The Secret Book Club

Mariana has a split-screen consciousness. She is aware of juxtapositions. Like now. At the cultural center in downtown Asunción, the assistant librarian is mesmerized by the sound of her own heels clacking on the red tiles of the courtyard as she goes in search of the enigmatic teacher of English. The courtyard is open to the elements. In the stifling December afternoon, the sun is nobody’s daddy. The assistant librarian is uneasily aware, as she walks, that out in front of the center an impoverished woman with a blank expression is selling sprigs of flor de coco for the Christmas holidays. People put the sprigs in their homes for the fragrance. The woman’s thoughts are shriveled things, coming back and back to her like the undead. Heel click.

It’s not really a bad habit, just something Mariana does. Anyway it’s not something she could change.

She finds the teacher drinking mineral water in the student cafeteria, alone at a round table on which sits a paperback copy of Borges’ El Aleph, the pages swollen with humid reading. John Savage does not look up from the textbook on which he is concentrating until she signals with a cough that she is there. He closes the book, marking his page with a finger.

“Yes?”

“The director asked me to give you this. It came to her office.”

She hands him an envelope, an old-school letter that came to Paraguay on an airplane, with a Minneapolis postmark. She pictures Minnesota tundra, the gliding shadows of white owls. He takes the letter, lays it on the Borges paperback. She wants to tell him about the secret book club. He of all people, she thinks, would approve of the concept. But he is not a person who invites a confidence.

“Was there something else?” he wants to know.

She nods toward the Borges. “I’ve read it three times. Every story in the book.”

Does he consider this an assault on his privacy? Maybe. But he nods slowly, a gesture anything but neutral, a gesture into which Mariana reads a host of meanings, some of them in conflict with each other.

John Savage is not an old man. He must be forty. But he is antique. An anachronism. Does not use a cell phone. Does not answer emails from the staff, or from the director, though he must read them. Rents a room on the second floor of a rose-colored colonial house on Pitiantuta. Wears white shirts and takes his meals at the German restaurant, now run by a Chilean with a clearly indigenous face. Savage is overweight, but not grotesquely. The heat gives his a face a red sheen. His hair is lankly blonde and a little long. His gray eyes are fire or ice, depending on the moment, depending on factors of which Mariana is completely ignorant.

He is impatient for her to leave.

“There was something I wanted to mention,” she says.

She loses her nerve. He goes back to the textbook.

Back in the library, she hides the turmoil into which the brief encounter with John Savage has thrown her. Two teenagers from one of the private high schools approach the desk wanting to use a computer. The internet is a health risk, you will suffer irremediable harm, she wants to warn them but doesn’t. She is delighted, ten minutes later, when one of the club members comes into the library and makes a beeline for her desk.

The woman is not somebody you would imagine to be a member of Mariana Paz’s secret book club. She’s a professional. A lawyer, perhaps. Her nails are perfect. So is the sheath-like yellow dress, and her poise.

“I’m beginning to read the Mexicans,” she tells the assistant librarian. “Any suggestions?”

“Pedro Páramo,” says Mariana. “That is, if you don’t already know the book.”

The woman’s smile is so warm and open, checking out the book, that Mariana is half- tempted to tell her that she is a member of the assistant librarian’s club. This is her dilemma. There is nothing to bring the members together. Except for the books, of course. She herself lacks something – an internal strength, a confidence – that would allow her to convoke a meeting of the club she has called into being by force of imagination.

She lives with her father. Her mother died when Mariana was seven. That evening they eat a light dinner and sit for half an hour together in the back patio, where Hernan Paz smokes a Cuban cigar being careful not to blow the smoke in her direction. In a bitter orange tree, a squawky bird. Hernan wishes his only daughter would marry. He feels he has failed her, although he is not quite sure how, raising her as a single father. He cannot help trying to make up for what he perceives to have been his parental shortcomings.

Hernan works for a Brazilian soybean company. He purchases soybeans on their behalf. There is little about soybeans he does not know. They live a comfortable life in a comfortable house in one of the quieter suburbs. Six months ago he bought his daughter a new car.

