Imagining Tanya

By David Allan Cates

These early stories by the award-winning novelist, David Allan Cates, take place in Mexico and Central America during the war years of the 1980s. The protagonists are exiled lovers—broken for the most part and trying to make sense of their new world of grief. Far from home and working in a boatyard, on a movie set, a banana freighter, as a veal salesman, medical interpreter, writer, and Sandinista volunteer, they’re forced to re-imagine not only love, peace, suffering, and beauty but the meaning of their very own lives. “The stories in David Allan Cates’s Imagining Tanya, sometimes harrowing, sometimes hilarious, are always moving. Like his novels, they’re the perfect mixture of tough and tender, full of heart, mystery, and wisdom. But the compressed form allows him to focus on the strange, subtle moments that turn a life upside down or right it again, even if his characters don’t always recognize the change when it comes. In these rich pages, a host of American ex-pats wandering in Central America—some innocent, some jaded—all carry with them the potential for an earthly, messy sort of grace, gifted to them by a masterful storyteller.” – Scott Nadelson, author of One of Us and The Next Scott Nadelson “David Allan Cates creates a vivid, unforgettable world of souls lost in Central America in the 1980s. The characters’ heartbreak and displacement are mirrored by the larger conflicts of war all around them, and they seek redemption in the bravery of loving through pain. Imagining Tanya is a bold, gripping, and seductive collection, full of moments of grace.” – Maxim Loskutoff, author of Ruthie Fear and Come West and See

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: May 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781647507541

David Allan Cates

David Allan Cates is the author of five novels, and a collection of poetry, The Mysterious Location of Kyrgyzstan. His novel Hunger In America was a New York Times Notable Book, X Out Of Wonderland and Freeman Walker, both Montana Book Award Honor Books; and Ben Armstrong’s Strange Trip Home and Tom Connor's Gift were both winners of Gold Medal for Best Fiction in the Independent Book Publishers Book Awards.Cates is the winner of the 2010 Montana Arts Council’s Innovative Artist Award . His stories and poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines, and his travel articles in Outside Magazine and the New York Times Sophisticated Traveler.

Book preview

V

Imagining Tanya

That night when he finally came back to the cantina on the beach and marched us away, Philippe didn’t look angry, just tired and sad. And he didn’t say anything either, not until we got to the van and headed up into the hills toward the border. His long face lit oddly by the dash, he babbled in Lebanese about who knows what, and then in French to Hélène, who cried, and then in English about how in Beirut all the officers were mafia trying to control drugs and arms, and how one day they told him to point his gun this way and shoot. Then the next day they told him to point it the other way and shoot.

That’s when he started banging his fists against the wheel, and the dash and the windshield. Hélène made him pull over and I got out as fast as I could.

Nobody cared who we were killing! he screamed while I stumbled down the ditch in the dark with my pack to find a safe place to sleep.

The next morning, I woke up sweating from the heat. My head hurt and my skin hurt, and when I checked myself out, I saw the ants—hundreds of ants crawling on my arms and stomach. I yelled and jumped out of my bag, and then the van door opened and Hélène stepped out. She watched me bouncing around in my underwear, whooping and slapping myself, but all she did was nod back toward the van and put her finger to her lips.

I got control of myself and dressed. And while she heated two cups of coffee on a little gas camping stove she’d set up on the shoulder of the road, I sat down on my pack and examined the ant bites on my arm, twenty-six on one forearm alone.

How about my face? I asked. I was on my way to visit Tanya in Guatemala, and Hélène and Philippe had picked me up hitchhiking the day before.

She lifted her chin and looked down over her nose.

No, she said.

Is he all right?

She shook her head, but not as if to say he wasn’t. More as if she was thinking about something else. Then she stood up, turned her back, and began to brush her hair.

Sometimes, I no endure, she whispered.

I didn’t know what to say to that. She wore a baggy white short-sleeve blouse with Mexican embroidery around the collar. Behind her, the sky was blue and the hills green.

Then she said, This Tanya. You want?

