The Man Who Was Left Behind

Mr. Mackenzie sat in the park and dreamed of Mexico.

There were four green-painted wooden benches set in a semicircle around a patch of scrubby grass. Beyond the grass rose a high brick wall, the boundary of a squeezing outcrop of tenement houses that swelled forth into the air as though they had either taken their unplanned mushroom growth from the steadiness of the wall or possibly come like a tide from far away in search of a wall and might some day break over it. He imagined that the wall, brown in colour and made of fine, small bricks, had been there before the rest of the surroundings. Perhaps it might have been the last upright of a mansion burned by its owners or by northern troops a hundred years before when that part of the world was countryside.

The green paint was bubbled and flaking off the benches. During the months he had known about the park he had never seen anyone official around the area, no repainting, no planting or weeding had taken place, nor was there a waste bin to fill or be emptied. The spot lay in one of the poor districts of town. Possibly no authority knew that it still existed.

Occasionally a cat or dog would stray into the cramped space to sit in the sun which except for the direct downward focus of the noon hour fell unpredictably, making its way from uneven rooftop landscapes and deviously notched streets to light now here, now there over the bunchy, long-bearded
grass. One day, presumably during a school vacation, a group of four small boys tried to make the park a playground. They lasted a day and a half and then gave up. Without a word even among themselves they came to the conclusion that it was impossible to claim possession in the face of the owners.

For the park belonged to the three coloured hobos who sat on the other three benches. On his first visit he realized that they were in permanent occupation. If they were to leave the place for a month, when they came back it would still be theirs as though they had never gone.

That first day when he came back to look and found it and stepped through the entrance he had felt something go through them slowly like a water level rising and then holding there as he sat down on the remaining bench. He felt, but forgot. They made no move to show him what they thought. What was happening among the three of them was so strong and obvious that it needed no expression. They simply looked at him without looking, waiting for him to go, knowing that sooner or later he would be submerged by the wish and feel that he was out of place. But at the time he had not noticed. At the time he merely thought of them as “the other people” coincidentally stationed in the park to which he had been drawn. Only afterwards, after a few days, he remembered them and guessed what had gone on in their minds and what strategy they had used towards him as, so he later discovered, they used towards other intruders.

He had seen the entrance around a street corner and thought: if I can find my way back to it tomorrow I’ll go in and sit down.

Places you see in a town when you are walking without aim have a way of disappearing. Sometimes it strikes you that a certain arrangement of steps and balconies is Renaissance Italy, that a segment of gallery railing seen through
leaves is part of a French colonial villa. But when you look for those times and nations the next day, there is only the jumble of today’s buildings with the washing hung out and a full-rigged harbour of television mastheads unsailed and stiff against the moving sky. The more you look, the more familiar and reasonable appear the obstacles against what you are searching for. Soon you believe it was a trick of the light as you turned your head.

He had walked by the entrance and seen part of the wall, clung to by creepers and brambles, and against them a tangle of bushes and a few small trees, one taller than the rest, a kind of palm. It was this tree with its awkward windmill leaves that suggested the thought of the tropics and of Mexico. And when he had sat down on the bench, he set himself the task of bringing back the full flavour of that first look by concentrating on the object which had given the hint.

He screwed up his eyes and looked directly at the tree. Then he found out that it was not necessary to contort the expression. The best effect was achieved by staring with the eyes wide open, looking and not looking, a trick of mind as much as of the vision. It seemed a wonderful discovery in the beginning, and he felt the way a child feels when he discovers that by wanting to, you can look at something close and blur the background, and then wish your eye to change its focus to the background, blotting out what is near. The eye by itself has always been able to do this trick, but the marvel is in first knowing that you can wish it into happening. Not two years before, Mr. Mackenzie had heard a friend’s grandchild declaring to his mother that he could see atoms with the naked eye. “You look right up into the sky and you can see them moving around,” he explained. “I bet I’m the only person in the world can see them without a microscope.” The parents had told him that he must have been seeing the reflection of cells on the retina, it was not an
uncommon phenomenon. It seemed a shame. He remembered the confidential tone and the awe in the boy’s voice as he had said it: I can see atoms. Mr. Mackenzie felt like that the first time.

