Here, I also have no sense of where the moon should be or when it will appear. Even at home I found its motions confusing, but I was seldom taken aback by its presence as I am in Rio, where it seems to spring from nowhere, especially on nights that are inexplicably clear and temperate. When this morning I opened my eyes and it was shining in them through the upper window like a burglar's flashlight, I felt as if I were receiving a message.
Not from God or nature or anything like that, but from my own simple failures and regrets. Of course, I did feel the presence of God, as I often do and always have, but I believe that if He were there it was only because of the presence of truth. He cannot resist truth; it is what lures Him near.
The truth in this case was a simple and homely memory: my route to school. In my eightieth year, I awake in a blaze of cool silver, gravely going over the paths and roads that led to my school more than seven decades before. I do not remember each blade of grass, each rut, each smooth and dusty reach of white earth, but I do remember every alleyway, long prospect, and major turn.
But why? Why such a small thing? After all, I was captured by the retreating German armies as they compacted upon their center in Berlin. Each soldier was a Dürer, so firmly and savagely engraved, so tired, tragic, and clear, that I felt myself made ignorant by my own victory. I was taken to the courtyard of a ruined building and held in the open for two days and nights without protection from artillery or air bombardment. The score or so of Russians, Czechs, Khazars, and who knows what else said that as soon as the space filled up we would be shot. I believed them, and I am sure they were right.
But Berlin fell before the courtyard filled, and I was saved yet again by some unaccountable grace of timing. During the two days that I awaited execution the moon rose through the clear nights as if, with its brilliance, to escort us out. The moon appeared insistently and with unchallengeable beauty through rivers of smoke and dust that had risen with the day's bombardments and run silently on the still night air. This moon was a great comfort in what we took to be our last hours, the calming emissary of another world.
Why then, when I woke many years later, did the same light shine not upon the fall of Berlin but upon my walk to school? You would think that with so many memories of great events such a thing would long ago have been forgotten. The whole world watched Germany fall, but no one's eyes ever followed a lonely child to school, at least not this one.
I cannot explain it, but first memories, first sensations, first loves—when life was clear and unburdened—are what awaken you at night when you are old. Perhaps it is because now I am weak again as I was when I was a child, and without means.
Just as I had done almost three quarters of a century before, I awoke this morning in moonlight, dressed quickly, and, with paper and pens in a (now antproof) case that I carried at my side, went on dark paths through the woods, alone. At that time in the morning the birds have not yet begun to sing, but they are about to. I remember the moment. It was a very good time indeed, full of expectation. And, if I remember correctly, for a seven- or eight-year-old, walking on those dark paths took some courage.
Today I found myself in the; garden so much earlier than usual that I had to wait for the light. While I was there the moon went very low and was quashed in the sea, and the stars pulsed lightly for a few minutes afterward.
Though I was happy to contemplate the stillness, I was there at that hour in service of a kind of spycraft. I was varying my route and time in response to a certain ineffable pressure, a tension unidentifiable to the senses. When assassins come, they are preceded by faint waves as delicate as starlight. Death comes lightly, but if you are listening, you can hear it even far away.
I had altered my route and arrived in the garden before the light so that if anyone came later I would see him first—unless I were bent over these pages. My eyes now take about a minute to change focus from small print to a freighter on the horizon or an assassin at the garden gate. I wish I knew how to speed the focus. There must be some kind of oil, or an exercise. Ah, but it's too late.
Soon after the light, just as the sun was getting hot, my heart jumped, I straightened in my seat, and I saw something that took sixty heavy years from my shoulders—a child running up the path, skipping like a ram, his little legs moving underneath him more rapidly than an eggbeater (do they make eggbeaters anymore? I haven't used one since the sinking of the Lusitania).
Upon seeing the child, I thought he was my own. And he was. Funio had been sent by Marlise to bring me a message on his way to school. No one could climb the mountain faster or more easily. When he reached me he was hardly out of breath even though he had run all the way.
His schoolbag was strapped to his shoulders and he was in his customary shorts and shirt. No longer is he in that state, as once he was as a baby, when he would suddenly forget everything in the world, drop what he was doing, and embrace me. Now embraces are only for arrival or departure, and his eyes get watery because he knows that, soon, he's going to lose me.
But he forgets that, and his eyes flash as he begins to chatter like a chipmunk, in English or in Portuguese, whatever you please.
Most children of his age would be given a written message to pass on, but not Funio, who remembers every detail, and conveys any length transmission either verbatim, in précis, or in code. If you gave him the American Constitution he could read it, run up the mountain, and deliver it word for word.
Once, Marlise had him carry a series of account numbers from her branch to another. He memorized them. To be sure that if he were captured by Indians and tortured he would not betray the depositors, he divided the numbers by 7.35 if they ended evenly, and by 11.14 if they ended oddly. With this store of information he sped through the streets, reprocessing the information at his destination.
"Mama says to tell you that the barber told her a man was looking for someone."
"In Niterói?"
"In Niterói. The barber followed him back to the city. He's staying in a hotel. He's very ugly and he has a pony tail, and lots of hair in his nose, and his nostrils are flat and he has an earring and big bones. Oh, he has a Turkish passport."
