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, the Ixil Maya being one of populations hardest hit by the war, the army’s now-notorious scorched-earth campaign of massacres, and its other well-documented crimes and horrors. As long as Sister Julia was living in a way that brought her closer to the meaning of Jesus Christ as she understood it, she didn’t care what other sins she was committing, was how my friend explained it. He said, She likes to call herself a Jesuit Anarchist. It’s been something like fifteen years since I last spoke to the British journalist, but I see him on TV quite a bit. He’s become an expert on the Taliban and Al Qaeda. I have no idea whatever became of Sister Julia Goldberg, but I doubt she was killed. As far as I know, whenever they murdered an American nun in Guatemala or El Salvador, and they murdered more than a few, we heard about it.
Of course there were millions of centroamericanas there, too, more or less my own age, born on the isthmus and still living there. Surely among them was the romantic companion I so longed to find. I even told myself that it would be a logical way to resolve my sometimes-confusing identity issues, to have a serious relationship with and eventually marry a centroamericana, as tritely prescriptive as that sounds now. But over the next decade, I only had a few one-nighters and brief involvements, which I was never able to keep going much longer than a week, with a mix of local and foreign women I can count on one hand. No real intimate connection or electricity, not smart or funny or political enough, that’s the sort of thing I’d tell myself, whether she’d cut out first or I had. Instead, I’d carry around some absurdly far-fetched, unrequited crush or obsession, I could keep one of those going for years.
There were two bedrooms in the apartment, originally built for Abuelita’s sister Nano, over my abuelos’ house, and for a while Penny Moore lived in one of them. She was the most important human rights investigator in Guatemala, though she did that anonymously. Her cover was working as a stringer for one of the American newsweeklies, where not even her editor knew her secret. I accompanied her on a lot of her information-gathering trips up into the Quiché, Huehue, and Rabinal, and one time we crossed over from Mexico with an Ixil guide named Maria Saché, who led us to the camp of a nomadic Maya refugee group, one of the comunidades de población en resistencia, who’d fled into the mountains and forests to evade the army, living on wild plants and roots when they were on the run, sometimes able to settle long enough to harvest a season of corn, and improvise a little school. Even deep inside the rain forest, sometimes the only drinking water the refugees could find had to be squeezed or sucked from machete-hacked tree vines and roots that fathers held to the lips of their children, they’d even offer the chance to draw a few sips to a pair of thirsty journalists before taking any for themselves. I did my own reporting, too, in Guatemala and elsewhere in Central America, every year publishing three or so magazine pieces, and those occasional freelance checks were what I lived on. I saw a lot, but not as much as Penny and a full-time correspondent like my other closest friend, Geronimo Tripp, always rushing off to the latest hot combat zone. But in Guatemala City I stayed in my room a lot, too, trying to get my novel going, writing by hand on legal pads or pounding with two fingers my little Olivetti portable. Or I’d spend entire rainy season afternoons hidden away in the upstairs mezzanine of Pastelería Jensen, a café in the center, writing in my notebook or reading novels in those British paperback editions that I bought in the little foreign language bookshop one block over, owned by a young French-Guatemalan Jewish man. He had books in English, French, German, even Japanese, but he never stocked any title known to be politically left. I remember a young French backpacker type coming in and asking for Che Guevara’s Motorcyle Diaries, and the bookstore owner looking like he was about to have a heart attack. He meticulously wrapped every purchased book with brown paper and tape, but if you tried to strike up even the smallest small talk with him while you patiently watched and waited across his counter, all you’d get back were terse nods, which must be why my memory of his very large head atop his small, slender body and his marzipan-pale, mole-splotched, sensitive face and thin, stricken lips remains so vivid. Sitting up on that café mezzanine with my little individual pot of coffee, I’d unwrap the brown paper around whatever black- (The Sentimental Journey), light-green-
