Behold Things Beautiful

By Cora Siré

After twelve years in exile, living and teaching in the safety of Montreal, Alma Alvarez has been persuaded to return to Luscano by her old friend Flaco, who has invited her to give a lecture at his university on the tragic Uruguayan poet Delmira Agustini, a writer with a cult-like following known for her erotic poetry and film noir demise.

Having been arrested herself after the publication of a poem which offended the military regime, Alma knows how influential and dangerous poetry can be. But her mother is dying, and her return to Luscano feels inevitable. She soon discovers that life in Luscano is still rife with secrecy and duplicity. And Flaco turns out to have a hidden agenda as well. As Alma attempts to readapt to a country that, despite its seductive charms, may not have broke free of its brutal past, she catches sight of the man whose actions prompted her exile and begins to follow him in secret.

The imaginary country of Luscano, an amalgam of Uruguay, Argentina and Chile, is vibrantly brought to life with a nod to the region’s literary tradition of magic realism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Signature Editions
• Release date: Feb 22, 2017
• ISBN: 9781927426906

Cora Siré

Cora Siré lives in Montreal. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in anthologies and magazines such as Descant and the Literary Review of Canada. She has been a finalist for the Quebec Writers’ Federation/CBC prize and received honourable mention for the Winston Collins/Descant poetry prize. Drawing on her encounters in realms ranging from Argentina to Vietnam, her work explores themes of exile, identity and the redemptive power of art.

Book preview

Part I

Sometimes, when my beloved one and I dream in silence — a sharp and deep silence like an unusual and mysterious sound lying in ambush — I feel as if his soul and my soul were running far away, through I know not what lands never seen, in a powerful and roaring torrent.

Torrent by Delmira Agustini, Cantos de la mañana (1910)

1

Delmira Agustini leaves her parents’ house at dusk. She walks down her street to the Plaza Internacional, where the drenched tips of cypress trees loom above the buildings, then turns onto Calle Andes, catching the singsong cries, ¡Diario! Diario!, of boys peddling El Día’s evening edition. The street is congested with buggies and motor cars. As she steps over gutters and murky streams to avoid the jostling horses, her umbrella tips scrape the stone facades of houses.

Delmira walks on, wishing she could sink into a trance, the very word, un trance, she evoked during the interview yesterday with the journalist so typically, profoundly ignorant of the cost to one’s soul of writing poetry. She sold him that lie about her poems emerging in a dreamlike state, complete works magically produced by sleight of hand. The journalist, narrow and hesitant as a young fox, took down her words while sitting on her mother’s sofa, the requisite cup of tea cooling. He was too nervous to trust his hand to lift the cup to his lips and when she asked, What is your age? he swallowed hard and said, The same as yours, Poeta, twenty-seven. She felt for him then, bent over his notebook, blushing at her gaze, unaware she’d never read his forthcoming article full of her lies. She could have encouraged him or reached for his hand but there was between them such an abyss, and she was already receding in the torrent of her making.

A light shines over the entrance to 1206 Calle Andes. When Delmira knocks, Enrique Job is there immediately. She shakes out her umbrella and follows him into his rented room off the main hallway. He locks the door and hovers, an unlit cigar in his hand. The wall behind him is covered with photos of the poet, her paintings and sketches. Delmira stands by the mirror and removes her velvet hat, leaving it on a table along with her purse, which contains a hand mirror and a letter addressed to an Argentine publisher, a man who later claims never to have met her.

Enrique Job shows her the tickets he purchased yesterday, two passages to Buenos Aires by boat. Please, Nena, think about it. We could — 

Put them away. She stands by the mirror and unbuttons her dress, letting it glide down her silk slip. Delmira steps out of the dress and sits on the sofa bed to remove her shoes.

Enrique Job lights the cigar. Perhaps he tries one last time to dissuade her. If so, the argument is short. Where is it? she might ask with the poet’s urge to see, to concretize. He removes the nine-millimetre-calibre Smith revolver from a drawer in the nightstand. If she has masterminded this scene, she must have compromised on the modus. Her verses foreshadow a beheading, smothering and, most often, poisoning, a spider’s poison, pill of delirium or divine poison, but the macho horse-trader must have drawn the line. She loosens her hair and lies down on the sofa bed.

Less than half an hour after Delmira Agustini entered her ex-husband’s room, two shots are heard, a pause and two more.

