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  “Many men deserted, never to be heard from again. By the time they crossed the Sierras de los Pedernales, at a pace of two miles a day, half their horses had been lost down ravines and over cliffsides. Others were lame, hooves shredded to pieces by sharp flint. The militia that now approached its destination on Golfo Dolce would be forced, as Cortés knew, to depend on an element of surprise in their attack. Cortés could only hope Olid’s forces remained smaller than his own and were not augmented by recruits from local tribes.

  “Lookouts who were sent ahead to ascertain the rebel’s military strength returned to Cortés with unexpected news. Las Casas, who had (as you will remember) been taken prisoner by Olid, had not, as Cortés presumed, been executed. Instead, Olid merely jailed him. Perhaps he had entertained some notion he would be able in time to bring Las Casas around to his own way of thinking. No one knows. But it was a grave tactical error, for Las Casas himself was a crafty and persuasive man who managed from his prison cell to provoke an insurrection within the town of Naco. Escaping his guards with the help of counterrebels, Las Casas succeeded in finding the traitor, and placed him under arrest. Cristóbal de Olid, these scouts reported to their much-pleased commander, was beheaded soon after, out in the village square as all his men looked on.

  “The rumors of what took place after his decapitation, though not reported in either Cortés’s Carta Quinta (Fifth Letter) to the Spanish Emperor Charles V or Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s Historia Verdadera de la Conquista, would spread through New World colonies and back to Spain. Like Saint Denys, the medieval Bishop of Paris, who was beheaded on Montmartre, like Saint Mitre of Aix-en-Provence, Cristóbal de Olid was said to have knelt down after the ax had severed his neck, knelt down on one knee to lift his head gently off the ground. Scornful of both his executioner and the crowd that looked on, he stood up before them, stood up proud, brushed away the blood and dust that clung to his face, and walked from the center of the clearing into a forest toward the inland mountains, his head held proudly in hands, his eyes unblinking, eyes clear as the stars that are sprayed like bits of ice across the big sky over my poor country this very night—”

  II

  American Baedeker of Matteo Lupi

  1.

  THE SOLITUDE OF the room, already breached by a tapestry of sirens and the whispered utterances of the foreigners, was lost when she heard her own voice returning to her after so many years, wayworn, hot, willowy, her own voice which as it returned—in the decrepit light of this place—substantiated just how distant those times were, with their anger and promise. A dry prairie drawl came through the speaker of the machine, bearing against the hiss of static which sounded like so much gravel stirred by a stick in the bed of a creek. Hannah listened, and dark hair trailed forward over the shoulder of the same khaki blouse she had been wearing for days. She pushed her hands into the pockets of her baggy jeans, shifted weight back and forth. To hear herself again was somehow heartening—wasn’t it? she had, after all, set matters right, hadn’t she? But the voice, her voice, was so grainy and flattened under the raspy old recording; she understood that despite everything there remained a character inside the voice itself which she’d never comprehended. How impressionable she once had been, she thought. How toyed-with.

  “Operator … I, hello?” and there was a pause before the musical interlude of another answering machine began a kind of waltz whose melody was painfully played out by what could only be an amateur orchestra straining down the tin winkle of a phonograph. Perhaps the words on this other machine were ruined? What came through the line now was a high, hacking, fluttering squeal. As abruptly as the squeal began it stopped and she waited, her eyes (almond, just like mama Opal’s in the photograph over the stove) closed.

  That voice, and the words, the urgency of what they conveyed, may have slipped away with so many other voices, but there was no question who was responsible for bringing it back. She rewound the tape, heard the tiny reels spin, hoping his envoy was not awake yet or couldn’t hear. At least that way she could have time to think through this new facet, this voice business—why he’d felt it necessary to play back a terrible error of youth for her (and he left no other message, just the recording of a recording), as if the past was somehow unsevered, was something he could still work with to her disadvantage. Already, after a night stretched out smoking on the cane settee where she’d made up questions and figured out the possible consequences to the answers, she had come to the conclusion that Lupi and the old man must leave as soon as possible. How to get them to go, and where to send them, was another matter. That Lupi—whose naiveté she believed was genuine—would protest, claiming the old man was his charge and that she couldn’t send them out helpless into the streets of the city, she predicted, and it gave her second thoughts which she knew she’d also resent.

