The Origin of Species (64 page)

“Is better for you, my friend. She’s my sister, you know, but very hard. Very tough. Not like you.”

Since then Miguel had kept up the connection between them as if it had never been in question, calling at all hours, showing up unannounced at Alex’s door to drag him to some friend’s place or function. The simple fact was that he actually seemed fond of Alex, had grown attached to him as if Alex were a young naïf in a bad neighborhood whom he had taken under his protection. Alex, post-María, post-Amanda, didn’t have the will to fight him off. It was a relief, really, to let Miguel take charge, to fall into the rhythm he had of coming and going without plan as if he were still roaming the streets of San Salvador trying to keep his finger on the pulse.

“What did you do back there, exactly?” Alex had asked him, not entirely sure he wanted to know.

“This and that. First my father’s factory, then when it closed down jus’ little jobs for money. To carry things and so on. Like a messenger.”

An innocent. Except that in El Salvador there were no innocents, only sides. The army there organized youth groups to stand on street corners and watch everyone who came and went, a sort of demonic Boy Scouts that formed the recruiting grounds for the death squads and paramilitary.

Miguel still had his network of mole-like associates, short, slick-haired young men who would come together in little nodes at the
Salvadoran events and stand laconic and dark-eyed and watchful like boys at a high school dance, then melt into the crowd again. Alex was lucky if he ever heard a complete sentence pass among these boys—it was all Miguel’s
unibersal language
with them, a nod, a grunt, a wave of the hand. Not like the politicos, with their heated talk. Alex couldn’t have said if they were simply scoping the place for women or arranging names on a hit list. More likely they were doing the sort of “little jobs” they had done back home, since none of them ever seemed to lack for cash. Miguel sometimes would open a wallet packed with wrinkled twenties and hand over a few bills to this one or that one like a mafia overlord, a separate economy unfolding within his little cell that seemed to have nothing to do with the normal Keynesian flow of the refugee world, the welfare payments or the low-end service jobs or the remission of funds to family and freedom-fighters back home. Never once had Alex seen Miguel express what could pass for an unambiguous political position—he stood above all that, or beneath or beside it, wherever, it seemed, he’d be clear of the line of fire.

“The rebels, you know, they have guns like the army. You shoot, someone will die. The bullet doesn’t care if it’s left or right.”

It was Alex who had suggested the tutoring, in that way he had of bringing upon himself the things he most dreaded. He thus managed to institutionalize a relationship that might otherwise never have survived its flimsy foundations. He had hoped to keep some sort of connection to María, he supposed, though he never actually asked about her. It was only by chance that he learned she had moved out on her own—he dropped by their old apartment once when he couldn’t reach Miguel on the phone to find María’s room had been taken over by one of Miguel’s ferret-eyed young cohorts.

“Sorry, man, she take the phone with her,” Miguel said. “A couple of days, I get another one.”

She had moved up to Jean Talon to be closer to her work, Miguel said. Her departure looked suspicious to Alex, but Miguel took it in stride, over the next few months taking in an alarming number of new roommates, as if he were running a sex trade operation or underground railroad. Each one seemed as transient and shifty as the one before, but they all had a story, had smuggled up from the States or been evicted because their welfare had been cut off or were the cousin of an in-law on Miguel’s mother’s side.

Then out of the blue one day Miguel told Alex he had moved, like his sister, to Jean Talon.

“I thought you said there were too many Salvadorans there.”

“No, man, you don’ even see them. Is all Italians. Good people, like us. Latin people.”

Alex wasn’t sure whom exactly Miguel meant to include in that “us.” His apartment, when Alex saw it, looked like a carbon copy of the last, except that instead of clotheslines strung with laundry out back there were the elaborately trellised and furrowed back plots of the local Italians. Alex had never spent much time around Jean Talon but now suddenly he was there every weekend—Miguel would call and wheedle and cajole, say Alex’s brain would rot if he was always working, until Alex would lose the will to resist.

“You become a machine, man, is no good. You become a fucking Canadian.”

