A silence descends on them. This is the closest Herb has ever come to speaking about his own sexuality with Mamita. He seems more discomfited than she does. Did it just slip out? Does he think she doesn’t know?
I forgot to feed the dogs, says Herb. It’s horrible, Yolanda, I’ve been having recurring nightmares in which I’m traveling faraway, in Europe, and suddenly I remember my dogs, my cat, that they’re here in Boston in a room, dead on the floor, starved to death due to my own having forgotten to feed them. What would Sigmund say about it, do you think? Please excuse me, Yolanda.
He dashes out of the room. Downstairs, somewhere, are his three dogs. She doesn’t know about dog breeds. Two are quite large but extremely thin, with long noses and ears, golden brown long hair. One is small with curly whitish fur. Somewhere there is also a long, luxuriously black cat with emerald-green eyes.
There is a charcoal sketch pinned to a small easel on the floor over there in the corner, a nude man on his knees, his sinewy, perfectly proportioned torso upright but arching backward, head thrown back, mouth open in ecstasy or anguish, and between his spread thighs where his sex should be there is a smudgy blankness. I know what you must be thinking, even you, Mamita, because it doesn’t look like anything else. It’s as if that blankness represents the back of the head of a nebulous ghost. She can hear dogs barking downstairs, and now Herb’s bellowing Red Army Choir voice is singing “Happy Birthday.” A young Asian man comes a few days a week to houseclean, but there is no one to regularly feed his dogs. Herb must always worry about forgetting.
The other day I picked up this Rudolf Serkin recording of French Suites, says Herb when he comes back into the room, holding the record. I’ve been playing it in my bedroom. A quieter mood, he says, quieter but magical.
You were singing “Happy Birthday,” Herb?
Yes, to Mitzy. My female borzoi. He straightens up from the record player, the music gently dancing out into the studio. Even listening with one ear, Mamita likes it.
It is magical, she says.
Reality is magical, don’t you think, Yolanda? he says.
This assertion she needs to think over. How many people in Guatemala, including some she knew, who were in the Árbenz government or were even just considered sympathetic to it have been killed or imprisoned in the three years since the coup. The gringos compiled a list of suspected Communists for the new government, supposedly ten thousand people are on it. Could she be on it? Or was she considered just an ordinary young female secretary from a known anti-Communist family, not a member of the diplomatic service under Árbenz, who’d just happened to find a job in the Boston consulate. Was that why, after the coup, she hadn’t wanted to return to Guatemala, because she was afraid? Worried, too, that her friendship with el joven might have cast suspicion on her? In his last letter, el joven wrote that you could get put onto the Communist list even if you’d been overheard saying or were suspected of holding the belief that “in a Democracy the people choose the government.” During the months after the coup when he was taking refuge in the Mexican embassy, el joven fell seriously ill with typhoid, as did scores of others crowded together there. The United States was pressuring the ten or so foreign governments whose embassies in Guatemala were housing refugees to deny asylum to all of them because if any of those refugees were allowed into their countries they’d go on fomenting Communism there, too, and then it would all end with a giant Red stain extending from Mexico to Chile. As the months passed, those countries, exasperated with having to care for their uninvited guests, finally defied the US government, citing international asylum law as, at least, a pretext. Árbenz was allowed into Mexico, and a month later el joven followed. In his last letter el joven wrote that he’d gone to see Árbenz in Uruguay, where his exile continued, though it was destined to end in suicide after he returned to Mexico City. El joven wanted to come to Boston; he wrote that he had a new passport and identity. But we went back instead, Mamita and I, to Guatemala in 1957 or early ’58. By then the government was less worried about bilingual secretaries from good capitalist families who’d married a gringo than they were about what was, so to speak, gathering on the horizon: war that was going to last for over three decades.
I’m sure Sargent, Herb is saying, wasn’t even a regular churchgoer. I never set foot in any synagogue when I was a boy. My father was a Red, and we were, too, and so was your husband’s old man. Bert wasn’t exactly a yeshiva boy, you know. But he sure looked the part at his peddler’s cart after school, selling potatoes in his wool peasant coat and pants stuffed into his black knee socks, like old Moe made him do. I used to see Bert standing there in the cold, weighing out potatoes, and, oh Yolanda, let me tell you, did he look forlorn. Who could ever have seen Bert then and imagine: There’s a future University Club squash champion, master of false teeth, and the husband of a beautiful young Catholic woman from our Southern Hemisphere? The night before D-Day was the one time I ever willingly took part in a religious service, with a Christian chaplain killed the next day during the landing on Omaha. Out of a hundred and fifty men in my battalion, Yolanda, only seventeen of us survived
