THE UNFORGOTTEN: A Novella and Other Stories

Spy

THE UNFORGOTTEN

≈ HOW NICE TO SEE YOU

It’s a time of violence, of upheavals, dispersals. Fires, floods, earthquakes, erupting volcanoes destroy dwellings and lives. People flee from countries they once called home. Throughout the world people die from a shiny new Virus. The death count is over half a million and still counting. Mercedes lives in the middle of New York City, a major epicenter of the disease: hospital tents in the park, helicopters flying above, ambulances wailing below. A Black man is killed by police for having a counterfeit bill. Protests. More killings. People pack up and leave. Many will never to return to the city they’ve celebrated for most of their lives.

Mercedes doesn’t seem to have the Virus but it’s infected her mind. The Virus colors her thoughts Orange. Code Orange.

And rage at ongoing injustice colors her thoughts Red. Blood Red.

Of Tomorrow the Mind Does Not As-Yet Know (Martha Ronk). Not As-Yet. Not so far. The poem, pre-pandemic, assumes a Tomorrow to be known, at least that’s how Mercedes wants to read it. Not As-Yet.

Following her 80th birthday, celebrated shortly before the Virus came to town, a massive flareup of acute pain coursed throughout her body. A microcosmic anticipation of the worldwide flareups to come? Getting out of bed: an effort. Getting dressed: an effort. Getting up from a chair: an effort. Pliers to turn on the stove. Diagnosis: rheumatoid arthritis. Stress may be the cause, the doctor told her. Calm down, the doctor said. Steroids and medication relieved the pain, brought back her strength, but damaged her liver and kidneys. Now her white cell count is low. She’s a high-risk statistic.

Alone in self-imposed quarantine, she writes. She writes letters to judges and officials respectfully asking that immigrants be released from jail and not be deported from the USA where they have made a new home. She writes stories about all kinds of places and people and things, and about her own life. Ever since she was able to put words on paper writing has been her way to survive.

≈

She remembers an early attempt to write as clearly as if she’s right there visiting her grandparents’ farmhouse in Rhode Island. She’s in the small sitting room next to the kitchen, the room where the family gathers. From the bay window she can see fields leading down to the river in the distance. It’s winter because potted geraniums bloom red on the sill, plants that flank outdoor steps in warm weather. There’s a fire in the stone fireplace although she’s not sure about that.

She’s curled in the squishy brown ottoman chair. She hovers a pencil over a pad of blank paper on her lap. Bravo, her uncle’s sleek, brown Dachshund who lost a bite-size chunk of one ear in a dogfight, is lying in front of the fireplace. (Yes, there is a fire.) Usually Mercedes coaxes him onto her lap, but at this moment she’s focused on marking a sheet of paper with dashes and swirls.

Have I written a word? Have I written a word yet? She rushes into the kitchen waving her sheet of paper between her mother’s face and the half-peeled potatoes in the sink. She demands to know if her scribbles are words. No dear, says her mother, barely glancing at her daughter’s efforts.

Some women get erased a little at a time. Some reappear … (Rebecca Solnit)

Decades later it was the mother who was erased a little at a time. She did not reappear. To say that she didn’t recognize her daughter is no longer a metaphor.

She would sit on the edge of her bed, stare out the window at the parking lot of The Institution. How……Nice……To……See……You, she’d slowly annunciate when she became aware that Mercedes had entered the room––her rote response to all who approached. It was not long before the mother was no longer capable of saying How……Nice……To……See……You or any other words. Mercedes wonders if the mother ever asked herself somewhere in the far recesses of her brain, Have I said a Word? Have I said a Word yet?

By the end, when Mercedes would enter the Common Room, she’d lower her eyes, unable to face yet again the cluster of seated bodies, heads lolling in semi-baldness, faces erased of all awareness, only to be confronted by rows of ankles flopped beneath flowered quilted robes, feet slid out of tattered slippers, flaking skin wrinkled over congestions of purple veins like heavily trafficked roads seen from a descending airplane. When she raised her eyes it was she who could hardly recognize her mother.

≈

Mercedes was not erased. She reappeared over the years, slowly came into being in words on a page.

The words were always there within those first scribbles, merely unborn. It wasn’t long after that moment in her grandparents’ back room that they came into life wobbling and tilting on the pages like a newborn colt, spellings approximated, some letters printed backwards.

Lines and lines of words gradually becoming more upright and steady, pages and pages of words all lost, discarded, forgotten.

Still, there is one story Mercedes never, never forgets. A little girl was chopped into teensy, teensy pieces. The tiny bits of her were sprinkled all around the whole wide world. And that is why, the story concludes, hope is everywhere.

