Call Me Brooklyn Page 4

  We were in New Jersey, in a labyrinth of highways surrounded by industrial yards and parking lots crammed with hundreds of identical vehicles as far as the eye could see. As we were passing the cargo terminals of Newark Airport, I stopped looking out the window and began to leaf through the magazine without paying much attention to its contents. A small, rag-paper envelope slipped out from between the pages. Intrigued, I grabbed it and saw a name written in ink, followed by a number:

  Zadie (212) 719-1859

  My first instinct was to tear open the envelope, but I stopped myself. If I did things correctly, this number could possibly lead me to her. The area code indicated she lived in Manhattan. I placed the envelope in between the pages of my diary and put away the magazine in the net pocket in front of my seat. Only then did I pay attention to the cover, a Native American with a scar on his face, wearing sunglasses, meticulously dressed up, standing by the door of a casino and holding a leather portfolio in his right hand. The masthead was in white letters—New York Times Magazine—followed by today’s date: October 13, 1973.

  I began to make conjectures about the girl. What was her name? Had she taken the bus from Deauville or boarded at one of the other stops on the way? I pictured myself calling this Zadie, whoever she was, talking to her, or with some other stranger, or leaving an anonymous message on an answering machine, offering incoherent explanations to some faceless other.

  I don’t know when the rolling of the bus lulled me to sleep. The last sight I remember before drawing the curtain to shield me from the sunlight was of a wooden house, half-hidden by some maples. When I awoke, we’d already arrived at our destination and most of the passengers had already exited the bus. I rushed to grab my bag from the overhead bin and, when I got off, I couldn’t help but laugh, thinking I had been on the verge of doing exactly the same thing as the girl in Port Authority: staying asleep on the bus. I managed to wake up at the last minute, but even so, it bothered me, because I had broken my routine: get off before arriving in Deauville, watch Stewart Foster’s horses grazing in the pasture, pay my ritual visit to Sam. The thoroughbreds could wait, but something told me that I should go to Rick’s gas station right away. I had a feeling that once there the mystery whose shadow had been haunting me since that nightmare woke me up in the middle of the night would be solved. I left the bus station and stood on the side of the road. Farther off in the distance I could clearly see the Texaco sign next to the gas station. But it wasn’t lit. It couldn’t be more than half a mile to the gas station, which was at the intersection of the old highway with the county road. I threw my bag over my shoulder and with an uncanny feeling of unease began to walk, my eyes fixed on the neon sign.

  On the way, there wasn’t the least indication of life. No cars passed me by. No one came out to welcome me or waved at me from afar. When I arrived, there wasn’t a soul in the old service station; the place felt ghostly without Sam and his loyal Lux by the entrance of the store. Someone had ripped off the sign telling clients to pay for their gas inside before pumping; in its place, hanging on a rusty chain blocking the entrance, was a wooden board that said STATION CLOSED. That was it. No other explanations. The door and the windows of the general store were sealed with boards of plywood. My premonitions began to become a fearful reality. I walked on the gravel path leading to my friend’s shed, listening closely to the sounds of my steps, trying to understand how in the hell he always knew it was me. The place was empty: not a single piece of furniture, or utensil, or any other trace of his presence. Mechanically, I walked toward the small vegetable garden by the stream that ran behind the gas station. It didn’t take long to confirm my suspicions. On the other side of the wire fence, I saw a small gray headstone and a succinct inscription.

  1958–1973

  Et Lux Perpetua

  I went up to the tiny grave and touched the epitaph with my fingers, finding it strange that someone like Sam would have used such words. The name, I supposed, was down to the Bible, and how it colored his idea of the world. Lux. That’s why he had taken up the animal after he lost his sight. The dog became the light that was missing from his eyes. If Sam too had died, as I was beginning to worry must be the case, they would have buried him in the small graveyard by the Anabaptist church in Deauville. I tried to imagine Sam’s epitaph, thinking that no one could improve on what he had written about himself on the day he began to practice his last profession: “Sam Evans, Memorizer of the Word of God.” May he rest in peace, I said aloud, looking at the rectangle of white pebbles that marked the contours of the place where Lux had been buried.

