Category: Nonfiction

I barely remember what her cat, Coco, looked like—that’s how quickly he died after I arrived. I know he was white because in the months following his death, I would find white hairs clinging to my clothes after sitting on the living-room couch. Norma kept him in a cardboard box in the laundry room so that he couldn’t try to walk and further injure himself. He smelled like urine for the last week of his life. She woke to that odor one morning. He had used his last bit of strength to tip the box over, drag himself through the kitchen, down the hall, into her room, and under her bed to die. Though she was in mourning and felt guilty for not having taken him to the vet sooner, it only took a few days for her to start talking about replacing him.

Her younger daughter, Laura, was planning to move out, and her older daughter, Florencia, had moved into her own apartment years ago. Norma divorced their father, who died in the early nineties. She would soon be living alone, and I suspect this was part of why she decided—or why her daughters convinced her—to host a foreign-exchange student. She was to be my “host mother” for five months. The term makes it sound like a parasitic relationship. At bottom, it was economic: in exchange for money, she gave me a bed and served me dinner. On the housing form used to match students with families, I marked that I wanted to be “somewhat involved” in my host family’s life, rather than “very involved” or “not at all involved.” To me this meant we would eat together, converse casually, and go about our days separately. We would become minor characters in each other’s lives.

For the month leading up to my departure for Buenos Aires I debated whether I wanted to go at all. I managed to convince everyone, including myself, that my hesitation had nothing to do with the impending breakup with my first boyfriend. He would be away the following semester, and we decided staying together for that long at that distance would be too difficult. During the winter vacation before I was to leave, I made up a slew of perfectly sound reasons to stay, and my real mom and I mulled them over for hours at a time. We wrote long pro-con lists and forgot to change out of our pajamas. She joked that it felt like we were in some kind of absurd play. Clarity, like Godot, would never arrive. After a couple of weeks, bored by my indecision and annoyed with our circular dialogue, I decided to go.

The life Norma and I shared could have constituted the second act of the play. The costumes were the same. We often shuffled around her bright top-floor apartment in our pajamas late into the afternoon. The action would center on Matters of the Heart before branching like blood vessels into other themes, always returning to the same place. At first, my Spanish wasn’t as good as I thought it had been. Being heartbroken in a foreign language felt like doing advanced math with a migraine. She spoke in a fast, muffled twang that even her daughters sometimes struggled to decipher, while the halting train of mumbles into which my English had recently deteriorated was even less comprehensible in Spanish. I hardly registered my sighs; they had become my normal breath. But sighing around a good mother is like sighing into a megaphone. Her ears twitch at the smallest hints of anguish. Norma was especially eager to check in, probably because she had no one left to take care of, and because her daughters seemed to deprive her of any discussion of their private lives. She used these phrases that knocked me out with their poetry. “Te ves caído,” she would say. In my immediate, half-literal translation: You look fallen.

At first, I didn’t see what the big deal was with Buenos Aires. I decided the people were unfriendly and the empanadas were bland. I had to force myself to leave the apartment, descending twenty floors in a harshly lit elevator, where every surface except the floor and door was a mirror. There was a me standing in front of me, a me hovering upside down above, hundreds of me on either side lined up like slouching soldiers. I stared at the ground until stepping into the world.

I brought stories home to Norma. I recounted how an ancient, nearly toothless man in the nearby town of Tigre tried to “buy” my friend, presumably for sex, as we stood on the bank of a river. Norma sat wide-eyed as I told her about the boy who I saw dangle a puppy off the side of a tall building for several seconds before hugging it to his chest, caressing it, comforting it as if he weren’t the one who had just threatened its life. “The things that happen to you!” she would say.

Though a homebody like me, Norma enjoyed having people around, especially her daughters. Every once in a while, Florencia, Laura, and I would sit around the glass dining-room table to work, and Norma would walk in and just stand there, smiling, rubbing her hands, sometimes finding an excuse to talk to us (Did we need more light?) before walking back into the kitchen. While I tried to cobble together enough ungrammatical interpretations of whatever dense piece of Argentine literature my professor had assigned that week, the sisters did real work. Florencia was a human rights lawyer at a major NGO, a teacher, and was studying for a master’s degree in public accounting to boot. When police unlawfully arrested a couple dozen women at a peaceful demonstration on International Women’s Day, Florencia, who had attended the demonstration dressed as a witch, defended several of them in court. Laura was a professor and economist with a socialist streak. Once, as we were sitting down for dinner, she pointed to the television, on which a handsome reporter spoke of economic decline, and said, “Hey, those boludos screwed up the colors on my graph.” While Florencia looked exactly like her mother—tan, short, pursed mouth, chestnut hair—Laura, who was taller, pale and freckled, with coarse black hair, must have inherited all of her father’s features. I wondered if this had anything to do with the fact that Norma didn’t get along with Laura as well as she did with Florencia.

“Every time they leave, every time I see the door close, I die,” Norma confided after they had left one night. Florencia had come to help Laura move the last of her things into her new place. “Kids fly the nest earlier and earlier these days!” Norma said. Laura was twenty-nine and Florencia thirty, and I think if Norma had it her way they would never have left. “When we have children, we introduce infinities into all of our emotional equations,” wrote the essayist Adam Gopnick. “Nothing ever adds up quite the same again.” My first heartbreak must have looked like basic algebra to Norma, compared with the inexplicable calculus of watching her daughter—a dead ringer for her late ex-husband in drag—abandon her childhood home.

Norma sat for hours watching political programs. Of this fixation she once told me: “My friend says I should stop watching these shows because they make me bitter. She suggested I watch telenovelas instead. Imagine that!” At the beginning of each day, Norma would click on the boxy television in the kitchen and say, “Let’s see what death there is today.” Usually she said it gravely, other times matter-of-factly, even casually, an existential shrug. The opinions she voiced in response to these programs had only two settings: absolute agreement and hostile dissent. “Exactly!” she would shout. Or, “What a moron!” Sometimes she would talk at me about national politics, using terms I didn’t know and rattling off names that may as well have been the names of soccer players. “Exactly!” I would answer. “What a moron!”

She hated the president, Macri, and flung insults at him when he flashed onto the screen. Her favorite was “Hijo de padre” (Son of a father), a feminist revision. She was half-jokingly incensed that I went on a date with a guy who voted for Macri. When I came back from our second date, at the end of which he made it his goal to prod my uvula with his tongue, I told her, “He kisses like he votes.” I never heard her laugh so hard. “Muy bien, Willy,” she said.

I once meowed when I saw Macri on the television delivering a speech, knowing detractors did this when he spoke in public. They called him “Macri Gato.” In Argentine prison slang, the “gato” is the person in prison who is second in command to the “boss” and does all of the boss’s bidding. The joke is that Macri is the “gato” for big corporations. Norma cackled, then sighed.

“Oh, Coco. I need a new cat. But I’m not ready yet.”

“When you’re ready, I’ll catch a stray for you,” I said. “What kind do you want?”

“One with yellow fur and green eyes,” she told me.

I have blond hair and green eyes. I was about a month into my stay and already she had begun talking about how much she would miss me when I left. I must have smiled at her skeptically. “No, no! Completely unrelated,” she said. She had nothing to say for the green eyes preference but explained that she preferred lighter fur to darker because it was easier to see the cat’s skin that way, easier to detect wounds.

The extent to which she considered me part of her family became clear one day when she asked me to pick up some pastries for her at the bakery down the street and I forgot. “You did me wrong,” she said, “I’m marking you, like I mark my daughters.” Another ominous poetic phrase. I said I forgot to pick up the pastries, and it’s true, but I think I forgot on purpose. Her complaints about how little my study-abroad program paid her and her requests that I do little favors and chores for her had been growing concurrently. In the beginning, I was happy to replace a lightbulb or run to the store for some oregano, but it became hard not to see these requests as attempts at getting her money’s worth. Her gentle (if witchy) admonition dispelled my suspicion and left me embarrassed for ever having it. I remembered her other motherly dictates. “Put on a coat, I’m cold,” she would tell me as I walked out the door. I was always to move the basket of apples away from the microwave before using it, “To prevent them from maturing too quickly. To keep them sweet, like you.”

She was fascinated by Tinder, which I had been using. “She doesn’t want me to date anyone,” she told me, pointing at Laura who had come to eat dinner with us.

“Like I told you before, it’s not that I don’t want you to date. I just don’t want to help you set up a dating profile. It’s weird for me! Why don’t you just go out to a cultural center to meet people? Or go out dancing.”

“What, you think after my divorce I didn’t hit every dance floor [actually, she said, ‘every danceable place’] in this city?” Norma retorted.

Laura and I laughed, but Norma didn’t understand what was so funny. Having already eaten, she was painting her nails a pearly pink at the kitchen table. It was impossible to eat the beef she had prepared without also tasting the nail polish.

The only photo in her apartment was a black and white portrait of Che Guevara propped on a bookshelf. He smirked through a scraggly beard, reclining in a chair, holding a cigar between his forefinger and thumb. He had no use for the top four buttons of his shirt. This man who cared so deeply was carelessly handsome. I imagined him picking Norma up in an olive jeep, a black beret about to slip off his head, cigar clenched between his teeth, one hand on the wheel and the other around her shoulder. He drove fast but slowed down when she asked him to. Her face was all powdered up, as it was even to go to the supermarket. But tonight was different. He was taking a night off from the revolution to twirl Norma into tomorrow. They were going to hit every danceable place in the city.

Typically, she left the apartment only for groceries or to go to the bank, though every once in a while, she went to the orchestra, usually alone. The performances took place in what used to be the Buenos Aires Central Post Office, now named La ballena azul, the Blue Whale. The auditorium lies several yards off the ground on finlike stilts, and its silver grooved exterior resembles a blue whale’s throat. She would come home late and rave to me about the show, gesticulating wildly like a conductor, exasperated by the impossibility of putting such an experience into words. After emerging from the Blue Whale, she seemed to have a renewed faith in the world. She walked with the light step of someone who never lost faith in the first place. If she paid attention to the TV at all, she was more generous with the newscasters. She hummed as she stirred rice, and I didn’t mind that we wouldn’t eat until midnight.

She left the radio on all day so that the apartment wouldn’t be silent. It didn’t matter what the music was; it was just noise to her. Because she didn’t understand English, the American pop songs that blared unceasingly couldn’t be anything but noise. Normally these songs would be nothing more than noise to me too, but when you’re heartbroken, you’re in thrall to the saccharine. For months, they picked at the scab with their stories so unspecific they weren’t stories at all, and yet they were everyone’s stories. I wanted to gag every singer who could see “it” in your eyes or was thinking about the way you looked that night.

The stereo hunched beneath the stairs to the second floor of the apartment, where I stayed. On my way to my room, I would sometimes lower the volume what I thought to be an undetectable amount, but Norma would turn it back up within minutes. Neither of us had acknowledged these little battles of attrition until one day I was coming down the stairs and she looked at me as she cranked up the volume. “Willy, I need this. I need the radio.” She told me the noise was a proxy for the indistinct chatter of real people. Maybe it even created the illusion that she was throwing a party where the guests were always just about to arrive.

She might have actually thrown parties, but most of her friends lived about a ten-hour drive away in her hometown of San Luis. Not long after college, she left to work as a chemist at the military hospital in Buenos Aires. This was in the late seventies, during the country’s last and most violent dictatorship, the seven-year period when as many as 30,000 Argentinians were “disappeared.” In the same hospital where Norma managed a laboratory, where she mixed chemicals and cleaned beakers and checked items off of lists, people who were considered a threat to the dictatorship were being tortured. They might have been brutalized with electric cattle prods, as so many were back then. Torturers closed the blinds and muffled screaming with loud music.

I wanted to hear more about her past, but she was mostly uninterested in the subject, or else unwilling to share. She would dangle intriguing details only to demur when I followed up, sometimes before I even had the chance. One day I drove with Florencia and Laura to the ritzy suburb of Pilar for their friend’s birthday party. Before we left, I sat with Norma in the kitchen as I waited for the sisters. “I used to live out there… but that’s a part of my history I don’t want to discuss,” she said, cutting herself off as she unfolded and refolded a towel. Another time, when I was on my way to Tigre, she started telling me how her late ex-husband used to take her there on his boat for the weekend. “Those must have been beautiful weekends,” I suggested. I heard the naïveté of my words as soon as they left my mouth.

“Well, yes. And no… What’s this guy saying?” she asked, leaning toward the television. Maybe I had located the limit of “somewhat involved.”

The housing coordinator for my program—a chain smoker with nothing but jokes and gossip to tell—had informed me at the beginning of my stay that Norma was the direct descendent of Justo José de Urquiza, an Argentine general and president of the Argentine Confederation from 1854 to 1860. I pretended to have just noticed that she shared his last name and asked Norma whether he was a relative. She confirmed that her grandma was one of his twenty-three children. He had lots of extramarital affairs but gave all of his illegitimate children, including Norma’s grandma, his last name. Norma seemed to think this was generous of him. I asked more about her family, about whom I knew almost nothing, I who had been using her mother’s old sewing machine as a desk upstairs, pumping the rusted foot pedal as I did my homework. I knew she had seven siblings, but I didn’t know she was the youngest. Five of them had died and the remaining two lived far from the capital. “I’m the lone baby,” she said.

We were a couple of glasses into a bottle of cider she’d bought to celebrate me finishing my final papers, when she said, “How lucky you didn’t fall in love with someone here. Being in love from that distance—no. It’s too hard. You already know.” Sometimes it works out though, I argued. My parents had started dating when my dad was living in Florida and my mom in California, I told her. “But how old were they?” Early thirties. “Ah, well then of course. Your mother was a plane searching for a hanger.” She made a gesture with her hand that was supposed to mimic a plane swaying in the sky, which was when I realized how drunk she was. I laughed and asked if this was an Argentine saying.

“No, I came up with it just now!”

Norma and I had our only real argument during my last week. She had just been bickering with Laura when she came into the living room, where I was reading and listening to music on my computer. She turned on the radio, drowning out my music. I waited until she walked back into the kitchen to say, “How about I play you something,” as I plugged in my computer to the stereo. “No, I need it for the sound,” she told me, agitated. “Right now, it’s just about the sound. And besides, not everyone is going to like your music.”

Earlier that day, my ex-boyfriend had called to ask if I was still in love with him. We had broken up five months prior, though we continued to speak every few weeks, apparently just enough to sustain his attachment but not mine. When I told him as gently as I could that I wasn’t in love with him anymore, he said thinking about me on his worst days had been the only thing keeping him from killing himself. We stopped talking. During the months that followed, I had nightmares about him leaping from the Golden Gate Bridge. In that moment with Norma, I was feeling scared, irritable, unwilling to bear the mark of loving and of being loved.

Rather than walk away or apologize, I shared an obvious and impudent observation: “It’s funny how the same things that keep one person from going crazy are the things that drive other people crazy.” Either she didn’t understand, or she thought I was being overdramatic. She furrowed her brow at me and then walked into the kitchen. I’m marking you, she had said. Later, I apologized and so did she, explaining that she had been fighting with Laura all day. “No pasa nada,” I said, which means “Don’t worry about it,” but translates literally as “Nothing happens,” as if taking forgiveness a step further by erasing consequences altogether. “Well, I love you very much,” she said.