I do, I said, and sipped my coffee. After a year apart from her, I meant to surprise her. And I was close now, only a half day away.

You need? She still had her back to me, brushing her hair.

I laughed. I was flattered by her questions, by her interest, but embarrassed too.

Hélène lowered the hair brush and turned to look at me. Her eyes were yellow-green, and her coppery skin smooth. I need Philippe, she said.

She was maybe five years older than I was, and beautiful, and I had no idea why she was telling me this.

You know why Philippe…last night? She pointed her forefinger at the side of her head and stirred.

Went crazy?

She nodded. Wents crazy! You know?

No, I said.

She leaned back against the van and kept her eyes locked on mine, as if trying to decide if she believed me.

An old school bus wound up the road, the engine popping and snorting and then leveling out as it made the final turn and passed us, leaving a cloud of exhaust.

I ask him if I sleep with you, she said.

I swallowed and stared past her at the hills, and the road winding down between them. My stomach felt light and my knees weak, but I didn’t speak on the off chance that maybe I’d misunderstood. I looked at the ant bites on my arm, and then up at the van, and I thought of Philippe in there. I wondered if this was some kind of test. I wondered if he was listening.

I only wanted a ride, I said.

She laughed suddenly, lifting her hand, and letting it drop to her side again. Four or five thin metal bracelets slid to her elbow and then back down to her wrist. I tell you, she said, not to make you sad. But so you are the only who does not know.

She opened the van and climbed inside, then closed the door behind her. I sat down on my pack in the shade, sweating like a pig, and itching. I’d have hitchhiked out of there, if any car had passed, or another bus, but none did. So I just sat and wondered what Philippe was going to do when he woke—how long I’d have to wait for a ride if he decided to leave me, and what if he decided to kill me? I thought again of the cantina and how stupidly I’d sat drinking beer, enjoying the evening. Every now and then Philippe had said, English, please, for Christopher, but English was harder for Hélène so mainly they stayed in French, and I didn’t mind. We sat at the only table out on the sand, the three of us, and I liked the way their voices and the crashing surf mixed together in the wind. I liked the beer and the string of yellow lights hanging from driftwood sticks jammed into the sand, and I liked how Hélène and Philippe looked at each other and laughed and how they seemed to me to be in love.

So when Philippe suddenly stood up and wandered out onto the dark beach alone, I thought he’d only gone to pee.

Behind me now, in the van, I could hear Hélène and Philippe talking quietly, and in addition to everything else, I suddenly felt lonely. I tried to think how close Tanya really was. I’d come at least three thousand miles in nine days and I looked around at the dinky little road and the big hills and thick green forest, and the idea that I was close seemed relative to the point of meaninglessness, like Venus is close to the sun. I was less than twenty kilometers from the Guatemalan border and half-a-day from Tanya, but I wanted to see her at once. Need? When she left me, Tanya walked off with a vital organ or two, leaving a hollow in my chest that I hadn’t been able to fill. Not that a few nights I hadn’t been tempted to try—I mean, to take advantage of opportunities with other women. But I never could go through with it. And in the morning rather than feel good about myself, loyal and noble and all that crap, I’d feel sad as ever and even more confused. I’d go to work and stare at the machine that filled a gross of little plastic creamers until the gleaming stainless steel moving up and down became a shiny blur—and inside the blur, I’d see her face.

So, sitting on the side of the road I tried it again. I squinted down the grassy bank into the trees until everything got blurry and I almost did—I mean, I started to see her shape and the outline of her face but I couldn’t conjure the features.

I reached into my pack and pulled out the stack of her letters. She’d written every couple of weeks and I’d already read each one probably ten times, but I read them all again. The first three or four were as I remembered, and I basked in their glow. Tanya wrote how much she missed me, and that what we had was so perfect she didn’t know how she was going to live without me.

But after a month or two the lovey-dovey stuff thinned and she was starting to bore me with enthusiastic descriptions of her surroundings, accounts of how the Indians made red dye, or who was related to who next door—and occasionally she’d throw in a Spanish word, as if I knew what it meant.