Somehow Miguel had already so understood the instinctive self-abnegation that formed the bedrock of the national character. It was true that there was hardly an outpost of Alex’s emotional landscape these days that didn’t feel colonized by an almost Presbyterian sense of chastisement—most recently Katherine had dropped out of school and taken a shit job as a receptionist and his parents had canceled a trip to the Holy Land because of some funny bleeding from his mother’s nether parts. Miguel took him to bars up in Little Italy that were worlds away from all of this, full of overdressed Italian girls on the lam from their nineteenth-century parents and gold-chained Ginos who drove up in muscle cars. It was everything he had fled from back home, but it felt like a kind of anaesthesia now, familiar and without pain. Miguel had abandoned his own kind the instant he had moved in amongst them and cleaved himself to the Italians, which suited Alex fine—he didn’t know how many more cumbia nights he could have borne, how much more of seeing María across a room and feeling like a eunuch. In the bars he got mildly or totally drunk and even managed to fraternize with the womenfolk, because Miguel, who looked at home here with his black pants and lamé shirts, had wasted no time on that front. They might end up dancing until two in the morning, something the normal Alex simply didn’t do. But then it wasn’t the normal Alex who went out to these bars, but some other sleazy, devil-may-care one, the sort of
person that back in high school he had despised and desperately longed to be.

He never made the mistake of trying to take any of these Italian girls home. Even if that had been remotely possible it would surely have led to unmitigated disaster—within a week he would either have found himself bound up in a web of soul-strangling obligations he would never have got clear of or paralyzed with ethnic shame. But Miguel never left with anyone either. Alex suspected he had never had sex with a woman, for all his talk, and indeed he always looked relieved at the end of a night to have Alex to rescue him.

If the trains had stopped Alex crashed at Miguel’s, stumbling home with him through streets that looked surreal in the night time desertion. The houses were mainly poky two-story townhouses built right up against the street, but half of them were done up with the rococo flourishes of ducal palaces, fancy brickwork or pillared doors or Juliet balconies in swirling metal that seemed straight out of the grand apartment houses of Milan. Once Miguel tried the door of the big Romanesque church off Dante Street, and found it open.

“Let’s check it out, man! Come on!”

He was already inside. Alex imagined alarms going off and the pastor appearing from the rectory half-dressed and furious, but there was only the cavernous silence. He made his way through the dark, ghostly shapes looming up from every direction.

Miguel had found a light switch.

“Over here, man.”

A couple of sconces came on in the chancel to send grainy light up into the dome above the altar. It was adorned in a massive fresco crowded with iconography, a Madonna ringed by the angelic host and below these the saints, perhaps, and lower still the mere mortals, every creature in its place. The bottom tier was a veritable mob, fat-cheeked clerics and dewy-eyed altar boys and a man in a suit who looked like he’d wandered in off the street by mistake.

Miguel pointed to a figure in the bottom corner. “Is your hero.”

Alex had to strain in the light to make sure he’d seen correctly: it was Mussolini, in full military regalia, a bit more hirsute and robust than in life, perhaps, but clearly him, sitting astride a charger flanked by a host of cardinals and by the pope himself on his throne.

“He wasn’t a hero,” Alex said. “He was a dictator.”

“You are wrong, my friend. He was for the poor. Schools, hospitals, all of this.”

Alex felt irritated that Miguel knew these things.

“That doesn’t make him a hero.”

“Is depend what was before. For some people, I think, he is a hero.”

“Is that how people think back in El Salvador? That it’s better to have a dictator?”

Alex was surprised at how wounded Miguel looked.

“No. I don’ talk about El Salvador. Is different.”

Anyone other than Alex would surely have softened to Miguel long before. He was just a child, really, nearly ten years Alex’s junior, just someone trying to make a life. Yet each time Alex saw him he felt the same little node of resistance form in him.

Miguel had taken his place at the dining table and was leafing through the notebook Alex had given him for his exercises. Sure enough, he’d done barely half of what Alex had assigned him.

“You know, you got to move from this place, man,” he said. “Is not good people here.”