  “Thank you operator,” the message continued, after the music, “yes operator, it’s through operator, thank you, yes I know it’s the machine again.”

  The operator—deep Southern even in her yeah—got off the line and young-Hannah continued to whisper under the rustle of what she remembered were the heaviest sheets she’d ever slept in, starched and institutional. The stitching, initials of the place, she could picture: a dreary blue.

  “Look, I think I’m in trouble. I mean you’re, we’re in trouble I’m not sure it’s seven in the morning so, well, uhm … call make sure that—look this makes me very mad I hope you understand—”

  But the voice in the recording gained, and as it did the volume gained, too, so that somewhere back farther in the darkness of the present room, a loft, Lupi awakened into the bad music and old words. Behind the Japanese screen, he rustled on the pallet she had made up for him.

  Neck ached. Must in the nose. One gets too old for this sort of thing, he thought. He peered around the lacquered screen (this he could smell through the must) into the loft where the television played—its light jumping, jittery—what were those? vegetables? yes, purple squash, coral squash. Hands, numbers flashed over the hands. He had never seen anything like these hands, so quick, so slender, deft, as the squash piled up like coins—

  “It slices,

  It dices,

  It even juliennes!”

  The image altered. Children skipped together down a tree-lined block, hips jerkily jabbing sides, and up a lime lawn. The image cut away to the same kids in a kitchen, gathered around a mother. She passed them chocolate bars on sticks as the word Crunchy appeared, evanescent, startling in the visual field. The girls giggled, nibbled, licked. One boy ran his eye down his ice cream bar, across the floor, over the mother, who met his smile with her own:

  “It’s delicious

  And nutritious!

  Easy to eat

  Fun treat!

  No muss,

  No fuss, and

  No mess for Mom!”

  Enchanting, like home, thought Lupi, though after a confused lapse filled with more muffled static young-Hannah’s voice interrupted again. “Make sure that everything, look, this is me I’m in the hospital down here I’ve … had some kind of—”

  She saw the lacquered screen wobble.

  “—but we’re in trouble or you are, how many times am I going to have to call? no one has phoned me I’m hurt I’m in trouble I’m going to die or something.”

  Well, she had thought that she was going to die, she was sure of it, and back then, when the voice spoke to Krieger’s tape because she had nowhere else to turn, nothing immediately contradicted her fears—just as she could find no reason to feel her apprehension over what might go wrong here was misplaced. Only after she had made the call did she begin to understand why she’d slept with him, why she did any of the things she did. It was not, nor was it ever, a matter of loving or saving him. Krieger wasn’t interested in being saved—he wasn’t interested in much of anything, was he?—no, that wasn’t true, either. The poor girl, me, she said to herself, babbling into the line so angry and moreover hurt that he wasn’t there to
listen. No one deserved that kind of treatment, let alone someone who had been, and not sweetly, courted.

  “I’m hurt I’m going to die or something call me, get me out of this place that’s what you promised wasn’t it I, sure, so I’m, I’m waiting, here I’ve got my shoes on in bed I mean there was all that mud it’s like clay here I—” and that was it. The squall of a click came before the tone hummed through.

  He—Lupi, the envoy—was up (she was right), had pulled his trousers on and buttoned them, fingercombed his dull, black hair, run the back of his hand over a three days’ stubble. There was an air of exhaustion in the sequence of movements, yet he felt sharp-headed even though the week—which had begun in Rome, crossed the mountains from Managua to Tegucigalpa and skittered, such was its method, temporarily to rest here—had hardly afforded him the chance to see to daily routines like shaving. Start again, he thought as he stepped forward. This time he did knock the screen over. It teetered in the blackness and toppled with a puff.

