It seemed to Rachel each time Margie talked about the place she spoke more lovingly of it.
“How many times have you been there?” she asked.
“Just twice,” Margie replied. “But I should never have gone back the second time. That was a mistake. I went for the wrong reasons the second time.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, it’s a long story,” Margie said. “And it’s not important. You’ve got the first time ahead of you, and that’s all that matters.”
“So I get to be a virgin again,” Rachel said.
“You know, honey, that’s exactly right. You’re going to be a virgin again.”
ii
If Rachel had entertained any last doubts about taking the trip, they evaporated once she got on the plane, settled back in her seat in the first class cabin and took a sip of champagne. Even if the island wasn’t all that Margie had advertised it as being—and in truth nothing short of Eden would match up to the promises—it was still good to be going away where she wasn’t known; where she could quietly and quirkily be herself
The first leg of the journey, to Los Angeles, was unremarkable. A couple of glasses of alcohol and she began to feel pleasantly sleepy, and dozed through most of the flight. There was a two-hour stopover in Los Angeles, and she got off the plane to stretch her legs and get herself a cup of coffee. The airport was frenetic, and she watched the parade of people—rushing, sweating, tearful, frustrated—like a visitor from another world, interested but unmoved. When she got back on the plane there was a delay. A minor mechanical problem, the captain explained; nothing that would keep them on the ground for long. For once, the prediction from the flight deck was correct. After twenty, perhaps twenty-five minutes, the captain duly announced that the flight was now ready for departure. Rachel stayed awake for the second flight. A little tick of anticipation had begun in her. She found herself turning over in her head things that Margie had said about the island and the house. What was it she’d said at the lunch table? Something about it being a place where magic still happened, miracles still happened?
If only, Rachel thought; if only she could get back to the beginning again; back to the Rachel she’d been before the hurt, before the disappointment. But when had that been, exactly? The careless Rachel, who’d had some faith in the essential goodness of things; where was she? It was years since she’d seen that brazen, happy creature in the mirror. Life in Dansky—especially after the death of her father—had knocked that girl to the ground and kept her from getting up again. She’d lost hope by and by; hope that she’d ever be unburdened again, ever be blithe, ever be wild. Even when Mitchell had come into her life, and turned her into a princess, she’d not been able to shake her doubts. In fact for the first two or three months, even after he’d confessed his love for her, she’d been expecting him to tell her she needed to brighten her outlook a little. But he seemed not to notice what a quietly despairing partner he had. Or perhaps he had noticed, he’d just assumed he could rescue her from her doubts with a touch of Geary largesse.
Thinking about him, she became sad. Poor Mitchell; poor optimistic Mitchell. In parting from him, she had done both of them a kindness.
Honolulu Airport was much as she remembered it. Stores selling hula-hula girls crudely carved from coconuts, and bars advertising tropical cocktails, parties of lei-draped travelers being led about by escorts carrying notices on sticks. And everywhere that preeminent symbol of the crass American tourist: the Hawaiian print shirt. Was it possible that the paradise Margie had described lay just a twenty-minute flight from this? It was hard to believe.
But her doubts started to fall away once she stepped outside to catch the charmingly dubbed Wikki-Wikki Shuttle that ferried her to the terminal from which her flight would depart. The air was balmy and fragrant. Though it came off the sea, it came with the scent of blossom.
The plane was small, but it was still less than half full. A good sign, she thought. She was leaving the Hawaiian-shirted vacationers behind. The plane rose more suddenly and more steeply than its bulkier brethren, and in what seemed seconds she was looking down on the turquoise ocean, and the high-rises of Honolulu were gone from sight.
VIII
The flight that carries the traveler from the high-rises of I Honolulu to the Garden Island is short; less than twenty-five minutes. But while Rachel’s in the air let me describe to you a scene that occurred almost two weeks before.
