Death, Sleep & the Traveler (26 page)

“Ursula’s complaints are meaningless,” Peter was saying, “quite meaningless. You must simply ignore them. Most wives complain about their husbands. As a matter of fact, my friend, if you were not as emotionally strange as you arc, Ursula would not like you at all. A curious paradox but true. And you will note,” he said, smiling up at me with the wind in his face, “you will note that I did not say ‘sick’ but merely ‘strange.’ I will not pin you down, to use a vulgarism, until you request me to do so, professionally.”

His long dark fingers continued to stuff the little white bowl of his pipe with shredded tobacco, the sun was a cold ray in a dark sky, his smile belonged not on his weathered and sardonic face but rather on the little round sculpted face of some clever cupid. He continued to stuff the white pipe. I removed the shells from my gun.

“But what is so wonderful and so hard to believe,” Peter said then through the clarity of the fierce wind, “is that she cares for us equally. To her all our differences are nothing. And what a capacity it is to be able to elevate two such different men to the same level of acceptability. She has the gift of love, my friend. The gift of love.”

Cupped in his two dark bony hands, the flame of the
match was pale beside the intense red color of his hunting shirt. Then the pipe was lit and the two of us, side by side and thinking in our different ways about Ursula’s love, were heading home.

He bolted forward from the bench. In the dry and desperate heat, in which the three of us had been reposing as if in a dream, naked and white and at our ease, suddenly Peter bolted forward from the wooden bench and, in complete silence, flung his hands to his chest and looked around him with eyes filled with the joy of extreme pain. His chest was a network of small bones, every hairy filament in his pubic growth appeared electrified, his white legs and arms were long and oddly muscular, his nipples were dark, his loins were a nest of blue veins.

“Peter,” Ursula said in alarm, “what’s wrong? What is the matter?”

Her sentence was the only one spoken from that moment forward in the sauna. And yet throughout that terrible ensuing time, during which Peter pantomimed his death and Ursula and I our helplessness, through all that time, which on the clock was nothing, I heard Peter’s voice (jocular, lofty, confidential) inside my head. As we watched, moved, tried to assist him, and while he lurched and staggered about in the small circle of his dying, I thought I was listening to every word he had ever said, and I did not know which was worse, the brief and wordless struggle of our performance there in the sauna, or the confidence and unbroken flow of that silent voice. There he was, talking
away at the moment of his own painful death (which was from his heart, I realized at once) and in complete ignorance of the advice, the pronouncements, the elocutions of middle age, the sparkling tones. He talked to me even after he lay dead on the floor. I could not bear to listen.

When he fell, tall white fishlike man I no longer recognized, I could hear his nose breaking on the slats. He lay on his stomach lurching and trying to crawl after the trail of bright blood that flowed from his nose. A moment before, and in shock and ignorance, I had seized his arm and attempted to steady him. But as he collapsed he tore loose from my grip. Now we could hear the very sound of the pain inside his chest.

Ursula was kneeling at his head with her face constricted, her breasts in a chaos of motion, her breathing heavy, and had somehow managed to lift his head and was now holding his bleeding head in her two hands. At his mid-section I too was kneeling, one knee raised, the other burning on the wooden slats, and I heard the faint popping sound of the tubes that were parting inside Peter’s chest.

His body looked like dry fat and cartilage. He looked like a creature that had been skinned. He was still flicking with movement. But then that awful movement ceased. He was dead.

And then he defecated. Yes, even while Ursula rocked his head and tried to soothe the contorted face, and even while I knelt helplessly at his side, listening to my friend’s silent voice, suddenly Ursula and I knew simultaneously what had happened and together stared in shock and grief at this last indignity.

He was dead. The smell was strong. We could not move. We did not know what to do. The fecal smell of Peter’s death was overpowering the smell of eucalyptus that was filling the small room. I thought that Ursula and I would soon die like Peter there in the heat. But I could not allow my friend’s body to remain unclean, that much I knew.

In another moment or so I acted on that lingering knowledge, and using my flat hand as a trowel, slowly scooped the terrible offending excrement from Peter’s corpse. And bearing in my hand the last evidence of Peter’s life, I managed to gain my feet, open wide the door and stumble to the edge of the cold and brackish sea.

As I hurried up the path toward the house and telephone, naked and stumbling and in my own way deranged, I thought that my hand would be forever stained with the death of my friend.

Moments later, and after I had placed the useless telephone call, I was joined at the house by Ursula, who, draped in a towel, looked at me with an expression of terror and fury and collapsed in my arms.

