The Origin of Species Read online

  They crossed an area of rubble and blight to a tiny street of old barracks-style row houses that opened out to the rail yards and the badlands of the canal. There was a smell here of old ice and something else, like the humic smell of thaw but a bit ranker than that, a bit sour. The houses came up so hard against the street it seemed a violation to pass in front of them, the blue of midday TVs visible through the yellowed curtains. Miguel led him through a door at the end of the street and up a tottery staircase to a flat on the second floor. The whole of the place could be held in your eye in a glance, a tiny fifties-era kitchen at the back and then two rooms connected by a double doorway, the front one blocked off by a flowered sheet that had been tacked to the door frame. Out back, through a flimsy storm door that led out to the fire escape, Alex caught a glimpse of cluttered back yards, half of them strung with laundry to take advantage of the spring sun.

  “Is my home,” Miguel said, smiling broadly. “Come.”

  The middle room seemed to be Miguel’s. There was a small Formica-topped table with three battered chrome-and-rattan chairs, a worn corduroy loveseat, an unmade bed on the floor. Scotch-taped on the wall above the bed, in a fairly orderly fashion, were a Playboy centerfold of a decidedly Aryan blonde and a few smaller pictures of musclemen in various poses probably taken from some body-building magazine.

  Miguel had seen Alex’s eye go to the centerfold.

  “You like it?”

  Alex felt himself flush.

  “Not really my taste.”

  Miguel pulled a little curtain back from a cabinet at the foot of the bed to reveal the surprise of an expensive-looking Samsung stereo. Alex didn’t like to think where Miguel might have got the money for that, or for the fairly impressive wardrobe he had hanging on a metal rail in the corner—there were suits, sports coats, lounge-lizard lamé shirts, a row of immaculately pressed black pants. Yet nothing else about the place spoke of excess.

  Miguel put a Thriller cassette in the stereo and cranked up the volume.

  “I make the coffee!” he shouted, and disappeared into the kitchen.

  Sunlight beckoned through the thin sheet that hung over the doorway to the front room. It took some strength of will for Alex to resist its call, though he imagined a different world there, fluffed and pillowy, perhaps, or maybe with posters of Che and Fidel on the walls. He tried to busy himself by looking through Miguel’s tapes—standard pop items like Bon Jovi and Madonna and Duran Duran, half with the rough photocopied liners of bootleg editions. There was nothing that looked Salvadoran or even remotely Latino, though the liners conjured up every Third World marketplace Alex had ever been in as vividly as a smell.

  Miguel had returned with the coffee. He didn’t bother to turn down the music.

  “Is good, no?” he shouted, though the truth was that Alex found it somewhat inferior to the house blend at his corner Van Houtte’s. “El Salvador is very famous for coffee!”

  Alex ought to be taking more advantage of Miguel. He liked to think of himself as someone who kept abreast of world events, yet he knew next to nothing about El Salvador except what he read in the papers—military strongmen, right-wing death squads, left-wing guerillas. That was what the country was for him, not some poor campesino on a hillside growing his coffee beans, though that was likely what the fighting was all about. And there was probably some ugly political reason why the coffee he was now drinking tasted as dull as the Maxwell House he got off the shelf at Steinberg’s, though maybe the beans, bought at rockbottom prices by some conglomerate and then specially roasted and centupled in price, were exactly the ones that showed up in the premium blends at Van Houtte’s.

  When he’d started at St. Bart’s, he’d imagined it as a crash course in international politics. But then one of the Iranians had told him of his family’s flight across the mountains into Pakistan, for which he claimed to have paid fifty thousand dollars. Alex had been staggered by the sum. He had imagined some executive exit with Mercedes and driver.

  “Is very bad,” the man had gone on. “Make you pay for everything, but then they steal you, no food, no clothes. My daughter she die.”

  Alex didn’t think he’d understood. The man’s tone had barely altered.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “My daughter die.” Now Alex heard the catch in his voice. “Too cold. No food. Is very bad.”

