On a blazing but cool afternoon, we stood in a street nearby, about to make the fateful decision I had been urging. We were supposed to go back to the ship after an early dinner in the hotel, and if we were to break from the tour we would have to do it that afternoon, within the hour.
We were standing in front of a bookstore window half full of new books in the process of being set out for display. The woman whose job it was to put them out was having tea. She was middle-aged, a classically beautiful Scotswoman who, nonetheless, because of the way her hair was done, vaguely resembled a water buffalo.
As we spoke, she was watching us and we were watching her. She drank her tea from a china cup with a gold rim, and she had three delicate shortbread biscuits on a matching plate. She had eaten two already, very slowly, as if defying some law or principle. Just before Miss Mayevska was going to give me her consent, and I am sure she was, the woman picked up the last biscuit and pulled it across that vast and dangerous space between the plate and her mouth.
With a non-euclidian hold at its end, and no Firth of Forth bridge to support it as it sailed across the gap, its structure collapsed, it crumbled, and it fell to the floor. "Oh dear," said the woman, noiselessly lip-read through the glass, and put down the tea. She swept up the biscuit, placed it aside, and returned early to her work.
The word yes was just about to come from Miss Mayevska's lips when the woman lifted a heavy book up and over the wood panel that separated the display window from the interior of the shop. It was a French book, with a painting on the cover. It was what today—and I hate to say it—would be called a coffee table book. The title was L'Aurore. The painting we saw was so compelling that it was as if the aurora had removed itself from the sky onto that small square behind the glass. As soon as Miss Mayevska saw it, her heart skipped north.
Within two weeks we found ourselves by a rushing stream of immense power on the Nord Cap of Spitzbergen, as close to the pole as one can get in Europe. The water was achingly cold and entirely pure, born of a white glacier that had never felt a footfall. We remained there alone for the few hours it took the world to dim and darken and the aurora to arise. The sky looked like wheat fields in all their beauty, but it was dancing in celestial splendor as if in a dream of death.
Miss Mayevska's face was framed in dark sable, and her eyes were filled with the otherworldly color of the aurora.
The First Man I Killed
(If you have not done so already,
please return the previous pages to the antproof case.)
SIX MONTHS HAVE passed since I last sat in the garden, surrounded, as I am now, by inchoate insects just hatched from little eggs, who fly in lines as tight as the singing electric wires of a tram line shining with the sun. I know nothing about the lives of insects, but it occurs to me that when I was seized at this very bench and I collapsed upon the ground, the great-great-great-great grandfathers and grandmothers of these little things were yet to be born.
And when they are born, they are nothing like our rounded and needful human babies that teach you, finally, what love is, and why you are here. No, the insects require no training, no care, no tenderness. They step right into the world, looking like a cross between an expresso machine and a 1928 Packard, and then they begin flying arcs and circles, tracing lines of red and gold in the rising sun in the gardens of Niterói. I suppose the parents don't even stay around to watch the eggs open.
It is a great privilege not to be hatched and then loosed upon the frightening speedways of the air to hunt a few bouncing gnats, lay an egg, and expire. In relative terms, these little buzz bombs can fly at 4,000 miles an hour. And they have no emotions, no regret, no deep unfulfilled desires ... I think. If, in fact, they do, they're in trouble.
I almost died on this very bench. I had come here at my usual time, before the streets and alleys fill with the sickening smell of brewing coffee, and spent my usual half hour catching my breath and watching the sunrise. I then uncapped my pen and took these papers from the antproof case. At that moment, a ship's whistle sounded far below.
I am unable to ignore such a summons, and I rise, always, to see what great creature has sidled in from the sea and how the wind washes the smoke over its smooth decks. As soon as I stood I perceived the source of the sound—a red ship laden with silver and blue containers, backing into a berth on the other side of the bay.
