02 Feb Frances Mayes: Quetzal
Frances Mayes is the best-selling author of Under the Tuscan Sun, Bella Tuscany, Every Day in Tuscany, A Year in the World, and numerous other works of prose and poetry. Her most recent book is The Tuscan Sun Cookbook. She and her poet husband, Edward Mayes, divide their time between North Carolina and Cortona, Italy. Quetzal is part of the new Lonely Planet literary anthology Better Than Fiction, a collection of original true travel tales by acclaimed fiction writers. The story is reproduced here with permission from Better Than Fiction, copyright © 2012 Lonely Planet.
As a Latino man stops next to me at the museum, I breathe in a scent that makes me turn towards him. I never knew if Carlos splashed himself with cologne or if he naturally smelled of lime, sugarcane, cloves and some tropical yellow flower I imagined to be hibiscus. The man near me also has black hair slightly curling over his collar, so I look at my shoes until the surge of memory subsides.
The first time I saw Carlos, he, his wife, Ingrid, and baby Marienöelle were getting out of their Mercedes with umpteen suitcases, parcels, umbrellas, toys and garment bags. A young woman in a crumpled uniform, who turned out to be the nanny, carried the baby, while Ingrid scooped up as much as she could. Carlos looked at a key on his ring and started towards the door. He carried nothing but a sleek briefcase.
I was sitting in a lawn chair with two new friends while our tiny children played in a wading pool. They’d found a turtle and were teaching it to swim. “Well, look at that,” Michaela said softly. “Is this the prince of the realm?” Carlos nodded to us as we took in his fawn-coloured suit with over-stitching that announced the suit as Italian and tailor-made. Later, I’d see that he had twenty-seven others in his closet.
As they all neared, we stood up and said hello, welcome to Lawrence Court. Did they need any help? Frances. Irene. Michaela. We’d just moved in too, late August, in time for fall semester. We were the first to live in the new graduate student apartments at Princeton. The Mercedes, the fine Italian suit, the nanny – my God, where would she sleep in the small two-bedroom apartment? My husband was on scholarship in math and computer science. We planned to borrow what the generous funding didn’t cover. The others we met were in similar situations.
I went inside to direct them to apartment #2, across the hall from mine. As Carlos opened the door, I caught a scented breeze of the tropics.
“He smells like something to drink at the beach,” I said as I sat back down. “Something with a twirly umbrella.” The turtle lay upended, forgotten in the grass. Its legs worked but it could not right itself. “Sweetie, put the turtle back on the rock in the water. She’s very unhappy.”
Ingrid brought the baby out and deposited her in the wading pool. Ingrid was monochromatic – pale, no-colour hair, no lipstick, and with those glasses that darken. They’d come from Paris, where they’d both studied at the Sorbonne. Carlos had other degrees, she mentioned, one from the University of Bologna, another from the Escorial in Spain, where he was a classmate of the heir to the throne. While Carlos pursued a PhD in economics, she would be studying theology at the seminary.
“Is your husband Spanish?” Irene asked.
“Oh, no. He is Nicaraguan.” Ingrid blew her nose into a tissue and crammed it into her pocket. “Allergy,” she explained, waving her hand with a glance that included the whole apartment complex.
Irene helped her haul in more luggage and Carlos did not come out again.
The last time I saw Carlos, he stood by his green Mercedes limo on the tarmac at the Managua airport. “Your book has travelled too far with me.” He handed me my long-lost copy of Yeats’s poems as I was climbing the stairs to my plane to Panama. He’d mentioned on the way that he was worried about skirmishes along the Honduran border. He was wearing a white shirt, immaculate as always, jeans and crude huaraches. His hair, combed back and wet from the shower, began to curl. As I turned back to wave, he squinted. I couldn’t tell whether he was smiling but as I look back from here, he stands starkly alone and I think he is biting his lower lip.
