The Vigil

By Penelope Williams

Raúl has a wonderful wife, two beautiful daughters and a secret he can’t let go. When his past erupts back into the present, there are life-changing choices to be made. Raúl's situation suddenly becomes as volatile and unpredictable as the events that triggered it all back in 1968, when the whole world was in upheaval and the Mexican government sent tanks into Tlatelolco square. A fast-paced, passionate and insightful love story describing the deeply personal impacts of political struggle.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dragan Matijevic
• Release date: Nov 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310977718

Penelope Williams

As a child, Penny would row ashore to school from the sailing boat she grew up on with her family. This gave her a quirky view on life, encouraged by the stories she heard from blue-water sailors arriving in Falmouth Harbour. Penny grew up with a hunger for distant horizons and foreign shores. Her explorations took her to Europe, Africa, South America, Asia and even Antarctica. But her biggest adventure, which was falling in love with a Croatian magician (Dragan), happened right on her own front door step in England! So far, their story includes building their own woodfired oven for The Artisan Bakery School, moving to a crazy old cottage in Devon, taking an Invisible Man to Singapore, working with children in Sri Lanka and India and kayaking round the islands of Dalmatia. Penny also runs a professional copywriting, editing and translation business. She and Dragan write together to celebrate the magic that happens in real life.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1 - Raúl - October 1999

I am on my knees, the real one and the plastic one, head bent beneath a gauzy rain that floats down like dressings. There is a lot to heal. Thousands of us gather in the dusk at the end of the march. The white sheet banners that have rolled through the streets like rows of slow breakers all day, foam into the square and collapse with their bearers on the ground. Maria y Alejandro, Roberto, Marcos, Miguel - the familiar names.

Crouching low to arrange my altar is convenient because I can’t stand up any more. I’ve walked too far today. The damp pulls my scars and nags my bones. I feel like a beggar building a fire by the road. Sonrisa, my wife, will be mad when she gets here. I swallow some painkillers, dry, and fiddle with the candles and flowers I have brought for my friends.

On October 2nd 1968, our government authorised our army to open fire on us. We were students then, peacefully protesting against things that the government had done, and some they had failed to do. Tanks were sent to herd us in front of the snipers. There was a massacre. They took away the bodies in garbage trucks and buried them in a mass grave. Then they tried to bury the incident. Officially this is the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, celebrating the three great cultures of Mexico City: Aztec, Spanish and Modern. For those of us who have reason to consider this celebration premature, the name that sticks is its old one, Tlatelolco. It’s not one the world knows, but for Mexicans it has the same ignoble ring as Tiananamen Square, or Kent State, or Bloody Monday in Paris, ’68.

Dusk flips into darkness and the flare of pocket lighters makes Tlatelolco look briefly like the stadium for a pop concert. Candles bloom and steady all around me. The smell of melting wax and charring wicks drifts across the crowd. Faces float in the amber light, those too young to have been born at the time, and a few with the permanently pained bewilderment of parents who have survived their children for yet another year. They are old now, in their seventies or eighties. Probably counting the days.

There are so many flowers here it looks like Xochimilco market: The lilies I have brought smell so sweet they catch my throat but the marigolds, the flowers of the dead, are pungent as fresh herbs - the perfumes of lament.

Next to me a livewire in rags is chalking the life-size outlines of three bodies, like they do to remember Hiroshima. Around them he commences a giant garland. His work is quick and professional though he only seems to have white chalk. It looks ghostly in the dark. I pass him a candle for which he thanks me, saying he will light it when the picture is finished. His eyes stray over my shoulder and I turn around to see Sonrisa, taking her coat off and shaking the drizzle from her thick, honey hair. She puts her palm out flat and smiles. It has just stopped raining.

Sonrisa has a proper name but it is so ugly, such a caliper on her personality, that the first time she told me I did not believe her. I nicknamed her Sonrisa - ‘Smile’ -because that’s what she made me do. She is younger than I am, over twenty years, but her velvet presence gloves a good deal of common sense. Being sexy is a hazard for a physiotherapist; we met when I was one of her patients and now the poor girl is married to me. People we meet are torn between gazing at her and speculating over our relationship. Most men think they’d make her a better husband. Maybe they would.

