Copyright © 2017 by A.G. Curtin.

Library of Congress Control Number:            2017909948

ISBN:                        Hardcover                          978-1-5434-3166-7

                                  Softcover                             978-1-5434-3165-0

                                  eBook                                   978-1-5434-3164-3

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Rev. date: 07/26/2017

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CONTENTS

I        Ellen

II      Mei-Feng

III    Aisha

IV     Fleur

V      Dolores

I

Ellen

I HAVE AN AFFINITY FOR the past that was woven into my childhood in the stories of my grandmother. My grandmother saw the world divided not into countries or continents but destinations of our ancestors, known, presumed, or imagined. She told amazing tales of our fabulous Moorish gardens in Spain; stolen from us together with our vast estate; of an ancestor, an early Renaissance painter, whose likeness hangs in the Prado; of a sixteenth century Franciscan monk wandering the mountains of Mexico.

In 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain launched Columbus for the New World and vanquished the Moors at Grenada. They also expelled my Jewish ancestors from Spain. Some settled with their neighbors in North Africa and became good Muslims. Others joined the Inquisition in persecuting their kin. Many were part of he Sephardim Diaspora strewn across the then known world and parts that were yet uncharted and some eventually arrived in America, as my family did in the 1940s. Others have simply disappeared.

My given name is Anonios, originally Greek. My own odyssey takes place in the last decades of the twentieth century on various continents where I worked as a travel writer, journalist, sometime painter, gardener, and, most recently, peasant farmer in Mexico. With my long, somber face and strange given name I was a celebrity on TV in the seventies bringing the nightly news into millions of living rooms in America.

***

Now I sit in my wheelchair by the garden as I do each day when the weather is good, reading and rereading the diaries I’ve kept over the years, reading and reliving the past, hoping to finish the history of my travels that I’ve been writing. It’s early afternoon. The house is still. Shadows of the clouds blow across the roof and over the waiting croquet pitch. A figure moves in the foreground, a figure from my past: Ellen, my first wife, working in her garden. Her man’s blue shirt is streaked with paints and linseed oil. She contemplates the melon patch, tastes a leaf of lettuce, snips a dead blossom from a zinnia. Her garden is a painting where vegetables and flowers are transformed into new compositions as they grow and prosper under her care.

I turn the pages to the late fifties, the first of our many trips to Mexico. Ellen painted the countryside while I walked the streets gathering material for travel articles. On weekends, we explored together taking photographs: a donkey standing on its shadow, a field of yellow-ochre maize, a dark, wrinkled woman who made us tacos.

In Mexico City we walked the history of their art at the Museo Nacional de Antropología: Aztec polychromatic urns and vessels, intricate gold jewelry, tapestries, painted books, pictorial codices and manuscripts in their Nahual language, feather work and delicate paper cutting, the monumental and terrifying architectural sculpture of their gods. "There is nothing farther removed from Greco-Roman and Renaissance naturalism, based on the representation of the human body," says Mexican writer and poet Octavio Paz, "than the Mesoamerican conception of space and time." At the Museo de Arte Moderno we watched European and indigenous culture transformed into a new Mexican art in the work of the artists who were born or lived there, Diego Rivera, Jean Charlot, Frederick Leal, Frida Kahlo.

We always traveled together, Ellen and I, even after our son Tom was born. We traveled with a bottle of wine, a loaf of bread, a hunk of cheese and the dog named Adlai. Sometimes I would catch sight of them from a distance: Ellen, child on her back, dog at her feet, hand poised in the space between the palette and the canvas, framed in my mind now like a picture.

A breeze ruffles the pages of my journal. The years slip by. December 1965: Tom, teething, was restless with fever. I flew to Mexico alone. I took every back road headed for Oaxaca though I never got there. Scenes from that trip still played themselves back and I let the memories roll past, searching for clues I might have noticed at the time, hints to the future that I could have seen. The sounds and smells surround me still and I am remembering small things along the road, pointing them out the way I used to when Ellen was beside me in the car—the way she always was.

I pass a row of trees with arms at their sides like children’s metal soldiers. A straw-laden donkey like a small moving mountain. I slow for a rock by the road that might have been a turtle. I wave to dark-skinned children with their brightly dressed mothers and the children wave back. I stop beside a young woman carrying a basket of oranges. How much? I ask, and she smiles. How much for oranges? Two dollar, she says. I discover I have bought the whole headload. I gobble fruit as I drive, planting new trees out the window.

Near noon at a small village I find the road closed, blocked. The streets are jammed with stands of food and milling people. I leave off my blazer and buy a bright-colored guayavera. Children in amazing costumes follow me, calling out gringo, gringo, holding out their hands, déme dólar. An old man, almost toothless, one slow eye, wizened dark face, brings me something in a paper cup. !Feliz cumpleanos!—Happy Birthday—he says, and calls me hermano—brother.

It is December twelfth, the Mexican day of the Virgin of Guadalupe. On a day in 1531, a dark-skinned woman, the Virgin, appeared to the Indian Juan Diego, a convert to Christianity. The Virgin instructed Juan to tell his bishop to build a place of worship at the spot where he stood—until then the site of a temple for Tonantzin, the Aztec goddess of earth and corn. When his bishop asks for a sign of the miraculous event, Juan returns to the barren winter hillside and picks roses blooming there—I see them blooming again there, now.

