LITMIR.BIZ

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jumpsuit that I liked to tease her about, a necklace of scarlet beads around her neck. Her extraordinary character amplified her awkward beauty, electrifyingly vital, with that touch of dark Azrael energy. I was trying to absorb that we were saying goodbye, for a long time at least, and would never be roommates again. She laid the garden rake down on my bed, her bequeathed going-away present. It was, indeed, a deadly weapon. She was flying to London, where she’d spend a week huddled with “Aunt Irene,” as we were supposed to refer to Amnesty International whenever speaking of it over the phone, going over and preparing their next human rights report. She’d be briefing a parliamentary committee, flying to Geneva for secret meetings with UNHRC officials. Danielle Mitterrand had invited Penny to stay with her in Paris for a week or so, who knows what else. When she came back, she wasn’t going to be my roommate in Tía Nano’s old apartment anymore. We both understood it really was time for her to live somewhere more secure, people in London and elsewhere who knew her situation were pressuring her about it. I didn’t pay any rent and had never charged Penny; we’d just split utilities. Besides her morning cup of yogurt, a banana, and coffee, she hardly ever ate there. I helped her carry her luggage down the long, narrow stairs to the metal door leading to the street. The drive to the airport was notoriously dangerous. If they didn’t want people to leave the country but hadn’t found a way to make them disappear beforehand, they’d sometimes ambush them there. A simple hatchback car with polarized windows, electrical tape over the cracks in one, was waiting for her, and a couple of sturdy muchachos got out, one to open the trunk, the other casting his eyes up and down the street, his hand thrust into the clearly weighed-down pocket of his baggy nylon windbreaker. Afterward, I went back up the stairs and could feel tears starting in my eyes. I almost never cried. When had I last cried? I had a terrible feeling of gloom, of foreboding, like my spirit was going away, too, another passenger on a long shadow train of the ghosts of the murdered or soon-to-be murdered, a train with shadow wheels on shadow tracks, its silent clacking echoing through blood and nerves, the rhythm of the flinching tremor in my cheek. When I went back into my bedroom, the sun was coming through the windows in a way I’d never noticed before, directly hitting the roughly surfaced, painted yellow wall over my bed, suffusing it with the deep golden yellows of ripe papaya skin, which contrasted with the large minty emerald squares rimmed in blue of the Momostenango wool blanket laid over my bed. Penny’s hand rake propped atop the blanket somehow possessed the gravity of a compact heavy anchor plummeting into ocean depths despite being motionless, its glinting prongs like prehistoric fangs, with its painted whorled wood handle, the wet slurry seal color of just-laid sidewalk or maybe more a periwinkle gray, but that combination of colors and light, that unexpected tableau, as if inside a mysterious door opening in the air, suddenly struck me as unbearably beautiful and melancholy, and with a sob that came out of me like a punch, I fell to my knees, face against the scratchy wool of the blanket, hand clutching the rake by the handle, and wept like I never had before as an adult.

      New London, the Thames harbor, docks, berthed sailboats, nothing out there today on the choppy grayish waters. The next stop, a short stretch of seascape away, is Mystic. Bert once brought us somewhere around here to see the submarine base, and to the seaport in Mystic to tour some of the old three-masted sailing vessels. I remember standing on the balcony of a motel early in the morning and looking down into the pool where Mamita was swimming laps in a light-blue bathing suit, her hair tucked under a bathing cap, how beautifully and swiftly she swam with her long, graceful crawl through the limpid water. Was that motel around here, in Mystic? Falmouth? Woods Hole? Wait, I think it was Boothbay Harbor.

