Copper Beech

                                 

Aaron Zacharias                                                 

Copper Beech

It still amazed her that she lived here again in her parents’ house.  It had become impossible for her to maintain two homes, especially two very expensive luxury residences.  The magazine she edited was losing readers and revenue and she could barely afford the upkeep and property taxes of her parents’ home much less maintain a condominium in a luxury tower.  She still hadn’t decided whether to put it up for sale.  She easily found a tenant, a wealthy Chinese business magnate who wanted it for his son while he attended university here. He had already offered to purchase, quoting a price that she found extremely tempting.

She did what she could to maintain the house of her teenage years in much the condition that her mother and father had kept it in.  When her mother died ten years ago, followed by her father the following year, Iris Beltran tried twice to put it on the market.  No one wanted it.  It was a large house, three stories with eight bedrooms, beautifully appointed on a quarter acre lot in an exclusive neighbourhood.  Rather small next to the thirty room palaces, it held its grandeur amid the leafy serpentine streets that resembled more a forest than an urban neighbourhood.  Reluctantly and nearly bankrupt, Iris rented out her condominium and moved back home.

Her favourite room was a corner bedroom on the second floor with huge windows on both walls that met at the corner, the result of rather a sloppy renovation that her father  commissioned thirty years ago  It had never been used much in the past except as an occasional guest room.  She never went in there, neither as a schoolgirl  nor when she was married to Esteban.   Now it was the house’s new appointed centre.  A room without shadows.  There were no memories here, no odour of the past. She almost had no personal memory of this room, unlike the rest of the house.  She could not spend more than a minute in her old bedroom, nor the living room, or the dining room, or anywhere else without the pattern in a stain glass window, or the detail of a ceiling molding reminding her of a bad day in school when she was a girl, or a quarrel between her parents, who had frequently and noisily clashed, or of her husband or Mani her stepson.  Through this bright corner room the house could again have for her a vestige of innocence.  She lay back on the cushioned rattan recliner staring listlessly at the white fireplace mantel, adorned with vases, a grandmother clock and decorative plates.  The window was clear, unadorned and uncurtained but for a colourful batik hanging in front, and a pendant teardrop crystal.  In the mornings sunlight would pass through the crystal, throwing broken rainbows all over the room.  In the mornings, while taking her coffee before leaving for work, Iris would transfix on the little bright spectrums that coloured the plain white walls and the cream coloured upholstery.  The batik, two egrets in a tropical swamp with green, blue, orange, yellow, and black tones, she bought many years ago from a local artist who ran her own gallery, just before her marriage to Esteban.  Two years later he gave her the crystal for Christmas and then he died.

Iris sponsored Esteban and his young son Manuel as refugees from Chile, just two years following the coup and the installation of the brutal Pinochet dictatorship.  She coordinated a group of rather well off progressive folk for the support and sponsorship of refugees.  She had an eye, an ear, and sometimes even a heart, for the many political shipwrecks everywhere in Latin America except her native Mexico.   She didn’t want to touch her native country, not in that sense.  She had just turned fifteen, and the day after her quinceanera her brother died, or rather was killed.  It was October 1968 and Mexico was preparing for the Olympics and Raul, a tall and gangly twenty year old was part of a demonstration against government injustices and outrages in La Plaza de Las Tres Culturas where he and hundreds of others like him were gunned down by police.  Her father had a cabinet position with the national government.  Quickly he was removed and made a foreign diplomat and so with hardly enough time to mourn they were in Canada, safely out of the way preparing for Christmas in this beautiful big house where they never spoke about Raul, or Mexico or the massacre and where only English was permitted to be spoken, with the single exception that her father and only her father could still swear in Spanish when he was angry.  

She had followed with interest the Marxist government under Allende to its horrific and untimely fall five years later.  Her conservative parents—her father, a specialist in pre-Columbian antiquities as well as a high ranking diplomat, had held many curatorial and government posts both in Mexico and in Canada—thought her choice of activity a bit odd and treated her activism as an eccentric hobby, even while encouraging her and assisting her with Esteban and his little boy.  They stayed with them in the house, in two of the four bedrooms in the garret.

