Honored Guest

CLARO

DANNY LOOKED TRIM in shorts and a white T-shirt. He had been ill the previous year — the heart — but the operation was a success and he was now absolved of illness. It was remarkable, the skill of surgeons. Her sickness — her malady, she called it lightly — was of another sort, quite minor really. She had a form of arthritis, a syndrome called Polymyalgia rheumatica, and it was not known whether it was a disease of the joints, the muscles or the arteries. Statistically, she was rather young to be suffering from it. Though it wasn’t particularly painful, she could barely move her limbs. Some of their friends had immigrated to Mérida for a good part of the year, and they too were now trying it out. The place was warm, cheap and genial, and the gardens could be lovely.

For breakfast there was sliced papaya, sweet rolls and good strong coffee. Their young man, their houseman Eduardo, was breakfasting comfortably with them, eating cereal, his favorite, Cap’n Crunch.

“Thank you,” she said as Eduardo cleared away the plates.

She wanted to put more effort into the days, into the living of them. She was aware of the effort Danny was making. The days seemed very much the same here but this was just the seeming of them. Each delivered its own small surprise. Yesterday, sitting in the garden with only her aching body for company, she saw not just one but three motmots on the sloping tiled roof. They perched close together, their long, partially featherless tails flicking back and forth. The one in the center was being groomed by the other two. His feathers were ruffled and he looked dazed. Their heads were a lovely turquoise color. They preened and pecked at the one, drawing its feathers between their beaks. A frond from a royal palm slipped free and fell and two of the birds scattered at the sound, leaving the one upon whom their attention had been conferred alone, swaying, its beak open. Eduardo had hurried out and cut up the frond quickly with his knife. He hoisted the sections on his shoulder and trotted to the courtyard next door, the annex they had acquired to hold their construction and yard debris.

When he returned for the frond’s heavy boot — almost as big as he was — Lilly called out, “Eduardo, you are not putting any pesticides in the garden, are you? Any poisons?”

“If it is not your wish, no.”

“It certainly is not my wish.”

“I do not,” he said. He took off the floppy hat he wore and looked steadily at her.

The motmot then took flight, to her relief. It looked all right.

She liked Eduardo’s little daughter, Stephanie, who was four. She was small and stout, not timid or incurious but solemn, with large dark eyes.

It was a new crowd here, though she could recognize them. There was the chatterer, the flatterer, the wag, the silent one. There was Stephen, who had found a new love. His other woman had been a horror, a terrible alcoholic, and that was a story. She’d passed out yet again and Stephen insisted that she see a doctor. With difficulty, he got her in the car. “You need help, Lucille,” he shouted at her. He drove her to the doctor, the good one on Colón, but the office would not accept her because she was a corpse. He had to drive the body to the hospital himself. Neither would that institution receive her; no, she must be returned to where she died, their home, and only then could the authorities confirm her death and the proper procedures commence. Stephen was in traffic for an hour, making his ghastly circuit of the city, his dead wife beside him.

That, however, had been three years ago, and now another had found him, a good one, an American near his age with tremendous energy. They were restoring a hacienda on the road to Uxmal. Lilly and Danny had gone out there for lunch. The place was lovely but far from finished, of course. There was a chapel, and two of the stables were being turned into comfortable suites for tourists. They had ripped out all the henequen, which was not merely agave here, it was political. In the great courtyard a black garbage bag was caught in the topmost branches of a poinciana tree. Stephen’s woman explained that it was not trash but a kite that one of the children had lost. They permitted the children to take a shortcut through the walled hacienda on their way to school. It was a kite. They were on good terms with the people of the village.

At lunch, one woman said, “I’m ordering a black lucite bed with little lights embedded everywhere, and I’m seventy-two years old.”

A man was talking about the coast. “In the morning, the ceviche is wonderful. Lunch, too, can be good. But dinner? Never. The sea’s gifts begin to stink.”

It was May 14, the day of St. Matthias, the thirteenth disciple, who was chosen by lot to replace the puzzle, Judas, that dark ordained deceiver. Matthias was a figure not of mystery but of disinterest. Nevertheless, he had his day.

Lilly was venturing out that morning to the English library, which was just around the corner, to take out storybooks for Stephanie. She wanted to teach the child how to read but had no idea of how to go about it. Stephanie was bright. Together they would find a way. They enjoyed each other’s company immensely.