  After that, Alex had tread lightly. These weren’t the kinds of things you wanted to broach over coffee during break. He wasn’t there to be a voyeur of other people’s misfortunes; he was there to teach English. Every class he felt the same disjunction, doing past participles while out there in his students’ heads were the memories of horrors he could hardly imagine, yet he couldn’t figure a way around the thing. The only solution would have been to become people’s friend, get into their lives, do all the hard, slow work of growing intimate, and who had time for that?

  He seemed to have time for Miguel, though.

  From an old Westclox Baby Ben near Miguel’s bed Alex saw he had little more than an hour before his lesson at Berlitz.

  “Any word on your case yet?” Alex said, though somehow it hurt him to ask.

  Miguel had straddled one of the dining chairs and was bobbing to the thump of “Billy Jean.”

  “Eh?”

  “Your case. Your refugee claim.”

  “Psshh. Backlog, backlog, tha’s all. Meantime we get our few hundred dollars to eat and waste our time. I think maybe is better to go illegal in the U.S. Son’ Salvadorans making big money there.”

  It felt ridiculous to be shouting like this.

  “It’s probably better to wait,” Alex said, though what he meant was, it was better for María to wait. “They’re saying there’s going to be an amnesty soon.”

  It had occurred to Alex that his distrust of Miguel might be another case of simple animal resistance, having more to do with María than anything else. Yet there was still that aura of difference that came off him. Why did he live down here in St. Henri when most of his countrymen, even the ones who came to St. Bart’s, lived up on the Plateau? For all his chumming up to Alex, Miguel had never once asked him for advice on his claim, though Alex knew this was something the other students talked about incessantly, trading stories of what worked and what didn’t and building up a whole mythology of fact and superstition and lore.

  Miguel was telling him about a Salvadoran he’d heard of in L.A. who was getting rich just selling pupusas to other Salvadorans.

  “You go there, is like San Salvador, Salvadorans everywhere! Not like here.”

  “But you live so far from the other Salvadorans here.”

  “Bah,” Miguel said, not missing a beat, “is jus’ a ghetto up there, tha’s all. Is not my style.”

  The song ended. Miguel, seeming suddenly bored, reached over to the stereo and hit the eject. Alex felt his ears ring with the sudden silence.

  “So tell me,” Miguel said, pulling his chair up closer to Alex’s. “Which is the good club here for girls? The Canadian girls?”

  Alex felt himself bristle.

  “I don’t really know the clubs, to tell you the truth. You might try some of the bars on Crescent Street.”

  Miguel made a face.

  “Too many Jews,” he said.

  Alex took a big gulp of coffee. It had been stupid to come here. He cast his eyes around the room to avoid looking at Miguel, trying to find something to hang his excuses on so he could flee. By a kind of reflex his eyes went to the sheet that closed off the front room.

  He felt Miguel’s gaze on him.

  “I’m having a party tomorrow,” Alex blurted out. “If you wanted to come. You and your sister.”

  He regretted the invitation at once. He’d just wanted an exit line, something with finality.

  Miguel’s face lit up. “A party, yes, Mr. Alex! Is good!” He clapped an arm around Alex’s shoulder. “I will come. I hope to see many Canadian girls.”

  Alex felt hopelessly dirtied now, by his o
wn motives, by Miguel. Even his dislike of him seemed to sully him: no one Alex knew would have spoken like that, yet if he’d said, “Too many JAPs,” if he’d known the idiom, Alex might not have batted an eye. Then for all Alex knew—though somehow he doubted this—Miguel was on the run from some death squad.

  Miguel saw him down the stairs.

  “You’re a good man, Mr. Alex,” he said.

  At the door Alex noticed, for the first time it seemed, how small Miguel was—he couldn’t have stood more than five feet. Alex completely overshadowed him. An old newspaper had blown up against the stoop, and Miguel, with surprising fastidiousness, bent to clear it away.

  “A mañana,” he said, then took Alex’s hand in both of his and gave it such a firm Latin squeeze that, for an instant at least, Alex forgave him everything.

