The Origin of Species Read online

  “Because of the union,” she said, when he’d screwed up the courage to ask why she’d left home.

  “The union made you leave?”

  She actually laughed.

  “Because I was part of the union. Is very hard then.”

  She’d been a teacher in San Salvador, he’d got that much out of her—“dans la banlieue,” she’d said, in the suburbs, whatever that could mean. He couldn’t picture it, what her school might look like, what sorts of lesson plans she might write up. All he knew of her country were the acronyms he read in the news, FMLN, FECCAS, FAPU, ERP, the splinter groups within splinter groups, the leftists who couldn’t be trusted and the rightists who could. In the library he looked up articles in back issues of The New Republic and The Manchester Guardian, but the more he learned, the murkier things became: here was a country with a semblance of order, opposition parties, an elected government, but all that was the merest scrim, a rag draped over the void. In a garbage dump outside San Salvador truckloads of bodies showed up every morning in various states of mutilation, split in half, maybe, or with the heads cut off or the severed genitals stuffed in the mouth, and all this went on while American congressmen praised the progress in human rights and voted funds for new helicopter gunships. The bodies were just a sideshow: meanwhile, there was the war, whole villages burnt to the ground if the rebels had so much as begged a glass of water in them, and half the country in refugee camps, where you waited for the chance in a million that some government or church group would pick you out from the miserable rest and take you home.

  At El Mozote, the soldiers brought everyone to the square and separated the men from the women and children, putting the men in the church and the women and children in some nearby houses. Over the course of a morning they tortured the men and then executed them, either decapitating them in the church with machetes or taking them to the woods outside town to be shot. In the afternoon, they started with the women, first the younger ones, whom they raped and killed, then the rest, whom they shot in groups in a house at the edge of town. Some of the children they had already hanged from trees around the playing field near the school; the remainder they herded into the sacristy at the back of the church and machine-gunned through the windows. Only two people survived, a boy who ran into the woods after seeing a baby speared on a bayonet, and a woman who somehow managed to crawl behind a bush when her own group was taken out to be shot.

  It beggared the mind that humans could ever do such things, and yet Alex couldn’t remember having taken any special notice of the event when it had first come to light. Even now he could feel his brain trying to shunt it off to some back corner: there was no use to it except the guilty thrill of its unambiguousness, its stark evidence that the enemy was a monster. Beyond that there was only undigestible horror, the blood and the screaming, the children hanging from tree limbs while their legs twitched. None of these things brought him closer to María—rather, he felt the weight of them like a third person between them, someone who knew, and knew, and made anything he could say pointless. He kept seeing the scrubby woods of El Mozote, the soldiers, the mud houses, like a bad dream he couldn’t shake. The soldiers were just rebels with better uniforms, disgruntled peasants whom the army had got to first. People heard of these savageries and always imagined themselves as the good guys, but Alex wasn’t so sure: if the captain had come to him and said, “Kill the children,” who knew if he’d have resisted.

  It didn’t help to be off spelunking like this in the gray zones of moral relativism when he was at one of María’s church-basement solidarity nights. Not a lot of the people there were disgruntled peasants, it turned out—they were ideologues, Marxist-Leninists, Trotskyites, Maoists, educated urbanites like María and Miguel who hadn’t clawed their way up the continent to get there but had taken a connecting flight through Miami to Dorval. He met a mechanic who ran a hamburger joint off St. Lawrence; an accountant who’d done agitprop at a camp in Costa Rica but worked in construction now; a sociologist who’d been an advisor to the guerillas, on matters like the most humane colors to paint the detention cells where they held kidnap victims. He never met an actual fighter, he wasn’t sure why: maybe they didn’t survive long enough to leave, or were just having too much fun.

  He could tell there were all sorts of fault lines at these gatherings, but was never quite sure where they ran. There’d been betrayals and reversals, splinterings, questions over methods, but it wasn’t as if people were ready to bear their wounds to him. He got treated probably just as he deserved, as someone who couldn’t be expected to understand. A scuffle broke out once at one of the pan-Latino nights, and it took him a while to figure out what had happened: a couple of Cubans had tried to crash the event, looking for women or just lonely, and had been roundly turfed out. The Cubans were reviled for having abandoned Fidel, although in the Great Chain of Latino Being they still had a certain cachet over the Salvadorans, who languished on the bottom links, well below the Chileans and below even the Guatemalans, who at least had their colorful national garb to set them off. Guanacos, the Salvadorans were called: hard workers, but not too bright.

  María fit half the national type. She’d take him to these events—though it was more as if Miguel did, and she just happened to come along—and then she’d be off arranging tables or selling food or carting kegs of draft to the bar while he was left in some back corner with the men. It put him in mind of the courtships he’d seen in his childhood, where the suitor would come and drink highballs in the living room with the males while the women did the work. Except that there was no intimate moment afterward, with the trailing chaperones: the whole night might pass, and he’d be lucky to so much as bump elbows with María. Meanwhile his conversations at the back of the room, with men who all stood a good head shorter than he did, were never quite as compelling as he might have hoped: there was all the forced bonhomie to be got through, until his face hurt, and the problems with language and noise, the sense of sticking out like an extra appendage. It was almost worse than getting stuck with the other gringos—las masas, he thought of them as, the hangers-on, the milling dispossessed—or with Miguel. Miguel came and went, had his own shadowy network of associates that he checked in with like a secret service agent, but sooner or later he always turned up next to Alex.

