Out There: a novel (27 page)

The sun was beginning to set when the old woman arrived, stooped against her cane in front of his bench, her head wrapped in a green towel as if she’d just washed her hair. Jefferson was ready. Here she was, his helper. He could see a shimmer around the outline of her small frame, and the refrain from the hallelujah song began to play way back in his ears. She looked at him, and he spoke the question, slowly, as best he could. “Por favor.”
Please.
“Dónde está Gabriel García Márquez?”
Where is Gabriel García Márquez?

The woman looked at Jefferson and paused, peering up through the branches of the almond trees above, up to the high-rise balconies. She looked behind her with a stern brow, and then she looked ahead, to the left, and to the right, and finally she placed her forehead down into the pocket of her hand as it lay open and propped against her cane. She seemed to be navigating the tangled streets of the metropolis, retracing her steps to a place she had visited long ago. Jefferson waited, hopeful.

When the old woman returned from her mental wanderings, she waved her one free hand in a new direction, what Jefferson guessed was eastward. She spoke in a fierce Spanish he could not follow, but from the vigorous thrashing of her left wrist, he guessed he must still be many miles away from the right neighborhood. As best he could, Jefferson asked her to confirm this fact and she nodded,
Sí,
and thrashed her hand and wrist again in what he interpreted to mean
Get going!
He was thanking her and standing then, preparing to retrieve the Kawasaki and head off in this new direction, when the old woman’s language became intelligible, as if she had finally found the words for which she had been searching, nodding and smiling. “San Ángel. San Ángel! No, El Zócalo! San Ángel, señor! Sí, señor.”

It
was raining again, and Jefferson’s thoughts had turned to literature and its embrace, a good story’s ability to guide the reader to a better life, to help him to know himself more fully. Iraq seemed so far away. Though he continued to kneel every morning and read the list, seeing each of those names and faces as clearly as he had ever seen them, Jefferson could no longer smell the acrid aftermath of each unique explosion. Try as he might to remember that smell, to recall the singe of his nostrils, the sensation had fallen into a new category of memory, the memory recalled with effort rather than the memory that shrieks in the dark of night.

He had spent the morning walking in the rain and asking many people the same question—
Where is San Ángel? Nearby, yes?
He continued to trust the words of the old stooped woman, who had seemed so certain that this was the neighborhood Jefferson sought. He had left
Remedios the Pup with a kind shopkeeper who said she loved the name Remedios and loved
One Hundred Years of Solitude
, but had had no idea that García Márquez lived in Mexico. Wasn’t he Colombian? Still, Jefferson continued to have great faith in the act of asking for help. So far, it had led him right.

Again, most people shrugged at his question, or appeared unwilling to stop and talk because of the rain, but there were three who tried their best. A middle-aged woman with a very large bottom shoved into a tight black skirt seemed to want to help, but she also seemed confused, pointing down one street, giving him directions in an English-Spanish hodgepodge, then pausing and pointing in the opposite direction, down a different street. A teenage boy carrying a boom box said he’d played with Gabriel García Márquez’s grandsons when they were young—yes, he knew where the boys had lived—but he’d never met the writer, had only heard his grandmother speak of him. Did Jefferson want him to show him where the grandsons, those little boys, had lived all those years ago? A delivery guy unloading several cases of soda for a snack shop was pretty sure about Miércoles Street, or somewhere near that.

In this way, the blind leading the blind, the curious helping the curious, the trustworthy aiding the trustworthy, Jefferson ended up in the place called San Ángel, the place he believed he had been looking for. From a brochure in the lobby of a small inn, he read that it had been an ancient settlement long since enveloped by the metropolis. He sat on the curb across the street from a snack shop and a park, and he waited for what would happen.

It was quiet, a kind of quiet he had not yet experienced in Mexico City, and something about this quiet made him believe he must be in the right place. This was the enclave within the stormy chaos that Jefferson imagined that writers everywhere might seek. It had the feel of gravity and of slow, fluid thinking. It had the feeling of refuge.

He sat on the curb, drinking Cokes and eating peanuts, pretending he belonged and waiting for something to happen. Occasionally he took out the collage and worked on it a little.

At the end of the day a woman and her two young daughters walked to the park from an opposite side street and began playing a game of tag on the small green patch of grass, near a swing and slide. Jefferson watched the children play and enjoyed their quiet company, having no intention of asking the woman for help. She was obviously from this part of the city, a local in this quaint neighborhood; she had packed a snack for her girls in her satchel, and she said a number of times that it would soon be time to go home for dinner.

It was she who spoke to Jefferson, smiling. Was he visiting San Ángel?

Jefferson, tired, told the truth. “I’m trying to find Gabriel García Márquez,” he said. “He saved my life, you know?”

She wanted the whole story. What had happened to Jefferson? How had he come to know of the writer? Was he American?

And so he told her. Beginning with Ms. Tolan and Honors English 4 and including the list of
losses and ending with the Forty-One All-Time Best Quotes
and Nigel’s Kawasaki and his great fortune with the bergamot woman and, really, just about everyone he’d met along the way.

“I’ve got to find him,” he said finally. “I’ve got to tell him.”

The woman seemed surprised, as if she’d learned something new about a story she’d thought was already finished.

It turned out that she’d known Gabriel García Márquez since she was a little girl. She’d grown up next door to him, and her parents were friends of his and his wife’s. They’d shared meals, celebrated holidays, alternated between homes. Lots of people love him, she said. Lots of people dream of meeting him.

