The Collected Stories, page 29
Instead, tears made their usual protective lenses for the safe observation of misery.
So bury me, she said, lying flat as a corpse under the October sun.
Tonto immediately began piling sand around her ankles. Stop that! Richard screamed. Just stop that, you stupid jerk. Mom, I was only joking.
Faith sat up. Goddamn it, Richard, what’s the matter with you? Everything’s such a big deal. I was only joking too. I mean, bury me only up to here, like this, under my arms, you know, so I can give you a good whack every now and then when you’re too fresh.
Oh, Ma … said Richard, his heart eased in one long sigh. He dropped to his knees beside Tonto, and giving her lots of room for wiggling and whacking, the two boys began to cover most of her with sand.
In the Garden
An elderly lady, wasted and stiff, sat in a garden beside a beautiful young woman whose two children, aged eight and nine, had been kidnapped eight months earlier.
The women were neighbors. They met every afternoon to speak about the children. Their sentences began: When Rosa and Loiza have come home … Their sentences often continued: I can’t wait to show them the ice-cream freezer Claudina bought us … They will probably be afraid to go to school alone. At first Pepe will have to take them in the car … They will be thin. No, perhaps they will be too fat, having been forced to eat nothing but rice and beans and pampered with candy and toys to keep them quiet.
The elderly lady thought: When they come home, when they come home …
The beautiful young woman, their mother, said, This pillow cover for Loiza, I don’t know if I’ll finish it in time. I make so many mistakes, I have to rip. I want it to be perfect.
There were yellow canario flowers among green leaves on the pillow slip. There was a hummingbird in each corner.
The two husbands, accompanied by a stranger, came into the garden and waited under the bougainvillea while the father shouted, Coffee! Black! Black! Black! He always shouted these days. His wife retired to the kitchen to make a fourth pot of strong coffee. The father turned to the stranger, speaking as if the visitor were deaf. Now this is a garden, my friend. This is beautiful. The life here is good. You can see that. The criminal element is under control at last. The police patrol the area frequently. I can see you’re a decent person and I’m glad to have you on this street. We do not rent to Communists or to what you call hippies. Right now in one of my houses the head of the Chicago Medical Center is sleeping. That house across the street there, with the enormous veranda. He sleeps late. It’s his vacation from family troubles and business worries. You understand that. We, my colleagues and I, have been responsible for building nearly all the houses you see, the one you’ve rented. They are well constructed. We want people to come with children and grandchildren. We will not rent to just anyone.
The elderly woman cannot bear his shouting voice. She asks her husband to help her toward home. They slowly move across the lawn.
The stranger sits among the amazing flowers and birds for a few minutes. He is a well-dressed man, middle-aged, who happens to be a Communist. He is also a father of two children who are only a little older than the kidnapped daughters of this household. He is a tenderhearted but relentless person.
In the course of the next few days, as he shops and walks, he speaks to his neighbors, who are friendly. A woman in the corner house often stands at the wrought-iron gate, the reja, she calls it, of her veranda. When he asks, Did you know them? she bursts into tears. She says, They never cry anymore, I know. The little one, Loi, played with my granddaughter. When they were tiny, they sat with their dolls right there in the hammock in the back, rocking rocking, little mammies. I thought they would grow up and be friends in life.
He spoke to another neighbor whom he met in a shop. Returning together along the street of palms, the neighbor asked, Did he insult you in any way? No, said the stranger. Well, he often does, you know, some people think he’s been driven mad. I would be driven mad. I would sell and leave. But he has too much invested here. He hates every one of us.
Why? asked the stranger.
Why not? he replied. Wouldn’t you? We are the witnesses of the entire event. Our children are skating up and down the street.
Yes, I see, said the stranger.
A third neighbor was washing his car. (This was another day.) He courteously turned down his car radio, which was singing evangelical songs of salvation. He said, Ah yes, it is terrible. Everyone knows, by the way, everyone knows it was his friends who did it. Perhaps he knows too. At least one was deeply involved. We have all been harassed by the police, but I for one am glad to be so pestered. It makes me believe they’re doing their work, at least. But one, Carlo—the main one, I think, I’m not afraid to say his name—killed himself under investigation. Just last month. A Cuban. Always laughing.
