Travel Writing Page 4

  “Probably not. Probably just talking to everyone who saw her last. Process of elimination. Or maybe because you went to the funeral. If there’s foul play, they watch the funerals.”

  “What kind of foul play?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “This bothers me; this scares me.”

  “Forget it,” he said. “You’re covered. If you hear from him again, call me; I’ll find out what I can, but you don’t have anything to worry about.”

  In the first Lisa Kim dream I had, we were sitting in the garden at La Choza. It was late October, but the sun was warm on our backs, bright on our faces. It was too high in the sky for the time of the evening; we wore big sweaters. We were all lovely. The women had white teeth and wisps of hair across their faces. We laughed and laughed. The air was golden. We were all friends, although I hadn’t seen some of these people in years, didn’t know a couple very well, didn’t know one at all. Still, I felt closer to them, more comfortable with them than with my real friends, with myself. Perhaps we were stoned. Things moved slowly. Things tasted wonderful.

  We were passing big platters of kamoosh: fried tortilla chips spread with beans, then melted yellow cheese, then guacamole. We were eating Steak Oaxaca: flour tortillas covered with chunks of carne asada, onions and cilantro, then melted white cheese. We were drinking beer from cans so icy they were hard to hold. We were holding them high in the air.

  Someone toasted Carlos Zambrano, who had just pitched a no-hit, no-run perfect game striking out all twenty-seven Red Sox he had faced to win the World Series. I think we’d just come from Wrigley Field. It must have been a Sunday.

  We toasted Ernie Banks for hitting a home run onto a rooftop across Waveland Avenue.

  We toasted Bill Madlock for going four for four on the last day of the season to win the batting title.

  We toasted Rick Reuschel for being so fat and graceful.

  We toasted John Kenneth Galbraith for being so tall and old.

  We toasted Dag Hammarskjold for giving his life for world peace.

  We toasted Homer Simpson and Julia Child and Dave Van Ronk and Susan Sontag and Snoop Doggy Dogg. Then Lisa Kim appeared at the other end of the picnic table like a happy Banquo. She raised a champagne flute. She smiled that smile, her eyes locked on mine, and she shook her head a little bit as if to say, “I can’t believe it.” What she actually said was, “Here’s to you, mister, and we both know for what.”

  On Saturday morning I bought a clothbound artist’s sketchbook at Good’s Art Supplies and took it down the street to Café Express, a coffeehouse full of secondhand couches and kitchen tables near our apartment in Evanston. I got a big ceramic mug of coffee and started writing. It was the first time in a long time that I’d written much of anything that wasn’t of some utilitarian or commercial value, and I didn’t quite know how to begin. I decided to make a list, a catalog I guess, of something that had been on my mind a lot: my near occasions of death. The first time I know I might have died was when I was two or three and I had a temperature of 104. My parents put me in a bathtub of cold water and ice cubes, and I screamed bloody murder. The first such event I remember was three or four years later, when I slipped off a jetty in Lake Michigan into a riptide and someone—I don’t know who—just caught me by the back of my T-shirt. Then there was the cold spring weekend my family went to our summer home before the water was turned on or the phone activated. We built a huge banked fire in the living room and slept on mattresses around it. It turned out that the firebrick in the fireplace was old and bad and the heat had caused a smoldering fire in the wall behind. We all woke together in the middle of the night to a room filled with smoke. My brother and I rolled down our hill in pitch black to seek help while my parents kept the fire at bay with water, soda, milk, and then sand until the volunteer firefighters from Covert five miles away arrived.

  Another time my dad got a headache working in the basement on a Sunday afternoon in January. He suspected a gas leak, but the two guys from the gas company found a carbon-monoxide leak instead and shut our furnace down. They said that we were lucky we didn’t wait until Monday morning to call. I remember my dad forked over a good chunk of his life savings without a word of complaint to have the furnace replaced that very night, which turned out to be the coldest of the year. We lay in our beds beneath mounds of blankets and comforters listening to the workmen clanking in the basement beneath us. It was 3:00 A.M. when they fired up the new furnace, and the temperature in the house was 38 degrees. For a long time after that, I dated things from that day; the day we didn’t die.

