During this time, the English ambassador, a dignified and imposing figure, toured the academy. When he was ushered into Watoon's class, he signaled that it should continue as if he were not there—and it did, for a while. Though it must have been peculiar, ambassadors are used to such things. Then Watoon pushed his luck.
"Phrase to greet English person from England!" he shouted at his charges.
"Blow me!" they chanted in unison.
"Blow me, what?" he asked, turning his head and cupping his hand to his ear.
"Blow me, English shitbird," they shouted, without the slightest idea of what they were saying.
"Say again to our guest. Stand up to show."
They all stood up, faced the stunned ambassador, and shouted, "Blow me, English shitbird!"
The ambassador turned to the commandante, who was smiling placidly, and, realizing that he was on his own, shot a fierce glance at Watoon.
To which Watoon responded, with an expression of absolute innocence and a huge grin, "Suck my ass."
That, of course, was the end of Watoon. And it was also the end of me. Trying to save himself, Watoon told the commandante that I had taught him everything in the holy book, and because the commandante had known for years that Watoon ran to me for help at every opportunity, I was fired, too.
Even had I the energy to contest this in the Brazilian naval courts it would have been immaterial. The academy has replaced us with two Englishmen who, I am told, speak beautifully and are expert at teaching English as a second language. Quite frankly, I think the cadets will have a great deal of difficulty trying to say words like air, which they will now have to pronounce "A,ah," but their problems are minor compared to mine.
I was pensioned off with a weekly stipend sufficient to buy a mango, two aspirins, and a postage stamp. I have the gold, but am physically unable to get it, and, quite apart from that, I have always believed that immense wealth would change Marlise for the worse. Great riches are like a tiger—beautiful, captivating, and, once you find them, they eat you. They even ate Constance, and Marlise at her best is less alert than Constance after a magnum or two of champagne.
Funio, for all his brilliance, wouldn't be able to retrieve a single bar or even reach the place where it rests. He will have to be a lot older and a lot bigger, and I gave my word of honor to Marlise that I would tell him neither where the gold lies nor even that we have it. Marlise knows about the tiger, and she doesn't want it to eat her child.
I myself am no longer strong enough, and I trust no one, because I know no one to trust. And what would I do with riches except to prolong a life that is saying to me more and more every day that it has reached its natural end? If I die I'll cheat the assassins of their chance to kill me. But should they manage to find me before I die, their bullets will bring me sublime satisfaction.
I'm in the garden in Niterói. Once again, it is early morning. It has just rained. The blue waves beneath me, silent at this height, are once again drawing me in. The flower beds are steaming, and I am the only one here. Sometimes I wonder what the purpose has been of all the years since 1914. I should have died then. I wanted to. I was nine years old when my time came, and I have lived ever since with immense sorrow. Death, for me, will be like the most comforting sleep.
I used to have a picture of my father as an army officer in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War. He was kneeling on one knee, flanked by two Filipino soldiers. The three of them were looking at a sand map on the ground, and though the Filipinos steadied themselves with rifles, my father didn't. He was wearing wire spectacles, and clenching a pipe in his teeth. Someone must have said something amusing, because the three of them were laughing. It was neither a polite, nervous laugh nor the kind that is so strong it makes you close your eyes and change your position, but, still, it was happy, fully realized. In fact, they looked just about as happy and healthy as anyone can. In all my eighty years I have never seen anyone quite so relaxed, so strong, and so content. As a child I used to stare at this photograph and dream that I would grow up to know the same feelings as these men crouching in the dirt, and at times, I suppose, I have, but never so well as had my father, before I was born, and this I could tell by the marvelous expression on his face.
The picture of my mother was much different, although it was taken at approximately the same time. Looking at the camera from a gazebo near the pier of a resort island in Lake Erie, she was standing tall and straight in a white Victorian dress and straw boater with ribbons, her dark hair cascading about her sunburnt face. She never would have been considered pretty, because she was too tall and her features were unusual, but her face had so much in it and her expression was so complex and full of life that she was, in fact, a great beauty. The ideal woman at the time was chubby, weak, and round, and she was angular, thin, and strong. She would do better today, but even so she would not meet the thoughtless standards that in matters of beauty so often prevail.
