talking to the dead
by Douglas Messerli
Toby Olson Tampico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008)
As these figures offer up their pasts to one another, they become a
closely knit community, reliving each other’s lives even as their own lives
slip away.
The most romantic and dashing of their tales is the one told by John of
his youth in Mexico, where, as a pilot flying supplies for an oil company in
and out of Tampico, near the Gulf of Mexico, he meets the revolutionary General
Corzo and his cohorts, Calaca and others, and where he falls in love with a
powerful native woman, Chepa, who takes him into her isolated home as her
lover. John’s tale has a near swash-buckling quality as he recounts Chepa’s
dogs, died blue, yellow, and red, and various adventures, including a meeting
with the General—with whom the oil company representative attempts to negotiate
an important deal—interrupted by a violent storm which ends in a ship of men
and women, all dressed as figures celebrating the Mexican Day of the Dead,
nearly drowned as the ship flounders and begins to sink near shore.
Yet all of their stories, in one way or another, are exciting adventures
involving sex, struggle, and possible death.
Frank tells the story of his mother, a God-fearing farm wife, who when
her husband travels to move his farm equipment to another part of the state,
has sex in the chicken coop with a young hired hand—an event which Frank, a
young boy at the time, accidentally witnesses:
They were on the floor
together, off in a corner on blankets, and the
the chickens were watching
them. I had the door half open, and I must
have heard something, her
voice possibly, or seen the chicken light at
the end of its cord where she held it, wavering. I stopped there, just
inches before the door’s squeak, and heard the muffled grind of grain
under the blanket where his heels shuffled and a tapping that was the
long electrical cord striking the floor as she bucked over him, riding him,
facing me, but not seeing me.
The event results in the mother’s
hate of her son, and three days later, at the age of 34, she falls to the floor
at the kitchen sink, dying of a heart attack.
Peter, younger than other men, tells his story beginning with the day he
learned he was HIV positive. A heterosexual, who has evidently contracted the
disease from a woman he is met, Peter has recently retired as a policeman and
is beginning a new career as a detective. One of his first jobs involves a
mysterious man, Gordon Strickland, who asks him to join him on a trip to bring
documents to a dealer in Boston, but a second job temporarily intrudes as a
young woman calls him, clandestinely meeting with him as she seeks his help to
escape her violent husband and their house. The two jobs become intertwined
when he meets Strickland’s assistant, Carlos, who, eventually moving in with
him, helps him fend off an attack from the husband of the woman he has helped.
Larry, a gay man also dying of AIDS, tells of his work one summer on a
farm in Utah, where a nun, the daughter of the farmer, also lived. One day
while working, another young man, Matthew, a beautiful boy, “lean and
articulate in his bony structure, smooth-chested, a mop of blond curls like a
city flapper,” suddenly falls into a hole, trapped by a stump and the exposed
root system. Together Larry and the nun struggle to save him, first as the nun
tries to dig him free with the tractor; later, as they struggle to save him
from strangulation, undressing him and rubbing him with grease to help him get
free.
Gino, the oldest of the group, tells perhaps the most horrifying tale of
all. Years before, at eighty-two years of age and living in an isolated
farm-house, Gino is visited by his estranged daughter and two male friends,
demanding money. When he refuses her, she and her friends surround the house,
boarding it up from the outside and setting it on fire. Gino is saved only
through his clever tactic of immersing himself in a bath filled with water as
it falls from the second floor as the house begins its collapse:
I turned back then and the house
was gone, no longer obscuring sight of the
rise above it, and I saw the oak
tree shimmering above the ruins in the last
thin clouds of rising smoke. And
before I saw down on the ground, then lay
down, I think I heard the sound of
sirens in the distance, though it could have
been my own voice, searching for this place of dead ambition that has been
within me since.
In short, each of these men recounts stories and stories within stories
of love and hate woven through with what we all must ultimately face, death
itself.
Rather than leaving his dead men to die, however, Olson gathers these
storytellers (John, Frank, Larry, and Gino) for one final exciting voyage to
Tampico, where John will attempt to reclaim the house that Chepa left him
decades before.
As anyone who has read a novel by Olson knows, however, there are bound
to be numerous Dickensian-like coincidences and intertwined relationships
before the story comes to end. And Tampico
does not disappoint.
We have already discovered that the nurse, Kelly—whose sex throughout
the book is never revealed—has traveled to Tampico with his/her mother years
ago after the death of the father. There an aunt tells them that their father
had another name as well, Calaca, whom John has described in his story as one
of General Corzo’s soldiers.
Meanwhile Carlos, the man whom Peter has befriended years earlier, finds
in Stickland’s secret cupboard papers which will Chepa’s Tampico house to him.
Arriving in Tampico to claim his bequest, he encounters the other men—whose
voices he suddenly recognizes, having heard them during their discussions at
the manor as he lay in a delirium in another Manor House room. They gather, all
of them, at the house, until the next morning an Indian guide, Alma, arrives,
offering to take them on a final last voyage—inland over a few days’ rough
terrain. When they finally reach their destination, they discover an Indian
Shangri-La, a utopian world ruled by Chepa, where Carlos suddenly meets up with
his father, Manuel and wife, Ramona, who, it turns out, is Gino’s daughter.
Soon after, we discern that Carlos is John’s grandson!
They moved in their bodies for
a moment, adjusting their bones under
their skins. Then they stood
perfectly still in the picture that was the
picture before it was taken.
…A dull thud of explosive then a brief
white light, and for a moment
all their faces were illuminated skulls,
empty in dark sockets, but
their teeth in those perpetual and wise grins.
The seemingly unrelated tales they
have been telling have suddenly become an interwoven story of their loves and
life. The past, through death, has finally been married to the present.
Los Angeles, March 27, 2008
Revised, Los Angeles, April 2, 2008
No comments:
Post a Comment