Esteban had been tortured, his wife disappeared, likely murdered by the state police, and his little boy, Manuel, had been in the care of relatives.  They had made their way first to Venezuela, then to Canada, where Iris met them both at the airport.  Esteban was gaunt, with hollow cheeks and staring, haunted dark eyes.  Little Manuel, thin and subdued, but much a small copy of his father, clung to his hand, and stood by his side as though to protect him from this silent cold country they had just landed in.  Within a year he married Iris, making her a young stepmother to a wary and suspicious five-year-old.  It hadn’t been much of a courtship, neither had there been any indication that they wanted to sleep together.  But one morning while having breakfast outside together under the copper beech Esteban in Spanish asked Iris if she would marry him.  Without thinking it over she replied yes, first in English, then in Spanish.  It wasn’t till years after his death that Iris finally understood how bored and lonely she was sharing this ostentatious house with her parents and of how drawn into the lives of the refugees she often was.  She named this tendency of hers “love” and followed suit with Esteban who was fifteen years her senior, after entertaining puzzling but mild crushes for three of his predecessors. They remained in her father’s house, since Esteban could not find decent paying work—he had been a professor of Psychology in Santiago de Chile—so he eked out a living in Canada as a cab driver.  Unable to cope with his memories of imprisonment and torture, the pressures of driving taxi at night simply ensured that he almost never seemed to get any sleep, and what sleep he had was usually punctured and disrupted by nightmares.  Further tormented by his inability to be for Iris the loving and attentive husband that he thought she deserved, nor the strong and devoted father to whom his son was entitled he eventually hanged himself from the copper beech in the back yard.  It was winter, not long after New Year’s, when Iris' mother discovered his body dangling like a broken branch from one of the naked lower limbs on a cold and rainy morning.  They had been married for just more than a year.  With Esteban, Iris spoke Spanish, and more Spanish and nothing  but Spanish.  For eight long years she had had to conceal and bury her  mother tongue until it lay at the bottom of her mind, forgotten but for its violent incursions into her dreams, often of her dead brother, where they would have long and interminable conversations together in the language of Cervantes.  She never spoke of these dreams to anyone and especially not to her parents.

From where she reclined in the rattan chair Iris could see the copper beech, growing tall, strong and stately in the middle of the back garden, near the equally grand monkey puzzle tree.  For Esteban the monkey puzzle was a reminder of Chile where it is native but he cared not for the copper beech, finding it dark and ill-omened, the “black tree”, el arbol negro, he had called it. The new spring foliage shone maroon, red, purple, bronze and black in the late afternoon sun.  The colour of the leaves reminded her of the skin of Michael who became Iris’ lover within a few months of her husband’s death.  Michael was a young diplomat from a troubled African country.  Iris, using her father’s connections had managed to score with him an interview for her new magazine: “Horizons.”  Michael called her not “Eerees,” the Spanish pronunciation of her first name to which she had long been accustomed, but “I-ris,” the common English style.  This is how he asked for her when he returned her phone call, saying in lightly French-accented but otherwise impeccable Oxbridge English, “Hello, may I please speak to I-ris Beltran?”  With Michael, from the moment of their first meeting and throughout their three interviews Iris chose not to correct him, but to relish this reinvention of her name, and ultimately of herself that had just been granted.  She again forgot her Spanish, never speaking or reading the language of her country, except in dreams, always in dreams, speaking el Castellano not with her brother but with her dead husband.

The affair ended after six months when he was summoned back to his country, his wife and children.  Iris never saw or heard from him again, then, years later learned that he was butchered with most of his family in the genocidal inferno that was suddenly sweeping his nation.  More years passed and Michael’s son, the only family member to have survived, was in Canada on a speaking tour.  Iris secured with him an interview which they conducted in a café where this cultured and polished young man reminded her so keenly of her former lover that she could hardly contain the distress, the ache and the grief that threatened to swallow her alive.  She didn’t dare allude to him that anything had ever transpired between her and his father though she was still sure that he somehow must have figured it out.  After he left she wept.

Michael had mentioned that she was the first white woman he had ever been to bed with.  This designation of race was strange to her, as Iris was Mexican and therefore not considered Caucasian.  But her father was white, of the pure Spanish blood line that remained  untainted in the upper classes but for perhaps  a touch of Aztec or Zapotec ancestry, and her mother was the daughter of immigrant German Mennonites.   With her ash-blonde hair, hazel green eyes and pale complexion, she was assumed to be German, perhaps Dutch or Danish.  Even people from Spain were surprised to hear her speak flawless and fluent Spanish, and more so because her accent was so recognizably Mexican.  Iris was often mystified about this thing called “Race.” She set her glass of white wine on the table and forced herself up from the rattan recliner.  She saw herself in the mirror, an aging woman, unmistakably attractive, squarely built with a finely structured, still pretty face and perfectly proportioned cheekbones.  She wore  her hair short, and always dyed it the same honey-blonde.  