"Turkish passports can be bought in vending machines," I said.
Because he understood about assassins, little Funio began to cry.
"Funio, Funio," I said, putting him on my knee. "I have no fear. Look."
I held out my hand, and it was rock steady. Though I am eighty years of age, I have no tremor. "You just stay out of the way," I told him, "and I'll take care of everything."
He was not consoled.
I drew the Walther and put it in his hands. "Funio, I was in the war, and much more. I know how to use this. I'm not afraid. It even gives me a strange kind of happiness, because fighting has been so strongly intertwined with my life...."
"Still," he whispered.
What could I say? I kissed him, and he ran off to school, skipping down the long path. I have never been able to tell him how much I love him, though that is perhaps the way it should be, because words could not express what I feel, and actions, too, would come up short. Someday, as sons do, he will come to understand me.
Meanwhile, I must be vigilant.
So I sit in this garden trying to be alert to the present as the comforting force of memory brings me back. I can relive a day in a moment or a year in a day, and for someone with not so much time remaining, this makes great sense. In revisiting what I have left behind I can sit on this bench and feel waves of affection, awe, and sadness, which in combination with the richness of the garden, the warmth of the sun, and the blue of the sea, makes my life full. Though I have no choice and I must write this down, I had no idea it would be so easy.
In middle age, I did not understand that I was still young. I was seasoned by loss, war, the simple passage of time, and the new and vexing qualities of a body grown imperfect. But I had never had terrible pains in my legs. I had never worn an appliance of any sort—I thought appliances were things
such as dishwashers and refrigerators, and only later did I discover that these were major appliances. I had never collapsed in a public place. I had never had a catheterization, and, what is more to the point, I had never had a Brazilian catheterization. I had a wife with the grace and physique of a professional dancer, the perpetual youth of a koala bear, naturally blazing blond hair, a doctorate in economics, and the wonderfully entrancing qualities that flowed from having several billion dollars. Life had a gravityless air. I was able still to stay up all night in sexual enthusiasm and not pay for it with a visit to the Mayo Clinic. I had not experienced the period in my fifties when, despite all my efforts, I began to resemble Konrad Adenauer, and I did not yet envy things like bats, squirrels, and rabbits for their youth and physical vitality.
In the midst of what I did not realize was a hot hardwood blaze with nary a sign of white ash, Constance left me. She just walked away. That wasn't very constant, was it, but what's in a name?
Now I have Marlise. Marlise is beautiful, she always was. And as she has aged, her beauty has not fled: unlike so many women in her cohort, she doesn't look like a turtle or a lichee nut. Her way of speaking is ever fascinating, in English and even in Portuguese. Still, Constance left me, and there is a hole in the air where she once used to be. She's gone.
Miss Mayevska is also gone, but though I still grieve for her and for the children she must have loved beyond all measure, especially in the last moments when they were taken from her, she and they are either clasped passionately to the heart of God, or there is no God.
As my union with Constance was broken by mortal will, thinking about her is possible without tears or theology, two things that I'm often too weak to endure, and for which I am saving all my real strengths for the last, when I hope to exit like a fighter pilot.
In May of 1950, Constance and I flew to Denver and then to Jackson Hole. There we bought two quarter horses, two pack horses, saddlery, harnesses, camping equipment, down jackets, oilskin coats, and Stetsons that saved us in the days of rain. We had a compass, maps, two lever-action rifles and a few boxes of ammunition, some wire, and a fence tool.
On the route we followed, most of the range was open, which is not to say that we did not have to cross fences, for we certainly did. The horses we rode at home could have taken three-strand wire fences in their sleep, but even had we had them and they were able to survive the rough, the pack horses would never have been able to follow.
The way to cross fences was to cut the two upper wires and step the horses over the one that remained. Then you used six inches to a foot of the wire you carried (depending on the tension of the wire you cut) to mend the damage, and you went on. You did it as carefully as you could, out of respect and courtesy, and as the toll for crossing land not your own. We took a little lesson in how to do it properly, and the cuts we left behind were put back together with many more than the required twists, which is more or less what I wanted to do with my life and what I have not been able to do, but what I may do yet.
We followed the Continental Divide as much as we could, though it is often only a chain of impassable ridges and summits. Still, plateaux flank either side of it and run sometimes even at the crest, and along their many miles you can ride at the top of the world, just about as far from cities and settlements as you can get, your only encounter being a few sheepmen and their startled flocks.
From the shepherds, with whom we spoke—not knowing Basque—in a mixture of French, Spanish, and Italian, we bought mutton. I have always had a taste for mutton, preferring it to lamb for many reasons, and up there it was cooked until nearly all the fat was gone, and smoked very heavily to preserve it without refrigeration, which is just the way I like it. It was our staple protein, which we used sparingly with several kinds of lentils, and rice. Other than that, we had a few bags of dried fruit, flour, sugar, dried soups, and a bottle of lime juice from which, like British seamen, we took daily sips.