  – 4 –

  Alex had what amounted to his lunch, though it was already past four, at the Casa Italia, a passable short-order place near the Forum that for some reason was wildly popular. On the back wall, near the kitchen, was a rack that sported the signed sticks of the various NHL luminaries who had graced the place, but everything else was pure Italian kitsch, the stucco work, the plastic checkerboard tablecloths, the huge poster of the Holy Family that hung behind the espresso machine. Alex ate there because it was close and cheap and quick, though there was also the fact that the owner, Domenic, a Molisano like his parents, a mixed blessing, had taken a kind of patronal interest in him. The place was Alex’s only real contact with the city’s Italians. Before he’d moved south he’d lived just a couple of metro stops from Little Italy, but had seldom gone up there. It was the alienness of the place that had somehow got to him, not that there was anything there that wasn’t dead familiar, the faces, the voices, the look of the houses, but seeing all of it from the outside made him feel at once how insular it was, how cut off from the wider world.

  At this hour the Casa Italia was nearly deserted. Domenic was at a back table talking to a suited man in the somber, highfalutin English he put on for people of stature, in this case probably the noodle salesman.

  “I’m not saying I won’t change the thing if that’s the law says to do it. I’m just saying the Italians we been here a hundred years, we got some rights too. You go to Chinatown you got every fucking sign it’s Chinese and nobody says anything.”

  Domenic’s beefy son Carmen took Alex’s order. Domenic hadn’t so much as looked over at him—it was all part of the intricate push-and-pull of insider relations, made subtle by a hundred different forces, the noodle salesman, the empty restaurant, that Domenic was from Campobasso, the provincial capital, while Alex’s people were from the boonies. Fucking Italians. Yet every time Alex set eyes on Domenic, he felt a visceral tug. It was the mountain look of him, hard and stoic and plain; his mother’s look. It was ancient, that look, you could feel that; the look of the Samnites, Alex thought, the old Sabine tribe of their parts. It didn’t show up much in his father, but Alex knew why—his people had come to the mountains a mere few generations back, fleeing some blood feud or crime, something Alex had learned from a cousin on his last pass through Italy, along with a few other facts about his family he’d never had any inkling of.

  He ought to have picked up a paper before coming in. He and Félix had more or less dropped the Berlitz lesson book in favor of open conversation, unbeknownst, of course, to Alex’s Nazi boss, Mme Hertz. But now, with Félix, Alex had to go in fully armed and fully informed, lest he make the mistake of simply falling back on his usual half-baked orthodoxies. He’d almost lost it when Félix had defended Reagan’s bombing spree in Libya.

  “But it was all staged!” Alex had said at once, though he’d barely scanned the articles on the subject. “That whole nightclub thing in Berlin, they didn’t even have any proof!”

  Félix had merely shrugged his Gallic shrug, with an equanimity that had made Alex feel like the worst sort of conspiracy theorist. “So people say. Maybe it’s true, but so far nobody said what’s a better way.”

  Anywhere else in the country Alex could have comfortably relied on a knee-jerk anti-Americanism, but not here in Quebec, where they still regretted not having joined the Americans in the Revolution. Alex was sick of it, all this pussyfooting around the minefields of nationalist politics, except that Félix, for some reason, had remained his most reliable customer, making possible indulgences like this restaurant lunch.

  Carmen had brought out his penne, along with some sort of seafood antipasto that Alex had never seen on the menu.

  “Did I order that?”

  Carmen nodded toward his father, who was still talking to the noodle salesman.

  “On the house,” he said, then motioned with his chin to say, Eat.

  With Alex’s after-meal coffee—nothing like cappuccino here, just thick-as-crude espresso—the bill came to four ninety-five. A good deal, though with the expenses of the morning he was already way over his daily budget. He added a buck as a tip, given the antipasto, despite the fact that he’d had to choke the stuff down. Ever since his overexposure to fish in the Galápagos, any kind of seafood and he’d feel his gag reflex kick in.

  I guess it happens, doesn’t it, one bad experience and it puts you off a thing for life.

  Well, Peter, I’m not sure “bad experience” really captures the magnitude of the matter.