By the time I read my way to the most recent letters, my mood had grown even worse. And when I got to the ones where she mentioned my friend Jason, who was teaching the Mayan Indians Iroquois dancing, and who seemed to be kind of a know-it-all, my stomach soured and I felt downright foul.

In three or four straight letters she must have reported every single word Jason uttered about local politics or the guerrillas, and I pictured her following him around with a notebook.

Then, in the second-to-last letter, she wrote that she loved what we had but the world was a messed-up place and she loved that, too.

In fact, she went on, the more terrible, the more beautiful and mysterious—and in ways beyond you or me or anybody.

Right—I thought, seeing everything a little more clearly—but not beyond Jason, who’d suspiciously disappeared from her prose.

And if that wasn’t hard enough, Sometimes, she wrote in the last letter, I feel sadder than I’ve ever felt before.

I fingered the pages carefully and made the stack even, and put the letters back in my pack and zipped up the pocket.

Now I was depressed. Me and my big surprise. I tried to remember if before I left, I’d imagined our reunion as happy, or if I just hadn’t bothered imagining it. All I know is at that moment, sitting on my pack, leaning against the van of a man who might get up crazier than he went to bed, who wasn’t a stranger to killing, apparently, and whose beautiful wife asked him if she could sleep with me, a hitchhiker, I wasn’t too sure about anything. Tanya’s letters bothered me. The truth is they’d bothered me the first reading, and on each reading since. But this was the first I admitted it. For me, the defining fact of the past year was the pain of Tanya’s leaving. But in Tanya’s letters, the polite understanding seemed to be that we were apart because of forces bigger than ourselves. Not because she decided to go into the Peace Corps—and never that her decision broke my heart.

Suddenly I hated the letters. If I hadn’t already tucked them safely into my pack, I’d have been tempted to throw them into the jungle. Because if it weren’t for the physical proof of letters, I might have been able to convince myself I’d invented her completely. That she never existed. Certainly, if a guy stood in front of a creamer machine long enough, he could conjure just about anything, not only a pretty face and brown eyes and the feel of a girl’s skin, the smell of her body, but entire conversations that may never have actually taken place.

Just then the van door opened and Philippe stepped out. He was wiry, with thick, curly black hair, and black, deep-set eyes, and he paused when he saw me. I tried to nod casually as he gave me the once over. He wore a white t-shirt and black jeans and he needed a shave. I reminded myself that yesterday I didn’t think he looked like a terrorist.

He turned and disappeared behind the van and I held my breath. I waited. Then I heard his piss hit the gravel, and his voice.

What a weirdly beautiful day! he said.

We finally got rolling about midmorning and Philippe was all smiles—and Hélène, too, her voice breathy and never talking to me but staying in French. Only once in a while she even looked at me, which was all right. It gave me a chance to watch them, to see the tenderness in their eyes again, and to hear the affection in their voices, like in the cantina last night. Only today I was wiser. I hated infidelity and couldn’t imagine how Hélène could claim to need Philippe, and then ask to sleep with me. Or how Philippe could flip out last night, and act so jolly today. Yesterday, when he picked me up, Philippe told me they’d started in Quebec and now were on their way. What that meant, I hadn’t the slightest idea. So, in my confusion, I made something up. It was an old habit. All I had to do was add one fact to any given situation—and everything changed. When I was a kid lying in bed listening to my parents scream at each other, I’d pretend there was a kidnapper standing cowed at the back door. That way, every rotten thing they shouted at each other became something they were really shouting at him. Their fury stopped him in his tracks and kept me safe.

So, sitting in the van this morning, I imagined Hélène had a fatal brain tumor. She was dying, of course, and this trip had become her swan song. She needed Philippe but, in her desperation, to live these last days, she needed even more. And Philippe—poor Philippe, what courage! He had a high, goofy laugh, and his head bobbed agreeably as he drove, and he chattered away in French with Hélène, but down deep, as he contemplated life without her, he was going slowly insane…

We passed through some gorgeous country, green and lush, passed houses made of sticks and mud, or planks painted pastel pink. We passed sweeping terraces planted with who-knows-what, and Indians riding skinny little horses or walking with pots on their heads. Philippe downshifted to second, and then to first while we inched up a mountain shrouded in mist. We drove down the other side, into a deep, wide valley, hot and dusty, passing soldiers walking or hanging out in the shade, and twice we had to stop at roadblocks.

