I went nearly mad for days, until we knew. I had plans for having every policeman in the state of New York skulk behind the staircase when this gentleman came to call. I tried to build a prison in the root cellar, there to hold and torture him until he revealed the name of his employer. Although I realized that if I killed him I would never know who had sent him, I polished up my single-barrel 20-gauge shotgun until it shone like a piece of Homeric armor. I even polished the shells, and spent hours in mock loading, pointing, and threatening, all in front of an oval mirror in which my mother had once checked her hat and the fall of her cape or coat.
When my uncle found two flat chunks of wood nailed with bent penny spikes into the posts of the root cellar, he called me to explain what they were. A clothesline that had been tied weakly around the bent penny spikes had been intended as manacles. "Why don't we just wait to see what he says?" my uncle asked.
The man whom I was going to put in my dungeon was a miniature old white-haired fellow named Smith. Apart from being as dapper as an ant, he was not distinguished in any way. He had no accent and spoke in no dialect. He did not speak with his hands, or express emotion or enthusiasm. I was sure that behind him stood the murderers of my parents.
He was inquiring, he said, in behalf of the Dominican Sisters of the Sick and Poor. At every stage, I expected that this would be exposed for the mere cover story that I assumed it had to be. When the mother superior came to discuss with my uncle the provision that allowed us to retain farming rights to the land until 1930, I pegged her for an actress and a con woman. When the papers were finally signed, I thought they were a fraud. When the abbey began to rise, I waited for it to become a toll booth. And when the nuns moved in, I assumed that it was all a trick, that they would soon turn around and sell to the tycoon who wanted to build a bridge. But the Dominican Sisters of the Sick and Poor stayed and stayed, and even as I flew on my Newfoundland run, I passed over the abbey, surrounded by fields that were still beautiful and of which I knew every contour, and there, in a ragged glen, I saw my house. It looked like a brick sugar cube, a model that would come with a Swiss train set. In all those years, the trees had grown, but the slate and brick had remained unchanged. Though I could not see the inevitable alteration of detail that, were I ever to go back, would break my heart yet again, it was easy to imagine.
When the two figures jumped from the railroad car it wasn't dark, but the sun was low in the sky, its weakening glare filtered through the trees of Teller's Point. The result was a broken pattern that with fading daylight and the background of trees near the rail bed made whatever happened pure shadow.
We had never seen anyone leave a train along this stretch of track, other than train crew hopping on and off. It was exciting and mysterious to see the shapes drawn into the summer shadows like barely perceptible puffs of smoke. No doubt the birds up the track had been silenced, but we still heard the din of a golden summer evening.
I left at a few minutes before eight and started to make my way home. By the time I approached our field nearest the river I had forgotten the mystery and begun to think about dinner.
But as soon as I burst from the woods I stopped dead. Just at the edge of the field, twenty yards to my left, two men were standing, looking at the house.
I walked toward them, and when I was close I said, too proudly, "This is private property."
"We're sorry," said one. "We're just trying to get to the road. We're tired and hungry."
"Oh," I said.
"I hope we don't have to go back to the tracks. Can we just go through to the road?"
They were dressed for the city—suits, vests, hats, watch chains. It would have been cruel, I thought, to make them march around in the swamp, so I said it was okay for them to pass through to the road.
They were the kind of men who are in terrible health but who by size and weight alone are ten times more powerful than they look, and, perhaps because they were so big, their exaggerated gratitude seemed fitting and, somehow, sincere.
"That's very kind of you," one of them said. "You know the area, don't you? And you're fast: you're a kid. Would you mind running into town to get us something to eat? We've been traveling since yesterday, all the way from Indiana, and we're very hungry."
"I can't do that," I said. "I have to have dinner." I thought it strange that they had been traveling from Indiana, because they had New York accents, they were dressed like Chelsea saloon rats, and their train had come from the direction of the city.
"It would take only a few minutes, and it would really help us."
I shook my head. I was getting uncomfortable, even frightened. I wanted just to run toward the house.
"I'll tell you what," said the one who was doing the talking. "All we need is something to get us going. Is there a place nearby where you can get coffee?"
"Yah," I told him, although it wasn't really nearby.
"Well here then," the talker said, pulling something out of his pocket. "Take this."
He held out a twenty-dollar gold piece. My father tried to save these, and hardly ever could. I understood what it was worth, how hard it was to get, and how harder still it was to hold. I took it.
"And here's two bits," he added, "so's you don't have to break the coin when you get the coffee."
Over the years, many people have told me that I was blameless. I was not even ten years of age. How could I have known what was to happen? But as I ran to buy the coffee, I felt guilt and sorrow. I was hoping that I could do everything quickly enough to freeze the danger in place. If I could do it in a dash, duck out, and hurry back, everything would be all right.
I ran so fast to the Highland Café that when I arrived I was too winded to speak. And yet I couldn't wait to catch my breath, so I slapped the silver down on the counter, pointed to the coffee urn, held up the index and middle fingers of my right hand, and then upended them and walked them across the counter. Soon I had two coffees to go, having dismissed with a wave the usual queries about cream and sugar.