And then she wrote down the famous writer’s address—on Calle Miércoles—and a few particulars about his compound on a piece of paper from her purse. He had done most of his own gardening until he grew too ill, she said. Perhaps the old man might have changed his habits, but if it were her, she’d wait on the south side of the wall, just outside the old turquoise garden gate with the symbols of the cosmos carved into its wood. In the past he’d liked to pick up his newspaper there. She knew because as a teen she’d had trouble sleeping, and sometimes she’d sat on the curb outside her compound and visited with him in the wee hours. “He’s an insomniac—or used to be,” she said.

It was a good bet, she said, though he was older now, and he’d been very sick with cancer for a long time. Though he’d survived, his mind wasn’t what it once was. Jefferson could try, though, the woman said. He’d need a miracle, but why not try?

In
all, it rained four days, three hours, two minutes, and a handful of seconds. During that time Jefferson buttressed his courage in the covered walkways and narrow alleyways of San Ángel, Remedios the Pup by his side.

And then the sun came out, and Jefferson followed the woman’s instructions to the end of the little street behind the public garden, where it became a cobbled lane. The wall that stood before him, she had explained, would look like posole, a deep ivory with flecks of brown and rust, and it would be draped with a tangled mess of trumpet and wisteria vines. From the other side he would likely hear peacocks screaming. Occasionally one of the more skilled flyers among them might leap momentarily to the top of the wall, just long enough to gawk at the outside world before falling backward into the old man’s garden. He loves his peacocks, the woman had said.

When Jefferson arrived, all of the woman’s words proved true save the peacock teetering on the wall. Here was the posole-colored wall hung with vines. Here were the proud yelps of birds from the other side. Jefferson wasn’t certain, but he guessed they were decades-old almond trees standing in a long line. Spreading out tall and wide and dense, the line of trees said
No
to the heat and to the sun and to anything else that might threaten a man’s solitude. On the other side of the narrow cobbled way came the scratch-scratch-scratching of chickens and the intermittent calls of what he guessed must be a lone peacock.

He felt ready to get his bearings, to watch the compound gates, to see the cars pass by, the neighbors walk past and wonder, but nothing else. Now that he stood so near, Jefferson was sure he was not ready to knock on the front door.

He turned to the left and walked until he reached the end of what he believed to be García Márquez’s wall and the beginning of the next property, about fifty yards down, and then he turned around and continued back in the other direction. He passed the front entrance, rough-hewn double pine doors with a tarnished lion’s-head knocker, and went on until the wall rounded the corner of the modest street, and followed a smaller brick lane until he was out of sight behind fruited trees and overhanging vines. The wall reached another corner at the end of another hundred yards, and around it the lane turned into a two-rutted grass and dirt alleyway.

Jefferson followed the alley as far as his eyes could manage, down into the greenness. In front of him, just before the corner, stood a wooden door, a single wooden door stained turquoise, raised several inches above a bed of fine gravel and carved with the moon and the stars. Just in sight of the main entrance with its driveway, this one looked to be the portal for a housekeeper, a gardener, anyone taking out the trash. It was here, at this spot near the back corner of the property, that Jefferson decided to camp out for the evening. It was possible someone would see him, think he was a bum, ask him to leave, but Jefferson believed in the power of his intentions, and he believed this was the spot where he’d wait until morning.

He had some confidence to build and some remembering to do: Why had he come down here again? And besides all that, a whole lot of reading.

At some point in the trip, somewhere between San Miguel and Querétaro, Jefferson had realized with great disbelief he that he had never actually read
One Hundred Years of Solitude
in its entirety. Not from beginning to end. If someone had asked him his favorite scene or favorite line, Jefferson would not have paused, for those were questions with lots of easy answers. True, one’s favorite line, one’s favorite scene even, might change from day to day, but he’d always have an answer ready for a question like that. So many favorite scenes. So many three-page sentences. But if someone had taken him for an expert, if someone had asked him what the novel was
about,
its themes, even its plot, Jefferson would have crossed his eyes and mumbled. The truth was, he had not once read the whole story.

Jefferson
stayed awake for the next thirty-six hours, taking breaks for sandwiches and to use the bathroom at the little snack shop down the street, and read
One Hundred Years of Solitude
, making notes in the margin as he went along, Remedios the Pup by his side. During that time no one came in or out of the turquoise gate, though a young woman walked out the front entrance in the early evening and returned again the next morning around nine, and another woman, an older woman, arrived midmorning and stayed until about four, and twice a third woman, scarfed and sunglassed, drove off in an old brown Mercedes, each time returning about an hour later. Jefferson kept track of the comings and goings on a blank piece of notebook paper, folded up with the rest of his important papers and tucked inside the novel’s front cover.

Oh, but the reading of that story he thought he knew so well! So many characters to keep track of—all those Aureliano Josés, all those Arcadios, all those gypsies, all those years of war—and the repetition reminded him of that perpetual motion toy the guidance counselor at Santa Fe High had kept on her desk. Thank goodness for the family tree printed just after the title page. He felt he must be an idiot for having to consult it so many times. Was Aureliano José the son of an Arcadio or of an Aureliano? And who was the father of those identical twins switched at birth?

But when he stopped being so hard on himself, Jefferson discovered something unbelievable—that after all the time he’d spent with the novel, there was still more to be discovered. For instance, how had he never before noticed the idea, in the mind of the youngest Aureliano, that literature was a plaything, a device to make people laugh, something to be enjoyed?

The story involved flying carpets, and it led him through swamplands and highlands and several times past a petrified Spanish galleon. It escorted him into the bedrooms of concubines and the hammocks of nostalgic lovers, and liberated him from any meager ideas he may have had of sex or of family or of home. Oh my God, and the women. Jefferson was swept away by the most beautiful woman among five thousand of the most beautiful women (Fernanda!), as well as the one who could eat more than any man, an award-winning gastronome known as the Elephant. But most of all, the story reminded him of war and all its devastations. At the end of the 436th page, Jefferson was both satisfied and exhausted.