  As I returned to the front of the station, I saw an approaching pickup truck slow down until it had come to a full stop. The driver opened the door and, sitting up, waved his hat at me, signaling me to approach. He was around fifty years old and was wearing a very dirty pair of denim overalls. When I reached him, he explained:

  The gas station is closed.

  I see that. What happened? Has something happened to Rick or Sam? You must know them. Are you from around here?

  Yeah, of course. Rick is fine, but old Evans passed away a couple of weeks ago. I stopped because I saw you didn’t have a car. What brings you to Deauville? You need me to drop you off somewhere?

  I told him I was a friend of Louise Lamarque. Everyone knew the Manhattan painter who spent long seasons alone in the windmill house.

  If you want, I can take you there. It’s on my way.

  I accepted his offer, thanking him, and put my bag between us in the front seat. I told the man in the overalls that I had seen Lux’s grave.

  The poor thing could have probably held on for a bit longer, but before letting himself die, Sam took him to the veterinarian.

  The memory of the old man’s grave voice echoed within me:

  And the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, Son of Man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel.

  He was a good man—Sam, I said. I don’t come here a lot, but it’s hard to imagine Deauville without his stall.

  What finished him was the new gas station they opened in town. Just like that, people stopped coming here. Rick was offered a good retirement, but he asked for permission to continue to manage the old gas station, and they let him do it, out of pity. What they couldn’t do is give him a job in the new station and much less let Sam put up his stall, as you call it. People are too busy, gas prices have gone up too much, and you can’t bother customers with that sort of thing. Everyone knew that the only reason Rick went on working was that if he left he would have deprived his old friend of the only way he could make a living. But the situation was absurd. Now and then some old acquaintance stopped by to say hello, people like me, but for the most part, Rick and Sam were two solitary shadows stranded in that deserted service station. A couple of weeks after all this, Sam decided to put Lux to sleep, saying he was way too old. Sam wanted to go on living in the shed just the same, and there was no way to make him change his mind. Finally, Rick stopped working, although he kept on coming to the station every day. He brought Sam the meals Kim prepared him, and they did his laundry. He always stayed for a while, keeping Sam company, but that couldn’t last. Rick offered to pay for a room in town, but Sam was too proud to accept anything like that.

  One Sunday morning, when Rick came to pick Sam up to take him to church, Sam wasn’t by the entrance to the store. Rick found him dead on his straw mattress. The doctor couldn’t find any good reason he should’ve died. Natural causes was what he said in the end. I say, if that’s what happened, if he died of old age, without suffering, he didn’t have it so bad. Hopefully we’ll all go that way when our time comes.

  We had arrived at the intersection with the windmill. The man in the blue overalls stopped his truck and shook my hand. We had forgotten to introduce ourselves.

  Walker Martin, if you ever need anything, he said.

  Gal Ackerman, I replied and thanked him.

  No need to thank me. And before taking off, he added: If you want to see
Rick, he’s at his sister Sarah’s house on Red Creek, right next to the hardware store. Have a good day, my friend. Sorry to have been the bearer of bad news.

  No problem. I’m not as surprised as you might think. In fact, I was at the gas station because I had a premonition . . .

  After he drove off, I threw the bag over my shoulder and followed the path toward the windmill. The door to the house was locked, but there was a light on in the studio. I stamped off, each footfall reminding me that never again would anyone recognize me simply by hearing the sound of my steps.

  Three

  ABE LEWIS

  March 9, 1964

  I felt the impact of the landing in my stomach and looked out the window. It was still nighttime, and in the darkness, Barajas looked like a ghost town. Two rows of bright specks stretched back to the end of the runway. Near the ground, strips of fog wrapped themselves around the beacons. When the aircraft changed directions, I made out the shapes of other planes. Against the outline of the hangars, they seemed like sleeping monsters. Finally, the plane came to a stop. I stood up, dazed, and headed for the door with the rest of the passengers. Outside, a gust of wind slapped my cheeks. I noticed a neon sign that read AEROPUERTO DE MADRID-BARAJAS, the letters blurred by the fog. A dim glow floated over the open field on the other side of the wire fence. It had snowed. Sleepily, the passengers climbed down the steps and boarded a bus that had been waiting for us with its engine running. I sat by the driver and adjusted my watch to Madrid time. It was a few minutes before seven.

