The Origin of Species (6 page)

When Alex came into class today he found Miguel slouched in his usual place at one of the flimsy tables that served as desks. María’s place, however, was decidedly empty, and María did not come hurrying in from the washroom or some appointment to fill it as the class got underway. Alex couldn’t believe the sense of desolation he felt at her absence when he had barely exchanged half a dozen words with her and knew almost nothing about her except what he’d gleaned in class through the scrim of a foreign language.

He’d been planning to wing some conversation practice by starting up a discussion on Chernobyl, but right from his garbled introduction he saw the thing was going to be a disaster.

“Is very bad,” one of the Iranians said. “Is close to Iran.”

He saw a smirk appear on the faces of a couple of the Salvadorans.

“Gorbachev, is bad,” the Iranian said. He was looking right at the Salvadorans now. “The Communists, always liars.”

Alex didn’t know where he’d imagined this could lead. Nowhere good, it seemed.

“What about nuclear power?” he said, foolishly carrying the thing on just beyond the point where he might have passed it off as casual conversation rather than an actual lesson plan. By then people were staring at him with squint-eyed, baffled looks, their notebooks spread expectantly. Alex was terrified at the chunk of unstructured class time still stretching before him. In a panic he resorted to a paired conversation exercise he used at Berlitz, but he hadn’t reckoned his numbers well and got stuck pairing an Iranian woman with a Salvadoran one. Almost at once the two turned from each other back to their own compatriots, so that soon all English had given way to the usual sniping in Farsi and Spanish.

He ended the class a good twenty minutes early. Milly stood frowning at the door of the front office as his students filtered away. All Alex’s hopes for his party had drained by now. In any event, he had been a fool to imagine he would ever have had the nerve to invite María.

As he was packing his things Miguel sidled up to him.

“Bad day, yes?”

Alex let this pass. He clicked shut his book bag, then said, as inertly as he could manage, “I see your sister isn’t here today.”

He knew at once that he’d made a mistake.

“No,” Miguel said slowly. “Not today.”

The bastard. He was playing with him.

Alex said nothing.

“She got son’ meeting,” Miguel said finally.

“Oh? What kind of meeting?”

“Don’ know. Son’ kind of political thing. I say, María, why you want son’ political thing when they break our balls for that back home. But she say is a better way to learn things, in those meetings, than coming here.”

Alex took the cut like a man, showing Miguel no pain. Meanwhile, María grew ever more remote: he imagined her part of some underground resistance cell, fighting for the end of El Salvador’s dirty war.

“You wan’ a coffee or son’thing?” Miguel said.

Alex knew he should just put him off.

“I dunno. I’m pretty busy.”

“You come to my home,” Miguel said. “I make you Salvadoran coffee.”

Alex had to remind himself that he was indeed busy. But next to that was the prospect of seeing the rooms she lived in, of smelling her smell there, of running into her.

“Is close,” Miguel said. “You come.”

Somehow, Alex found himself trailing after Miguel into the crooked side streets of St. Henri. The few times Alex had been through here he’d stuck to the main roads, but Miguel was leading him on a whole zigzagging sweep through the place, across vistas that might as easily have been the barrios of San Salvador as Montreal. They passed dead-end streets that disappeared under the expressway, garbage-strewn empty lots, stretches of warehouse and corrugated-tin sheds behind which the skyline of the downtown rose up like a foreign country.

They crossed an area of rubble and blight to a tiny street of old barracks-style row houses that opened out to the rail yards and the badlands of the canal. There was a smell here of old ice and something else, like the humic smell of thaw but a bit ranker than that, a bit sour. The houses came up so hard against the street it seemed a violation to pass in
front of them, the blue of midday TVs visible through the yellowed curtains. Miguel led him through a door at the end of the street and up a tottery staircase to a flat on the second floor. The whole of the place could be held in your eye in a glance, a tiny fifties-era kitchen at the back and then two rooms connected by a double doorway, the front one blocked off by a flowered sheet that had been tacked to the door frame. Out back, through a flimsy storm door that led out to the fire escape, Alex caught a glimpse of cluttered back yards, half of them strung with laundry to take advantage of the spring sun.

“Is my home,” Miguel said, smiling broadly. “Come.”

