When I passed on my way back, the woman was gone but the cat was still there. Gray, spotted, with yellow eyes. I got a bit of ground beef and milk from the organic supermarket. The cat came down when he saw the food, and I brought him home with me. Immediately he settled down in the sun on the patio and set to observing the birds that flew over the vines. He looked fixedly into the air, absorbed, as if perceiving something no one else could see. (Investigations of a cat.) He adapted quickly, staking out his territory in the glass-walled sitting room in the back, walking around among the rooms, going up onto the roof, and when I was reading he would come up to me and purr. He liked watching TV and would continue to stare at the device even if it was turned off, as though expecting the distant images to appear once again. He slept in a shoebox, and he disliked electric light. The veterinarian told me he was healthy; I was going to have a cat for a while. He was affectionate, followed me around everywhere, looked up at the ceiling with some private emotion.
Whenever I went to New York I put Nina in charge of looking after him. I’d grown quite fond of him. He seemed to recognize me when he saw me come in. He would immediately station himself on the armchair as though waiting for me to sit down and read. An English friend once told me that cats can help you concentrate, they get up on the table where you’re working and lie down peacefully and stretch and close their eyes. Without realizing it, you take on the serene quality of the animal yourself. That wasn’t the case for me, it was more like I was transferring my moods onto the cat, and sometimes I would see him shoot off running as though he’d seen a ghost and then find him a while later curled up in the gap under a kitchen cupboard.
When I conjure up those days, I see them divided clearly into a vast swath of light and a narrow band of darkness: the light belonged to the calm of the library, where I would spend entire days among the books, forgetting everything, but in the air there hovered the shadow of Ida, my obsession with her and her past, like the vestiges of Nina’s lost Russia with its moments of heroism and its sorrows.
When night fell, I would go out for a drive in the car. I’d take Prospect toward Washington Avenue and then set out for the highway, not stopping as I passed the Hyatt but continuing as far as Trenton, toward the desolate suburbs of the city with its homeless wandering the streets among fires and vacant buildings. The slums, close to the administrative center of the city, were like its nightmare, the place where reality revealed itself for what it was. Poor neighborhoods, half-abandoned buildings, shut-down factories, avenues prowled by police patrol cars that moved slowly down littered streets with old men and very young women sitting on the front steps of houses.
Sometimes I’d park in an alley, look for a bar with its lights on, and sit down at the counter. In the back, two or three kids dressed in black, with streaks of yellow in their hair, playing pool. A cumbia dance playing on the jukebox. Everyone there speaking Spanish, with Mexican and Puerto Rican cadences. A girl in a red blouse stepping up to dance with a tall boy with tattoos across his neck and part of his face. The worse I was doing, the more isolated I would feel; it was as if I’d managed to distance myself from everything but the memories of her that passed through my head. Had she been involved? The tension of a segmented life, of actions that repeated in discontinuous series. What was she hiding? What lay underneath? Menéndez knew all about her secret life, her disguises, her nocturnal rendezvous, but did he know something more? How to explain, if not, why he would have come to investigate me personally. He’d paused on one side, in the hallway, looking through his notes and talking with O’Connor. Professor Brown, did she make any reference to her years as a graduate student at Berkeley? I was surprised. She’d never made any reference, not to me. Maybe it was a bluff, a gambit to trip me up and discover what it was that I knew. Parker thought that Ida’s years in Berkeley had been typical for a radical student in that era. Pacifist marches, fiery speeches, long hours of debate in endless meetings. The FBI was tracing Ida’s contacts during that time. They had a list of the people she saw frequently. She was a leftist like so many others, with ties to countercultural groups and also to the Black Panthers. Nothing that many other students weren’t doing in that era.
As I go through my notes, the slightly stained pages from my notebook call to mind the old papers with notes written in Spanish about life in Argentina that Hudson finds in a box many years later in London, when he realizes that, on those pages, the vestiges of the great dust storm of 1851 still survive. In the desert, the dust darkens the sky with a whirring that seems unstoppable, and the country folk walk with heads bowed, their hats tied down by handkerchiefs knotted under their chins, the horses with their eyes blindfolded to keep them from getting spooked. I took notes no