  In the terminal, everyone was smoking. A border guard stamped my passport and handed it back to me. In the baggage-claim area, there was a group of civil guards whose three-cornered patent-leather hats I had seen in the photographs that Ben kept in the Archive. Outside, there was a line of black cars waiting. I noticed that in Madrid, taxis had a red stripe painted on the side. I went to the front of the line, where a cab driver took my bag and put it in the trunk. Where to? he asked when we were both inside. Atocha Station, I replied. The driver, a man with a wispy mustache, sallow skin, and a surly disposition, nodded silently, wiped the windshield with the sleeve of his shirt, and pulled down the meter lever. Imitating him, I wiped my window and saw that daylight had begun to break over the snowy landscape. We passed by factories, old brick buildings, chalets, houses, and groves separated by large tracts of wasteland and empty lots. We had made it to the outskirts of the city when the soapy smudge of the sun rose above a row of low houses.

  A few minutes later, we entered an elegant residential neighborhood. Everything caught my attention: the stately mansions, the blocks of apartment buildings no higher than five or six stories, the balconies and terraces on the houses. The shops weren’t open yet, but the streets were already bustling with life. It was evident that the people of Madrid were not used to the snow. For them, it was a rare occurrence that disrupted their daily routine. Because I had seen them countless times in the photographs and documents that Ben kept in the Archive, many places seemed familiar, but no particular names came to mind until the taxi stopped at a red light, a few meters away from the Cibeles Fountain. The sight of the statue called up a vivid memory. I was fifteen. Ben and I were in the Archive in Brooklyn. My father was showing me pictures of Madrid during the time of the Republic. In one of them, there was a group of militiamen smiling and posing in front of the bags of sand they had placed around Cibeles to protect the goddess from Fascist bombs. The traffic light changed to green and the image vanished from my memory like a movie fading to black. The taxi went around the fountain, and as we entered the Paseo del Prado the lampposts lining the street were all suddenly turned off, plunging the city into a murky pool. We jolted down the cobblestoned boulevard until we reached a second plaza with a fountain presided over by Neptune. I recognized the statue, as well as buildings of the Museo del Prado behind it. The avenue flowed into a huge esplanade occupied by a sort of giant roller coaster whose slopes consisted of the maze of ramps connecting all the arteries flowing in and out of the esplanade. The metallic structure of the roller coaster was so big that you couldn’t see the buildings on the opposite side no matter where you were positioned. The taxi drove onto a steep ramp that went all the way up then wound down to the side entrance of Atocha Station. Here we are, the mustachioed driver said, lifting the meter lever. He called out the amount of the fare and got out to collect my bag from the trunk. I told him to keep the change and he thanked me without deigning to smile. I got lost in the crowd milling about the station. It was an unpleasant morning with a cold breeze stirring the dirty snow. I climbed a stairway that led to the esplanade. From there, the traffic junction seemed stranger and even more gigantic than from the taxi. The tentacles of the giant metal octopus took over the whole surface of the plaza and reached out into all the surrounding streets, clogged with smoking cars.