On one of my last nights, Norma asked me to play some music as we prepared for my going-away dinner. Laura was making gnocci with cream sauce in the kitchen and the whole place smelled like butter. That afternoon, a woman from the countryside had delivered two cats to Norma, both of which had yellow fur and green eyes. One hid behind the out-of-tune piano in the living room, and the other curled around my neck, purring. A few friends, both Argentinians and Americans, were on their way. I asked Norma what her favorite song was. “Oh, play Mozart’s ‘Piano Concerto 21’! I cry every time, every time.” The song started to play. Strings sidled up to meet a hesitant piano in midair. Outside, there were no stars, but you could see the lights of the surrounding buildings for miles through the sliding glass doors that let out onto a terrace. The lights glowed at eye level, like stars glimpsed through airplane windows.

She didn’t cry, just stood beside the dining-room table, as she had when her daughters and I were working, and she told me the song reminded her of being in love. The melody had coaxed more out of her than any of my questions had, and opened the door for one more: “How many times have you been in love?” I asked. Four, she said, a number that tells as much and as little as pop song choruses. Then she closed her eyes just as the piano took hold.

It was early March when the news from home first became worrying. “I’m nervous about leaving him when I go to London for a few days,” my mother said on the phone. This wasn’t itself unusual, but when she came back, he was very sick—bad, even for him. When she described the symptoms—fever, delirium, flushed cheeks—I could remember him in that same state when he’d had pneumonia nearly a year ago. Grim hospital wards, old machines, and dying men whose relatives were nowhere to be seen. It was always miserable, how lonely illness was. It always seemed chaotic as well, the edge of life, or death. Bed sheets falling off, nurses running around, people confused as to what they were doing there, why they felt this way.

He had nearly died then; not for the first time, the doctors said that it was incredible he survived, that they “were preparing for the worst.” When people tell you that so many times, and for so many years, it becomes hard to imagine that the worst can ever really happen. I began to feel idiotic for being scared of it, caught up in a strange emotional battle, where feeling scared seemed, in hindsight, like an overreaction, because the threat never fully appeared. The same prognosis was given and then withdrawn again and again and again.

I should have been happy he had lived through another scare, and yet I felt deflated and confused for having gone through so much grief only to be back at the default state of fear. Another few months became something taunting by the end, something weirdly unbearable. Time felt meaningless and tyrannical.

It was happening this time, though, even if it seemed unreal. While my mother was away, a family friend had gone to check on him. She had fed him dinner, looked after him, and made his last days comfortable and kind. Without that, he may have been dead when my mother returned. Instead, he was well enough to say that he didn’t need the hospital, although he did. He was taken in and the diagnoses given: pneumonia and stroke. Oncology did not explain the connection to his cancers. By this stage, he had over seventy tumors on his liver, in the bones of his spine and in his remaining kidney. They had worn him down, despite all his efforts, some seemingly endless reservoir of strength. I could not imagine this cycle of stoicism and resurrection ever failing.

—

The day before he died, I went to see an exhibition of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe at the Grand Palais in Paris with my boyfriend, an Irish writer, Darran. At that time, I was living in Paris, while he was still back home in Ireland, and he’d visit regularly. He had arrived in Paris a few days earlier, and we’d been spending our time in museums and cafes, stretching out our free tickets and expensive espressos, to fill the frozen, bright days.

We went to the Mapplethorpe exhibition in the morning. I was reviewing it for a magazine. I knew my dad was ill, but I didn’t know quite how badly he had deteriorated. I was waiting to find out whether I needed to book flights back, whether it could really be that bad. Death loomed, though; I saw it in everything, everywhere. I tried to concentrate on work—I wanted to get as much finished as I could in case I had to leave Paris—but even my work was all about death, it turned out.

We took the Metro from Montmartre to the Grand Palais, an imposing building surrounded by decorative gardens and busy roads and police marching around. It was eerie and dark inside, like a mausoleum. Women in veils and latex, dying flowers and bowed heads. Fur and lipstick and Irish hair, props and faces lit to seem as blank as sculptures from Ancient Greece. A large white, minimal cross on the wall, next to all the other crucifixes and dying roses. A figure in a blank hood.