  Lupi righted it, rearranging its three panels so that it stood free again, and came out away from the wall. “That lady, she’s your friend?”

  Hannah didn’t answer; she rubbed her temples, helping the blood through, chewed on her thumbnail.

  “Sorry about the, uhm, what do you call it? but it didn’t break,” he tried, though it was all happening too quickly to take in. He was convinced he heard a rooster crow far off in another room, below, down under his feet. “What was that?” thinking, That can’t be a mistake too, they crow the same everywhere.

  But she ignored him. She didn’t need to be so suspicious, did she, after all this man was a naïf. He would have to be, to allow himself to have gotten involved with Krieger, wherever he was and whatever it was he was doing, and with her, Hannah herself. Hers was a very finite system, too, and his being here put not just her and her made-up family in jeopardy, but Lupi himself. If he didn’t leave, he would find himself absorbed. That’s how the place worked. Such a naif.

  “Why’re those kids’ faces green like that?” standing in front of the television.

  No answer. Shrugging, he edged through the shadow-sewn shapes to the kitchen, where he poured coffee into a water glass, after an assertive yawn, chin thrust a little far forward, bit of groan coming out with his breath. He wrapped a dishcloth around the hot glass and sipped, eyes fixed on Hannah—dear sweet Nini she was not, but not unlike Nini in some ways, the proud nose, open nostrils which always made him think of a kind of nobility since open nostrils meant a willingness to take in the world in great sweeps and breaths into one’s being, her skin ginger, bangs over her brow, thin-shouldered, lean and—that was it—bowlegged about which there was an honesty, no? honest-legged—American.

  What should he say? nothing? something? He was a long way from his tiny flat on the Via Casilina, whose east window looked onto the Piazza di Pigneto with its chestnut trees, whose south allowed an unblocked, immediate view of railroad tracks busy with trains from places as far away as Trieste, Hamburg, Paris—and he’d come all this way to end up here with this woman whom he had never met before last night, and still he didn’t have the least idea of how to accomplish what was expected of him next. Here he was, he thought, just where the fat one had said he would be, in a room, and although he had not left this room since he’d arrived, he knew that what the man, whom he didn’t like, had told him was probably true. New York—an island over which his plane had flown and into which the cab had driven him.

  He had slept, not in fact having meant to, for he’d wanted to take in every detail of the trip. Especially he wanted to be able to remember the drive in from the airport, which, as he was led to believe, lay on another island adjacent to this one, one to which he had planned to return in order to catch another plane, fly back to Rome, fabricate some new identity and begin all over again. But he had dozed off as the skyline loomed emerald in the haze at the end of the Long Island Expressway. With the old man’s head leaning lightly into his shoulder he slept through the Midtown Tunnel, whose sweating walls opened up and delivered him into Manhattan as the cab crossed town into the part Krieger had told him was Chelsea.

  “You sure you got the right address?” the guy asked through the scratched partition.

  “I don’t, yes I—”

  “He okay?” pointing with his pen, having pulled the partition back.

  “Sorry?” He looked the driver hard in the eye and the notion that he knew more than he was letting on came and went.

  “Old mama there, who else? he okay?”

  Lupi read the numbers once more that were written on the piece of paper the fat man had given him, said yes, tugged at the lapel of his companion’s jacket. They climbed out into the night street, feet swollen from the flight, to stand together in the silence along the block, before the building whose address matched that written on the paper he clutched as if for equilibrium.

  A wet, salt wind gusted and afterward no movement at all. He had never loved his own life so much that the fear of its ending, of its being taken away from him, mattered very much—he had always advocated this to himself, certainly. It was one of his strengths, he knew—still, here on this abandoned street, at the lowest point in the angular canyon, when a sewer-scented whiffet from somewhere down in the bowels of the island had swelled and risen, blown by subterranean bellows through the vents of a manhole cover, he flinched, seeing a scuttle, something driven before it.

