The world leaves behind unseen that which is great and that which it loves. New loves are born, and then they too are left behind. In this oversped and cowardly rush, devotion has no place, consistency no value, love no other reward than forgetfulness. I don't like it. Apparently only one antproof case is left, and I have it, but unfortunately it is not large enough to hold everything in my heart.
So, as you can see, I'm doubling back now, writing on the reverse of each page and heading toward the beginning. This has made me somewhat giddy, because I feel as if I possess a time machine. If only I did. I would pilot myself back to that perfect evening in June, and wait for the two gentlemen from Mr. Edgar's private car. As they came through the woods, I would put a Winchester slug into each of their brains, and then roll them down the hillside into the marsh. And then I would go home for dinner, unable to tell the tale, too moved to speak.
The antproof case is truly beautiful. They don't make things like it anymore, and even if they did they could not age them to match the glow of its suffering, or condition them to know what it has held and where it has been, or teach them sixty years of absolute inanimate patience. True, it may have seen only the sky as it sat upon the shelf near a window, but it may have sat upon that shelf for twenty years, master of nuances among the clouds, or of the silence and darkness of years in a drawer, or of breezes that swept across the cool tiles as it spent nights on the floor.
You have been my little ally, always on the lookout, running up the mountain to give me warnings from the barber, listening for footsteps near the door. Though as I write this you are a child, your early understanding of such things will be perfected. You will never find a weapon to which you will not take quickly and easily. You already know how to walk quietly at night, how to arrive unexpectedly, how never to be caught unaware.
I cannot imagine not teaching a child these lessons, but I must beg your forgiveness not only because they are such early sorrow but because I brought you to what you know by bringing you to me. I hope that, if and when the time comes, the things you learned from me will save your life, and that you will embrace my memory as I embrace my imagination of you as a man.
The gold is in the water, which is where it should be: water flowing, water dissolving, an eternal collision of oxygen and spray, a cool cloud that scours the walls of rock and the notion of time.
It rests behind the turbulence, protected and safe. The sweep of the current and the power of the backwash cannot carry it away, and the river will never run dry, for the simple reason that the territory of its tributaries is vast and green. Many years ago, the parts of the plane that could be swept downstream were taken into the flow, never to reappear, or, if they did, only to puzzle whoever happened upon them.
I have returned to the site several times, and at night I slipped into the river. With a telescoping aluminum pole I probed close to the backwash and found the fuselage, what was left of the wings, and the tail. The weight of the gold and the engines has kept the plane in place, and there it lies.
If you want it, you may have it. Because I promised Marlise never to tell you, and because this memoir may fall into the hands of others, I can't say exactly where the gold is. I dare not break my promise. And, anyway, knowing that it lies at the base of a fall is not enough, for I have changed my description of things so as to keep the actual location a mystery. Is it in Brazil, or some other country? Is it really a waterfall? Keep your mind open, and think of my description as a construct, a code.
By the way, Funio, do you remember where we saw the ducks? We ate something that Mama did not allow us to have at home or in her presence, and it was our secret. We have discussed it on several occasions since. That day, I brought the air pistol, and I let you shoot it. The occasion and the location are engraved in your mind, and I have confirmed several times that you remember.
There. The transfer is complete. All of this is not so strange, really: wealthy people often give their children surprises like this, only instead of gold in the water the gift is usually a numbered account in a Zurich bank. If the revenue agents could have their way they would probably be flies on the walls of nurseries, or frogs hiding in the rocks of trout streams, as fathers tell their sons and daughters those numbers in rituals that, unbeknownst to the children, impress the code in their memories like a branding iron sinking into wax. Half the people I knew at Harvard had a number, but that was then, when it was different, when virtually everyone there—except me—was rich.
You may wonder why I chose not to retrieve that which I had rightfully stolen. One might even say that I had earned it—in the odd way in which I earn what I earn, do what I do, and come to know what I have come to know.
Which is exactly the point. These were wages that I did not want, and only by leaving them uncollected could I live with myself. I didn't take anything because I wanted it, I took it because I was driven to it, and had I been unable to refuse it I would have continued to suffer as before. As things unfolded, I took it and I left it, and in refusing it I suffered a little less. It's true that the moment I realized I had become too frail to get it myself I changed my mind, but had my strength been miraculously restored I am sure my mind would have changed back.
