He turned away and resumed walking ahead of me.
“Some asshole, not really worth talking about. And Daphne, yes, she can be charming, but she’s too concerned about other people’s approval. A fake artist, a fake recluse, always hurting and full of recriminations. You wouldn’t like her much, I think.”
“I want you to see a doctor when you go back.”
“Not yet. Not now.”
“You said you felt your brain was frying.”
He pretended not to hear me, or maybe he was simply unable to concentrate on anything other than the frenzied energy zipping around his body.
He stopped and pointed toward the profile of the mountain.
“Look! Behind that ridge over there. See? That’s the way to Blue Lake. That’s where I’m taking you tomorrow. There is a secret trail somewhere near the Pueblo.”
“That looks really far to me.”
“Not really. We can definitely make it. Anyway it’s the reason why we came here. It’s the place I told you about.”
The landscape was lit with hues of orange and purple in the late-afternoon sun. I shivered.
“Don’t worry about the trail—I’ve got a map,” he said. “Someone gave it to me, but we’re not supposed to tell anyone how to get there.”
* * *
That evening we sat in a small restaurant housed in a two-hundred-year-old chapel, lit dimly by a few hanging chandeliers. The young waitresses looked like poets, with their rosy cheeks, wispy buns and long skirts. Even the menu was poetic: buttermilk yellow and blue cornbread, wild quail stuffed with green chili, home-baked tamales with Oaxacan-style mole, ruby trout wrapped in corn husks. The waitresses’ heavy boots resonated loudly on the wooden floor, but the brisk sound of their footsteps was part of the western mystique and ambience: candles, a roaring fireplace, a tattooed cowboy shaking margaritas behind the bar.
Now that we were sitting down at last in a closed space, I decided the time had come to include my husband in the conversation.
“Lorenzo is an animation designer; he works for a large studio. They make incredible films,” I started, but Teo didn’t react.
“He’s heard so much about you,” I added. “I think you’d really like each other.”
I wasn’t sure this was actually true, but I needed Teo to acknowledge Lorenzo’s existence somehow. Since I had arrived, Teo had never mentioned his name, or asked about him, as if the fact that I’d gotten married two years earlier were a detail he could ignore. Perhaps he couldn’t cope with the fact that things had changed, and there were new people in my life who were close to me.
“I’d like you two to meet one day,” I insisted.
He nodded absently, shifting in his seat, then made some gesture as to check his pocket for the pack of cigarettes and glanced toward the door.
“I need to have a smoke.”
“Now?”
“Yes. I’ll be right back.”
As I waited for Teo to return to the table, I crumbled a pill into his tamale. He claimed he wasn’t hungry, but I insisted he take a few bites. I kept my eyes on his plate to make sure he ingested the right morsel, like an assassin observing her innocent victim take the poison. It was exciting to watch him swallow it as he kept talking nonstop, knowing that the medicine would soon take over and hopefully rein him in. The next morning the crushed-up pills would go into his oatmeal.
* * *
Teo did have a map, a crumpled sheet of paper torn from a notepad with the circular stain of a coffee cup in its center. Someone had drawn it in precise maroon fountain-pen ink.
He showed it to me the following day, as we were sitting on the porch of The World Cup café with our takeout cappuccinos. More lovely hippie kids with long hair were stretching their sleepy limbs in the sun, sipping their caffeine next to a couple of well-behaved drunks. I read the tiny writing underneath the map: The name of Blue Lake in Tewa language is Ma-wha-lo. Good luck, it said in the flourishing handwriting.
“Why ‘good luck’? I wonder,” I said.
“You’ll see.”
“What exactly do you mean?”
He hadn’t bathed in days and was smelling rank, of nicotine and sweat.
“This lake is so blue like no other blue in the world,” he said. “A cobalt blue nobody has been allowed to see. And we’ll be the first ones to see it.”
* * *
We drove about ten miles north of Taos, then climbed quite a way past Arroyo Seco, toward a place called El Salto. The arrow on the handwritten map pointed toward a small trail where the road ended. The landscape was mountainous, snowy and darker. It was freezing, but the cold in my lungs felt clean and pure like crystal. We walked up the canyon in the shade of juniper trees and tall pines. The sun filtered through the branches, projecting blades of light on the snowy ground. A half-frozen stream gurgled in places. We had to cross it a few times, jumping from rock to rock. We proceeded in silence, listening to the snow crunch under our boots. As we kept climbing, the forest opened more and more till we reached a grove of aspen trees that still retained most of their yellow leaves. They fluttered in the wind, like tiny flags of shimmering gold. Teo stopped to look at them in silence. He brushed one of the tree trunks with his hand.
“These guys keep growing, even in the wintertime,” he said as he scratched the white bark with his fingernails. “See this green layer underneath? It has some kind of sugary substance. It’s food for elks, bears, moose, beavers. Aspen trees are like pastry shops for animals when there’s nothing left to eat in the winter.”
He looked up toward the canopy of heart-shaped yellow leaves quivering against the sky. I was hoping the meds would soon kick in.
“Aspens, like other trees, are genetically identical because their roots are all connected underground,” he continued. “That’s why they all change color at the same time. They even heal one another—did you know that? Trees send out alarms to one another when they are attacked by parasites and shoot nutrients through their roots to the ones that are withering or in danger. No tree is an individual. Think of this forest as a giant rhizome that shares the same immune system.”
He looked around enthusiastically and shot his arms up in the air.
“Everything we perceive as separate is part of a single intelligence! The forests, the reefs, the shoals of fish that move in sync, the swarms of bees, the waves, the tides! Everything is connected. And the Pueblo people know this.”
“I guess so,” I said, even though I wasn’t sure I believed it.