  In my teens and twenties, I had several close calls that involved automobiles or alcohol—or both. Once my brother was trying to get my dad’s Chevy station wagon up to 100 mph on a long, straight county road in rural Michigan. There was one blind spot on the whole stretch, and when we came over the rise, a 2½-ton farm truck was pulled across the road. The driver saw us and started forward, we braked hard and steered behind him, skidding right beneath his tailgate, which was cocked at a 45-degree angle and which scraped the hell out of the roof of the car.

  Another time after playing softball and drinking beer, I was driving someone else’s car way too fast on an unfamiliar road when I almost missed the same kind of curve Lisa Kim missed. I braked and slid sideways through the gravel and off the road into high grass. Had there been a ditch there, I would have rolled into it; and had there been a tree, I would have hit it very hard. Once, after helping friends move on a hot day, we were drinking beer and eating pizza on the roof of their new apartment building when we dared each other to walk the ledge around the perimeter. I still don’t know how we all made it.

  There were two airplane flights, one out of Columbus that hit a front like a stone wall on its initial ascent, and one into Quito, Ecuador, on a foggy night surrounded by the Andes when the pilot came in to land three times and roared off three times before he finally touched down the fourth time, and the flight attendants led the applause for what one of them said was “a very, very difficult landing.”

  Then there was a bump that turned out to be a sebaceous cyst, a heart murmur that disappeared, a lab test that was in error, and a bandit wearing a Yankees cap and a blue bandana over his face and holding a very small gun in his right hand who stepped out from the bushes when I was riding horseback in the hills of Jalisco in Mexico. He had me dismount, pull my wallet out and lie facedown in the dusty road. As he leaned to remove the Mexican currency from the wallet (he left the American money), he put the gun against the back of my head. And those are only the close encounters I’m aware of. Who knows how many others I might have walked through or past like Mr. Magoo, with things crashing all around me.

  When I finally put my pen down, it was afternoon, and I was exhausted. I had not expected to write so much or for so long; incidents came back one after another. I did not know how lucky I had been, nor how lucky any of us has to be to stay alive on this planet for very long. I closed my journal and went home.

  The next day I made a second entry. This time I started writing down everything I could remember about Lisa Kim’s accident. I guess, in a way, it was the beginning of this piece you are reading now.

  In college I would hurry across the campus just to look in my mailbox, and the sight of one trim envelope through the little window would make my heart skip a beat. Now if I’m busy, I often don’t open my box for two or three days at a time—nothing but bills, catalogs, and credit-card come-ons usually, seldom the kind of hand-addressed linen envelope I found there on a day late in January. The return address stopped me: Maud Kim Nho, Meadow Lane, Glenview. I stood right there in the vestibule and opened it.

  First there was a note on stationery that matched the envelope written in a small, precise hand and green ink:

  Dear Peter,

  I am taking the liberty of writing you after considerable thought and at the risk of reopening wounds that are now, I hope, beginning to heal. I found this letter fol
ded in the back of a book on Lisa’s nightstand. I have been looking at it and reading it over for a couple weeks now. I’ve almost destroyed it several times, both because of its intimate nature and because Lisa had not sent it, and I can’t be sure that she intended to, but I can’t bring myself to do so. It is so full of her, of her energy and wit and intensity, and we have so little of her left. At the same time, it is not mine, and I feel like an eavesdropper reading it. It is yours, and so I found your address in the guest registry from the funeral and am sending it to you to do with as you wish. I hope you don’t mind.

  Yours, Maud Kim Nho

  Then there was a letter in bigger, bolder, black handwriting on typing paper:

  P,

  It is just dawn and I am just awake and you are on my mind. Isn’t that an old song? Funny how we always talk in lyrics, you and I: all you need is love, what’s love got to do with it, many a tear has to fall. I love that about you, your layers upon layers, your allusions, your asides. A conversation with you needs footnotes and a reader’s guide. But then I love so much about you. I am quite madly in love with you if you don’t mind my choice of words; see, now you have me doing it.

