Festival of Deaths(78)

Just because she felt that something awful was about to happen, didn’t mean it really was.





2


CARMENCITA BOAZ ALSO FELT that something awful was about to happen. She’d been feeling it all day, and it had been making her dizzy. Carmencita always got dizzy when she was frightened. She’d been doing that since she was a child. Guatemala City had not been the calmest place on earth over the last twenty-five years. It had not been as bad as Managua or some of those places in El Salvador, but it hadn’t exactly been St. Petersburg, Florida, either. Carmencita could remember hearing gunfire in the distance when she was very young and being warned against stopping for ice cream in one café or another because some political group nobody had ever heard of the day before yesterday was now threatening to bomb it. There were times when Carmencita thought that getting the United States of America out of Guatemala was the best thing that could happen, but she’d never understood how anybody was going to bring that about by blowing up cafes. That was when she’d decided that all political people were mentally and spiritually ill. She had added spiritually to her definition in spite of the fact that her own spirituality was somewhat suspect. Itzaak thought she was very religious. She let him go on thinking that because he was very religious himself, and she thought he might think less of her if he realized how ambivalent she had always been about Catholicism. Maria had gone to Mass every morning and made her go, too. Now that Maria was dead, Carmencita slept late or stopped at the Greek diner around the corner from work for breakfast and a newspaper or just walked slowly instead of rushing, but she did not use her mornings for church.

Back in Guatemala city, the nuns brought the children to Mass every morning before school. The children knelt in the dark and the cool of the church and looked at the statues cradled in the niches against the walls, the Virgins and the Martyrs, the Patron Saints and Intercessors. To Carmencita, they had always looked as wooden as they really were, as dull as the plaster they were made of. The nuns were real and always holy. The nuns gave up their lives for the sake of other people. The saints stared sightless into the candles poor women had spent the milk money to light at their feet, and did no good at all.

I should have joined one of the Pentecostal churches, Carmencita thought, and almost laughed, out loud, in this temporary office with its walls of thin plasterboard. She could just see herself, jumping and dancing and speaking in tongues. She could see herself doing those things the way she could see herself bungee jumping from the Brooklyn Bridge.

She got up from behind her desk and went into the hall. The cutting room door was open. She could see DeAnna and Lotte and Sarah sitting around inside it, but no sign of the tech man. If this had been New York, Lotte would have been screaming, wanting to know why the tech man hadn’t gotten there first, wanting to know who she had to fire to get the job done the way she wanted it done. Since this tech man belonged to WKMB and not to The Lotte Goldman Show, DeAnna apparently believed she didn’t have the right to shriek or that it wouldn’t do any good.

Carmencita moved off to the door that led directly into Studio C. She opened that and peered into the rafters to see if Itzaak was still at work. The rafters were empty. They echoed hollowly above her head. Carmencita pulled the door closed and went on down the corridor.

She found Itzaak in the room they called the open room, which was nothing but a small space that had been cleared of everything but a few chairs and designated for the use of nothing. It was where the people who didn’t have offices ate their lunches if they didn’t go out or rested for a moment or two when nobody needed their services. It was the only room in the Studio C suite that had been decorated for the season. In one corner stood a dwarf plastic Christmas tree, with a handful of tinsel on it and not much else. In another corner stood a plastic menorah with plastic candles with plastic flames on them, set off by strings of paper-doll cut-out menorahs stuck to the walls behind it. Itzaak was always saying that it didn’t make any sense, the way Hanukkah was celebrated in the United States. Everywhere else in the world, it was a minor holiday. But Carmencita understood.

Itzaak was sitting at a cardboard-topped, fold-up card table, eating soup out of a polystyrene cup. When he saw Carmencita in the doorway, he got immediately to his feet and held out his hands to her.

“Carmencita,” he said, “come in. I would have stopped by and asked if you wanted to eat with me, but I thought you would be working.”

“I was working.” Carmencita kissed him on the tip of the nose, and then pulled up a chair for herself. “I got tired of working. And besides, I was a little nervous about this afternoon.”