“I like them well enough.”

“Is too many English, man. Too many racists.”

This wasn’t quite what Alex had expected.

“I wouldn’t think they’re any worse than the French.”

“No, you’re wrong, one hundred percent. The French, maybe they say it in words, but the English say it in their eyes. Is the worst. The French know that. They know what it is, when someone looks at you. Like that book. White niggers.”

Alex was astounded.

“You read that?”

“No, man, I seen it on your shelf the first time I came here.
White Niggers
. Is all I need to see. Is something you feel in your bones. The Quebecois, they feel it. They’re like us.”

The ambiguous “us” again. This time, Alex was pretty sure it didn’t include him.

“You know, I come to your door downstairs,” Miguel said, “with that fucking security you got, it doesn’t work, and is like a dog coming from the street how people look at me. I’m just saying to you, man.”

Whatever will Alex had had to start tackling the past perfect tense had gone from him. Instead he pulled a couple of beers from the fridge, left over, for all he knew, from his end-of-term party a year ago, and handed one to Miguel.

Miguel brightened.

“My friend. I thank you.”

They set chairs out on the balcony and sat drinking and smoking like mestizos in the village square. The office towers downtown reflected the sun as it sank behind Alex’s building. Out over the St. Lawrence the cars were crossing the bridges into Longueil, where Félix had lived in his fifties bungalow and Pierre Vallières in his tarpaper shack. Miguel had a photo tacked to his kitchen cupboard that showed a white stucco ranch house in San Salvador that looked much more like Félix’s bungalow than Pierre’s shack, though a sort of militarized version of it, the doors and windows barred, the garage battened down, the garden ringed with twelve-foot walls topped with barbed wire and broken glass.

“Do you think it’s safe for your sister to go back?” Alex said.

Miguel picked at the label on his beer.

“What’s safe? How can you say
safe
in a war?”

Alex felt all the questions he had never dared to ask hovering between them. He knew too much by now, was the problem, enough to piece things together.
Little jobs
, Miguel had said.
Like a messenger
. Maybe watching people come and go. Once they grew out of the youth groups, young men like Miguel normally graduated to the Organización Democrática Nacionalista.
ORDEN
. Order. This, depending on whom you asked, was either a fabrication of leftist propaganda, or a loose association of civic-minded peasants interested in controlling crime, or a
CIA
-trained counter-insurgent paramilitary organization that was the main recruiting ground for the death squads for government informants.

“She said there was a boy there she’d been involved with,” Alex said. “That she’d got a letter. A threat.”

“She said so?”

Already Alex felt he had overstepped.

“She seemed to think she was safe now. She wouldn’t say why.”

Miguel kept picking at his bottle.

“Is only for her to tell. Before, I was there, I could see things, but now who can say?”

See what
, Alex thought.

“Did you know this boy? The one who was killed?”

“Did she say so?”

“She didn’t mention you.” Alex had never seen him like this, so wound up. “Only that he was killed.”

“Is better you don’ ask too many questions, my friend. Is not Canada, my country. You don’ know the things there.”

He had hit the usual impasse. It was as if a crust covered the real truth of the place, as if there was what could be seen and known but beneath that a kind of sinkhole where everything was darkness.

Any next question he could ask seemed like stepping too far.

“You know, in El Salvador,” Miguel said, “every day you wake up, you have to decide, am I going to live or die. That’s it. You just have to decide.”

The comment settled between them a moment like a stone sinking down.

“This boy. Yes, I know him. Not from María. From the street. She never brings him to the house, but I know him. Is my business to know. One day someone can knock on the door, and if you don’ know, they can kill you. They can kill your family.”

They were at the heart of it now, the awful thing, unfolding just as Alex had feared.

It wasn’t too late to stop.

“Is that what happened?”

“Why do you want to know this, man? It doesn’t matter now.”

“But she’s going back there. It doesn’t sound safe.”

“What did María say? The letter. Who was the one that sends it to her?”

Alex wasn’t following.

“She didn’t say. The military. The death squads. Whoever sends those things.”