Chapter 7: The Dream

It is in the cold black darkness of an early winter’s night when she discovers a deep secret about herself.  Believing it only a dream, she discovers that the secret is, in fact, all about darkness, about unlit corners, shadowy doorways, windowless rooms, about all those places the eyes can no longer see anything, not even one’s own hand inches from the eyes.  The secret that she can see clearly in the dark.

She awakes.  First in a half dreamy state as the images continue to wash over her mind’s eye like tears, images repeating, images reconfigured, images redrawn according to the whim of an unfettered imagination held captive in the world of dreams.   She watches herself move through the darkness confidently, knowing without seeing whatever is filling up the dark space.  She knows it is there. 

She wakes fully.  She is no longer moving through a dark space, seeing without seeing.  She is in her bed, she is certain, certain as the clock’s light on the nightstand revealing 3:03 on his red face, which she can see with her eyes.  That she lies on her bed , which she can see with her eyes; under her yellow and green quilt, which she can see with her eyes; in her small home far North and thousands of miles from her mother.  She knows all this in spite of what she is now hearing.  In spite of hearing her mother’s voice calling out to her, loud and clear that she should come downstairs. She knows she is in her home, awake.

Her mother’s voice persists, insists that she should come downstairs. She begins to wonder about...when other voices in her mind join in, the thoughts in her mind racing each other, one toppling over the other, words stumbling over the other , sentences piggybacking in an endless loop of syntax-less meaninglessness, all this a sure sign she is in trouble, will of course never get back to sleep and lately she is of the opinion that these noisy intrusive voices in her head are, dare she think much less speak aloud, the Devil himself taunting her, working insidiously to possess her through chaotic thoughts, ensnare her in the mind’s confused web of words: the devil of distraction.  She is beginning to believe she had be enlisted into her own private battle with Evil.

She calls out, stop the noise, be gone, demon of distraction.  She tries to pick up the conscious though of what she was wondering before Babel rose up, each voice fighting for hegemony.  Then she remembers,  yes, that’s it. She is wondering why she is hearing her mother’s voice if she is so fully awake and in her own bed.

She listens. It is dark in the room save for the clock’s obnoxiously lit-up face.  She can see all the furniture, every picture on the wall, every bottle on the vanity only because she has put them all there herself.  She can’t see each of these things with her eyes, but she knows they are there. She sees them in her mind’s eyes, in the place where memory of the familiar and safe reside.    She begins to drift away, the voices subsiding as she takes the mental inventory of her room.  The good, the commonplace and the everyday overcoming the evil of noisy distraction, sleep moves towards her like a welcoming ghost, and she curls up on her side, hugging her cool pillow.

Her mother’s voice calls out again, come downstairs please.

She throws off the covers, pulls on her blue woolen socks, wraps herself in her Mexican blanket and heads downstairs, fully prepared to find emptiness below.

Her mother is standing in the living room.  But it’s not her living room anymore.  Or is it?  Numerous tall windows fill the walls of a room larger then she remembers.  Her mother greets her with a tired, grateful smile and hugs her, something that feels out of character and yet familiar.  They sit down to chat and catch up, when her mother’s face suddenly changes as  shadows pass over it.  Her mother’s wrinkles grow more pronounced and her forehead maps out lines of concern, her eyes fix on something beyond. Her eyes follows her mother’s.  She sees the shadowy outlines of people standing in the windows.  Every window frames a dark, faceless figure.  She realizes the figures are growing larger, they begin to loom, hover, press against the window.   They are in every sense portentous.

She is afraid.   Her mother is afraid. They both know  that these figures are ominous, but they don’t know why; they are nameless, unvoiced, untold, silent ghosts.  Her mother turns to her and speaks with an authority that no one dare call into question.  Find a dark space, her mother tells her.  They can’t get you there.  And with your gift of seeing clearly in the dark, you'll escape their evil  and save the world.  And with those words, her mother points to the fireplace that suddenly appears in the room, and tells her to hide in the chimney.

She knows this is one of those times to listen to her mother.

Chapter 6: Anna's First Journal Entry

In the past I kept journals so that I would remember to listen to my children. As much as I love mom, she really doesn't listen to me. She never has. So I began to keep journals. Mostly I wrote about the trips I took or the boys I was in love with, or thought I was in love with.