  And why shouldn’t we talk in lyrics? We are so musical, my love. We are all about music, rhythm, beat, and syncopation. We are a song, you and I. The first time we did our dance moving together in the dark, it wasn’t sex, it wasn’t fucking. It was breathing together, it was swaying, it was the two of us becoming a third thing for a moment, moments. I don’t remember what happened to my clothes. I don’t remember you touching me with your hands, not in the usual places, just my hair and upper arms and lightly on my hips. And then I realized you were inside me, but it was hardly the point, it was almost incidental, it was the way I always thought it should be (another song?). You can say that our little friend helped, but I don’t think very much; what happened was inevitable.

  That is how I feel about us, my darling. We are inevitable. We are inexorable. We are a juggernaut. I am very sad that we can not see each over Thanksgiving, but we shall, as always, have Tuesday, and then while we are apart, you will have this surprise missive to remind you of me. Besides, this thing we have is so strong that I don’t need to see you. I am fine. I am happy, safe and secure in the warmth of our love though we are far apart and long away from each other. I love you deeply and eternally.

  L

  “Shit,” I thought standing there, my hand unsteady by the time I had finished reading, looking about for fear someone would come along and catch me. “What do I do with this damn thing?” I thought. “Why did I have to read this?” I thought. “Why couldn’t someone feel this way about me?” I thought. For the first time in almost three years, I badly wanted a cigarette.

  3

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  Travel Writing

  Dateline: Cuernavaca Mexico

  by Pete Ferry

  On the ninth day of their march, (Cortes and his) troops arrived before the strong city of . . . Cuernavaca. It was . . . the most considerable place for wealth and population in this part of the country . . . For, though the place stood at an elevation of between five and six thousand feet, it had a southern exposure so sheltered by the mountain barrier on the north that its climate was . . . soft and genial.

  —W. H. Prescott, The Conquest of Mexico

  HERNANDO CORTÉS, Helen Hayes, and I were attracted to Cuernavaca by the same Chamber of Commerce sales pitch; the place has a damn near perfect climate. We all first went there on R and R. Señor Cortés was taking a break during his conquest of the Aztec Empire. Miss Hayes had just been crowned queen of the New York stage. And I was trying to get away from America for a while so I could look back at it and write about it. Truth be known, I badly wanted to be an expatriate. I guess I thought it would look good on my curriculum vitae. I was at that stage in my life where I defined myself by the things I did and the people I hung out with and, having recently found myself predictable and my life prosaic, my self-improvement plan was simple: Go somewhere interesting and hang out with better people.

  And Cuernavaca is somewhere interesting. It sits just sixty-four miles south of Mexico City on the initial Pacific slope of the massive range of volcanoes that cluster around the capital. Beyond it to the south stretches the vast, verdant valley of Morelos that supplies many of the flowers we in the North pay so dearly for during the winter. Cuernavaca is all about flowers, cloudless winter skies, sidewalk cafés, swimming pools, and palm trees. Its mean winter and summer temperatures vary only two or three degrees either side of seventy-two.

  It should not surprise you, then, that in addition to Cortés, Hayes, and myself, Cuernavaca has at one time or another attracted the likes of John Steinbeck, Merle Oberon, Ivan Illich, Anthony Quinn, Henry Kissinger, Erich Fromm, Gabriel García Márquez, the last shah of Iran, John Huston, and Malcolm Lowry, who set his novel Under the Volcano there, plus every Mexican luminary you can think of. These are the kind of people I went to Cuernavaca looking for, the kind I wanted to be with and be—artists and writers and freethinkers—but I found Charlie Duke instead. He introduced me to, among other things, the time-honored Cuernavaca pastime of name dropping and taught me the finer points of expatriation. In no time I fancied myself one of Steve Goodman’s exiles from the old song “Banana Republics,” hoping “to cure the spirit that’s ailing from living in the land of the free.”

