Memoir From Antproof Case (10 page)

I could not speculate like this were I not sitting in a garden on top of a mountain in Brazil, alone, in daylight that is quickly becoming as hot as the bees require.

I had been in love with Miss Mayevska from the beginning, when I first met her—indeed, by suggestion and description, even before I met her—but in the few years that passed since that time I had grown just old enough to love her deeply. This means, among other things, that I would have immediately sacrificed myself to protect her—and I would have—but it didn't work out that way. I was lucky, and she was very unlucky, and there was nothing I could do about it.

One of the most endearing things about her was that although she was naturally beautiful—of the blackest, softest hair, the clearest widest eye, and the most noble and delicate face I have ever seen—she did not dress well. She could afford any item of clothing in the world, but (except for the magnificent sable parka she bought for the trip) she wore the awkward clothes of a suffering clerk.

The countryside around the hotel reminded us of the fields above the Parfilage, where we had labored together in the years when our courtship was sustained by perhaps one hidden glance every day or two, and no more. And we knew simultaneously and suddenly that we might be happy, for the rest of our lives, on a farm in Scotland. Even with just the money we had with us we could have bought good land, a good house, and the machinery that would make our production efficient enough so that we could pay the people who helped us a wage that would enable them to prosper. That, I understood even as an adolescent who had escaped from a mental institution, was one of the benefits of capital that a certain person who worked in the British Museum had entirely glossed over, and indeed the very phenomenon freely applied has transformed the industrialized world, changing peasants into yeomen.

Still, I didn't really care about economics, not then. I begged Miss Mayevska to marry me. We would stay in Scotland. We would lose ourselves there, for Scotland is as good a place as any to be lost. We would have sons and daughters.

She almost agreed. I assaulted her with the tenderest, most imaginative, and most implausible representations about farming. I told her my very specific plans. I told her that I would be faithful to her for the rest of my life, and I would have been. I told her that I loved her, and I did.

She was as apprehensive as any young girl might be. Young boys are mercurial, and they are supposed to be. I imagine that she feared being left on a farm in Scotland, with a child or two, after I had gotten on to something new and changed my mind.

In the middle of June we went with all our heavy Germans to Edinburgh. We made an obligatory stop at the bridge over the Firth of Forth, admiring the ironwork floating perilously high above us, and in Edinburgh we stayed at the Royal Hotel Macgreggor, overlooking the river and the park.

On a blazing but cool afternoon, we stood in a street nearby, about to make the fateful decision I had been urging. We were supposed to go back to the ship after an early dinner in the hotel, and if we were to break from the tour we would have to do it that afternoon, within the hour.

We were standing in front of a bookstore window half full of new books in the process of being set out for display. The woman whose job it was to put them out was having tea. She was middle-aged, a classically beautiful Scotswoman who, nonetheless, because of the way her hair was done, vaguely resembled a water buffalo.

As we spoke, she was watching us and we were watching her. She drank her tea from a china cup with a gold rim, and she had three delicate shortbread biscuits on a matching plate. She had eaten two already, very slowly, as if defying some law or principle. Just before Miss Mayevska was going to give me her consent, and I am sure she was, the woman picked up the last biscuit and pulled it across that vast and dangerous space between the plate and her mouth.

With a non-euclidian hold at its end, and no Firth of Forth bridge to support it as it sailed across the gap, its structure collapsed, it crumbled, and it fell to the floor. "Oh dear," said the woman, noiselessly lip-read through the glass, and put down the tea. She swept up the biscuit, placed it aside, and returned early to her work.

The word
yes
was just about to come from Miss Mayevska's lips when the woman lifted a heavy book up and over the wood panel that separated the display window from the interior of the shop. It was a French book, with a painting on the cover. It was what today—and I hate to say it—would be called a
coffee table book.
The title was
L'Aurore.
The painting we saw was so compelling that it was as if the aurora had removed itself from the sky onto that small square behind the glass. As soon as Miss Mayevska saw it, her heart skipped north.