They fished aboard an infant octopus that was already dead. The sea was in steady motion beyond my porthole as if someone had at last discovered our destination. A sailor hung the infant octopus outside my door. The motion of the passing sea was swifter than at any time during our journey. The sea was dark, the sky was exactly right for a holiday. I could hear the swishing of a few dumpy women
still playing their deek-board game with sticks and pucks. Now we were on course to a destination. The impartial sky was chilly, bright. But they told me I was confined to my cabin, as if I were an officer instead of mere passenger, and accused of a crime. They told me the wireless operator had been relieved of duty and was under sedation. They told me they had spent the entire day searching the ship from top to bottom, fore and aft. But to no avail. They had looked in the cabins, the lifeboats, the engine room, the companionways, the lockers, the wireless shack, the crevices beneath the flywheels of great machines. But to no avail.

The purser was sitting on a wooden chair outside my door. His trousers were freshly pressed. We were a mere speck in the empire of that dark sea. The purser called to the attention of strolling passengers the baby octopus white and swaying on its length of cord.

They assured me that the search throughout the ship was continuing.

The islands became more numerous. They were small and golden, each one a perfect bright sphere for exploring. But I was confined and he was heavily sedated.

Even inside my cabin I could hear the rumors. And a few dumpy women with wooden sticks and pucks.

“Allert,” she said quietly and behind my back, “it is not necessary to wash my underpants. You are always kind to me. But you shouldn’t bother to rinse my panties.”

“Oh, but it is nothing,” I said, and felt the life of the ship in the soles of my naked feet. “It is an unfamiliar chore for me and one I like. But surely if you can press the clothing of the ship’s crew it is somehow appropriate that I rinse your panties.”

Sitting as she was on the far end of her rumpled berth, small, indifferent to the hour of the day, Ariane was not within range of the small mirror fastened above the porcelain sink. I could see the familiar disorder of the little stateroom whenever I glanced from the frothy sink to the mirror, and even had a splendid reflected view of the opened porthole above the berth, but I could not see Ariane and could only assume that she had already removed her bathing suit as I had mine. At the sink I stood with a towel knotted around my waist but assumed that Ariane would not care to wrap herself in towels.

“Well, you are doing a very thorough job, Allert,” she said behind my back. “But don’t you want to hurry a little?”

“Two more pairs to go,” I said into the empty mirror that was quivering slightly with the pulse of the ship. “Only two pairs. And do you see? They look as if they belong to a child.”

“But, Allert, I think you have become a fetishist!”

“Oh yes,” I said heavily and raised my face to the glass. “Yes, I am a deliberate fetishist.”

I nodded to myself, I submerged my hands to the wrists and scrubbed the little shrunken garment that felt as slippery as satin on a perspiring thigh. I was enjoying myself, half naked before the sink and rinsing Ariane’s six
pairs of off-white panties. They were not new, those panties, and the crotch of each pair bore an unremovable and, to me, endearing stain.

“There. You see? I am done. Now we shall hang them to dry.”

But that day Ariane’s wet undergarments on which I had worked with such prolonged and gentle satisfaction, remained in a damp heap in the porcelain sink. In a single instant I forgot all about Ariane’s damp panties (reminding me of the clothing shop windows into which I used to peer as a youth in Breda), because in that instant I turned from the sink to find that she had not resorted to a warm towel, as I was convinced she would not, but also that there on the other end of the rumpled bed, with the wind in her hair and her legs drawn up and crossed at the ankles, she was far from that complete state of nudity in which I had thought, even hoped, to find her. But I was not disappointed.

I did not know how to respond, I felt a certain disbelief and breathless respect. But I was not disappointed. Because Ariane sat before me girdled only in what appeared to be the split skull and horns of a smallish and long-dead goat. It was as if some ancient artisan had taken an axe and neatly cleaved off the topmost portion of the skull of a small goat, that portion including the sloping forehead, the eye sockets, a part of the nose, and of even the curling horns, and on a distant and legendary beach had dried the skull and horns in the sun, in herbs, in a nest of thorns, on a white rock, preparing and polishing this trophy for the day it would become the mythical and only
garment of a young girl. What was left of the forehead and nose, which was triangular and polished and ended in a few slivers of white bone, lay tightly wedged in my small friend’s bare loins. The goat’s skull was a shield that could not have afforded her greater sexual protection, while at the same time the length of bone that once comprised the goat’s nose and hence part of its mouth gave silent urgent voice to the living orifice it now concealed. The horns were curled around her hips. On her right hip and held in place between the curve of the slender horn and curve of her body Ariane was wearing a dark red rose. I recognized it as one she must have taken from the cut-glass vase of roses that had adorned our table for the noon meal.