As a child I would consider these photographs, convinced that I would have neither the strength and vitality of my father nor the luck of meeting a woman like my mother.... And then a bolt of wonderful lightning would strike me and pleasantly ricochet as I realized that, because I was my father's and mother's son, I did have a chance, after all, of growing into their strengths and graces.
The photographs became icons. One glance was enough to suffuse me with memory and love, a careful study made me forget the present, and a profound meditation transported me in time until I did not know if, in fact, I had ever left them. I treasured the images beyond all measure. I had wanted them with me when I was buried or burned, so that they and I would go together, whether by slow oxidation or quick fire. But I lost them when I landed in Brazil. They were taken by the rushing water, the water dissolving, the water flowing and full of oxygen.
I was born haplessly at the end of December, 1904. I have always believed, though perhaps illogically, that children born at the height of summer, when light floods the world, prefer summer and all that is bright, and that children born in the darkest days merely dread the cold and dark. Though at times I have loved winter when it is dry and the sun and the moon shine across broad snowfields, in the main I shrink from it. In winter I was never warm enough. Our house did not have central heating, and not only did I dislike servicing the wood stove, I resented that when a passage in a book or a problem in a text seized my attention it meant that one half of me would roast and the other half freeze. Winter with a wood stove was like being on the moon: there was fire and there was ice, and there was nothing in between.
My birthday and Christmas were Siamese twins. Faced with this coincidence, my parents would simply invest as much in a single present as they might otherwise have spent on two. But this was no consolation for me. I was a child, and I innocently wanted everything.
Of course, I never got everything, but my greatest present came in January, when the light began to strengthen and each day was longer, when Christmas and birthday presents were forgotten in favor of the signs of the whole world brightening. Even in February, the month of despair, when increasing light is hidden by increasing cloud, a month that, in my experience, has never been as crystalline as the one that precedes it; and even in March, the month of betrayal, when storms and wind fight the coming of the light; and even in April, with its well known cruelties and too much rain—even in the winter that remained, playing itself out slowly, the light grew stronger in a brilliant crescendo.
Long before June my broken heart had healed and the world seemed buoyant. We lived on the Hudson, and to reach the river (as I could do at incredible speed), you had to cross two very beautiful sun-drenched fields and go down a steep path through an oak wood, pass over a stone dam and leap across the gap that made the spillway, descend another small hill, and weave through a grove of tall reeds out onto the track bed of the New York Central Railroad. Only beyond the rails did the beach open to a vast bowl of water and distant mountains. The river's main channel, through which pli
ed sailing ships and steamboats in all but the darkest winter months, ran in the distance over miles of water or ice.
My speed increased as I grew older and stronger and years of practice taught me every angle, every foothold, every slope. I could launch myself over trees that had fallen across the path, either the right or left leg extended, depending upon where in my stride I took off, without sight of the other side, for after thousands of runs I knew it exactly. This gave to my transit from house to river an appearance of recklessness. As I became more and more capable I ran faster, I took longer strides, and I sailed higher and higher over the obstructions in my way.
Sometimes I frightened myself when my limbs, knowing better than I both the path and what they could do, stretched longer and pushed harder than my intent. Sometimes, it seemed, I was suspended in the air for so long that I flew.
I would dream at night of leaving the path and never alighting. This dream seemed more real than life itself, so I directed my efforts at learning how to fly—not by gliding or being lifted by a balloon, but as a kind of human projectile, an arrow loosed from rails of grace and strength. I was nine and a half years old. It was the summer of 1914.
