You can imagine what it is like for me, then, in a country where, if a fly alights successfully upon a mango, ten thousand dancers take to the streets in delirium and euphoria, a country where a man who wins the lottery spends twice what he has won on a party to celebrate his winnings. They're not Scotsmen, these Brazilians. They know quiet observation only when they're sick, and they cannot ever leave anything unmolested. They stand in groups to watch the sunset, and gossip about the growth of plants. Even the wind isn't allowed to curl the waves in peace; they sing about it.
And yet, they have no consciousness. It's as if they lack the part of the brain that rigs time into the geometrical construction in which one is trapped. Life for them is like floating in a warm river. They do not have the northern gifts of apprehension and perception, our bright sense of fire, our sharp dread of ice, but they live their lives as if they are riding on rainbows.
Though they cannot see it, even the dissolute life they live is still a part of the truth—a ripple upon the sea, a diamond-flash in the stream. That I know and that I have known. What sometimes escapes me as I detest them for their licentiousness, their repulsive addiction to coffee, and their bulbous, floppity nakedness, is that their existence is not merely a part of the truth but also a means of seeking it out, a methodology, if you will, like the dance of the bee, or an orchid swaying on a warm breeze, all without pain, all vigorous, lovely, and full of grace.
I have always thought of the year 1900 as the nozzle of a big pastry bag that unfurls icing when you squeeze it, and that for almost a hundred years the curl of civilization has been unraveling in discord. Though the rest of the world has left the antipodes behind, we are stuck in a better time. In Montevideo, everything is so old that it could be 1910, and, oh, if only it were so. I wish the world would stop hurtling ahead at such great speed. I wish that tranquility would, by action, cease to be overawed. In a sense, the century itself explains what I have done, although my purpose is not to make excuses.
In the early 1950's—the month was June—I went to Rome for Stillman and Chase. The cities of Europe still had the feel of war. Many buildings were in ruins, many more pocked and damaged, and concrete fortifications littered the fields and beaches like remnants of a receding glacier. I remember the sound of the sea at Ardea on the Tyrrhenian, which had not been broken from its insistent rhythms by or since the years of war. The immutable brine washed through the stones like a heartbeat, just as it had when, almost ten years before, I climbed out upon a beach of the same sea in North Africa, still alive after having gone down in my plane.
In those ten years I had put on a little weight—I was in my late forties—and had lost the grace I once had for running free and sailing over obstructions like a deer. And, except in the early hours of the morning or late at night, when I dressed in my habitual khaki shorts, polo shirt, and mountain boots, I was imprisoned in expensive suits.
I had to be in Rome for a few days, including a weekend, and did not have enough time to visit the airfields from which I had flown against Germany, vaulting the Alps in a roll of voluminous air that lifted the wings of the P-51 so buoyantly that they bent with the strain. Nor was I able to arrange a trip to Venice as I had wanted, so I stayed in the city, and on Saturday night I went to an opera recital in the Villa Doria. I was very lucky in that the gentlemen who sang were at a high point. These were the greatest singers in the world, and they knew it. Despite the fact that they were singularly unhealthy champions of pallor and girth, they were angels of song. Perhaps they had trucked with the devil, or perhaps in their operations in such elevated realms they had simply needed their bodies less and less.
I was ecstatic, and, like a young boy, I imagined myself in their place. Then I returned to the Hassler, where I stopped at the bar to get a bottle of mineral water before I went up to my suite. In the corner, almost hidden in darkness, were the four greatest male singers in the world. While I had walked through the night among robbers and bicycle thieves, these four huge blimps had taken a taxi. Suddenly, at the end of the long green tunnel of cool night air filled with my memory of their singing, there they were.
With the bottle in my hand, held at the neck the way you'd carry a fishing pole, I stared at them. The glasses on the black lacquered table around which they were sitting were beaded on the outside and sparkling like ice. At the center of the table was a bowl of celery and olives.