Was it political? asked the stranger.
No, no, my friend, no politics. Money. Greed. Of course, I’m sure the kidnappers thought: The money will come. What is $100,000 to that person. The children blindfolded a day or so will be returned. No one the wiser. No problem. No one the wiser. They dreamed. A new car—two new cars. An expensive woman in the city. Restaurants. High life. But aha! something went wrong. I’m not afraid to tell you this. Everyone knows it. Clearly. The money did not go out quickly enough. Why? Let me tell you why. Because our friend is vain and foolish and believed himself too powerful and lucky to suffer tragic loss. Too quickly (because he is an important man), the police, all, the locals, the federals, moved in. Fear struck the kidnappers, you can see that. You may ask, Where are the children? Perhaps in another country, perhaps kindly treated by a frightened wife. Perhaps they will forget, go to school, they will think—oh, that childhood was a dream. Perhaps they are thrown into the sea. Garbage. Not good, not good.
He turned the radio up. Goodbye, sir, he said.
The very next house belonged to the elderly woman. She sat on the front veranda, a shawl over her knees. Her husband sat beside her. She rolled little metal balls in her hands, an exercise designed to slow the degeneration of her finger muscles.
The stranger stepped up to the reja to say goodbye. His vacation was over. He would leave the island in the morning.
Look at this, just look at this, her husband said, waving a newspaper at him. The stranger looked at the article that had been encircled. The reporter had written: “In an interview this afternoon in his summer home in the mountains, Sr. L——, father of the little girls kidnapped almost one year ago, said, Of course they will be returned. If I had less publicity they would have been returned long ago. We expect them home. Their room is ready for them. We believe, my wife and I believe, we are certain they will be returned.”
The elderly woman’s husband said, What is in his mind? He thinks because he was once a poor boy in a poor country and he became very rich with a beautiful wife, he thinks he can bend steel with his teeth.
The woman spoke slowly. You see, sir, what the world is like. Her face was imperturbable. The wasting disease that deprived her limbs of movement had taken from her the delicate muscular gift of facial expression.
She had been told that this paralysis would soon become much worse. In order to understand that future and practice the little life it would have, she followed the stranger as he departed—without moving her head—with her eyes alone. She watched, from left to right, his gait, his clothes, his hair, his swinging arms. Sadly she had to admit that the eyes’ movement even if minutely savored was not such an adventurous journey.
But she had become interested in her own courage.
Somewhere Else
Twenty-two Americans were touring China. I was among them. We took many photographs. We had learned how to say hello, goodbye, may I take your photograph? Frequently the people did not wish to be photographed.
Now, why is that? we asked. We take pictures in order to remember the Chinese people better, to be able to tell our friends about them after supper and give slide shows in churches and schools later on. Truthfully, we do it with politics in mind, if not in total command.
Mr. Wong, the political guidance counselor in the Travel Service, said it was because of Antonioni’s film on China and his denigrating attraction to archaic charm. His middle-power chauvinism looked on China as the soufflé of Europe, to rise and fall according to the nourishment beaten into it by American capital investment and avant-garde art.
He said the high vigilance of the people would not allow us to imitate this filmmaker’s disdain for technologies that visibly assert themselves in urban steel and all along the terraces of rice and soy and wheat.
One day, in the hotel meeting room, he said, You do not love the Chinese people.
Now, he shouldn’t have said that. It made us stop listening—especially Ruth Larsen, Ann Reyer, and me. We were to a tourist in love with the Chinese revolution, Mao Tse-tung, and the Chinese people. Those who were affectionate did once in a while hug a guide or interpreter. Others hoped that before the tour ended, they’d be able to walk along a street in Shanghai or Canton holding hands with a Chinese person of their own sex, just as the Chinese did—chatting politics, exchanging ideological news. Surreptitiously we looked into family courtyards every now and then to see real life, from which, though in love, we’d been excluded.
