Catherine Leroux - The Party Wall

The raid is poorly organized and not very successful. Only two people are arrested and a few objects are collected around the pools. A team from the day shift has been dispatched to comb the beach. The mandatory report will run to many pages. A huge task, it seems, for such a frivolous misdemeanour, and the officers give Simon dirty looks. The lieutenant, on the other hand, is delighted: the reporters are going to love this weird story and he’ll be able to spin the incident so as to make his unit shine. Walking out of the police station, Simon pauses on the sidewalk and fingers his telephone, itching to hear Carmen’s voice. His hands fumble in his pocket and he pulls out the cigarette he stashed away there a few hours earlier. The lighter snaps, the cigarette starts to burn, and Simon takes a long, salty drag. He puts the phone back in its case. The night is over.

Nothing breathes in a columbarium. The boxes are insultingly small and appear altogether unsuited to holding an entire being, albeit in the form of ashes. Their volume is barely enough for a rosebud, a letter, or a square of silk. The layout of the wall adds to the atmosphere of coldness; one might just as well be in a bank vault lined with safety deposit boxes. Except that here, the boxes will never be opened; these bodies reduced to dust will never again experience the open air and its untameable winds, nor will they be able to transform into something, to blend with the earth and nourish wild flowers and ideas. How can anyone choose to spend eternity here, Carmen wonders as she walks through the hushed aisles looking for the number marked on the back of her hand.

She is in no hurry to find the niche of Magenta Lopez. In her pocket the sloppily folded piece of paper makes a deafening noise as it crinkles with each of her steps. It is from this document that she learned the truth: her mother was not Frannie. Of course there is no gentle way to impart this sort of news. The way Frannie had chosen was the most brutal: a letter in two copies that looked more like a shopping list than the confession of a lifetime. Each line contained a piece of their family puzzle. First line: Roberto Aurellano, the name of Simon’s father. Second line: Magenta Lopez, the name of Carmen’s birth mother. A quick inquiry among relatives revealed that she was a cousin of Frannie’s who had died when Carmen was still an infant. Frannie, who was already pregnant, agreed to take care of her. In Carmen’s eyes this act of generosity was the most baffling part of the story. She came to the conclusion the family had paid Frannie to adopt the child; nothing else could account for this decision, made by a woman with just enough maternal instinct to take care of an alley cat.

Whereas Simon was entitled to a complete name by way of a father, all Carmen had to chew on was the word “Hector.” A nearly senile aunt told her that not much was known about the man who had “put Magenta in the family way,” except that he was a not very “respectable” person, who was coerced into marrying her and absconded immediately after the wedding night. While her brother began a nation-wide search for Roberto Aurellano, Carmen gave up all hope of finding either one of her biological parents alive. Curiously, however, she was none the worse for it. Having refused from a very young age to define herself as Frannie’s daughter, she had abandoned the idea of having parents. That they were dead or gone missing for good made little difference to her; she was done with grieving, and it was only out of some automatic compulsion that she had decided to visit the ashes of Magenta Lopez.

Treading up and down the uniform aisles of fake gold and sculpted glass, she thinks about Simon far more than all the parents who deserted her. It’s been a month since the funeral, and still no news from him. Her messages and emails have remained unanswered, and when she does manage to catch him at home he stays distant, like a vague acquaintance bumped into at the supermarket who just mouths a few tired greetings while eyeing the frozen products. What the posthumous letter changed has nothing to do with Carmen’s origins and everything to do with her brother.

She finally comes to Magenta’s niche. It gleams; there are no fingerprints marring its polished gold surface. This absence of life saddens Carmen, and she promptly brushes her thumb over it to spread a little dirt, a trace of smog, of humidity, of the salt air and the bustle of the outside world. The inscription on the urn is Magenta Lopez, 1943–1966 .

Without warning, a thick lump rises from her chest to her throat, a warm, invasive surge. The tears take her unawares; until a few seconds ago nothing in this whole affair had managed to move her. But now, those two dates—1943–1966—tell her something she had not contemplated: Magenta died at the age of twenty-three. “I’m older than my mother,” she murmurs, with her reflection rippling on the glossy surfaces in front of her. She cannot explain why, but she is shaken by this realization. Her mother was just a young woman when she died. Now Carmen meets her and she is almost twice her mother’s age. There is something unbearable about this role reversal.

As she tries to regain her composure, Carmen searches in her pocket and pulls out a sheet of paper. She rolls it up like a miniature parchment and affixes it to Magenta’s niche. The last page of Neruda’s Odas elementales . How else could she pay tribute to a woman she knows only through a deceased poet?

For the last few minutes she has not been alone in this aisle of the columbarium. Behind her, someone else is weeping in short bursts of muffled sobs. Gradually, this sound, so very alive, draws her away from the dead. She turns around and finds herself facing a man in his early sixties, hair turning white, proffering a tissue as though he had been just waiting for the opportunity.

“Paying a visit to one of your relatives?”

Carmen nods.

“Me, it’s my children,” the man says pointing to two urns graced by faded colour photographs and fresh flowers.

“They died young,” Carmen remarks.

“Yes, seven and nine. It seems like only yesterday.”

Unable to cut short the conversation, Carmen positions herself in front of the pictures and studies the round faces of the two kids, one on a blue bicycle, the other holding on to a swing. The odour of incense comes out of nowhere and, as is the case whenever she smells it, Carmen feels an invisible foot treading on her chest.

“I’m Marcus,” the man says.

“That’s funny. I met a Marcus once in similar circumstances.”

Not knowing why, she starts to cry again, and, like a giant sweeping over acres of land, Marcus places his hand on her back. The columbarium comes alive, as if thousands of urns were suddenly spreading their dove-like wings.

The telephone rings at around 4 p.m.; he is in the depths of sleep and his formless, aimless dreams coil around him like a boa constrictor. He grunts a little by way of answering, hangs up, and staggers over to his daughter’s bedroom. She is out but her things are there. The blinds, as always, are down and he gropes around nervously in the dark. In her backpack is a binder, a Bret Easton Ellis novel, and an astonishing number of pencil drawings haphazardly jammed into the pocket. No sign of his daughter’s wallet.

His colleague called after the investigation unit had shared its leads with the city’s precincts; nine wallets were found amid a pile of clothes at the Sutro Baths. Their owners are to be summoned to the police station for fingerprinting. The prints will be compared to those collected at similar gatherings, because the nighttime bathers are suspected of belonging to a group that entered the prison at Alcatraz as well as a military bunker and a few other off-limits locations. While this appears to be a minor offence, the media focus on these characters’ stunts may give rise to exemplary penalties.