  “Is good for you, man? You like it?”

  He kept trying to figure Miguel’s angle. More than once it crossed his mind that Miguel was trying to marry María off to him. Alex was ashamed at how his blood quickened at the thought: he would stoop as low as that, in a pinch. Over time, surely, she’d grow to love him, which he took to mean that she would sleep with him. But then this was the sort of scheme at which María would have laughed out loud, even Miguel would have understood that.

  He doubted he’d ever seen Miguel and María exchange more than a dozen words the whole time he’d known them. Yet some line of force joined them, nothing as straightforward as affection but more like an animal awareness. He thought of Miguel as her chaperone, but the matter wasn’t as obvious as that—he was always there in Alex’s peripheral vision, sometimes just standing alone, talking to no one, watching over things, yet Alex had the sense that if he’d been the sort to get María off by herself, Miguel wouldn’t have stood in his way. But then he wasn’t the sort; maybe that was why Miguel had chosen him.

  About the only time Alex and María had actually been alone together had been at a mass, at her little neo-baroque church in the East End. Alex hadn’t been to mass in years, and it felt to him like the primitive blood ritual it actually was.

  “You are not a Christian,” she said after, in her blunt way. “I can see it.”

  He reddened. There had seemed an openness to her in the church that he’d never seen before, as if she might be approachable, someone he might get around to touching one day.

  “I was raised one. But no. Not anymore.”

  “Is okay,” she said, making light of the subject. He’d caught sight of her r
oom once and there’d been a shrine in the corner with a little plaster Madonna and votive candles. “Is still time.”

  He didn’t know what made him think he could bridge gulfs like these. He thought about her constantly, obsessed with her with the sort of achy unreasonableness, the readiness to court humiliation, that he hadn’t felt since high school. Yet the more he saw her, the less there was to say. She was working two jobs now, waiting tables and doing piecework for a sweatshop on the Plateau; he’d call her and dread getting her brother and suddenly hang up after the second ring, then ten minutes later call again. Then he’d manage to see her and there was always the same sense of anticlimax. The few times he’d stolen a moment alone with her at the end of a night he had stood there at her door, the blue light of late-night TVs flickering in the neighbors’ windows, and all feeling, all hope, had drained from him. It wasn’t just El Mozote and all that; it was everything, his life, the lie he had made of himself as this shambling, good-hearted white guy.

  “Well.” He’d lurch in awkwardly for the kiss on the cheek. “Hasta la vista.”

  “Sí, sí, hasta luego.”

  More and more she was just this burden to him, of knowledge, of thwarted desire. He’d joined a local chapter of Amnesty International over the summer: not for her sake, he told himself, and certainly not as anything he’d even dare mention to her, and yet she was the one who had driven him to it. Amnesty was exactly the sort of white, liberal do-gooder group he loathed, but then he came across an interview with a former death squad member in one of the journals he had been reading.

  “If there was a protest from Amnesty or something,” he said, “then we let them go. Otherwise, we killed them.”

  Twice a month now he met in an airless room in the downtown Y with a group of lonely-looking hair-shirters like himself and drafted letters to tyrants around the world politely beseeching them to cease their atrocities. At home, he continued the work on his new personal computer, a suitcase-sized portable with a flip-up plasma screen that he’d talked his father into funding—or rather, that his mother had, on his behalf—to help with his dissertation, though so far about all he’d done on it was write his Amnesty letters. “Your Excellency,” the letters began, or “Your Highness,” or “Your Grace.” It has come to our attention. There have been reports. We are deeply concerned. He sent the letters out not so much because he believed in them but because he reasoned that even if he didn’t, it didn’t mean they wouldn’t work. He had quickly learned to avoid the Salvadoran cases: too much conflict of interest, he thought, after appeals started coming in against the guerillas under the dreaded heading “Extrajudicial Executions.”

  Somehow he had frittered away his summer like this, mooning over María and finding every excuse to avoid whatever was truly pressing. His dissertation, for one thing, on which the only progress he’d made was drafting a new, as yet unapproved, proposal; getting his life in order, for another, making a plan, sorting out his priorities. He’d been home for a week, with the obscure intention of gleaning some sort of insight into how families ticked; though with each day that passed, it only became clearer why he abhorred them. There were children everywhere all of a sudden, nieces and nephews he’d taken for granted for so long they seemed like weeds he hadn’t tended to.

  “Forget about romance,” his sister Mimi had said once. “Your children are the biggest love affair you’ll ever have.”

  At the time he’d thought, Not enough sex, but now he hung on the notion as if it might save him. Then he went by to see her.

  “I’m not even sure I like my children,” she said now. She was about half his size, the legacy, probably, of protein deficiency back in the old country and a bout of anorexia as a teen, though now she looked wasted away from even her usual elfin self. She’d just built a new house that she hated, so that there were rooms in it she wouldn’t even enter, so far did they fall from her hopes.