Greeting her with a kiss, I ignore the pointed look she casts at my knees. I frown at the still unlit candle in my hands. She doesn’t like me being here, but she always ends up coming too. She says it’s upsetting, but why wouldn’t it be?

I gulp at the air. I get nightmares whether I join the vigil or not. Remembering, for me, is involuntary - I am attacked by my memories, assailed by them. Since 2nd October 1968 I have not attended another protest march. Despite years of a kind of Mexican ‘dirty war’, of honest people, brave people, intellectuals, people I knew well, all disappearing in mysterious circumstances, people who died for defending their ideals, I have done nothing. Not a banner, not a letter, not a whisper. Nada. My giving a damn about this country ended on that one sad night, la Noche Triste. Since then I have maintained a mutely rabid cynicism, and stayed alive. I’m not proud of myself.

Nearly half of the people in the photograph I’ve brought with me are dead. The other half are somewhere here in the square, most of them. Some grief unites and others it divides - not all of us keep in touch. Thirty years is a long time; some of us have died in our sleep.

The candle flame shivers. There’s no wind, only the sighs of vigil-keepers, variously released like moths against the dusk. Sonrisa starts to hum along with a family behind us, a solemn Spanish hymn. I look around at the banners and posters with the names of dead students, dead relatives, and their photographs blown up beside them. The beehive hairstyles look dated now. The frosty lipstick and the blue eye shadow on Maria del Carmen and Dolores shine brighter than ever this year; their parents must have found a different photo lab to enlarge the prints. Such is the craft of remembrance, of keeping alive a person who should never have died.

My fingers itch for a cigarette. I have been here for half an hour, but the crowd started gathering at three this afternoon. This whole thing makes me more nervous every year, but I have to do it, have to come, whether it’s an organised event or a private moment alone. The first year in hospital they let me light a candle by my bed. Now I bring my candles here for the ghosts on the ground.

Following my gaze, attentive as always, Sonrisa sees the woman smoking at the same time as I do. Theoretically I have given up, but it’s a bit of a joke. Sonrisa springs up to ask her for a cigarette, nodding in my direction. She hates me smoking, says she is afraid that cancer will leave her a widow, but there are times when she relents. Strange how compassion makes us contradict ourselves.

There are twenty people in the photograph, smiling with the heady confidence of youth. My compadres, my fellow demonstrators. Jaime, Miguelito, Rafa, Alfredo, Nacho and Jesus were all at the UNAM – the National Autonomous University of Mexico - in different faculties, studying law and medicine. Concha, with her hair down to her knees, was in her final year of a history degree and Laura was one of the secretaries. They were all killed. The rest either missed that demonstration, or escaped by running away. We don’t see each other now.

Singing washes in and out of the square, old campaign songs, rising and falling amongst the ragged chatter and prayer. The lights coming on in the tower blocks where snipers and students hid, glitter orange and yellow. It makes it even harder to see any stars. From the church on the corner a party of school children file out to stare at the square packed with people and candles and flowers. This has nothing – and everything – to do with them. Until 1996, our schoolbooks omitted any mention of the massacre.

Thrashing the air, a helicopter buzzes overhead. My shoulder blades contract. Whirring blades and lights, it comes so low over the square that the candle flames gutter and the vigil keepers murmur, angrily. A woman jumps up and screams.

Bastard!

She curses at the helicopter until her relatives catch her flailing arms and pull her down.

A man who might be her husband sits down behind her on the ground, pulls her between his knees, so she is wrapped up in his limbs, her back against his chest, his chin on her shoulder, rocking. She is not crying, but her eyes are squeezed shut and her mouth chews dumbly at grief. She was probably here that night, she looks like a survivor. But it’s not her face I recognise, it’s her anger.

Sonrisa’s hand lands lightly on my shoulder.