By the time Lilly reached the library, she was exhausted. She sank into a chair and the librarian was kind enough to offer her a glass of water. Her whole body ached. A small television set was on, tuned to an American news program. A man of much experience in strategic planning in both Republican and Democratic administrations, was discussing a matter of grave importance. He was calm, stunningly articulate, erudite. He slumped a little as he spoke. One could not argue with his analysis; no appeal was possible. He proceeded with the phrase on the other hand. Relentlessly, dispassionately, like a great weight falling. On the other hand. He reminded Lilly of the surgeon who had saved Danny, or rather repaired him. That had been a frightening time for them.

No, she reconsidered this. The surgeon had been worldly, certainly, but this man was of another cast. No dread was left unanticipated. Nothing had to be true. His thought was of a stunning circularity, seamless, unassailable. He was a man unconfused by the corrupting shapes of destiny.

“Feeling better?” the librarian asked.

“Oh … yes,” Lilly said, startled. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Thank you for the water.”

“Shall I turn this blowhard off?”

“I’ve had quite enough of it, thank you,” Lilly said.

He was a lanky American with a thin, amused voice, rough skin and white, exceptionally white, teeth. His glasses were boyishly smudged. Betty Boop was tattooed on his forearm. “A symbol of my Jewish heritage,” he said when he saw Lilly glancing at it. “Father’s side.” He put his hands on his hips.

“I’m looking for one or two simple storybooks,” she said. “I’m trying to teach a little girl — a little friend of mine — the alphabet.”

“I’ve just been organizing the children’s section. Not my specialty. Half the books should be discarded, in my opinion. They look as though they’ve been eaten by goats.” He frowned. “Someone gave us a whole set of Ant and Bee.”

“I’m not familiar with that series,” Lilly said.

“Twits from Great Britain. The rage for decades. I can’t believe it’s washed up here. An alphabetical story for tiny tots. Ant and Bee live in this goddamn cup and have a dog for a friend, get it?”

Lilly laughed.

“And the dog takes them for a ride on his back but they crush an egg on the road, not seeing it because of the fog which is so thick it causes him to trip over a gun and knock his hat off.”

“A gun!” exclaimed Lilly.

“The illustrator’s got the gun looking like a goddamn cannon, which is so confusing.”

“I guess not Ant and Bee, then,” Lilly said. “You’re quite convincing.”

“I was never the most reasonable child, but those two simply outraged my sense of the appropriate. My mother said again and again, ‘Why are you fighting Ant and Bee?’ Eventually she had to admit to the other mothers, ‘Rockford simply hates Ant and Bee. Nothing can be done.’”

Lilly laughed.

“You’re a good audience,” he said, peering at her. He removed his smudged glasses and held them up to the light. “Wow,” he said, “no wonder.”

“There’s some explanation as to why children’s stories are so nonsensical,” Lilly said, “but I can’t remember it.”

He was violently rubbing the glasses on the hem of his guayabera. “You’re new here,” he stated. “When people first come here they want to do something.”

She walked stiffly to the shelf that held a ragged selection of picture books. “How many of these can I borrow?”

“Are you kidding! Take them all. No one’s been in this place since the Second Annual Chili Cookout we had in the garden last week, a great turnout. People love their food booths. May I suggest what I believe? There was once a single language which all creatures possessed. It was highly complex and exceedingly beautiful. Latin was but a gross simplification of its glories. Then some sort of cataclysm, we can’t even guess. Overnight, a soiled, simpler world of cruder possibilities. Words had to be invented, they became artificial. Over centuries we appeared to evolve but our language didn’t. Words aren’t much more than a waste product now, space junk. We’re living post-literately. It’s all gleanings and tailings. It’s boring, it’s transitory, but a counterliterate future is at hand. It’s what’s coming. The only thing language does now is separate us from the animals. We require something that separates us from ourselves.”

“You’re some librarian,” Lilly ventured.

“I’m not the librarian. The librarian is imprisoned in the back. Furious, frightened. Gagged, bound.”

“I’m smiling uncertainly now, I suppose,” Lilly said.

“You’re a nice lady,” Rockford said. “Everyone will tell you I’m a foolish man. People can actually find me annoying.” He raised his hands and pressed his fingers together. “Forgive me.”

