Memoir From Antproof Case (60 page)

I pushed hard with my legs and flew through this into a chamber of roiling water in which I had so little buoyancy that I could hardly float. I breathed in a few times even though I was not in air, and when I broke through to the surface I was choking and deafened by the thunder of falling water. The chamber behind the fall was like the surf on a brisk autumn day. It was only half light in there, and almost impossible to breathe.

I tried to swim out, but the force of the water pushed me down irresistibly, held me against the bottom, and then threw me backward. I knocked my head against part of the plane, and floated up again, just as slowly as the first time.

As water fell into the chamber the same amount of water had to be cast out. The exit wasn't on the floor, so it had to be along the sides. I dived down, hugging the wall, and halfway to the bottom I felt a strong current. The more I followed it the more I was accelerated, until I was no longer even swimming. Soon I was going so fast that I curled up and put my hands over my head for fear of being hurled against an obstruction. I was not hurled against something solid but, rather, thrown out of the water and into the air. I breathed during my moment of free flight, fell again into the foam, came to the surface, spread my limbs, and, as usual, found myself riding at great speed on the cool torrents of a river that had saved me.

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

 

A
T
S
ãO
C
ONRADO
I discovered that what I had written would not fit in the antproof case. Perched on the glacis, with wind ruffling the pages, I had tried to stuff them back in, but I was afraid that I might drop them into the sea, and my efforts were half-hearted. With a blooming rose of pages clutched against my chest, I teetered in the rock face, got to the road, and made my way to a café on the beach, where I sat within fifteen feet of an expresso machine, breathing hard and soaked with sweat as I struggled to get the manuscript into the case. I was so enraged by the odor of coffee that I was unable to do anything. On the bus coming home I tried again, but was still trembling because of the coffee, so I gave up.

I float on a raft of troubles that intensify day by day. Long ago I would have thought that by ending my life an inconspicuous failure—a
poor
inconspicuous failure—I would at least have been free. But problems are torturers: they are encouraged by your defeat, like dogs that go wild as their quarry sinks to its knees.

The next day, after a long and fitful sleep, I put on my bathrobe, went to the desk, and, trembling with despair, tried to get the São Conrado pages into the antproof case. I summoned all my strength and could not do it. I might have done it were I to have wrinkled them, but I would rather die than wrinkle a clean sheet of paper.

"Well," I said, trying to comfort myself, "it's simple. I'll go to the store where I bought the antproof case, and buy a new one in a larger size." That would be much better than stuffing everything in anyway, because getting the pages out would be a nightmare, and if the contents were under as much pressure as I am the seams might start to open, which is dangerous because some ants are very small, and others, though they be not small, are tiny nonetheless as juveniles.

I allowed a full day for obtaining a new and larger case. For me, shopping is one of the most physically and emotionally exhausting things in the world. This is because I am somewhat inflexible and fairly exact. I'll decide, for example, that I want a tie of a certain pattern and color—neither of which has ever been heard of in the worldwide history of neckwear—and then spend the rest of my life looking for it. I will look at a million ties, and never will I find the one I want. I will then add to my burgeoning store of regrets and disappointments yet another, like a lost and unrequited love, that I carry with me. I cannot give up on things, I simply cannot. If they, like Constance, are animate and have wills of their own and they push me away, I have no choice. But I do not have the right to give up on those things that are silent and still and forever unobtainable ... I do not have the right to let them drop.

God help me if I actually need something in a day. I'll walk
from store to store, monopolize the phone system, and veer about the streets, totally devoid of blood sugar. And I knew that finding a good antproof case might not be so easy, as I had bought the original in 1955 or 1956.

Very early one morning, less than a quarter of an hour after the stores opened, I walked into the stationers where I had obtained the first case thirty years before. Nothing had changed in those thirty years. When I first settled in Rio I'd come to this place for my supply of stationery, but as in the case of many establishments that one patronizes in the beginning of one's residence in a strange city, after I had abandoned it I had come to associate it with the period of ignorance and naivete when I would pay double for almost everything.