Within two weeks we found ourselves by a rushing stream of immense power on the Nord Cap of Spitzbergen, as close to the pole as one can get in Europe. The water was achingly cold and entirely pure, born of a white glacier that had never felt a footfall. We remained there alone for the few hours it took the world to dim and darken and the aurora to arise. The sky looked like wheat fields in all their beauty, but it was dancing in celestial splendor as if in a dream of death.

Miss Mayevska's face was framed in dark sable, and her eyes were filled with the otherworldly color of the aurora.

(If you have not done so already,
please return the previous pages to the antproof case.)

 

S
IX MONTHS HAVE
passed since I last sat in the garden, surrounded, as I am now, by inchoate insects just hatched from little eggs, who fly in lines as tight as the singing electric wires of a tram line shining with the sun. I know nothing about the lives of insects, but it occurs to me that when I was seized at this very bench and I collapsed upon the ground, the great-great-great-great grandfathers and grandmothers of these little things were yet to be born.

And when they are born, they are nothing like our rounded and needful human babies that teach you, finally, what love is, and why you are here. No, the insects require no training, no care, no tenderness. They step right into the world, looking like a cross between an expresso machine and a 1928 Packard, and then they begin flying arcs and circles, tracing lines of red and gold in the rising sun in the gardens of Niterói. I suppose the parents don't even stay around to watch the eggs open.

It is a great privilege not to be hatched and then loosed upon the frightening speedways of the air to hunt a few bouncing gnats, lay an egg, and expire. In relative terms, these little buzz bombs can fly at 4,000 miles an hour. And they have no emotions, no regret, no deep unfulfilled desires ... I think. If, in fact, they do, they're in trouble.

I almost died on this very bench. I had come here at my usual time, before the streets and alleys fill with the sickening smell of brewing coffee, and spent my usual half hour catching my breath and watching the sunrise. I then uncapped my pen and took these papers from the antproof case. At that moment, a ship's whistle sounded far below.

I am unable to ignore such a summons, and I rise, always, to see what great creature has sidled in from the sea and how the wind washes the smoke over its smooth decks. As soon as I stood I perceived the source of the sound—a red ship laden with silver and blue containers, backing into a berth on the other side of the bay.

When I sat down I saw that my pen was rolling away from me. The bench is not quite level, and the pen was rolling like one of the logs upon which the Egyptians moved giant blocks of sandstone.

I reached to my left to grab it, but it escaped me by a micron. I extended myself. It escaped once more. And so on, until I found one part of me at one end of the bench and the other part at the other end. The bench is about five feet long, and my torso, from coccyx to glabella, about three feet long. This momentary extension, I believe, temporarily disconnected my arteries from my heart, which then stopped.

As luck would have it, gravity seized me and threw me upon the ground, snapping the arteries back into their accustomed ruts, and I survived. But the shock and pain of the temporary disconnection were such that I could not arise, and I lay by the bench for half an hour until a gardener discovered me and called an ambulance.

To my astonishment, the ambulance arrived at the hospital without killing anyone or turning over, and I was raced through the halls on a gurney as if I were in danger of death. I tried to explain, in Portuguese that had begun to fail me and turn into the plain idiom of my youth, that luck and gravity had reconnected my heart to the rivers of my blood, but no one understood. They were agitated, and I was tranquil. They worked about me as if in war, and I watched. I kept telling them not to rush, but they had probably seen too many American movies in which emergency rooms run at the pace of hand-to-hand combat.

"Look," I said, "the body is like a guitar. It has a certain music. Find the tempo of the music. Put on the music. I'm not a machine. Treat me with the rhythm of my own heart, and I'll be fine."

And those fools, they tied me to the table and gave me an injection of atropine. I needed rest, not twenty cups of purified cappuccino. It nearly killed me. Then they pounded on my chest like monkeys trying to open a coconut. They broke my sternum. Blood began to pour from my mouth.

