Part 74 (2/2)
Happiness
”I watch you,” Father Emilio said to her in September. ”You've been with us over two months, and I still don't understand or know how I can help you.”
”What do you mean? I'm fine.” Larissa was in the kitchen, in the afternoon. She had just finished kneading the dough for pandesal and was taking a tea break. The tea was good in the Philippines. She hadn't been much of a tea drinker before. But here they got their tea from somewhere aromatic. China Oolong? Green? It was soothing and fine.
”You're not fine. You're a gloomy Gus. Look at you.”
Well, who wouldn't be gloomy? In two months she had received one letter from Kai. One! You want to talk about memorize? She memorized that letter. It wasn't hard to do, the letter being so short and all. Sixteen lines. Including the Dear Larissa.
Dear Larissa, I miss you too. I'm not a great letter writer, and I'm sorry about that, but I think about you all the time, think about the good times we had. Billy and I are working from sunrise to sundown. The stables are coming along nice. Almost done, remarkably. You'd like them very much, and the horses are doing well. Billy is an awesome wrangler and all-around great guy. We have big plans, Billy and I. I want to tell you about them when I see you. When will that be? Not soon enough. When are you coming back? I wish you could call me sometime. I love your letters, it's like you're right here with me. Though not quite. Please keep writing. I really look forward to receiving them. Nalini sounds like a great kid. Your friend Che would be happy to know you're keeping an eye on her. I'm going to go now, but I'll write again soon, and I think about you every day.
Love, Kai ”There's nothing you can do,” Larissa said to Father Emilio. ”You can't fix this. You can't fix anything.” Love, Kai? That's what she got? She had written him thirty, forty letters, and this is what came from him? She sat and stared out the window. It was pouring rain, water like a tidal wave was was.h.i.+ng away the hopscotch course, the chalk outlines of momentary joy. The gra.s.s was sodden with standing pools. After the children would wake up from their afternoon nap, the greatest fun of their day would be to run around barefoot in those shallow ponds full of lilies.
”Larissa, look around you,” Father said. ”Sixty girls and boys in our Christ the Redeemer orphanage are growing up without mothers and fathers. Some of them are disabled, some of them are blind, can't walk, have heart valve problems, cleft palates. One died last week from dengue fever. I know she was already sick and small, but still. Despite this, they manage. Nalini, too. They skip rope, play cards, invent games out of rocks, they hide and go seek. They've been transformed by your play rehearsals. You should hear them in their beds, in the morning, in the yard. It's all they talk about. Every day they do this: find cheer despite the seeming misery of it. Why do you sit there and cry over your own sorrows? Even while you bake bread, cook sweet rice pudding, cut up fruit for halo-halo, make costumes for Mary and the Wise Men, I see you lead a joyless existence; why?”
”I don't know how they do what they do,” Larissa replied. ”I don't understand them at all.”
”You should feel a sense of sacred awe toward all mystifying things you don't understand,” said Father Emilio. ”The mystery of life is legion, that's why we continually pray for guidance and comfort.” He nodded coolly. ”You would do better not to view them with the scorn I hear in your voice.”
”There's no scorn, Father. But they're children! I'm hardly going to take an example from them. They don't have to live with what I have to live with. No pain, no regret, nothing.”
”No pain, no regret, really?” Father Emilio said so quietly. He folded his hands in front of him.
”I mean, they're not waking up every day saying they would do anything, anything, to live their life over.”
Father Emilio watched her. ”No, they probably don't do that, though I can a.s.sure you they wake up in the dead of night from all manner of other unimaginable things. But is that what you do?” he asked. ”You wake up every day and say to yourself that you would do anything to live your life over?”
”Yes,” Larissa said to hima”and meant it. All she wanted was to live it over. To get up every morning with joy, see, once there was joy! and run toward her day, toward that one hour when she was in bliss on Albright Circle. One hour a day to feel young, to have love. Father Emilio wanted her to find it? She had found it. And now look.
”Larissa, please. Don't be keeled over like this, choking on your guilt and despair. Learn to live with the choices you made. Would you like Sister Margarita to teach you how to make macapuno?” It was a thick coconut dessert delicacy.
”Not today. Look what's happening to me,” she said. ”Love is vanis.h.i.+ng. Yet it's the only thing left.”
He stood up. ”I must go attend to my other duties,” he said coldly. ”But, Larissa, love is not vanis.h.i.+ng. It's everywhere you look, every single place on this earth. You can't get away from it. And everywhere love is, G.o.d is. And G.o.d is not where love is not. Open your eyes, and cast your glance on something other than yourself. And if you can't do that yet, then look inside your heart. When were you happiest? When did you feel most fulfilled? What place do your memories take you to? Go there, and see if you can find a way to keep yourself.”
After college and before she hooked up permanently with Jared, who was off looking for himself while being a tour guide in the Himalayas, Larissa spent the summer as one of the performers in Great Swamp Revue, a traveling band of improv actors, who rode in one bus from town to town in New Jersey and lower upstate New York, performing in local theaters, up north to Woodstock and west to Allentown. Ron Palais, their road manager, booked thirteen Sat.u.r.day night gigs and seven Sunday matinees. There were eight in their theater group. Evelyn was one of them. So was Ezra.
