Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories (43 page)

“Come back, Ella,” called a man’s voice.

“—stopped just in time,” the conductor went on. “No one has been hurt, a few of our men bruised. But the train cannot proceed, and we must walk backwards through the tunnel.”

“Walk backwards!” the child laughed. “Not me!”

“Well, walk forwards, but in the direction from which we came.”

“I want to walk backwards,” said the contrary child.

“Ella!” the man called again.

There was an orderly scramble from the train. A wheelchair and its feeble old occupant took some time to disembark. “My suitcase,” fretted a woman. “Carry the thing yourself,” snapped a man. “This way,” called a voice from the rear.

Seventy-five passengers edged past the stalled train. They were beamed on by the workmen’s batteried torchlights. Only the figures were illuminated; the walls of the tunnel, the floor of the tunnel, even the air in the tunnel, was black. The little girl so eager to walk backward rode on her father’s shoulders. A large fellow in a leather jacket carried the crippled old man in his arms; another carried the wheelchair, folded, above his head; a calm attendant in a flowered turban followed the threesome. Behind the last car the crowd reassembled, along with engineer and brakeman and conductors and firemen. The old man got resettled in his unfolded chair. Now they were addressed by the chief conductor, who wore epaulets.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we must return to Muñez. We will walk eastwards through the tunnel.”

“… an important appointment!” shouted a man.

“We regret the inconvenience. Tonight the transportation department will provide lodging in Muñez hotels. Tomorrow we will board buses to the capital.”

“Buses go around the mountain, for God’s sake,” said the man with the important appointment. “They take eight hours.”

“Alas … Railway personnel are ready to escort us now. Only a few miles. A small commuter train will be waiting at the mouth of the tunnel.”

“The evening express will smash us to pieces … oh!” A trio of old women.

The chief conductor permitted himself a sigh. “All trains have been cancelled,” he assured the crowd.

Alain planned the days ahead: no trains at all during the repairs, then one track opened, a small army of men deployed to direct operations first in one direction and then the other. There’d be television inaccuracies to correct, newspaper editorials to counter, extra buses to commandeer for that lengthy mountainside road. Private planes would rent themselves out to fly from the capital to Muñez and back again until one crashed into the mountain—no safe air route had yet been discovered.

The procession was led by the chief conductor. The other train workers distributed themselves among the passengers, their torch-lights supplementing the tunnel’s flicker.

Alain and Dea were near the end of the line. He carried his briefcase in his outer hand. In hers she carried a rattan sack containing samples of other rattan. Their inner hands were free. Occasionally their knuckles brushed. The man with the important appointment, who had broad but somewhat hunched shoulders, complained at length to a fellow traveler, apparently a stranger, who murmured with idle sympathy and occasionally turned his head as if searching for someone to take his place.

In half an hour the light from the torches melded with another light, a gray evening light. They breathed fresher air. The tunnel was behind them now; they stepped into knee-high grasses. An old wooden train waited. It had only three cars, and most passengers had to remain on their feet during the ride to Muñez. The man in the wheelchair and his attendant were stowed like baggage in one corner. The little girl Ella insisted on curling up in an overhead rack. Dea stood in the aisle, alongside the hunched man, who was still muttering. Alain stood beside Dea.

At the empty station—how many hours earlier had he boarded that fateful express train, right here?—the mayor was waiting under a grand nineteenth-century arch. He looked like the last soldier in a defeated army. He distributed hotel vouchers. Then he and Alain walked together to his office, past stone mansions with delicate balconies: mansions sacrificed to governmental need. Hibiscuses flourished everywhere: the national tree, beautiful but easily bruised. At the mayor’s desk, from the mayor’s chair, Alain spoke briefly on the telephone to the president, and briefly also to Isabella, who thanked God and cried a little, then at great length to the minister of transportation, and at medium length to his own second in command. By the end of the final conversation it was midnight.

“Minister—you are welcome to spend the night at my house.”

“It’s the oddest thing—I travel so much that now I can sleep only in hotels. But I thank you.”

