Light Action in the Caribbean (11 page)

Rosa and Martín, lacking a certain cupidity and the designs of power that would have drawn them more completely into
the world, nevertheless willingly engaged in its terrors. Against holiness like theirs one has no recourse, no protection. It was part of the reason I broke down that night.

I slept most of the day after my night of reading and catharsis. The following day Camilla and Manco went to Callao to visit his grandmother, and I had the house to myself. I took out the nine letters my father had given me and read them for the first time in many years. I had then a sudden, intuitive sense of the order of all the letters. Assembled along these lines they revealed a clear evolution of psychological and spiritual ideas.

The letters my father gave me seem all to have been among the earliest written. Their composers describe with wonder and joy each other’s smallest physical attributes. They dwell on the blinding ecstasy produced by mere touch—the inside of the wrist, say, lifting the bare flesh of the breast. Rosa writes of the heat and the pressure she experiences straining against him, the sensation of his penetration she feels in her spine, the delirious loss of her mind. Martín writes of the inexplicable tears that wet their faces, the thrill of restraint and hesitation in his tongue drawn across the shuddering currents of her skin. They make love in her garden most often. In their letters they speculate at the way they tear plants from the ground in their ravishment and at her compulsion to ride him like a horse, and they recall how in a kiss Martín had unfurled honey against her teeth and then slowly caressed every part of her mouth he could reach.

In those early letters they seem to affirm not physical passion
so much as entry upon a form of reverie both familiar and unknown to them, a capacity for such experience that for them must have been an abiding hunger. In subsequent letters (the majority of these from the library) they explore the meaning of this elevated state, and they consider the unity they have discovered through it—with each other, with jasmine blossoms that fall on them in the garden, and with their spiritual calling, the prayer and ministration that shaped the hours of their daily lives.

It’s my feeling that I have read most of the letters they wrote, that there were few earlier or later ones. The letters originate in the realm of physical sensation, move to a more ethereal realm (though still rooted in the physical), and culminate in what appears to be the completion of an understanding of what they were striving for. I would guess that all of the letters were written during a period of only two or three months, and I see the evidence of this intense companionship most clearly in a change in Rosa’s life. Certain references in the letters suggest that Martín prevailed upon Rosa to cease beating herself. Rosa had as profound an effect, I think, on Martín’s life, though this is harder to discern. If Rosa’s “period of aridity” came to an end during these months, this, too, was possibly the time that Martín acquired the gift that permitted him to speak to animals. Before this, his love had embraced even the most wounded human being; following upon his intimacy with Rosa, the tenderness he exhibited was undiscriminating and unbounded. It extended toward all life.

In what I feel was the final letter, Rosa tells Martín that as a sign of their love, of the “elimination of the barriers that exclude God,” they should regularly place vases of flowers on
the garden wall, where the arrangements would be visible to each of them. Indeed, in statements included in testimony taken down by the apostolic tribunals, I’ve found references to the fact that until their last day it was the habit of each of these people to place bouquets of flowers on their common wall, the instances of this noted because no matter what the season, vivid displays of lilies and roses appeared.

The letters of Rosa and Martín have compelled my salvation, but they have also created a dilemma for me. My foremost responsibility, I believe, is to protect them from fanatics, from obliteration or derision. (Curious, how late in life has come the realization of what my father meant.) In the days following my discovery of the letters in the library, however, I developed such an affection toward the world, such a sense of tenderness toward anyone caught in the predicament of life, that I came to view publication of the letters as an urgent matter. By means of this one gesture, I thought, so much of the putrefaction and hypocrisy of evil could be wiped away. I now saw the physical attraction between my students, Pedro and Analilia, not as mundane carnality but as unperfected desire, and within that a potential for pervading love, whether or not they decided to marry. With Camilla, whom I had become so remote from, who had become almost an idea to me, I rediscovered simple sensual pleasure. Perhaps most striking for me was the recovery of a sense of the vastness of the world outside my own concerns and aspirations.

