The Party Wall Read online

  The little girls leave the string of vacant lots and come back to the more populated section of the street, where the buildings are taller and much older. For the umpteenth time, Angie fingers the change nestled in the pocket of her shorts. It’s all there; everything is fine. They reach the bridge that crosses one of the countless rivers and streams running through the city—greenish, foul-smelling, yet teeming with the prodigious activity of sub-species of fish, salamanders, and tadpoles mired in a translucent mud through which their smooth or sudden movements can be discerned.

  Monette stops halfway across the bridge, bends her head forward, and then looks imploringly at Angie, who signals her consent with a nod. The delighted younger sister diligently puffs her cheeks and lets fly a wad of spit that hits the surface of the river with a noticeable splash. Satisfied, she resumes her walk. When Angie crosses here alone, she takes the liberty of dropping something she’s found into the water, usually a piece of wood that will drift down to the sea. But not today.

  Gradually, the street comes alive. Old ladies sweep their porches with unexpected energy; kids throw basketballs through hoops with gaping nets. Passersby go in and out of nameless stores that have mysteriously survived the arrival of large malls on the outskirts of Savannah. The coins in Angie’s pocket jingle. Out of the corner of her eye, she recognizes a few girls from her school but pretends not the see them.

  A ball rolls up to Monette’s feet, and she immediately bends down to pick it up but is checked at the very last moment by her sister, who senses a trap. Behind a hedge two boys are stifling their giggles. With the tip of her sole Angie kicks back the ball covered with dog shit and nudges her little sister toward the other side of the street. They’ll be there soon.

  Half a dozen teenage boys are lolling on the grocery stairway; it’s an old building, which from a distance appears for all the world to be resting on piles—not such an absurd idea, given the climate along the Georgia coast. The youngsters chew on jujubes and peppered beef jerky and swap slaps in a furtive exchange of invisible objects, practising the covert moves that all too soon will be their bread and butter. When the two young girls arrive, the boys give them the sideways look that manages to stare without ever meeting the other’s gaze, the intent look whose weight Monette does not yet grasp and Angie has already learned to evade.

  Intimidated by the group, who leave little room for them to climb the stairs, Monette stops, but Angie prods her, knowing how important it is not to slow down, not to leave an opening for the pack. The little girl is uneasy and stumbles as she makes her way up the stairs; the boys snicker. Seeing her sister’s tiny shoulders sag, Angie deftly lifts her up and sets her back on her feet. As she does when walking in the woods, Angie has the feeling snakes could slither out from any direction and coil themselves around her feet; she would like to run inside the store but holds back and straightens her angular body in order to appear strong and proud. Finally, Monette reaches the door, stretches her arm out to open it but doesn’t manage to turn the knob. Angie comes to her rescue and soon they hear the familiar tinkling of the rusted bell. The street disappears; the numbing tenderness of the air-conditioning takes hold of them.

  THE CAT’S TAIL

  (SIMON AND CARMEN)

  The rain is so heavy that neither the bay nor the end of the bridge can be made out. Only the lights along the shore, the harbour lights and those on the poor boats steaming out to sea pierce the darkness. Yet it is still early. Carmen cranes her neck in an attempt to glimpse Alcatraz through the storm. She always looks for the island when crossing the bay. That she’s unable to see it now annoys her.

  “Look straight ahead,” Simon grumbles in the passenger seat.

  “If only they would keep the lighthouse working.”

  She rummages through her handbag, pulls out her mobile phone, and reads a message while her brother sighs impatiently beside her.

  “Do you know how many people die each year fiddling with their phones while driving?”

  Carmen shrugs. Deep down she’s convinced of having more than two eyes. When she looks at the landscape she still manages to watch the road ahead. When she sends an SMS she has no trouble seeing Simon’s frown of exasperation. Running races has nurtured this ability. A sort of double vision or, rather, double consciousness. The ability to be simultaneously in one’s body and elsewhere. Though unaware of it, Simon shares this gift. He is too focused on the straight and narrow to let himself be diverted like this. Simon is yoked to his chosen course, and he follows it like a soldier on the march.