The place is a small, raffish town called Puerto Bueno, a community which probably takes the prize as the most unfrequented in this book It is located on one of the outlying islands of the province of Magallanes, which lies in Chile, at the tip of South America. Not a place people go to take relaxing vacations; the islands are wind-scoured and charmless, many of them so desolate they are completely uninhabited. In such a region, a town like Puerto Bueno, which boasts seven hundred citizens, represents a sizable community, but nobody on the neighboring islands talks about the place much. It is a town where the rule of law is only loosely observed, which fact has over the years attracted a motley collection of men and women who have lived their lives at, or sometimes beyond, the limits of permissible behavior. People who have escaped justice or revenge in their own countries, who have gone from one place to another looking for a place of refuge. A few have even enjoyed a certain notoriety in the outside world. There was a man who’d laundered fortunes for the Vatican; and a woman who’d murdered her husband in Adelaide, and who still kept a snapshot of the body in her purse. But most of the citizens are unimportant felons—abusers of substances and forgers of banknotes—whose capture is not of great significance to their pursuers.
Strange to say, given its populace, Puerto Bueno is a curiously civilized little place. There is no crime, nor is the subject of crime ever raised in conversation. The townspeople have turned their backs on their pasts, and want only to live out their remaining years in peace. Puerto Bueno isn’t the most comfortable of places to retire (it has only two stores, and the electricity supply is tetchy) but it is preferable to a prison cell or the grave. And on certain days it is possible to sit on the crumbling harbor wall and—viewing a sky unmarked by the trails of aircraft—think that even this charmless spot is proof of God’s charity.
Very few boats come to drop anchor here. Occasionally a fishing vessel, plying its way up and down the coast, takes shelter from a squall, and even more occasionally a pleasure boat, its captain hopelessly lost, will appear, only to disappear again just as soon as its passengers get a glimpse of the town. Other than these, the harbor is a hospice for a handful of small boats, none of which look healthy enough to put out to sea again. In the winter, at least one of them will sink there in the harbor, and rot.
But there was one vessel that fell into none of these categories: a vessel, called The Samarkand, more practical than any of the fishing boats and yet more beautiful than any of the pleasure boats. It was a yacht, of sorts, the timbers of its hull not painted but stained and varnished. Its cabin, wheel and two masts were likewise deeply stained, so that in certain lights the grain of the wood was uncannily clear, as though the vessel had been etched by a master draughtsman. As for the sails, they were of course white, but they’d been repaired many times over the years, and the patches were apparent; irregular shapes of canvas that were slightly paler or darker.
Perhaps to most eyes it was not as remarkable a vessel as I’m making it out to be. In one of the fancier marinas of the world, in Florida or San Diego, it would have not looked particularly fine a thing, I suppose. But here in Puerto Bueno, its arrival on a gray, cold day seemed like the visitation of something from a realm of dreams. Even though its captain (who was also its first mate and bosun and sole passenger) had been bringing the vessel to Puerto Bueno for far longer than any citizen could remember, its appearance on the horizon always brought folks down to the quay to watch its approach. There was a certain rightness to its coming—like the return of spring birds after a season of ice—that m
ade even these hard hearts a little more pliant.
Once the vessel was safely within the arms of the harbor, however, the spectators would hurry away. They knew better than to watch the actual docking, or worse still spy on the solitary black man who captained this boat as he disembarked. Indeed something very like a superstition had occurred over the years that anyone watching the captain of The Samarkand set foot on terra firma would die before a year or so had passed and the vessel came back again. All eyes were therefore averted when the man known by just one name made his way up the hill to the house he kept high above the harbor. The name, of course, you already know. It was Galilee.
