Ana Simo - Heartland

At seven o’clock I went to see how Rafael was doing. The kitchen had a door that opened to the outside, and another opening onto a covered hallway leading to the cellar and the garage. The maid’s room could only be reached through the garage. It was unlikely that any noise in that room would be heard in the house. McCabe would never know we were not alone. On the other hand, Rafael could be screaming his head off in there without me hearing anything from the house. The boy I had grown up with would never go mad or kill himself. But the man with the Patek Philippe watch who talked about coups and containers was more opaque. I rapped softly on his door. When he did not answer, I went in. I did not see him at first. The room was in shadows. He had moved the chest of drawers away from the door and the only window, and was writing on it by the light of the table lamp, his back against the wall. That might prolong his life by ten seconds if his presumed killers came through the door, twenty if through the window, provided they did not first throw in a grenade, as they always do in the movies. He did not lift his head from the notebook or stop his hand, which was flying over the paper. I envied him. I wished it were my hand on that paper. But I had been marooned on a white sheet of paper for a long time, long before the loss of nouns and verbs made denial impossible, marooned from the moment “Benbassa” had won me that Blue Ribbon almost forty years ago. Perhaps it was Benbassa’s curse that had shaped my life, the punishment for pretending to be a writer. Benbassa’s curse, and not McCabe, even if I sensed an undercurrent between the two.

Sitting on the maid’s bed, I watched the shadows cast by Rafael’s hand flit over the paper, left right, left right, a squadron of black moths taking off one after the other and disappearing into the night sky. Turgenev would have heard the scratching of pen on paper. I had to content myself with what my eyes saw, unconfirmed by my ears. Pens glided silently these days. Technology worked hard to silence our little helpers, while cacophony swamped the world. I envied Rafael his writing, as I envied McCabe sauntering up and down the stairs when my bandaged feet kept me tied to bed. And I envied him his tale, particularly if it was a paranoid mirage: then it would be tragedy instead of political drama. Above all, I envied him his readers, the daughter and the son, and their descendants, who would turn his tale into an immortal myth. I wished I were Rafael, even if a death squad was on its way. I had my own coming, anyway. I wished I were him, but without leaving my body. I could not conceive of myself inside a male body. And look what I inhabit now: a carcass, a shell. At least I don’t have a dick. Watching Rafael’s hand I soon began to feel his words flow in my mind. His hand and my mind were synchronized as if he was taking my dictation. My rhythm, intonations, hesitations, commas, and periods were all there in his hand. I never read Rafael’s letter to his children, that is, the one he recorded on paper, but I remember every word I dictated to him. It went like this:

“Dear beloved children:

“I’ll be dead in a few hours. You’re going to hear many bad things about me. Don’t believe any. The worst that can be said about me is that I was mad with love of country. Falling in love is a kind of madness. When the love object is a person, sanity eventually returns. When it is your country, or an ideal, you become increasingly delirious and infect all those who surround you. I was mad until a particularly horrible event suddenly cured me a few days ago. My eyes are now wide open. Many terrible crimes have been committed before this even more terrible crime. I’m responsible for them. Not because I committed them myself, or even knew about them, or approved them, but because they may not have happened if I had not thrown the dice. Mad love of country was my motivation, but I do not absolve myself with it.

“I wanted you to begin life freer than I did. That is why I never told you much about my parents—your grandparents whose names you bear, Genoveva and Ezequiel—or the place where I grew up. The past can nail you down. I’ve been trying to remove the nails since I was born. I kept of the past only what I could bear. I thought I would tell you the whole story later, when it could do you no harm, when you were my age and had your own children. Don’t think I was covering up some big family secret. Ours was an ordinary story about ordinary people. It is just that, until recently, these two places were my black holes: La Esperanza, the sugar mill town where my parents came from, and Shangri-La, the fetid subdivision where I was born and grew up. You have never heard those two names; neither has your mother. The ‘Elmira, a small town in the heartland’ listed as my birthplace in my official bio means nothing to me. My parents, your grandparents, are buried in Shangri-La, an orphan settlement straddling the border between Elmira town and county, and forgotten by both. Go visit your grandparents’ grave when you are older and can travel alone. Do not bring anyone else with you, not even your mother. Go to La Esperanza, too. Maybe I have a double there! I wish I could go myself.

“My dear, beloved children: I was not gifted for fatherhood. Every time you asked me to play with you I was scared. Even before you learned to speak, you seemed to have things in mind that I could not begin to imagine. I felt shy in front of you, so discipline was my only language. At least I never hit you, but I know I bored you with my lectures. I want you to know that your father is dying an honorable man. I am not hiding behind anyone. I am not saying that I just obeyed orders. I was mad, blind, wrong. I’m sorry.

“Your loving father,

“Rafael Jacinto Cohen Martínez”

That was the end of my dictation. I do not know the names of Rafael’s wife or children, but I distinctly felt his hand writing “Genoveva and Ezequiel.” The florid, Esperanza-style signature, with full surname and both of his parents’ names was, in my opinion, a childish affectation. It was bound to confuse the twins and become fodder for the Aztlán fundamentalists, whom Rafael reviled. Maybe he was just trying to be intimate, maybe his public name, Rafael J. Cohen, was too intertwined with “National Security Advisor” to be a father’s name. Rafael’s hand stopped. He had filled the entire notebook with his large handwriting. The last half was the letter that I “dictated” to him. The first half he had done before I came into the room. Was it a letter to his wife? A last-minute will? I say quote-unquote “dictated” to stress that I knew, and know, in spite of my present diminished circumstances, the difference between the literal and the truthful. My dictation was truthful, but not literal, as in facts happening in the physical world. Hence the quotation marks. The difference between one and the other should be evident to you, dear listener, without me pointing it out at every turn of my account. Rafael put the notebook inside a manila envelope. I noticed an incipient bald spot on top of his head. “Give this to my kids, but don’t read it, please. It’s kind of embarrassing,” he said, acknowledging my presence. I later wrapped the envelope in plastic and hid it in the safest place I could think of: in the cellar behind the old boiler, which was no longer in use. It must be there still.

Rafael was suddenly cheerful. He jumped and clicked his heels in the air, sideways, like he used to when he finished his homework. That was his only physical trick and he did it amazingly well even now, when he was at least thirty pounds heavier. Rafael had always been chatty. I didn’t like to talk. So we got along fine. He wasn’t just chatty anymore. Words poured out of him now in every direction, frivolous and hectoring, indignant and lyrical. One moment he launched a vitriolic diatribe against Aztlán fundamentalists: “They’ve repackaged the old Aztlán tripe. They’re selling it as ersatz identity for the identity-deprived white masses. I mean, how cynical can you get?” he said, gasping angrily in between words, and giving himself a burst from an asthma inhaler that he pulled out of his pants pocket. The next moment he exulted in remembering a heavenly Sachertorte he had tasted last month at the Café Demel in Vienna, neither of which would have existed had the Caliphate not been savagely repelled there a generation ago. The possibility of loss increased his gustatory pleasure, he said, words desperately pouring out until he checked his watch. “It’s halfway there, already. Even in rough seas.” He fell silent and slumped in bed, his eyes half closed. His face was more revealing then than when he was talking. I would have learned to read it if he had stayed for a while. “They must be burning my library by now,” he mumbled, his eyes now fully closed.