She had not yet changed out of her work clothes: today, a white linen suit partly concealing a silk black T-shirt.  Very smart she looked, for she had always known how to dress.  As an afterthought she sloughed off her white suit jacket and threw it on a chair in the corner.  She hadn’t even thought of changing into something comfortable now that she was home from work.  The suit jacket was pale and slightly dingy against the coloured floral upholstery and the rumpled heap it lay in just barely suggested the kind of slovenliness and disorder that Iris had carefully avoided all her life.  Right now she had to think of dinner.  She no longer employed a cook, as she wanted to save money and the magazine. “Horizons” was headed for trouble.  The Internet had made conventional periodicals increasingly redundant and readership was down everywhere.  She was the editor in chief now and had taken a voluntary salary cut.  

Shortly after Esteban’s death his son adopted “Mani” as his nickname, which Iris teased him mercilessly about by calling him alternately “Cacuhete” which like “Mani” is a Spanish word for “Peanut” which she was also still fond of calling him.  As a child the nickname infuriated him, but he soon grew into it and now introduced himself not as Mauel but as Mani, but with the accent on the first syllable, and therefore sounding rather different than the word for peanut. Mani had done well despite his traumas.  Refusing the elitism of the exclusive boys’ school to which his adoptive grandparents wanted to send him, he opted instead for the district public schools where he did neither well nor poorly academically, excelled in track, and was reasonably popular.  Now he worked as a journeyman plumber.

It was Mani who had befriended a family of Cuban exiles, whose son became his best friend in the last three years of elementary school.  Iris was still involved with the refugee aid committee that had also become a local Latino collective, dominated by exiled Marxist Chileans.  They even had their own radio show on a community station which featured news, events, music and views with a decidedly leftist slant on events in Latin America.  Upon meeting and becoming friends with her stepson’s Cuban friend’s parents Iris thought that it might be a worthy idea to bring them on board as program guests, contributors and commentators.  The collective reacted with shrill outrage.  They carefully elucidated to Iris that she, a wealthy daughter of the Mexican bourgeoisie, could be neither trusted or expected to make wise and politically discerning decisions, and they could not permit such a slap in the face to their beloved Fidel Castro nor to his Glorious Cuban Revolution.  If not exactly drummed out of the Latino collective, Iris was suddenly made to feel less than welcome.  She gradually backed out of the collective, and got her revenge with a feature story she wrote for the magazine.  They retaliated by dedicating air-space on their program to discredit Iris and Horizons. She wrote another article.  They threatened her with litigation.  Iris threatened to counter-sue.  She had written in her rebuttal that “this business of virtuous left wing violence trumping evil right wing violence is just the sort of Marxist-Leninist nonsense that is well past its shelf-life and really ought to be taken off its life support.  The Cuban exiles that I know have been every bit as violated, traumatized, mishandled, mistreated and abused by their own governments as those in Chile under Pinochet or those in Argentina during the Dirty War or those in Uruguay which was rocked by a particularly vicious coup in the same year that Pinochet jack-booted his fascistic hubris all up and down the Andean Cordillera.  For anyone to suggest that Castro and his minions are entitled to ride roughshod over the most fundamental human rights of the Cuban people, while forbidding Amnesty International or any other legitimate Human Rights organizations into the country shows the most puerile and adolescent ideological blindness.  And I won’t bother to mention in this column space the necrophilia surrounding Che Guevara: notwithstanding that most of the young women and closeted homosexuals who wear his pretty face on their T-shirts are just the people he would have taken out and shot as counter-revolutionaries and social degenerates."

These days she didn’t tend to write like that, and really shied away from conflict.  She was fatigued by it all and no longer knew what to believe.  Really, politics bored her, had always bored her, and for her it wasn't a question of right or left but what made her get emotional for the day.  She had been called by someone in the collective a shameless chameleon and she agreed that she was so she changed her magazine's scope to human interest and local community events.  Perhaps easy to love Che for being pretty while hating Pinochet for being ugly?  She could admit now, without shame, that she really was rather shallow.

Mani seemed pleased enough with his stepmother, she supposed.  She couldn’t compare him to having a son from her own body, of her own blood, since this had never happened for Iris, who had never been keen on motherhood.  Perhaps she had always been too selfish, as the collective had charged, and too narcissistic.  She could admit even this now without shame. Keen on motherhood or not, with help from her own parents she had raised Manuel and quite successfully.  He stayed in high school and avoided the ethnic gangs that had been slowly taking control of the schoolyard. She had lauded his choice of trades as she knew that he was not born to be a scholar.  He exuded testosterone in such a way that women were always attracted to him and men admired and respected him.  He was just past twenty when the dictatorship came to an end and Chile was again a nominally democratic state.  With Iris’ encouragement he travelled there for two months to meet his relations.  She offered to join him for support, but Mani insisted that he must do this alone.  This had gone well for him, and grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and a half-sister he had never known with open arms received him.  He had since been back to Chile twice and was planning a future visit with his wife and new son. Since his return he had come to speak nothing but Spanish to his stepmother, who welcomed this gladly.  His Chilean accent had softened slightly and adapted rather well to her upper-class Mexican diction.  Their visits had become for her something very special.