He could see Mexico all at once emerging beyond the sorry bushes and weeds and spatulate, hangdog leaves of the tree against the wall. It seemed wonderful and extraordinary in the beginning, to have the knack of doing it, making a breakthrough that no one else had ever imagined. Later it became natural. He would sit there looking and not looking and go out to the tree, the bushes, the wall, and through it into Mexico.

They had taken the trip to celebrate his retirement. He and his wife. Margie and her fiancé had come too, and Jim on his own without his wife or the adopted children. They visited the ruins: solid, heavy triangles and trapezoids and steps. There was sun on their heads. And he remembered the jungle. Even when not in sight you could tell it was there and recalled it afterwards like a scent bound to a certain part of your life or a special kind of weather or a town you have lived in for a year and never returned to. They used to sit in the square two streets down from the hotel; a band played, and he remembered the flowers and the trees in the square and the peace of sitting near a green place, like sitting near water.

Margie and her young man—what was his name? Harvey, something like that. They bought ponchos, the man behind the counter telling them about the quality of the material and how it was made, how it was like no other. They tried them on right there in the street and laughed, and bought several. But Mr. Mackenzie did not think the shape of the thing went with their faces. You ought to have been an Indian to wear them. And you had to be an old man to know why wearing Indian clothes didn’t make you an Indian. One day he stood with Betty in a tourist office and
there was a loud sound of cars braking outside, like a squeal of pigs. “Look at that,” said the man behind the counter, who was also American. They looked through the glass wall and saw an Indian wearing a poncho and walking across the stalled street. “They’re a terrible problem. They don’t understand any of the traffic rules. And they have this in-born fatalism—they figure you die when your number comes up, so they never take any trouble to avoid accidents. Just step right off the sidewalk into the street anywhere, any time when they feel like getting to the other side.”

He liked the Indians. And the weather; sunlight as strong as iron, and then for a few hours in the day, every day, it would rain. Really rain, coming down so fast and close that it had no quality of rage, so much of it and so intensely that it had to be accepted as natural, coming down as though something had broken up in the sky. That was one of the strange things about Mexico—you accepted it as natural, knowing that behind all the extremeness of life there, the colours, the weather, the temperature, the people, was something absolutely objective, impassive.

He remembered the beautiful fruit and cooking in the streets, but they all decided from the start never to eat anywhere except in a restaurant. Not healthy. Then Margie and her fiancé came down with stomach cramps. He felt fine. He wondered whether they had stayed behind in order to be alone in the hotel, and the thought pleased him. But later in the week his wife caught whatever it was, and after her Jim had it. He, the old man, retired, was the only one not to catch it. He had not even felt the altitude.

There was a man who made guitars, a delicate business involving mathematical calculations as to the spacing of the fret-bars. He had no tools for measuring, perhaps knew no higher calculations than counting from one to ten. He spaced the instrument by eye.

“Will you look at that,” Jim said. “I’d say that’s pretty
damn smart. What do you think, do you think Billy could stick with it and learn to play it?”

Betty said she was afraid Billy might be too young. Margie thought he’d probably be old enough, but wouldn’t the noise drive Alice crazy? Jim supposed so, and they went on with their stroll but he turned back twice to watch the man at work. Mr. Mackenzie thought: I was the same buying the electric train set for him at Christmas how many years ago. Fathers and their children. Even when the children are not really his. You could see he wanted the guitar for himself as he used to be when he was a boy.

“Buy it anyway. He’ll grow into it in a few years.”

“I think maybe I will. There’s only one trouble with it, that’s the wood. Best guitar wood comes from Spain, I hear. But to begin with—what do you think?”