By the time we got to Tanya’s village it was mid-afternoon and the dirt streets were practically deserted. We drove around until we found a kid who knew where Tanya lived and took us there. Philippe parked up the block and said he’d wait, and I walked up to Tanya’s door, just a wooden door in a line of identical wooden doors, each about fifteen feet from the next and leading through a white stucco wall along the sidewalk.

I took a deep breath and knocked. Nobody answered right away and while I stood in the hot sun my ant bites started itching. I looked to the van parked and waiting a half block away and was tempted to walk back and get in. I could ride into Guat City with Hélène and Philippe, and then figure out how to get home. But I’d come this far and knew I needed to see Tanya. If only to keep from losing my mind. She was pretty and smart and once whispered she’d love me forever. Then she left. I needed to know that I didn’t make her up. I needed to know that she was real, that once we’d been together, and that I’d lost her.

I knocked louder. Still no answer and I felt panicked. I looked up and down the dusty street. The whole town was nothing but long white walls lined with closed brown doors. And everything under red-tile roofs. If Tanya wasn’t behind this door, where could she be?

Suddenly I heard somebody on the other side. Footsteps, then a hand on the knob, and then the door opened a crack, just enough to see a man’s white blond hair and red face. The face said, Yeah?

Is Tanya in?

The room was dark behind him and he looked confused.

Tanya, I repeated.

He suddenly laughed. Christopher?

I stepped in and my eyes took a moment to adjust to the dark. Not only that but the smell of incense about knocked me out. Mayan Indian weavings lay on the floor and hung on the walls and I kept expecting to see her. I must have been scanning the room because the next thing Whitey tells me is, She just got back from Leon.

Leon? I was pretty agitated and about half shouting.

Whitey laughed again. From the look on his face, he just woke up. He wore shorts and plastic sandals.

Up north, he said. Ten hours over a gut buster. She’s sleeping. He extended a hand and I reluctantly shook it. I’m Jason, he said.

I didn’t like the way he was grinning.

How do you know who I am? I asked.

He made an innocent face. Pictures. Then he motioned me to the couch, a futon with a calfskin across the back.

What was she doing up there? I asked.

He shook his head. Something about sorghum.

Sorghum?

He shrugged and laughed again. He seemed to get a kick out of me but before I could ask him what’s so funny, we heard a noise down the hallway: footsteps. We both turned and there on the threshold stood Tanya, wearing a t-shirt and shorts, her brown hair so short on the sides I barely recognized her. I didn’t know what to say. My heart pounded in my chest and my legs got weak. I stared.

She started to grin and step toward me, and I almost shouted and ran to her but couldn’t. I felt anger rise from the hollow in my chest and suddenly bloom like a mushroom cloud. I was angry at her for leaving, angry for having come all this way, angry because her eyes shone brightly, happily, and angry because Jason was standing there, too.

She must have noticed something because she stopped in her tracks. Her mouth shook with surprise and caution. So did her voice.

Christopher? was all she said.

What I did was sit down on the futon and fold my hands on my lap. The anger felt hot and heavy in my face and neck. I was afraid to open my mouth. I struggled to compose myself. In my head I was fast-forwarding our lives, through our engagement and marriage, through the years of bliss and the years of misery, to divorce and bitterness until, finally, Tanya and I had become just another old divorced couple, like my parents, very civilized.

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. I thought I’d drop in, I said, looking around the room and nodding with approval.

What? She looked at me as though I must be joking, joy still in her eyes.

When I didn’t smile back, her face twisted. She looked confused.

What’s going on? she asked.

I shook my head. I’ll be leaving in a second. I’ve got a ride out there. I pointed to the street. I looked from her to Jason and then back to her.

Tanya’s face had always