A Covenant with Death (19 page)

And the embarrassment, the shame, that racks me now, forty years later, is secret, exquisite, and agonizing. The walls of my study (once my father's) reproach me: they are lined with plaques and scrolls and photographs, some merely pompous (clubs proclaiming that I am a good fellow), some serious (a letter from Harlan Fiske Stone), some downright subversive (an award from the CIO and a photograph of Franklin Roosevelt shaking my hand). Now I am venerable, and no one knows or cares that I passed the crisis of adolescence at the ludricrous age of twenty-nine; a crisis for which there is no medical name but which the knowing might call generalized tumescence. I was swollen with garbage and bitterness, the litter of the soul, and saw no possibility of relief in a world of grubbing egos. My own ego was monstrous, mainly because I had never done anything for anyone and could justify my uselessness only by assuming that the world was not worth my energies. But I did not see that then. Certain rebukes I will not accept: that I failed to join, or to attack, or even to take seriously, this or that political or social group. Middle-class I was, and lazy, and living in a small corner of the world, and not for me were starving millions and oppressed masses and kings and bankers and jack-booted heroes. Mostly I wanted to be left alone. With Rosemary, or someone like her, conveniently to hand.

Well, they grow up a lot faster nowadays, don't they? Which means that they early commence killing and owning. Most of them never make it all the way; they live to be a hundred and are still twelve or thirteen when they die, hoarding goods and triumphs and vital juices, fearfully squaring up the edges of home, community, nation, God. Existence assaulted me late, but I think perhaps the assault was successful. Otherwise I would not be writing this. Otherwise I would have nothing to tell you.

And what do I have to tell you? Well, I had intended to save it for later, when I had established to your grudging satisfaction my small right (in your terms) to speak at all. But I will tell you some of it now, and be brief, and not explain. I do not like you. You have submitted yourselves to things, and soon they will kill you (all of you in fifteen minutes, they tell me), and you are half dead anyway because even your passion is a sort of trader's ecstasy, and those you say you love are acquisitions to be measured against the acquisitions of others and cherished accordingly. You worry lest your children love the flesh, and will not teach them how; but you rejoice when they are taught to kill and become sergeants. You join culture clubs and lament taxes; but you will not strike, picket, stand up and shout for the simplest of human decencies like not killing little children in Sunday school with homemade bombs. You see a pair of splendid breasts in a film, and you stare and form committees; slouching doom sneers on every doorstep, and you avert your eyes and go your way. Your poets have told you that you are locked and frozen in your desire, unroused; and you are too busy to listen. Or afraid that love will cost you money; you have created a God who approves of moderate interest rates. There is not one among you with the heart to walk naked on a sunny day.

On the fifteenth of June, being burdened by no murders, rapes, arsons, boys tying tin cans to dogs' tails, branded women, or excessive revolver shooting, I turned the office over to John, hustled my mother into a hired car, and pointed my finely chiseled nose into the afternoon sun. The car boomed along, creating its own exhilarant wind, and we never even stopped for a drink in Nogales; just checked in at the border and fled south. As we climbed we left behind the cottonwoods and desert willows and mesquite and yucca, the dun and yellow, and wound between fields of buffalo grass and groves of piñon and juniper and then through a forest of quaking aspen and scrub oak, green and silver, and a breeze came up. We stopped at one high, jutting curve and left the car in its ruts to sprawl on the grass and drink from the canteen, and we could see fifty miles: valleys and washes and distant mountains, and the late sun on it all like a bank of flame. Ruddy golden grasses, and stretches of blue-green, and in the hollows and canyons a heavy blue-purple. Four mule deer came browsing through a stand of oaks; a red-tailed hawk wheeled over the car, intent, raptor's beak cutting the wind; when he was gone the thrashers revived and swooped and called, and a buckeye butterfly stopped to rest on my foot. The sun was a friend again, and the earth itself—land, sky, mountains, groves—was luminescent. My mother broke the silence, and the enchantment: “Let's go,” she said. “I need a bathroom.” Poor, sad human beings. When I started the car the mule deer fled and the thrashers vanished.