2

Vertigo overcame Alma as she looked down at the sea and the jet’s reflection, a black swallow winging across the Atlantic. Flaco’s grandmother once told her you could predict Luscano’s weather by the flight of the golondrinas. If they were flying high, the forecast was good, but beware when the swallows skimmed low.

The androgynous voice on the intercom reminded passengers that Luscano was the first stop, five minutes only, and then it was on to Montevideo. Alma closed her laptop and gathered her belongings. At this point, her brain zinging from the strong Brazilian coffee she had consumed during the stopover in São Paulo, Alma wondered who would stop her if she went on to Montevideo. But after the jet touched down smoothly and taxied to the terminal, Alma made for the door along with two couples, retirees perhaps, dressed in sensible khaki and sturdy sandals. The other passengers, mainly Brazilians, remained seated. Lucky them, she thought.

After the staircase was rolled to the side of the jet, the attendant opened the door and the passengers in front of her made their way down the stairs. Alma stepped out and grasped the railing, steadying herself against the pull of her briefcase and bag. She had an immediate sense of being observed. She scanned the two-storey bunker, stucco still peeling off the concrete, the same tattered blue-red flags whipping westward. There. On the airport roof was a man with binoculars, brazenly surveying the passengers descending from the plane. She couldn’t tell from this distance if he was wearing a uniform.

Alma hurried to catch up to the blur of khaki ahead of her, walked with the couples across the tarmac and entered the low-ceilinged hall. A conveyer belt curved in and out of openings in the concrete and soon her luggage appeared. She managed to heave the suitcases, weighted with books, onto a cart, which she pushed towards the booth for customs and immigration. A uniformed PFL officer studied her Canadian passport. She scanned his face against memory. An ex-militar might have found work in the Policía Federal de Luscano and he was the right age. He stamped the passport, slid it across the counter along with a card she’d have to submit when leaving the country. It was valid until July 6th, 2004, precisely one year, and more than enough time. Welcome back, he said.

Alma pushed the cart through automatic doors. Before she could fully process the gleam of chrome and glass in the arrivals lounge, the blur of children in motion, the newspaper kiosk plastered with lottery tickets, the colourful Discover Luscano posters on the walls, Flaco appeared. He wrapped his arms around her and she felt the roughness of his tweed jacket through her shirt. "We survived, chica!"

The words surprised. His survival, she was certain, had never been in question. Then Roma was embracing her, lifting her off the tiled flooring. Alma, you’re still so light. A strange observation but that was Roma. Flaco took over the cart and they led her outside, ignoring the PFL guards with machine guns who slouched by the entrance and the bilingual sign, No Carts Beyond This Point, the English surprisingly accurate.

Flaco unlocked the same brick-red Fiat he’d always had, wedged one suitcase into the trunk and the other on the back seat. Roma scrambled to perch on top of the suitcase. It took three tries before the car started, the radio blaring a milonga, strumming guitars to the beats of a bombo. She never lets me down. Flaco smacked the dashboard. "La Vieja’s my only loyal girl," he said with a sideways glance at Alma. In one of his emails, he’d confessed to two ex-wives and three children, none of whom lived with him. As for Roma, Alma didn’t know what her situation was. They had not stayed in touch and Alma assumed some guilt about this. But Roma, reaching over the seat to squeeze Alma’s shoulder, seemed free of rancour. Flaco steered out of the car park, past a grove of wind-worn palmettos, and turned onto the two-lane highway that sloped towards the seaside capital.

A new billboard beckoned, Bienvenido a Luscano, Capital federal de Luscano, Población 1 350 000. So the country had grown despite everything.

Roma and Flaco talked simultaneously, grilling Alma about the trip and how she was, how it felt to come back. She described the trajectory of her flights across the continents and the incredible daybreak over the Amazon, a brown ribbon shimmering through the green vastness scarred by clear-cutting, bald spots visible from the air, while struggling to align these versions of her friends with the ones she’d stored in memory. Roma was stockier, almost owl-like with her black hair cut very short. She wore glasses with round wire frames that enlarged her dark eyes. Flaco had become appropriately professorial, right down to the paunch protruding from his jacket. The two were older of course, Flaco close to forty now, but both bent on resurrecting their student selves, jokey and careless, as if to prove that the twelve years hadn’t changed them, that all was well in Luscano and Alma needn’t fear.