When we began to listen to Mr. Wong again, he was accusing one of us of taking pictures without permission. Where? When? Where? Who? we asked. We hoped we were not about to suffer socialist injustice, because we loved socialism.
Right here in Tientsin, in front of the hotel, Mr. Wong said.
Ah, we thought, it’s possible. There were terrible temptations for photograph-taking right across the street from the hotel, in the beautiful small park. There the young played Ping-Pong, the old slowly at 1/25th did Tai Chi. Also, the middle-aged textile workers had left their sewing machines for a few days in order to participate in designing the cloth they fabricated. They stood around the rose garden drawing leaves and roses. One of us could have done that—just snapped a picture, too excited to say, May I please take your photograph?
Mr. Wong continued. The accused, he said, had photographed a lower-middle peasant lugging a two-wheel cart full of country produce into the city. A boy had been sleeping on top.
Ah, what a picture! China! The heavy cart, the toiling man, the narrow street—once England’s street (huge buildings lined with first-class plumbing for the English empire’s waste), like the downtown Free West anywhere. In the foreground the photographed man labored—probably bringing early spring vegetables to some distant neighborhood in order to carry back to his commune honey buckets of the city’s stinking gold.
This act, this photographing, had been reported by one vigilant Chinese worker incensed by Antonioni’s betrayal. Mr. Wong pointed his political finger at our brilliant comrade Frederick J. Lorenz. You! he said. Especially you are not a friend.
A general gasp and three nervous snickers. Immediately Ruth Larsen touched Fred’s shoulder to show loyalty. Freddy! Not Freddy! Joe Larsen jumped up. He walked to the door. He put his hand on the knob.
We had all assumed that Mr. Wong’s guilty man would be Martin, a jolly friend to all revolutions, an old-time union organizer, history lover, passionate photographer. (Before our tour ended, he had taken 4,387 pictures, although his camera had been broken for two days. It was not exactly broken; it had simply closed its eye, exhausted.)
Ruth, Ann, and I had discussed Freddy. Ruth thought he should have been spoken to long ago, but not for his photography. In this China, where all the grownups dressed in modest gray, blue, and green, Freddy wore very short white California shorts with a mustard-colored California B.V.D. shirt and, above his bronze, blue-eyed face, golden tan California curly hair. She didn’t think that was nice.
Who are you, Ruth? The commissar of underwear? Ann had asked.
At breakfast Ruth had started to address him: Freddy! Then she’d thought, Oh boy! There you go again—the typical analysis by the old, which is: Rough politics is O.K. if it leans on the arm of bourgeois appropriateness. So she’d said, You sure keep your suntan a long time, Freddy.
Fred closed his eyes in order to think in solitude. We suffered a tour-wide two-minute fear. We waited for Fred’s decision. He opened his eyes, then rose in high courtroom style to rebut.
Mr. Wong made a little smile. He looked around at us all. His finger pointed once more: You, Mr. Lorenz, have been accused by still another worker of invading a noodle factory.
Cries of No! No! Christ! Come on! He’s kidding! Three young people, who liked to see us older folks caught in political contradiction or treasonous bewilderment, simply laughed.
One of us, Duane Smith, had put his life savings into this trip. He’d studied Chinese for six years in night school in order to come one day to this place and be understood by the Chinese people in Tienanmen Square. He didn’t laugh. He whispered, This is serious. What if they throw us out?
Ruth said, Never!
Invading what? said Fred. Joe! he called out. He said, Oh, God! and sat down. What was China talking about?
Joe Larsen chewed sugarless gum very hard. He walked around and around in a little circle of annoyance near the door. Then he moved directly across the room to look at Mr. Wong. He believed in doing that. His politics was based on staring truthfully into the cruel eye of power.
Mr. Wong, he said, you know, in Peking I visited a street noodle factory too. One not far from the hotel.