Brand-new Lawrence Court was a ring of two-storey apartment buildings around a grassy centre. We could see the “dreaming spires,” as Scott Fitzgerald described the university, across the fields where the children hunted for baby rabbits. Under the powerful force of propinquity, we made friends quickly. We organised a baby-sitting pool because most of us were intensely social and ready to party and to explore New York. The air seemed charged. The grad students (male – Princeton was just on the brink of allowing women) came from Iraq, Ireland, England, Germany, Sweden, Japan and all over the US.
Only a few of the women worked while the men studied. We volunteered at the university’s nursery school. We had a common room where we could gather for dinners. Often a couple would house-sit for major professors, so we entertained each other in the book-filled faculty houses as well. Although in our twenties, we already cooked with a vengeance. If you had the flu, someone brought over dinner. If you wanted to go to the city, someone always could pick up your child, who hardly would notice when you returned because so many children were around. My daughter, three, had an immediate best friend. Frank, my husband then, like most of the other men, felt on the verge of stepping up to an incredible future. So much brilliance in this druidic circle of red brick buildings.
Without such a promised-land future, I nevertheless felt as though I’d landed in paradise. For my whole life, I’d wanted abroad. I felt exhilarated to meet Ann from Ireland, with her severe chiselled face and wry wit; Grete from Norway, with her apartment furnished with ceramics she’d made, and Turkish rugs from when her husband Ralph had taught at Roberts College in Istanbul; Michaela, from Nuremberg, with ethereal blonde beauty and family secrets from World War II; Lauren, a California dreamer with a radiant warmth. And Ingrid, sniffing into her tissue, carrying a tome on Heidegger or Kant, never participating in the parties. She would come outside while the baby played, and I’d ask her about Italy, where she’d studied and met Carlos. “We’d hike above Verona to a hut and make love,” she said. My, my, I thought. How exotic for this critique-of-pure-reason, standoffish woman. If others joined us, she’d soon tuck her tissue into the pages of Reinhold Niebuhr and wander off.
I, too, always had a book and that was how I got to know Carlos one afternoon when he arrived home from class. “Ah, William Butler Yeats.” He began to quote: We sat together at one summer’s end / That beautiful mild woman, your close friend / And you and I, and talked of poetry … The lines were from “Adam’s Curse,” one of my favourite poems. He sat down, took my book and began to read aloud. Now and then he’d look up and I saw a sweetness, maybe just a little reaching out towards someone else who liked what he did.
He was already considered odd and remote. “Could I borrow this sometime?” he asked. “I’m without my books here. I do have some. Would you like to read Rubén Darío, a very beautiful poet of my country?” He took a thin leather book out of his pocket and read. The Spanish was mellifluous (later I read Darío in translation and was not so enamoured). I’d never met anyone remotely like Carlos. He spoke fluent Italian and German, as well as Spanish and English. His way of saying my country seemed more intimate than if I’d said the same. He was not at ease like the other guys, who came out and threw a football or shared a beer in the afternoons or met for pool, hitting the ball very hard if the subject of qualifying exams were in the air.
On occasional afternoons we talked under the pines outside our building. “Garcia Lorca, Francesca, is the poet of the corazón.” I had not heard of Neruda then. Carlos knew poems by heart. He brought me the just-translated One Hundred Years of Solitude. It’s hard to write how this affected me, a secret aspiring poet. Talking to Carlos, I had the (very bad) image of myself as a dry sponge suddenly dipped in spring water. By the time I finished reading Gabriel Garcia Márquez, I had a magnetic pull towards Latin America. Or Latin America as embodied by Carlos.
Of all the superb, bright people at Lawrence Court, Carlos was the most mysterious. Frank was totally tolerant of this friendship. Maybe an economist/poet from Central America posed no threat to my husband’s secure self-image. Besides, he liked Carlos too, more than others did. Frank thought he was very smart, and Ingrid as well, though her lack of interest in the day-to-day world drove us both nuts. Frumpy and disdainful of those who were not, she lived in an intellectual cloud. Everyone knew that the people we were meeting would go home to become important figures in their worlds, and Carlos, with his over-the top world-class education would be major in Nicaragua.