How, you may well ask, did my half-brother come to be keeping a residence in a criminal community somewhere in the back of beyond? Chance, is the answer. He had been sailing down the coast when—like one of those fishing boats I made mention of earlier—he was driven to seek refuge from a storm or be drowned. Believe it or not, this was not an easy decision at the time. He had been passing through a period of profound depression, and when the storm came he was of half a mind to let The Samarkand be driven before it and turned to timberwood. He had decided against this course not for his own sake but for that of his vessel, which he considered his only true friend. It was no decent fate for a boat as noble as his to have its entrails washed up on the shores of this coast and picked over by peasants. He had promised The Samarkand that when the time came he’d make certain it died a good death, somewhere far, far from land.
So he took shelter in Puerto Bueno—which at that time was a quarter of its present size, or less, its harbor newly built, and almost entirely unused. The man who’d founded the construction was one Arturo Higgins, a man of English descent who had lost all his money in the endeavor, and had taken his own life the year before. His house stood unoccupied at the top of the bill, and Galilee, out of some perverse desire to see the place of suicide, had gone up the hill and entered. Nobody had visited the house since the body had been removed: gulls had come to roost in its bedrooms, and there were rats’ nests in the fireplace, but its desolation suited the trespasser mightily. He purchased the house the next day, from Higgins’s daughter, and moved a few belongings in. The view, on clear days, was peaceful, and he came to think of it as his second home; his first, of course, being the vessel moored in the harbor.
After a couple of weeks he’d departed, locking the house up behind him and making it quietly known that anyone who ventured over the threshold would regret it.
He’d not come back for thirteen months, but come back he did, sometimes three or four times in a single year, sometimes with several years intervening. He became a mystery of some note, and there’s force to the argument that the felons and the fugitives who came to the town thereafter did so because they’d heard of him. If this is so, you may ask, then why did the tale of the voyager, a man with divine blood running in his veins, not also attract a few finer spirits? It’s a reasonable question. Why didn’t saints come to Puerto Bueno, and Galilee’s presence turn it into a town where the lame skipped and the dumb sang patter songs?
I have only this answer: he was too crippled. How could his legend inspire healing saints when he was incapable of healing himself?
So there you have the way things were, until a week or so before Rachel departed for Hawaii.
It happened that Galilee was not out at sea at that time, but resident in the house on the hill. He’d brought The Samarkand into Puerto Bueno because it was in need of repairs, and for the last few weeks he’d been back and forth between the harbor and the house daily, laboring from dawn to dusk on repairing the boat, and spending the hours of darkness sitting at the window of the Higgins house looking out over the Pacific. He would not let anybody set foot on The Samarkand to help him. He was a perfectionist: no other hand but his could be put to the tasks of nailing and planing and staining. Occasionally some inquisitive soul would idle along the quayside and watch him at work, but his glare was enough to drive them away after a little while. Only once did he engage in any social activity in the town, and that was one windy night—just a few days before his departure—when he appeared at the little bar on the hill where it seemed half of Puerto Bueno’s citizens came to drink on any given evening, and downed enough brandy to have poleaxed any man in the bar. All it did was make Galilee a little merry, and he became quite loquacious—at least by previous standards. Those who talked with him came away with the flattering impression that he’d opened up to them: shared a few intimacies. The following morning, however, when they came to repeat what he’d said, they could recall very little that had pertained to Galilee himself. His conversation, it seemed, had been a form of listening; and when he had chimed in with something it had invariably been a fragment of somebody else’s life he’d been recounting.
Two days later, his work on The Samarkand seemed suddenly to become much more intensive. He worked the next seventy-two hours without a break, his nightly labors lit by hurricane lamps set all about the boat. It was as though he’d suddenly been given sailing orders, and was obliged to depart sooner than he’d expected.
Sure enough, he was at the general store in the late afternoon of the third day of his labors, ordering supplies. His manner was brusque, his expression thunderous: nobody dared ask him where he was headed this time. The supplies were delivered to the boat by Hernandez, the son of the owner of the store; Galilee paid him extravagantly for his efforts, and asked the young man if he’d apologize to Hernandez Sr. on Galilee’s behalf; that he knew he’d been less than civil earlier in the day, and he’d meant to cause no offense by it.
