Signal to Noise(29)

“The same thing as always. Pretending to write. The bar. Smoking like a train. The last few times he came over...”

“He’d come over?” Meche asked, quite shocked at that.

Her mother turned off the stove and plated the eggs. She set them down before Meche and handed her a fork.

“In the last couple of years. Not a lot. He wanted to know how you were doing. I showed him some of the pictures you sent me, of the Northern Lights. ‘Too cold,’ he told me.”

Natalia sat down across from Meche, holding a glass of orange juice between her hands. Meche really did not want to eat, but she took a tiny bite.

“He wanted to write to you. I gave him your e-mail...”

“Why would you do that?” Meche asked.

She had told Natalia not to give her personal information to her father. He’d had it before and they had few, sparse conversations over the years, generally on Christmas and her birthday. When she lived in London he phoned one night, teary and drunk, talking about music. An incoherent babble of self-pity, of “Let me explain a few things to you about myself,” and all of it mixed with lyrics from songs. A mess. She told her mother not to give her phone number to him again and changed the number.

“He was dying, Meche,” Natalia said, palms up. “What else was I supposed to do? He said he was going to write to you from an internet café. I guess he didn’t.”

“Nope.”

Meche added a couple of spoons of sugar to her tea, stirring it slowly.

“Do you miss him?” her mother asked.

“My father?” Meche asked. “How could I miss someone I hadn’t seen for half my life before he died?”

“Because you look like you miss him.”





MECHE CONTINUED CATALOGUING her father’s albums. Around noon, she realized she should have eaten the eggs instead of just taking a bite. Her father’s cupboards were barren, the kitchen minimally stocked. Above the sink she found a big box of animal crackers. There was also powdered milk.

She thought of eating the crackers, but the memories of her father and a younger Meche enjoying them with a glass of milk made her pause. She grabbed her jacket and walked two blocks away, to a narrow Chinese café. She asked for tea, but this being a Mexican-Chinese café, there was none. She settled for café-au-lait and fresh bread rolls, watching the woman half-asleep behind the cash register; thinking that this café could be right from the 1980s, so old and worn it looked.

Meche grabbed her earbuds and pressed play, but despite the cheery assurances of Elvis Presley the world seemed dim and grey. She paid, went back to her father’s apartment, and found it dimmer and greyer than the café.

She did not feel like sorting his records. She was tired of looking at album covers and decided to put some of his other things in boxes. The typewriter, to begin with.

It was impossible to believe a man would continue to use a typewriter well into this decade, but he had. It was a heavy beast, many keys worn with the passage of time. Meche set it in the box, then began to gather his manuscript pages. There was, literally, a pile of them and many more scattered all over the house.

While looking for more pages, she found a dozen shoeboxes under the bed. Each box was packed with tiny little notebooks, inscribed with her father’s spidery handwriting. Most of the notebooks contained songs. Songs he’d written. A few things for the book, but it was mostly his songs and his random thoughts.

Meche had never seen any of her father’s songs. She knew he’d written them and she knew he’d stopped. But he hadn’t stopped. There were notebooks from the 70s, but others were labelled from the 80s and 90s, and as recently as a few months before. She pulled out a bunch of yellowed letters and discovered these were the love letters he had written to her mother years before, when he was courting her. He had written lyrics in the margins.

Secretly, under his bed, Vicente Vega had collected decades worth of lyrics and of his life.

Meche grabbed one notebook from 1973 and opened it, turning the pages curiously, looking at the careful, small letters, the tiny script with almost no spaces in between words.





Natalia and I agreed that if we have a boy, she’ll pick the name, and if it’s a girl, I get to pick. I know we are going to have a girl. I know she will have my eyes. I have been thinking of a proper name for her. There are many pretty names from songs which she could have. At first I thought maybe Emily because of the song For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her, but then I changed my mind. I thought about Julia because of The Beatles’ song from The White Album. Then I figured maybe I should name her after a singer instead of a song, and oh boy, anyone who knows me knows my first choice was Janice. But yesterday I was listening to Mercedes Sosa singing Gracias a la Vida by Violeta Parra and I think I will call her Mercedes Violeta, in honour of two great Latin American writers. Life has not given me many things, but it will give me the most important thing I can ever have: my very own Mercedes.





Meche looked around the house and found the record she was looking for easily. It had been in the stack next to her father’s bed: Mercedes Sosa singing Gracias a la Vida. She put the record on and sat on the floor in her father’s bedroom, looking at the painted palm trees.

Meche took out the picture of her in her father’s arms and she wondered about this man she did not know, this stranger who had passed away and left nothing but papers, records and songs.