  “Have you heard about this re-enactment business at Alcatraz? It happened a few months ago, in the fall, I believe. A bunch of youths took advantage of the island being closed on a holiday and landed there at night. They occupied the cells, the guardrooms, and recreated penitentiary life as it was in the fifties. They left a long rope made of sheets knotted together hanging from a window. Ring a bell? Surely you must have investigated.”

  After muttering a few words that sound like “coast guard jurisdiction,” Simon leans forward to switch on the radio. Barack Obama’s voice rings out, broadcasting a message to the nation that the brother and sister only half listen to. The bridge makes landfall. To their right the dinosaurs of the port of Oakland keep on unloading cargo with sweeping elliptical movements, their rasping machinery not the least bit bothered by the rain. As they drive past the high-rise apartment buildings of Emeryville, Carmen tries to pick out her mother’s window. Just like Alcatraz Island, the apartment is empty, dark, and impossible to distinguish in the grey light. She turns onto a wide street washed by the downpour. In the distance the neon sign of the hospital shows the way. All the windows there are lit up.

  The instant he sets foot outside the car Simon feels the tremor. Instinctively, he looks around him. It’s a vast parking lot and nothing can fall on them, except a lamppost. But that would require some bad luck. He waits, his hand pressed against the dripping roof of the car. On the opposite side of the car Carmen does the same, alive to the seismic waves rumbling beneath their feet. Residents of the area have a contradictory attitude toward earthquakes. On one hand they are so inured to them that nighttime tremors don’t even wake them up anymore. Yet they remain keenly aware that any quake could be “the big one,” the one that will plunge the coast into the Pacific Ocean, submerging centuries of history, and flood the rest of the region with an unprecedented tsunami. Simon checks his watch. Over a minute. Nothing collapses; the hospital looks completely undisturbed. At last, the rumbling subsides and recedes into the boiling entrails out of which it came, and the ground grows still. Carmen locks the doors and heads toward the visitors’ entrance.

  “Francisca Lopez,” Simon asks the receptionist tersely.

  “224,” she snaps right back.

  The corridors are strewn with miscellaneous objects. Evidently the tremor did shake the hospital. Some of the staff are busy cleaning up while others go in and out of the rooms where terrified voices can be heard wailing. From the far end of the corridor a gravelly voice reaches them above the clamour. The call grows more distinct as they approach.

  “Help! I need help!”

  A red-faced nurse steps out of room 224 just when Carmen and Simon arrive.

  “Are you her children? That’s good—you’ll be able to calm her down. She just tossed her bedpan against the wall.”

  “Empty, I hope?”

  “You figure?” the nurse replies, holding up a urine-soaked rag in her gloved hand.

  Carmen goes in first. The lights are dimmed, the bedclothes in disarray. Under the sheets is a tiny woman, whose brittle bones seem to be enveloped not in flesh but fine, crumpled paper. She is howling at the top of her lungs.

  “Help! Don’t leave me here!”

  Carmen places her hand on her mother’s scrawny arm.

  “We’re here, mother. Everything’s all right.”

  Frannie turns towar
d her and opens her enormous black eyes, whose pupils can’t be distinguished from the rest.

  “Simon? Carmen? God in heaven, you’re going to get me out of here. This shitty building is going to collapse, and these dickwad quacks are going to let me croak alone.”

  Simon steps closer. He knows he ought to touch his mother to reassure her, kiss her on the forehead, but he can’t bring himself to do it. Years ago, the lukewarm disdain he had felt for Frannie’s body transformed into an aversion. He can’t bear her emaciation and her hollow gaze. He comes nearer and strokes the pillow a few centimetres from her cheek.

  “The earthquake is over, mother,” Carmen says. “It wasn’t very strong. Nothing is in danger of collapsing.”