We invited Carlos and Ingrid for dinner, leaving their door and ours open when the nanny was out. They never invited us, and I wondered what they ate. Ingrid was no cook, though she appreciated good food. Over candles and Julia Child’s beef Bourguignon, Carlos quietly told us that he would return to León, where his family came from, that he would wrest Nicaragua from Anastasio Somoza Debayle.
Poet with smooth bronze skin and eyes the colour of whisky. Revolutionary. And lover of a book that began: Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
When they went home, I’d sing while we washed up, Managua Nicaragua is a wonderful spot, with coffee and bananas and a temperature hot … Some song from my mother’s era, all either of us knew about Carlos’s bruised spot of a country down in the crook of land between the US and South America.
In 1974 it was raining the day we drove to León, a golden colonial city and Carlos’s liberal birthplace – the early capital and the centre of opposition to Somoza. On the horizon, two pyramidal volcanoes pierced the sky. Carlos took us to meet his relatives, who lived in narrow row houses of Greek blue, ochre, dead white, saffron. Inside, rooms with no doors splayed around a courtyard. I thought the houses were the most felicitous architecture I’d ever seen, the shiny tile floors that looked as though they’d been waxed for a hundred years of solitude, the seamless connection of indoors and out, big long windows open to shifts of air.
I imagined a lifetime there: a skinny schoolgirl who played the piano in the corner, tried to perfect French, dreamed of Europe while swimming in Lake Nicaragua, the only freshwater lake with sharks. My room would have been across the courtyard. Bare, except for a hammock, cot, and a chest painted with parrots. A room with eight rocking chairs in a circle around a low table opened to a courtyard. What brilliant simplicity, arranged like that for centuries, austere and voluptuously tropical. The old aunts offered guava and pineapple juice and called Carlos “little one.” I was narcotised by the shadowy room banded by panels of light, banana leaves rustling in the slight breeze. A time-skimming image came to me then: gnarled hands, thin as a heron, dim eyes dim, I am still sitting in this circle.
Carlos attended university in León first, before he embarked to Europe. How did he accomplish this? It did not seem likely – these were not rich people.
The largest cathedral in Central America dominates León. There’s a statue of Rubén Darío, who lived there and walked through the dusty plaza with lion statues and the gaily painted outdoor restaurants where he was not wary of the iced drinks. León, a luminous city of bells. Years later, I dreamed that a woman looked down at me from the bell tower of the cathedral. “You don”t get it, do you?” she asked. “When you get it, I will ring the bells.”
At Princeton, when I was offered the chance to audit art history and architecture courses, my days expanded exponentially. I sat in the back of the museum auditorium, silent. The real students, all boys, were seven or eight years younger; I, the interloper. The professors dazzled me. Every lecture seemed a revelation. I was completely alight with interest in Renaissance art, medieval and modern architecture – but, who understood? Well, yes, Carlos.
He talked about Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, Picasso’s Guernica. The Piazza Navona in Rome used to be flooded for races. The tomb of Augustus is actually an Etruscan shape. “There’s a piazza in Verona with a statue of Dante, muy simpático. I will meet you there one day.” He bought art books that I couldn’t afford and we sat in the grass looking at Giorgione and Titian. He discounted Memling and the northern painters. Too constrained. In his apartment he had a pre-Columbian figure made from lava stone, a squat, thick-lipped seated humanoid. Ugly, but with silent power. It was wrapped in newspaper on a closet shelf. That’s when I saw the twenty-seven bespoke suits in fine, thin wool, and silk, and linen.
In those years, you heard the term “soul mate” a lot. My husband seemed that to me then, though not later. We had a child, we had a plan, we were a great match. Still, I understand now, decades later, the magnetic pull between an overly romantic Southern girl and the secretive, worldly student from the tropics. Reading Márquez then, I was struck with the similarities between my South and the territory of that novel. Violent, hot countries, seething with tensions, perhaps promote stronger longings for aesthetics. Or maybe it simply was my pull towards the not known, his pull towards – what? I was literary but unformed, socially adept like most Southern girls, and beginning to feel my way towards being a writer.
