Time's Arrow (12 page)

We have our own cabin, scene of many a knee bend and chest flex, on A Deck. There are also communal exercises, on B Deck, which John leads in association with a swarthy purser called Togliatti. We do jumping jacks, and chuck a bit of hooped rope about. To begin with, in the evenings and mornings, during stroll time (the suit, the stick), all the people tended to gather at the sharp end of the ship, looking at where they came from, as people do. Only John is invariably to be found on the stern, looking at where we're headed. The ship's route is clearly delineated on the surface of the water and is violently consumed by our advance. Thus we leave no mark on the ocean, as if we are successfully covering our tracks.

And we seem to have got away with it, likewise. John's feeling tone is buoyant: he seems wonderfully relieved. But if you had me on the table or on the trolley in intensiv

care—the submarine blip of the oscilloscope (like a lost code), the richly sighing respirator—then I'd be going, going, tumbling end over end. I didn't get away with it. I came too close, I spent too long with suffering and its foul chemical breath; its face is fierce, distant, ancient. The hospital, tepidly humming—I can remember it
all.
To remember a day would take a day. To remember a year would take a year.

Something ails the ship's engines. How they cough and choke and retch. The smoke that feeds our funnels is much too thick and black. Our Greek captain puts in a courtesy visit during dinner and apologizes in his ridiculous English. Often, for days on end, we can only wallow helplessly or make grand clockwise circles. Ugly sea gulls backpedal in our path, seeming to break their fall through the sky. John fumes, like the ship, but the people don't seem to mind. And I quite like it, the sense of suspension, far from land and the means of doing harm. At night, while John's impatient body sleeps, I listen to the waves loosely slapping at the side of the stilled ship.

The slapping sea sounds nice but it's insincere, flattering to deceive, flattering to deceive.

What with John's new fitness program, and the salutary Atlantic air and everything, I myself expected some kind of halfhearted renewal. It didn't really happen. Still, I couldn't help responding, at least in spirit, to the orgy of general joy as we docked at Lisbon; and even John stiffly lent himself to various aromatic embraces. But then the ship idled there for hours, in its own sea mist of impatience and anxiety. Limply I gazed at the mortal oiliness of the water, in which no creature could prosper, and the dockside crowds of welcome floating and swimming above like tropical fish. After that, will and vividness again absented themselves. In fact  

tuned out altogether for at least a week, while John checked into the hotel and ran around town shuffling papers and permits and palm grease and all the other shit you deal in when you're firming up a fresh identity. We came out the other side of it with a temporary chauffeur, a good profit, and a really first-rate new name: that of Hamilton de Souza. I am assuming that this identity business is a foible of John's, of Tod's, of Hamilton's, and not universal. But look outside, at the street-skinned hills, the wildernesses of the parks behind their railings, and all the people. This crowd must churn with pseudonyms, with noms de guerre. Those that the war will soon reel in. We've been through three names already. We seem to be able to handle it. Some people, though—you can see it in their faces—some people have no names at all.

Hamilton and I are well established now, of course, in our agreeable villa, with our three maids, plus Tolo the gardener, and the dog, Bustos. It lies in a shallow valley a couple of clicks north of Redondo. Listen: there go the goats, the faint arrhythmia of the bells on their collars, led by the white-clad peasant. The goats are white too, a little herd of souls. The herdsman's infrequent cries are full of the Portuguese melancholy, the Portuguese humanity. Twice a month the fat lawyer whom I think of as the Agent comes to visit in his sweaty suit. We drink white port up on the roof here and converse in formal and limited English. The birds are excited by our garden and by the flowers that shine around us in their troughs and pots.

"So delightful," says the Agent.

"We call that one Bouncing Bet," says Hamilton.

"Charming."

Hamilton points with a finger. "Brown-Eyed Susan."

"So attractive."

"John-Go-To-Bed- At-Noon."

Below, from the lawn, a muscular blackbird crashes into the air.

Around us in the middle distance, which is as near or far as anywhere else seems to get, lie other havens of plaster and flora. I like it here. The villas loom pink and yellow on the arid land, like sweetshops on the planet Mars. The light has the color of fake gold.