“I know you don’t much care for the computer,” he says in his quiet voice.

She imagines him as a bear, a plodding creature with a labyrinthian consciousness, cursed with melancholy. She knows he is about to suggest, again, that she experiment with one of the online dating services.

She is thinking about John Savage. He speaks faultless Spanish. The tenses are correct, as are the prepositions. But in his mouth it is a strangely colorless tongue. You would not think he was an American, from the sound of him, but you would not be able to say he was from Spain, say, or Colombia. She knows about sublimation.

The next morning as Mariana goes up the steps into the cultural center the woman selling flor do coco begins to tell her a tale of woe. Her shoulders have sunk. She speaks in Guaraní, which is a language of beauty and despair. Mariana has no doubt every detail of the woman’s story is true. Her poverty is narcotic. Hopelessness clouds the passion in her black eyes. Mariana fumbles through her purse for change that will change nothing.

Settled at the circulation desk – this is where she is happiest, especially when someone selects a book that matters – she hears a rumor that John Savage is quitting. The rumor agitates her, and when the lunch hour arrives she trudges in the wet heat to the Bavaria. It is an old-fashioned restaurant. Patrons eat at clunky wooden tables in an interior courtyard, pole fans oscillating to move the stagnant air. The floor is old brown brick. The palm trees outgrew their pots years ago, though there is a precarious quality to the way the birds light in their branches, as though the weather is likely to change at any moment. The waiters are stoic men in black pants and white shirts who have family responsibilities, licit and illicit, that weigh them down. The sound of cutlery and clinked glasses is like an overheard conversation.

John Savage is lunching at a table alone. In front of him, propped on a bread plate, is a collection of stories by Roberto Bolaño. He is midway through the book, and she cannot help wondering which story he is reading now. At his foot, a tawny cat appears to know him. It is unlike Mariana to be here, to come up with an excuse to sit at his table. She is conscious of a sensation of hurtling speed.

“I hope I did not bring you bad news.”

The comment puzzles him. He signals to his waiter, a man with a glass eye and a towel over his shoulder, to bring her a plate. The waiter cuts a generous chunk of Savage’s schnitzel, adding an equally hefty dollop of German potato salad, and serves her. He pours beer from the American’s bottle into a glass he has placed in front of her. All three of them watch it foam.

“The letter,” Mariana says with some hesitation. “Yesterday. From Minneapolis. At the center they are saying you will quit.”

Savage shrugs. The gesture is not unkind, and she wishes again that she could tell him about the book club. Presently there are eleven members. She lost a reader in the spring, a retired engineer from the waterworks. He died from complications following a stroke. She wore a sober dark dress to the funeral Mass, sitting in the back row, saying nothing to no one. The newest member is an outlier. A businessman with a Rolex watch and bristling impatience. But he reads, he reads the good stuff, he keeps coming back and checking out book after good book, and Mariana’s sense of fairness, a sense of inclusion, obliges her to welcome him. If only they knew about each other, about the club.

“What do you think of the schnitzel?” John Savage asks her.

She has yet to taste it. She does now and tells him it’s good and says Minneapolis must be awfully cold, this time of year.

“I may stay here,” he says. “I like this country.”

Few foreigners come to Paraguay. Fewer still say they like it. The admission makes John Savage a novelty, and a person of interest.

“If I were from another country,” says Mariana.

She takes a slow swig of cold beer. Here it is. Euphoria. One of the experiences on her list. So this is what it feels like.

“If I were from another country and I came to Paraguay, I would be put off by all the poor people in the streets.”

“Put off?”

“That’s not the right word.”

“What is the right word?”

“They would hurt my heart.”

“Isn’t that the purpose of a heart?”

He drains his glass. The waiter brings another bottle. He pours for both of them. To Mariana it feels like a conversation proceeding on two levels, only one of them out in the open. She is crestfallen when he looks at his watch.

“I have a class.”

She nods. “Advanced conversation.”