When the singers saw me, they looked at one another, shrugged, and motioned for me to approach. It was not as if circus stars had invited an awed child into their midst—we were roughly the same age, I had a very vivid and emotional sense of Europe, having recently played my small part in the greatest opera in all of history, and, to my profound discomfort, I was dressed like a minister of finance. Still, my heart jumped, and I was anxious not to be lost in their august consideration of music and art.
But, of course, being artists, they wanted to talk only about money, and they displayed an exaggerated respect for me, as my business was money at its most arcane. People love that. I asked question after question about the structure of an aria and the ineffable beauties of harmony, timing, and tone. They asked question after question about exchange rates, tax treaties, and arbitrage. And then, as the night deepened, we began to talk of our childhoods, and that is how I got to know them, and they to know me.
They are all dead now. I watched from afar as they dropped, one by one, and though they were very rich, when they passed away they were not remembered for their money.
I knew then, at the bar in the Hassler, that my questions were better and more important than theirs, because their work was far better and more important than mine. I remembered the line of silver trumpets (in Italy, the brass sections are often silvered) echoing off the garden walls of the Villa Doria, and as we spoke—they of growing up in villages and cities in Spain and northern Italy, and I of the Hudson and the private sanitarium at Château Parfilage (it was a lunatic asylum, actually)—I decided that I would quit the firm.
When I told them this, with great conviction, they thought I was drunk, but I pointed out that I had been drinking only mineral water. At first, as a gesture of elegance and courtesy, they were opposed, as you must be if someone tells you he is about to throw over his career to join the circus. And, I suppose, being familiar with their own magnetic effect, they were always cautioning romantics who wanted to follow in their perilous and glorious footsteps.
But, then, inexplicably, they warmed to the idea. The Spaniard asked if I were independently wealthy. I shook my head from side to side like a ventriloquist's dummy.
"To know," he asked. "How you live?"
The two Italians chimed in simultaneously (these people could time a note the way Robin Hood could shoot an arrow). "When you leave," they said, in C major, "you should be very meticulous. Make sure to turn off the lights, and take all the money with you."
"Now, you may have a point there," I said. "You have really hit upon something, you know?" They could sing for a million years and they would not have a hundredth of what passed through Stillman and Chase in a day. And I, I could have a heart attack in Greenwich after several more decades of asphyxiation, and die in a private room in a teaching hospital, or I could spend a few magnificent and tense years planning, coming alive with illicit electricity—and then abscond with enough to buy five hundred houses in Greenwich and die in as many teaching hospitals as I wanted.
"What a good idea!" I said. "I hadn't thought of it!"
"Bankers, after all," said the Austrian, who—what else—was more serious than the others, "are the worst kind of dogs." I hadn't really seen myself that way, but I was not offended.
We made a plan. They were as animated as if they were singing, but I was fooling them, for as we went through the elements I was thinking in parallel and in secret. In the end, I seemed to have lost my enthusiasm, for, among other things, the scheme was as implausible as one would expect of a plot hatched in a bar of the Hotel Hassler by four opera singers and
an investment banker who had spent part of his boyhood in a mental institution. But, though I concealed it well, I was burning with excitement.
I'm getting ahead of myself, which is strange to say when one is speaking of events of almost half a century gone, as the only real way to get ahead of oneself is to tell the future and report from death. Is approaching death what has driven me to write this memoir? Certainly not.
If things work out well, then you will come to understand exactly why I have written it, although I use the words written and said almost interchangeably—not because I am unaware of the difference, but because I have found, even at the start, that the power of a memoir is to turn voice to word and word to voice until they are fused together as smoothly as a sheet of oil upon a slab of ice.
My motive, as you will come to know if you are who I hope you are, is very plain. Perhaps my words will have some other effect, but my purpose is as simple as a machine designer's urge to diagram his engine, or the explorer's desire to draw a map. I have a homely task to fulfill, and this is my method of fulfilling it.
