Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories Page 3

  Before leaving for work, Lex always knocked on Robert’s half-open door.

  “Entra!” Robert practiced.

  Lex would then say something about the day ahead. Would Robert like to visit the university? Lex could give him a library pass. If he wandered into the outdoor market, would he please pick up a pineapple? Jaime, still on the floor with his murmuring car, poked his head between Lex’s knees and then raised it, his little golden face between the denimed legs solemn, or perhaps only uncomprehending.

  When they were gone Robert heaved himself out of bed. He boiled bottled water for tea and ate three plain crackers. Despite this abstemious caution he invariably passed several loose stools and a quantity of brownish water. “Nothing to worry about as long as there’s no blood,” Lex had told him after the first episode, the second night of the stay. Lex’s voice had been reassuring but his lips were prissy; and Robert, standing outside the bathroom with his belt unbuckled, raised a defiant chin like a child who had soiled his pants.

  But the morning diarrhea always left him feeling better, as if he had explosively asserted himself in these austere surroundings. He next read the front page of the newspaper, using the dictionary often. Then he took a shower in cold water and shaved in cold water and got dressed. He stuffed his fanny pack with map, dictionary, currency, and flask. He wore it frontwards: a tummy pack. After putting on sunglasses and a canvas cap, he left the house.

  He had arrived on a Saturday; by the end of Wednesday, the day before, he had tramped all over the city. He had wandered into the barrios. He refused Chiclets and Valium peddled by street vendors. He stumbled upon a small archaeological museum tended by some devoted women. There he learned that the great-beaked toucan was considered an incarnation of the devil.

  And he stared at the windowless edifice within which members of the National Assembly, according to the new popular insult, farted their disagreements. He traveled by bus to two hot, dusty towns. Both had museums of martyrs. Back in the capital, he had spent late Wednesday afternoon at the huge outdoor market. Pick-pockets roamed the place, he had heard. He kept his fingers lightly on his canvas pack.

  He bought Betsy a necklace of black coral. Though he loved and admired her, he missed her very little. Her absence this trip had not been a matter of dissension—they had farted no disagreements. There were reasons for her not coming: Lex himself had been home recently; his house here had only a single guest bed; and this not altogether regular situation—a young man becoming a father to a young boy—seemed to demand the presence of an unaccompanied older man, the older man, the grandfather.

  Grandfather! To a child whose whole being seemed at odds with itself—the eyes soft, even tender; the mouth, with its widely spaced teeth, slack; the body taut, subject to occasional spasms. Yet he would become part of the family, a Katz. Jaime Katz. What would Robert’s grandfather, a rather sallow person himself, have made of such a development? He recalled Zayde Chaim shawled in silk on the Days of Awe … and it was at that moment, standing in the market, his hand on his canvas belly, that he remembered what day it was. The day before the day before Yom Kippur. In twenty-six hours, Kol Nidre would be sung.

  Now, on Thursday morning, the embassy answered Lex’s inquiry: to its knowledge there was no community of Jews in the city, in the country. Lex hung up. “They have one Jewish staff member. She goes home to Texas for the holidays.”

  “We’ve struck out.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lex said, and stood up. “I have to go to work. About tonight … I had forgotten Yom Kippur … a few people from the organization are supposed to come for dinner.”

  “Let them come,” Robert said. “I’m not such a worshipper, you know. I don’t fast. At your bar mitzvah I had to retool my Hebrew, and even then it wasn’t so hot.”

  “Jaime?” Lex called into the bedroom. “Rápido, por favor.” He turned again to his father. “You worked over those syllables like a diamond cutter. Betsy used the transliteration.”

  “She’d never studied Hebrew.”

  “But you were heroic. For my sake.” He bowed his head.

  “I wish I could do it again with my high school Spanish,” said Robert, hot with embarrassment.

  Lex raised his head. “For his sake,” he said, indicating with what seemed to Robert a faggy lift of one shoulder the child in the bedroom. A vat of lava bubbled in Robert’s intestines; he managed to contain it. How reckless he’d been to eat that fruit. Jaime was taking his sweet time putting on his backpack. The shabbiest barrio kid in this mess of a country had a backpack. “Vámonos!” Lex said at last.