The mayor seemed relieved. Alain looked at his voucher, recognized the address, and set off along the main avenue. A late tram moved behind him like a bodyguard. Ahead the hotel was dimly lit. Alone, in its lobby, sat the woman. He had forgotten her name—Lea?—but he had not forgotten her. From the moment the train thudded to a halt, sharply braked by the quick-witted engineer—“I saw the side of the tunnel crack, half a mile ahead,” the man would say on television. “I saw rocks appear in the crack; I knew what was happening; I prayed that the engine would stop clean and the cars behind not pile up, derail …”—from that moment of death averted, of survival ensured, Alain and the woman had been twisted together like cars in the wreck that hadn’t happened. He approached her chair and held out his hand. She took it.

A
LAIN REMAINED IN MUÑEZ
another several days. There were officials to speak to before he returned to the capital to meet with another shaken bunch. For the next several months the unfortunate occurrence in the tunnel would call on his patience and his willingness to let somebody else end a conversation. By some miracle no plane crashed into the mountain.

The rest of the survivors rode to the capital the next day on the extra buses that had been pressed into service. Dea arrived home at five in the afternoon. Luc’s pharmacy occupied the front of their house, and when she entered he was waiting on a customer, explaining the possible side effects of a medication. Seeing Dea, he interrupted his own speech, though without moving from behind the counter. He looked at his wife with his usual kindly upward stare—he was a short man—and his already pale skin paled further with relief renewed, gratitude renewed—they had spoken on the telephone the evening before, he knew she was safe, but still. From an expertly penned-in corner their two-year-old sent up a howl of welcome.

Dea did not work the next day. Instead she took her beloved son to the park, and they watched the puppet show, and listened to the band, and shared a giant dish of ice cream. But the following morning she returned to her trestle table in the back room of their house, a windowed studio looking out on a small garden fringed with hibiscus. The child played at her feet with tongue depressor soldiers and a castle made of empty pill vials.

Before she had left the capital for Muñez she had moistened sixty-seven strips of willow. She had inserted one end of each of them into the groove running around the circumference of an oaken disk: the base of a new basket. Now the construction rested upside down atop a mold of her own design. The willow staves, curving downward, had dried. The inverted, embryonic basket reminded her, as always, of a woman gone mad, a flat-headed woman with evenly spaced locks of hair revealing glimpses—sixty-seven of them, in this case—of a demented, featureless head.

She selected a long piece of flexible cane the color of an old man’s teeth. She dampened it. She removed a single willow stave and slid the end of the cane into its place, at an angle, and returned the stave to the groove, fixing the new cane forever. She began to weave, removing and replacing every second stave as she worked. This first circumnavigation was always the most exacting, calling for the strictest control, and she could afford to concentrate on nothing else but the work of her hands, though she was alert to the child, and she knew that a light rain had begun outside, and she was aware too of a memory of another rhythm accompanied by a sighing, a more delicate music than she would have expected from a man so … robust. She rested a burning cheek against briefly idle knuckles.

I
T WAS TEN YEARS
before she saw him again. The capital is a big place, and people mingle freely, garments brushing garments in the squares and in the markets and in court. But Alain and Dea did not chance to meet in the public places. And Alain and Isabella did not go to crafts fairs; and Dea and Luc were not fans of the pageantry of government—the splendid inauguration of a new president during that decade, for all the attention they paid it, might have happened on another planet. The new president asked Alain to continue as minister of gaming.

Ten years. The concert hall was packed. The soprano, now an international star, had been raised in Dea’s neighborhood; as girls they had been friends. Dea received a pair of tenth-row tickets. Luc chose to stay home with the children—there were three now—so Dea invited a fellow artisan, a young man whose abstract weldings were not yet famous.

Alain and Isabella were also in the orchestra section, a few rows behind and to the right of Dea and her companion. Alain had an excellent view of neck, ear, sometimes nose, a part of her brow. Her hair had been cropped. The soprano sang a program of familiar arias and love songs. She sang them to Dea—that’s what he thought; she sang them on Alain’s behalf.