It’s the TV cameras, she says, casually. Maybe we’ll all be on the news.

I don’t think so. The helicopter will be full of police, no matter what is painted on its door. I shrug her hand off and she turns away, pretending to look at something else. She doesn’t really understand. As far as she’s concerned, what happened is over. It’s not that she thinks we should forget, but that we, especially I, should invest some energy in moving on. Typical nurse. She wanders across to talk to a couple who have brought their children with them. They are singing a clapping song. The idea of bringing little Marta or Luisa here makes me sweat.

A passing journalist pauses to photograph the chalked silhouettes, throws a handful of pesos next to the candle on the ground. It seems a gross gesture but the coins are eclipsed into the pockets of the skinny boy. Perhaps the bodies are not a memorial but a prediction. A suggestion. Better fed than dead? We would have argued about things like that for hours in the old days.

We. The second photograph is inside my shirt. It’s a black and white, deckle-edged print of the old fashioned sort. The high gloss is cracked and the corners are beginning to curl. Snatched at an angle, it shows a girl’s face gazing solemnly past the camera, lips just parted as if she’s about to speak, the sunlight polishing her wide Mayan bones. Her enormous eyes flash black and I know that the second after the shot is taken, their lids close on a kiss. I prop the picture against the lilies. Then tilt my head up to the charred orange sky as salt water slides into my ears.

***

It’s time to go. Sonrisa picks her way back through altars and banners to help me unobtrusively to my feet. I insist on driving home. Sonrisa sits with her feet tucked to the side, almost under the seat, to show me she is not ‘driving’ with me. Maybe I look fierce. I feel sad.

The traffic crawls and we find nothing to say. She struggles but can’t resist a reference to the photograph.

Why is she so important?

She’s not.

I lie, as I have every year since we were married, five years ago.

She’s not important. She just missed the group photo, that’s all.

And what was her name?

She knows, she just wants to make me say it. To see if she can guess any more of the story from the tone of my voice or my hands on the wheel or the tensing of my neck.

Clara. Clara Juárez. You know that.

Her photograph shifts a fraction against my skin. Every year I promise to burn it, and every year I fail. I can tell there’s a row on the way.

CHAPTER 2 - Raúl - May 2000

Marta! You can’t eat raw cookie dough, sweetheart. It will make you sick.

But the cookies don’t make me sick..

"Señor Noé! Por favor.. tell her she can’t!"

Pepa has been with us since Marta was born – a sort of gift from Sonrisa’s well-off family - but she still calls me Señor Noé. It’s Noé as in the guy with the Ark, but my English students call me No Way. Everyone else calls me Raúl. Or papa.

Papa! I want a …

Sweeping a floury Marta down from the kitchen table creates a billow of white that makes her sneeze.

"‘I want, I want’ doesn’t get, señorita. Come on. It’s time for bed. Cookies in the morning."

Marta runs off to look for her sister.

Luisa! Bedtime! Hurry up!

How can you be bossy at six? Then I think of Sonrisa goading me on to the end of the parallel bars. Vamos, Raúl, we haven’t got all day!

Sonrisa and I got married on Marta’s first birthday, much to the relief of Sonrisa’s family, who did not think I was the marrying kind. I’m not. But Sonrisa talked me quietly into it the same way she coaxed me into walking again. I have no other family; my father and my brother died years ago, and my mother ran away when I was born. I tell people she died giving birth.

My brother and I brought ourselves up while my father polished shoes and broke hearts. He met women passing his ‘El Oso’ shoeshine stand in the street, with its blue canvas shade and its big, brown shiny bear – the Oso brand. He offered them roses, invited them to coffee, then dinner, then brought them home. His great attraction was his story, a fabrication that corroborated mine: he was tragically widowed and struggling to bring up two young boys on his own. There are as many softhearted girls willing to rescue men as there are of the ‘rescue me’ sort. My father’s instinct for telling the difference was his only gift. The thing he lied about was love. He could not bear to be needed, not even by us. The brighter women who sensed this left as quickly as they came. We copied my father and called them all ‘darling’, to save remembering their names.