It was the happiest summer of her life.
They lived in cheap motels and slept on the bus on the way to the next gig, they showered sporadically, read constantly, talked and smoked incessantly, recited tragedy and comedy under the pulsing beat of the Clash and the Ramones. They did not want to be sedated, they felt and saw and heard everything like they were on ecstasy. After each performance they went out drinking, continuing to rehea.r.s.e, to riff off each other, to sing. Did you stand by me? No, not at all. They danced and paired up with unlikely partners. Larissa stopped wearing makeup and a bra. Evelyn performed Job on stage, the whole thing by herself in a soliloquy. Larissa had been blown away, but their manager told Evelyn not to do it anymore. ”People aren't going to get it, Ev,” Ron told the disappointed and incredulous woman. ”The whole suffering thing. n.o.body wants to suffer.” Ezra said he agreed: suffering was for chumps. ”No point in suffering for its own sake. It's self-pitying, self-indulgent, and stupid.” He smoked three cigarettes in the time it took him to utter those few sentences. ”Do you know why we suffer? So that the works of G.o.d can be made manifest in us. That's Job. Ev, can you convey that in a five-minute speech to families on a Sunday afternoon after church?”
Ezra was teasing her, but Evelyn didn't give up; she persisted despite Ron's orders, despite Ezra, who must have been a little bit in love with her also. Who wouldn't be? Larissa herself was a little bit in love with Evelyn, and while Ezra and Larissa were in bed, their eyes became moistened with the image of Evelyn's lovely mouth incanting, I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came.
During this Renaissance Fair summer of her life, when Larissa's hair was cropped like a boy's and her face plain of makeup, she had joy every day and knew it, was cramped and didn't care, had few comforts, no money, was always broke, and didn't care. She lived not understanding why she was living and even less why eventually she had to die, and didn't care. Every night she got up on stage trying to imitate the inimitable Evelyn reciting long-suffering Job, with her own fruitful efforts from Romeo and Juliet, and Prospero's speeches. We are such stuff as dreams are made ona Larissa knew it was fleeting even then, but fully believed it would come again, in another form, to be happy like that, so alive! packed up on a bus, all her life's belongings in a duffel bag under her feet, hung over from the night before, rootlessly drifting from town to town, singing karaoke in the smoke-filled bars. Did you stand by me? No, not at all.
And almost everything but the happy did come again.
”I don't know what you think of me, Father. You must judge me. How can you not?” During a lull in the afternoon, after lunch, before vespers, when the children were having a short siesta, she and Father Emilio, with the tiny shadow that was Nalini, were taking a short walk in the monastery gardens before it downpoured again.
”I have nothing but profound sympathy for you,” Father Emilio said. ”Do you judge yourself?”
”Oddly, only since I've been here.”
”That seems odd to you?” Father Emilio shrugged.
”A little bit. After all,” said Larissa, ”this place is completely removed from anything I've ever known. I can't figure out what's stirring my conscience. Nothing in it is familiar, nothing rouses the senses or the memories.”
”Nothing?”
Larissa chuckled. ”No, and I must admit I'm not a fan of the vinegar and the pickled fish. Though I enjoy the coconut.”
”But the thick liver sauce poured over the crispy suckling pig, that doesn't move your conscience?” Father Emilio smiled a little.
”No.” Larissa chewed her lip. ”You knowaI really didn't mean for it to happen. This thing with Kai.”
”Didn't you?”
”My pockets weren't empty and the devil wasn't dancing in them. I had a good life.”
”Yes. Che was quite envious of you, or so she would tell me. I kept telling her to struggle is okay, too.”
Larissa shook her head. ”I've had both. Believe me, a comfortable life is better.”
”That's what Che told me too, and she hadn't had both.”
”She was still right.”
”Was she? Your life got easya”and emptya”and your soul started looking for a way out. The question you have to ask yourself is why? Larissa, you had love in every room in your house. Why wasn't that love enough?”
Larissa frowned. She didn't like the formulation, the premise, the implied conclusion. ”That's not true,” she said. ”It was enough. It had nothing to do with that.”
”Didn't it? What then?”
”I told you, I just wasn't vigilant enough.”
”True, vigilance is essential in virtue.”
”It's not about virtue,” Larissa frowned. ”It's about what feels right in your heart. But in the beginning, I wasn't guarded enough. I should've been more careful. I should've never pretended to myself even for a moment it was nothing. Now it's too late, but that's how it happened.”
Father Emilio nodded. ”That's how it always happens. I kept telling Che to be careful with Lorenzo, to guard herself against his destructive pa.s.sions. All she wanted was not to struggle. I said to her, but Che, when you're struggling, conflicted, in a panic, you're always calling on G.o.d, praying to him, begging him for help, and few things please our Lord more than to give solace to the souls that cry for him.”
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