  Fists raised cheek-high in the dark, Lupi looked closer and saw a bag, a potato chip bag, cocoon of bright cellophane. He glanced at the old Indian standing motionless beside him, and was about to explain, apologize, in the broken Latin they used to communicate, but there was nothing to say, and in any case what was the Latin for potato chip? The Indian’s eyes twinkled like the cellophane and he chortled, making a kind of hiss which whistled off his teeth. Lupi knew that if he were more in control of the situation he would tell the old man to shut up.

  As it was, he laughed back. Spirit of fraternity.

  “Lupi?” washed from the shadow; she had probably been standing there the whole time—she, too, had seen him. He brought the paper up to his face to read her name.

  “What are you doing?”

  “What,” quizzed the recessed door beneath the symmetric web of stone wreaths and fake columns. Squinting, he could make her out in the crepuscular cartoon mass as her head moved to glance up and down the block. She was tall, Lupi could see. Taller than he. Her arms were crossed. Even in the dimness, how girlish her face was, as pale as paraffin wax, but strong in its features, cheek and chin, molasses-colored lips traced out in the flesh.

  “Before you say another word I just want you to know that I think you’ve got to be crazy, I don’t know who you are, but you’ve got to be crazy,” which made Lupi feel relieved, for some reason. She unlocked a door.

  He took the old man gently by the elbow and said, “Nunc videbimus quid fiat.” Let’s get ourselves clued in—fiat? fiet? who knew what anymore—

  He couldn’t remember whether they had walked up stairs or been carried up in an elevator. The aural details came easier, the chomp of keys, blood that pecked in his wrist, that potato chip bag, its arid rustle. Some welcoming committee.

  L’eau qui chante et qui danse. Where had he read that before? There was a poster on the wall. The water that sings and dances. It was an advertisement for seltzer. Pretty old colors, straight out of his childhood, made him feel more at home than he should. L’eau qui chante et qui danse—yet now he’d stubbed his toe on the table leg, said, “Merde.”

  She rewound the tape and listened to the first message again before ejecting it from the machine. He had heard. What point was there in hiding it? No one else would ever hear it, though. With the meat hammer on her chopping block she smashed the cassette in one blow. She shucked it, tangled it, stretched the tape into thin strands.

  “Would you mind doing something for me?” she said.

  He sipped at the muddy coffee, rubbing the toe ag
ainst the inside of his calf; the toe throbbed.

  “I don’t want you to mention this tape to anybody, I don’t know if you heard it but I just, can I ask you to do this? I’m doing something for you, you can do this for me, right?”

  “I didn’t hear nothing,” Lupi spoke into the hot glass and within a moment he managed to abide by her wish, crumpled up the voice, the rooster’s caw also for safe measure, and discarded them both, stowed them under the metal washbasin which stood by the stove, masses of grape ivy growing out of it, spilling to the floor.

  “There’s a cup there somewhere, might be easier for you to drink your coffee.”

  In order to create some aura of independence he would refuse the cup. Altogether more awake than he wanted to be, he blinked hard and tried to plumb the darkness of the loft. The yellow face of a small clock glowed on the shelf over an antique six-burner stove. Color of rose gold, size of a rose blossom. This, and the wild little screen with spinning wheels and screaming people, were the only sources of illumination in the room. Clock anemic, television riotous, these lent their light to the objects around them. A pot of coffee looked like a one-horned goat; a rack of miscellaneous dishes on the counter resisted identification. He sipped and let the hot steam penetrate his eyes. He pressed the glass to his forehead and rolled it from temple to temple, the temples themselves fraught with such a train of words worked up into babble over two, three, four tongues, pronouncing evils and absurdities—this taunting, that tracing the profile of the Nicaraguan girl in the filthy chemise (she had been as treacherous as the others). All night trucks had rumbled down in the smoky streets and with them those sirens, endless sirens, he had never heard so many. He imagined they were like the furies of classical drama, spirits of punishment screaming vengeance across the night, stirred up by curses, mysterious powers of blood and earth that crashed through time. That, too, was pure romanticization; would it fit under the washbasin with those other … units?