What would seem astonishing to a modern reader of these letters, of course, is that two saints embraced the physical
hunger that enveloped them instead of running from it. They took it as a sign of God. Then, riding a wave of passion large enough to drown most of us, they transmuted that clutching, compressing, exhausting physical love into a deeper knowledge of God, achieving a peace in their own lives that they gave away in all the dark corners of Lima.

Even as I saw the good that could come from publishing the letters, however, I knew it was being realistic rather than cynical to see that any such publication in Peru would be suppressed, or so thoroughly undermined that the letters would finally be dismissed as forgeries. The Church would call it blasphemy, Hollywood would beat at the door with money and offer solemn promises. The endurance of these letters through fourteen generations would then culminate in an explosion. They would fall back to the earth like so much confetti.

By some means, however, I intend to release these letters. It is amazing that love like this is the experience of saints, but the apparatus of sainthood and Catholicism, it seems to me, is not essential in the story of these people, only knowledge of the spiritual life to be found at the core of their physical experience. Ecstasy seems directionless to me, but like all passion, it might be directed toward the divine.

I am considering several courses of action. If I forward copies of the letters to a friend in China, a scholar of religion at the University of Wuhan, he could arrange for their publication there. They would then emerge as a kind of heresy and so enjoy that protection. I am also considering paying for their publication in Lima under the auspices of a spurious monastery in Catalonia. Eventually they would be discredited
by the Church as a work of fiction, but they would suffer less that way than if the authorities were forced to treat them as a reality.

The letters, of course, have given me my first understanding of the humanity of saints. I’ve written out passages from them on small slips of paper which I meditate upon during Mass. For example, in one letter Martín describes how he wishes to place his lips in a depression above Rosa’s clavicle and draw from it the poisonous residue left by her father’s beatings, which she had endured as a child. In another letter Rosa speaks of the power of memory to kindle desire when presented with a certain scene—the undulating flight of swallows reminds her of the swoon of physical ecstasy, the overlapping songs of finches in the garden at dawn restore the sensation of his first touch.

For now, I will keep the letters I took from the library. I don’t know how to resolve the theft, but it can wait until I see a way through this larger responsibility. I’ve never discussed the letters with Camilla. I have not discussed them with my eldest son, Artaud, though I am actually inclined to pass them on to our middle child, Elouisa. She has a quick, irreverent mind, but she is the most principled person in the family and contains, I suspect, the deepest waters. I consider that it has fallen to me only to have made this additional discovery in the university library, to complete the collection of letters. Now that their meaning is so clear, it may be for Elouisa to determine our next step.

When Camilla and I were courting, I took images from the letters to astonish and impress her. I now believe this the only sin, the one failure of integrity that I persisted in with these
letters. It filled me with such shame that I later confessed the sin many times, to be forgiven again and again.

One evening I will ask Camilla to go for a walk with me. I hope to direct us to some place along the Río Rímac, a spot where the other two might once have stood.

The two gentlemen behind me are speaking fervently of a mining venture, which holds for each of them a promise of long-sought wealth; but my attention is drawn, again, to the one hundred macaws in the garden. (Last night when I arrived at the hotel, I didn’t notice that change, not in the silence and darkness beyond the deserted lobby. When I came into the breakfast room this morning, the animated stretching of wings and bold display of color on the other side of the glass wall were unexpected, intriguing.) The two men are in such high spirits about the prospects of their enterprise that I turn to eavesdrop. Asterquerite is what they’re talking about, a rare compound found occasionally with other siliceous minerals on the peninsula. (I originally read about it in something my mother wrote. It has no industrial application, as I recall, so is of no commercial value.)

The macaws are a long way from home—the scarlets, perhaps from Venezuela, with their blue, green, and yellow wings and red tails, and the deep iron-blue hyacinths from the interior of Brazil. Their crisp, vivid dress seems an extension of the perfectly appointed table before me, starched linen, Royal Doulton china. A ripe casaba melon I’ve just begun is succulent as honeycomb. The coffee is dark and robust.

The birds, with their shank hook bills and long, tapering tails, appear regal in the limbs of young eucalyptus (the hyacinths roosting higher up), but they twitch and glare, as if puzzled by the precipitous disappearance of a familiar horizon.