  Taking a detour, I crossed to the other side and got lost in the labyrinth of the hilly side streets, not worried about where I was or where my steps were taking me. Distractedly, I read the signs of the pensions and hostels along the sidewalk without going into any of them. I wasn’t in a hurry, and it felt good to wander around the old quarter, despite the weather. After walking for a good while, as I turned a corner, I came upon a plaque that read Pensión Moratín, 3rd and 4th Floors, and for no good reason, I decided to try my luck there. The pension looked out on a tiny triangular plaza. I pushed the front door open, came to a dark lobby with a wide wooden stairway, and walked up to the third floor, where I saw a door with a sign that said, Enter without Knocking. I pushed it open, and found myself in a reception area where a woman in her forties was reading a newspaper with a striking name, Ya. When she saw me, she stopped reading, folded the newspaper, put it down on the counter, and greeted me with a stern smile. After jotting down my information in the registry book, she accompanied me to my room, one flight up. It was spacious and had a balcony that looked out on the triangular plaza. When I saw the room, it occurred to me that it may not have been all that much different from the room Ben found for my mother almost thirty years before; he had taken her to a pension in Cuatro Caminos, where she stayed for a few weeks right before giving birth. There was a chipped white metal chamber pot under the bed, and in a corner, by a rolled-up rug tied with a string, a gadget that upon closer inspection turned out to be an electric heater. I plugged it in with a certain apprehension, making sure that it was far enough from the bed. I took off my shoes and fell fully clothed on the frayed, white bedcover with its faded green embroidery. I closed my eyes, allowing myself to be flooded with images of the journey punctuated by the faltering echo of Ben’s voice telling me which places in Madrid I could not fail to visit, no matter what. When I succumbed to fatigue, I dreamed I was at the Archive in Brooklyn. The afternoon light streamed in from the garden surrounding the figure of my father. Standing with his back to the light, Ben was telling me about a bar called Aurora Roja.

  It was near the Cuatro Caminos Plaza. The owner named it after the novel by Pío Baroja, the Basque novelist that Hemingway had admired so much. I say it was because I suppose it no longer exists, and even if it does, it’s surely changed its name by now.

  Ben walked up to me and showed me a very old picture.

  That’s where I met your mother.

  I took the photo with utmost care, but when I went to look at it closely, the image had vanished. The rectangle of paper had become the window of an airplane. The sun slid far away over a carpet of resplendent clouds. I scrutinized the horizon, but it was impossible to make out anything in that vista cut through by a never-ending light.

  When I awoke, it took me a few moments to realize where I was. I got up, opened the shutters of the balcony, and looked out at the plaza. All around me was a panorama of snow-covered roofs. The bells of a nearby church began to peal, and I was overcome by a sense of unreality. I just couldn’t come to terms with the fact that I had been born in this place. I went back into the room, took a change of clothes and my toiletry bag fr
om my suitcase, and went to shower in the bathroom down the corridor. When I got back to the room, it was still too early to call the man with whom I had made an appointment. Trying to make some sense of the situation I found myself in, I sat in an armchair with faded upholstery and read Abraham Lewis’s letter for the umpteenth time. Nominally, it was addressed to Ben and Lucia Ackerman, but the true recipient was me.

  Sarzana, October 6, 1963

  Dear comrades,

  My name is Abraham Lewis, Abe to friends. I am from Florence, Alabama. Like you, I once enlisted in the Lincoln Brigade and arrived in Albacete in October of 1937. After a training period, I was deployed as an ambulance driver, first in the rearguard near the Ebro and then in a hospital near Gerona. I was repatriated against my will at the end of 1938, as were most of the other members of the International Brigades. After some time passed, I re-enlisted as a volunteer in 1940. I was sent to Italy this time, which had very important consequences, as you will soon learn. Since the end of the war, we spend half the year or so in Sarzana, because my wife is from here, and the rest of the time in the States. I wish things had taken another course, but cruel, cursed fate, or whatever you want to call it, chose me. So be it. Enough with the prologues. When someone gives his word to do something, the best thing is to do it as quickly as possible, that’s the best thing for everyone involved. So I’ll get to the point: the reason I’m writing is that three months ago someone crossed my path, or I crossed his—Umberto Pietri.

  I lifted my eyes from the paper. It didn’t matter that I had read the letter countless times. It still hurt me to see that name. Every time Lewis got to a part of his story in which Pietri figured, it felt as if someone was twisting a knife into my guts. I skipped ahead as if these lines were laced with poison, and in the following paragraph I read: