The Invention of Exile by Vanessa Manko Read Free Book Online Page A

was not a saint, he knew, could not be celibate. Long ago he’d come to know this, given in to it. Women of satin skin, women he’d clung to. He thinks of Julia. (It was always Julia.) He tries to picture in his mind the shape of her face. If he can recall even that much, her other features will soon emerge, come into focus—her steely blue eyes, how they sank in slightly, the better to see the curve of her cheekbones; the way her brow sloped gently upward to the honey hair, full and always pulled back from her face, tied into a chignon at the base of her neck. And maybe, if he thinks hard enough, concentrates on the image, he can see her smile forming, which always took a little coaxing, her lips often—and when he remembers her last—pressed together into a pout, one that masked a panic. And if he allows himself even more time, if he is lucky, he can conjure up the sound of her voice: high and sweet, like a chime, and always with that American, northeastern accent of hers, so fast and held tight in her chest as if she never quite drew enough breath when speaking. And, then, when he has the face, her likeness, her very presence quite set in his mind, he continues across the Zócalo, trying to hold her in his mind’s eye. The image, though, is like quicksilver—shattered by the sounds, the night, a second’s onslaught.
    He passes what had once been the Aztec marketplace, the Inquisition’s execution ground. A walk through centuries. His mother had given him her love of walking; how much she loved to walk in the fields of their farm. Even in those insufferably frigid days of Russian winter, when evening came at three in the afternoon. They’d walk to the road that ran along the wheat fields, barren, hard. Or even those closer, less distant winters of New England, winters cracking, breaking into spring—rain or sap on branches, the green and moss of the thaw come in earnest. Could he withstand either of those winters now?
    The Mexicans are a kind people, he has to admit, though he has learned to keep a distance, slide by people, let others slide off him. He’s grown into it, another habit, though if he strips it all back and really looks, his true nature, core, or whatever one wants to call it, longs to embrace the world free of any suspicion or cynicism. And back then, in the first years in Mexico City, he had been such an obvious gringo, standing out so in the cantinas of La Condesa. His pale, white skin with its bluish pallor, like alabaster. His tall, commanding countenance.
    â€œYou come here to get lost?” they asked him that first year. “It’s the right country. The land of the disappeared,
los desaparecidos
. Even so tall a man, you can disappear, you can.” He’d been angry at that. What right had the man to define him? He would not disappear. He would not stay in this godforsaken country.
    â€œMy stay is temporary,” he had told them. “I’m going to America.”
    â€œIs that right? Where are you from?”
    â€œRussia.”
    â€œ
El ruso!
He’s Russian.
Amigos. El ruso
.”
    He did not like that to be known, regretted it as soon as he’d revealed it out of anger. He’d learned the necessity for vigilance—the vigilance of a foreigner. Aware, always—who surrounded him, who might be at the next table over, who lingered too long within a doorway, who asked too many questions. He did not know how else to live in the world when he was so far still from any place he could call, think of as home. Now, a city, a language has gone ahead and seeped in, and, more often than not, he knows he is mistaken for a native Mexican: skin around the eyes dark; face, forearms, and hands a tarnished bronze; black hair graying into a metallic iron.
    And now where is he? He’s come out of an alley, disoriented. He doesn’t know which way to go. It is shocking and in his confusion he begins, instinctually, to move