Thirteen Crucifixions, 92

No one spoke in the car, they might even have been silenced by Derek’s need for contemplation.  The pinprick of light had already grown, not quite to the size of a distant headlight.  He didn’t want it to shrink.  This visualization had become his most important new discovery, and Derek was prepared to lose, to cast off and walk away from everything and everyone who would get in the way.  How could he tell this to Carol?  What might he say to her?  Even she might stand in the way of… he couldn’t name it, this process.  The word “REPENT” flashed from the bumper sticker of the dark green Toyota ahead of him.  It was one word out of many, but the only one he could see.  He was beginning his repentance?  A word, a concept he had never taken seriously.  He wasn’t religious, had never been, but he was in repentance.  Of what had he to repent?  Of what had he to not repent?

            He knew that he was going to start crying, at this worst of possible times.  He had still to turn down Commercial Drive, since they didn’t have much further to go.  He felt like a sugar cube inside a glass of warm water.  What could he say to Carol?  Right now, what could he tell her?  That she please take the wheel so he could bawl his eyes out without killing everyone in a car crash?  He couldn’t, not in front of this mother and child act in the back seat.  And she was pregnant, though not visible, and inwardly he felt strengthened, composed.

            “What do you do for a living Derek?” Maria suddenly asked him.

            He had to ask her to repeat the question, for her English seemed flawless, with a hint of Uxbridge.

            “I am a journalist.”

            “In Nicaragua we used to shoot the journalists.”

            “Viva la revolucion!” Derek said.

            “Ortega and his Sandinistas are destroying our country.”

            “No, the upper classes are merely getting their come-uppance.”

            “It isn’t fair.”

            “Yes it is.  For the campesinos, for the poor workers—“

            “Worthless trash.  While the real people of Nicaragua suffer.”

            “Oh!  Cry me a river you poor little disenfranchized rich girl.”

            “You have no right to talk to me so.”

            “Get used to it Maria.  And welcome to Canada.”

            In bitter silence they concluded the drive to Glen’s, and Derek knew that he would have a mad struggle ahead of him to recapture his vision of the light.  Quarrelling was useless, it was destructive.  He had never felt bad about anything before.  Not just that he’d hurt someone’s feelings, but that he’d grieved the light.  He did not want to grieve the light.  If this meant not even swatting a mosquito, he would risk and suffer malaria or worse, if only not to hurt that new and vital connection he was beginning to experience.

            “So what do you think of Canada, so far? He asked.

            “It’s like England without history.”

            “Come again?”

            “The weather is just as awful, but there’s no history.  It’s dreadful.”

            “There are thousands of years of history here that we almost wiped out when we committed genocide against our aboriginal peoples”, Carol said.

            “Oh, they were probably savages”, Maria said.  “We still have them in Nicaragua.  By their very existence they shame and embarrass the rest of us.”

            “I would hardly call savage the great Mayan and Toltec civilizations”, Derek said.

            “They were further north.  And there is nothing civilized about human sacrifice.”

            “Like what Samosa practised against journalists?”

            “Oh will you stop!” said Maria, bursting into tears.  She was doubled over, sobbing.  “Richard promised me that “I’d have a better life here, a decent life, and freedom—and instead there are all these hostile people who judge and criticize and condemn me.  I do not like this country.  You people are as cold as your awful winters.  And what right have you to speak of my country, where you have never lived.  You don’t know Nicaragua.  You don’t know those horrible communists, how much blood they have shed, how many people they have defrauded.  And the constant warfare, the danger.  I want a better life.  For me.  For my children.  This is why I come here.  Yes, I have money, but it makes me the enemy over there. I want to live where I won’t be hated.  Why are you Canadians so full of hate?”  She was still crying, as her little girl stared at her in passive bewilderment.

            “Maybe you’d like a minute or two before we go in”, Derek said.  It was only now, just before opening the car door, that Derek realized that somehow in a way he couldn’t quite understand this Maria from Nicaragua was going to be a part of his life.  He couldn’t see how, or in what way, but the very thought of this filled him with horror and dread.  He really wanted to wait for everyone to leave the car, then drive off somewhere along the Squamish Highway where he could drive off a cliff.   Recognizing at once his overreaction as folly, he tried again to enter that secret place, but it now felt very distant and quite unobtainable. 

            “Let’s go in now, shall we?” Carol said, opening her door and pressing down the button so as to securely lock it behind her.