Whatever I do I've always done not because I want something but to compensate for a loss, to bring about a balance, to create amends, to make things right. I never cared about money, though it was at times exciting to have a great deal of it. And one of my strong beliefs is that there is something right and holy about gold lost in flowing water, as if this were one of the harmonies of nature, as if prospectors removing it from mountain streams create an imbalance that I was born to redress.
Be that as it may, your mother and I did well enough without it. In fact, she would have been unbearable with it. When first we met she actually took me by the hand and brought me to the window of a jewelry store, where she greedily and seductively pointed to a pair of gargantuan gold earrings. They were so big that they had a wire between them for passing through the hair and over the crown of the head, as no earlobes could support such weight unaided.
Had we had money, she would have had her face lifted a half a dozen times by now, wasting her life and mine on appearances. I experienced enough of that kind of thing at Stillman and Chase over the years, and when I was married to Constance I learned to keep away from it. Most fabulously rich people, Funio, become idiots.
Some are idiots to begin with, but, of those who are not, my guess is that seventy to eighty percent later succumb. They foolishly convince themselves that they are better than others, and holding yourself above others strips you of intelligence and vitality. I do not know exactly why this is, but I have seen it far too many times to believe otherwise.
We lived simply and happily on my small income as an instructor at the naval academy and her salary as a bank teller. It was as good a life as I would permit myself to have. And perhaps because I never wanted Marlise to share my penance, I did my best to forgive her when I grew old and she was still so young.
Though I am your father, I am not your natural father. Your natural father was biologically an acrobat. But it doesn't matter. I have loved you like a son, and you have been devoted in a way that I admire beyond measure. Now you may claim your patrimony, or you may be like me, and quietly do without it.
I don't know when I'm going to die or how old you will be when I do, or how long it will take you to find this. Still, I'm close to the prospects that overlook the unending plains of death, and I must set some things straight while I'm still alive and can tell the truth.
Your mother was always impressed with her own beauty, and wanted to be attended by those who were her equals. That is why, in a biological sense, you are not my son. As hurt as I was by this, it was impossible not to love her—one more woman whom I loved and who did not love me. Ironically, I loved her for her beauty. And I also loved the way she speaked English.
It was difficult to defy the commands of blood, which made me want to make l
ove with her as often as I could so that I might soften my own imperfections by mating them with her glories: her statuesque teeth whiter than an igloo, her flashing green eyes, her hair the color of blood and gold, her unceasing vitality. All nature drove me to her and her away from me. She would touch me, and her mind would wander. She would fly from me, like every woman I have ever loved, and drink coffee.
Coffee. When I look back I feel neither shame nor regret about my war against coffee, but sometimes I wonder why it had to be me, why I was the one who was chosen. I wasn't born to throw a man from a moving train and impale him upon a spike, or strangle a mass murderer above a bed of decaying take-out chicken, or shoot German aviators out of the sky above the Mediterranean, or obliterate soldiers in trucks on the road to Berlin, or settle the fate of a nonagenarian in a wheelchair by snapping his neck like a biscuit. What led me to such things? Was it coffee alone? I hate it. It has conquered the world. I lost to it a long time ago. My only option was to harry it until I die, but I cannot ever conquer it. How many people in this world have even the vaguest idea that it is the handmaiden of evil? Only a few. The rest go blithely about their business, smiling and happy under its spell. At best, they feel that it is neutral, neither good nor evil, but only a hot drink. When I try to tell them, they're amused at my distress, which pierces me to the heart. Only Smedjebakken knew. The others don't understand. They can't understand. But whereas they have been captured, I remain free.
As I've said many times, in this matter I am unbiased. It is purely a question of fact, and my view is trumpeted, by the facts. Why, might you think, is coffee officially considered a doping agent at the Olympic Games? Because of his asthma, Che Guevara was addicted to yerba maté, a caffeinate, and look what happened to him. There is no hope. Coffee is second only to petroleum as a commodity traded among nations. 750,000 tons of it are consumed every year in Brazil alone. In Rio. and São Paulo coffee is served to clerical workers as they labor, which explains why our electricity bill sometimes amounts to a billion and a half dollars, and why I receive letters addressed to "Dear Mr. Deceased."