“Go ahead, buy it.”

Jim had a camera with him that hung on a strap from his shoulder. He took a picture of the hotel, of the square, of the woman selling tortillas at her stand by the red flower bed, and of the man who sat on the pavement and made his guitars while Margie and her young man watched him, wearing their ponchos just that once because otherwise it was too hot. And he took pictures of his father and mother standing in the court where the Mayans used to play basketball. Over to the left, Daddy, no not that far.

Betty said, “Honey, if you want to take it in the sun like this, I’m going to have to put on my glasses. Hold this for me, Charlie.”

“All right,” he said, and took the packages she handed to him. “And now if you’ll hold this for me, I can get mine out, too.”

“But if I’m holding all these things, how can I—oh Jimmy, you didn’t take it then, did you?”

They laughed, and there were more photographs. He hated having his picture taken, but that day it was all right
except for a moment, when Jim was saying no Mother over there and you Daddy that’s right now Daddy no a little to the right there Daddy, and he felt a sadness, knowing that Jim was not his favourite son.

They had come through everything and out the other side into holiday and reunion, to being a family together in a strange land. Margie would be married soon and have children, not children to carry the name, but that no longer mattered. Just that they were real grandchildren. Before they left for the vacation his wife had said, “This house, it gets bigger every day.” But what was the sense of moving? Especially since Margie had told her mother she wanted to have children right away. That would fill the house again. It was good to have come through and have a sense of the future there for them. Just for that one instant he had thought about Ben who was dead. And about Jim’s first wife.

They walked around the square in the morning and his wife called to him, “Oh Charlie, come look at this.”

“Ee, what awful things,” Margie said, and clung tighter to her fiancé’s arm.

“Can you beat it?”

“What are they?” he asked.

“Spiders on cards. They wear them like a brooch. I saw one the other night when we were in that restaurant with the fountain, and wondered what it was. Boy, wouldn’t Alice love one?”

“Like a hole in the head. Look at your mother, look at Margie. They don’t like it either.”

“But it’s too much. I’m going to buy one anyway. I wonder how long they live.”

The man who sold the spiders explained to Jim how long the lifespan was likely to be and how to take care of it. They walked on. Jim pushed the card under Margie’s nose.

“You aren’t afraid of a little old spider, are you?”

“Oh ugg, Jimmy. Oh barf. Get that horrible thing away from me. For heaven’s sake, Daddy make him stop.”

She let go of her young man and came to him, crouching up against his shoulder while Jim darted the card at her. It was as though they were both children again. Like going back all that time to when Ben was still alive.

Later in the day he began to feel unwell.

“Let’s sit down for a minute,” he said.

“Don’t tell me you’ve finally got the bug,” Margie said.

“I think maybe that’s just what it might be.”

They sat down at one of the tables in the square. His wife sat next to him and put her hand lightly over his wrist. He looked out to where the people were walking by, and they seemed to be going past him behind a block of water.

She said, “Miserable luck. We’ll just sit here for a couple of minutes and if that’s what it is then you get right to bed. Remember what happened to me just because I wanted to get up? That’s the way it works—you feel much better all of a sudden but you’re not. It takes about forty-eight hours.”

A waiter came up and stood by the table. Jim ordered a beer and the young man thought he’d have one too. “Do you want one?” he asked Margie. She said, “No, I’ll just have a sip of yours,” and he put his arm over the shoulder of her chair. She leaned back into it and said, “Poor Daddy.” The pit of his belly clutched together with cramp.

Jim said, “I thought you couldn’t be made of sterner stuff than the rest of us. They tell me it’s called the Aztec Two-Step because it comes on so hefty it takes you just two steps to get to the john.” The beer came and Jim lifted the glass to his mouth, tipping it into the sunlight and making the beer look larger than it was, hanging in the air and corn-coloured. Sweat came out on Mr. Mackenzie’s forehead. “I think I’ll go on back to the hotel,” he said.