VALPARAÍSO (7)

9.

Does time heal? Do we truly ever get over things? When we awaken from a dream is it really over? Or is time like blood, traces of experience and memory coursing through us, corrosive and enduring? When I set off for Valparaíso to try and find my brother, the only cheap flight I could find on short notice was an overnight from Mexico City to Santa Cruz, Bolivia, on a now-defunct airline, Lloyd Aero Boliviano, then on to Santiago the next morning. I had to think about price as I was between jobs and a little short. A wordsmith in a movie town that had little respect for them, I’d known some decent paydays but not in a while. My little publishing company, Orlowe Books, devoted to reissuing out-of-print noir novels, had never made money. Recently a startup software firm had hired me to edit an online arts encyclopedia, a project that had lost little time in going under. To make matters worse, Lara Tree, poet, researcher at the Getty Center, and the woman I’d shared my life and beach flat with, had decided to move back to New Haven to take a job at the Yale Library. 

I’d never been much of a traveler, except in imagination and in my readings. For the long plane voyage south, I’d brought with me a few books on Chile, a country about which I knew next to nothing. On the afternoon flight to Mexico City, I read descriptions of Chile’s long, narrow geography, its Andean spine and ranging coastline from the Peruvian border to the Antarctic south; its great paired Nobel poets Gabriela Mistral and Neruda; its history of sea voyages, settlements, earthquakes, and recent political turmoil: Salvador Allende’s downfall and the iron rule of General Pinochet. 

Then I came across a reference to a story, The Earthquake in Chile, by the 18^th century German writer Heinrich von Kleist. In it, two unmarried lovers, condemned by the Church, flee a disastrous earthquake that has destroyed Santiago. Outside the walls, huddled among other survivors of the ruined city, their love is acknowledged, their sin forgiven. But when they return to Santiago, the lovers enter the church and are set upon and beaten to death by a mob. History had closed back in upon them. 

Upon reading this, I suddenly began to weep, my head buried in my hands, as the plane leveled over Mexico City. 

The fleeting gift occasionally bestowed upon youth Harry Winter had spoken of. Rima the Bird Girl and the Rousseauian jungle romance afforded the fugitive Abel only to end in doom. The shock of coming upon tattered Harry on Alex’s couch. And Alex and Maddie, for whom, like Kleist’s lovers in Santiago, time had briefly opened up then closed. Tears for our ravaged father, and for my own lost youth too, I suppose… 

That night in the recording studio, after Alex appeared at the door, the crowd in the control booth rushed down the corridor behind him to the restroom to find Maddie Haden on the white linoleum tile floor, arms curled to her chest in that mantis pose of hers, a discarded syringe and rubber tourniquet on the floor beside her. Somebody called for an ambulance while Alex kneeled next to her, keening, beating his hands on the floor. Dryden Poe stood by the door, looking quizzical, perplexed, as if an experiment had just gone wrong. 

This poisonous turn of events emptied the studio out fast. Nobody cared to be found in the presence of an overdose, let alone one next door to a porn operation. An ambulance and two squad cars arrived. Attendants tried to revive Maddie, then wheeled her out on a gurney and continued working on her inside the ambulance at curbside. Police cordoned off the studio. A detective unit started taking photos and asking questions. 

They tried to bring Maddie back for a long while. When they finally ceased their efforts, Alex fell across her sobbing and wouldn’t be pried off. 

It just didn’t seem possible, that this had happened. Maddie’s death, which would mark the end of all our youths in different ways, must have been to the investigators just another LA night tale of sickly excess. The angle of the injection and the fingerprints on the needle made it clear the shot hadn’t been self-administered. Her cousin, eighteen and legally culpable, would be held and presumably charged. Only it took a while, in the confusion, to realize that Dryden was no longer there. 

He’d disappeared, and not just from the studio but from the face of the earth. Russell Poe must have whisked his son out of there in a hurry. By the time detectives arrived at the house in the canyon late the next day the Poe family was gone, and with it furniture, clothes, all traces of their existence. As if a film set had been struck. As if the family had never lived there. As if Alex and Harry and I had not visited that house that night a week earlier. 

As my father put it later - darkly, bitterly - if there was anything Russell Poe knew how to do it was how to make people disappear. 

