The Autobiography of Red (10 page)

Geryon was packing when the phone rang.

 

He knew who it was even though, now that he was twenty-two and lived

 

on the mainland, he spoke to her

 

usually on Saturday mornings. He climbed across his suitcase and reached

 

for the phone, knocking

 

the
Fodor’s Guide to South America
and six boxes of DX 100 color film into the sink.

 

Small room.

 

Hi Mom yes just about

 

. . . . 

 

No I got a window seat

 

. . . . 

 

Seventeen but there’s a three-hour difference between here and Buenos Aires

 

. . . . 

 

No listen I phoned
—

 

. . . . 

 

I phoned the consulate today there are no shots required for Argentina

 

. . . . 

 

Mom be reasonable
Flying Down to Rio
was made in 1933 and it’s set in Brazil

 

. . . . 

 

Like when we went to Florida and Dad swelled up

 

. . . . 

 

Yes okay

 

. . . . 

 

Well you know what the gauchos say

 

. . . . 

 

Something about riding boldly into nullity

 

. . . . 

 

Not exactly it feels like a tunnel

 

. . . . 

 

Okay I’ll call as soon as I get to the hotel—Mom? I have to go now the taxi’s

 

here listen don’t smoke too much

 

. . . . 

 

Me too

 

. . . . 

 

Bye

 

It is always winter up there.

 

As the aeroplane moved over the frozen white flatland of the clouds Geryon left

 

his life behind like a weak season.

 

Once he’d seen a dog having a rabies attack. Springing about like a mechanical toy

 

and falling over on its back

 

in jerky ways as if worked by wires. When the owner stepped up and put a gun

 

to the dog’s temple Geryon walked away.

 

Now leaning forward to peer out the little oblong window where icy cloudlight

 

drilled his eyes

 

he wished he had stayed to see it go free.

 

Geryon was hungry.

 

Opening his
Fodor’s Guide
he began to read “Things to Know About Argentina.”

 

“The strongest harpoons are made

 

from the bone inside the skull of a whale that beaches on Tierra del Fuego.

 

Inside the skull is a
canalita

 

and along it two bones. Harpoons made from a jawbone are not so strong.”

 

A delicious odor of roasting seal

 

was wafting through the aeroplane. He looked up. Rows away at the front

 

servants were distributing

 

dinner from a cart. Geryon was very hungry. He forced himself to stare out

 

the cold little window and count

 

to one hundred before looking up again. The cart had not moved. He thought

 

about harpoons. Does a man with a harpoon

 

go hungry? Even a harpoon made of a jawbone could hit the cart from here.

 

How people get power over one another,

 

this mystery. He moved his eyes back to the
Fodor’s Guide.
“Among

 

the indigenous folk of Tierra del Fuego

 

were the Yamana which means as a noun ‘people not animals’ or as a verb

 

‘to live, breathe, be happy, recover

 

from sickness, become sane.’ Joined as a suffix to the word for
hand

 

it denotes ‘friendship.’ ”

 

Geryon’s dinner arrived. He unwrapped and ate every item ravenously seeking

 

the smell he had smelled

 

a few moments ago but it was not there. The Yamana too, he read, were extinct

 

by the beginning of the twentieth century—

 

wiped out by measles contracted from the children of English missionaries.

 

As night darkness glided across the outer world

 

the inside of the aeroplane got colder and smaller. There were neon tracks

 

in the ceiling which extinguished themselves.

 

Geryon closed his eyes and listened to engines vibrating deep in the moon-splashed

 

canals of his brain. Each way

 

he moved brought his kneecaps into hard contact with punishment.

 

He opened his eyes again.

 

At the very front of the cabin hung a video screen. South America glowed

 

like an avocado. A live red line

 

marked the progress of the aeroplane. He watched the red line inch forward

 

from Miami

 

towards Puerto Rico at 972 kilometers per hour. The passenger in front of him

 

had propped his video camera

 

gently against the sleeping head of his wife and was videotaping the video screen,

 

which now recorded

 

Temperatura Exterior (−50 degrees C) and Altura (10,670 meters)

 

as well as Velocidad.

 

“The Yamana, whose filth and poverty persuaded Darwin, passing in his
Beagle,

 

that they were monkey men unworthy

 

of study, had fifteen names for clouds and more than fifty for different kinds

 

of kin. Among their variations of the verb

 

‘to bite’ was a word that meant ‘to come surprisingly on a hard substance

 

when eating something soft

 

e.g. a pearl in a mussel.’ ” Geryon shifted himself down and up in the molded

 

seat trying to unclench

 

knots of pain in his spine. Half turned sideways but could not place his left arm.

 

Heaved himself forwards again

 

accidentally punching off the reading light and knocking his book to the floor.