We have three servants, Ana and Lourdes, and Rosa, the gypsy girl, to whom I will be obliged to return. I'm familiar with the servant thing, because I had one before: Irene. Oh, Irene! . . . The thing with servants is, you're always cleaning up after them, but not very intensively, it's true, and they're terribly polite. Servants are poor, and I'm talking broke—I mean busted. They give what money they have to the Agent; yet they're always finding that little bit extra, to give to me. Rosa, the girl, is especially insistent. We accept these dues with a seigneurial twinkle. Nobody said it was fair, but at least it's intelligible. What's the trick with money? Money, which might as
well
grow on trees? It all comes down to the quality of your trash. In New York government did it. Here we do our own. Tolo the gardener, with Bustos the dog tensely balanced beside him, on the cart pushed by the mule: they go to the village dump. Or we rely on fire. Quality not quantity. Our trash is
class
trash. Rosa, who is poorest of all, lives in the gypsy camp over the slope at the far end of the valley. We sometimes stroll out that way, in the evenings, and wait, and then discreetly precede her when she walks to the villa; she never turns, but she knows we're there. The camp is made of trash but none of it is any good. Trash. I am its lord. She its bondmaid or prisoner.

Our hobbies?

Well, strolling. Impeccably turned out in twills and tweed, with hunting cap, with Bustos bouncing at our feet. It's an appealing notion, that animals should contain the souls of gods. You can believe it of a cat. Even a mule. You can't believe it of Bustos, loose-skinned and entirely frivolous, with his entreating eyes. The hide-faced peasants, the burdened women clad in black, they croak a furtive greeting, which Hamilton de Souza spiritedly returns. He picked up the lingo right away, but I can't get any kind of fix on it. The only word I feel at home with is
somos.
There's a game we play, Bustos and I, with that saliva-steeped tennis ball of his; and he likes to twirl those sticks. Across the valley, to the slope. The camp really is very dirty.

Oh, and gardening, too. No hands-on stuff, like at Well-port. We stand over Tolo's bent form, and point with our cane. The flowers are amusing, but dreadfully vulgar. All those bursts of pink and crimson.

Our other hobby is gold. We collect it. We amass it. About once a month, with the Agent, we motor to Lisbon and pay a call on an elderly Spaniard in his office at the Hotel de Luxe. We have money ready, supplied by the Agent. We count the florid bank notes and hand them over across the desk. Then, after the old guy has examined, weighed, and wrapped it in a turquoise napkin, we get our gold, in little ingots the size of collar studs. Lassitude and shame and a dreamy disgust provide the medium for these transactions. We sit there, leaden. The heavy brown furniture, and Señor Menini: his eyepiece, the solder in his teeth, his dusty scales. Hamilton and I grow rich in gold.

Can you call Rosa a hobby? Does she qualify? A glimpse of Rosa, as she walks to the well in her pink tatters, and Hamilton's blood slows and clogs, and his hair hums. He just seemed to walk right into that one: love at first sight.

The very day we got here he cornered her in the scullery and embraced her with tears in his eyes, saying
adorada, adorada.
Rosa is pink and dirty; she is dusky, she is rosy. One of her duties is to replenish Hamilton's chamber pot each morning. He is usually to be found in his pajama bottoms, shaving, when she comes through the door. In slow declaration he turns toward her. She crouches to place the embarrassingly heavy bowl beneath the bed. She leaves with her eyes on the floor, saying
bom dia.
Frankly, he's missed the boat with Rosa. She's much too young for Hamilton— or for anybody else, probably, except her brothers and her dad and her uncles and so on, or so Hamilton speculates (I can tell), when he skirts the camp at dusk. Last week she celebrated her thirteenth birthday, so now she's only twelve. He watches her in the yard with her cloth and bucket, as she kneels to tackle the clean plates. The slope of her back, the way she wipes her brow. In her luminous scraps of clothes she is pink and bruised, like the inside of her mouth, the teeth still both big and little. Soon, to fill those gaps, she will get some milk teeth, purchased from the tooth fairy. ... In women, what is he looking for, mother, daughter, sister, wife? Where
is
his wife? She'd better turn up soon, while there's still time. Rosa gives him presents, which, on his trips to Lisbon, Hamilton fondly redeems.

But the body he is most interested in, these days, is his own. He is his own hobby. And his body is its own lover. What a love is this, between upper limb and external heart. Christ no, it's not like the Wellport days, back when: poor old Tod and his one-man no-shows, his lone fiascos. Hamilton just can't get over it, his body. You would think he'd never had one before. As he moves through the house, mirrors monitor him. Him, it, this, this:
this
is the body he primes and mortifies and shrewdly inspects in all the rippling funhouse mirrors of Portugal.