That was the last conversation anyone in Puerto Bueno had with their fellow citizen during his visit. Galilee weighed anchor as the night fell, and The Samarkand slipped out of the tiny harbor on the evening tide, to destinations much speculated upon, but unknown.
IX
i
Nicodemus, as I’ve already indicated, was a man of prodigious sexual energies. He loved all things erotic (except books, of course): I doubt more than two consecutive minutes ever passed without his thinking some sexual thought. Nor was his interest limited to human, or superhuman, congress. He enjoyed the spectacle of an unleashed libido in whatever skin it showed itself. His horses especially, of course. He loved to watch his horses fuck. Many times he’d be right there with them, in a fine old sweat himself, whispering now to the stallion, now to the mare, encouraging them in the act. And if things weren’t going well, he’d have his hands in the heat of things, helping it all along. Masturbating the stallion if need be, and guiding him home if he was clumsy; touching the mare with such tenderness she’d be calmed and accepting.
I remember one such incident with particular clarity; it happened perhaps two years before his death. He had a horse called Dumuzzi, of which he was particularly proud. And with reason. This was a stallion in the genes of which I’m certain my father had divinely meddled, for I never saw, nor expect to ever see again, so remarkable a horse. Forget all you’ve heard of Arabian stallions, or of the warrior steeds of the Kazak. Dumuzzi was another order of animal, preternaturally intelligent, exquisitely proportioned and magnificently formed. His bloodline, if it had survived, would have redefined what we understand by the word “horse.” I’ve sometimes wondered if my father hadn’t been sculpting this splendor as a kind of inspiration to the human world; a species of such perfection it would make all who witnessed its strength and beauty meditate on the sublimity of creation. (Then again: perhaps it was merely a selfish indulgence and he intended to keep Dumuzzi’s son and daughters at L’Enfant; I will probably never know.)
The point is: the night of which I speak there was a thunderstorm of majestic scale, which had been moving in since the late afternoon. Darkness had fallen prematurely, as great bruise-and-iron clouds covered the last of the sun. Even at several miles’ distance the thunder was so deep it made the ground shake.
The horses were panicky, of course; in no mood to be fucking. Especially Dumuzzi, who
se only real frailty was temperamental: he seemed to know he was a special creature and was wont to behave operatically. That night he was feeling particularly difficult: when my father came to the stable to prepare him Dumuzzi stamped and kicked and refused every calming word. I remember suggesting to Nicodemus that we try again the following morning, when the storm had passed, but there was a battle of wills here that no suggestion of mine was going to pacify. Nicodemus addressed Dumuzzi as he might have spoken to an inebriated and volatile friend; told him that he was in no mood for this drama, and the sooner Dumuzzi calmed down and began to behave sensibly, the better for all concerned. Dumuzzi ignored the warning; if anything his shenanigans escalated. He kicked his trough to splinters, and then kicked a hole in the stable wall—just punched out a dozen bricks as though they were so much papier-mâché. I wasn’t afraid for my father—at that time I believed him immune from harm—but I was certainly anxious for my own safety. In my various travels on behalf of Nicodemus, in search of great horses, I’d seen what harm they could do. I’d visited the grave of a breeder in Limoges who’d had his brain kicked to mush two days before I arrived (by the very horse I’d come to view); I’d seen another fellow, in the Tian Shan mountains, who’d lost his hands to an irate mare, just had them bitten off: one! two! And I’d seen horses fight among themselves until there was more blood on their flanks and the ground beneath their hooves than in their veins. So there I was, afraid for my limbs and my life, but unable to take my eyes off the spectacle before me. The storm was almost overhead by now, and Dumuzzi was in an eye-rolling frenzy. Sparks of static electricity ran up and down his mane, and leapt between his hooves and the ground; his complaints were so loud they cut through the thunder.