Perhaps it is a mistake, admitting she knows what course he is about to teach. Perhaps it is a form of self-assertion, a trait in which she is sadly lacking. She has a grounded sense of how she must look to him. A thirty-year-old librarian, a reserved and bookish woman who if not plain is certainly forgettable. In a crowd, no one will notice her going by.

They walk together back to the center. He carries his sadness as another man would carry a briefcase. In his office, she has noticed, all the books are second-hand, most of them paperbacks. They will be left behind. She understands that he is a temporary person whose business it is to move on. The insight feels like maturity; a gift she has not earned.

When he leaves her at the door of the library she tells him, “I would like to see a white owl. In Minnesota.”

He nods. “Yes, the snowy. Sometimes they come down from Canada.”

That is the extent of their goodbye, but she has the same sense she had in the Bavaria of a conversation on two levels.

Her father has been given a year-end bonus at work, and that evening he takes her to La Pergola to celebrate. Across the capital, on the sidewalks, at the intersections, uprooted people from the country wander slowly as if trying to escape a bad dream in which they unaccountably find themselves the star. Through the meal, Mariana tries to make sure melancholy does not get the better of her father. They drink an excellent Spanish wine. He tells her anecdotes involving the people at work. Her filial love has a tear in it, an inexplicable flaw in the fabric.

The next day at work she attends to another club member at the check-out desk. He is a reporter for ABC Color. She has seen his byline; he covers social events. He is a man of indeterminate age with the scar from a bad burn on the back of his left hand. He is working his way through the classics of Paraguayan literature. She suggests a poetry collection by Elvio Romero, and he goes away happy. This is his lucky day.

Something about the pleasure she observes in the reporter stimulates her to go to John Savage’s office. He is packing his books in cardboard boxes and has a frenzied, almost a tortured look.

“Where will you go?” she asks him.

He stops. Sets a stack of paperbacks on his desk. Blinks the way she imagines a snowy owl might. “There are books, right? And then there is everything else.”

She considers this a profound statement, if not on its own merits then for the obvious connection with the woman on the street selling flor de coca. She has suspected all along that he has the eyes for such sights but has been wary of projecting onto him what she so earnestly wishes there to be. She asks again where he will go.

“I like this place,” he says. “Didn’t I say that already?”

“We should dance.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Before you leave Paraguay. Go out dancing.”

“I don’t have the legs for it.”

A true statement, it turns out. That evening she experiences real pathos, watching her father’s eyes light up when he learns she is going out with a man. Dancing, no less. A bear with a song in his heart. She does not attempt to tamp down his expectations. That would be cruel. Anyway she has her hands full, tamping down her own.

Savage is waiting on the street in front of the rose-colored house in which he rents a room. He has recently showered. His hair is damp. His white shirt is freshly pressed. Getting into the car, he hands her a book. A novel by Esteban Cabañas. She wonder if he knows the author’s name is a pseudonym, that the story is written by the great Paraguayan painter Carlos Colombino. She decides to say nothing except thank you.

Siglo 21 is absurdly loud, obscenely crowded, luridly dark. Savage disappears and comes back with beer in bottles. They dance. Nothing Mariana can conceive of is as disastrously wrong as the two of them on the dance floor with a horde of twenty-somethings seeking oblivion. The American dances like a snowy owl. She herself trips over her self-consciousness. Inside twenty minutes they have left the club.

She drives down to the river, by the presidential palace. They get out and walk. It is a fine time to be there. There are no other walkers, and this part of downtown has been beautified. The Spanish government paid for the restoration of colonial-era buildings. There is a moon. It shines in the eyes of prancing cats. Out on the river, what may be the sound of oars slapping the water. A night fisherman, or a contrabandista.

“I’m married,” he tells her.

“To a woman in Minneapolis.”

A nod, noncommittal. “My wife despises me. I despise her. We will never live together.”

“Why not divorce?”

“She is Catholic in the worst way.”

“I would like to know her name,” says Mariana, wondering why.

“Bernadette. She hates my books.”