Over the months, our connection flourished. The books flew back and forth. Picnics with both families along the lake, walks, bocce. Carlos adored my daughter and lost his reserve when teasing her, making her stuffed animals talk, and asking her serious questions that she seriously answered. He had a timetable: he, and several of his friends, would overturn the regime in Nicaragua within three years. We were shocked that he felt bitter towards America for foisting the Somoza family onto his country. “But you came here for education …” We thought then, as many still do, that everyone envies America.
“So did Somoza.”
Mostly he described his country. “Green, green, how I want you green …” he quoted from Lorca.
“Greenest green I’ve never seen,” I countered.
“When you come to my country, we will go to Granada. There’s a convent painted the colour of the bluest sky. The cathedral is yellow. And the houses – they’re like fruits: pineapple, green apple, pomegranate, peach. All lined up with doors always open. The lake is so large that there are waves and you can see the very small islands. The most perfect architecture – houses with arches around the bottom and upstairs porches. You have never before thought of Nicaragua as a place for architecture, yes?” He often added on a “yes?” where most would say “no?” I didn’t say that I’d not thought of Nicaragua, period.
I did not think of Nicaragua but when I arrived there I recognised a place I always would remember. Frank, Ashley and I were en route to Peru, where Frank would teach seminars on computers in Cuzco, where there were none. We had almost lost touch with Carlos after he moved back to Managua. In a few calls, he’d said that he was working for the government. “But you understand,” he’d say, leaving what, where, when and how dangling. When I told him we were going to Peru, he insisted that we stop on the way.
He picked us up in a luxury car with a driver. My first image of Managua was the only tall building, which the earthquake of 1972 cracked down the side. Vines scaled the walls – surreal – up to about the fifth floor. What a mighty force from the earth pushed up those vines. The rest of the city seemed made of tin and scrap lumber. We crept, parting crowds. The street was full of poor people, full. Some were shirtless, with ragged pants. The first question I asked in Nicaragua was, “Why aren’t they stoning us?”
Carlos looked out with a bemused expression. “Because, cara, they don’t know to.”
Just then one angry, toothless man shouted something and banged his fist on the hood.
“What the hell did he say?” Frank asked.
Carlos pursed his lips. “Mmnn, he said something like, ‘You’re enjoying life, aren’t you, you son of a bitch.’ ”
I would like to have lingered at Princeton but my husband raced through grad school and was handed his PhD in two years. We were off to larger spaces guaranteed by the visionary choice of a computer science degree in 1970, the cusp of the changed world. Carlos, too, was leaving. We’d experienced a close connection without ever becoming physically involved. One kiss, that was it. He was in our apartment returning a box of books. He couldn’t find my Yeats. When I offered him a glass of water, he followed me into the kitchen and put his arms around me from behind. I turned, and there, finally, we kissed, a kiss of longing and loss, not passion.
“I have something I want you to keep,” he said. From the box, he took a newspaper-wrapped package. He gave me the pre-Columbian figure. I wanted to give him something too.
“Wait.” I went to my room and opened my jewellery box where I kept my father’sgold cuff links monogrammed with his initials.
The next day Carlos left for New York and onwards to Nicaragua and his destiny to overthrow the dictator. He called from the hotel. “Will you come with me? Will you live with me in my country? I will make it happen if you will come.”
Head-over-heels romantic I was, but I knew I was not leaving my family.
“I told Ingrid how I feel. She found the cuff links and threw them out the hotel window.” I saw them falling, catching glints of light, bouncing on the sidewalk.
And that was the end of Princeton, where we all had loved our lives and where we began to grow in different directions.