The display of food is like nothing I have since seen. Not on market days in the south of France or among the street-food stands of China or Thailand. Nixtamal, says my brother, pointing to a corn dish… pico de gallo… güerios… chilipiquines… tostada… quesadillas…. gordita… and he hands the little fat one to me, the dough stuffed with cheese, tomato and salsa… enchiladas… tomales. Everywhere, on blankets and tables, heaps of beans, squash, peppers, eggs, stalks of sugar cane, breads. Chickens cluck to themselves in crates among the laughs and calls and laughter.

I wander, munching. Music begins, a pulsating sensation enters the blood. I feel it in my arms and legs, my head, my heart. The matachins arrive wearing white ruffled pants and flowing ribboned headdresses above silk handkerchiefs covering their faces. El Monarca, tall and masked in red and yellow streamers, enters surrounded by young girls in virginal white, each taking her turn in the dance as La Malinche, the revered and reviled Indian mistress of Hernán Cortés. Then the sword dance begins, Los moros y cristianos, and as the last Moor sinks lifeless to the ground the crowd gasps. El Toro sways into the dancers’ circle, a leather mask with horns and canes for forelegs. El Toro waves his horns in a feint. El Monarcha pretends to trip. The crowd screams. But the sword strikes. El toro staggers, falls, lies still.

A child comes to stare at me. I give him a buffalo nickel I find among my pocket change. Búfalo, búfalo, he says, and runs with the coin to his mother. Now, far down the street, the picture of the Dark Virgin in blue and gold sways as its pole is carried through the crowd. I must go talk to her, says my brother; I begin to dream as I drive on.

Ellen stands at Tom’s crib. I creep up behind her, wrap my arms under her breasts. The child’s eyes open slowly, close, flip open and shut tight. She leans into my groin, turns to Tom for a last glance and lifts her mouth to mine. How can we move so slowly toward the bedroom, teasing ourselves and each other? Wait. Let me kiss you again, not there but here. No, here. Let me guess where—

A goat leaps into the road. I slam on the brakes. Ellen has vanished.

Four white crosses stand by the road. Broken glass. A door handle, small loaves of bread, flowers, still fresh. I slow, gape, drive on and stop at a dusty roadside place, The Good Times Restaurant, parked up with old trucks, to telephone Ellen. There is no answer. I sit where I can have a beer, watch the crowd and brush up my Spanish.

I was aware of the waitress beside me as I turned the pages of the menu, but she wasn’t about to trouble herself or me with the obvious question. I glanced up, curious. Startled, I looked away, flipped over the menu and allowed myself another look. I had seen her before.

Where?

Her dark sienna skin had the luminescence I liked to look at on the streets of Santa Fe or Guadalajara. Her dark hair was pulled back in a heavy braid. Her eyes set in the deep hollow above her high cheekbones.

She was no bibelot from my past. Not one of my mother’s parade of nurses. Her modeled shoulders were familiar. Her sculpted face, haunted, brought back familiarity. Recognition? I searched for the wisps of memories of that passed me of a beautiful dark young person wearing a Mexican blouse, jewelry, a crowd of similarly dressed women but as I concentrated, the milieu became more elusive and strong features were those of a familiar Mexican painting from a recent trip South.

I ordered the first thing I could think of and followed her easy motion as she pushed aside the swinging door into the kitchen. I lined up salsa bottles and listened to the conversation at the next table—four men talking about a certain woman.

The kitchen door swung open.

She set down my plate without a glance at me, upscale norteamerican tourist, short haircut, steel rimmed glasses, new guayavera. Her nametag said Dolores—Lady of Sorrows, the name in Spanish from the title of the Virgin Mary, sometimes shortened to Lola or written as Lolita, the diminutive of Lola. A pale vaccination scar the size of a nickel marred her arm below the pink sleeve of her uniform. I had seen her working in the fields, perhaps, or in a market, passed her on the street?

The odor of chicken was nauseating. I’d stumbled into a terra incognita or extra-corporeal experience and didn’t want to explore it. I paid my bill and turned the car back toward the airport where I checked on the plane and picked up my bags at the hotel. Again, no answer from Ellen, but soon I would see her.

A faint light creeps over the edge of the world as the plane begins its descent. The Fasten Seatbelt sign is on. The early-morning thruway has an eerie emptiness. My neighborhood, like a postcard of the place where I once lived, is quiet, asleep. My keys jangle at the door. No thumping of Adlai’s tail. No sing-song cooing from the baby’s room. The bedroom is empty. The easel missing and the box of traveling paints.

Soon she will be at the door: she and the child and the dog all home from painting.

The doorbell rings.

A man in a suit stands outside. A man in dark clothes waiting to enter, as though he had always been there, lurking. As though the accident had been waiting to happen. The details are irrelevant, but he persists. Two cars collided on a country road and in the blink of an eye, everything I love is gone.

***

Darkness is creeping under the lilacs. The garden lies empty in deep shade. Soon the car will come down the road, scattering gravel—my son Juan, Juan from Mexico, home from school. He will drop his books with a thud. I will hear the sound of their footsteps on the hardwood floor. Then they will come looking for me, my son and my new wife.

And so I wait, turning the pages back to the beginning, listening again for my grandmother’s reedy voice telling the story of how our ancestors crossed North Africa. And they got on a camel, she says, and they turned its head to the east. Her tiny grey head bobs up and down as though she were on that camel. And wherever that camel died, that’s where they went to, but they must have got rich, because they never came looking for us. The lost ones,