The Fiat jolted over the ruts and potholes of Ruta 6 — the north-south artery from Brazil through Luscano and down into Uruguay — notorious for head-on collisions and overturned trucks. Alma remembered her morbid fascination with the improvised roadside cemeteries, the makeshift crosses, statues of saints and the Virgin among plastic daisies and offerings of cigarettes and oranges. The stretch of fence separating the field from the road was so dilapidated, it didn’t look as if it could keep the group of skittering goats from bursting through. Distant shacks squatted on the fields and there were the tents and trailers of a gypsy encampment. Suddenly the highway branched into four newly paved lanes with tulip-shaped lights springing from a concrete median. Flaco explained that the money for the new autopista had dried up before its completion all the way to the airport.

You’d think, Alma said, they’d have started from the airport to create a good first impression, and immediately regretted her words. She’d resolved not to criticize or compare.

Flaco glanced at her. Ready for tomorrow?

Alma shifted in her seat. I hope so. A truck roared past the Fiat. Then she asked, How’s Hannelore?

Your mother called three times to make sure I’d pick you up. She’s waiting for you with the Bolivian.

The spire of the cathedral appeared in the distance. Then, before she knew it, they were in the city, Flaco tearing down the exit ramp. He drove onto Avenida Reconquista and Alma rolled down her window to smell the saltiness of the sea breeze, humid but cool. They entered a residential suburb of homes with shrubs sagging through iron fencing, acacias and palm trees coated with dust, yellowing grass lying tamped within gated gardens. It had been dry, Flaco explained, and the winter harvest of crops in his family’s finca would be late this year.

They passed a cart pulled by an arthritic horse, the driver stopping to collect empty bottles set out on the curb. Alma turned to look at his creased face under the baseball cap, remembered him well, the man who’d allowed neighbourhood kids to hitch a ride to the beach in his cart. The size of the lots and houses expanded as they approached the sea. Even so, signs of neglect and deterioration were evident in the mildew creeping over the stucco, the rusted fences and cratered sidewalks. There were jalopies of the same vintage as Flaco’s Fiat and sun-bleached bicycles leaning against trees.

On the limit of Barrio Norte, the trees had grown. Their branches formed an archway that filtered the sunlight. And there was the jacaranda, its thick clusters of leaves fluttering high above the roof of her mother’s home on Calle Buenos Aires.

Flaco stopped at the curb and carried her suitcases to the door. When Alma tried to express gratitude that they’d come to pick her up, Roma whacked her on the arm. What else are we going to do on a Sunday morning? Come to the bookstore and we’ll have a proper talk. As she walked through the gate, Alma glimpsed the faces through the window, her mother and Xenia waiting in the living room. Vertigo of a different kind.

The front door opened and there was Xenia in her woven skirt and white blouse. "M’hija!" Alma went to embrace the entirety of her, the compact sturdiness and the scent of sweet grasses Xenia burned in her room to fend off mosquitoes and evil spirits.

In the living room, her mother sat bundled in a shawl, hands grasping the armrests of her chair. Alma stooped and Hannelore touched her cheek, appraising her with eyes still green and canny. Then Alma went back outside for her suitcases and dragged them to her room, returning to drop onto the sofa under the window. Her mother’s hair, short as Roma’s, but completely white, rose in tufts over her gaunt face.

You’re shocked, aren’t you? I’m reduced and it’s awful. But you cannot imagine my joy right now. I’ve always adored Flaco. Now I love him for convincing you to come back. If I were up to it, I’d have Xenia open a bottle of champagne.

No, it’s fine. I’m too exhausted myself.

Xenia returned from the kitchen with two glasses of pomelo juice. Alma drank quickly. Hannelore waved her glass away. Xenia, stop fussing and sit down. Alma, tell us everything.

Alma attempted a coherent summary of the last weeks in Montréal, marking term papers and exams, subletting her apartment, arranging for a replacement during her sabbatical. Her tongue felt thick, her thoughts disordered. The living room seemed emptier, the wallpaper replaced by white paint, fewer paintings on the wall. Where’s the piano?

I sold it after your father died, along with his violin.

Contemplating this house without music, Alma was struck by the force of her father’s absence. At times she’d mourned Luscano as if grieving for someone she’d never see again and that grief had included the living. Her father’s death two years after she’d left had almost seemed predestined.