He took the books she had selected to a desk, put his glasses back on and wrote the titles down in a ledger. He consulted a calendar on the wall and recorded the date as well. Indeed it was St. Matthias’s day, he for whom little had been imagined.

Walking home, she saw a thin donkey pulling a flat cart stacked with bags of cement. The reins were red.

“You know that prednisone is making your face puffy.”

She didn’t raise her hand to feel her bones. She would have once.

“Your lovely face,” Danny continued. “A blurring.”

“It’s your glasses.”

“What! I don’t wear glasses.”

“A joke,” Lilly said.

“I wish I hadn’t mentioned it.”

“It’s just a side effect. A known side effect. Nothing unusual.”

“Of course. If it’s helping you. That’s the important thing.”

“I don’t know that it is. I’ve got to give it a chance to work, the doctor said.”

“I’d read that the benefits were supposed to be more or less immediate.”

She turned her head to the left, then to the right.

“See, you couldn’t do that two weeks ago.”

“I feel like a puppet,” Lilly said.

“You’ll be climbing the pyramids soon, singing at the top of your lungs. Then you’ll run down, you’ll bound down.”

“I’m happy you feel so well, Danny.”

“There’s no obligation for you not to. It’s not a trade-off.” Though he sometimes entertained the disagreeable notion that it was.

Eduardo looked at her with hostility, then his face broke into a warm smile.

“Why do you do that?” she asked. “Do you do it just for me?”

“Qué?”

She said nothing but watched as he raised his broad brown hand and slowly drew it across his face. There was the look of hostility and contempt once more.

“You are easy to tease,” he said in a friendly manner.

They had gone, as part of a small group, to visit the artist Iseabail. He lived in a slum, in a house he hadn’t left for twenty years. The roof was falling in. The hurricane had destroyed the pond where he kept his pet carp. In the past, when it suited him, he had removed a carp for printmaking and feasts. The chandelier above the dusty table, still set formally for ten, was ribboned with strings of dirt. No more the notorious dinner parties, renowned for their delightfully surreal touches. Still, he painted every day. He favored working from photographs or postcards and was not averse to commissions. He was gracious, though the zipper on his pants was broken. All the Americans had a number of Iseabails. They were colorful and looked good on the high walls of their houses.

“Now you’ve met them both, Lilly,” her friend Barbara said, “our pet zanies. But Rockford is just awfully fey, you know, whereas Iseabail is an artist and one not trying to formulate and impose some inner belief on anybody, thank god. I know you’re going to say the eyes are off and it’s true, he doesn’t do the eyes as well as he should, but that’s part of the charm. As for Rockford, the trick to dealing with him is just to say ‘Really! Really, is that so!’”

Stephanie wore the same blue dress every time she visited. Lilly bought another dress which she kept folded in tissue in her closet. She planned to give it to the child when the moment seemed appropriate. This moment occurred when Stephanie, gripping a sandwich Lilly had prepared, squeezed a fat slice of tomato onto her lap. Lilly produced the new dress and convinced her that she should put it on while they washed the other one. Together they washed the blue dress in a pan of water — it seemed scarcely more than a rag — and hung it on the clothesline. Though the day was warm, there was no breeze and the fabric dried slowly. Stephanie examined it frequently to confirm that the awful stain was not reappearing. They did little more that day than watch the small dress dangling on the line. It was still damp when it was time for her to leave with her father and catch the bus that would take them home, thirty minutes away. Lilly wrapped it in a plastic bag. Eduardo did not remark on Stephanie’s new dress or the parcel she held. He looked weary. His hair was white with plaster dust, as he had rewired an entire wall that day.

The next time Stephanie came to the house, she was wearing the same thin blue dress. Lilly never saw the other one again. The two of them did not discuss it.

Rockford had been murdered, shot in his room in the library where he slept and took his meals. It was all anyone could talk about. There hadn’t been a murder in decades. Nothing had been stolen, not even the rings on his fingers, and there were no suspects. Perhaps it was someone who resented the fact that the elderly woman whose modest palacio it had been willed the place for a library. There were certainly other things she could have done with the money. The rumor was that someone from Chiapas had done it. Everything unpleasant was blamed on someone from Chiapas.