When the Peru trip came up, I’d lost touch with Carlos, except for a few calls. One day he said, “Some workers on my farm saw this rare quetzal land on a shed – a magnificent bird with a turquoise head and green wings and a scarlet breast.”
“Oh, how marvellous. Did it stay or fly away?”
“They did not know what to do with such beauty and they stoned it.”
We arrived at Carlos’s house to find baby Marienöelle a lively daddy’s girl speaking three languages. How Ingrid had changed! No more dowdy clothes and snuffling allergies. Her hair upswept, her dresses bright, her nails polished, she thrived in Nicaragua. Their house reminded me of Gaston Bachelard’s idea: A house should protect the dreamer.
It was a house to dream in. They built it on a rise, the hazy lake in the distance. The rooms opened off one side of a long curved loggia. The other side – all shutters – swept open to a jungle garden. I looked for quetzals. The ceiling made of bamboo, shining tile floors, beds draped in white gauze, the dark library, the warm rain falling along the open loggia – the house seemed to have been formed by a hand like the one that made the pre-Columbian figure Carlos gave me: sui generis, totemic, spell-binding. Three women worked in the enormous kitchen and I loved the noises of pounding, laughter, rattling, and their dialect that lulled like the hum of cicadas and tree frogs. The electricity scared me. It often crackled and the lights blinked rapidly then went out. For hot water, you had to turn on a switch above the showerhead, get blasted by cold until suddenly the water was too hot and sparks flew.
The first night, we drove out on rough roads. One Land Rover kept ahead of us, another stayed behind and we jounced along in the third. “They’re carrying extra tyres,” Carlos explained. “We’re bound to blow one along the way but it’s worth all that.” We had two flats. Frank nudged me and nodded towards the drivers as they changed the tyres. Two guards back in the shadows carried rifles. We’d seen a pistol in the glove box. Then we arrived in the dark, dark at the edge of a volcano. We stepped out on sharp black lava and walked to the lip: over the edge, earth on fire. The sound, a washing, hot sound, could be an old god laughing. From the ferocious orange inferno way below, sulphur singed the tropical night. Everyone in such a place must imagine sacrificial victims. Ashley grabbed her father’s hand; she was as mesmerised and horrified and awed as I.
At an outdoor restaurant, a line began to form at our table. People came up to Carlos, even to Ingrid, petitioning them for a favour. My cousin needs a licence, my son lost his job, I need a permit. This is when we learned that Carlos’s job was “something like you’d call secretary of state” under Somoza. I didn’t ask questions, assuming this was his plan, to subvert from within.
We grew used to guns. Everywhere we went we were guarded. Just a precaution. Ingrid invited three witches to a session I joined. The women, who looked like well-to-do matrons, performed a ritual in a dark room. The five of us sat around a table. Ingrid asked the question, “Will there be a revolution?” In dim candlelight, the women began moaning. The table lifted and began to spin. We rose and circled with the table, which then crashed to the floor. I suppressed a laugh. Did they really think the table spun with spirits” force? One witch flung open the window. “No. No revolution.”
We drove far into the rainforest. At one house we stopped and Carlos paid the coffee-farmer something. He dragged a homemade marimba into the chicken yard where we sat on stumps while he played mournful melodic tunes that sounded like music beating on our ribs, like the jungle if it could sing. Further into nowhere, we stopped at a worse shack and a small girl came out. She was amazed at car headlights, which she’d never seen, and by the dresses Ashley and Marienöelle wore. Her shift of cotton sacking hung straight. At another, deeper and deeper in, a family of a dozen lined up on porch rockers, and as we rode by Carlos said, “Each of them has his own philosophy.”
Our connection, as it had been, was broken but still there was something everlasting.
Frank and I talked at night about whether Carlos still was the revolutionary meliorist poet or if he’d sold out to live the lavish life of corrupt government powerbrokers in a banana republic. I saw that he could not have been kinder to the people we met and that they liked him. While he was remote at Princeton, here he clasped hands everywhere and threw his arm across people’s shoulders.