  He popped up to his apartment again to change and get his Berlitz book, not daring to risk the wrath of Fräulein Hertz if he showed up without it. From there it was a quick dash over to University to Berlitz’s beautifully corporate offices. Alex had always thought of Berlitz as some fusty Old World holdover, but politics had served it well in Quebec, where it did a brisk trade among anglophones getting francisized under the hated Bill 101 and among francophones who’d thumbed their noses at English in their youth and now couldn’t get by without it. Alex had been hired at breakneck speed: three days of training and then plopped in a tony classroom at the princely sum of eight seventy-three an hour before a select handful of students toting their combination-lock briefcases and Chanel handbags stuffed with Berlitz workbooks and pads and complimentary pens.

  He had to suppress a thrill of pleasure whenever he entered the Berlitz offices. The hush; the smell of the air; the sense of having penetrated, however obliquely and under whatever false pretenses, the inner sanctum. He breezed past reception to avoid a sighting of Mme Hertz and toward the warren of classrooms. Through closed doors he caught the reassuring patter of the Method: question and response, the Berlitz catechism. The order of it, the mindlessness, was a balm after the chaos of St. Bart’s. A gulf divided this place from St. Bart’s and yet he knew that in his toady’s heart this was the work he took more seriously, as if St. Bart’s was just slumming, a time-waster, a sop.

  Félix was already waiting for him in one of the big leather armchairs set out in the special room reserved for executive one-on-ones. He rose to take Alex’s hand as he came in, towering over him like a rebuke.

  “I suppose today you give me the coup de grâce,” he said, with the undertone of deference that always put Alex on edge, so little had he done to earn it. Alex felt the flush of conflicted emotion rise up in him that Félix always stirred, a strange mix of attraction and its denial. He was only a businessman, after all, patrician and gray, always in those suits of his carefully styled to give a hint of the casual but which probably cost three times as much as the stereo Alex had begrudged Miguel.

  He wasn’t wearing one today, though.

  “Ah, yes, I’ve just come from home,” he said, as if to excuse himself, though he was dressed in a cashmere pullover and plush cords that still gave him the air of the scion of some old seigneurial line.

  Six weeks now, Alex had been meeting with Félix, as often as three times a week. From the outset he’d decided Félix was exactly the sort of smug, chip-on-his-shoulder Quebecois that everyone west of Cornwall thought was the norm here: it was that Gallic manner of his, like a sudden chill in the room, as if it fell to
Alex somehow to carry the full blame for their coming together. Alex had started their first class with his standard opener in these one-on-ones, asking about Félix’s work.

  “I don’t want to talk about that, it’s very technical,” Félix had said tersely, and right off the tone between them had been set, and Alex had seen his entire lesson suddenly give way to empty space.

  All through their early sessions there had been this strange tussle of foray and resistance, as if Alex were some student wasting Félix’s time for a school project. They’d chance onto a subject that showed promise, but then just when they’d reached a certain momentum Alex would manage to derail things with an ill-considered question or found himself floundering in the vast bogs of his own ignorance. Félix would grunt, he’d stare at his hands, then lapse into silence.

  “Ah, well, yes,” he’d say finally, with his little frown. “So.” And that would be the end of it.

  They got onto literature once—Alex ought to have been grateful, someone actually literate for a change—but very quickly Alex ended up in the usual cul-de-sac: all of Félix’s background was in the classics, and in French texts Alex had never heard of, or had only gazed at on library shelves.

  “It’s normal,” Félix said, in what seemed his idea of making allowances. “The schools now, they don’t teach these things. At my school it was different. You’ve heard of it, I suppose, Jean de Brébeuf, it was Trudeau’s school, but they were all the same, those schools, very rigorous. I don’t think you have that on your own side.”

  Arrogant nob, Alex had thought. He hadn’t missed Félix’s ploy of mentioning Trudeau only to dismiss him, so he could have his pedigree and eat it too—they were all the same, these bloody nationalists, always playing both sides, damning the priests and then naming the metro stops after them, holding Trudeau up as a proof of their worldliness and then deriding him as a sellout.