“It’s a beautiful name. And the letter?”

“She wants money.”

“Will you give it to her?”

“There is none to give.”

“One thing I do not understand,” Mariana says.

She finds it surprisingly easy to be direct with him. She pictures her father at home in the back patio. Next to him on a low table sits a bottle of Calvados, a treat to celebrate his daughter’s rare date.

“What’s that?”

“You already ran away from Bernadette. All the way to Paraguay. Where can you run to now?”

“I like this place,” he tells her for the third time, and finally she gets it. He cannot bring himself to leave. He is a person whose destiny is to keep moving, and yet he can’t. The situation is confusedly thrilling.

“At the cultural center,” she says. “Out front, there is a woman who sells flor de coco.”

“I’ve seen her.”

“She had a common-law husband. He beat her. He broke her ribs. She escaped. They had a daughter. The daughter ran across the road and was hit by a bus.”

“The daughter died.”

“Yes. There is more to the woman’s story. I only know part of it.”

Mariana comes close to telling him about the secret book club. She thinks he will approve. Why does she finally not do it? When she comes into the house, later that night, her father is sitting up in his chair reading The Economist. It costs him not to ask her how it went. To save him a little suffering she tells him she had a good time, and he lets it go at that.

At the cultural center the next day the air conditioning is out. Ferocious wet heat storms into the library, the offices, the theater, all the classrooms. The problem with the system appears to be serious. It will not be fixed any time soon. Nerves are rubbed raw. Tempers flare. Meetings are cut short. When Mariana goes to the cafeteria for a cold drink, John Savage is sitting there reading a book. He looks up at her and nods. Goes back to his reading. This is why, she understands, she did not tell him about the book club.

There are books, and then there is everything else.

A mordant feeling overtakes her, late in the afternoon, when one of the club members shows up. What a fool she is, pretending that her club exists, that it’s a real thing, a thing of consequence however invisible. The AC is still out, but he appears not to notice. He has to be the oldest member of the secret book club by a good ten years. He crosses the floor to the circulation desk slowly, leaning on an ebony cane. The knob of the cane is the silver head of a snarling leopard. He wears a short-sleeved shirt, and liver spots deface his forearms. His face is tanned leather, the color of brogues.

“Good afternoon, señorita.”

“It’s good to see you, sir.”

He seems to forget, for a moment, what he is about. But he is the last thing from senile. She has had just enough casual conversation with the man over the past few years to recognize a first-rate intellect. A pugnacious mind, a mind that resists easy satisfactions. The mind of a reader.

“I want something new,” he tells Mariana.

“Sir?”

“I’m going back to Quixote.”

In a universe of infinite possibilities, this is the request that delights her above all others. The library owns half a dozen Quixotes. She chooses the nicest, a commemorative edition with a tooled leather cover. Receiving it from her hand, the old man says, “Now that’s the ticket. I thank you.”

The instant he exits the library, Mariana calls someone to take over the desk. She marches to John Savage’s office where she finds him sweating in the infernal heat of late December. She can’t be sure, but it appears as though he has taken his collection of paperbacks out of the boxes into which he had put them yesterday and is engaged, now, in putting them into other boxes. He has a harried look, as though he has just read another letter from Bernadette. There are books, and then there is everything else.

It is a novel feeling, being in charge, so novel it takes her a moment to understand what is going on.

“There is a club,” she tells him.

He stops his book packing and looks at her. It is not a welcoming look.

“I want to tell you about it.”

He shakes his head. “I’m not into clubs.”

“You’ll like this one.”

He looks skeptical. But she knows she is right. In a world of persisting wrongs, she is right. In Minneapolis, an unhappy woman curses as the shadow of an owl darkens her own shadow on the crusted snow. In Asunción, an unhappy woman shuffles to a corner offering sprigs of fragrant flowers to passersby who look away. But Mariana is right.

“Come to the cafeteria,” she says. “We’ll have a mineral water.”

He accepts the invitation while telling her again that he is not into clubs.

“You’ll like this one,” she assures him.