There were Polaroids that Mapplethorpe had taken in the 1970s, and then formal black and white portraits of the artist and his friends. He had created a system of iconography that embraced S&M and Catholicism at once, in this pursuit of true beauty. There were classical, sculptural nudes and arrangements of flowers. “I am looking for perfection in form,” he had said. ‘“I do that with portraits. I do it with cocks. I do it with flowers.” He lined up Saints and rent-boys, celebrities and Michelangelo. Striving for transcendence, perfection, and immortality, he had developed an aesthetic, spiritual code in these figures, flowers, and icons. He had reappropriated religious iconography to show how art and sex, for him, were his own religion. He had written a letter to Patti Smith: “I stand naked when I draw. God holds my hand and we sing together.” There was Robert and a skull, Robert in drag. Robert with a cigarette. Robert living with and dying from AIDS.

But his photographs betrayed none of these horrific struggles. Instead, they were an altar to his idols and ideals, beyond good and evil, beauty and ugliness, success and failure. He had used art to transcend, to go beyond struggle, to assert his own ideals in spite of the doubt he must have felt or experienced from other people. By transforming images of death, sex, and himself so that he triumphed, transcendent, by turning what seemed pornographic into a form in the language of Michelangelo, he sought redemption not only from personal, spiritual dilemmas, but from life itself.

His work is about death, I wrote down, sitting on a bench in front of some of his portraits, and reconciling with death. Redemption through art was a way of making peace with death. This central concern explains the sublime atmosphere of the exhibition, even as it feels like a graveyard or shrine. The nudes are so still that they cannot be alive and, of course, frozen in time and a photograph, they are not. The flowers seem to be placed as carefully as funeral arrangements. The little altar, with images of Jesus’ crucifixion, together with the lines and lines of photographs of Mapplethorpe’s friends and idols, complete the reconstruction of a fantastical funeral. He has reconciled with doubt, pain and death; he has created his own meticulously executed send-off.

—

We walked out of the exhibition, out of the darkness. Outside, the pond shone turquoise and shallow, with statues and tourists in the distance, and a froth of fine algae at the bottom. I sat on a chair by the pond and smiled and smiled, and Darran took a picture of me. We were both wearing black; I had a scarf with little skulls on it. I had not picked out these things intentionally.

I was surprised by the brightness of the sun outside, the fresh green of the gardens and trees we walked through, after the soft tones of marble and spot-lit flesh and bone. We walked on to the Jardins des Luxembourg, where the pathways were covered in fine cream gravel. I heard a strange noise as we walked that I couldn’t quite place—a lone cry—and looked around to see what it was. I saw a single black crow, seemingly oblivious to the people straying around, standing still on a spot of the lawn, continuing to make its odd, eerie cry, beak open, toward the sky. “Isn’t that creepy?” I said to Darran, and he nodded and we kept walking. It had seemed so incongruous there, in the green and the sun, as tourists in neutral travel clothes wandered  by.

We had just come back from the exhibition when my mother phoned and told me how bad things were. “He’s not getting better,” she said. I had been so used to being told he was dying that it didn’t seem fully possible. But I booked flights to Scotland for the next day, anyway, in a daze. By the time we got home, he was gone.

—

In the week or so before the funeral, so many flowers were delivered that they took up every surface: lilies, their scent pervading over every other, white roses of various shapes and arrangements. They covered everything: a large dinner table, side tables, sideboards, a dresser, two desks. They arrived in cellophane and paper, with sad notes from friends. So much white, but occasionally some purple, from a thistle, the dark green stalks and long, winding leaves. When all the vases were used up, I found other things, jugs and glasses, to put them in. We bought a couple more vases. I took most of the leaves off the stems, cut them down, arranged them.

