A FAIRLY ORDINARY FOOL by Carrie La Seur
“A human ode to joy,” Papá says when he sees the yellow eyelet dress I scored at a thrift store in Adams Morgan, practically radiating affection he’s so eager to warm the chill congealing between us the last few years. “The yellow butterflies flooded our street every March. I thought Gabo must be from Caracas.”
Briefly, dryly I kiss his cheek and we brave the rental’s ancient elevator. As we turn the first corner, raincoat hoods raised against mercurial winds carrying dirt, he says, “A writer friend is coming too, with some family. Let’s go by their hotel and see if they’ve arrived.”
My hard stop disrupts Centro Histórico pedestrian flow. The moment he proposed this spontaneous, whimsical adventure for the two of us, I should have remembered that there’s always a woman involved. I’m never enough. The gender neutral pronoun makes me sure that “they” is “she.” Until now I’ve been sharp enough to avoid this one.
“Clementine,” I say. It’s an accusation, but he doesn’t know why. Not yet.
He ducks his head with the penitent, intending‑to‑be-charming look he gets after doing something he knows will annoy Mother or me, asking forgiveness rather than permission. It isn’t charming. It makes me want to take off alone into streets where my gringa get‑up will get too much attention.
“She’s invited to the service,” he says in a pleading tone. “You can see inside the Palacio.”
I’d hardly recognize Clementine Lagrange, but I’ve written to her. Papá couldn’t know. I remember every word of the letter I wrote over many angry days sophomore year, a therapeutic exercise after Mother opened the guarded chamber about the affair that ended their marriage, breathing whiskey onto me in a deep back booth after a 9/11 memorial that was too much for both of us.
Dear Ms. Lagrange –
I feel as if I know you from reading your books and articles about you, and most of all from how my father talks about you. There were things I didn’t know until recently when Mother told me how you interfered in their marriage. She knew everything. She hired a private investigator who got shots of you entering and leaving budget tourist hotels together in the middle of the day. So tacky and sordid. She confronted him and he admitted the affair.
When they divorced, I couldn’t sleep without my giant Huggy Bear so I carried it between their apartments until I fell down the subway steps and Papá bought another to keep at his place, but the new one wasn’t the same. Did you think for a moment of collateral damage? I know he was at fault too but he wasn’t flying in from Minnesota.
You string him along years later. Your picture’s on his desk, from your first book jacket where you look like Olivia de Havilland. Mine isn’t. Do you feel powerful knowing that his wife and daughter line up behind you? What kind of selfishness does it take to steal a man you don’t even want?
It doesn’t matter much anymore. You’ll be dead soon and I’ll move up his priority list. But a few people see what you are – a vampire feeding on young lives. I guess that makes you already dead.
I stand silently on the street corner, rocked by Mayan women as high as my elbows pushing by under wide bundles. Papá tries to peek under my hood but I turn away.
“I thought it would be fun to meet friends. It was a mistake,” he says in resignation. “We don’t need to.”
I might never have been ready to broach the subject myself – but forcing me into Clementine’s orbit is pushing too far. Now I show my face, my anger.
“Mother told me. I know.” Thick air catches in my throat. The Mexico City pollution index must be soaring today. My eyes tear up.
Papá puts his hand for support on a filthy steel shop curtain. He bends away and grows smaller, as if he’d like to become invisible. That I’ve pained him anguishes and pleases me. It’s difficult to squeeze my juvenile adoration of him into the smaller, dimmer space his actions have created, like overgrown Alice in Wonderland, arms and legs jutting out of the house at odd angles. After a long pause when I think he might crumple, he says, “I’m a great fool.”
I feel the cruel urge to mock him.
“You give yourself too much credit. You’re a fairly ordinary fool.”
My tone is light, but I see the words cut, harsher than intended. Anger and love knot together in my heart, inhabit one turbulent space, indistinguishable as I put my hand on Papá’s shoulder. He reached for me the same way days ago in D.C. sun thousands of miles away when news of Gabo’s death hit CNN. His hand, chilled and grimy from the steel, clasps mine like something from the grave, desperate for living warmth, terrified I’ll pull away. His face is suddenly ravaged, dry lines on his cheeks that I’ve never seen before and darkness around his eyes. It frightens me to see him so abruptly changed.
“We don’t have to see them,” he says. “Let’s go walk in the Alameda.” He pulls my hand through his arm and leads in another direction. I’m momentarily appeased.
“No,” I say and stop again. “I want to see her.”
