The Origin of Species Read online

  He got up to clear the table.

  “I guess the meal was a little burned.”

  “Yes,” María said simply.

  He scraped the remains of their plates into the garbage, quickly, trying not to think about the waste. He couldn’t believe now that he hadn’t planned any side courses or backups, not so much as a salad or bowl of chips.

  “Can I get you anything else?” But a furtive scan of the kitchen had turned up only a bit of pumpernickel left over from Jiri and a few slices of browning Hungarian salami. “I could make you a sandwich or something.”

  From somewhere the thought rose up in him unbidden, If only she would just go.

  “Is okay. Just son’ bread, maybe, is good. And son’ water.”

  Water and bread. It almost brought tears to his eyes, the thought of all his misplaced hopes.

  He set two slices of Jiri’s brick-heavy pumpernickel in front of her, liberally greased with Fleischmann’s, and a glass of tap water.

  “Do you know his company, your friend Félix?”

  Alex felt his bowels fist up again. So they hadn’t finished with Félix.

  “How do you mean?”

  “What they do. Their work.”

  He figured he should play it safe.

  “I’m not sure, really. I guess they make aluminum. They must mine it or something.”

  “No, no mines. Is from the soil.”

  “Oh.”

  “They just have to take it like that, from the top. I know, from my country.”

  He didn’t like the direction they were headed.

  “You have aluminum?”

  “Not so much, I think. But your friend, his company was there.”

  Ah. So this was the rub. He expected some horror story now of ruined farmlands, polluted rivers, of cattle dying off or children coming down with rare cancers.

  “So that’s why you don’t like him,” he said.

  But María waved the suggestion off.

  “Was only some months they came, to dig some holes. Then there was the war, they came home.”

  Alex had actually been ready to use phrases like foreign investment in Félix’s defense, though María would have made mincemeat of him.

  “Tell me the truth,” María said, in an ominous teasing tone. “You play with him, don’t you? With Félix. Because he is a homosexual.”

  Alex’s blood froze.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I mean maybe you like that he is a homosexual. How he looks at you and so on.”

  Alex couldn’t quite pinpoint the exact nature of the horror that had risen up in him.

  “His being gay doesn’t have anything to do with it. He’s my friend. Like I said.”

  But María laughed.

  “I could feel it. How he didn’t like to see you with a woman.”

  Alex still wasn’t sure if what she was accusing him of sounded true because it was so or merely because he was always inclined to believe the worst about himself.

  “You’re just not used to men being friends with homosexuals.”

  “It doesn’t matter to me, what men do. But is true men are different here. Is very strange for me.”

  She had taken on the air of someone looking on at something that had nothing to do with her. You never had a chance with me, she seemed to be saying.

  “How, different?”

  “Different. Maybe is better I don’t say.”

  It was like a challenge now.

  “No, go ahead. It’s interesting.”

  “Yes. Maybe so.”

  María shifted in her chair with what looked almost like pleased anticipation.

  “The men here,” she started, “I don’t know. They are like boys. They don’t know what they want. They don’t know what it means to be a man.”

  Alex took the blow directly.

  “Ah.”

  “Look at you, how you live. You have everything, you have education, a nice house, you are safe. In El Salvador, there are no people like you, who are so free, only the poor, who have nothing, and the rich, who are always afraid of the poor. But you have freedom and you don’t use it. You’re with a woman, you don’t know what you want—you are polite, you don’t ask a question, you don’t say what you feel. Is true, in my country is different. The men, the good ones, are men. Is not macho—is because they must choose. Not like boys who want one thing on one day and a different one on the next.”

  Alex sat silent. He felt like a rabbit caught in the blaze of María’s headlights.

  “You are upset,” María said, laughing.

  “No, it’s fine,” he said. “It’s fine.”

  It felt unseemly to make any attempt to defend himself.

  “My Alex,” María said, in a maternal tone that seemed truly to spell the end of any chance of carnal involvement. She rose from the table. “Thank you for your supper. You are a very nice man.”

  He was getting his wish: she was taking her leave. He would never be able to face her again, if they ended like this.

  “You’re going already?”

  “I must meet with someone from my group. For the conference.”

  He stood by in a daze while she gathered her things. At the door she kissed his cheek lightly as if saying goodbye to some nephew or cousin.

  “Maybe you can still come to the Salvadoran parties, yes? Or my brother will miss you.”

  When she’d gone he collapsed on the couch. This was the worst, to feel infantilized—he would rather be a prick, an asshole, a cad, than a boy. Who was she to lord it over him, coming from her two-bit banana republic with its few thousand acres of hacienda and bush and its politics out of the Dark Ages? Yet she seemed to have more sense of herself in a single toss of her hair than Alex did in the whole edifice of his pathetic life.

  He turned on the radio, unable to bear the silence in the apartment. Gzowski was just announcing the lineup for the morning show repeats: a regional report from New Brunswick; a piece on Thanksgiving turkeys. In El Salvador, the rebels ran a radio station that was like the nation’s lifeblood: the entire war they’d managed to keep one step ahead of the enemy, moving transmitters, generators, aerials, on their backs in the dead of night, surviving carpet bombing and special forces assaults and U.S. signal-location equipment to go on the air every evening at six for their regular broadcast. These were María’s role models back home. Alex, meanwhile, had Peter Gzowski, reaching out to the nation’s housewives for their secrets on turkey basting.