I thought, this is it, I'm going to die even before I finish my memoir.

"Funio," I said, as they beat me relentlessly. "Funio, Funio," I cried, because I missed him. But then, as I jangled down the violent laundry chute that I thought would be my last, the music started. It came from within (they were too serious, those idiots, to have a radio), and it stabilized me in the surf that was tossing me about—until I felt that I rose above it, suspended in the sun, like Botticelli's Venus.

All was quiet, and I saw what seemed to be a great spiral shell of dawn-colored blue and glistening gold, braided and braiding, the one color twisting about the other, and I heard one note, a single call, a pure sound that gave me the strength to break the bonds with which they had tied me down.

They jumped back. Wouldn't you? I'm eighty years old, and the straps were thick. "I'm all right," I said. "All I need is an ice-cold glass of papaya juice."

This they understood, not because they're doctors but because they're Brazilians, and they turned off the timer that had been timing my death, let down their masks, and put away their stupid needles.

Then began six months of what was supposed to have been rest. The first two weeks of my recuperation were spent in the hospital itself. They took me to a room on a high floor overlooking the bay. I shared this room with a voodoo priest.

He had the same ailment I had: his blood vessels had been temporarily detached from his heart. It has happened to me now a few times, and now I know just to wait it out as you would a cramp or a headache. You see, the vessels are attached by means of some highly elastic material, and when they slip out they are under enormous pressure to resume their normal positions.

Of course, my physicians lampooned my understanding of cardiology, but I countered simply that as I had passed the age where they could make any claim to be effective, whatever kept me going was good medicine.

"You lose people at all stages of their lives," I said, "even adolescents as strong as wildebeests. And eighty-year-olds? All you can do with us is mimic the roles of drug pusher, jailer, and extortionist."

"We can't prolong life beyond its natural cycle," my physician replied. "We're not gods."

"Then let me go."

"We can't. You'll die."

"If I stay I'll die too, and I would much rather die in the rose garden in Niterói than here in this hideous hospital, next to
him.
"

"What's wrong with him?"

"Oh, nothing," I said. "He's just a voodoo priest who watches television continually. He's a robot, a slave, a zombie. He spends many gleeful hours with soap operas, and watching cleavaged women spin game wheels. He shrieks when they give away toasters or wind-sailing boards, and the only time he rests is when it's time for the news. Then he switches off the apparatus and paws through the chicken hearts and lizard tails that are brought to him by a steady stream of women whose heads are wrapped in bandannas."

"Would you like to be moved?"

"You
can't
move me. I've asked and been told that it's impossible."

"You insult me as if I'm in a trance," the priest said, turning away from a scene of a man and a woman arguing next to a waterfall. "I hear you."

"You are in a trance. You watch that thing all day."

"It has good programs."

"Even if it did, and it doesn't, you would be wrong to watch it. It's a usurper, like a catbird, or carbon monoxide, or Claudius."

"You," the priest said, pointing his finger at me, "are a crazy person.
You
attacked
me,
" he stated indignantly, "because I was drinking a cup of coffee."

"It wouldn't be the first time," I said under my breath, and then, because the doctor had left and the voodoo priest had turned away from me—not because he lacked the strength for argument but because a new program was starting—I fell back upon my pillows in weakness and defeat, but I remembered.

I had lost my battle with the world. No longer could I set foot in my own country, or speak my own language other than to a mischievous child prodigy or to oversexed Brazilian naval cadets who were required to take my course. I had long before alienated all my friends, or they had alienated me. I came to dislike most of them rather severely after a period of twenty or thirty years, when I would discover that I hadn't known them at all, and that they were capable of such things as abandoning their children, converting their faith, or attacking me because I do not drink coffee.

And coffee, of course, a drug, a filthy, malodorous poison and entirely destructive addiction, has vanquished the human soul, spoiled innocence, and destroyed childhood. It is virtually omnipotent: I have never convinced anyone, not even one person, not to drink it.