Joe said he wanted to be absolutely clear. It was his fault that he and Fred had stopped at the noodle shop in the city of Tientsin. He was, when not in China, writing a novel, a utopia, a speculative fiction in which the self-reliant small necessary technology of noodle-making was one short chapter. He had considered it a good omen to have passed this street factory and to have been invited to observe all the soft hanging noodles and, in the bins, the stiff dried noodles. He admired the manageable machine that shaped, cut, and extruded them.
Why is he admitting all that? Duane Smith said. He’ll get us thrown out.
Never, said Ruth.
The others had hoped for more interesting admissions. Joe often took long walks when the rest of us were visiting points of cultural interest. At supper he would tell us how he drank tea with old men, a condition he liked to consider himself a member of. He had taken a ferry ride with noisy Chinese families to the other side of a river. There, in an outlying district, two old people—guardians of the street—had shown him how to dispose of a banana peel.
Some of our people with poor character structures were jealous of his adventures. They’d been a little ashamed of their timidity when he spoke, but now that he was being spoken to, they were proud of their group discipline.
Mr. Wong, Joe said, Fred accompanied me. He was not alone. It was my idea. I’m crazy about your street noodle factories. Lane factories, I believe you call them?
Mr. Wong looked at Joe. Then he pretended Joe wasn’t there and never had been. Mr. Wong did not like to be interfered with right in the middle of a political correction. Also, he did not seem to want to accuse two people at once. Why? Perhaps accusing one person was sharper, required only one finger and one harsh cry. At any rate, he ignored Joe and the interesting socialist question of decentralized neighborhood industry. Instead he said, Mr. Lorenz, why did you choose to photograph that peasant?
What? Me? Me? Me?
Fred said Me? so many times because he was (and is) one of our foremost movement lawyers. He’s accustomed to approbation from his peers and shyness from petitioners. He can be depended upon to take the most hopeless case and to construct, out of his legal education and political experience, hope!—along with a furious protesting constituency.
So once more he cried, Me? Oh, take my film. Take it. Take the camera. You’ll see. There’s nothing … Take it. I don’t even like to take pictures. I hate the lousy thing.
He tried to jerk the camera off his neck. He failed.
That’s true, Mr. Wong, said Martin, trying out a reasonable tone (as one comrade should speak to another). My camera was broken last week and he gave me his. It didn’t bother him at all.
We are not interested, said Mr. Wong. You will be here twelve more days. We wanted you to know that the Chinese people are vigilant. He made the tiniest bow, turned, and left.
Some of us gathered around Fred. Others gathered as far from Fred as possible.
Later that evening we were invited to share our folk heritage with the Tientsin Women’s Federation. We sang “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.”
The next afternoon Ruth talked to Ho, one of our guides. We all liked him, because he rolled his pants up to the knee when it was hot. She said, You know. Fred’s one of our great poor-people’s lawyers.
But you guys aren’t into law so much, are you? said Ann. She has always been a little sarcastic.
You deserve this, I said to Ho. Who asked you to invite Antonioni, the star of the declining West? I bet lots of less-known people were dying to make the film.
Let’s get off his hack, said Martin, composing us nicely in his lens, snapping a group photograph. Duane Smith said, Please! Leave him alone.
Ho had become accustomed to our harassment. He folded his trouser legs one more lap above the knee. But it’s right, is it not? he said. You must ask the people first, do they wish to be photographed.
Yes, I said, but that’s not the point and you know it, Ho.
And tomorrow, when you visit the countryside and the fisheries, you will inquire before you take a picture of the poor or lower-middle peasant?
Sure, said Ann.
You will say, even if it is only a child, may I take your photograph?
O.K., O.K., we said. Relax! We heard you the first five hundred times.
About three months later, Martin invited us to a China reunion at his house, full of food, slides, insights, and commentary. Twelve people came. Ann had flown to Portugal that very morning. Duane Smith had written from California to say naturally he couldn’t make it but would Martin lend his fishery slides for a couple of weeks and airmail them at once special delivery, certified. Fred was sure he’d see us; he was due in New York for a week of conferences.