In those days, most restaurants had nesting containers for outservice. These were made of tin and stacked under a handle, like something you might see in a Chinese dairy. I carried two of these containers, one atop the other, but I had no handle and they burned my hands. Every few strides I would have to stop to put them down and blow on my palms. After a while, when the whole thing was not quite as hot, I held it and ran.
I wanted to get back to the field so I could see the two men. I would slow down only after I had confirmed that they were still there. As I ran, the coffee sloshed out of the containers and scalded my hands. It flowed down my arms and wet my sleeves. My shirt front was soaked with it, and my pants had an oval stain centered on my fly.
Though only half the coffee remained, the gold piece was safely in my pocket and I thought that if the two men didn't like the service I could always give back the money. But before I came to the edge of the field I saw through the trees that they were not there.
As I froze in place, my hands carefully cradling the tin containers of coffee, I feared above all that my parents would think I had betrayed them. My thoughts were half shadow: I knew what was coming, and yet I did not. My father had seen everything. He would be self-contained no matter what his fate. He had once told me that every day of his life made him less afraid of death, and that, at the end, no shock or surprise would be too much to bear. But my mother was different. She always went into everything with a full heart that could be broken.
I threw down the tin containers and started to run. As I neared the house I saw one of the front shutters moving slowly in the breeze. My father would not have tolerated that. He would have fastened it.
I was queasy with fear. At the same time, I was sure that I would be scolded for being more than half an hour late and for having stained my clothes with coffee. I was afraid that my father would be severe with me for accepting money from strangers and leaving the property without reporting their presence, and even for throwing down the
coffee before I brought it to them. How embarrassing it would be, I thought, if the two men were sitting in the parlor, waiting for the coffee that had soaked into the ground.
But I was also aware that something totally unknown and far worse might enable me to avoid these lesser catastrophes. The most terrible thing I could imagine, therefore, had its attractions, and even though I sensed that its promise of freedom was entirely false, I was drawn to it. As I ran toward the house I tried to banish my thoughts, but what good is trying to forget thoughts that have already occurred?
Despite all this I was sure that everything would be all right, that my childhood was not suddenly about to end, and by the time I opened our front door my agonies had begun to subside. Apart from clothes soaked with coffee, I was at least half presentable. If the men were there, I would give them back their money and apologize for the rest. Such things happen. They would think I was an honest boy who had tried hard and met with a painful accident.
But they were not in the parlor, and the house was still. I called out. "Mama?" I asked, and no one answered. "Mama?" I said again, my voice shaking.
The whole world changed for me when I saw that the dining room table had been overturned, and that everything that had been on it—food, dishes, cutlery, water, candles, bread—lay on the floor.
I went into the kitchen, where my mother and father lay a few feet from one another in death.
I called to them quietly, but they did not move. Their eyes were open. My father held a kitchen knife that was stained with blood. He had fought. And yet his expression was one of contentment. And my mother's, as I might have predicted, was one of anguish.
She had a small bullet hole in the back of her head. She had been executed. My father, too, had a small-caliber bullet hole, at the temple, but he had also been shot in several places with a .45, and the blood on the floor was his. It must have been his assailants', too, for the knife blade had not a spot of silver upon it.
All I said was, "Oh oh oh," over and over again. Then I stopped. Tears poured from my eyes, but I remained perfectly silent. I lay down between them, in my father's blood. I put my hands on their bodies, and felt with my fingertips that at least they were there, that I could still touch them. And then I closed my eyes. As I fell asleep, I was certain that I would join them, and of course some day I will.
The Glacis at São Conrado
(If you have not done so already,
please return the previous pages to the antproof case.)
AS A CHILD I often heard the expression "the resilience of the human spirit," and it was my luck to understand it as the Brazilians of the human spirit. This misconception instilled in me an almost theological awe for a people that I might otherwise perceive as hopeless and dissolute. Though they are prodigal, undisciplined, and morally blowzy, because of an accident at an early age and because I heed those voices that I first heard, I cannot help but see their redemptive side.
While the snow fell and the fire burned, my mother spoke from the semidarkness, commanding me never to underestimate the Brazilians of the human spirit. "When you are a man," she said, "you'll face many tests that now you cannot even imagine, and you will pass each one if you have faith at the outset in the magnificent Brazilians of the human spirit."
Who choreographs these Brazilians that swarm and strive in their millions, sexualizing the esplanades like grunion, obsessed with vanity and passion, swirling through the days and nights like so many Paolos and Francescas, driven as obviously as puppets. You see them on land, in the water, and in the air, twisting in lazy switchbacks in the blue after sailing off the Gavea under hang gliders.
The reckless among the hang glider pilots wear neither clothes nor helmets, just the sock that passes for a loincloth on the South Atlantic beaches, and to see them flying naked and by the score in the sunlit sky is to see an invasion of angels, for to glide properly they must stretch and extend their limbs like figures in Renaissance paintings—dancers, angels, recumbent gods. Who has choreographed this extraordinary flight? Chance? It would seem to me that in this world the virtuoso mixing of the colors alone would tend to rule out bangs and booms and other 'singularities,' although I know that, these days, if people believe in something, just as often as not they believe in a boom. "The boom is my shepherd, I shall not want...."