      I was on a quick book tour that I’d come up from Mexico for when Penny turned up by surprise at a reading I was giving at Politics and Prose and took me out for drinks and burgers afterward at the same bar good ol’ Tip O’Neill and some of the Kennedys used to drink at, where she said she remembered the color of the killer rake’s handle as fire-engine red. No, Penny, you’re wrong. It was slurry seal, I said emphatically. Though I wasn’t as sure as I’d sounded. Penny had spent years on the lecture circuit, traveling the country, talking about Guatemala, showing her slides, speaking in church and synagogue basements and public libraries, visiting colleges and universities. She wasn’t making any money but was invited to sit with do-gooder fat cats on the boards of various human rights and foreign policy organizations; then she suddenly enrolled in the Wharton School of Business. Five years later, by 9/11, she’d made an immense fortune in big-time finance. Of course anything Penny turned her obsessive attention to she was going to excel at. That night in the bar, she confided after her third martini that she utterly loved being ruthless in her business dealings but only so long as she believed she was competing against the sorts of bastards who for decades had been dictating all the ways that Guatemala and the other Central American countries were to be fucked over. Not long after, Penny had some kind of breakdown, was diagnosed with severe PTSD and what they called “addiction to perfectionism,” and spent two months in a treatment center in the Berkshires; then she went to live in Bali with her lover for a year; now she uses her wealth to found projects like the scholarship fund for Guatemalan Maya students whose advisory board she invited me to join, and she’s promised a big donation to the “learning sanctuary” for immigrant kids in Bushwick that I volunteer at. Penny’s back again on her relentless lecture circuit, too, paying her own travel expenses, traveling the United States speaking to ever-smaller audiences. She says she doesn’t even care as long as at least a few people show up, and now and then she’s nicely surprised, in California, say, by a college or even high school crowd that includes many students who came from Central America as small children, others born here, kids so eager to learn everything they can about what went on during the war decades in their ancestral countries that their parents fled, the most common complaint being that those same parents often refuse to talk about it. Penny always tells me she’s writing a memoir, I hope she does.

      Outside of my aunt and uncle and cousins, I couldn’t deal, back then, with people who didn’t get what was going on or didn’t want to; people, both up here and down there, who weren’t bothered by or were just passive consumers of all the lies endlessly poured over mass murder. The war and its politics made me judgmental in a vehement way I’m likely to roll my eyes at now whenever I encounter it in others, less over the judgments than over the vehemence, sometimes as embarrassing as hearing a recording of my own much younger self. But a fundamental truth of the war in Guatemala was always that those with the most wealth and power to lose were the most indifferent to how many were slaughtered: young mothers, babies, entire villages, whatever, it made no difference to them. To this day they’re sure they were on the correct side of history, even if what they have to show for it are failed narco states with starving populations and everybody trying to get the hell out, and now here comes the next narco president, General Cara de Culo, “a good muchacho,” as the gringo ambassador called him in a newspaper article the other day. Those trips back to New York in those years were always incredibly isolating.

      But by the end of the eighties I’d moved back anyway, where I shared an apartment in Brooklyn with Gero Tripp. We still sometimes worked in Central America, even went down together for the Panama invasion. But soon after, I decided I wasn’t going to do that anymore. I was at last finishing my first novel. Gero was on his way to becoming an international war correspondent superstar. Bosnia, the West Bank, and Gaza, with the Pashtuns who fought the Red Army in Afghanistan, the Tamil Tigers, the Polisario Front in Western Sahara. He’s in Iraq right now. I was also venturing into risky territories I’d never been to before. At thirty-three, I started having girlfriends and relationships, one after the other, and that enormous change in my life consumed me. It started the night I went to meet a younger friend, a Harvard law student who’d been an intern reporter in Managua, for drinks in the city, and she turned up at the bar with a friend of hers, Burmese Belgian Pénèlope Myint, raised in Hong Kong and Brussels, a doctoral student writing a dissertation on Italian feminist writers. At the end of what turned into a long New York club-hopping night, we wound up in a crowded taxi, Pénèlope sitting on my lap as we made out, the other people wedged into the back seat around us making cracks about how we were so fogging the windows the driver couldn’t see. And so began that crazy incineration of a year, split between New York and Cambridge, the memory of which I treasure so much that often when I’m in Boston I walk down to the Esplanade only to gaze Gatsby-like across the river at that grad student high-rise against the sky and the white balcony from which, one

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