The plane was lifted, dropped, rolled, and pitched with such ferocity that I felt as if I were inside a bone in the jaws of an atropine-injected terrier. The cabin jingled like crazy. Straps and belts beat against the bulkheads like whips. I saw screws turning in their holes, and watched the needles on my many gauges snap back and forth in unison like the Rockettes. One second I had full tanks of gasoline, and not a tenth of a second later I was totally dry. One second I was at sea level, and another at 40,000 feet.
The vibration was so bad that my eyes started to dance in their sockets. I had no idea how much time had passed, or what altitude I had reached, or even if I were pointed up. I was freezing cold, with water spraying in my face, and my muscles were cramped from fighting the controls. But as the plane rattled and shook and I was about to lose my influence over it, perhaps to be turned upside down and slammed to the ground, I began, as always, to enjoy it.
I heard a note of music, a single note that rose as if from nowhere and was held impossibly long. I had heard it before, when I would dive after a plane evading me for its life, and shell casings flew from my cannons like tailings flying from a milling machine. There, in the storm, in ten-tenths cloud, once again, nothing of me was left as I rode on waves of pure force.
I had no objection to this. I felt neither pain nor fear. I sank from chamber to chamber deeper into the darkness of life and the light of the soul. All in all, it was a remarkably gentle thing, and the greater the force of everything flying apart, the stronger the presence of absolute tranquility. The feeling is like that of coming home. I wanted the plane to break apart, but at twenty-one thousand feet I broke through the surface of an endless mass of cloud and rode into a clear sky blazing not with the insanity of lightning but with the solidity of stars.
Dry air flooded the cabin, and, despite the roar of the engines, the world was silent. Below, the clouds flashed white in random syncopations that kept them continuously bright. I took my oxygen, found my course, and continued on with moonlit speed.
I came fully awake only at dawn. For hours I had been thinking and dreaming, shivering and faint. Though I would often fall asleep and then find myself jolted by the plane nosing up or down, I managed somehow to keep the compass dead on the right heading. When the sun finally lit the cabin and I came to my senses, I discovered that the source of this navigation miracle was that the water pouring over the instrument panel had shorted out half the electrical system. The compass had been faithful through the night to the magnetic field of the instrument panel. No matter which way I turned the plane, it always read the same.
I had absolutely no idea where I was. Though the sun had risen more or less where it should have, previous to that the sky had lightened far to my left and somewhat behind me. The land below looked like the interior rather than the coastal plain. All across the horizon fat clouds like the floats of jellyfish rode in the buoyant blue sky, trailing dark veils of rain. But everything was mostly sunny and depressingly green, with hardly a river in sight and not a single road that I could see. It wasn't the Amazon; it was far too hilly.
Though I had less than an hour of fuel I thought that perhaps everything would come out all right if I flew east, that I would sight the coast and then discover that I was within striking distance of my destination. So I flew on for half an hour, searching for the thin blue line that would mean my salvation, but it did not appear. With, at best, twenty minutes' fuel remaining, I realized that I had been defeated.
The country below me was an endless carpet of corrugated green hills and occasional rocky outcroppings. In the creases of the hills flowed streams or brooks, but nothing sufficiently flat or wide for an emergency landing. The best I might do would be to come in along the top of a ridge, but as the ridges were covered with tall trees, that held very little promise.
Even an airport might not have been enough, in that a large part of the landing gear was missing or stuck. During the war I had seen bombers trying to land on a wheel and a door, and more terrible a sight does not exist than that of a plane, full of wounded men, that slowly cartwheels and breaks into flame.
If I survived the crash, I might not survive the wilderness. And even if I did I might lose the gold either to the undergrowth or to someone who would find it before I could return. Now the best that might happen was that, unharmed, I would reach my apartment in Rio de Janeiro and have to start all over again in a strange country where I knew neither one word of the language nor a single person. Though this was defeat, I felt immediately younger.
When I had only ten minutes of fuel in my tanks, I saw a road, one of those newly cut orange ribbons stretching like a ray of light through endless green. The corrugated landscape stopped at the edge of a green sea. The clay was probably impassable in the rainy season, and the track was empty for as far as I could see.
I flew along its length, reconciled to the fact that when my fuel was exhausted I would land on it as best I could, hoping to settle the fuselage into a narrow slot after the trees had clipped off both wings. I was unable to see from the air that the road was following a grade, but this came clear when a river appeared two miles to the right, where an outcropping of rock stepped down in the gradual descent of the terrain. The river issued from a green berm and a tangle of trees, plunged in a dazzling white fall, and then turned forty-five degrees from the road.
Though this stream was no wider than the road, I thought it might be more forgiving of a landing, so I flew along its length for a few minutes looking for an opening, but the straightest and widest section was at the beginning, just after the fall.
Banking 180 degrees, I began my descent. I didn't think I was going to come out alive, but at least I knew that the river was white and fresh, and that it ran fast.
As I dropped lower I discovered that I had underestimated it. It was wider than it had appeared from altitude. Were I to risk crashing headlong into the fall, I might be able to take the plane in over the water and clear the obstructions on the banks. I decided to do this, though I hadn't much running space.