They had set up a patio table and chairs in the garden, near the copper beech.

Sue, Mani’s beautiful young wife was of Korean and Cuban parentage but spoke not a word of Spanish.  Her father had escaped North Korea as an infant with his parents, immigrating to Canada while still a child and her mother, a former official with the Cuban government, had been thrown out of the country for counterrevolutionary activities.  Iris was intrigued and fascinated  that a woman so slender and delicate could have just, days ago, carried to term a nine pound baby.  The miracle of birth never ceased to amaze her, perhaps because this had never happened for her, and never would happen for her.  In a way Iris felt as though she had never really begun to live and every baby she saw she wanted to touch and caress as though to re-enliven her barren and lifeless womb. While they sipped iced pomegranate soda following a light cold dinner she had prepared them Mani’s wife discreetly nursed the baby in the shade of the branch that ended the life of her father-in-law.  She was covered with a maroon embroidered shawl they bought recently in southern Mexico and it nearly matched the dark foliage that nearly caressed the top of her head and the colour of Michael’s skin.  Mani still did not know how his father had died.  He was told about a car crash following one of his night shifts driving cab.  He was barely six when it happened.  Iris wondered if she would ever nerve up the courage to tell him the truth.   A wasp began to hover around the remains of the food.  Unable to shoo it away, Iris and her stepson pulled their chairs back until they sat near mother and nursing child underneath the copper beech.  Iris noted to herself how scarce honeybees were becoming.  Horizons recently had featured an article about bee colony collapse after which she really began to notice the high price of honey. Sue was in a maternal trance as she clung to her newborn and Iris looked in Mani’s eyes and said  to him in Spanish, “ Es muy bonito este arbol debajo de lo que nos sentamos, si?” (“Isn’t this a lovely tree we’re sitting under?”)

Now that she was working only part-time and the weather was nicer Iris was taking long walks in the neighbourhood, where grew an abundance of copper

beeches, even more numerous than the prehistoric looking Chilean monkey-puzzle trees.  They were feature, or signature trees of well-to-do neighbourhoods such as this one where Iris lived in her parents' house.  She had decided to count all the trees in the neighbourhood, first the monkey-puzzles, because they were from Chile, then the copper beeches, to remember Esteban.  After the first fifty of each kind of tree she stopped counting.  She couldn’t go on and on her last outing struggled and fought hard but unsuccessfully to contain her weeping.  She never cried at her husband’s funeral, nor when she saw his body hanging from the tree branch, nor ever.  No one knew this little secret of hers, which Iris Beltran was determined to carry with her to the grave or to the crematorium.  She looked up at the chromatic density of bronze, maroon, crimson, and purple coloured foliage shining like an ancient vase in the evening sun, and hoped that neither her stepson nor his wife had noticed the little formless song that had just escaped through her lips.  Perhaps she was singing to the baby whom suddenly she almost desperately wanted to hold and gently rock next to one of her dry and shrunken breasts.  She closed her eyes, then opened them again and caught the dark burgundy radiance of the leaves incandescent in the dying sun and asked her stepson and his wife in a cheery voice, "Would anyone care for a glass of white wine?"

        While reaching for the white wine in the fridge Iris’ eye caught a carelessly folded square of yellow paper.  She hadn’t recalled putting it there.  Before reaching for the glass she picked it up, unfolded it and saw the blue ink of her own handwriting.  She couldn’t remember when she had scrawled out this inscription on the memorial plaque at La Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Mexico City, during a visit there two years ago, the site of her brother’s murder with hundreds of other protesting students, written by Mexican author Rosario Castellanos:

“Quien?  Quienes?  Nadie.  Al dia siguiente nadie.  La plaza amanecio barrida: los periodicos dieron como noticia principal el estado del tiempo.  Y en la television, en la radio, en el cine, no hubo ningun cambio en el programa.  Ningun anuncio intercalado.  Ni un momento de silencio en el banquete.

(pues, prosiguio el banquete)

(Who?  Who are they?  Nobody.  The next day, no one.  The sun rose over the plaza swept clean; The newspapers offered as the main news of the day the state of the weather, and on television, the radio, the movies, there was not a single change in the programming.  Not even an announcement inserted.  Not even a moment of silence at the banquet.

(well, the banquet must continue.)