can be, look at Téo, there’s nothing necessary about their aggressiveness, they’re taught it, taught it means manliness. Like poor Raoul, he was a sweet kid till he joined that gang. And even afterwards, when he was with Rosa or me or his sisters. I remember him combing Lidia’s hair, and making tea for Rosa once when she was sick, carrying it to her so tenderly, caressing her forehead, pleading, “You feel better soon, Mama?”

Doesn’t she see that? I suppose she hasn’t had many models, doesn’t seem to know many men very well, I wonder why, Jesus, I’m a dyke and I know tons of sweet men, look at Professor Madrick or Professor Goldie, of course there’s also that asshole Reilly, and there are plenty of men like him but they’re not all like that.

Of course it’s true that men have committed the great sweeping crimes against humanity, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, the tsars, Napoleon, Alexander, Genghis Khan, all those millionaires who built American industry, J. Edgar Hoover, whatshisface Palmer, the guys who run the companies that pollute everything. … It’s true that lots of men are greedy aggressive cruel predatory that all they want is power, money. …

She turned on her other side.

But the human race would never have survived if we were all like that. Survival of the fittest, huh! They’re not the fittest, they think they are, they grab the best of everything, the most of everything, they leave people to starve. But they die, they destroy their kids, turn them into suicides like Wittgenstein’s father, turn them into neurotics. Their sperm doesn’t conquer the world. The rest of the human race would go down the tubes if it were left to them. But we don’t. Lots of us die young, babies in Ethiopia now, the cane cutters’ babies Alex was talking about in the northeast of Brazil, millions and millions do die because of the policies of the very rich. But millions live, and they live because they help each other, they share, they cooperate, they love.

Love.

She sat straight up, stared glumly at the wall, got out of bed and fished for a cigarette on her desk.

You haunting me, Momma? she wondered, exhaling smoke as she climbed back into the bed. She leaned back against the hard headboard of the bed, pulled a pillow behind her, sat there smoking.

Even in the death camps, people cooperated, shared. The women especially. Kept them alive.

Can’t tell that to Lizzie, she’d never hear it. Sentimental slop, she’d say. Idealization. Rosa taking Bianca’s three kids from two floors up when Bianca was in jail. Nine months they lived with us, and we barely had room ourselves, nine months she fed those kids when feeding her own was a struggle. She took me in, for that matter.

Jesus, what would have happened to me without her?

You didn’t think about that, did you, the other night, deciding not to go there again. You can never not go there again, you hear me? No matter what. Rosa saved your life.

Think you’re alone, well, you are alone, you and your body and whatever happens to you, no one else can ever know completely, still, there’s an eye that sees, a hand reached out, food given, comfort, sympathy. I’ve been lavished with that all my life, Momma, Rosa, all my friends. Now them. Even Lizzie, despite her beliefs.

Can’t live her way. Can’t. You must frizzle up inside and turn into a robot, or else you die, really die.

You must love to live, Ronnie.

She stubbed out the cigarette, lay down again, and closed her eyes. A wave of tiredness caught her and she turned sighing, surrendering to it.

Yes, Momma.

27

M
ARIE-LAURE WAS THE
first to leave. She announced at breakfast that she’d called a friend, who was coming to pick her up and return her to Boston. Mary—who had breakfast downstairs that morning—protested she could stay longer, could leave with them—Aldo would drop her in Boston on the way to the airport that afternoon. But Marie-Laure insisted she couldn’t wait until the afternoon, that her friends were going to a movie that afternoon and she wanted to join them.