Forgetfulness Read Free Page B

them from her. The conquistador's lisp had reminded her of her father and suddenly her father was alive in her mind. Risen from the dead. They were a family again, if only hallucinatory. He could not harm her, so she reconsidered and welcomed him to her dreams, a ghost from the distant past. She was certain now that she would be all right if she kept her nerve, lived inside herself, and never doubted that help would come. Florette struggled unsuccessfully to get comfortable, wrapped her
arms around her chest, and closed her eyes. Light danced behind her eyelids.

    When she woke, she was thinking of Thomas. The night was so dark he would never find her unless he stumbled on their bivouac, perhaps heard the men's voices or smelled their tobacco. Surely by this time he would have realized she was lost and set about organizing a proper search. He knew the trail very well. On Sunday afternoons Thomas often came walking with her, carrying a blackthorn stick and telling amusing stories as they ascended the trail, snow glittering on the slopes of the high mountains to the south, Catalonia beyond. They rarely met anyone on the trail and always returned before nightfall. Florette insisted on it. Mountains were unsafe after dark and the Pyrenees were no exception, inhabited as they were by vengeful gods without conscience. So Thomas would know her approximate location and there had always been a kind of sixth sense between them similar to the shared oneness of identical twins. They noticed when things were out of place and read each other's moods as easily as they read the weather; and they knew when not to inquire too closely on those occasions when there was silence at the other end. An explanation would come in due course. But night had fallen and there was no sign of Thomas. She thought she had never seen a blacker night, as if the gods had pulled a curtain over the heavens.
    She tried to imagine him now with his American friends, the table disheveled, candles guttering, something on the stereo, Broadway show tunes or a hummable opera,
La Bohème
or
Cavalleria Rusticana,
songs by Edith Piaf or Billie Holiday. The friends did not speak good French so their conversation was in rapid English, usually politics, difficult for her to follow even when Thomas turned to her and translated. Capitalism's responsibility for the turbulence of the modern world, its heedlessness and chaos, its savagery, its utter self-absorption, capitalism the canary in the mineshaft. But it's what we have, isn't it? No turning the clocks back. Against the jihadists, we have capitalism. Will money trump faith? They all had stories of
catastrophe from remote parts of the world, Thomas filling glass after glass of Corbières as they made their way through the cauldron of cassoulet. Bernhard Sindelar had stories from NATO headquarters and the various security services of Europe and elsewhere. Russ Conlon, overweight and semiretired, was content to eat and contribute anecdotes from unnamed friends at Interpol and the Paris bourse. Florette's mind wandered as she gazed out the window at the golden afternoon, the sky a washed-out blue, the trees beginning to turn. Autumn in Aquitaine was a natural masterpiece. What a mistake to remain indoors. When Bernhard lapsed into German, Florette knew the men were back in the factories of the small Wisconsin town they grew up in, red brick factories now abandoned, windows shattered, industrial locks rusting on the Cyclone fence that protected the property from vandals, though there was nothing left to vandalize and no one to care if there were. Capitalism's song: the downtown began to decay and then, overnight it seemed, the streets were full of Puerto Ricans and no one knew what there was about wintry LaBarre, Wisconsin, that would attract people from the sunny Caribbean—and here Thomas turned to her and explained that the Puerto Ricans had been there all along, the grandchildren of workers imported to do manual labor