Ignacio bounced out to greet us, yelling and burbling over his shoulder to rouse the servants, and threw his arms around my mother, kissed both cheeks and then her hand, kissed me, purled and plashed and susurrated, and then actually spoke, with the effect of Bach in an iron foundry: “What a long time it has been! What a long time it has been!” He pushed us to the house and sent small boys scurrying after the bags, herded us to our rooms, saw that we had water, and commanded us to grace the drawing room in half an hour. We were all laughing and gesticulating, spraying Spanish, nodding and slapping. Welcome home.

I was downstairs in twenty minutes and there she was, formal and cold as I kissed her—and God! how lovely she smelled—while Ignacio beamed. “Have you missed me?” I asked her.

“One always misses one's family,” she said politely.

True,” I said. “Many nights I have longed for the warmth of this house,” and Ignacio slapped my back again and roared, “Ah! Ah! Ah!” meaning, what a well-spoken man this is. He was not putting it on. Dinner was an event, fish and goat and his best wine, and after dinner he unveiled a prize, a new gramophone, and insisted that we dance, he and my mother like something out of the Spanish court, circa Charles Five, Rafaela and I more grave and Victorian. She kept her distance, and was cool, and I knew she was right. It had, as Ignacio kept insisting, been a long time, and I had not been a gentleman: one letter, as far as I could remember, in all those months. And she was older, stronger, disconcerting. But Ignacio bore all before him; we danced and drank and gossiped—Ramón had a new son—and tumbled to bed exhausted. He poked me awake at about six and I enjoyed his pleasure so much that I decided to add to it: when we had eaten eggs and beans and drunk coffee with milk I suggested that we go shooting, and we did, the two of us on leggy paints, high in the hills, sitting on the grass and banging away at some sort of mountain cony, dozens of them popping up, insatiably curious, at the lips of their holes. Ignacio was in a state of percolating ecstasy, and when we cantered into the yard and saw Rafaela, still cold and distant, he bellowed, “What a man this is! What a man this is!” and dismounted, and bobbled into the house to see about lunch.

It was our first moment alone. She turned away; I followed. We sat on a stone bench; before us the sun danced up off a muddy fishpond. We were surrounded by junipers.

“I heard you were married,” she said.

“Married! Where did you hear that?”

“From Jorge. My cousin. He saw Luis Nava, who said that your wife had come to live with you.”

“Not true. I am not even engaged. I had a visitor at the house a few times. My mother was always with us.”

“As she and my father have always been with us here. All right.” She smiled sadly. “It is really not my business. Welcome.”

“Thank you.” I kissed her. “It is good to be here.”

“Don't kiss me again,” she said. I waited. “We have had a visitor too. A friend of Ramón, young and quite pleasant.”

“Oh.” What could I say? Slack and lifeless, I sat. She rose and walked to the edge of the pond. She was wearing a long summer dress, and she was small, a cameo, her black hair trailing long and gathered only by a ring. A bird swooped low over the pond, shot away.

“I am twenty-one,” she said. “A woman.”

Yes. And I was twenty-nine and a boy, and all my turnings led to rebukes and malignity.

After a while she went into the house. I sat at the pond for another few minutes, old, stiff, and gray. And then wonder assailed me, that I could be so badly hurt, my heart shrunken and cold, my lungs tight and my belly griping. I never knew, I thought; is this love? God, how it hurts!

And Rosemary? I barely remembered Rosemary; but then I saw her face, and the golden hair, and the hills and valleys. I must be insane; I love by geography; that was in another country but tomorrow I will be in that country again. And then will I remember Rafaela? What do I love? One for summer and winter, one for spring and fall? Do the names matter or the faces or is it only lips and hips and maidenhair and am I nothing more than a blind and nervous organ? Is that all? Is that all I am? How do you learn to love?

So that too died on me, though Ignacio never noticed and when we left, Sunday morning, the trunk was full of wine and two hundred cigars. I said goodbye to Rafaela quietly, memorizing the shape of her nose and the curve of her lips and the depths of her dark, dark occhi di venere; I knew there was pain in my own eyes, and I thought I saw it reflected in hers. I was glum all the way home. My mother's first words were sharp: “Have you been fooling with that lovely girl?”

“Of course not,” I said.

“She's a princess,” my mother said vehemently. “If you rebounded from that Swedish girl—”

“Her name is Rosemary.”

“—and did any canoodling with Rafaela I'll tell Ignacio to shoot you.”