Should you be someone entirely unknown to me, well then, the arrow has been lost, the seed driven by its sad and diaphanous parachute to a vastly different realm, where it will sparkle in barren silence for an infinity. The decision is not mine. It belongs, as does everything, to the wind.
Let us assume for a moment that I missed the target, and that I will never know who you are. Still, I will address you as you. If you are a man, then perhaps we could have flown together, or robbed a bank, two activities that are always absorbing and enjoyable if done properly. In the case of flying, the great thing is to be carried where you could not have imagined you would ever be, and to come back alive. In the case of robbing a bank, the requisite is that no one be hurt, which is actually as difficult as or more difficult than extracting the money. Ideally, the reallocation of funds should not come at the expense of honest citizens, banking organizations, the government, or the polity, but, rather, purely by a swift attack upon what is corrupt, illegitimate, and untenable.
And, if you are a woman, perhaps I would have loved you. That is not to say that you would have loved me. I don't assume that. In fact, I assume the opposite. I have been difficult and objectionable, some would say absolutely impossible, since I was born, well, since I was ten—and yet I had in me far more than my expected share of love. Perhaps this was because, in a life that was a paradigm of unrequitedness, with so much investment and so little expenditure, love grew upon itself and was many times multiplied.
If you doubt the veracity of my story, remember that in the compression of eighty years into so short a span as this memoir the time between events is lost, and it is only the grace of time slowly unfurling that gives to the shocks of one's life the illusion of expectedness.
I had planned to write chronologically, but then realized that, of course, I don't think chronologically. Writing a memoir is like fishing. You cast your line and you pull on it when a fish strikes, but you never know what will be on the other end, for the ocean is deep and is filled with marvelous creatures that do not break the surface in expected order. Nor do they swim under the waves with the whales leading and the minnows at the end of long straight lines. A memoir, like a fish, will not thrive under every discipline. Another way of putting this is that if you alphabetize the Iliad you will have approximately the Athens telephone book. When I think back, things don't line up, they stand out, so I will take them as they come, as once I took them as they came.
One copy of the manuscript exists, and one copy alone, because at the reproduction store in Niterói the self-service machine is next to a coffee urn. I begged them, almost on my knees, with a clothespin on my nose, but they would not move it. Therefore, to protect this story from that which would destroy it, I have taken great pains to secure a totally antproof case, to which, I trust, you will return these pages one by one as you finish reading them.
Miss Mayevska
(If you have not done so already,
please return the previous pages to the antproof case.)
HOW CAN YOU know history? You can only imagine it. Anchored though you may be in fact and document, to write a history is to write a novel with checkpoints, for you must subject the real and absolute truth, too wide and varied for any but God to comprehend, to the idiosyncratic constraints of your own understanding. A "definitive" history is only one in which someone has succeeded not in recreating the past but in casting it according to his own lights, in defining it. Even the most vivid portrayal must be full of sorrow, for it illuminates the darkness of memory with mere flashes and sparks, and what the past begs for is not a few bright pictures but complete reconstitution. Short of that, you can only follow the golden threads, and they are always magnificently tangled.
The dominant images of the year 1919 are those of a world awakening from the nightmare of war—troops returning, families reunited or shattered by grief, the armistice, the peace. For Americans, it was a time of recrossing the Atlantic, east to west, of the return to a world as quiet and full of hope as Childe Hassam portrayed in paintings that even now have not lost the least part of their lustre. For me, however, little was tranquil as I followed the crooked and contradictory threads that illumine not only the times themselves, like bones that glow within the gelatinous plate of an X ray, but which point to where the times are headed.
In the spring the Atlantic was crowded with busy steamships terribly overloaded on the western passage and nearly empty upon return. I was one of the American boys on the sea, but I was not returning to the New World, a hero. Au contraire. I was a passenger on the east-bound Jeanne d'Arc, I was fourteen years old, I was fair-haired, smooth-cheeked, as lean as a ballet dancer, and I was in a strait jacket.