Lately she had been sleeping alone, in a room of her own just off the salon. It was the discomfort of her body, the constant tossing and turning. She was no one to share the night with, she’d be the first to admit. And since Rockford’s death she’d been having nightmares. There would be a sense of tension in the air, then a figure separating from the shadows cast by the ungainly wardrobe. Something threatening was wielded — a gun? — a charge of extinguishing light was imminent, but there was still time, a skein of coiled time in which Lilly could act, could acknowledge and confront this thing which had come to take back something she didn’t understand. Something had been given to her to understand and she simply wasn’t strong enough to understand it. Still, she was strong enough to resist it being taken.

She would scream, whirl herself upright, fumble for the light, alarm the old dog, Amiga, the stray who sometimes slept beside her.

Danny had returned to Miami for a checkup with his doctor. He would be gone for five days. He would see the accountant and lawyer as well, for his father, it was suspected, was becoming senile.

Eduardo labored around the house, forever occupied. He didn’t bring Stephanie with him, saying that she had an earache. Lilly was lonely. She had lunch with Barbara and Wilbur, after which they drove to Kabah and looked at the rain-god masks.

“Do you ever have difficulty with Arturo?” Lilly asked.

“No,” Barbara said. “You don’t like him? We’re delighted with him, we’d be lost without him. Wilbur just paid to have his teeth fixed. Four root canals! But he’s a doll, just like your Eduardo.”

Wilbur was trying to convince a carver in the souvenir palapa to come to their house and give him a price for carving one of the doors to the bathroom. It was a wonderful bathroom. “Can you reproduce one of Frederick Catherwood’s scenes on a door?” Wilbur asked.

The man shrugged and said, “Sure,” at the same time. He was carving a jaguar and smoothing the fresh cuts with a leaf. Two finished jaguars were available.

“Not that I expect it to be perfect,” Wilbur said. “Just so people will recognize it as an illustration from Stevens’s book.” He said to Barbara, “I think this would be fun.”

“When I first came here I thought all those jaguars on the facades were eating mangoes,” Barbara confided to Lilly. “Finally someone told me, ‘Barbara! That is a sacrificed human heart!’”

The day Danny was to return home, Eduardo came to her and said, “I must leave for at least a month. I must make money for a”—he paused—“unanticipated expense.” He took off his hat and regarded it sullenly. “I must dig for a swimming pool for a whole month. It must all be done by hand, no dynamite.”

“My husband will be disappointed,” Lilly said. “Could you tell us what the problem is? Perhaps we could help.”

“I cannot tell you.”

She wanted to be more approving of Eduardo, who did a great deal for them. In general she did not like people much. It was said that there were certain trees that didn’t like people. The ash? Perhaps she had once been such a tree, a solitary ash. The prednisone made for jumpy thoughts. The fact was, she failed to make connections with people. She liked children before they became closed and canny. She scratched her arm absentmindedly and droplets of blood sprang out as if by magic. Her skin was thin as paper.

“I will miss Stephanie’s visits,” she said, “I’ve missed seeing her.”

Eduardo winced. “It is about Stephanie.”

“Is she all right?” she asked sharply. “You must tell me. Is the earache worse?”

He said that Stephanie had flushed a live kitten down the toilet and he had no money to pay the plumber.

“You haven’t the money to pay a plumber?” Lilly said, bewildered. She rubbed the blood into her arm. Gently, without looking at it, she smeared it into her skin.

Stephanie was playing with the kitten and the kitten nipped her or perhaps it was that the kitten took food from her plate and she was angry and wanted to punish it. “Of course there is no excuse for such a thing,” Eduardo said. “She should not have done it. A very ugly thing to do. She does not have an earache, she is being punished. I wanted to spare your feelings. I know you are charmed by Stephanie. You do not want to know this.”

“I must speak to her, Eduardo. You must bring her here and let me talk to her right away. Does she know this is wrong?”

“She says she is sorry,” he said dismissively.

“She is so gentle,” Lilly protested, “so respectful of everything, the books, the flowers. She fills Amiga’s water dish. I find it difficult to believe she would do such harm.”

“I knew you would not believe it,” Eduardo said.

“I must see her. I will pay for the plumber. You must return as usual next week, every day, with Stephanie.”

“I’m not asking for money. Sometimes you misunderstand me. But I must work digging a swimming pool for a month so that I can pay the plumber.” He spoke stubbornly, as though spellbound.

“I will give you the money you need now. Please pay attention to what I am saying.”

He nodded. “You’re bleeding,” he said.

Stephanie ran to Lilly and hugged her legs.