I didn't think at the beginning of the trip or in planning it that I would shoot game. I have killed men, but in almost every case they were heavily armed and about to kill me. And although to me it appears to be morally reprehensible, I bow to the necessity of eating animals. Nonetheless, I don't like killing them. The evisceration, skinning, and removal of head and extremities, all of which can leave you covered with blood in nightmarish fashion, is not my cup of, well, tea.
But the horses forced me into a different frame of mind. They were very stupid about snakes, of which, in the seven hundred miles on our twisting backtracking route from Jackson to Denver, we encountered many. We surprised them sunning themselves on the far sides of rolling hillocks or coiled like buffalo offal baking on flat rocks Upon the snow.
The snakes, who had been sleeping at the switch, would make a big thing about being caught off guard—rattling, hissing, and posing like politicians. In a ceremony undoubtedly several million years old and inherited from their eohippine ancestors, the horses were never content with changing their path and leaving the danger behind. Instead, they went up on their hind legs, their flaming eyes riveted upon the disgusting adversary.
Physically, it made sense. A snake couldn't reach them if they were eight feet in the air, and dared not strike at their hind legs as long as the windmilling hooves and the head—shaking in negation, teeth exposed—remained cantilevered over the base. For the rider, however, it was hell.
I learned rather quickly to take my rifle from its scabbard, work the lever as I aimed, and blow the snake to oblivion. I could do this because the man at the store where we bought our equipment insisted that we take two boxes of bird shot. I had been fixed on long range, high velocity, Winchester loads, but he had directed my attention to snakes and birds.
The horses expected me to make the snakes as limp as an old couch in a dump, and as I did this it put me in the habit of killing. When eventually we ran out of mutton, I felled game birds. During our six weeks en route we ate sparingly and lost weight, but we ate well. Our hunger, primed sometimes for twenty hours or more, never fully satisfied, and driven by days of hard riding, was a far greater chef than any that Paris has ever produced.
In all that time, we never surfaced. It was a matter of honor. Never once did we sleep indoors or seek either town or restaurant. For a month and a half we had no newspapers, and it was quite a shock when we rode into Denver on the 26th of June, which was, I believe, a Monday, and saw huge headlines proclaiming that North Korea had invaded the South. We knew that some of our relatives and friends would be going to war, and that I would sit it out, being finally too old and not Wanting to push my geometrically extrapolated luck.
Depending upon trial and error as much as compass and map, heading for points that the eye found irresistibly beautiful rather than heeding the dangers and difficulties of rivers to be crossed and slopes too steep for horses, we went from Jackson through the Shoshone Forest and into the Wind Rivers, where we picked up the Continental Divide and tried to stay high in the cold. We left the Wind Rivers at South Pass and went into the Antelope Hills, which are not named that for nothing. Hundreds of racing antelope rocketed across the landscape like planes with wheels that barely touch the runway just before they are airborne.
We went shy of the Antelopes into the Red Desert, up to the Continental Divide again in the Sierra Madre Mountains, and then through an infinity of forests and meadows around Columbine, to the east of Steamboat Springs, through the Arapaho Forest, and down into Denver. Without knowing it, we had probably crossed and recrossed the Divide two dozen times.
We had become the readers of sun and shadow, content with watching the far-distant dappling of the plains below. With our sense of time elongated, our bodies hardened, our eyes sparkling, and our patience deepened, we lost ourselves and we were happy.
Constance said that the wind and sunburn were not good for her face, but never, never have I seen a woman as beautiful as she, with her hair sunbleached and disheveled, her cheeks reddened, and her eyes set from days of look
ing over great distances—to the horizon by day and the stars at night. This highlighted in her the quality that I love more than anything else in a woman: vision.
I have seen women play the role in films of the woman of the frontier, but although some with great gifts can do a passable job, none has ever held a candle to Constance after these weeks above ten thousand feet, in the sun and the wind, with not enough to eat. It was as if her womanhood had been polished by the sun.
Sometimes we rested for a few days by small lakes hidden in the mountains. Here, on the north side, in the middle of the day, on sun-warmed rocks sheltered from the wind, we made love in the open with no inhibition and the certainty that no one was within a hundred miles of us.
The weather was with us, clear skies and the stars unimpeded, an aerial traffic jam of pinwheels, flashes, and the apparent fluorescence of the Milky Way, perhaps the most mysterious and yet the most comforting thing that one can see. We became expert at navigation by the stars, at finding water by the complexion of the grasses, at sleeping on snowbanks, tending to injured horses, mending fences, and shooting birds as beautiful as startled angels.
I learned once again exactly what I loved, and I was happy. One night, in the south part of the Wind Rivers, on a rocky slab fifty times the size of Madison Square, when we were deep in the finest days of our lives, I proposed to Constance that we have a child, and she cried. That cold and hungry night of almost blinding stars, with the sound of white water never ceasing, was the highest that I had ever reached, and except for escaping my own death as my plane exploded, and except for the birth of Funio many years later, it was, I think, the moment for which I had been born.
Even though I did not know it at first, and suffered the illusion that all was perfect, from that night forward, I fell. Now, with some detachment, I do not regret it. One cannot stay very long in the holiest precincts, and should not expect to. And, upon reflection, my fall appears to me to have been not merely swift, but beautiful.