Amy stopped reading.
Her grandmother had always listened to her.

All that changed last week--about the reasons why I kept a journal. I saw the documentary called Bitter Fruit. It was about the CIA and its role in overthrowing one of the presidents of Guatemala who as trying to create a more democratic country through land reform, democratic in the sense of wealth distribution. I realized that I know nothing Guatemala, about my father and his father and their life in Guatemala. I know we have my grandfather's books and some of his letters. But I've never looked at them except to look at my grandfather's penmanship.

Amy stopped reading.

She thinks about the mahogany bookcase.

Whenever dad talks about Guatemala he tells us about how he ate fresh fruit. How beautiful the weather was--that Guatemala is the land of eternal Spring. He talks about his education, and his favorite book The Three Musketeers. He likes to tell me about Lake Atitlan and the twelve Indian groups that lived around the lake each named after one of the apostles and each group wearing its own distinct dress. And he always said that the Indians were happy and that they didn't want to change.

Amy stopped reading.

She had heard these stories from her grandfather.

I knew my grandmother just barely. She didn't speak English, so mostly I remember sitting close to her and waiting to see what she pulled from her purse. She always seemed to have whatever was needed at that moment. My grandfather died before I was born. Dad never talks about him. When he does, he calls him Mr. Rubio. I know that my dad has nine siblings, two are half brothers.

Amy stopped reading.

She knew this about her grandfather.

I'm writing what I know because what I don't know is beginning to feel very large.

I know that my grandfather worked for some Guatemalan presidents, that he wrote books (which we have) and that he was the Consul General to Guatemala for the Southeastern states when he died in 1944. I'm wondering what role he played in these repressive governments I'm just now learning about.

Amy stopped reading.

She knew this about her great-grandfather.

But she had never wondered about him in this way.

To tell the truth, I'm afraid of what I'll find out. But I couldn't sleep last night, so I'm pretty sure I need to find out.

Amy stopped reading.

She's not sure what to think.

I called dad last night and began to talk to him about the documentary. He says that the communists needed to be stopped, that the communists were the ones killing and shooting. That under Ubica Guatemala became safe again and roads were built and the killing stopped. He says that nothing else happened except that the communists were put down and Guatemala was saved from communism. But I could tell he was upset that I asked. I had never asked about Guatemala and its politicals. And dad had never offered that information.

Amy stopped reading.

She never saw her grandfather get upset.

Every summer during high school I worked for my dad's freight forwarding company on Camp Street. He arranges for goods to be shipped to Central American countries. My job was to go to places like the United Fruit company and to consulates to pick up the bills of lading or to get the documents stamped required for the shipments. I didn't know anything about the United Fruit Company and how it was part of the coup in Guatemala back in the mid 50's.

Amy stopped reading.

She didn't know this about her mother.

She didn't know what her mother was writing about.

I start this journal with the intention of finding out what I can about my family's past, about my father's past and his father's past. It's his father's past that's actually the mystery. That's what this journal will record--who my grandfather was. I'm writing this for myself, and maybe for my children.

I talked to my brother and sister, and told them about what I am doing. My brother as usual encouraged me to continue. My sister as usual became agitated at the thought of uncovering something unpleasant.

Amy stopped reading.
My mother had a sister?

Chapter 5: The Stages of Grief

Amy sat on the unstable antique chair that had come with the apartment on Magazine Street, looking at  the small plastic suitcase and the medium-sized cardboard box she had rescued from her parents flooded home.  The two flood survivors had been occupying a dark corner of the room since she moved back to New Orleans a little over a year ago.   It actually didn’t take her that long to get her things together.  But the move had taken up a lot of her psychic energy.  She needed to focus on the present.

  There weren't too many people who had returned yet, and the only livable area was the "sliva by the riva", the area of town that stretched from the French Quarter along the Mississippi River levee and that wound its way through the lower Garden District and Uptown to the River Bend, on the river side of St. Charles.  The lonely For Rent sign was a small one bedroom that was just a few inches and a slender wallboard beyond what would have been an efficiency apartment.  She found a job at a health club in a downtown hotel and was able to sell the Saturn, which made it possible for her to afford the high rent.  The out-of-desperation $1000 sign-on bonus the hotel offered and which was in fact offered everywhere in town from McDonalds to the Ritz,  covered her moving costs and security deposit.
 