“Why?” As he might speak to someone with grenades in her purse.
“I haven’t seen her since I found out. I might have a few things to say.”
He considers for a moment, nods slowly. “All right.”
I breathe as deeply as I can in the haze and work on a neutral expression. The schizophrenic architecture calms me: Art Deco, modern jumbled shopping arcades, rows of ironwork balconies then broken windows and faded shutters beside a gaudy facade like New Orleans. Adamant art and color. Frida Kahlo’s omnipresent scowl adorns another steel curtained shop and tile climbs to a roof four floors above where Mayan suns beam down. New York and D.C. are dull by comparison.
I’ve almost forgotten my pique a few blocks away when he leads me into a ridiculously fancy lobby for the neighborhood. He gets points for showing the sensitivity not to book us into the same place and knowing I don’t like this sort of glitz. A glittering bar stretches so wide and high that I wonder if the bartenders use library ladders to reach the bottles. The concierge looks us over approvingly. I’m dressed for the place, but even if I weren’t, Mother taught me how to throw back my shoulders like a Wolcott and walk into any room, in any condition, as if I own it.
A woman approaches us, late thirties or early forties, rounded but not truly heavy, in sensible low-heeled shoes suitable for walking and a dress that covers her shoulders and knees, a Catholic schoolgirl grown up. She holds a girl of eight or nine by the hand. Papá introduces them as Mary and Eloise, Clementine’s granddaughter and great-granddaughter, who could pass for Mexican. Mary is a cellist with the Houston Symphony, he says, and describes with pride my degree course at Georgetown. Mary’s warm eyes examine me as she leans to embrace me lightly and kiss my cheek, unaware of my tension or attempting to soothe it.
This was all arranged in advance, I see – the rendezvous with Clementine, the introduction of offspring. Nothing was left to chance. Was Papá texting them as I changed clothes? Fury rushes back, flushing my cheeks, at being thrust into this situation – even as I grudgingly admire the tactics: a neutral setting, a public place, innocent bystanders, even a moving historical event to accomplish the reacquaintance safely.
“Such a pleasure,” Mary says, like a woman accustomed to cocktail parties. “What a pretty dress. So happy we could all be here. Say hello, honey,” she prompts Eloise. She’s nine, Mary mouths to me and Papá as Eloise glances from a later volume of Harry Potter and offers a quick “Hi.” With a wide smile Mary steps aside to reveal the main character in our drama.
Behind her, bowed but well-balanced with an ingenious cane that unfolds into a camp stool, stands a shadow on my life. Under chunky turquoise jewelry and a loose white dress, in her nineties Clementine’s body has assumed the shape of age beyond effort, where pretense falls away and human component parts become visible – prominent eye sockets, long cords in her neck, tendons in speckled hands. She looks as ancient as the mountains, practically mummified. Her hair is a shining silver ornament, parted in the middle and curled gently below her ears. She’s beautiful, I acknowledge resentfully, but her eyes behind huge bifocals are wells of sadness deeper than anything she could be feeling for Gabo. Papá’s never spoken about their relationship so I search this withered personage to explain the fascination she evidently holds for him. Only her eyes hint at the writer of sufficient status to have a place at the Palacio today.
He’s in her arms already, a man beginning to show age, but they give small cries of relief like young lovers separated. Their heads fall on the other’s shoulder, and – the detail that softens my brittle outer shell – Clementine’s gnarled fingers grasp a handful of the black cloth of his jacket and cling tight, like a woman farewelling a soldier. This lasts at least a minute, while Eloise reads and Mary and I make polite eye contact then look away, mutually awkward before this display of elder emotion. When at last the embrace loosens, Papá kisses Clementine’s forehead, then her lips.
“Te extrañé,” he says softly.
Her look of great tenderness strikes at my certainties. I’ve never seen Mother look at him that way, although maybe before I was old enough to remember there was a time like that. Her expression grows teasing and delighted.
“Y tu, cabrón,” she says. They laugh.
“This is my Graciela,” Papá says. They turn to me with sobering faces.
Still holding onto him, Clementine extends a hand, palm up, solemn. “Are you still angry with me?” she asks.
I ignore Papá’s startled look and watch instead the silencing gaze Clementine lays on him, the power she has. I fixed such furious blame on this woman, as an alternative to hating beloved Papá, that I thought it was a permanent thing. It once occupied my whole heart, but now instead of holding a vital organ hostage it’s become a decoration one might hang on a tree and box up when the season is over. In the flesh they aren’t ogres but humans – and he, not she, broke the vow to Mother nearly twenty years ago. I want to take her hand but after the rictus of grief and anger it’s difficult to unbend.