Though many now believe that this was the last innocent summer the world would ever experience, theirs is the view of a younger generation that did not have the opportunity to know, as I did, the soldiers of the Civil War. How innocent were the men of Gettysburg or Chancellorsville? The only innocence the world has ever known has been the innocence of Eden, of Woodrow Wilson's understanding of foreign affairs, and in the hearts of each new wave of children. In 1914, not everyone lived as buoyantly as I did, and I knew it.
By the fourth of June, 1914, a Thursday, I was no longer bound in winter clothes that were not warm enough anyway, no longer a prisoner of mud and slush on my five-mile walk to school, too young for finals, and, with the summer ahead, unusually happy. Because the teachers were needed to proctor exams for the older grades, academic classes were over, and the younger children spent most of the day outside. That was fine with me.
My regal afternoon of damming up the brook—it was my generation that went on to flood half of Tennessee—came to an abrupt end when we were called inside for shop. Our teacher was a retired Marine major who had been at the Battle of Mobile Bay. He was a master mechanic and a natural archivist, and hanging from the rafters or on the walls of the huge loft where he taught were a Wright-Brothers-type flying machine, an Eskimo kayak, a used stuffed tiger, and hundreds of lesser things such as boomerangs, Gatling guns, Egyptian cutlery, Japanese kitchen utensils, masks, swords, paintings of whales hauled onto the beach, and an immensely heavy pendulum that defied the expediencies of the earth's rotation and held its place faithfully with reference only to the infinite.
The Major was a good and irascible man who made us pray before operating our machines. In the mechanics loft the whole class would clasp its hands and bow heads in silence as shafts of sunlit dust worked slowly to divide the room into perfect sections, and lost bees dashed through the light like drops of melting gold. Our prayer was simple: we asked that, in making something, we would not become enamored of our own powers, and we prayed that we would not cut off our fingers.
The machines were dangerous: band saws, circular saws fit for the Perils of Pauline, presses and cutters that could relieve a child of his extremities as quickly as a frog's tongue summoning a mosquito and with no more remorse. Today, children would not be allowed close to such hazards, but at the time machines like these were the promise of the future, their powers still not cloaked in shadows of malevolence. And, then, a notable local problem was that many hands had more fingers than they were supposed to have had, anyway.
The Major didn't Want the children in his charge to have their hands chopped off, so in addition to prayers he had a strategy. He used coffee, or, more specifically, coffee beans, which he kept in a white paper cup upon which were drawn a skull and crossbones. Because he was accustomed to scanning the vast prairies of the sea from the bridges of naval vessels, and to sighting enemies on land as they peeped at him from deep thickets, not much escaped his attention.
He would watch the whole class at once as he stood smoking a Cuban cigar, and if he saw a child with his hands in the wrong position, or another about to whisk an obstruction from under a seething blade, he would haul back on a huge lever to disengage the overhead shafts from which leather belts descended to clasp flywheels attached to the drives of each machine.
Having saved the violator's fingers, he would then proceed to save his soul, which is how, on the fourth of June, 1914, I was commanded to approach the skull-and-crossbones cup.
The Major addressed me with the special formality he reserved for young children: he would call us "Miss Adams," or "Mr. Bernstein," and, if he wanted to point to an element in our character, "Dr. Smith," "Professor Alford," "General Osborne," or "Reverend Antrobus." He mocked us, but gently, and his tone was always that of encouragement and respect, as if he could see into the future.
I knew I was in trouble when he addressed me as "Inmate," and summarized my transgression, at first, in a Southern African language he had learned as an observer with the British Army, and into which he would lapse only when he was annoyed. I don't even know what language it was, much less what he said, but it came fast and furiously and it sounded like: "Satto cooca satibelay, amandooka helelay pata pata. Desanday nooca, ge-zingaypo walela. Soocowelay detnandica coomanda. Ma me rotsuna contaga tu ay vaca doganda." It was like Italian with a lot of clicks, and it mesmerized us.