It wasn’t easy, Hannelore was saying, to sell your father’s violin but his pension from the orchestra was worse than paltry. Then she spoke of her students, mentioning some names Alma might remember. I did well enough the last few years with the tutoring and the translation work. Always paid Xenia on time, didn’t I?

Xenia smoothed her skirt. "Sí, Señora." She glanced at Alma with her perceptive eyes, a dark willing away of that old tension. Alma had always loathed her mother’s impulse to pointedly delineate Xenia’s position in the household as a paid muchacha.

Hannelore went on about her students, how often they and her friends came to visit. No, I’m never lonely, not at all. Eventually her chin dipped and Xenia whispered, She needs to rest. Alma expected her mother to argue, but Hannelore had closed her eyes.

In the kitchen, Xenia prepared some toast and opened a fresh jar of dulce de leche. Then she sat down with Alma at the table. We have to prepare ourselves. The doctor comes often now. Hannelore’s breathing had become difficult. She refused to take steroids anymore. They cranked her up and she couldn’t sleep.

Why didn’t she tell me? Why didn’t you — 

She forbade me to mention it.

The two women had conspired to shield her from the details of Hannelore’s condition during the weekly phone calls. And Alma had willingly participated. Hard truths were inescapable, lying in wait like traps; Alma knew that, although she didn’t know how to prepare herself for her mother’s death. Instead, she asked after Xenia’s family in Todos Santos.

A sense of homecoming then, as she sat at the table eating toast smeared with dulce, the refrigerator whirring in the background and Xenia’s voice, the music of her Andean inflections as she described the struggles of Bolivia’s coca growers and told of her nephews and nieces, their children and grandchildren.

Later, Alma showered, changed and lay down on the narrow bed beneath the window. She felt heavy and stiff. Flying always made her hands and feet swell. She tried to let herself be lulled by the sounds of Xenia moving around in Hannelore’s bedroom next door, hoping to fall into that trance she’d been thinking about on the plane, but her thoughts were on overdrive. The Luscano she’d left behind, with her loved ones — her parents and Xenia, Flaco and Roma — and the landmarks she permitted herself to remember had existed in a time warp. She’d tried to adapt the memory of them to allow for time and fate, sculpting their faces, bodies and countenances, but absence had proven her imagination inadequate. Negating the effects of illness, she’d preserved her mother’s physical markers, the posture and elegant legs, the black hair twisted into a chignon. Flaco’s invitation to lecture had brought her back and, sadly, Hannelore knew it.

Her lecture was tomorrow. Tomorrow! She should have allowed herself more time to recover from the trip, had assumed the one-hour time difference between Luscano and Montréal would limit the jet lag. Instead of reviewing her notes, the in-flight movies had seduced her with the last chance to wallow in North American culture. Adaptation, then The Hours, and coincidentally, both had featured Meryl Streep. Watching her perform, Alma had hoped to absorb some of that steely self-awareness and puritanical bearing, qualities her mother had come closer to mastering than Alma ever had, her last lucid thought before falling asleep.

3

Several blocks northeast of the house on Calle Buenos Aires, a man in white trousers and a tennis sweater observed the sea through a telescope by the window. Patrón Pindalo began most Sundays in the third-floor turret of his house, convinced he learned more of the comings and goings in Luscano’s port from his telescope than from reading El Día’s column on the shipping news. The slow scan of the horizon, the wonder of seeing an enhanced reality in which hidden details were exposed and amplified, focussed him for the morning tennis game he demanded of the pro at the club.

Patrón Pindalo leaned into the high-powered lens. A regatta of sailboats was dispersing from the yacht club’s piers, and further east three fishermen hoisted nets of shellfish onto their boat. A ship trolled in direct line with the sun and the glare prevented him from discerning its name or flag. He looked up from the telescope but could not locate the ship, impressed once again by the power of the lens, one of those gringo gadgets he’d purchased on a trip to the north.