In the early morning, merchants are somnambulant and subdued. They expect and want little. As the first customer, I was, therefore, semi-invisible. The fan was turning, moving air laden with the smell of printed paper and oiled leather. In the back, a mimeograph machine was spitting out flyers, and near the cash register a parrot slept on a wooden perch.

This was the emporium of a man who had been sewn into the sleeve of routine. Probably not a single thing had been changed since the moment when, for him, life had finally lost its sparkle. The shelves were half empty, the stock obsolete and covered with dust. Still, he carried certain items—lecterns, pointers, stamp-licking machines—that enabled him to survive at the edge of the business district. The faded colors that surrounded these things—green, brown, and beige—had evolved rather than been chosen, his decorators and designers being oxidation and the sun streaming through the front windows. Nothing had been placed where it lay, either deliberately or less than twenty years before.

A little old man with two-inch-thick glasses and salt-and-pepper hair slowly approached me. "May I help you?" he asked, as listless as a dog in a fish store.

"Yes," I replied, for even though I had slept little and arisen early, I was as eager as always when enraged. "I'm looking for a large antproof case."

"For a what?"

"An antproof case. A large one."

"What's an antproof case?"

"It's a case," I told him, "into which an ant cannot obtain entry."

"I never heard of such a thing."

"I have one," I said triumphantly, "and I bought it in this store."

"When?"

"In nineteen-fifty-five, or six."

"I'll ask my father," the man said as he turned.

After some muted mumbling from the far recesses of the back room, a sound that I imagine must be familiar to the halls of monasteries, a man far more ancient than I walked slowly toward me. His glasses, twice as thick as his son's, were so powerful that were he an astronomer he would not have needed a telescope.

"I used to sell dah hantproof case," he said, "in dah Tventies. Did you buy von den?"

"No, I bought one only recently, in the mid-Fifties."

He thought for a moment, sleeping with his eyes open. "It must have been von of dah last vons ve had out. Vhat color vas it?"

"Green canvas, rosewood, brass fittings, and a scarlet inlay."

"Oh yes," he said, in slow motion. "I tink dhat vas dah last von ve solt. Vhen people vent on hexpaditions to dah Hamazon, ve couldn't stock enough of dem. Ve had dem," he said, lifting an arm to indicate expanse, "stacked hup to dah sea-link. Ve had dem for men, for vimen, for children heven. Big vons, little vons. Heverytink!"

"And not one is left?" I inquired. "If you have one yourself, and it's the right size, I'd be happy to trade my smaller one for it, and pay the difference."

"None left. Such a tink vas for a different time. People cared about different tinks. Dah vorld vas different. Dey don't make dem anymore. No von vants dem."

"
I
do."

"Vhy do you bother? Now, if such ha tink vere made—hand people don't tink about hants hanymore—it vould be plostic."

"I think about ants."

"It vould be ha color new to dis hearth."

"Ants still exist, just as they used to."

"Hevrytink is different now."

"But not me. I'm not different. I haven't changed."

"No?" he asked.

"No."

"Vhy not?"

"I can't," I said. "I can't leave them."

"Who?"

"All those left behind."

"If hit's your pleasure," he told me. "But, deh fact remains, I have not ha sinkle hantproof case. Der is not ha store in hall dah vorld vere you vill find von."

 

I had managed to find a light in every dark chamber of the past eighty years. But suddenly hearing that no one made an antproof case, that no one cared, that they were forgotten and strange, suggested to me that this was the end.

How perfectly natural, expected, and perhaps in certain circumstances even admirable it had seemed, when I was young, to buy an antproof case. Now, if I am to believe the astronomer, no one thinks about ants. Is there one less ant in the world now than once there was? Probably the ant population has grown by quite a few trillion, and yet no one thinks to use an antproof case.