  Jaime came running. Lex went outside to warm up the Jeep. Jaime turned in the doorway and waved a silent good-bye to Robert—he had yet to call him by name. Farewell here was signified by a beckoning gesture. The motion startled Robert every time; it startled him now. He took a step forward, as if the child were really summoning him. Then he halted, hissing. This place! An invitation to come closer was made in an equally ass-backward manner: wrist limp, you wagged the back of your hand at the person you wanted, as if shaking him off.

  Was the child laughing at him? No, it was only one of those wet smiles. Robert dutifully mimicked Jaime’s come-hither movement. He felt like a cop directing traffic. He felt like a dirty old man. Jaime grinned and banged out. Robert bolted for the bathroom.

  HE SPENT YOM KIPPUR EVE with a gaggle of gentiles. They weren’t bad, Lex’s fellow workers. A high-minded couple in their sixties, slack of belly, gray of hair, giving their final years to just causes. A pretty young nurse. A second, older nurse, freckled and tough. Some others. They ate rice and beans, expertly seasoned by Lex. Jaime played on the floor. Occasionally he whined for Lex’s attention. Lex would finish what he’d been saying, then he’d turn his eyes to the boy and listen to the high voice repeating short, insistent phrases, and reply with a “sí” or a “no” or some grave explanation.

  The adults talked of the torments of the country, the centuries of cruelty as one generation mistreated the next. “The church has a lot to answer for,” said a fierce Canadian woman. “Those first missionary schools—they taught us how to inflict pain.” He wondered what she meant by “us”; then he remembered that she was a Native American, a member of an indigenous people. He had met her earlier in the week when she’d dropped by. With her untidy hair and glasses and dissatisfied mouth she’d reminded him of his cousin from the Bronx. He’d met the churchy couple earlier also, at an evening lecture on cooperatives that Lex had taken him to. But this was the first social gathering Robert had attended, and he realized belatedly, when it was almost over, that it was a party in his honor.

  Early the next morning they packed up the Jeep. They were to spend the weekend visiting orphanages in the mountains—Robert, Lex, Jaime, and Janet—the freckled nurse, not the pretty one.

  Janet did the driving. She knew how to handle a Jeep. She drove fast on the two-lane highway, passing whenever she could. When they were stopped by a pair of very young men in fatigues, each holding a tommy gun, she answered their questions with such authority that Robert expected the teenage soldiers to stick out their tongues for her inspection. Instead they waved the Jeep on. Robert jounced along in the front seat. In the back Lex showed Jaime how the big bricks of Legos fit together. Jaime watched indifferently, his fingers around his toy car.

  They stopped late in the morning in a lush little town. There were coffee estates nearby, Janet said. In the courtyard of a restaurant, parrots watched from fronds. Jaime ran toward a cat he knew and settled down in a corner of the courtyard. The proprietress-cook brought the child a dish of pasta before welcoming the others in perfect English. She had a large, curved nose and a wide smile. “She’s Chilean,” Janet said when the woman had returned to the kitchen. “Her corn lasagna is terrific. She’s been active in revolutionary politics.” Robert understood: arms smuggling.

  Two graceful waiters with angelic faces served them. Robert knew not to take their androgyny seriously. “Girlish on t
he outside, tough guys within,” Lex had said about similar men. “Not gay.” Robert did not ask whether Lex had enjoyed a native lover. Some years ago he had ascertained that his son practiced safe sex; he and Betsy wanted to know nothing further.

  The corn lasagna was indeed delicious. Jaime shared his pasta with the cat. Robert would have liked to linger over coffee, to walk around this town and visit its museum of martyrs; to return at the cocktail hour and enjoy an aperitif with the South American adventuress while the parrots dozed. Instead he paid the bill and shook her hand and bid good-bye to the birds with the proper summoning gesture.