My brother Carlos left home at fifteen to work in a plastics plant making coloured clothes pegs and washing up bowls. He quickly became addicted to the chemicals and we saw less and less of him at home. I don’t think my father missed him, but I did.

I slap flour off my shirt and flick a blob of cookie mixture into the sink. Pepa dodges and tuts. I swore I would never have a family of my own. The scope for damage is so limitless.

Yet here I am with two beautiful daughters and a wife who has changed my life. It’s school tomorrow, for all of us except Sonrisa, who goes to the clinic to bully and cajole the muscles of the miserable into just a little more. Luisa has just started at nursery school and Marta will be moving up next month. They’re growing like vines.

Our apartment is modest but in a good residential area, with trees and a park not far away. We have embraced convention. Or it has embraced us. In one of the two bedrooms Marta and Luisa share a huge double bed, which they call ‘Isla de la Cama’ - Bed Island. We will have to move when they grow, but for the moment they think it is heaven. I ask them which story they would like. Marta starts to wind her fingers into my hair. It’s as long as it was when I was a student, but it’s grey. I wear it tied back with parcel string or rubber bands, but Marta likes to plait it, which drives me crazy. Sometimes I get into the car and lean back on this knobbly extra spine that I have to undo before I can drive to school. Long hair may be cool, but pink plastic bows clamped on the ends are not.

Marta, don’t you dare!

I jiggle my reading glasses down my nose at her and frown. She giggles, unimpressed. Luisa looks up at me seriously.

The world was in complete darkness, I begin, smoothing out the page. Creatures lived sadly, stumbling and tumbling against the trees and rocks. There was no light or warmth and so the crops could not grow.

They snuggle in towards me.

The gods, noticing this problem, gathered together and decided that something must be done. The world needed a sun, and for this a sacrifice must be made.

Luisa does not know what the word sacrifice means, but she knows a bad situation when she sees one. The dark pages are full of frightened eyes and shadowy rocks. I turn over quickly.

The people made a fire and gathered round it. Then the gods commanded the Prince to jump into the fire and be transformed into the sun. But the Prince was a coward and hesitated for a very long time.

Luisa puts her finger on the picture of the Prince in golden robes, quaking at his bony knees.

Tonto! she whispers. He’s silly!

Marta has taught her to say this.

So the Prince’s servant, noticing this, rushed straight into the fire himself! Immediately he was changed into the sun…

A full double page of glorious gold and red sunburst draws an awestruck ‘aaahhhh’ from both my daughters, even though they have seen it at least twenty times before.

… and in the light, all the people could see the Prince, still standing there all alone. He was so ashamed, he ran straight into the fire too and was turned into the moon. And the moon was just as bright as the sun.

We pause to admire another fabulous explosion of silvers and blues.

But now there was so much light at night that the people could not sleep! So one of the gods looked around him and found a rabbit. He picked the rabbit up and threw it so far it landed on the moon, where the light fell softly through its fur. Which is why the moon is not as bright as the sun, and why, if you look carefully, you can see the rabbit there to this day.

I want to see the rabbit!

And I do! I want to see the rabbit!

We look out of the window from the Isla de la Cama, but there is no moon tonight. I promise them that if they go to sleep quickly, the moon will be here tomorrow so we can look for the rabbit again. I kiss them goodnight and go to turn out the lights. They trust me, and their trust makes my hands shake.

***

One of Sonrisa’s most magnetic qualities, beyond her unquestionable beauty, is her capacity for stillness. It’s like that rain-washed peace that comes after a storm, a deep translucence that calms those around her without anyone quite realising what’s going on. Her nature is to lie or curl up on the most comfortable surface available, including the floor, and just be. Disturb her and she simply pours herself away into another space, as soft and fluid as a cat. I have tried to express this to her many times, but I only make her laugh. I don’t think she’s aware of it herself, because it’s too much a part of who she is. She just couldn’t be any other way. You only have to watch her at a party to see what I mean. Children find her first, clinging to her hip or her legs, then the intractable elderly, or the dysfunctional adolescents, or the brink-of-a-breakdown lonely hearts. Sipping at that pool of quiet, absorbing her serenity like some sort of grace.