As they days went on, I plucked out the dead ones as they wilted, rearranged the bouquets with those flowers missing, merging them together. Cutting stalks, refilling water, bundling all of the cellophane and ribbons into rubbish bins. There was so much clearing up, cutting things away. I thought of Mapplethorpe, the flowers he had photographed. I imagined the actual process that had gone into them. How many flowers had he bought, for a photograph of one? What did all the waste look like, scattered around his studio? What did he do with the leftover flowers, and the flowers he’d finished photographing, when he was done with them? Or did he just discard them, decadently, or busily, efficiently, entirely focused on the art at the end? Why had he not photographed more dead flowers, decaying things, why this stark purity?

I thought of those flowers again—his entwined white tulips and his star-like orchids and his sensual, begging lilies. The dark and light, the harmony and the desire, pushing through. I thought of them over and over, as they flickered in my mind, and somehow, it was consoling.

—

A lot of the flowers had already started to wilt by the time of the funeral, which was later than usual because Easter had made the church’s schedule busy. The service itself was to be in the afternoon, but the cremation, which was to be more private, was in the morning. Most of the family did not go, but I went with my mother and aunt and uncle, in a black car, over the Tay to Dundee. The crematorium was in a part of the city I hadn’t been to before, in a well-kept garden, surrounded by gray stone tenements on the hill.

I went with my mother inside, and we sat near the aisle, on the left. I noticed the coffin placed on the altar, raised up. The priest gave a short service, the words of which passed over me, as I kept looking at the patterns of color on his robes, so I would not look at the coffin.

I held her hand as he sunk beneath the ground to be burned in a chamber. It seemed like some somber magic spell—a clunky disappearing act. So strange, I kept thinking, that there were only moments between his body being there, solid and still, and then gone to ashes. A lever pulled, it sounded like it, a steel door open and then shut, a measured fall, a letting down. A camera shutter, shut. A man, gone. A man down.

—

Over the next few days, the last of the cut flowers died off and were discarded, and the place felt emptier for it. I couldn’t take it all in at once, so I began just drawing. Robert Mapplethorpe took me by the hand, and perhaps my father did too—gave me lilies and roses, morbid confetti.

I tried to capture the flowers before they died, too. I drew each one, recording their gradual wilting, as they fell.

Books

“I love my native air, but it does not love me.”
–Robert Louis Stevenson

The best novel about Miami is Halfway House by Guillermo Rosales.

The non-translated title is Casa de Los Naufragos, a literal translation of which would be “House of the Ship-Wrecked” or “Home for Castaways.” Both of these are good mottos for Miami.

Robert Louis Stevenson imagined his island of castaways in the shape of a skull. The map of his island reveals its shape as well as discloses the location of its gold, the sole reason the castaways are on the island in the first place.

The authors of Miami imagined a city in the shape of gold itself, and to make it come true, they had to disguise the fact that, in building it, they were constantly digging up the skulls of the people who lived here before them.

Rosales obliterates the mirage.

His Miami is smaller than an island: it’s a single house, a hell-hole for the collection of abandoned and vulnerable people marooned there. The house exists solely as a money-making scheme for the owner, who collects revenue from the government for each person he houses. The cheaper he can house the people, the more revenue he pockets. Rosales doesn’t name it as such, but another word for this phenomenon is “development.”

The dramatic tension of the book stems from the possibility of the protagonist William’s escape from the house, but, and this is hardly a spoiler, once he does escape, he discovers that Miami’s cruelty doesn’t confine itself to any one residence. The house is not special in any way. It’s not a prison, an island, or a zoo, but a microcosm of the entire world.

Inside or outside of the house, William is marooned in a city in which he has no value. Both systems, Capitalist and Communist, grind up and spit out people like him. All the rhetoric—revolutionary, democratic, populist, establishment, anti-establishment—is nothing but a come-up for those who wield it, a shroud laid over the bodies of the victims.

It’s almost as if, in writing Halfway House, Rosales realized he’d told the whole truth and there was nothing left to say because he never wrote another book.