—————

There are poems to Rosa, which he takes from the trash. They are brought in the wicker wastepaper basket by bowing Lourdes. Never more than two or three lines long.

The soul of a princess in her gypsy rags,

Doomed to fret in her humble stall . . .

And:

Rosa, whose innocence asks to be saved!

Where the knight who will deliver her?

Yeah. Where the knight. These lines of his he moodily and sometimes tearfully erases with his pen—a good image, perhaps, of his chronic diffidence.

His body now exudes this pink gook which he subsequently bottles and gives to the Agent together with a bunch of other toiletries.

When he goes out there to wait for her in the evening, I sometimes think: It isn't Rosa. It's the camp he loves. The fierce and sentimental music and the ignorant colors, the prettiness and the disease under the fake-gold light, the tuberculosis and syphilis, the fires showing through the branches like illuminated brains, the glamorous nomas of eye and mouth, the childishness and all the valueless trash. He wants to do something to the camp. What? Here in Portugal he pretends not to be a doctor, probably wisely, and steers well clear of anyone who is sick or injured, Lourdes with her dramatic fevers or Tolo knock-kneed with gout, even Rosa's scrapes and sprains. He leaves it to the local man: the local man, whose tremulous reliance on a few patented drugs Hamilton observes with a speechless sneer. But he wants to do something to the camp. He wants to doctor it.

Mind and body are preparing for war. The body, during the waking hours, with its regimes, its saturnalias of self. The mind at night. Something is savaging his sleep. Surprised into consciousness, alone in the black hemisphere, he cries until he laughs; then he uses the chamber pot that Rosa readied, and goes back to sleep quickly, despite the pain. Somewhere in the severe dance of this roiling sleep I can sense the beginnings of a profound rearrangement, as if everything bad might soon be good, as if everything wrong might soon be right. Admittedly this new recurring dream of his, in bald summary, doesn't sound particularly encouraging, but I think it's ambivalent and could go either way. He dreams he is shitting human bones. . . . Now and then, when the night sky is starless, I look up and form the hilarious suspicion that the world will soon start making sense.

One hot afternoon I came down from my bedroom, after a brief but taxing siesta, to see the Agent pull up in his outlandish Packard. Over a cognac he gloomily informs us of the Japanese surrender. Lourdes and Ana, I notice, have tears in their eyes and keep crossing themselves. The Agent tells me apologetically about the superstitious fears of these simple people. The end of the world.
A bomba atómica
... I was astonished. So! They did it. They had to go ahead and do it. Just when world abolition looked like a certainty. They couldn't resist: limited nuclear war. . . . Rather rudely, perhaps, Hamilton decided to take Bustos for a romp and leave them all to it. On our return the Agent had gone and the women were calm, unlike Bustos, that foolish puppy, who spins at my feet and fixes me with his heartbroken eyes.

There is a growing coldness in the household. Emotion is retreating from it. This is how things should be. Rosa, who still works for us, has safely escaped into childhood. The gaze that Hamilton turns toward her no longer moves softly across her face, her pink rags. This is fit. We will now be able to take our leave of Rosa with a quick nod, a little inclination from the vertical. I won't even miss Bustos, which the Agent dragged off months ago.

War wasn't going to come to us. War wasn't going to roll through
our
village. We were going to be inserted into it— with what they call surgical precision. With slow care.

One was not sorry to bid farewell to Portugal and its rhythm of misery and fiesta, the docks, the Agent's clueless stare. And one did what one could with the conditions on the sordid steamer. Actually Hamilton himself, so smart and handsome when he travels, soon looked as grimy and fatalistic as everybody else. There were about twenty passengers (this was no passenger ship) and we slept in the mess, on benches and deck chairs, much resented by the crew, each of us with his possessions, or his secret, crushed like a lover in his arms and whispered to in all the languages of Europe. . . . The other language, stoppered in Hamilton's throat: it is climbing to the surface. It twitches inside him. ... Of course, we converse with no man: just sighs and nods and frowns, speech-waivers. They play cards all day. They are low persons, flotsam. What does the war want of them? They look fully disgraced. We have our gold, stored in a second belt beneath our shirt, and tugging heavily on our nethers.