I had no need whatsoever to have been so constrained. At that age, especially, I was as tender and innocent as a milk-fed veal. But you know very well what happens to innocent and tender milk-fed veals, and where they end up. The judge whose bitter imagination had contrived my sentence actually had brought a cup of cheap nauseating coffee into the courtroom where I was being tried. What justice could exist when mine own judge was himself one of the many fiends I was compelled to eradicate?
With no coffee nearby, I was very gentle. I was easily moved, always in love, and most willing to sacrifice. I worked hard, and because I lived more or less alone and had no entertainment, and was totally serious, totally nervous, I was far and away the most accomplished student in my school, though my record was mixed. This was only because I was never able to force myself to engage those subjects that did not excite, confound, or invigorate my imagination, and also because I was always immediately willing to defy authority.
Even as a schoolboy I made mortal enemies among adults—my Latin teacher, for example, a cruel, balding young man of twenty-seven with a canine tooth that hung out over his lower lip even when his mouth was tightly closed. The first day in class, we took a look at him and we knew that God had put us on earth to carry forth the victories of the angels, which were achieved not only on the pale blue terraces of heaven but in the most unlikely corners of hell. Though I received consistent zeros in Latin, by the time I exited his jurisdiction I had scarred my teacher, scalded him, lamed him, and punched out his pointed and drooping tooth.
Others were worse. When I was not yet ten, an art teacher whose name was Sanco Demirel ordered me to have my hair clipped. I threw back at him a simple flat no. He immediately charged through the rows of desks, lifted me into the air, and transported me to the book-storage room. Rage often builds upon itself, and his was no exception. As I flew, painfully gripped, high above my accustomed altitude, I feared for my life.
He slammed the door of the book room and took a cane from the top shelf. "Bend over!" he commanded.
For me, this was a defining moment. I decided then and in an instant that defiance and death are preferable to subjugation, and I narrowed my eyes, signaling for a fight. Irritated beyond measure, he began to chase
me around the room, flailing with the cane. Books flew about like chickens, but I was able to escape. It did not take long to make him apoplectic, and I knew that if he caught me he was going to kill me. I rattled the door. It was locked, the latch frozen, and I hadn't the strength to move it, but he thought I was about to escape.
He was at the other end of the room. So much lay littered between us that he despaired of catching me, and threw the cane in frustration. It missed, it clattered, and it was soon in my hands.
He remained unfazed, for I was only half his size. The straight end of the cane was quite narrow. As soon as I realized this, and that my possession of the cane gave him an excuse to beat me to smithereens, I put it in the pencil sharpener.
As I began to turn the crank, his jaw dropped. Had he moved quickly he would have had me, but he hesitated. When I removed the bamboo shaft from the gray sharpening machine, I was no longer a fourth-grader about to be turned the color of blotched jam, I was Achilles.
The shaft was three feet long, with a six-inch tapered point of razor-sharp, hard, blond bamboo—and I was as agile as a gnat. I could jump and twist unlike any grown man, and my reflexes were so fresh that I was able to toss five pennies from the back of my hand and catch them one at a time before they hit the floor. I will never forget the light and uplifting moment when the power fled from him to me. A beam of sunlight came through the windows above the highest shelves and enveloped me in a bright golden disc.
The first thing he said, shrinking back, was, "I didn't intend to hurt you."
My answer to that lie was, "Sanco Demirel, you are going to die."
I have always been fiercely protective of children, especially myself, as the task was almost exclusively mine from a rather early age. I had not then the moderating experience that later years would fail to bring, and I fully intended to kill him, right then, in the book-storage room. I jumped the piles of overturned primers, fragrant pine drawers that had flown from cabinet carcasses like extracted elephant teeth, and chairs turned helplessly on their sides. And, by God, the ray of sun followed me, shining upon the golden sword that I was ready to thrust into any one of a hundred terrible places in Sanco Demirel's cruel bullying body.