Shopping (Is a Pleasure)

The poet Lorenzo García Vega (1926–2012) left Cuba in 1961. He was one of the founders of Origenes and a winner, at age 26, of Cuba’s National Prize for Literature. He arrived in the United States with three doctorates: one in law, one in philosophy, and one in literature, but he couldn’t teach here because he’d been forced to leave his diplomas behind. He went to New York first, but always bounced around, and finally ended up living out the last ten years of his life in Miami, where he worked as a bag boy at a Publix supermarket. I don’t know which Publix. It might have even been a Winn-Dixie. I shop at Publix, though, so when I tell the story, he worked at Publix. It’s important to say, right off the bat, that Lorenzo García Vega, poet and Publix employee, hated Miami. However much you think you hate Miami, trust me, García Vega hated it more. He wouldn’t even call it Miami. He renamed it Albino Beach. To him, it was a wasteland of stupid rich people riding around in golf carts, an observation that, as electric cars become more common, only becomes more true. It also should be noted, however, that Lorenzo García Vega hated every place he ever lived. His hatred had an unimpeachable integrity. I like to think that he chose Miami because he knew he’d hate it. He knew he’d hate the social circles, the stratifications, the neatly defined political and literary cliques. He knew he’d hate the ostentatious wealth, the disgusting level of corruption, the skyscrapers built with blood money. I like to think he also knew that this place needed him. That eventually one day it would rediscover his voice. I like to think that he placed himself here like a virus, a mosquito egg in the warm, stagnant water, and waited for us, and while he waited, he bagged groceries for people who wouldn’t look him in the eye. He bagged groceries for other writers who knew exactly who he was, forcing them to awkwardly duck out of his lane or shop at a supermarket that was farther away just to avoid him. He wanted to die in plain sight. He wanted to be the thorn on the vine as it wilted. His 2005 collection, his last, is called No Mueras sin Laberinto, which I’ve seen translated as Don’t Die Unnoticed, but “laberinto” literally means “labyrinth.” And that’s Miami: a labyrinth where one of the great poets of the 20th century can die in plain sight, and no one notices. One of the abiding myths of the Everglades is that somewhere out there amongst the uninhabitable sawgrass is a pyramid, or a group of pyramids, a secret, holy place obscured by birds and muck, but actually, we live inside the pyramid. The ruin is Miami is the ruin. If you doubt me, just go ahead and turn off your air conditioner for a day, a week, a fortnight. Your house won’t get to a month before the swamp reclaims it. Lizards move in. Green shoots through the marble. Rain falls through the Spanish tile. “Everyone approaching death becomes a ghost,” García Vega said. In other words, transparent. Un-seeable. A wall of glass. A thin, barely opaque bag of plastic.

Nature

The Everglades were on fire, so I climbed onto the roof. I was sixteen. My sister had left for college, and the windows in her room were the kind that cranked open. When I popped out the screens, they became doors. From a ledge, I crawled onto the roof’s orange pattern, each tile tucked under the one above it like a fanned deck of cards. At the apex, I made a bench out of the horizontal line of barrel tiles and sat down to watch the western horizon, bathed in orange and black light. The air smelled wintery, dried up, dehydrated, and despite the far-off flames, it was cold. I felt like a logger tied to the top of a pine tree. On one end, I saw where civilization began, a thin line of water, and on the other, where it ended, a proscenium of smoke. It was easy, caught in the middle, inside the circumstance of height, to mistake myself as the protagonist. Miami is pockmarked with all kinds of apexes and all kinds of fire. All kinds of frames tell us, This is water. If Miami could only be one architectural feature, it would be a balcony. One thing architects never screw up here is the view, and if it’s the view that sells the property, it’s the gazing that makes a Miamian. How we look when we gaze is a feeling we’re constantly trying to replicate even when we’re not gazing. You can tell which parts of Miami are real because no one is asking you to look at them. If you ever get lost in Miami, meaning you’ve forgotten where you are, check which way the balconies are facing and then walk in the opposite direction.