At work, where I first met her, her presence is a vitalising force, a dynamic that charges her patients with the secret desire to do better than any of the others. She communicates, radiates, God knows how, the inspiration needed to live, to move again. You never catch her resting at the clinic; she hums through her day with a bright persistence that few patients dare resist. It’s nothing to do with what she says; she’s a very bright woman but not prone to intellectualising. Her opinions are mostly kept to herself. It’s barely even a matter of what she does. It’s what she is. She says her job is simply to accompany her patients on their way to recovery – spiritual as well as physical. However limited that recovery may be. She won’t give up, even when they want to, and the results speak for themselves. My wife is the most sought-after physiotherapist in the city’s foremost clinic. Surgeons send her flowers. Patients send her birthday cards. My own privilege is to live with her, and to know that she is not a saint.

Thank God. Seen by the yellow glow of the candles she has lit round our living room, her face has the piquancy of a youth sketched by Michelangelo. Angled cheekbones, damson lips, gilt curls and vast, slanting eyes. Gazing directly at me in a most un-saintly way.

I ought to be practising my flute, she says, without a hint of regret.

Mmmm… maybe I could help you with that?

I lean over the sofa where she’s lying and nudge her music to one side. She’s a gifted flautist, I’m the first to admit, but I know a set up when I see one. And this is a set up of the most delicious order. Our annual row about the vigil and the photograph has lasted precisely one day. Sonrisa is incapable of sulking. As I am incapable of resisting her. Debussy drifts to the floor to join the abandoned flute, and our chances of getting up early melt with the candles.

***

A sprawl of fifteen year olds must only ever be approached via at least three espressos in the school canteen. Which makes me more than a few minutes late for my first lesson. English is my major subject, and sometimes Geography. They asked me to take History but I refused. Teaching only part of the truth is teaching a lie.

The classroom windows are open but we’ve been here now for an hour and the room is a fug of hormones on the boil. I gave the class a Spanish tourist leaflet for Teotihuacàn - the pyramids of the sun and moon - and asked for their English version. They’ve obviously relished the parts about ritual sacrifice, but their translations are dismal. I save the worst till last.

Roberto, this sounds like a trailer for Reservoir Dogs!

A snigger travels round the two back rows.

Sí, Mister No Way,

He’s grinning. I’m about to say more but the bell unplugs the door and they whirl away, gurgling down the corridor to lunch.

As quickly as possible, I head off towards the staff room and its temporary peace. It is usually empty for the first twenty minutes, the staff being as hungry as the kids. Then they filter back to prepare for the afternoon. The Internet terminal is free, which is a miracle. I light up a cigarette from the pack in my pigeonhole - remarkably unborrowed-from since the last time I looked - and go straight to the CENAPRED site. El Centro Nacional para la Prevención de Desastres. They monitor volcanic activity, which is more frequent than you might think. Every day a tremor of some degree is recorded and every year a couple hit the news.

The camera that monitors Popocatépetl, about eighty kilometres away, shows a clear sky. The pollution here over the city veils the blue like a cataract over an eye. From the crater El Popo' flicks its fumarole of white smoke like icing sugar at the sun. Innocent. I watch it every day I can, and it never does the same thing twice. Since no one is around I print out the image in colour. The prints fade too quickly, but my collection reassures me, like prayer flags.