When I sat down I saw that my pen was rolling away from me. The bench is not quite level, and the pen was rolling like one of the logs upon which the Egyptians moved giant blocks of sandstone.
I reached to my left to grab it, but it escaped me by a micron. I extended myself. It escaped once more. And so on, until I found one part of me at one end of the bench and the other part at the other end. The bench is about five feet long, and my torso, from coccyx to glabella, about three feet long. This momentary extension, I believe, temporarily disconnected my arteries from my heart, which then stopped.
As luck would have it, gravity seized me and threw me upon the ground, snapping the arteries back into their accustomed ruts, and I survived. But the shock and pain of the temporary disconnection were such that I could not arise, and I lay by the bench for half an hour until a gardener discovered me and called an ambulance.
To my astonishment, the ambulance arrived at the hospital without killing anyone or turning over, and I was raced through the halls on a gurney as if I were in danger of death. I tried to explain, in Portuguese that had begun to fail me and turn into the plain idiom of my youth, that luck and gravity had reconnected my heart to the rivers of my blood, but no one understood. They were agitated, and I was tranquil. They worked about me as if in war, and I watched. I kept telling them not to rush, but they had probably seen too many American movies in which emergency rooms run at the pace of hand-to-hand combat.
"Look," I said, "the body is like a guitar. It has a certain music. Find the tempo of the music. Put on the music. I'm not a machine. Treat me with the rhythm of my own heart, and I'll be fine."
And those fools, they tied me to the table and gave me an injection of atropine. I needed rest, not twenty cups of purified cappuccino. It nearly killed me. Then they pounded on my chest like monkeys trying to open a coconut. They broke my sternum. Blood began to pour from my mouth.
I thought, this is it, I'm going to die even before I finish my memoir.
"Funio," I said, as they beat me relentlessly. "Funio, Funio," I cried, because I missed him. But then, as I jangled down the violent laundry chute that I thought would be my last, the music started. It came from within (they were too serious, those idiots, to have a radio), and it stabilized me in the surf that was tossing me about—until I felt that I rose above it, suspended in the sun, like Botticelli's Venus.
All was quiet, and I saw what seemed to be a great spiral shell of dawn-colored blue and glistening gold, braided and braiding, the one color twisting about the other, and I heard one note, a single call, a pure sound that gave me the strength to break the bonds with which they had tied me down.
They jumped back. Wouldn't you? I'm eighty years old, and the straps were thick. "I'm all right," I said. "All I need is an ice-cold glass of papaya juice."
This they understood, not because they're doctors but because they're Brazilians, and they turned off the timer that had been timing my death, let down their masks, and put away their stupid needles.
Then began six months of what was supposed to have been rest. The first two weeks of my recuperation were spent in the hospital itself. They took me to a room on a high floor overlooking the bay. I shared this room with a voodoo priest.
He had the same ailment I had: his blood vessels had been temporarily detached from his heart. It has happened to me now a few times, and now I know just to wait it out as you would a cramp or a headache. You see, the vessels are attached by means of some highly elastic material, and when they slip out they are under enormous pressure to resume their normal positions.
Of course, my physicians lampoon
ed my understanding of cardiology, but I countered simply that as I had passed the age where they could make any claim to be effective, whatever kept me going was good medicine.
"You lose people at all stages of their lives," I said, "even adolescents as strong as wildebeests. And eighty-year-olds? All you can do with us is mimic the roles of drug pusher, jailer, and extortionist."
"We can't prolong life beyond its natural cycle," my physician replied. "We're not gods."
"Then let me go."
"We can't. You'll die."
"If I stay I'll die too, and I would much rather die in the rose garden in Niterói than here in this hideous hospital, next to him."
"What's wrong with him?"
"Oh, nothing," I said. "He's just a voodoo priest who watches television continually. He's a robot, a slave, a zombie. He spends many gleeful hours with soap operas, and watching cleavaged women spin game wheels. He shrieks when they give away toasters or wind-sailing boards, and the only time he rests is when it's time for the news. Then he switches off the apparatus and paws through the chicken hearts and lizard tails that are brought to him by a steady stream of women whose heads are wrapped in bandannas."