It is becoming clearer from my companions’ ardent conversation that astequerite has a new-wrought, esoteric application at a mill in France. They concur that their profits could be considerable if they can perfect a route unencumbered by delay between the Arabian peninsula and buyers in France. The process will require many permits, perhaps a good deal of money.

The sun has risen over the hotel’s Spanish tile roof. In this more incisive light, the large birds are dazzling, garnets and lapis lazuli. They shift about crankishly, as if the thought of flight has now occurred to them.

I am savoring melted butter sunk in the lightly toasted texture of an English muffin when my two friends suddenly begin to wrestle with large paper maps, refolding them into manageable sizes, pursuing their conversation from one region to another. (The breakfast room is large but only one other table is occupied, two Arab men across the way, waiting for someone, I think.)

The waitress could hardly be more attentive, more polite. She asks, would I enjoy another piece of melon. Just a small slice? she smiles. I have eaten the first with such appreciation, I tell her, that to order another would seem crass. I ask, does she know anything about the macaws? No, she apologizes, she knows nothing.

One of the Arabs is scarfed in thick, languid smoke from his cigarette. He wears dark glasses, a short, black leather jacket, and for long moments at a time he stares either at his ashtray or the ceiling. The man across from him, dressed in a white jubbah, the white kaffiyeh on his head held in place with a maroon agal, has been speaking an unbroken aqueous stream of Arabic into a portable telephone, a muted harangue, which every so often breaks through the emphatic conversation of the men behind me.

“Monsieur? You have a question about the parrots?”

A young man in a dark suit and green tie steps aside with self-conscious formality to permit the waitress to place a bowl of Swiss muesli in front of me with a small pitcher of milk.

“Yes, you know about them?”

“A little, sir.”

“I was curious: it’s only hyacinths and scarlets?”

“Correct, just the two. Exactly one hundred of them, twenty-five each, male and female.”

“I see; it’s a stunning sight. I hope you won’t find this indecent, but I’m also curious, with all the freedom they have to fly, how—”

“Overhead, sir, we have—”

“Yes, yes, I see the net, I know they can’t get out, but what
I’m wondering is, how do you manage with the swimming pool? And the lounge chairs? I mean, it’s very clean.”

“Oh, yes. Everything here is quite spotless. You don’t have to be concerned at all. You will want a swim this morning?”

“No, what I mean is, the birds, they don’t … you know.…”

“Oh! Oh, no sir, they don’t. That has been taken care of. They go to just one place for that.”

“How do you get them to do it?”

“Lights, sir. Do you see the blue light there, at the corner of the roof? And that one over there? Every twenty minutes those lights blink, and the birds that have a necessity fly to their place.”

“Which place is that?”

“Just behind there, sir.” He steps around me to point discreetly but sharply at a spot above a bamboo thicket. “No one can see.”

“Yes. I understand now. But birds this large, they also eat a lot of fruit. They carry it around. What do you do about all the rinds and pits?”

“Rinds and pits?”

“Do you have another place where they eat?”

“Oh, yes! I’m sorry! In those trees, you see that platform with the slanting sticks? They feed inside there—but to get out, they can’t take anything with them. It’s an ingenious quality built into the design. You will find the rinds and pits in there.”

“This has been very helpful. Thank you.”

“Not at all, monsieur.”

My mother once wrote a story for
The New Yorker
about a Saudi sheik who collected psittacine birds. He responded to her questions, she told me, in enraptured language, dwelling on the subtlety and brilliance of their coloring, lingering over the attractiveness of their movements. The way she conveyed his passion in the article made his interest seem erotic. He collected the rare, the colorful: rainbow lorikeets and turquoise parrots from Australia; Rueppell’s parrot from Namibia; plum-headed parakeets from India. He sent a private jet to retrieve the rarest ones, she wrote, a bronze phase St. Vincent parrot, once, from that Caribbean island. It was during this conversation with her, in fact, after the article appeared, that I first raised the issue of the style of her writing and the Muslim world. Her tone and her approach with the birds, I offered, might not sit well with some people.