As I stood before the skull-and-crossbones cup, the other children gathered in silence as if to witness my execution. At the end of my indictment in the African language that—as far as I know—the Major may have made up, I was jolted by the question, in English, "Well, what do you have to say for yourself?"
"What did I do?" I asked.
"You tell us," he commanded.
"I don't know."
"Didn't I just tell you?"
"When?"
"Just now."
"Yes."
"So, tell us."
"Okay," I said, twisting up my face to free my memory. "Satto cooca?"
"Yes, go on."
"Satto cooca satibelay, amandooka helelay pata pata. Desanday nooca, gezingay po walela. Soocowelay demandica coom-anda. Ma me rotsuna contaga tu ay vaca doganda."
"Fine," said the Major, "but I didn't do it, so don't accuse me."
"I'm sorry."
"Brown, green, brown," he announced, passing sentence.
From having witnessed other executions, I knew what to do. I reached into the paper cup and pulled out a brown coffee bean. These, I had heard, were somewhat more tolerable than the green.
There it was, between my fingers, a partly cloven bean of an earth-brown color, obviously very tough and dry. This was the stuff that grownups drank when they got up in the morning and so they could digest their meals. Even if it were not yet processed into the popular drink, I imagined that it might not be that bad. At the grocery store I had seen a glass jar filled with coffee beans coated with chocolate. If they were actually candy, how dreadful could they be? Perhaps my classmates who in this same situation had retched and bent double were simply oversuggestible. I wasn't worried at all. I had always been able to do things that other children could not. My father had taught me some sort of Hindu technique for shunting pain to a siding, where, although I felt it, it seemed to have little to do with me but was rather like a phenomenon I was observing in someone else.
Because of this and other predilections I knew how to weather assaults and had unusual self-discipline. My perfect self-control led the dentist to think that I was a midget. I lived in a converted stable, a wonderful place that was, however, infested with very large rats that we called "beef rats." Early on, I learned to kill them with a hoe or a poker, which was neither easy nor without risk, as they fought back. These weren't little chicken croquettes with legs, but the size of guinea pigs and small cats
. Combat with them taught me fortitude, as did the lack of central heating in our house, the ten miles I walked every day to and from school, and the regular beatings I received when I passed through the tough parts of town.
What did I have to fear from a little bean, I, who could be silent while a dentist used his hand drill—on me—without anesthesia, I, who had been ripped to pieces in a mill accident and was sewn back together with hundreds of deeply driven stitches, again, without anesthesia? This bean was treasured around the world. It was eaten as candy.
I put it into my mouth and began to chew slowly, like a cow. In the first seconds I tasted nothing, and an expression of pompous mastery crept across my face. But as soon as the bean began to take possession of my mouth, my eyes widened and I breathed through my nose the way you do when you are just about to crash into something. I thought instantaneously of my parents' occasional disparaging remarks about coffee, and I wondered why they, tea drinkers, had not been more emphatic.
A bitter rivulet grew into a net of streams that crossed my tongue like a river fractionating across a delta or lightning cracking the blue-black glass of the sky. I was too shy to retch or bend double, so I simply let myself suffer, accepting the hideous internal contamination with each gasping swallow.
Then came the green, which was many times more powerful than the brown. I had known pain, but I had never known bitterness. Bitterness, it seemed to me, as much as I could feel or think at the time, was like the body and soul turning upon themselves, and I had never experienced that. Though tears poured from my eyes, I stood straight and proud, in absolute silence. I fought the bitterness by not bending, and in not bending I thought I had won. But I hadn't, because I had failed to understand that this was just a sign, a precursor.
It has been a long time since I have had a conversation with anyone who knows cold weather, the change of seasons, the coming of spring, the glory of summer, the dark of Christmas, and landscapes of blue and white. A city of the tropics with 200,000 people per square mile is somewhat different from a place where it is commonly ten below zero and there are fewer than twenty people per square mile. If I could import the silence, cold, and tranquility of my youth to Rio I would be the richest man in Brazil. Of course, I may already be the richest man in Brazil.