  “My children are like strangers to me. They’re like these lugs who showed up here and I have to look after them.”

  It was true: her children were lugs. Mimi loved books, loved conversation, had had hopes, but her boys, three in a row and big as oxen, no protein deficiencies there, spent their days in the rec room glued to the Mario Brothers. Mimi had raised them, but they hadn’t turned out like her. They had turned out like her husband Nick. Alex remembered finding him alone with them once when they were little, and the smallest screaming bloody murder when Nick had tried to pick him up.

  “I want Mommy! I want Mommy! I want Mommy!”

  Nick had put the kid down as if he were a ticking bomb.

  “Okay, okay.” Not panicked, really, not angry; just baffled. He was a good man; he liked American football, he’d been to university, he never used five words when three would do.

  “You might want to pop next door and get your sister,” he’d said.

  Alex wasn’t sure what it meant, that Mimi had given her lifeblood, had given up teaching, had read Dr. Spock, only to produce these pod-kids who were nothing like her. Meanwhile Nick had stood back like a breeder watching his stock and had somehow prevailed.

  “They’re just teenagers,” Alex said. “They’ll come out of it.”

  “All I live for now is when they leave home. It’s awful but it’s all I can think about.”

  Alex tried his luck with his brother Bruno’s daughter, Melinda. She was five, a better test case. He took her to lunch at McDonald’s; he took her to the petting zoo at Colasanti Farms. It was a perfect day. In the evening they sat with her folks and went over it.

  “Tell them about the lion cub,” he said. “How it came up to the window.”

  Melinda completely ignored him, looking off to one side with a wicked little half-smile.

  “She’s probably just tired,” her mother said. Alex got into his father’s pickup and drove home, though in the driveway, finally, he turned off the engine and sat blubbering like a child because he’d been snubbed by a five-year-old.

  That had been his refresher in family dynamics. Back in Montreal—who knew why he chose this moment for it?—he got out his little address book from years before, filled with the names of people he’d met in hostels or on roadsides or at currency exchange booths whom he hardly remembered, and he called Ingrid. He heard the ring tone at the other end, with its echoey European chirr, and the panic set in, at all the questions he didn’t know how to answer.

  There it was, her Swedish singsong.

  “Hejsan.”

  “It’s Alex. From Canada.”

  A long pause.

  “Oh. I see.”

  Things went downhill from there. The sureness he’d thought he’d feel at the sound of her voice, the knowing what to say, hadn’t come.

  “I got your letter,” he started.

  Her English was rusty.

  “Yes. I have wondered.”

  “It came a while ago, actually. January, I think.”

  Another pause.

  “Oh.” Why had he admitted that? “So. Then, you are not so convinced.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Not sure,” she corrected. “What you would like.”

  Every word seemed so freighted. He’d been an idiot to think they could just pick things up like old times, as if all these years hadn’t passed.

  “It’s just that my life is a bit complicated right now.” But he’d grown defensive. “It’s not as if I can afford to just hop on a plane.”

  That had been the worst thing to say. The tone was off, the suggestion of imposition, the crass sound of afford.

  The last time they’d been together, they had argued over money.

  “Yes, I see,” Ingrid said, and then, with sudden Oxford precision, “But of course, you needn’t have answered me.”

  Afterward he wondered if he hadn’t intended to botch things. It’s not as easy as you think was what had been going through his head. But she had softened finally, had sounded almost contrite.

  “Maybe it’s a better idea you sho
uld write me a letter. Maybe it’s clearer.”

  For all his months of agonizing, he felt he’d come nowhere. They hadn’t even mentioned the boy, not in so many words—it was as if there was some test he had to pass before they could get to that. Then the days went by, then more, and the letter didn’t get written. He tried, then again, but couldn’t get the tone right, kept slipping into self-pity and excuse, couldn’t find the balance between what to include and what to withhold. The boy, he kept thinking; what mattered was the boy. He did a draft on his computer but then reverted to long hand—he couldn’t bear those tight little dots that his printer spit out, as if there was nothing of him in the words, as if he hadn’t sweat blood.

  He could barely remember now what he’d said in the letter he’d eventually sent out. Two tight little pages: one for the past and one for the future, that was how it had seemed to him. He’d weighed every word, as if he were on probation, though there was also the other side of it, a kind of seeking permission or a waiting to be told, This is what’s right. He could be let off the hook, still; there was that chance. He thought of that, and saw himself falling, with what felt like freedom or terror, he couldn’t say which.

  Nearly a month had passed now since he’d sent the letter off. With each day that went by without a response, his thoughts grew more wild. He’d been too dry, too removed, as if they were dealing with a piece of real estate to be portioned off; he’d said the expected things, the ones any idiot could guess, but not the ones that mattered. He couldn’t remember if he’d offered to go to him, if he’d been as clear as that: was that possible, had he left out the most important thing? In his own mind nothing counted, really, until he showed up in the flesh. He ought to be home right now calling or writing again, offering to board the first plane, instead of sitting here at a conference on ozone depletion with a woman who was so extraneous to the main thrust of his life that to be with her was little more than a way of not being with himself.