It isn't right to go on and on about coffee, and I never do, so I will end my discussion of it with the core of my case against it. Coffee is evil because it disrupts the internal rhythm that allows a man or a woman to understand beauty in all things. It speeds up the metronome that rests within the heart, until the heart pounds forward like a locomotive off the rails. It blinds the eye to that which is gentle, shuttering the soul like a breech lock in a machine gun.
We are all perfect clocks that the Divinity has set to ticking when, even before birth, the heart explodes into its lifelong dance. If you doubt this, then why is it that a Carioca at rest will start to drum his fingers, and why is it that a composition of notes and intervals can make us cry, and why is it that when men and women are drawn together in a fusing of spirit and body, they move, they dance, they come together rhythmically, as in the ebb, the flow, and the rocking of the sea?
This drive, this beat, this universal tempo, is the most powerful thing I know. It overrides all calculation and greed, it runs gracefully past almost every imaginable sorrow, and it imparts harmony and sense to many things that, absent its insistent and flawless syncopation, would seem to make no sense at all. But when the metronome of the heart is driven forward, and the gentle pulsing of the soul attacked with a whip, darkness and misery come like storm.
I know this, though I have never had coffee. I know it because I have not allowed the rhythm to be altered, and I never will.
On a windless morning early in June of 1914, the sun burned the mist off Croton Bay and turned the water from silver to blue as herons alighted upon the Hudson with the delicacy of angels, gliding above the surface for time unending before they touched. Huge trees like clouds or brush strokes rose in tumbled confusion on the banks, embracing within the curls of their greenery more black spaces than the heart could imagine, and yet the sun shone through from behind, from the east. The forest was thick with birds, and the flowers within it were blooming, for the destiny of June is to be perfect.
It was too early for trains, too late for fishermen, and not yet time for the wind to break the river's surface into spangles for the sun, but from the darkness in the trees emerged a child who quickly mounted the track bed, crossed the rails, and found his way to the water. His eyes were motionless and dull from lack of sleep, his face tense and almost without expression, and his clothes stained with blood. He walked over the sand to its westernmost point, and stood with his left foot braced against a rock just below the surface of the river.
For the whole length and breadth of the Tappan Zee and Croton Bay ... not a sound, not a ripple, but only a dense tapestry of ferocious colors raked by the newly risen sun. With his right hand he reached into his pocket and withdrew a heavy gold coin. He looked at both its faces and at the edge, and then lifted his arm behind him, cocked it for a throw, and pitched that coin into the air as hard as he could. The sun never touched it as it flew, and when it fell into the dispassionate waters of the Hudson it was swallowed without a sound.
Have you ever wondered what kind of life someone would lead if, after wanting more than anything to die, he were to live for seventy or more years? Now you know. But that is not why I have written. The object of elegy is not to revive or review the past, the purpose of a confession not to right a wrong, the piecing together of a twisted childhood is not to heal the man who journeys through memory. No. The object is not remedial, but only a song to the truth. I have not recounted what I have recounted just so I may finally drink a cup of coffee. I have recounted it for the reason that a singer sings a song or a storyteller tells a story: once you have come to a place from which you cannot return, something there is that makes you look out and back, that makes you marvel at the strength of the smallest accidents to forge a life of sweetness, ferocity, and surprise. For the first songs are the gentlest and the most beautiful, they last forever, and they are the test of faith.
I was graduated from the finest school, which is that of the love between parent and child. Though the world is constructed to serve glory, success, and strength, one loves one's parents and one's children despite their failings and weaknesses—sometimes even more on account of them. In this school you learn the measure not of power, but of love; not of victory, but of grace; not of triumph, but of forgiveness. You learn as well, and sometimes, as I did, you learn early, that love can overcome death, and that what is required of you in this is memory and devotion. Memory and devotion. To keep your love alive you must be willing to be obstinate, and irrational, and true, to fashion your entire life as a construct, a metaphor, a fiction, a device for the exercise of faith. Without this, you will live like a beast and have nothing but an aching heart. With it, your heart, though broken, will be full, and you will stay in the fight unto the very last.
Though my life might have been more interesting and eventful, and I might have been a better man, after all these years I think I can say that I have kept faith.
All this time, my heart has told me nothing but to love and protect. The message has been strong through the twists and turns, and it has never varied. To protect, and to protect, and to protect. I was born to protect the ones I love. And may God continue to give me ways to protect and serve them, even though they are gone.
Mark Helprin, Memoir From Antproof Case
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