  In an hour they had left the highway and were climbing. Farms gave way to trees, boulders, scrub. Janet expertly circled craters in the road. Bracing himself against the plunges of the Jeep made Robert weary—or perhaps it was the lunchtime glass of Chilean wine. He leaned against the headrest, closed his eyes … and was awakened by something creeping along the side of his neck. He slapped the creature. It was a small hand.

  “Sorry, Jaime. Excúlpame. Hey!” for the child had slapped him back.

  “Jaime.” Lex’s voice was as authoritative as Janet’s. Some low, rapid Spanish followed. Then came a tap on the shoulder and a presentation across that shoulder, in front of his face, of three Lego bricks imperfectly joined.

  “Asa,” Jaime said.

  Casa. House. “Bueno,” Robert said, mustering enthusiasm. He turned to meet those attractive eyes, that odd mouth. Lex smiled primly.

  Just before two o’clock they reached the town where they were to spend the night. Robert carefully got out.

  “You need a back rub,” noticed Janet.

  The town square was a bare knoll. A church faced the square. Its stucco walls seemed to be unraveling. The one-storied inn sagged toward its own courtyard. Robert was shown to a rear bedroom. From his window he could see oxen.

  Janet and Lex invited him to walk to the orphanage with them. “Thanks, no,” he said. “I’ll sit in the courtyard and read.” And write another postcard to little Maureen.

  But as soon as they had tramped off, he felt forlorn. He would not stay; he would follow his son.

  They had told him that the orphanage lay two miles out of town, on the straight road west. He walked fast, at first. Within five minutes he had caught sight of them, and soon he was passing the low stone huts that they had just passed, each with its open door revealing a single room, the same room—a couple of cane rockers, a table. The same expressionless woman stood in each doorway. Children played in the mud. Had Jaime been born in such a home? More likely he had sprung from a shack like those Robert was passing now—tin and slats, the latrine in back made decent by a curtain.

  Lex and Janet walked together in the middle of the road. Jaime darted from one side to the other. Janet was taller than Lex. Her light brown hair humped over her backpack and draggled, khaki on khaki.

  At the end of the road a crowd of small boys waited behind a gate—just a couple of horizontal logs—a not entirely successful attempt to keep out nearby animals. Jaime scrambled between the logs. Lex and Janet vaulted them.

  Robert climbed over the top log, his bones creaking. He heard, as if in the distance, the sound of crying. Perhaps it was his own old-man’s wail.

  HE HAD LANDED amid the boys. Boys, boys everywhere. Boys: grimy triangular faces under black bangs. Boys: wearing clothing that a decade ago and a continent away had been high style—rugby shirts, jams. Boys: none seeming above ten years old, though he knew better. Perhaps some were twelve. Boys: waiting for guns and cholera.

  “Bob!” Janet cried. Lex smiled a welcome.

  They made immediate use of him, sending him to listen to the complaints of the orphanage director, a fiery young man with a thin mustache. Robert, sitting down, surrounded by boys, riffling through his dictionary every few words, managed to make out that the problem was money, both cash and credit. Supplies were low. The last cook had made off with the radio. Robert wrote down everything the fellow said and then got hustled away to umpire a three-inning softball game. The boys were not adroit. Then Lex arranged an obstacle race. Robert was assigned to hold an inflated clown’s hand in front of his chest. This hand had come out of Janet’s backpack; she’d blown it up in three exhalations, her freckles enlarging and then diminishing on her cheeks. Each obstacle racer had to slap the hand; some kids slapped Robert by mistake. Their teeth were as white as Chiclets.

  Soon they were corralled into a grim refectory. “Cerca me!” some pleaded. He sat down next to a little beige fellow with reddish hair. All the boys were given crayons and paper. The stuff might have been gold. They drew for half an hour, in blissful silence. Meanwhile Janet examined some inflamed ears—she had an otoscope in her backpack, too. Lex talked with a scowling child in the director’s meager office. The child looked less angry after the session.

  Robert praised the artwork. He helped the artists print their signatures. The red-haired runt was Miguel O’Reilly. Miguelito was particular about the slant of the apostrophe in his name.