The left outboard engine began to skip, so I knew I was just about dry. I lowered the flaps, knowing that once they hit the water they would act as a break and throw me and everything else in the plane forward with a shock that would probably kill me. But I had no choice. If I raised the flaps even at the last moment, my speed would be too great and I would crash against the cliff behind the waterfall.
I was too busy to think. The foam at the base of the waterfall looked like snow, and when the plane hit, the impact was not as great as I had expected, because the water was so full of churning air. The plane slid faster than I thought it would, which was alarming. In an instant it went right through the fall and smashed against the rock wall behind it.
I was still conscious as the cockpit filled with water. The nose of the C-54 pointed slightly up because the waterfall pushed down the tail.
I unbuckled my seat belt and floated from it quite easily. The glass was still in all the windows, so I swam to the door in the fuselage, but it had been jammed shut. Sure that I was going to drown, I looked up in a gesture of pride and acceptance, and when I did I saw a rupture in the fuselage, and that right above me, in the ceiling of the plane, was a spacious opening.
I pushed hard with my legs and flew through this into a chamber of roiling water in which I had so little buoyancy that I could hardly float. I breathed in a few times even though I was not in air, and when I broke through to the surface I was choking and deafened by the thunder of falling water. The chamber behind the fall was like the surf on a brisk autumn day. It was only half light in there, and almost impossible to breathe.
I tried to swim out, but the force of the water pushed me down irresistibly, held me against the bottom, and then threw me backward. I knocked my head against part of the plane, and floated up again, just as slowly as the first time.
As water fell into the chamber the same amount of water had to be cast out. The exit wasn't on the floor, so it had to be al
ong the sides. I dived down, hugging the wall, and halfway to the bottom I felt a strong current. The more I followed it the more I was accelerated, until I was no longer even swimming. Soon I was going so fast that I curled up and put my hands over my head for fear of being hurled against an obstruction. I was not hurled against something solid but, rather, thrown out of the water and into the air. I breathed during my moment of free flight, fell again into the foam, came to the surface, spread my limbs, and, as usual, found myself riding at great speed on the cool torrents of a river that had saved me.
The Finest School
(If you have not done so already,
please return the previous pages to the antproof case.)
AT SãO CONRADO I discovered that what I had written would not fit in the antproof case. Perched on the glacis, with wind ruffling the pages, I had tried to stuff them back in, but I was afraid that I might drop them into the sea, and my efforts were half-hearted. With a blooming rose of pages clutched against my chest, I teetered in the rock face, got to the road, and made my way to a café on the beach, where I sat within fifteen feet of an expresso machine, breathing hard and soaked with sweat as I struggled to get the manuscript into the case. I was so enraged by the odor of coffee that I was unable to do anything. On the bus coming home I tried again, but was still trembling because of the coffee, so I gave up.
I float on a raft of troubles that intensify day by day. Long ago I would have thought that by ending my life an inconspicuous failure—a poor inconspicuous failure—I would at least have been free. But problems are torturers: they are encouraged by your defeat, like dogs that go wild as their quarry sinks to its knees.
The next day, after a long and fitful sleep, I put on my bathrobe, went to the desk, and, trembling with despair, tried to get the São Conrado pages into the antproof case. I summoned all my strength and could not do it. I might have done it were I to have wrinkled them, but I would rather die than wrinkle a clean sheet of paper.
"Well," I said, trying to comfort myself, "it's simple. I'll go to the store where I bought the antproof case, and buy a new one in a larger size." That would be much better than stuffing everything in anyway, because getting the pages out would be a nightmare, and if the contents were under as much pressure as I am the seams might start to open, which is dangerous because some ants are very small, and others, though they be not small, are tiny nonetheless as juveniles.
I allowed a full day for obtaining a new and larger case. For me, shopping is one of the most physically and emotionally exhausting things in the world. This is because I am somewhat inflexible and fairly exact. I'll decide, for example, that I want a tie of a certain pattern and color—neither of which has ever been heard of in the worldwide history of neckwear—and then spend the rest of my life looking for it. I will look at a million ties, and never will I find the one I want. I will then add to my burgeoning store of regrets and disappointments yet another, like a lost and unrequited love, that I carry with me. I cannot give up on things, I simply cannot. If they, like Constance, are animate and have wills of their own and they push me away, I have no choice. But I do not have the right to give up on those things that are silent and still and forever unobtainable ... I do not have the right to let them drop.
God help me if I actually need something in a day. I'll walk from store to store, monopolize the phone system, and veer about the streets, totally devoid of blood sugar. And I knew that finding a good antproof case might not be so easy, as I had bought the original in 1955 or 1956.
Very early one morning, less than a quarter of an hour after the stores opened, I walked into the stationers where I had obtained the first case thirty years before. Nothing had changed in those thirty years. When I first settled in Rio I'd come to this place for my supply of stationery, but as in the case of many establishments that one patronizes in the beginning of one's residence in a strange city, after I had abandoned it I had come to associate it with the period of ignorance and naivete when I would pay double for almost everything.