It is as if all the ants had somehow been eradicated, and, yet, they are everywhere. If the president of France dropped a brioche from his breakfast tray and it rolled unseen under his bed, the ants of the Élysées Palace would emerge en masse to claim it, streaming from hidden veins beneath the parquetry and damask.

This is not a condition peculiar to France, for if they so desired the ants could dance upon the desk in the Oval Office or take a nap in Queen Elizabeth's ermine robes. They can go everywhere because they are so little that hardly anyone bothers to kill them. I'm not obsessed with them (I'm not obsessed with anything). It's just that when you have something of any importance you put it in an antproof case, don't you?

Half the time that we imagine things are changing for the better they are actually changing for the worse. The glory of accomplishment is misunderstood by later generations merely because of the ugly progress of quantities. For example, Lindbergh's flight was truly great. One man, straightforward and unafraid, did what had never been done, where richly funded syndicates with multi-engined planes and much greater power had failed and prevaricated. With a single engine, a small but brilliantly conceived plane, and no fear, he did what they could only plan. It was not so much that he flew the Atlantic, but that he flew it alone.

And now he is nearly forgotten as, day after day, the Concorde makes the crossing in a few hours as its passengers sit in
silence facing their champagne and caviar. Is it not better to be Lindbergh, suffering sleeplessly through dark nights over the Atlantic, than a tycoon in a silk tie traveling faster than the speed of sound and not giving it a thought?

The world leaves behind unseen that which is great and that which it loves. New loves are born, and then they too are left behind. In this oversped and cowardly rush, devotion has no place, consistency no value, love no other reward than forgetfulness. I don't like it. Apparently only one antproof case is left, and I have it, but unfortunately it is not large enough to hold everything in my heart.

So, as you can see, I'm doubling back now, writing on the reverse of each page and heading toward the beginning. This has made me somewhat giddy, because I feel as if I possess a time machine. If only I did. I would pilot myself back to that perfect evening in June, and wait for the two gentlemen from Mr. Edgar's private car. As they came through the woods, I would put a Winchester slug into each of their brains, and then roll them down the hillside into the marsh. And then I would go home for dinner, unable to tell the tale, too moved to speak.

The antproof case is truly beautiful. They don't make things like it anymore, and even if they did they could not age them to match the glow of its suffering, or condition them to know what it has held and where it has been, or teach them sixty years of absolute inanimate patience. True, it may have seen only the sky as it sat upon the shelf near a window, but it may have sat upon that shelf for twenty years, master of nuances among the clouds, or of the silence and darkness of years in a drawer, or of breezes that swept across the cool tiles as it spent nights on the floor.

 

You have been my little ally, always on the lookout, running up the mountain to give me warnings from the barber, listening for footsteps near the door. Though as I write this you are a child, your early understanding of such things will be perfected. You will never find a weapon to which you will not take quickly and easily. You already know how to walk quietly at night, how to arrive unexpectedly, how never to be caught unaware.

I cannot imagine not teaching a child these lessons, but I must beg your forgiveness not only because they are such early sorrow but because I brought you to what you know by bringing you to me. I hope that, if and when the time comes, the things you learned from me will save your life, and that you will embrace my memory as I embrace my imagination of you as a man.

The gold is in the water, which is where it should be: water flowing, water dissolving, an eternal collision of oxygen and spray, a cool cloud that scours the walls of rock and the notion of time.

It rests behind the turbulence, protected and safe. The sweep of the current and the power of the backwash cannot carry it away, and the river will never run dry, for the simple reason that the territory of its tributaries is vast and green. Many years ago, the parts of the plane that could be swept downstream were taken into the flow, never to reappear, or, if they did, only to puzzle whoever happened upon them.

I have returned to the site several times, and at night I slipped into the river. With a telescoping aluminum pole I probed close to the backwash and found the fuselage, what was left of the wings, and the tail. The weight of the gold and the engines has kept the plane in place, and there it lies.