Rivka Galchen - Atmospheric Disturbances

I practically ran back to Magda’s home. She received me warmly and began showing me photos of Rema — the hallway was a veritable gallery — while I hummed to myself Rema music. Rema in a baptismal gown, held up by large hands, the holder unseen. Rema as a brunette, sitting in a depression of sand, in a green-and-blue bikini, at the beach. A black-and-white photo taken on the front steps of that very home, with a small child Rema, barefoot, holding sandals in her hand. Rema older, looking bored, or angry, at Carnival, a sequined mask pulled up onto her forehead. Rema in pale blue at first communion. Rema in heels, and glamour hair, sitting atop a tractor, her legs crossed, her eyes squinted and looking off to the side. Rema in a burgundy graduation gown, her face blanched by a flash, with a wreath of baby’s breath on her hair. Rema in a rocking chair with a speckled greyhound crowded onto her lap.

Only: those photos seemed photos of other Remas. And I suppose, in a certain very straightforward sense — regardless of certain other possibilities — that was inarguably and precisely true: I didn’t know those younger versions of her. But I was unsettled and didn’t know what to do with that unsettlement, didn’t know if it was an ordinary everyday kind of unsettlement, or the paradox that is simply the most visible part of a profound error in an entire worldview.

Anyway: there were no wedding photos of Rema.

And no men. No men in any of the photos.

“Only once, you said,” I said to Magda. “Only once you met her husband?” I asked her, trying to behave casually, as if her gallery of Remas didn’t resemble a mausoleum, as if my questions were just ones of mildest curiosity.

“So long ago. He looked like the kind of American who would get fat. Did he get fat? I could see it in his jaw.”

“I wouldn’t say so,” I said, hoping she wasn’t somehow actually talking about me. Then: “I would like to let a room from you,” I blurted out.

She tightened the low ponytail that held back her hair. A scent of citrus escaped. “I usually charge two hundred seventy pesos a week,” she said, blushing terribly. “Though I’ll take you as a guest, of course—”

“No, of course not,” I interrupted.

We both felt (maybe I’m projecting) more awkward, more space-occupying than before.

Shortly thereafter that awkward money moment resurfaced, transformed, when in asking about the best way to get to the airport I mentioned to Magda the loss of my luggage, and she said So you have none of your objects? to which I shrugged nonspecifically. Maybe I felt bereft though; maybe it showed on my face; but I really wasn’t — not then at least — thinking about that other husband, or even the night nurse, or even Rema. I was just thinking of my suitcase, which actually is Rema’s and which is pale blue. Magda put her hand on my back, which is such a gentle and comforting way to be touched; it’s too easy to get into a vein of living where that no longer ever happens, where no one touches you in that particular kind way, which produces a very particular feeling, not precisely reproduced by anything else, except maybe by that hug machine that autistic woman designed in order to calm down cows on their way to slaughter. Magda brought me a handkerchief. She stood quietly next to me a moment, or maybe a few moments. Then, with her arm on mine, she insisted on lending me some clothes; she said she had some very nice men’s clothing, which she felt confident would not be too far off from my size.

“No really, I’m entirely fine,” I said.

“No,” she said.

I again declined the clothes.

“It’s hot outside,” she said. “And you’re dressed for winter. At least for you to have a change for tonight. And for tomorrow morning.”

So I consented to her offer. She showed me a mostly bare closet. The closet door rolled on rusty wheels. Inside: clothing hung on metal hangers, covered in plastic like from the dry cleaners. Thin pale button-up shirts with pearline snaps. Tailored pants pinned to themselves in grip around a cardboard rod. A tiny dresser of undershirts, socks, a shoehorn, a glasses’ case. Only after a very late dinner that night did I wonder why Magda had men’s clothing at all. And whose clothing it might be. And again who Rema’s other “husband” was or had been. And what that might have to do with her disappearance, or her double, or, for that matter, with me. And I admit, I wasn’t quite sure in which direction my investigation was or should have been proceeding. And I was surprised, unpleasantly, at how well the clothing fit me, even the pants.

I slept in that other man’s shirt.

I must confess that the insignificant price of letting a room from Magda relieved me; nevertheless, perseveration over the price of my last-minute, open-return airline ticket disturbed my sleep; and yet when I would succeed in tripping my thoughts off of perseverations on my profligacy, I would then proceed to ruminate over my miserliness, worrying that, in agreeing to such a cheap rate, I was taking advantage of my wife’s mother. Thus I’d be set in pursuit of relief from what had, initially, been relieving me. That’s why, reading the paper the next morning, over the coffee and medialunas that Magda offered me, I somewhat surreptitiously surveyed the classifieds section so that I could get a sense of whether I was paying a reasonable rent — a difficult task because I couldn’t decipher the significance of the abbreviations and the addresses.

Not far from the classifieds, in those back pages of the tabloid, I came across ’70s-looking portrait photos (long hair, slender faces, tinted glasses, loud print shirts) set off in boxes like yearbook advertisements. Alongside the photos were names and the day’s date, but of a different year: 1977, two from 1979, 1981. Then phrases like: Your struggle continues to inspire us. We carry you in our hearts .

The feel of those photos, the mood of them, brought to mind the Gal-Chen family photo. So that was what I recognized first, that very particular familiarity. It took me a few moments more — synapses having to wend a very circuitous path — for me to realize that these were not just late ’70s nostalgia photos; these were almost certainly memorials to Argentina’s disappeared, published on the anniversaries of disappearance.

Let me confess that — what with its being over twenty years since the end of the “dirty war” (a term that strikes me as a too-catchy euphemism for mass murder, “war” misleadingly implying that the paranoid fantasies of the junta were true, but this seems an issue for another time) — I hadn’t imagined that the wounds would still be quite so obviously alive, so manifest. I can see now that I should not have been surprised — what with my experiences, professional ones I mean, I especially should not have been surprised. People naturally perseverate on their personal tragedies, even though such perseveration doesn’t really serve anyone, neither the living nor the dead. I mean, there’s research on these things. It’s simply not a practical use of time to think constantly of the dead. I’m not heartless, and I do regret that I must sound that way, and I understand how resilience is in its way a demonic kind of strength, a strength not unrelated to a capacity for indifference, a strength that is discomfiting evidence against the existence of true, eternal love. But is it better for the living to burn themselves in others’ funeral pyres? As I wrote, once, “Mourning should be mortal.” And, well, I think it’s worth considering why memorial writing is so awful, why it so entirely fails to communicate the feeling of loss. I at least feel that it fails. Those vague earnest words all seem so demeaning, so shameful, like strangers hearing the sound of you going to the bathroom.