The late evening February sun was scattering spots of light on the hardwood floor of the virtually bare room, barely warming the damp cold air finding its way through the old wavy glass window panes. She had had the suitcase and box since she had emptied her grandparent's attic, but had not yet explored their contents. Not even the words “Anna’s Journals” written in her grandmother’s handwriting on the wrinkled box were strong enough to pull her from her drowning  grief.

Amy thought she knew what it meant to grieve. What could be a greater loss than the loss of her own mother? Or of not knowing her own father? Her mother had died when she was barely two. Her father, she had never met. He was a brief sentence, an aside, something she overheard as she passed by the bedroom door of her grandparent’s room. “He wasn’t ready to be a father,” was the most common portrait her grandmother would paint of him. He seemed to exist inside parentheses, an afterthought. She had also heard some sketchy words “jerk,” “narcissus”, “self-centered”, words whispered when the adults didn’t see her behind Aunt Adele’s newly upholstered (for the fifth time in five years) chair or under Aunt Concha’s heavy black dining room table where Spanish diplomats sat eating inky black squid.

Of course, much more than a sentence or even a paragraph was spoken about her mother Anna. There were stories, short ones and long ones and ones with punch lines and some that seemed almost mythical. Her grandmother told funny stories about her mother, stories that made her laugh. Or she told her stories with a moral at the end, lessons Amy was to learn so that she would not repeat her mother's mistakes. She heard tales of her mother’s energy, her accomplishments, her rebelliousness from all things Southern and gentile, and her bad choices when it came to boyfriends. Her grandfather described Anna differently, like a poet might describe a person admired from a distance. He told Amy about Anna’s dreams, about what she had longed for in her life, about the books she read, the poets she read over and over again, and the music she’d dance to alone out on the patio. Amy knew about cummings and Eliot, about Mozart, about The Nancy Drew Mystery series—all the things Anna loved and cherished.

Amy realized, came to terms with actually, that what she thought had been grieving was as ephemeral as her mother was to her—a notion, a fiction, a reconstruction of fragments of photos and stories. The grief she felt about her mother's death was that of an unrequited lover’s.

The grief she felt when she saw her destroyed home and city, and the deaths of her grandparents a few months later was  different. It was concrete. Physical. A bulldozer that razed her entire being. She sat on the floor recalling a litany of events that had been occupying her thoughts for the past year: Katrina destroyed her home.  Two months later, Mignon died. Then a month later Carlos died, heartbroken and too frail to face the loss of his wife, his home, his city. The day her grandfather died, Amy felt all over again and with twice as much force what she felt the day she had returned to New Orleans after Katrina. She felt deafened by the silence, suffocated by the stench of death, hopeless in the scope of what was gone. She had loved her grandparents as deeply as she had known them. She had loved her city as deeply as she had known it. And she knew them all so very well.

This grief brought with it the hard truth that she had not really grieved her mother’s death. The hard truth that she had not known her mother at all. She knew the photos and the stories. She had lost only what she herself had created in her imagination. A fiction. A fragment. A photo.

And now Amy sat with the box of her mother’s journals, taped, sealed how long ago she doesn’t know. Next to it lay the small plastic suitcase. What she thought she knew, not only about her mother and father, but about her grandfather and his father as well, was about to change in a way as unfathomable as Katrina’s destruction.

Chapter 4: The City of the Dead

After Carlos’ funeral, Amy stood with her grandparent’s lawyer Mr. Rasch, a well-dressed rotund man whose size betrayed the gentleness with which he had managed their legal needs.     They stood together in a tense silence.  The tension did not exist between them, but rather between the two of them and the cemetery staff;  a tension that contained the silent memory of what had happened, or not happened, at her grandmother’s funeral a half a year earlier, when the cemetery had left her grandmother’s coffin outside, unattended, for over a day before putting the casket into the designated section of the wall of the family tomb. Mr. Rasch had discovered this negligence through the network of contacts he had made over the years in his role as President of the Louisiana State Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors.  Such negligence was somewhat common before Katrina.  Post-Katrina, it had gotten even worse, like most things in New Orleans, in part due to the poor service of most funeral homes that had existed before the flood, in part due to the loss of available workers after the flood.   There was no place to live for those that lived, no one to bury those that died. 