After some ten miles of difficult downhill curves I said, “I like Rafaela. I like Ignacio. I'm not sure I like you. You giggle and titter about your lover-boy son as long as he works his wiles on people you don't care for. You're a snob. Rosemary's okay, and I suppose you know all about that—”

“It shook the house,” she said.

“—but let me get near a nice high-class Mexican girl and oh, no. Hands off. That's different.”

“It is. Besides, you're related.”

“Yeah. What? Tenth cousins? With Luis Nava in between? Anyway I plan to enter a monastery. I'm sick of the whole god damned business. Maybe I'll marry the Colonel. Down deep he'd like that.”

“You're a cold man in many ways,” she said. “You don't know that; but you are. You have no charity.”

“I spend all my time trying to be nice to people. Carrying on polite conversations with my mother when I'm tired and sad. But maybe you're right. Most of the time I just want to be left alone, but that's impossible, I guess. A fellow has to make a living. I have to live up to the Governor's idea of me. And laugh at Geronimo's jokes. And bow to the Colonel. And sit at Hochstadter's feet. And let John sit at mine. Do you remember Bill Carter?”

“Yes.”

“Why can't I be nice to him for a change? God knows he could use it. He never even set foot in my house. But everyone else—oh, hell. I don't know. I was happy yesterday morning, with Ignacio fizzing and rumbling and shooting the heads off little animals.”

“And what happened?”

“I guess a delayed reaction to Rosemary. I never did get around to screaming and kicking.”

“Is it all over with her?”

“Maybe.” We were racing across a flat toward Nogales. “The trouble is I don't react enough. Maybe you're right. Maybe I'm a cold fish. Rosemary gives me the gate and I say, All right, so long. That's no way for a tragic young lover to behave. And do you know
why
she did it?”

“Because you wouldn't propose.” That smug tone.

“No. Because that hermaphrodite of yours had to make a speech about the clap. The little girl got the horrors, with the wages of sin spread out in front of her like a rash. And all she could think of was a long line of lantern-jawed, constipated Swedish preachers thundering about mortal sin from the depths of their frozen balls.”

“You have a foul mouth,” she said.

“I was badly brought up.”

She surprised me then by saying seriously, “Yes. In a way you were. You know, you have to be a very natural man to be like your father was. Either that, or a great actor. You have to
be
it so you can't be anything else, or learn how to carry it off so nobody can tell the difference. And you're kind of caught in the middle.”

“The blood runs thin in the second generation,” I said bitterly.

“No. The blood's there. But you want something, and you don't know what. When your father swore it was like a volcano. Variation. Poetry. The wild Welshman. Couplets and quatrains on the stormy night air. But sometimes it comes out of you like a screechy nastiness. Because you haven't got the whole heart behind it.”

“All right.” I turned my head to smile at her, and I could see that she was grateful. “That's true. Whatever it is I'm going to turn out to be, I am not it yet. So mostly I want to be a lazy tomcat because that's easy. But it's impossible too because I'm like a little boy with a lot of relatives who pat him on the head when he gets medals at graduation. Everybody
expects
something. I don't even have time to find out what I really want. Hochstadter expects industry and uprightness. John expects praise. The Colonel expects gossip and phony manly wisdom. You want some kind of Paul Bunyan bringing home blonde maidenheads. And what do I want? A few women and a library. Because that's all they've left me to want for myself, without having to feel that I probably want it because somebody will approve of my wanting it. A hell of a thing.”

After a while she said brightly, “Well, there's no music without frets,” and I could have strangled her, but we were in Nogales.

And there was a new man on at the border station so we had to go to the hotel and unload the wine and cigars on the Mexican side and have the boys cross the border in the basement. Then we went through customs and drove around to the side door of the hotel and picked up the contraband, and it cost me two dollars in tips. Cheap enough; and, oddly, the smooth success of that criminal act restored my spirits. I was no longer above a joke or two and the rest of the trip was pleasant. My mother had picked up a Sunday paper in the hotel and announced that Stambulisky had been assassinated in Bulgaria. A bandit in Canada had escaped from a crowded courtroom and killed two constables and was still at large. More earthquakes: in northern Persia six thousand people, and possibly twenty thousand, were dead. The Cabinet had met to wish our President Godspeed. “Ah!” she said. “The Prince of Wales has been voted first among the dancers of the world by the National Institute of Social Dancing.”