Well, why not grab a baseball bat and hit him over the head? I said. My sister should have done that, if she wanted to help.
My oldest brother’s cricket bat, you mean. I don’t think it’s so easy. Any hint of violence paralyzes me too.
Of course, I thought to myself. I’d finally answered Bert’s violence with violence of my own, but I knew what Camila would say if I reminded her of that, that it was easier for a boy. Doubtlessly true, though I don’t know that I’d call it easy.
Well, your own father could be pretty mean, you’ve told me, I said.
If you mean bashing you over the head with patronizing pomposity, yeah—that British two-syllable yea-ah. But he never would have laid a finger on any of us. I like your sister, said Camila. She’s an emotional human, and she’s brave enough to try to talk about what troubles her. She must have loved you a lot when you were children. Who knows, maybe she still does. Though I have to say, I don’t see why she would.
Haha, I said.
Still my longest relationship, Camila Seabury. She and Gisela both for about five years, though with Camila, we were straight through to the end, whereas Gisela and I were off and on, probably more off than on, for all of it. And Camila was right, I did get over our breakup quickly. She kept the apartment, and I moved to Mexico City. I hadn’t even been there two months when I met Gisela, and that’s when something must have changed, because I’m probably still not over that. Would Camila really regard that as a change for the better?
Lexi and I are both unmarried. Neither of us has given our mother what she says she most wants, a grandchild. Just a coincidence, maybe? You can’t just go around blaming your family, your town, for that kind of thing, not at our age. But somehow take away my upbringing, take away Gary Sacco, Ian Brown, Arlene Fertig, and even what happened with Marianne Lucas, take away Monkey Boy and Gols, and who would I be? Would it be as if I’d never walked the earth? But I have walked the earth, and it’s been a long walk, and all of that is far in the past. Except I am seeing Marianne Lucas tonight. If nothing else, our dinner will be the only high school reunion I ever go to.
So I did manage to resist until we left New Haven. I reach down into my backpack and lift out the sandwich, pull it from its bag, set it down on the lowered seat tray, unwrap the wax paper but only around its top half, and hoist it to my lips for that first bite of crunchy sesame-seeded bread, capicola, soppressata, fresh mozzarella, olive oil–soaked hot red peppers, and sit back, savoring those flavors and textures. Finally I open the little Muriel Spark novel, holding it up in one hand. And read this sentence:
“Their eyes gave out an eager-spirited light that resembled near genius, but was youth merely …”
It makes me think of Lulú, the sweet, eager light in her eyes that chimes in my heart like a silvery bell. Gisela’s bottomlessly murky eyes were pretty much the opposite. Yet I’ve never in my life been so fixated—enthralled—by any gaze as by hers.
Besides journalists, all sorts of young foreign women, probably at least a slight majority of them gringas, were pouring into Central America during those war years: aid workers of every stripe, doctors and nurses without borders, solidarity activists, analysts and scholars of war and politics, spies, arms dealers, and even mercenaries. There were also those who would have been there even without the war: Peace Corps volunteers, embassy staff, grad students in every subject from anthropology to rain forest zoology, business types, eternal hippie backpackers; all manner of seekers seeking and scammers scamming, like those mixed up in the illegal adoption trade, fake orphanages filled with stolen and extorted babies.
Anyone might surprise. I knew a thirtyish British journalist, Cambridge grad, super suave fellow who was having a romance with a missionary nun from Indiana he’d met up in the Ixil. Sister Julia had graduated from University of Chicago Divinity School, she read Pascal and Simone Weil in French, and whenever she came down from the mountains to meet him at the lake or in Antigua or in the city, she traveled by bus with books of poetry in her knapsack. Rimbaud, Celan, Denise Levertov, I remember were poets he named. The British journalist and I weren’t close friends. The reason he came over to sit with me in Bar Quixote when I was drinking alone one night was because he was excited to tell me about his love affair with the nun from Indiana, and the reason he was so excited was because her last name was Goldberg, too, though she was “half-Jewish” by birth. I’m only half-Jewish, too, I told him. Do you think you might be related? he exclaimed. How many half-Jewish Goldbergs could there be? That made us both guffaw. Though she had a Catholic mother, she’d had to convert, because she’d never been baptized. He told me about another writer Sister Julia was into, Natalia Ginzburg, an Italian, half-Jewish and a Catholic convert too. That was the first time I ever heard of Natalia Ginzburg, but I didn’t read her until a few years later when I found some of her books in Spanish translation in a Mexico City bookstore. The British journalist told me he was in love with the missionary nun, but she refused to abandon the religious life because the people she was serving so needed her,