  “Liar!” Frannie shouts at her daughter.

  Simon steps in.

  “Look, we’re here with you. You know very well we wouldn’t stay here if it was dangerous.”

  Frannie gives him a mollified look.

  “If you say so, my boy.”

  Reaching her hands out, she demands her sheets. Carmen covers her, and her body vanishes under the greenish cotton. The hospital colours clash with the patient’s feverish energy. Hard to believe she had a heart attack just earlier today. Simon thinks of his wife. When he suggested she come with them to the hospital, this was precisely the prediction that served to justify her refusal. “I bet you’ll find your mother in top shape. It’s not worth the trip.” Then she dove back into her countless urgent cases, and Simon slammed the door in a rage. Realizing she was right infuriates him even more.

  He surfaces from his thoughts and notes that Frannie has been chattering on for several minutes. Nothing of her monologue has stayed with him; fortunately, Carmen is paying attention. She nods and punctuates the narrative with timely “uh-huhs,” summoning up the remarkable endurance that Simon has never been able to explain to himself. As a child he would enjoy challenging her to put this phenomenal aptitude to the test. He would ask her to stay balanced on her head or to keep a jalapeño in her mouth for as long as possible. If ever she cut short the experiment, it was always because of external factors—Frannie’s intervention, for instance. Usually, though, it was Simon himself, after what seemed to him an eternity, who would beg her to stop, cursing himself for having subjected his sister to such torture.

  The nurse they’d met earlier comes back with a clean bedpan. Her brusque manner bespeaks her contempt for the patient, but she says nothing. As she is about to go out, Frannie calls out to her:

  “Next time, don’t leave me marinating in my piss for an hour. That way, I won’t make a mess for you.”

  Carmen rolls her eyes and wonders if there is some way to leave a tip for hospital workers. She notices out of the corner of her eye that Simon is rocking from one foot to the other. Something is bothering him. Carmen takes him into the corridor.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “The matter is I’d really like to see her medical report. She looks healthier than a quarterback at the start of the season. I don’t want to have her mouldering away here for no good reason.”

  “You mean you don’t feel like mouldering here.”

  Simon half smiles at her sheepishly.

  “Okay, keep her company while I go find out how things stand.”

  She sets off down the corridor, which is gradually returning to some semblance of order. The moaning has stopped and the shattered bottles of medicine have disappeared from the floor. The geriatric department has recovered its padded atmosphere punctuated by the beeps and buzzes that chart the path of the dying. The nurses’ station appears at the intersection of three long corridors; Carmen would have preferred to walk another kilometre to find it. She does a better job than her brother of putting up with their mother, but it must come in small doses. In fact, that is what motivated her to start running. As a teenager, she needed an excuse to leave the house, and acceptable excuses were rare as far as Frannie was concerned. Long-distance running naturally arose as the next step: to go farther away and for longer periods of time. The army cadets saved Simon; for Carmen it was marathons.

  An overweight staff member makes a note of her request, assuring her that a doctor will soon come to see them. Carmen slowly returns to room 224. A few doors away, an old man calls out to her.

  “Hija! Hija mia!”

  Carmen stops in her tracks and stares at the haggard eyes, the tortured eyebrows, the twisted lower lip.

  “I’m not your daughter, sir. Sorry.”

  Back in the room, Simon is standing guard with his arms folded at the foot of the bed, while Frannie offers advice on what Alan and Jessica, Simon’s children, should choose as academic majors. Each day since they were born she has found something to say about their education, their nutrition, their leisure activities, and their clothes. Simon endures these interventions while inwardly railing against them. As for Carmen, she has been spared this litany ever since she informed her mother that her future included neither husband nor progeny.

  When she catches sight of her daughter, Frannie waves for her to come closer and whispers: “The bag! The bag!” Underneath a table, Carmen fishes out a large plastic shopping bag. In a conspiratorial tone of voice, Frannie orders Simon to shut the door.

  “What’s inside the bag?”

  “Nothing. Just Bastard.”