In the early morning, merchants are somnambulant and subdued. They expect and want little. As the first customer, I was, therefore, semi-invisible. The fan was turning, moving air laden with the smell of printed paper and oiled leather. In the back, a mimeograph machine was spitting out flyers, and near the cash register a parrot slept on a wooden perch.
This was the emporium of a man who had been sewn into the sleeve of routine. Probably not a single thing had been changed since the moment when, for him, life had finally lost its sparkle. The shelves were half empty, the stock obsolete and covered with dust. Still, he carried certain items—lecterns, pointers, stamp-licking machines—that enabled him to survive at the edge of the business district. The faded colors that surrounded these things—green, brown, and beige—had evolved rather than been chosen, his decorators and designers being oxidation and the sun streaming through the front windows. Nothing had been placed where it lay, either deliberately or less than twenty years before.
A little old man with two-inch-thick glasses and salt-and-pepper hair slowly approached me. "May I help you?" he asked, as listless as a dog in a fish store.
"Yes," I replied, for even though I had slept little and arisen early, I was as eager as always when enraged. "I'm looking for a large antproof case."
"For a what?"
"An antproof case. A large one."
"What's an antproof case?"
"It's a case," I told him, "into which an ant cannot obtain entry."
"I never heard of such a thing."
"I have one," I said triumphantly, "and I bought it in this store."
"When?"
"In nineteen-fifty-five, or six."
"I'll ask my father," the man said as he turned.
After some muted mumbling from the far recesses of the back room, a sound that I imagine must be familiar to the halls of monasteries, a man far more ancient than I walked slowly toward me. His glasses, twice as thick as his son's, were so powerful that were he an astronomer he would not have needed a telescope.
"I used to sell dah hantproof case," he said, "in dah Tventies. Did you buy von den?"
"No, I bought one only recently, in the mid-Fifties."
He thought for a moment, sleeping with his eyes open. "It must have been von of dah last vons ve had out. Vhat color vas it?"
"Green canvas, rosewood, brass fittings, and a scarlet inlay."
"Oh yes," he said, in slow motion. "I tink dhat vas dah last von ve solt. Vhen people vent on hexpaditions to dah Hamazon, ve couldn't stock enough of dem. Ve had dem," he said, lifting an arm to indicate expanse, "stacked hup to dah sea-link. Ve had dem for men, for vimen, for children heven. Big vons, little vons. Heverytink!"
"And not one is left?" I inquired. "If you have one yourself, and it's the right size, I'd be happy to trade my smaller one for it, and pay the difference."
"None left. Such a tink vas for a different time. People cared about different tinks. Dah vorld vas different. Dey don't make dem anymore. No von vants dem."
"I do."
"Vhy do you bother? Now, if such ha tink vere made—hand people don't tink about hants hanymore—it vould be plostic."
"I think about ants."
"It vould be ha color new to dis hearth."
"Ants still exist, just as they used to."
"Hevrytink is different now."
"But not me. I'm not different. I haven't changed."
"No?" he asked.
"No."
"Vhy not?"
"I can't," I said. "I can't leave them."
"Who?"
"All those left behind."
"If hit's your pleasure," he told me. "But, deh fact remains, I have not ha sinkle hantproof case. Der is not ha store in hall dah vorld vere you vill find von."
I had managed to find a light in every dark chamber of the past eighty years. But suddenly hearing that no one made an antproof case, that no one cared, that they were forgotten and strange, suggested to me that th
is was the end.
How perfectly natural, expected, and perhaps in certain circumstances even admirable it had seemed, when I was young, to buy an antproof case. Now, if I am to believe the astronomer, no one thinks about ants. Is there one less ant in the world now than once there was? Probably the ant population has grown by quite a few trillion, and yet no one thinks to use an antproof case.
It is as if all the ants had somehow been eradicated, and, yet, they are everywhere. If the president of France dropped a brioche from his breakfast tray and it rolled unseen under his bed, the ants of the Élysées Palace would emerge en masse to claim it, streaming from hidden veins beneath the parquetry and damask.
This is not a condition peculiar to France, for if they so desired the ants could dance upon the desk in the Oval Office or take a nap in Queen Elizabeth's ermine robes. They can go everywhere because they are so little that hardly anyone bothers to kill them. I'm not obsessed with them (I'm not obsessed with anything). It's just that when you have something of any importance you put it in an antproof case, don't you?
Half the time that we imagine things are changing for the better they are actually changing for the worse. The glory of accomplishment is misunderstood by later generations merely because of the ugly progress of quantities. For example, Lindbergh's flight was truly great. One man, straightforward and unafraid, did what had never been done, where richly funded syndicates with multi-engined planes and much greater power had failed and prevaricated. With a single engine, a small but brilliantly conceived plane, and no fear, he did what they could only plan. It was not so much that he flew the Atlantic, but that he flew it alone.
And now he is nearly forgotten as, day after day, the Concorde makes the crossing in a few hours as its passengers sit in silence facing their champagne and caviar. Is it not better to be Lindbergh, suffering sleeplessly through dark nights over the Atlantic, than a tycoon in a silk tie traveling faster than the speed of sound and not giving it a thought?