We travelled to the coast to visit Carlos’s colleague Cornelio Hüeck, always addressed with the honorific “Don”, the head honcho of the legislature. I expected grandeur but the merely large white house on the sea was sparse and tacky; the bedrooms were like prison cells. Ashley slept in a hammock and our beds were bunk-sized and damp. We met for dinner in a covered pavilion. The wife looked like a kitchen worker, not the partner of #2 in command. She sat by Don Cornelio’s side and tasted everything before he did. Was she his poison detector? He was a compact man, mean-looking. I thought he might be one of those escaped Nazis who had landed in the Americas. He paid the slightest attention to us, concentrating on Carlos. Two grandchildren played around the table. Each boy carried a real pistol.
At breakfast, Don Cornelio slurped turtle eggs, dozens of them, raw. (Even then they were endangered.) We loved the big rice and black bean breakfasts in Nicaragua, the fried plantains, fried pork, and red fruits we’d never seen. Carlos told Don Cornelio that Ashley liked to ride. As he finished breakfast, he said, “The horses are saddled. Ride down the beach as far as you like. I own all the way to Costa Rica.” Another imprint experience, that ride, galloping down a completely empty beach. Empty, that is, except for the men with machine guns. Don Cornelio kept four Land Rovers and we were more than uneasy to learn that he did so because no assassin could possibly wire four with explosives. A Russian roulette solution. No one could know which he’d select when we drove to secluded beaches.
Not long after, when the revolution ignited Nicaragua, Cornelio Hüeck hid up to his neck in that balmy sea, I read, until he was found and castrated, his testicles stuffed in his mouth. Hands tied, he was buried in a ditch. Whether or not he’d ordered the execution of the newspaperman Pedro Joaquin Chamorro in 1978 that jump-started the revolution, he was reviled for his outrageous land deals (all the way to Costa Rica) and doomed.
Carlos did not go on the horseback ride, and we wondered what they discussed all morning. I read years later that the American ambassador, Mauricio Solaún, thought Hüeck wanted to overthrow Somoza. Were he and Carlos co-conspirators?
We never met Somoza, though Carlos said that he wanted to meet the American visitors. Our five days passed quickly. Carlos was hospitable, generous, so very happy to show us his country. We had only one private talk. He told me that change was a scent on the wind and that the wild could smell it.
“What will you do?” I asked.
“I am sending my family away. Maybe for good. Maybe not. I will be here.” As we headed for the dining room for our farewell dinner, he said, “Always you must be happy, cara. That is a talent I can’t have in my country.” His lips glanced across my bare shoulder.
We were off to Peru, and then to start the rest of our lives. Frank and I would live together for many good years, then part. Ashley always yearns for the pace and taste of the tropics. I keep my love for that place as it was revealed. Years from then, I will live in a foreign country with a poet, a different paradise, without the marimba, the quetzal, the empty beaches, or witches who did not smell the gathering firestorm.
Carlos disappeared during the revolution. He’s untraceable. Did he give the Sandinistas sealed information, money, anything they needed to succeed? Did he take the last plane out? Run across the weedy tarmac with a satchel of filched money? End up in Paraguay with Somoza? Is he in Miami, working in a lamp store? Will he someday publish poems more beautiful than Rubén Darío about the golden light of León? What of Ingrid with her righteous theology books, and bold, babycake Marienöelle? Memory cuts and comes again. Where are the Italian-seamed suits – on the back of the petitioner who needed a licence? And the house built out of dreams?
The plane to Panama looks rickety. “Say a prayer!” There are no seats, just benches along the sides.
“This thing is a box kite.”
“Isn’t this fun?” I say to Ashley.
When I sit down, I see beside my foot a hole in the floor, and as we take off, through the rusty oculus I look down at the green, green sublime and dangerous country widening into a blur. I open my old copy of Yeats that Carlos handed me in the car. Slowly I translate what he scrawled across the frontispiece.
After all, there was some exchange.
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