She was four or five when she wrote that story, a sickly child prone to accidents. And her father was known for his terrifying, uncontrollable rages. Yet, while dismemberment is a brutal act, she doesn’t remember her story being about violence or pain. Hope. It was about hope. She was writing herself into hope. Hope far and wide. Ubiquitous hope.

She was a navy brat, an only child shuttled from place to place, country to country, language to language. She was looked after by a rotating series of indigenous servants hired by her mother who never could learn a foreign language. The maids would cuddle her and feed her forbidden sweets. She would grow attached only to be wrenched away yet again. Wrenched away? Dismemberment. Her story gets complicated.

≈

Now the onerous process of putting her home and affairs in order, begun before the Virus, has taken on new urgency. She’s overwhelmed. One thing at a time, she tells herself. File cabinets. Three of them. Desk drawers. Closets, seven closets. All packed with who knows what. Bureau drawers. Bookshelves, floor to ceiling in every room. Kitchen cabinets. Why should it be so difficult to get rid of possessions? She’s certainly had practice. A peripatetic childhood and a twenty-year marriage dictating multiple relocations. Divorce. Relationships. Packing, moving; discarding, letting go.

But for the past twenty years she’s been settled in a commodious pre-war apartment in Manhattan. She’s been able to do pretty much anything she wants: take subways to the gym, to meet friends, to outings all over town. Now, isolated by the Virus, she erases future events and appointments from her calendar one by one.

Another erasure is also occurring. Things she used to do without thinking, such as prepare breakfast, now require attention: set timer for coffee, plunge coffee press when timer goes off, put bread in toaster oven. One time she left the oven on until lunchtime. Scared the bejeezus out of her. She worries she’s becoming the Mother. How……Nice……To……See…… You. Not that she sees anyone in quarantine. Except on Face Time and Zoom. Yoga class on Zoom is not the same.

She’s about to renounce her life-long work as a translator. She’s bilingual, but words in both Spanish and English have become recalcitrant, slow to surface. Her dependence on dictionaries and thesauruses has increased. She can’t keep up the pace, meet deadlines.

But she can take all the time she needs to fumble for words to write stories. She writes of hard times that she has lived through, survived, even come out ahead. Resilient, she reminds herself. She’s resilient.

As in the beginning when words were struggling to be born, she now struggles to keep words alive, to keep herself alive, to keep hope alive. She writes to tell herself she can beat the odds on this one too. Neurogenesis! Words will give birth to new connective neurons wobbling in the hippocampus, dentate gyrus, or wherever. She sends out her stories, her letters, her petitions––not only for immigrants but also for prisoners and postal workers, bees and bears, elephants and elms, and many more of the multitude living beings of which she is a part. She scatters teeny bits of hope here and there on a world wide web as in the tale she wrote so very long ago.

≈ THE ZONE

The idea of writing about the past prompts Mercedes to settle in her frayed reading chair with an old leather-bound atlas. She’d purchased it with her twelfth birthday money, against her mother’s objections. "Dear, buy something nice," is what she’d said. She opens the atlas to Central America. Countries are defined in yellow, green, orange, pink, and purple. Panama is purple except for a minuscule orange segment: CANAL ZONE. The printed name splays out into the blue of the ocean, too large for the space it identifies, as when emotion too far exceeds its cause (Elizabeth Bishop). Mercedes’s index finger marks that tiny orange spot: her birthplace.

Panama, August 28, 1939. 6:02 p.m. Panama was teeming with documented US military and undocumented West Indians. Her father, César, a Mexican-born American citizen, was one of the additional personnel the War Department assigned to defend its vulnerable canal. That’s how she came to be born in a military hospital in The Zone, a separate entity within the Canal Zone that the USA had commandeered. It was a mere slither of land, a strip of real estate ten miles wide, not counting the waterway that divided it precisely in half. Nonetheless, this instance of imperialism made her an official US citizen, even if the territory was not in the US itself. To add to the confusion of where exactly she was born, Panama itself was still embroiled in secessionist revolts from Colombia in 1939 and so wasn’t exactly an established nation.

It was (and still is) an in-between place, a heterotopic place, a narrow isthmus connecting Costa Rica and Colombia, a humped strip of land jagging between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Furthermore, its claim to fame is a massive manmade rupture––a thoroughfare that the French engineer Lesseps envisioned as an act of perforation that would prove to the world that we are males.

She was named Mercedes Prudence O’Brian, an awkward assemblage of mismatches signifying her Mexican-Irish father and her New Englander mother, Gertrude.