You can’t actually see the volcano from the city centre now; the buildings are too tall and the pollution too dense. You have to go out to Lake Xochimilco to get a clear view. Some years ago, when the volcano first started to wake up again, I went out in a boat, as deep into the waterways and as far from the city as possible. I  lay back in the bottom of the boatman to watch the sky while the boatman poled us along. It was so still I could hear my heart, bumping against the traffic’s distant roar and the regular swish of the pole through the water. Over my head there gradually appeared the faintest violet swathe. I thought it might be cloud, or vapour trail. Intrigued, I sat up to discover the fumarole trailing all the way back to Popocatépetl’s distant crown. It seemed to lead my thoughts right back to the struggling, boiling roots of the earth where my memory did battle every day, fighting off the bad things and trying to remember the good, trying to remember sweetness and youth, trying to remember love before there was pain. Every time I look at it now, it does the same.

The fumarole makes me think about lots of things, takes me to a place that Sonrisa doesn’t know about, that I wouldn’t want to hurt her with; a place and a pain that are private, mine alone. It’s like a secret altar to the past, the man I used to be. That I doubt I will ever be again. So I watch the screen and think about life, love, politics, demonstrations, life, love. Mostly, I think about Clara. Her ghost lives with me, both unreachable and as tangible as the fumarole itself. This trail of vapour rising from the earth gives me sad thoughts, bad thoughts, rosy dreams and sometimes nothing at all. A blank as if the monitoring camera had suddenly been switched off and I can’t remember anything about her. Not her skin, not her laugh, not the smell of her hair, or her face as I saw it last, peering through gun smoke, choking on my name.

CHAPTER 3 - Raúl - 1966

The first woman I ever kiss is my father’s. She is weeping at the kitchen table when I come home in the small hours from working in the bar. I’m fifteen years old but employers don’t ask questions round here. Her mascara has been knuckled down her cheeks and a pile of lipsticked stubs spills from the ashtray. They’re not hers. They were left here by someone who wore vivid pink and swore she would never come back. This woman is not wearing lipstick and can’t be much more than twenty-five. He’s not often that lucky.

Hi, I say, opening the refrigerator door. No answer. She sniffs and draws a long, jagged breath.

"I thought he was so simpático… she looks at me, pleadingly. I thought he meant what he said!"

That he loved her, she means.

"Well, he’s not simpático, and he didn’t mean it."

I hold out a bottle of beer. She looks puzzled, so I take off the lid and set it in front of her.

Drink that. It makes more sense than crying over someone like him.

But…

I know. He’s my father. I owe him my life. But that’s all. He’s okay to watch football with or drink a beer after the game, but he is the single most selfish human being I’ve ever met!

He is still good-looking, my dad. Eyes as sweet and dark as shoe polish, hair he regularly dyes, and a strong, Mixtec profile that makes him look far more interesting than he really is. He smokes himself thin and drinks till he feels witty. He lures them in, sleeps with them till he’s bored, or till they get too close, then tells them he has been in love with someone else all the time. He has struggled, he says, but he can’t help himself and the affair is now, tragically, over. I’ve heard him actually say it: ‘We are star-crossed.’ Or some such heap of shit. Sometimes he even weeps with them, but he never lets them stay. I don’t blame my mother for leaving him, only for not taking me. Above all, I am determined not to be like him, no matter what it takes. I’ll get through school, go to college, get an interesting job, go out and see the world. Just to prove I’m not like him - and not like her either.

The girl is almost feral, a stray. She sniffs the top of the bottle before taking a cautious sip. Her dress is strappy, and her collar bones stand like a coat hanger through her skin. She looks as if she should be wrapped up in blankets and put in a box somewhere warm. I go to the sink and run the tap. There are no dishes and no mess because we never cook here. We make coffee, drink beer, and eat out from street stalls. Finally, warm water comes through and I turn around.

Do you want to wash your face?

I’m shy to ask but I want to see her eyes, glittering through the smears of black. She stands up as obediently as a child, cupping her hands under the tap to rinse her eyes and wiping her face with an unused dishcloth I find in the drawer. We are the same height. Her eyes are pale grey, looking almost blue against her olive skin. I run a finger along the clean line of her cheek. She looks at me gravely, with such trust, that I back away.

You shouldn’t cry, darling, I catch myself and ask her name.

Raquel.

Raquel? Don’t cry. It’s not worth it.

There is a pause while she studies me back and I start to feel out