In a bookstore I picked up an account of their history. Antigua was nested among three. Of those, Volcán de Agua was the largest, a looming pyramidal presence dominating the city. The tip was long gone, the huge mouth ragged, and therein lay the story. On the night of September 10, 1541, after three days of torrential rain, an earthquake hurled collected water out of the mountain’s cone, taking with it a massive portion of the top. The city on the slope below, the new colonial capital, was buried under tons of mud. I wrote it up in my own words (well, a little unavoidable plagiarism) and received Catherine’s outright praise.
That led to a discussion of other earthquakes in the country, catastrophic ones, that is, eighteen on record since 1565, three of them in this century. But when we came to the one in 1976 in which over 20,000 people died, she refused to talk about it because the international relief efforts were “highly political.” I added a silent “anomalistic” to her list of adjectives and almost walked away again.
Still, the journal strategy was working. My stipulation to students was to log only observations of life outside themselves. The point was to steer them away from the inevitable tendency to moon about their inner lives, which usually led to very bad writing. I liked it now for the same discipline. I found comfort in gathering a list of details—a line of little girls in blue uniforms crossing the street with a nun at each end, a man selling newspapers, piled three feet high on his head. I counted things: the arches on each floor of the Palace of the Captains General (twenty-seven) and the number of women I saw with at least one gold-capped tooth (forty-three).
Then the process itself pulled a couple of tricks. I was walking back from the school to my digs at the end of the day. The sun was still out, rain clouds delayed. The white sidewalk ahead, at right angles to the white building facades, appeared to be part of the architecture, a long geometric shape with sharp shadows and shafts of light. I walked through it, becoming part of it, then in my room described it, put it in an envelope and mailed it to Rebecca. She’d know what it was, another answer to a question she had repeatedly set before me, in her ongoing analysis of what made me tick. What really thrills you? That was how it went. What was I passionate about? Usually I just grunted, but one day I shot back an answer.
“Duke Ellington’s Mood Indigo. The Adagietto Movement of Mahler’s Fifth. Moby Dick. Any of the Impressionists. All of Dostoevsky. Emily Dickinson. Pinot Grigio. The Great Gatsby. Ted Williams. An inside-the-park home run. Simon and Garfunkel. Bach. Starry Night. Did I say Emily D? Doonesbury. The quartet from Rigoletto. King Lear. The Seventh Veil. Bob Dylan. Dylan Thomas. Sergeant Pepper. The big bang theory. Bucky Fuller. Lucky Jim. Hucky Finn. Marshall McLuhan. Howl! Franck’s D-Minor. Sibelius. The printing press. Arts and Crafts. Gilbert and Sullivan. Fats Waller. Isaac Asimov. The Parthenon. The Iliad. Barbra! Aretha! Did I mention John Coltrane? John Cage? Well, maybe not John Cage. John Lennon? Oscar Peterson? Koko Taylor? Lena Horne? Hammurabi’s Code? How about the theme from A Love Story, as sung by Andy Williams?” I took a breath and bellowed: “She fills my heart!”
Rebecca laughed, to her credit. I reminded her of Binx in The Moviegoer, she said, “Passion by proxy.” I told her I was pleased to be associated with any Walker Percy character, especially Binx, who was prone to hearing a great “rumble” in his “descending bowel.”
The truth was I could never predict what would “really thrill” me. I actually got a lump in my throat watching the TV retirement ceremony for John Havlicek during half-time at a basketball game at Boston Garden. And once when I was standing in the stadium at Fenway Park before a game began, impatiently waiting out “The Star Spangled Banner,” I was knocked for a loop by the words “still there.” Not that the flag was still there, not the ramparts, not anything in the song itself, God knows, but the fact that something was “still there.”
What was happening now was different, but not totally unfamiliar. Thoreau, one moonlit night, fishing from a boat with a sixty-foot line, felt a faint “vibration,” a message from another reality far below the water’s surface. And Henry James said something once about guessing the unseen from the seen. Though that seemed fatuous to me, I often told students to listen for the faint tap-tap-tap when they read fiction, like a knock on the door in the night, gentle at first, then louder and louder.
I didn’t tell them to listen for that in their own experience. But now, for instance, I would be in a tienda, say, buying toothpaste from a very cordial clerk—cordial the way almost everyone was, with a little air of old ceremony—and suddenly tap-tap-tap, I would know for a just a second that I was living in two worlds, and the one that was visible to me was not the realest reality.
I don’t mean by that the seamier aspect of the city. That was here too, like the scorpion that frequented the school bathroom, or the beggars who appeared out of nowhere. Or thieves. Once I watched a pickpocket apply his remarkable skill in plain sight and walk away into traffic, all before I caught on. Or the curious amount of public drunkenness. I learned to be careful to skirt fresh puddles of vomit on my morning runs.
One morning I came upon a young man lying on the sidewalk, head in the gutter, a woman sitting quietly next to him, a baby on her back. Had they been there all night? The guy looked unconscious, but he was breathing, just falling-down drunk. I tried to ask the woman if I could help, move him to safety, at least. But she turned away from me before I could speak, while the baby sucked placidly on the end of her braid.
The new reality I sensed was far less obvious than all that. Of course, I considered Stenning’s claim that a war was in progress, right now, all around me. But if so, there was no convincing sign of it. The television news shows I caught in the bars and the Ávila parlor never mentioned war, and the omnipresent camouflage fatigues, the clink of metal and squeak of leather as soldiers passed you on the street, seemed more decorative than anything else.
I inquired. I raised the subject with a couple of fellow drinkers at a bar. “Tell me what’s happening here. Is the country at war?”
These were guys I had met here before, always easily sociable, enduring my awkward Spanish. Neither of them answered. One gave me a look that suggested I was nuts, and the other suddenly saw someone he knew across the room, picked up his beer and left.
Then one morning I saw a photo tacked on a tree in the park, a young woman, smiling, a graduation picture on a sheet of cardboard, edges curled by rain, and under it the words ¿DÓNDE ESTÁ? Where is she? There were more, on another tree and another. Six or more of them, men and women, most of them young, some with that eerie question ¿DÓNDE ESTÁ? and others with PRESENTE, an odd Q and A: Where is she? Where is he? They are here.
That day at lunch—it must have been Thursday of the second week—I asked Marco if he ever heard news of the war. I asked it casually, and I didn’t ask his father, who sat across from me. That would have lent too much meaning to the question. Marco stopped eating and looked at me in genuine perplexity. “What war do you mean? Cold War?”
“No, here. In this country.”
“There is no war here.”
“No fighting anywhere?”
“Fighting. Ahhh,” he said. “You mean los guerrilleros? No, no. They are far away in the hills.” He slipped into his goofy accent. “Communeests, señor. They are heestory now.”
At this point his father jumped in. “Aqui no tuvo tanta fuerza la violencia,” he told me, emphatically. “Verdad?”
“You hear the man?” said Marco. “He say he doan know nothing about no war.”
“But he said la violencia. What does that mean?”
“In the mountains. The mountains. It’s over. Kaput!”
I