Details emerged that did little to assuage or clarify. Under police questioning, Alex revealed it had begun early that summer with injections of morphine, which Maddie had gotten free of after her car accident and her stay in the hospital. At one point her cousin procured heroin, more easily attainable and effective, and as it was expensive, he’d sold some off to other wealthy kids around west Los Angeles, the profits paying for the demo sessions as well. Dryden, who had been accepted at Stanford and aspired to become a doctor, had a certain predatory clinical interest, it seemed, and though he didn’t use himself, he injected her. Somewhere during the runup to the recording sessions, in response to Maddie’s spiraling needs, they’d crossed a line between medicating and devoted using. Dryden must have procured something from an unreliable source and that night, in the heat of the recording session, miscalculated a dosage. 

Dryden didn’t show up at Stanford the following week. Investigators were told Russell Poe was no longer affiliated with RAND in Santa Monica. Detectives calling to inform Maddie’s mother in Savannah of the death were told she didn’t know where the Dryden family was to be found and no, she didn’t wish to press charges. My brother had no rights in the matter, it seemed, his interests merely emotional and artistic - the loss of his love, his friend, his musical collaborator and muse of no interest to the law. With nobody to speak for Maddie or move the matter forward, a routine toxology report was filed, Maddie’s remains were transported to Savannah, and the warrant issued for Dryden’s arrest on suspicion of involuntary manslaughter quickly withered on the vine. If there was any kind of memorial service in Georgia, Alex didn’t hear about it. 

Our father was so upset by all this he called the investigative unit of the LAPD daily on his son’s behalf, haranguing them about information suppression, sloppy work and federal interference, until it was Alex who begged him to stop.

The night after Maddie’s death, Alex drove out to the recording studio to pick up the tapes. The session engineer, frightened and evasive, told him that hours before, two men had arrived, claiming the tapes were the property of Dryden Poe, brandishing receipts to prove he’d paid for the sessions. When the engineer had demurred, they’d thrown him up against the console and threatened him. 

During that first week after Maddie’s death, I had no knowledge of what had happened. Chagrined by my lyric-spewing phone rant, the last thing I would have done was pick up the phone and call Alex. I dragged myself through the cooling, indifferent Boulder school days in a dissociated reverie, my travels with Abel in the jungles of Guyana, my noir adventures in LA with Henry Orlowe, Alex, Maddie and Harry fading fast - though once or twice, in the late-evening sanctum of my room, Maddie’s apparition floated into view and I didn’t banish her. 

The following Sunday night I was doing homework in my room when Devi knocked. “It’s your father on the phone.” 

I picked up the extension and heard Dad’s weary voice: “Hi Garth.” Then he said: “You remember your brother’s girlfriend, Maddie. Well, I’m sorry to have to tell you she died.” 

To my benumbed silence, Dad said finally, “Garth?” 

“What happened?” 

“Drug overdose.” 

“Where’s Alex?” 

“In his room.” Dad’s voice shook with pain.

“Can I speak to him?” 

“It’s hard for him right now.” 

“Okay,” I muttered. “Say hi.” 

We hung up and I slumped to the floor of my room. 

The darkened, near-empty Lloyd AeroBoliviano plane hovered on the rainy runway. I stared up at the fuzzy video screen displaying a flight map tracking our voyage. The little plane icon quivered on Mexico City, pointing due south: Curacao, Iguazu, Antofogasta, Belo Horizonte. Fantastical names off childhood maps. I was heading to a different corner of the world, to lands whose people had in recent decades suffered dirty wars, or had simply disappeared: the chupados, those sucked down and away. Someone you loved has been killed, the perpetrator has vanished, no explanation is offered, you remain in a state of permanent mystery. 

As the plane rose shuddering into the air, I thought how Alex knew something about that. Maybe I did too. 

II. Cool Earth

10.

In the days following Marimar’s father’s return to Valparaíso, I climbed to the mirador at Cerro Concepción each morning with my coffee and donuts and waited, tracking the march of clouds north over Viña del Mar, the slow shift of harbor traffic below, the early tide of tourists to the guard rail. When it became clear she wasn’t going to come, I hiked alone up to Cerro Alegre, past Arturo’s shuttered house, and installed myself at the café on the hill as in those first Valparaíso days, nursing a café cortado and keeping an eye on Arturo’s door, watching the schoolboys, the postman, the nosy cerro cats. One day I saw a package on the doorstep, and on my way down the hill veered close enough to see it appeared to be from a bookseller in London. The next morning it was gone. Handouts and newspapers and mail never piled up by the door so I figured Marimar came daily. I could have waylaid her at the German Hospital before her shift, but I imagined the reappearance of her father after all these years could only be difficult for her and her mother. Surely she knew I’d fallen in love with her, further reason to avoid me. She knew where to find me, so I decided to wait. 