The middle room seemed to be Miguel’s. There was a small Formica-topped table with three battered chrome-and-rattan chairs, a worn corduroy loveseat, an unmade bed on the floor. Scotch-taped on the wall above the bed, in a fairly orderly fashion, were a Playboy centerfold of a decidedly Aryan blonde and a few smaller pictures of musclemen in various poses probably taken from some body-building magazine.

Miguel had seen Alex’s eye go to the centerfold.

“You like it?”

Alex felt himself flush.

“Not really my taste.”

Miguel pulled a little curtain back from a cabinet at the foot of the bed to reveal the surprise of an expensive-looking Samsung stereo. Alex didn’t like to think where Miguel might have got the money for that, or for the fairly impressive wardrobe he had hanging on a metal rail in the corner—there were suits, sports coats, lounge-lizard lamé shirts, a row of immaculately pressed black pants. Yet nothing else about the place spoke of excess.

Miguel put a
Thriller
cassette in the stereo and cranked up the volume.

“I make the coffee!” he shouted, and disappeared into the kitchen.

Sunlight beckoned through the thin sheet that hung over the doorway to the front room. It took some strength of will for Alex to resist its call, though he imagined a different world there, fluffed and pillowy, perhaps, or maybe with posters of Che and Fidel on the walls. He tried to busy himself by looking through Miguel’s tapes—standard pop items like Bon Jovi and Madonna and Duran Duran, half with the rough photocopied liners of bootleg editions. There was nothing that looked Salvadoran or even remotely Latino, though the liners conjured up every Third World marketplace Alex had ever been in as vividly as a smell.

Miguel had returned with the coffee. He didn’t bother to turn down the music.

“Is good, no?” he shouted, though the truth was that Alex found it somewhat inferior to the house blend at his corner Van Houtte’s. “El Salvador is very famous for coffee!”

Alex ought to be taking more advantage of Miguel. He liked to think of himself as someone who kept abreast of world events, yet he knew next to nothing about El Salvador except what he read in the papers—military strongmen, right-wing death squads, left-wing guerillas. That was what the country was for him, not some poor campesino on a hillside growing his coffee beans, though that was likely what the fighting was all about. And there was probably some ugly political reason why the coffee he was now drinking tasted as dull as the Maxwell House he got off the shelf at Steinberg’s, though maybe the beans, bought at rockbottom prices by some conglomerate and then specially roasted and centupled in price, were exactly the ones that showed up in the premium blends at Van Houtte’s.

When he’d started at St. Bart’s, he’d imagined it as a crash course in international politics. But then one of the Iranians had told him of his family’s flight across the mountains into Pakistan, for which he claimed to have paid fifty thousand dollars. Alex had been staggered by the sum. He had imagined some executive exit with Mercedes and driver.

“Is very bad,” the man had gone on. “Make you pay for everything, but then they steal you, no food, no clothes. My daughter she die.”

Alex didn’t think he’d understood. The man’s tone had barely altered.

“I’m sorry?”

“My daughter die.” Now Alex heard the catch in his voice. “Too cold. No food. Is very bad.”

After that, Alex had tread lightly. These weren’t the kinds of things you wanted to broach over coffee during break. He wasn’t there to be a voyeur of other people’s misfortunes; he was there to teach English. Every class he felt the same disjunction, doing past participles while out there in his students’ heads were the memories of horrors he could hardly imagine, yet he couldn’t figure a way around the thing. The only solution would have been to become people’s friend, get into their lives, do all the hard, slow work of growing intimate, and who had time for that?

He seemed to have time for Miguel, though.

From an old Westclox Baby Ben near Miguel’s bed Alex saw he had little more than an hour before his lesson at Berlitz.

“Any word on your case yet?” Alex said, though somehow it hurt him to ask.

Miguel had straddled one of the dining chairs and was bobbing to the thump of “Billy Jean.”

“Eh?”

“Your case. Your refugee claim.”

“Psshh. Backlog, backlog, tha’s all. Meantime we get our few hundred dollars to eat and waste our time. I think maybe is better to go illegal in the U.S. Son’ Salvadorans making big money there.”

It felt ridiculous to be shouting like this.

“It’s probably better to wait,” Alex said, though what he meant was, it was better for María to wait. “They’re saying there’s going to be an amnesty soon.”

It had occurred to Alex that his distrust of Miguel might be another case of simple animal resistance, having more to do with María than anything else. Yet there was still that aura of difference that came off him. Why did he live down here in St. Henri when most of his countrymen, even the ones who came to St. Bart’s, lived up on the Plateau? For all his chumming up to Alex, Miguel had never once asked him for advice on his claim, though Alex knew this was something the other students talked about incessantly, trading stories of what worked and what didn’t and building up a whole mythology of fact and superstition and lore.

Miguel was telling him about a Salvadoran he’d heard of in L.A. who was getting rich just selling
pupusas
to other Salvadorans.

“You go there, is like San Salvador, Salvadorans everywhere! Not like here.”

“But you live so far from the other Salvadorans here.”

“Bah,” Miguel said, not missing a beat, “is jus’ a ghetto up there, tha’s all. Is not my style.”

The song ended. Miguel, seeming suddenly bored, reached over to the stereo and hit the eject. Alex felt his ears ring with the sudden silence.

“So tell me,” Miguel said, pulling his chair up closer to Alex’s. “Which is the good club here for girls? The Canadian girls?”

Alex felt himself bristle.

“I don’t really know the clubs, to tell you the truth. You might try some of the bars on Crescent Street.”

Miguel made a face.

“Too many Jews,” he said.

Alex took a big gulp of coffee. It had been stupid to come here. He cast his eyes around the room to avoid looking at Miguel, trying to find something to hang his excuses on so he could flee. By a kind of reflex his eyes went to the sheet that closed off the front room.

He felt Miguel’s gaze on him.

“I’m having a party tomorrow,” Alex blurted out. “If you wanted to come. You and your sister.”

He regretted the invitation at once. He’d just wanted an exit line, something with finality.

Miguel’s face lit up. “A party, yes, Mr. Alex! Is good!” He clapped an arm around Alex’s shoulder. “I will come. I hope to see many Canadian girls.”

Alex felt hopelessly dirtied now, by his own motives, by Miguel. Even his dislike of him seemed to sully him: no one Alex knew would have spoken like that, yet if he’d said, “Too many
JAP
s,” if he’d known the idiom, Alex might not have batted an eye. Then for all Alex knew—though somehow he doubted this—Miguel was on the run from some death squad.

Miguel saw him down the stairs.

“You’re a good man, Mr. Alex,” he said.

At the door Alex noticed, for the first time it seemed, how small Miguel was—he couldn’t have stood more than five feet. Alex completely overshadowed him. An old newspaper had blown up against the stoop, and Miguel, with surprising fastidiousness, bent to clear it away.

“
A mañana
,” he said, then took Alex’s hand in both of his and gave it such a firm Latin squeeze that, for an instant at least, Alex forgave him everything.

A
lex had what amounted to his lunch, though it was already past four, at the Casa Italia, a passable short-order place near the Forum that for some reason was wildly popular. On the back wall, near the kitchen, was a rack that sported the signed sticks of the various
NHL
luminaries who had graced the place, but everything else was pure Italian kitsch, the stucco work, the plastic checkerboard tablecloths, the huge poster of the Holy Family that hung behind the espresso machine. Alex ate there because it was close and cheap and quick, though there was also the fact that the owner, Domenic, a Molisano like his parents, a mixed blessing, had taken a kind of patronal interest in him. The place was Alex’s only real contact with the city’s Italians. Before he’d moved south he’d lived just a couple of metro stops from Little Italy, but had seldom gone up there. It was the alienness of the place that had somehow got to him, not that there was anything there that wasn’t dead familiar, the faces, the voices, the look of the houses, but seeing all of it from the outside made him feel at once how insular it was, how cut off from the wider world.

At this hour the Casa Italia was nearly deserted. Domenic was at a back table talking to a suited man in the somber, highfalutin English he put on for people of stature, in this case probably the noodle salesman.

“I’m not saying I won’t change the thing if that’s the law says to do it. I’m just saying the Italians we been here a hundred years, we got some rights too. You go to Chinatown you got every fucking sign it’s Chinese and nobody says anything.”