Amy stood with Mr. Rasch until her grandfather’s coffin was safely secured in the space that was adjacent to his wife of 65 years. She realized she wasn’t ready to leave yet, so she walked outside with Mr. Rasch and thanked him for all he had done,  and told him she’d be in touch to finish up the paper work for the estate, or at least what was left of the estate.  As Mr. Rasch’s large shadow made its way across the deserted streets of the City of the Dead, a ghost town in a ghost town, Amy turned around and entered the narrow hallway of pitched-roof mausoleum.  It had been built about 75 years ago and was made of brick  plastered over and painted white.  Dark smudges of dirt and mold had crept into the corners and nooks here and there.  A distinct rusted-orange stripe encircled the perimeter of the tomb about 12 inches from the ground,  marking the spot where Katrina’s waters had sat for those long days in August over a year ago.    Below the steeply-pitched roof and above the arched doorway stood a white marble cross encircled with white marble ivy guarding the Rubio family whose name was carved beneath the cross.  

In the shadowy cool hallway, she read the plates that named those who had once lived:

Casimiro Rubio   1865- 1040

Angela Toleda Balmes Rubio  1882 - 1966

Adela Rubio Stern  1907 - 1985

Concha Rubio Pascal   1910 - 1980

Eduardo Rubio    1914 - 1997

Graciela Rubio Hirsch   1921 - 1999

Mignon Tuyes Rubio  1920 – 2005

Carlos Rubio   1917 – 2006

Anna Rubio 1955 – 1981

A few of the Rubios were missing. They were buried in other cities – Martha in Houston and George in San Francisco.  With the exception of her grandparents, Amy knew the others who were buried here through the picture and stories she had seen and heard. She knew that Aunt Adela had been the great beauty of the women.  She knew that Aunt Concha had famous dinners for the counsul of Spain for whom she had worked—long dinners  with multiple courses presided over by her Cajun husband Bruce Pascal who started every meal with a Cajun prayer.  Eduarda was known as Guayo, later shortened by the English speaking offspring to Y-O.  He was the electrician who married Jane Callahan, Anna’s godmother.  About Graciela she heard the least, although she had met her at one time. She thought she had once caught the tail end of whisper about her great-aunt Grace’s mental illness.   Finally she was ready to leave.

She walked back outside.  Much of the grass had grown back since the flood.  It still startled her to see how few trees there were, to see so much of the vast white cloudless sky that had been hidden behind the city’s thousands of oak trees, now gone.  The absence of the protective shade of oaks was just another reminder of the absence of so much more—of residents, of the people how made New Orleans what was always so special to Amy.  The mishmash of ideas and races and opinions, the crazy-making conflicts that always ended in laughter and a good meal or a stiff drink.  And as crazy-making as these in-your-face disputes and conflicts could be, their absence was worse.  The music, now silent; the cadence of speech and the unique look of the people, both born of back room liaisons, now silent;  the food, the parades,  all this she missed as much as she missed her grandparents.

In that moment Amy made her commitment to return, to move back and make New Orleans her home once again.  She wasn’t sure how she’d manage it.  There weren’t too many places available to rent and what was available had doubled in rent. Tragedy doesn’t necessarily make heroes.   All her friends were still in places far away. 

She walked back to where she had parked her grandparents’ gold Saturn, when into her brain and completely from nowhere appeared the memory of her grandfather’s mortification  when the sales people at the dealership lined up to sing to him and Mignon as they picked up the brand new Saturn back in 1999.  Her grandfather was a private man who hated to call attention to himself (a trait she had inherited).  Of course, her grandmother had loved the attention, and so in the end Carlos suffered the humiliating experience of this ueber-customer service Public Display of Affection, and was glad Mignon was happy.  Holding on to this memory, Amy felt a surge of energy and optimism and steered the car towards uptown, where the higher land of the city along the Mississippi River, at the rim of the so-called bowl, had not been flooded.  She knew it was a million-in-one chance that she’d find anything, but what was there to loose?

She drove onto the I-10 heading downtown, and turned off the Carrollton exit.  She drove all the way down Carrollton to the River Bend, turning left along the levee and then onto Magazine Street.    About ten minutes later, she stopped the car.  A For Rent sign sat in a window, as lonely as the sole oak tree on the street, as abandoned as the city.