  Ingrid had never made him feel this way, so dismissible; she had made him feel her equal, an adult. Everything else, her religion, her age, all the things he’d imagined were unworkable between them, seemed to grow small next to that. He thought again of the snow the last time he had visited: one day it had draped all the trees of Engelström in a mantle of white that afterward had glinted and dripped in the sun as if in a wonderland. Then once they had taken the ferry to the island of Ven, where Tycho Brahe had had his observatory, the island an eerie, enchanted place dotted with thatched-roofed farmhouses and smoking chimneys, seabirds forever wheeling overhead.

  He knew he was romanticizing the visit now. Her conversion had changed things—reading her letters he had always felt obliged to strip away the religious bits to get at the Ingrid he actually liked. When she collected him off the Landskrona ferry it was clear that she had aged, that she had moved on to a different phase of life, yet the look of her still made him ache, made him wonder that he had ever been with such a woman.

  “So you have come,” she said. “My not-so-Italian.”

  He had been on the road five months by then, on a patchwork ticket he had put together when he had left Nigeria. He settled into Ingrid’s little cabin, feeling like a stinking troll who’d stumbled into her life, dragging his worldliness and his dirt. In the house there were prayers before every meal; there was a Bible reading every evening. Alex and Ingrid were rarely alone, the entire day revolving around the children, getting them fed or off
to school or through their homework or ready for sleep. He sat with Ingrid in the living room after they were in bed but Lars, a gangly adolescent now, as tall as his mother, was down every few minutes on some pretext or other.

  “It’s difficult for them,” Ingrid said. “Our lives are so different now.”

  He knew from her letters that she hadn’t been with a man since she’d converted. She was waiting for God to send her the right one, she said, from which he’d assumed there’d be no question of sex. But now that he was here in the flesh, he wasn’t so certain. There was still the attraction between them, he felt it, and saw that Ingrid felt it too, from the way they were always skirting each other like charged particles. In practice, though, they remained scrupulously chaste, mumbling apologies if they bumped elbows in the kitchen, sitting down to eat with him at one end of the table and her at the other and the children between them like a wall. Then at night, when they talked on the couch, there were always those inches of space like an atmosphere they couldn’t cross.

  “It’s very late, I think.”

  “I’ll go.”

  It wasn’t until he rode into Landskrona with her one day to her work that they were truly away from the children. She was still driving her same old Volvo. They’d made love in it once, his first visit, exactly where he was sitting. She’d been wearing a dress, as if she had planned the thing, a light summer shift that had moved sexily beneath his hands.

  She had a dress on now.

  “Maybe it will be boring for you at my work,” she said. “If you like I can drop you in the town.”

  “No, I’d like to come.”

  She had given up her place at her elementary school after her conversion to take a job teaching language classes for new immigrants. “To change my life,” she had written him, and he had imagined her in some bright, sterile church setting, with acoustic tiles on the ceiling and posters of nature scenes and happy families on the walls. But the classes turned out to be in an old community center downtown that looked straight out of the sixties, the walls painted in flower and rainbow motifs and the lounges filled with corduroy couches and furniture made from tree trunks.

  “It’s because of you that I’m here,” Ingrid said, though she had never mentioned this. “Because of what you told me. That I shouldn’t close myself off. So you see, you had a big influence on me.”

  Alex didn’t know how to answer her.

  “I’m not even sure I would have remembered saying that.”

  “Yes, of course.” She smiled to hide that he’d hurt her. “It was only a small thing. But even still.”

  Her classes were full of people who seemed to have crawled out of the woodwork, for all the evidence you saw of them in the streets, brown-skinned men wearing hand-me-downs and women in burkas and kerchiefs and dark-eyed teenagers in Kraftwerk T-shirts. Alex was afraid Ingrid had made some terrible mistake: she looked so out of place, blond and blue-eyed and unblemished, like someone from a different species. But somehow the disjunction suited her. After his own years of teaching he envied the authority she had, how from the instant she entered the classroom everyone’s attention was with her.

  During a break, one of the other teachers, a rouge-cheeked woman whose animation radiated off her like a glare, buttonholed Ingrid in the coffee room, her eye on Alex.

  “It’s my friend from Canada,” Ingrid said finally, in English.

  “Canada! Ah, so!”

  “A very silly woman,” Ingrid said, as soon as they were away. “Just thinking to make a scandal.”

  The incident colored the rest of the day. At home Ingrid snapped at Lars for leaving his wet boots in the hall, and Lars sulked the whole evening.

  “I don’t understand,” he said, when Alex was helping him with his math, and pushed his books away.

  Alex had to fight to keep from losing his temper.

  “Maybe your mother can help.”

  He slipped out to his cabin when Ingrid was putting the children to bed. He didn’t think he could manage it, all this emotional footwork. But not long afterward, Ingrid appeared at his door.