Afternoons I’d spend back down along el plan, scuttling among too-familiar haunts, drifting into a rhythm outside of time or result, seeming to occupy this life and no other. I did my rounds as if no longer looking for my brother, or Arturo Wright, only waiting for Marimar. At one point I moved to a cheaper pensión off Plaza Sotomayor called the Residenciál Valdivia. I avoided the waterfront bars now with their whiskeys and pisco sours for a consoling array of local cabernets in quiet eateries, Neruda’s Valparaíso chapter open beside me: 

How many stairs? How many rungs of stairs? How many feet on the rungs? How many centuries of passes, going down and up with a book, with tomatoes, with fish, with bottles, with bread? How many thousands of hours weakening the grades until channels are made where rainwater circulates, playing and crying? 

My Spanish grew through comparing Neruda’s facing texts, listening in the streets, reading the city’s venerable daily, El Mercurio. One day, hoping to break out of my stasis, I set out to visit the poet’s other home in nearby Isla Negra, only to be driven back at the bus station by wind and rain. 

Each day I’d stop by an internet café daily to harvest emails from a previous life: Dad, wondering if I’d heard from Alex yet; my ex-amor Lara Tree appending little couplets upon the diverse attributes of snow from her New Haven flat. One afternoon as I was about to log off, a message appeared on the screen: “got yr mails…to valpo in a few days...where are you staying?” 

Excitedly I answered with the name and number of the Residenciál Valdivia. I waited, then when no answer came I signed off and left. The elliptical message, with my brother’s habitual aversion to the upper case, sent me flying along the late afternoon harbor streets. Alex was alive!

Back at the pensión, as if to further dispel the haze of recent days, there was a note under my door from Marimar, asking me to meet her at eight beneath the Turri Clock. 

I awoke from a light sleep at sunset, dressed quickly, and headed out through drizzle and light traffic down Calle Prat. She was waiting at the juncture of the three streets, beneath a black umbrella in a clear plastic raincoat and flat shoes, looking rather plain and wet. Hardly the decked-out siren I’d seen stepping out of a car that fugitive night. A perfunctory Chilean beso on the cheek left me deflated, suggesting our encounter was to be about more pedestrian things than the assignation I dreamed of. 

I took her umbrella and we walked off through slicked sounds and swerving headlights of rain traffic. She seemed skittish, preoccupied. Then as we turned onto Cochrane Street, she took my arm, reviving my hopes. We walked on in silence like that. 

“Do you work tonight?” 

“No.” 

At La Rotonda we found a dim, deserted table beneath the stained red velvet walls with their old coats of arms. A decrepit waiter poured glasses of Undurraga. We spoke softly, Marimar’s school English crossed with my cobbled Spanish. 

When I told her Alex had emailed me he was coming to Valparaíso in a few days, she asked, “Where did he write from?” 

“He didn’t say.” 

She looked more perplexed than pleased. “Arturo isn’t back. It’s strange. When your brother came, Arturo had just left on his trip. Alex wanted to know where he went. He said he was an old friend of Arturo’s. Then the next day he left too.” 

The only other diners, an elderly couple, rose, donned old coats, and left. The waiter brought steaming langosta and yellow rice.  

“So how is it with your father and mother?” I asked.

“Not good. They’re strangers. It’s been too many years.”

“Will he stay in Valparaíso?”

“No. He’s come on some mission.  He was a leader in the resistance to Pinochet. Those who survived are still settling accounts. When he’s done his work he’ll leave.” 

A huge mirror, scored with scratches and mounted in a peeling gilt-leaf frame, hung on the wall opposite us, draped with cork, netting, starfish. It evoked waterfront eateries the world over. In reflection I watched Marimar bend over her langosta. The angle of her head, the line of her neck, her dark hair swept simply back and pinned, struck me as elegant, wildly fetching. Free to gaze upon her in the musty mirror, I was gripped again by desire, and unreasonable love. 

“The sea colors everything here,” I said.