“Hello, dear,” Lilly said, “my little dear.”

The child giggled and clutched her. “I want to read, I want to color, I want to make those little cupcakes with the coconut.”

“Stephanie, we must … Listen to me,” Lilly said. “I want to ask you something.”

“Sí,” Stephanie said solemnly.

“The dress I gave you, why do you never wear it?” How shameful of me, Lilly thought, but I don’t know how to begin. I am proceeding but I don’t know how to begin. The child is slipping into the dark and no one knows, that dreadful Eduardo certainly doesn’t know. He is concerned only with the cost to him! she thought with disgust. The cost of a plumber! While this child was slipping unconscious into the dark.

“My mama gave it to my sister. She said it was too big for me.”

“And do you think it is too big?” Lilly said quietly, purposelessly.

“I’m sorry that the dress is not mine,” Stephanie said.

“Do you know what it means to be sorry?” Lilly said in the same lazy, idle tone.

Stephanie patted Lilly’s hands with her own small ones. “Could we color? Do you still have the crayons?”

“Do you want to draw?”

“No, color. There is a book you let me color in.” She looked at Lilly worriedly. “Have you forgotten?”

They kept Stephanie’s books and playthings in a bureau with a locking drawer. The key was on a ribbon on top of the bureau. The child liked the ceremony of unlocking the drawer. She liked the embroidered corners of the napkins they put on a pewter tray when they had lemonade.

“I have my own hamaca now,” Stephanie said. “I do not have to sleep with my sister.”

Danny walked past and smiled at them.

“What else has happened at your house?” Lilly asked. “You know I have not seen you for a long while. Have you been sick?”

“I am strong,” Stephanie said, placing the books on a table and arranging the crayons in a pleasing fan shape. “I am never sick. Sometimes Mama is.” She turned the pages of the coloring book. “That one is smudged,” she said critically. “That was when I was a baby.”

“Not so many weeks ago,” Lilly said. “Why don’t you color this page?”

“Gatito,” Stephanie said. “The kitten.”

She set to work while Lilly watched her raptly. She was learning ignorance, Lilly marveled. She had begun to be false, false to herself and others. Lilly would not allow this, she would not. This was the child of whom Barbara had said, “Why, she thinks you hung the moon!” She had a responsibility to this child.

“Is that your kitten?” Lilly asked.

“Sí.” Stephanie was humming to herself. “He is black. He has white ears. He likes cupcakes.” She selected another crayon. “I don’t know. I don’t really have a kitten. I have a hamaca.”

“Stephanie,” Lilly said. She grasped the child’s hands and held them fast. She felt them softly crumpling in her own. “You must not pretend this did not happen.”

Night. It was nothing if not reliable. Again, a single massed figure. A threat made material, followed by the ritual of crying out, the lamp rocking on the table as she fumbled for the switch, the little dog Amiga limping away, fearing her …

Instead, Lilly only gripped the sheets and, turning, pressed her face against the wall. Her eyes were wet. If it wasn’t a dream, she reasoned, she wouldn’t even feel it.

It was time for a drink in the garden. She didn’t drink wine because the sulfites were considered to be bad for her condition. She had a tequila over ice. She nibbled an almond. Eduardo sat comfortably with them, drinking from a bottle of Squirt.

“We’re celebrating,” Danny said. “Eduardo has bought a car — a VW one year younger than Eduardo.”

“It is the first car in my family,” Eduardo said gravely, without looking at Lilly. “No one in my family has ever had a car.”

“We looked at eight before Eduardo decided,” Danny said.

“You did all the paperwork,” Eduardo said. “It was difficult paperwork.”

“But it was you who made such a good down payment with your savings.” Danny said to Lilly, “I told him we’d help him out with the rest.”

“I will be working harder but that is only right,” Eduardo said submissively.

“I can hardly see you working any harder than you do,” Danny said.

“My first errand in my beautiful car was to take Stephanie home. We stopped for ice cream.”

“She was terribly upset about something yesterday,” Danny said. “What was that all about?”

Eduardo grimaced and squeezed his belly. “Stomachache.”

“She’s a sweet little girl,” Danny said.

“Then I drove back in my fantastic car,” Eduardo said. “That is when I bought the tequila. My gift.”

“It’s very smooth,” Danny said.

Eduardo grinned. He was happy about the car. He was going to take good care of it.