 

The woman next to him moaned

 

and slumped over the armrest like a wounded seal. He sat in the numb dark.

 

Hungry again.

 

The video screen recorded local (Bermuda) time as ten minutes to two.

 

What is time made of?

 

He could feel it massed around him, he could see its big deadweight blocks

 

padded tight together

 

all the way from Bermuda to Buenos Aires—too tight. His lungs contracted.

 

Fear of time came at him. Time

 

was squeezing Geryon like the pleats of an accordion. He ducked his head to peer

 

into the little cold black glare of the window.

 

Outside a bitten moon rode fast over a tableland of snow. Staring at the vast black

 

and silver nonworld moving

 

and not moving incomprehensibly past this dangling fragment of humans

 

he felt its indifference roar over

 

his brain box. An idea glazed along the edge of the box and whipped back

 

down into the canal behind the wings

 

and it was gone. A man moves through time. It means nothing except that,

 

like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.

 

Geryon leaned his forehead against the cold hard hum of the double glass and slept.

 

On the floor under his feet

 

Fodor’s Guide
lay open.
THE GAUCHO ACQUIRED AN EXAGGERATED NOTION

 

OF MASTERY OVER

 

HIS OWN DESTINY FROM THE SIMPLE ACT OF RIDING ON HORSEBACK

 

WAY FAR ACROSS THE PLAIN
.

 

There is no person without a world.

 

The red monster sat at a corner table of Café Mitwelt writing bits of Heidegger

 

on the postcards he’d bought.

 

               
Sie sind das was betreiben

               there are many Germans in

               Buenos Aires they are all

               soccer players the weather

               is lovely wish you were here

                     
GERYON

he wrote to his brother now a sportscaster at a radio station on the mainland.

 

Over at the end of the bar

 

near the whiskey bottles Geryon saw a waiter speaking to another behind his hand.

 

He supposed they would

 

soon throw him out. Could they tell from the angle of his body, from the way

 

his hand moved that he was

 

writing German not Spanish? It was likely illegal. Geryon had been studying

 

German philosophy at college

 

for the past three years, the waiters doubtless knew this too. He shifted his upper

 

back muscles inside

 

the huge overcoat, tightening his wings and turned over another postcard.

 

               
Zum verlorenen Hören

               There are many Germans

               in Buenos Aires they are

               all psychoanalysts the

               weather is lovely wish you

               were here

                     
GERYON

he wrote to his philosophy professor. But now he noticed one of the waiters

 

coming towards him. A cold spray

 

of fear shot across his lungs. He rummaged inside himself for Spanish phrases.

 

Please do not call the police
—

 

what did Spanish sound like? he could not recall a single word of it.

 

German irregular verbs

 

were marching across his mind as the waiter drew up at his table and stood,

 

a brilliant white towel

 

draped on his forearm, leaning slightly towards Geryon.
Aufwarts abwarts

 

ruckwarts vorwarts auswarts einwarts

 

swam crazy circles around each other while Geryon watched the waiter extract

 

a coffee cup smoothly

 

from the debris of postcards covering the table and straighten his towel

 

as he asked in perfect English

 

Would the gentleman like another expresso?
but Geryon was already blundering

 

to his feet with the postcards

 

in one hand, coins dropping on the tablecloth and he went crashing out.

 

It was not the fear of ridicule,

 

to which everyday life as a winged red person had accommodated Geryon early in life,

 

but this blank desertion of his own mind

 

that threw him into despair. Perhaps he was mad. In the seventh grade he had done

 

a science project on this worry.

 

It was the year he began to wonder about the noise that colors make. Roses came

 

roaring across the garden at him.

 

He lay on his bed at night listening to the silver light of stars crashing against

 

the window screen. Most

 

of those he interviewed for the science project had to admit they did not hear

 

the cries of the roses

 

being burned alive in the noonday sun.
Like horses,
Geryon would say helpfully,

 

like horses in war.
No, they shook their heads.

 

Why is grass called blades?
he asked them.
Isn’t it because of the clicking?

 

They stared at him.
You should be

 

interviewing roses not people,
said the science teacher. Geryon liked this idea.

 

The last page of his project

 

was a photograph of his mother’s rosebush under the kitchen window.

 

Four of the roses were on fire.

 

They stood up straight and pure on the stalk, gripping the dark like prophets

 

and howling colossal intimacies

 

from the back of their fused throats.
Didn’t your mother mind
—

 

Signor!
Something solid landed

 

against his back. Geryon had come to a dead halt in the middle of a sidewalk

 

in Buenos Aires

 

with people flooding around his big overcoat on every side. People, thought Geryon,

 

for whom life

 

is a marvelous adventure. He moved off into the tragicomedy of the crowd.