  These outcasts—did they know how deprived they were? Lex had told him about them: some abandoned at the gate as infants, some starved and abused before they arrived as toddlers, some rescued from prostitution, or at least reprieved from it. Jaime had served for a while as the mascot of a street gang.

  To the boys Robert must seem a patriarch. They were respectful of his Spanish—the stunted vocabulary, the lisp of remote conquerors. They were respectful of his gray hairs, too. In their country a man of his age should already be dead.

  The light was reddening, the shadows were lengthening, the parrots would presently lift themselves without a sound from their trees. The afternoon would soon end. Somewhere, elsewhere, maybe in Miami, a congregation was praying together, was feeling united, singular, almost safe.

  A child with a birthmark asked to inspect his watch, looked at it gravely, then returned it with a smile. Two others insisted on showing him their dormitory. He peered under the iron cots; he was supposed to laugh at something there, though all he could see was dust. Perhaps a mouse had recently scampered.

  He sat down heavily on a cot, startling the children. He drew them close, one against each knee. They waited for his wisdom. “Avinu malkeinu,” he muttered.

  A bell rang: dinner. They stiffened. He let them go.

  Oh the thin, hard, greedy boyness of them, undersized nomads fixed for a few years in a patch of land at the end of nowhere. Cow shit in the yard. Beans for dinner on the good days.

  Jaime had entered all the play. He’d had a very good time.

  They walked back to the inn in the dusk. Some of the huts were little stores, Robert now noticed. Dim bulbs shone on canned goods and medicines. Televisions flickered in the remote interiors, illuminating hammocks. How misleading to call this world the third. It was the nether.

  Lex had packed a cooler of sandwiches and Cokes that morning. “Jaime can’t manage a second restaurant in one day,” he now explained to his father.

  “What was the first?” Robert wondered. Then he remembered, as if from a rich tapestry seen long ago, the smile of the Chilean woman and the knowing supervision of her lime parrots.

  “I have enough food for us all,” Lex said.

  Janet shook her head. “I’m going to take your father to the café.”

  The café, behind the inn, was an open kitchen and three tables. A couple of men dined together at one of the other tables. No menu: today’s offering was chicken in a spicy sauce. Robert hoped his stomach could manage it. He bought a bottle of rotgut wine.

  “L’chaim,” Janet said.

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “My great-grandfather’s name was Isaac Fink,” she said. “He was a peddler who wandered into Minnesota by mistake, and stayed. The family is Lutheran to its backbones. Still …”

  “Still, you are somewhat Jewish,” he said politely. “Skoal.”

  They spoke of Lex’s talent and of Jaime’s eagerness. They spoke of the children t
hey’d seen that afternoon, and of Janet’s work. She planned to spend another few years here. “Then a master’s in public health, I think.” Her face grew flushed. “I was serious about giving you a back rub.”

  And perhaps this part-Jew would be willing also to inspect his tongue and massage his weary abdomen. He had assumed she was lesbian. She probably was lesbian. One could be something of everything here. “Thanks, but no,” he said. “It’s Yom Kippur night.”

  “Oh, I see,” was her bewildered response.

  In bed alone he found himself wondering whether the handsome Chilean chef might also be a little bit Jewish. And that native Canadian woman from last night’s party—such an expert kvetch. He and Lex should have searched harder for eight more Jews. In a room behind a tailor shop in some town lived a pious old man, too poor to have fled to Miami. In one of the squalid barrios a half-Jewish half-doctor dealt in abortifacient herbs. Atop a donkey, yarmulke concealed by a sombrero, a wanderer sold tin pans. The entire population could be Jewish, Jaime included: people descended from Indians who feared the toucan—what was a toucan but a bird with a schnoz?—and from haughty Marranos who prayed to Yahweh in the basements of basements.

  THE NEXT MORNING found him at last master of his bowels. He packed his overnight case and walked across the square to the crumbling church. Inside, though Christ on the wooden cross was naked, plaster saints wore velvet robes. The townspeople, too, seemed dressed up. He spotted one of the men he’d seen in the café last night. Today the man was sporting the yellow jacket of a gaucho.