"Would you like to be moved?"
"You can't move me. I've asked and been told that it's impossible."
"You insult me as if I'm in a trance," the priest said, turning away from a scene of a man and a woman arguing next to a waterfall. "I hear you."
"You are in a trance. You watch that thing all day."
"It has good programs."
"Even if it did, and it doesn't, you would be wrong to watch it. It's a usurper, like a catbird, or carbon monoxide, or Claudius."
"You," the priest said, pointing his finger at me, "are a crazy person. You attacked me," he stated indignantly, "because I was drinking a cup of coffee."
"It wouldn't be the first time," I said under my breath, and then, because the doctor had left and the voodoo priest had turned away from me—not because he lacked the strength for argument but because a new program was starting—I fell back upon my pillows in weakness and defeat, but I remembered.
I had lost my battle with the world. No longer could I set foot in my own country, or speak my own language other than to a mischievous child prodigy or to oversexed Brazilian naval cadets who were required to take my course. I had long before alienated all my friends, or they had alienated me. I came to dislike most of them rather severely after a period of twenty or thirty years, when I would discover that I hadn't known them at all, and that they were capable of such things as abandoning their children, converting their faith, or attacking me because I do not drink coffee.
And coffee, of course, a drug, a filthy, malodorous poison and entirely destructive addiction, has vanquished the human soul, spoiled innocence, and destroyed childhood. It is virtually omnipotent: I have never convinced anyone, not even one person, not to drink it.
Miss Mayevska happened not to drink it, which was pure luck. But maybe, had she drunk it, she would have stopped—she, of all the people in the world—for she really loved me.
Constance drank, at first in secret. And Marlise.... Although of course Marlise would not drink at home, she drinks every day, several times—expresso, cappuccino, mocha, and God knows what else. She thinks it's perfectly normal and innocent, and has been drinking coffee since she was four. She does it as easily as breathing. That gorgeous body, that I have never been able to resist, has coffee flowing through its interior channels in total hideous corruption, and you would never know it. By the time we kiss, I can't even taste it. But it's there, it's working, it's horrible.
All over the world, people drink it, blindly, by the million, by the hundreds of millions, by the billion. And they must have it, they think they cannot do without it, and yet it is not a food, or water, or oxygen. No one would ever give it up for me, or for anyone else. It is more powerful than love.
The voodoo priest and all his powders were as nothing compared to expresso, cappuccino, and mocha, which are stronger than all the religions of the world combined, and perhaps stronger than the human soul itself. Even the voodoo priest consumed his many cups of coffee each day after I had been ignominiously wheeled into the hall.
At mealtimes the stench was appalling. People cannot even eat without it. They cannot wake without it. Many cannot sleep without it. They refer to it as my. "My coffee." On at least one occasion I have assaulted a waitress who approached me, asking, "Would you like your coffee now?"
"Madam!" I say, "it's not automatic! You assume too much! Just because you and most other people in the world are fiends and addicts does not mean that I am!"
Though I have made a thousand attempts at resistance and though I have as my model the French Underground, which ultimately was successful, I have not a single ally, not a single friend, and am doomed to fail. The gentle world has been enslaved by the drug and lubricant of the synchronous, the conforming, the coordinated, the collective, and the congruent.
My one strength, my one victory, is memory, for in memory I purify, in memory I am alone, in memory I appear before the highest judge, far above the static and the clouds, as if in the sunlit clearings of the garden in Niterói, where all is tranquil and the world below is cool, windy, and blue.
I sank back on my pillows in defeat, remembering my first mortal combat, which in many ways set the tone of my life. It was a melancholy thing brought to me so suddenly and unexpectedly that I have always equated it with an electric shock, something I came to know well soon after the defense of my existence was deemed to have been a sin.