“We are porteños. All men are sailors, we like to say, all women sirenas.” 

“The Chilean coast reminds me of California.” 

“Ships carried people from here to San Francisco during the Gold Rush. It made Valparaíso rich until the Panama Canal was built. Arturo sometimes likes to talk about that.”

In the mirror, I watched Marimar dab her mouth, lay her napkin on the table. She looked up, finding my gaze in the cloudy, beveled glass. Our eyes locked. We floated there in reflection, a suspended realm uninhabited by Alex, Arturo, her father, only us. 

“Come,” I said, placing my hand upon hers. 

“Si,” her reflection whispered to mine, as if there’d never been any question. 

Mirrors appeared in rain puddles, storefront panes, car windows along the night streets, reflecting an abrazo, a kiss, a fervid, busy-handed embrace. In the pensión room, a power outage delivered us by candlelight before the bureau mirror, Marimar gripping the bureau top, finding my eyes in that glass as I lifted her dress behind. Our eyes still joined, we moved, my hands raking her flanks, until the surge came, mouths slack, half-lidded gazes wavering, and I fell upon her back. 

We sat side by side on the edge of the bed, undressing each other slowly in the guttering light. She was more beautiful in form even than I’d imagined. My eyes and hands moved over her as she bent to me. 

This time, it was before the bathroom mirror, our eyes in it, our muffled cries.

We lay on our backs in the dark, hands joined, thoughts racing with the speeding clouds and aircraft lights in the flashing sky above the harbor as the rain abated. 

“Had you thought about this happening?” I said.

“Of course.”

“Since when?” 

“Since that night under the Turri clock.”

I saw her again stepping out of the car in formal dress and lipstick, her revealed beauty as she walked away from me, the ache of jealousy and longing I’d felt afterwards climbing the cerro alone. “Who had you been with that night?” I asked, wanting salt in the wound.

“My cousin dropped me off there. We’d been at a nephew’s wedding. I had to go to the hospital and change into my uniform. I was late.” She touched my arm in the dark. “My cousin is very old-fashioned and has a bad temper, especially when he’s been drinking. That’s why I didn’t come to you.” She turned to me. “You looked so alone, so sad.”

I realized I’d construed Marimar that night as dangerous, sexual, a frank nurse comfortable with the life of the body - the beauty I’d just taken in the mirrors - but I couldn’t have borne the idea that she was simply a night creature, available, common. 

“Have you been with Arturo?” I asked.

“As a lover? Oh, no. I help him as a friend and as a nurse. He pays me sometimes, which is useful because my mother is arthritic and can’t work. Arturo seems to have some money, though you wouldn’t know it the way he lives.”

“How are his medical skills?”

“Quite good. He had some kind of training in Caracas.” 

“Does he have friends here?”

“I’ve never seen him with anyone. Only the neighborhood children. They adore him.”

Outside, a helicopter slapped the air then drifted out over the harbor. “Does he have a woman?” 

After a silence, she said, “I don’t think Arturo could be with a woman. He has demons. He doesn’t talk about them but you can feel them. They build up. Then maybe he goes to prostitutes. Or to the jungle to work with the tribes.” 

“Do you love him?”

“Yes, but he frightens me. It’s like he’s in some tortured conversation I can’t see or hear, only feel.” Marimar turned to me in the semi-dark. “Why are you and your brother so interested in him?” 

Marimar lay on her back, a sheet draped around her hips, breasts free, arms behind her head, hair trailing across the pillow. It was tempting, now that this had happened, to talk. I’d had nobody to confide in or even speak with since that night in Berkeley with Harry Winter. I reached over her and fished a cigarette from a bent pack on the bedstand and lit it. She took a drag and handed it back to me. We kissed, then studied each other, no mirrors now, still blasted by the rapture, the sudden heat. Outside, the rain had let up, leaving only light traffic sounds, the steady flash of warning lights in the harbor. 

I stood and walked to the window. Clusters of memory gathered. Why did you come to find your brother? Because Alex came to find Arturo Wright. Because we once both loved a girl who died at seventeen. Because I didn’t want Alex to hurt anyone, or himself, or me, or burden our memories any longer. Because I’m a fool. Because these days and nights in Valparaíso have left me half-mad. Because I was always sailing towards you, Marimar de mis sueños. 

I turned around to speak but she was breathing heavily with sleep, afloat on a bed of orgasm.