Instead I straighten to take advantage of being tallest. “No. But not being angry isn’t the same as forgiving,” I say. “Or forgetting.”
“No indeed,” says Clementine. She releases Papá. “May I walk with you?”
I’m helpless to refuse – as she of course intuits. Stiffly I give my arm and we move in procession, the others falling in, to the doors.
“It’s only three!” Mary says. “We’ll be standing for an hour. Grandma, let’s wait here.” But the crowd is forming outside. If we wait, it will only grow denser. Wind and rain have drawn back to allow the sun its rightful place. Heat mounts. The only thing to do is advance. Clementine nods at the doorman, who ushers us ceremoniously onto the sidewalk.
As soon as the crowd covers our voices, she says, “Ubaldo tells me you’re interested in working in Venezuela.” I glance back but Papá is already questioning Eloise about Harry Potter. His genuine enthusiasm for children is a saving grace.
“I suppose you want to talk me out of it too.”
“Quite the contrary. I want to help. It’s the kind of thing I did at your age. What would you do there?”
No one has asked this question, only ordered me not to go. I have to think a minute. My father’s country is a house that’s been ransacked. You’d put the door back on the hinges and start slowly. Set a chair upright. Get medical supplies to hospitals. Look for institutions with hopes of functioning better, under the radar of a government gone mad. Slide between the Scylla and Charybdis of arrest and cooptation by the regime. But I don’t want to talk about any of that with Clementine – in my mind a dilettante Joan Didion type who chronicles stricken countries she passes through for the thrill.
“Why do you care?” I ask. It’s the first comeback that comes to mind but I also want to know. “Why are we here? Why did you and Papá plan this ambush?”
Clementine takes several slow steps before answering. “I know you hate me. You have reason to. But I’m not your enemy. Did you read my letter?”
“I burned it.” The words feel good – hard and spiteful. I don’t want to be spiteful, but how quickly do I have to get over this? I’ve only known the truth for three years. How fast is a person expected to heal from an arrow through the heart? I remember her letter under an L. L. Bean catalog on Mother’s counter in Manhattan, a serpent waiting to bite. The nerve of that woman, I thought at the time, to send anything to Mother’s. I had no intention of reading her excuses but I enjoyed the ritual exorcism of opening a window, pulling the battery out of the smoke detector and burning the cursed thing to ashes in the sink. Later I wished I’d kept it.
The crowd moving toward the Palacio is a vibrant river running to the wide plaza decked with marquee tents, past the statue of a fallen Mexican president who looks suspiciously like Lenin. Thousands of mourners are identifiable by the books, yellow roses and chrysanthemums in their hands, signs and butterflies cut from yellow paper waving beside yellow balloons. Schoolchildren in uniform hold handmade signs with quotations from Gabo’s books. There is always something left to love, one of them says. Like Venezuela. Like Clementine. The remnants Papá clings to. People brandish Cien Años de Soledad as a reliquary, fine leather-bound editions and marked‑up, disintegrating paperbacks. I’ve never seen so many people carrying books, as if they’re en masse emptying a library before a flood. How do they know what to do, I wonder? Parents carry children and a little band with an accordion plays songs that are familiar although I don’t know the words. There’s festival and tragedy in the air, the atmosphere of a wake, a sorrow like gratitude.
The four of us clump together, nearly carrying Clementine, but the crowd is gentle. There is no impatience or pushing. I think of Catholic festival processionals with statues of the Virgin on her throne held aloft, only no one would mistake Clementine for the BVM. A legless beggar collects change. A tall black man holds up Colombian soccer jerseys printed with Gabo’s face, walking backward along the curb, hawking with shouts that are almost song. Eloise holds tight to Papá’s hand and someone hands her a yellow balloon. Someone tucks a yellow daisy behind Clementine’s ear and she drops coins from a waist pack into the outstretched palm. This weeping crush of shuffling, novel-hugging humanity is everything my orderly life in D.C. is not.
The crowd waves our little party forward out of respect for the fragile elder. When we reach the tents, Clementine produces an envelope and an usher hurries to us. I can enter the hall to assist her but must leave before the formalities. On my arm is a woman blacklisted by McCarthy for what she wrote about Latin America and the revolution she sought, greeted with nods of recognition as a few people realize who she is. I wonder what her legacy might have been if she’d been born into greater security, a different country or different times, a man’s body.