  Two roads leave the smoggy Valley of Mexico and cross the mountains to Cuernavaca. Both begin at an elevation of 7,400 feet, climb to 10,000 feet, and descend to 5,000, all in that sixty-four miles. And while travelers on one road can often see the other, the two take very different trips. It sometimes seems to me that the first is the road of the future. It is very handsome with bold red shoulders and flowering hedges dividing its four lanes. It is also an engineering marvel that sweeps in giant parabolas higher and higher to the very crest of the pass, where one can encounter snow in the winter and from which one can see what seems like the rest of the continent and, with a little imagination, the blue line of the Pacific Ocean on the horizon.

  The second road belongs to the past. It corkscrews up the mountainside twisting and grunting every inch of the way. It goes through villages rather than past them, and beside it Indian women squat selling birds or beads or the tough Indian corn called elote which is boiled, slathered with mayonnaise and sprinkled with Parmesan cheese. This road travels across highland meadows, near alpine lakes and through forests of pine and spruce that defy every stereotype of Mexico, and at one point it passes a line of simple white crosses that mark the spot where, nearly eighty years ago, Francisco Serrano and other revolutionary leaders being transported to the capital as prisoners were lined up and gunned down by their guards. The crosses always remind me that Maximilian and Carlota, their coach drawn by twelve white mules, used this ancient trail, and Benito Juárez in his black carriage and Stephen A. Austin, and perhaps even Cortés, or Montezuma, borne on his litter by six strong warriors.

  Both roads are worth traveling. I suggest that you drive one down and the other back. Of course, you may intend to never come back, in which case you should take the old road.

  And you should be informed that paradise appeals to everyone, even Mexicans, even the 99 percent of Mexicans who don’t live in rococo mansions and go to the dentist in Houston. There are places in Cuernavaca set aside for cab-drivers and shopkeepers, and Los Canarios is one of them. This ramshackle resort was all Lydia Greene and I could find or afford the holiday weekend we first hit town.

  Actually, Los Canarios sounded pretty good on paper: pool, garden, games, outdoor restaurant and bar, shops, palm trees, and lush vegetation. The problem was that all of this was shoehorned onto one small, seedy city block and most of it was dirty, dilapidated, and broken. Out on the street towering above the place was a big, broken sign dating, I suppose, from a time when the owners thought they might be able to attract wealthy Americans as guests. It read: LOS CANARIOS. HOTEL OF LUX.

  Just across the stree
t from Los Canarios is the other Cuernavaca. Las Mañanitas, an old hacienda that the city has grown out to surround, is one of the continent’s loveliest small inns and restaurants. Behind its high walls topped with shards of broken glass one finds peacocks sitting on velvet lawns, cool blue pools, and perfect gardens. On the grass and verandas are a few quiet tables and many attendants in white jackets who pour your wine, light your cigarette and, on cool evenings, build fires in portable braziers just to warm your feet.

  The last time I saw Charlie Duke, we ate dinner at Las Mañanitas. The first time I saw Charlie Duke, I was playing Frisbee with our dog Art out underneath the trees at Villa Katrina. Charlie came down the curving, cobblestone driveway carrying a trayload of margaritas and hors d’oeuvres above his head.

  The Villa Katrina was the weekend retreat of the German-Mexican Kronberg-Mueller family. It was situated on four acres of semiformal gardens that sloped down to a rugged barranco, or canyon stream, and consisted of a gatehouse; a main house complete with servants’ quarters, red tile roof, balconies, and a vast veranda; and a three-bedroom furnished guest house. Charlie lived in the gatehouse. We had just rented the guest house.

  Charlie was a tall, broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped, strikingly handsome man of forty-five whose manner, depending on your mood, could be described as genteel, effete, or even effeminate. Sitting on the bench out in the middle of the lawn, he talked an absolute blue streak, and he talked as if we were old friends, mentioning people, places, and events for whom and which I had no frame of reference. I went back to our bungalow that afternoon and laughed at him. What a boob. Almost at once Charlie became for me a sad emblem of what most expats really are: people who have way too much leisure time with which they do almost nothing but go out to lunch, drink, gossip, worry about their health, self-medicate, and complain about their gardeners.