I was raised on a bay of the Hudson that by historical and natural accident was a refuge for eagles. As the nation lamented that they were lost, I used to see them many times a day, and I thought they were as common as gulls. Inter alia, I learned to sense the presence of an eagle when I could not see him, in the broken patterns of common birds that flew in groups. Sometimes extremely subtle variations served to announce that presence. Their unity and surety would shatter and their wings would tense, ready to be pulled tight to the body for rolling and diving in evasion. Sometimes they passed over the trees in an even pattern against the clouds, like the spots of an ermine coat or the fleurs-de-lys of wallpaper, and then their ordered formation would explode into chaos, a sorrowful sight and a fine lesson.
The gliders of São Conrado swarm in chaotic splendor. I come here to watch them against the blue sky because I have discovered that toward the end of one's life one begins to understand the idea of angels. I have for many years seen angels in the faces of children, in the lovely drawn-out cries of singers, in painting, and in poetry. But only recently have I learned that they can appear apart from perfection, that it is their fate to be scattered across the sky, their formations exploded, their hearts stopped in shock.
I station myself on the huge glacis at São Conrado, a hillside of gray rock that projects into the sea, and spend the day looking up at the hang gliders. For this I also have a practical motivation. The beach where they land is white and wide, but (even if not by Brazilian standards) it is by my standards quite crowded, and the smell of expresso wafts from the coffee carts on the esplanade.
So I have found a ledge on the hillside of rock, where I come to sit during the afternoons with a newspaper, a water bottle, and the antproof case. Although the beach nearby is covered with people like a cake sprinkled with confectioners' sugar, never have I seen a single soul on these rocks. I have only a little tree to keep me company.
Its smooth trunk is curved and weathered, hammer-forged by wind and sea. It is harder and at the same time more supple than its cousins, and is the last tree out, rooted indelibly in the rock through which, when it was very young, it was obliged to burst.
I left the garden in Niterói, for a while, at least, because I sense danger there. After weaving through the confusion of Rio, I can come here, sure that I am and will remain alone. Though I'm high in the air, the sea is so close that sometimes the wind will carry a small particle of spray and wet my face or my page, so close that I've seen fins break the emerald surface. When I inhale I taste the minerals of the Atlantic.
I enjoy the full beating sun as never before. I don't eat when I'm here, though I do occasionally imagine dinners in intricate detail, but I need to drink, so I have a water bottle that I fill with the water I used to drink in Rome. The night that I met the great singers, I had thirsted for it on my walk from the Villa Doria to the Hassler, and had gone to the bar to get it, which is why I met them. I had drunk it during our talk, and then, the next day, I was drinking it when I saw the streetcar.
I am hesitant even to mention streetcars, having covered your eyes whenever one passed with boys surfing on top (now you know that I know who you are). I have tried to instill in you from an early age a natural revulsion for this practice, as it has caused the senseless death of so many children. Though I have always believed in your intelligence, adolescent boys have no probity. If you are anything like me, you will survive, but only by a hair, and, quite frankly, that makes me nervous.
You may think that shielding your eyes from boys surfing atop streetcars was manipulative. It was, and I have manipulated you in other ways, too. Perhaps by now you will have discovered that not all small boys are requir
ed to read through the Encyclopaedia Britannica volume by volume. In fact, in all of Brazil, you may have been the only boy of any size to fulfill such a requirement. Nor must other children commit to memory logarithmic tables, but I believe that someday, when others express awe at your mental agility you'll thank me.
I apologize, though not abjectly, for manipulating you, the last instance of which is your discovery of this memoir. For years I would put chocolates in the hidden drawer in the left hand cabinet of the partner's desk. You are unable to come into my study without looking in that cabinet. As that is where I will place the antproof case when I have finished my account, I trust that you will have found it.
I know to do this because when I was three or four I discovered candied fruit slices in a drawer of our china cabinet. To this day I cannot refrain from looking in drawers, even in someone else's house. I have often been embarrassed by people who put me on the spot when they see me obsessively looking in their desks.
"Excuse me," they say. "What (the emphasis is always on the what) are you doing?" They breathe lightly at the end of this question.
"Do you have any candied fruit slices?" I ask.
"No. I don't (emphasis always on the don't) have any candied fruit slices." More indignant and amazed light breathing.
"That's all right," I say, "I don't even like (emphasis always on the like) candied fruit slices." And I don't.
I've never had many friends, and this is but one reason why. Opening drawers isn't so bad, really, and, besides, I can't help it: I open my own drawers incessantly, sometimes just seconds after I've looked in them. During my years as an undergraduate I once (emphasis on the once) went to Thanksgiving dinner at the home of a classmate who lived in Beverly Farms. Perhaps because his father had been a member of the cabinet, there were cabinets and drawers all over the house.
We went upstairs to tell his father, who was sitting on his bed trying to pull off riding boots, that a snake was in the coal bin. Wouldn't you know, I went over and yanked open a dresser drawer, and it was just my luck to discover an inflatable sex doll. Of course, I didn't know what it was, so I pulled it out and asked, "What is this?"