Tears track her cheeks when she sees the vast black and white image of Gabo looking down on a sea of yellow flowers. I’m softening moment by moment toward her and steel myself, remembering a miserable Christmas dinner at a folding table in Papá’s dismal studio, but the Palacio de Bellas Artes is subversive with its grand murals and string music. I love the idea of it, not a cathedral or a royal palace but a temple of the arts. This is what we should honor, not gods or princes. Sometimes the Metropolitan Museum of Art seizes me with the inexplicable desire to fall to my knees. In the Palacio I understand that what I felt there, as here, is the presence of the divine.
Gabo’s ashes arrive in a black cube and the crowd calls out his nickname as if an old friend has strolled into sight. The urn rests on a pedestal before the flags of Mexico and Colombia, beneath the image of the man, the years of his life and the words La vida no es la que uno vivió, sino la que uno recuerda y como la recuerda para contarla. Clementine’s tears continue, soaking the neckline of her dress, more tears than I would have thought she had in her. Everyone is crying, like we’ve lost a sweet grandfather who gave us candy. How beautiful to be among people who love a man purely and from afar because of his art.
“That’s what I was trying to tell you,” Clementine says, pointing at Gabo. “He got it from me, of course. You have to go to Venezuela to tell the story. That’s what we do. We give the people the stories that change everything.” She dries her tears as I help her to her seat. She keeps a grip on me and I squat in the aisle to hear her over the din. The corners of the usher’s mouth twitch down but for now he leaves us alone.
“What did you say in your letter?” I ask.
She speaks into my ear, our faces so close that her parchment cheek brushes mine. “I said . . . when my writing career went up in flames, I found out that the love I gave it couldn’t perish. Artists aren’t like other people. Love is all we have to give. I gave him what he needed, and he did what he had to do. Children like to think they own their parents, but you can’t own anyone. I know it was hard for you, and I’m sorry for that. I truly am. There’s no avoiding pain in life. Sometimes we can postpone it, but usually that makes it worse in the end.”
It’s a series of koans strung together, thoughts I’ll weigh for a long time. I wish I had them written down as Clementine originally offered them – now I’ll have to hold this bag of clinking coins of unknown value. She’s watching for a reply, but with the sudden conviction that I’m talking to the wrong person I pull away and wind through the assembling eminences to find my way to Papá outside, the expediency of her words coiling in black knots inside me. No wonder she was friendly with Gabo. He was that way too, propping up Castro with his approval even as the dictator executed dissidents, the people a writer ought to defend, all to serve a vague principle. What is this fascination Papá has with leftist writers, contrary to his politics? What does he see in the funhouse mirror of their complicated souls?
“What did she say?” he asks, hopping off the streetlight pedestal he climbed to wave at me. A few steps away, out of earshot in the crowd, Mary and Eloise watch the pageantry and nibble churros from a paper bag.
I half smile. What stories we tell ourselves. All this time my anger has been misplaced. The only person who was responsible to my mother stands before me.
“She says she gave you what you needed.”
He thinks back, considers, eyes searching clouded heavens, coughs and says at last, “I wish I were a better man.” His dark gaze returns to mine.
“What is she to you? Why does she mean so much?”
His expression grows quizzical, the way it did when I was small and asked why the horizon looked flat or if trees could feel. “It’s funny, I’ve asked myself that many times. The best I can come up with is that I would’ve liked to be more idealistic. I would’ve liked to believe in the people’s revolution and all that but I never could. Gabo, Clementine . . . they’re fantasies I don’t have to relinquish in real life. They live and breathe and I can love them as they are.” He pauses to watch a flight of yellow butterflies released by a vendor on the corner from a tiny cage. “Or as they were.”
“You’re a romantic,” I say beneath the gasps around us as the butterflies dip to alight on heads and hands. A butterfly lands on Papá’s raised arm, a wisp of life like an animate pansy. Cautiously he bends his elbow until the butterfly is suspended between us, creating a little glowing world bordered by our bodies. In this space I’m a girl with her father’s undivided attention, all I longed for but could never win.
He whispers, “Don’t tell anyone,” but even as I lift my head to smile for real, his eyes shift to follow a stunning yellow-suited chilanga up Avenida Juárez.
Carrie La Seur is the author of two novels: The Home Place (William Morrow, 2014) and The Weight of an Infinite Sky (William Morrow, 2018).