The door opened behind him. The muchacha stood in the doorway holding the tray with his glass of juice, a concoction of orange, carrot and ginger, an anti-aging strategy to counter the effects of seventy-two years of hard work for his family, for Luscano. Patrón Pindalo approached the muchacha and took the glass, swallowing the juice in one long gulp while eyeing the young woman. She was new to the household, quite appealing today, he decided. Other days she struck him as awkward, half asleep, and he had to repeat his orders three times to make sure she understood. Patrón Pindalo returned the glass to the tray. Did you wake the children? She nodded. Get them ready for church. I’ll have Damian drop them off on our way to the club. He’d noticed that his grandchildren were often late for church, school, their music lessons. It was time to teach them manners and discipline. He might have failed as a father but now that Ernesto had abandoned the children, he had a chance to redeem himself as a grandfather.

He returned to his post by the window, noticing dust on the sill. Next time he saw the muchacha he’d tell her to give the room a proper cleaning. Things were going downhill, including his reputation. It was a national embarrassment how badly his children had turned out. At least Celeste was in Miami, beyond the reach of Luscano’s rumour mill, but Ernesto, what had come over him, leaving this house, his wife and children? He should have known enough not to humiliate all of them, his father included, for Luscano to gossip and titter over. Perhaps he’d fallen for the new muchacha. That would be understandable if not acceptable. Discretion, he’d drilled it into Ernesto all of his thirty-nine years, was essential to the Pindalo work ethic. His son refused to learn, hanging on his father’s back, a lifelong burden of guilt.

Patrón Pindalo eyed the lens again and made out the faint silhouette of a cargo ship. Perhaps it was the one he was waiting for. He’d readied the stevedores on his payroll to receive the goods. Engrossed in his ocean spying, he didn’t hear the trunk slam shut in the driveway down below or see the car glide through the front gates. What Patrón Pindalo did see, the Liberian flag and the name, Belleza, on the cargo ship, confirmed the arrival of the shipment of olive oil, figs and cashews in which the rifles and munitions were supposed to be buried.

4

The taxi careened around the Plaza Federal. Alma hung onto the strap above the back-seat window. Outside, the capital unravelled in damp bolts, grainy through the downpour, and much of it familiar. Distributed among the old colonial architecture, the galerías and coffee counters were a few new buildings, not skyscrapers but high for this low-rise city, their facades streaked with rain. Some bore the signage of banks, their entrances guarded by men in khaki uniforms with holsters. At the campus a damp banner hung from columns supporting the stone archway — ¡No a los sindicatos! — the no crossed off, replaced with a handwritten sí. The taxi stopped. Heaving her bag onto her shoulder, Alma opened the door and lunged to the curb. She fumbled with Hannelore’s umbrella as the back wheels of the taxi receded.

Alma cut through the quadrant, past the fountain and empty benches, and made for the oldest structure battened with vines. Ivy curled around the cornerstone set by the founding Franciscans: Anno Domino 1825 Facultad de Filosofía & Humanidades. Inside, a papery odour blended with stale cigarette smoke. She turned down the hallway. Two young men glanced at her as they conversed in low tones, mindful of the lectures underway inside the classrooms.

The double doors to the lecture hall were shut, a sheet of paper taped to the wood. Alma, ven a mi oficina, F., the handwriting, like her own, representative of a generation drilled by teachers adhering to state-sanctioned rules of script. Flaco’s come to my office as imperative as his emails, rightly assuming she’d remember the dean’s office on the second floor overlooking the river. Alma lingered outside the hall. Carvings on the length of each door depicted trees of learning, books substituting for leaves, the ersatz foliage thick and plentiful. Borges came to mind, perhaps because of his long career at the Biblioteca Nacional in Buenos Aires or his poem that celebrated books, secret and visible like the stars, from The Guardian of the Books.

She pushed on one of the doors and it opened to the hall, larger than she’d remembered. Two aisles led through rows of benches towards a raised stage. Alma took the steps to the stage and dropped her bag alongside a tray of bottled water and glasses on a table by the podium. She removed her jacket, draped the pale blue linen over the back of the chair. It was damp and wrinkled, as was her skirt. She tried to smooth the fabric with her hands.

The panelled walls gave off a brittle smell, the incense of prayers, she imagined, intoned by centuries of students fearing failure. Overhead six antiquarian carriage wheels hung from the ceiling, each a spoked circle of light bulbs. She’d once prayed for one of those fixtures to crash onto a mumbling professor’s head. Alma would not drone her audience to sleep. But how many would come?

The door opened and Flaco bounded up the aisle. He kissed her cheek and asked after Hannelore. Alma shook her head. He understood