  “You mustn’t run away from me,” she said.

  “Sorry. I just thought—”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. That you were angry.”

  “I’m angry, yes. But not at you.”

  They sat silent on the edge of his bed. Alex felt the weight of all the conversations they’d avoided until then.

  “You must be patient,” Ingrid said. “It’s very strange for us to have a man with us again after so many years.”

  “Not much of a man,” he said.

  “Don’t say so.”

  She shifted as if about to go but then leaned in to kiss him, tentatively, like someone trying something for the first time. Alex only let himself answer the kiss.

  “Yes, you are right,” she said. “We mustn’t.”

  Afterward, though, it felt as if they had crossed a border. The next night, she came out to the cabin again.

  “We must decide,” she said. “It’s too difficult, not to be one thing or the other.”

  But they didn’t decide, not really. Instead, each indiscretion gave a kind of permission for the next, so that one night it seemed acceptable to kiss, then to touch each other through their clothes, then to lie together half-naked on his bed. At the back of his mind Alex knew that deciding would surely mean they must stop, that there was no logical way forward, but somehow it was easier than he would have thought for them to ignore this. Ingrid had made clear that she couldn’t “make intercourse,” as she put it, they had at least set that particular limit, but then once they had set it they seemed freed to work up to everything short of it. It took several nights of this for Alex to admit in his own mind that he wasn’t really enjoying himself. He’d begun to feel the way he had back in high school after he’d felt up some girl in his car, dirtied and mean, that he’d done more than he was supposed to but less than he’d wanted. Meanwhile the children, to judge from their tense politeness at breakfast, had clearly figured out what he and Ingrid were up to, though what damage this was causing to their young Christian minds Alex couldn’t say.

  One night Ingrid, with what was almost her old uninhibited self, took him in her mouth and sucked him until he came. When he tried to reciprocate she eased him away from her.

  “Is it difficult for you to stop?” she said.

  “Is it for you?”

  He regretted his tone at once.

  “Perhaps it was wrong for you to come here. For me to invite you.”

  This was it, he thought, the end of their little deceptions.

  “Do you want me to leave?”

  She wouldn’t say it but it was clear they couldn’t continue as they were. He had made the mistake of thinking he could show up here as if Ingrid were a case study he was checking up on, instead of someone with a life, someone he’d been connected to.

  “I could visit my friend Ture for a while,” he said. “Since I haven’t seen him.”

  “Yes. Maybe so.”

  It was December by then. In Copenhagen, he found Ture on his own now but otherwise nearly unchanged from when he’d first met him, still smoking hash, still working odd jobs to keep up his social assistance. His apartment was almost literally knee deep in mess: dirty clothes, heaps of salvage, stacks of newspapers and books. One day they drank some hash tea that Ture had brewed and spent hours roaming the city with Ture’s friend Bent, a surly self-professed anarchist, ending up at Tivoli, the city’s amusement park. It was closed for the season, but Bent insisted they scale the fence.

  “I dunno,” Alex said, hardly able to stand by then. “I don’t think I can make it.”

  “Come on, you can tell your American friends that’s how they do things in Denmark.”

  Somehow, they made it over. The place looked surreal in the dark, with its empty rides and boarded-up stalls, its darkened fairy-tale buildings. Bent ended up climbing one of the roller-coaster hills and sc
reaming from the top like a madman. Two policemen came and Alex was sure they would be arrested, but they were merely escorted to the exit of the park and let go.

  “Fucking pigs,” Bent said, and spat.

  All Alex could think through all of this was how he wanted to be with Ingrid.

  “It can just be for a few more days,” he said on the phone. “I feel so awful here.”

  He knew she was thinking it would be easier if he didn’t come.

  “A few days,” she said. “We will try.”

  It was like his last visit all over again, this childish back-and-forth, except that this time he didn’t have the excuse of being a child. Then, right from the ferry terminal he got off on the wrong foot, leaning in to kiss her but checking himself at the last instant, and ending up just brushing her cheek.

  “Your friend is well?”

  He had been so cold, as if not to promise her anything.

  “He’s fine. He’s all right.”

  They stopped at the supermarket in Landskrona. The windows were tinseled with Christmas decorations.

  “I was thinking how you manage for money,” Ingrid said. “It must be difficult, on your travels.”

  “I saved some from when I was teaching. Enough to travel on, anyway.”

  “They paid you so well?”

  “Not really. I worked something out.”

  In fact he had almost doubled his income by selling some of his foreign exchange allowance on the black market. But he didn’t explain this to Ingrid.

  “And when you go home?” she said. “What shall you do?”

  “There’s some money waiting. To help me resettle.”

  “Ah. So you are not so poor.”

  “Not so poor, no.”

  She seemed to gather this in.

  “But in the meantime,” she said, “you don’t mind if I pay for things.”

  It was true—it was how he budgeted his travel, by assuming people would look after him. He wouldn’t have lasted a week in Sweden on his own, already down to his last seven or eight hundred dollars, with just a few thousand more waiting at home that wouldn’t even cover his student loans.