Perhaps I should begin by telling you, if you don't already know, that cities—and the city of New York is the city I know best, the city of my birth—have a voice. I am not furthering some useless metaphor invented as the engine of a crackpot academic paper that stretches for pages and pages without ever coming to rest upon a concrete noun, or a color, or the story of something that really happened (or might have).
No. The city has a voice, and a song, that change over its history and can actually be heard. In 1950, when Manhattan had virtually no air conditioners, when office windows opened, and there were elevated trains, the white sound that lifted off the streets was very different from that of a quarter of a century later, when, as in São Paulo, the buildings no longer baffled sound, and millions of air conditioners were humming at a high pitch.
The presence or absence of automobiles, and then the variations in their number, the marked changes in engines and exhaust systems, horns, radios, the way doors sound when they are shut, etc., etc., all determine the symphony of the city. By 1950 most of the animals had disappeared from the street: no longer could you hear a hundred thousand horseshoes clomping on the macadam. I remember the sounds of crowds walking on leather soles, muffled and shuffling, that then turned into a billion dancing crickets with the advent of metal heel taps for men and high heeled shoes for women, and then these great choruses quietly stood down as if in awe of synthetic rubber.
I could probably write a book about these sounds—the ferry whistles; the changing jackhammers; the bus engines and pneumatic bus doors that over the years were as complicated as a piece by Debussy; the evolving howl as the dampening spiderwork of fire escapes disappeared and tall buildings became colossal whistles in the winter wind; the coming and going of hurdy-gurdies, sound systems, and trees—for, once, even in Manhattan, you could hear the trees. In winter they clicked against the windows with their skeletal twigs. In spring the soft new leaves hushed the city's other sounds to an adagio. In summer they received sudden rainstorms, as if to mimic the heavy surf or a waterfall. In autumn they rattled and jangled, as if to prepare for Christmas. And in three seasons they held the birds. Even if you see a bird in Manhattan now, I've been told you can hardly hear it. You wonder about your hearing, or if you have fallen into a silent movie, or if the bird is a deaf-mute who is going to walk up to you and hand you a little printed card.
As the million sounds of the city
change over the years they do so with such slowness that the only way to hear them is in memory. In 1918, when I was fourteen years of age, the music of the city was played by horse's hooves, ferry whistles, steam trains, open windows, the wind in grilles and ladders, leather shoes upon the pavement, tapping canes, the cry of the junk men and food sellers, an occasional sputtering engine, and hundreds of thousands of trees that knit the streets back into the fabric of forest and field.
I lived with my uncle and my aunt, thirty-three miles to the north of Grand Central Station, in the town of Ossining. I stayed in the carriage house so as to escape the twice-daily stench of brewing coffee. Both my uncle and aunt were users, and had been so for many years, at times trying to prepare and drink coffee in my very presence.
Though I lived at a healthy remove, sometimes the wind would blow injudiciously and I would end up on the floor, convulsed, retching, struggling to breathe. Sometimes I would pass garbage cans and catch the smell of coffee grounds, which led to my first encounter with ambulances, which in those days were drawn by horses. Now I make wide diversions around garbage cans.
The summer of 1918 was the summer of Château-Thierry, Belleau Wood, Cantigny, and the Second Battle of the Marne. Although the American victories that marked the turning point of the war were attributed to a commander in chief we called "Pinchy-face," everyone knew that they were really the distant thunder of Theodore Roosevelt, whose presidency and character had shaped the American fighting man forever. For four years the Europeans had been doing a bloody isometric exercise, and then we came in, and as soon as we got going, everything started to move.
Some older boys that I knew had already enlisted, and some were actually serving. I was waiting my turn, hoping that America would drive to Berlin by autumn, and that the war would last three more years so I could do my part. (Perhaps I thought the investiture of the enemy capital might be very time-consuming.)