  Carmen and Simon look at each other in alarm. Bastard is the tabby cat Frannie adopted thirty years ago. Her love for him (which, in her case, involved shouting at him most of the time) was such that when he died she could not bring herself to part with him.

  Frannie gently opens the bag, revealing the animal’s stiff carcass, stripes intact, ears pricked up for all eternity.

  “Mother!” Simon exclaims. “Put that away immediately. Do you realize what would happen if someone were to see that?”

  “That, that,… It’s not a ‘that’; it’s a cat. An adorable pussycat!” Frannie shoots back, tenderly stroking the creature’s dry fur.

  Carmen can’t help smiling. In the past, the moments when her mother petted her cat were the only intervals of calm in the house, rare interludes that she hung on to to remind herself that Frannie had a heart. Because of allergies, Simon could never tolerate the animal, which, unfortunately for him, enjoyed an exceptionally long life. As luck would have it, however, the cat’s stuffed version is non-allergenic.

  “Simon’s right, mother. You have to put it back in the bag. If they find it, they’ll confiscate it.”

  Outraged, Frannie grabs Bastard by the neck and waves him high in the air.

  “I’d like to see them try! No one is going to come between me and my pussycat!”

  Brother and sister manage willy-nilly to take the animal and hide it just as someone knocks on the door.

  The doctor is a man with dishevelled hair—not a good sign for Simon. Certain professions, including his own and the doctor’s, demand good grooming. A police officer or a doctor with shaggy hair give the people they are supposed to serve and protect a chaotic impression, a feeling of uncertainty just when everything is shifting.

  Outside the door he summarizes an evidently voluminous medical report. Contrary to Simon’s suspicions their mother is indeed unwell. She suffered a serious heart attack that very morning. The tests indicate that her heart is working at a fraction of its normal capacity and that her blood is too thick, putting her at risk of a fatal stroke or thrombosis. On hearing this, Simon probes his own heart for sadness or fear. But it’s as if its volume has suddenly shrunk to the point where nothing is left but a grain of salt, a breadcrumb.

  “We’re giving her anticoagulants and hope that her blood will thin. In a day or two she’ll be able to go home, provided a family member or close friend is there to look after her.”

  Carmen fights back a sigh.

  “And her heart—can it be fixed?” she inquires.

  “At her age, n
o. All we can do is to help her live with what’s left of it.”

  Having said this, the doctor goes quiet and stares at the sister and brother in turn, waiting for comments or questions. But there is nothing to be said. Living with what’s left of their mother’s heart is what they’ve been doing for years.

  “So, am I dying?” Frannie snaps when they come back into the room.

  “No, mother, but you’ll have to be careful with your heart.”

  “Oh! My heart! You know very well that my heart stopped years ago. When I lost your father.”

  Simon freezes. His wife tells him that when he does this he looks like a dog. When he pricks up his ears he stops moving altogether. He waits to catch sight of the game. But Frannie changes the subject. For a hundredth, a thousandth time, the answer eludes him; the hare dashes off into the tall grass, where Simon never ventures to go. The truth about their father is a wily, agile prey despite its weight. His and Carmen’s personal Moby Dick. One of Frannie’s lifetime exploits will have been to mention their father almost every day without ever revealing his identity. Still today, at forty-three and forty-­five years of age, brother and sister regularly call each other in the middle of the day or night to share a new, occasionally credible clue but more often than not a piece of science fiction. A man on the bus who looks like them. A torn letter found in Frannie’s things. A sibylline remark made by an old friend of their mother’s.

  Claire finds these inquiries and late-night phone calls hard to bear. She is a down-to-earth woman and believes that people who reach middle age without knowing their father can very well go on living in the state of ignorance around which their lives have been built. “Get over it, for goodness sake!” What she is more loath to express is her exasperation at how much room this quest takes up and at the exclusive bond it nurtures between her husband and sister-in-law. A shared struggle she can neither take part in nor understand.