So then, given an incompatible name, born in a Zone that was not exactly Panama, toted on to Peru, then Cuba (a skinny island that might once have been an isthmus), shipped off to grandparents in the USA, on to Spain (this aged twenty-one of her own volition) only to come limping back to New York years later when jilted by her Barcelona lover . . .

Enrico. That first night with Enrico. No, not the night, the morning is the memory that lingers. Waking alongside him, sun struggling through tattered curtains as he lay sleeping, she didn’t dare touch him, didn’t dare disturb the fragile moment of bliss, the overwhelming longing she mistook for love.

So then, incongruously named, moved from The Zone to Rhode Island to Barcelona, with stops in between, is it any wonder that her personal identity has always been a bit shaky and now that she finds herself a confused and forgetful elder, her sense of who she is and who she may become is disrupted to the core. And is it any wonder that her finger searched for a tiny orange spot in an old atlas impelled by a desire to return to Panama where it all began. Return to the site that is no longer The Zone, to the Gaillard Cut now renamed Culebra, after the mountain ridge it severs. Return to origins erased and renamed. Return to Peru and Cuba and wander streets haunted by ghosts of obliterated monuments?

Yes, self-quarantined in the middle of a pandemic makes actual travel impossible for a long time, perhaps forever given her state of health and the potent new Virus. But she still has words to write herself to way back then.

She will return to places of displacements and erasures, sites analogous to the displacements and erasures happening in her brain. Establish a sense of who she has become and will be against the background of what once was and is no longer. Fanciful symbolism, ersatz determinism. Yet the idea of Panama, a place of which Mercedes has no memory, nags, intrudes when she least expects it, especially now that she fears she may be already be forgetting who she is or ever was.

She’s finding long-forgotten items in the process of decluttering her home so what better time to revisit the places of her past, places of her incongruous self. As old memories are unearthed along with forgotten belongings, the time has come to remember all she can remember, to piece together her incongruity, to write her own story, whatever that story may be. For Anatole Broyard terminal cancer was intoxicating; it gave him an unexpected freedom. All your life you think you have to hold back your craziness, he wrote, but when you’re sick you can let it out in all its garish colors.

She’s filled with an unexpected tingling joy, her mind alert, her body young again.

≈ LUISA THE UNPHOTOGRAPHED

Cross legged on the floor, Mercedes faces the battered, olive-green, military trunk she has avoided opening for the ten years since it first arrived. She slides out a flat envelope: PERU PICTURES. Please, oh God, please God let there be photographs of the maids, she murmurs. (She talks a lot to herself lately.) She knows it’s unlikely even though they were the ones who cared for her, loved her, protected her, and rescued her, throughout her first ten years of life. They parented her. Yes, parented. Back then she wanted to be one hundred percent of them, fully of them. But she knew she was not, never could be. Preciosa mariposa, Mercedes whispers. Precious butterfly. That was what Luisa and all subsequent servants called her back then along with other endearments.

It was a maid who had found baby Mercedes when she was lost. Gertrude had left her lying on a large bed while she went off to another part of the house. When she returned to the bedroom, her baby was nowhere in sight. Her shriek brought the maids running.

Kidnapped! Kidnapped! she cried. Prone to panic as she was, her fears in this instance were not totally unfounded. Foreign, white babies were occasionally abducted, although it was unlikely in The Zone where they lived, its parameters patrolled by US military.

My baby’s gone. Help, my baby’s gone. Kidnapped! Arms fluttering helplessly, Gertrude cried out the few words of Spanish she knew, "Bebé! Ayuda! Help! Ayuda! Bebé."

"Acá! Acá!" one of the servants called out as she spied baby Mercedes off to the side of the big soft bed, caught in the folds of hazy white mosquito netting tucked tight around the mattress. Wiggling and squirming, she had tumbled into this hidden place, a safety net, and gone peacefully to sleep.

The netting story became one of Mercedes’s favorites. As a little girl she’d ask Gertrude to tell it over and over. She couldn’t get enough of hearing how her mother feared losing her. Mommy, you screamed so loud the servants came running, she’d interrupt. She especially liked hearing how she was found enveloped in a web of whiteness, discovered in a cocoon like a squirmy caterpillar about to become a butterfly. That’s what she thought as she grew older and learned of such things. Then that became the part of the story she liked best. Twirling and fluttering her arms, she’d tell Luisa and subsequent maids the tale of her transformation. "Qué preciosa mariposa," they would exclaim. That’s how Mercedes became known among them as a precious butterfly.

As she expected, not a single picture of a servant. Not one. Ninguno. Nada, not even the politically incorrect colonial kind where The Help (Gertrude’s term as