Dea and her youthful escort stayed seated during the intermission. Alain and Isabella greeted friends in the lobby and drank champagne. Little sandwiches of smoked carp were particularly tasty. The second half of the program was Lieder. How varied she was, the soprano; how many strings she had to her larynx. He said that to Isabella—through her, really.

After the last “Brava,” after the final encore, the members of the audience stood, slipped past each other, murmured … Dea turned. Ten years had added a single thrilling line to each of her cheeks. He sucked in his stomach. Their eyes met for several seconds.

My handsome companion is a friend only …
That was all she wanted to say. She had much to boast of, though. She had become a master weaver. She taught at the crafts school. Her baskets, mostly handbags, were sought after by rich women, by tourists. She was working on an oval one at present—and the next day she returned to it, frowning, separating staves fiercely, choosing canes of conflicting colors, overlapping them, slewing and flitching. She made the lid of twined and strapped latticework, infiltrated with hexagonal weavings. It was a mad design. It would never catch on. It might not even sell, though her name smoked into the base was usually a guarantee.

That afternoon Alain took his daughter to the racetrack. She was twenty-six now, already divorced. He let her choose the horses. She chose according to the filly’s name, or the name of the sire, or the name of the dam, or the color of the jockey’s silks. Half-asleep, she watched the races on television in the clubhouse. Alain, leaning forward in his outdoor seat, followed each contest from start to finish. He panted, gasped, swore. They drove home with a small bundle of winnings.

A
GAIN TEN YEARS PASSED
. Another new president had just been elected. The inauguration took place in the Great Park, on a platform surrounded by flowers and facing a thousand folding gilded seats. On the platform sat the country’s one Nobel laureate, several former presidents, the new president, and all the ministers, Alain included, though he would soon retire and receive the usual medals. There were four young cadets holding flags, one cadet from each branch of the military service. Dea’s son, now serving in the air force, had been selected for this honor guard, perhaps because of his excellent school record, perhaps because of his unusual height. The families of everyone on the platform sat in the first, golden rows.

The oldest of the former presidents was very old indeed. He sat shrunken in his chair at the front of the platform, canes across his lap. Alain sat just behind him. Dea faced them from her aisle seat seven rows back. She shifted her body, and now she could see clearly the monkey face and diminished torso of the man whose current lifetime had lasted so long, and she could see, above his face, his face. Those remembered shoulders. Alain, for his part, could see the dark hair, the glasses, the long neck. Dea took off her glasses, hoping that their eyes might meet: But no, they were too far from each other. Nevertheless, they maintained a pseudo-gaze until the ex-president shuddered, and the long-sighted Dea guessed that he was foolishly about to rise. She rose. The president raised his rump and the canes rolled down his thighs and dropped to the dais and then to the ground. Dea strode forward. The old man stood and tottered and she saw that his crotch was wet. Alain slid out of his chair and caught the ancient figure beginning to fall and lifted him and held him in his arms like a dead child and watched Dea advancing and now their eyes did meet, but he was obliged to turn away in order to lay the ex-president across four chairs that had hastily been vacated. Alain bent down and opened the old man’s shirt and loosened his belt. “I’m a doctor,” said a fellow who had leaped onto the dais, and slipped his practiced hand underneath the shirt. The ex-president opened his eyes. Ambulance men appeared and policemen quieted the crowd (the four cadets stood without moving) and Alain, relieved of responsibility, straightened up in time to see Dea resume her seat. Luc raised his eyebrows at his wife. “CPR,” she explained. The old man wasn’t dead and thanks to Alain he wasn’t hurt. “I faint sometimes,” he insisted, “it’s nothing.” The ambulance took him to the hospital anyway. The inauguration went peaceably on. Afterward, Alain went to a grand dinner. During the meal he felt a roiling in his gut, ruining his appetite. Isabella shot him glances of easy compassion. She was still blond, still admired, still faithful.