The Autobiography of Red (14 page)

 

Exactly. So why are you guilty—whose

 

tank are you in?
Geryon was exasperated.
Was your father a psychoanalyst?

 

She grinned.
No it’s me who’s the psychoanalyst.

 

He stared. She was serious.
Don’t look so shocked,
she said.
It pays the rent

 

and it’s not immoral
—

 

well not entirely immoral. But what about your singing? Hah!
She flicked ash

 

to the floor.
Make a living singing tango?

 

How many people did you see here tonight?
Geryon thought.
five or six,
he said.

 

That’s right. Those same five or six

 

are here every night. Goes up to nine or ten on weekends—maybe, if there’s

 

no soccer on TV. Sometimes we get

 

a party of politicians from Chile or tourists from the States. But it’s a fact.

 

Tango is a fossil.

 

So is psychoanalysis,
said Geryon.

 

She studied him a few moments then said slowly—but the gnome gave the piano

 

a shove against the wall

 

and Geryon almost missed it—
Who can a monster blame for being red?

 

What?
said Geryon starting forward.

 

I said looks like time for you to get home to bed,
she repeated, and stood,

 

pocketing her cigarettes.

 

Do come again,
she said as Geryon’s big overcoat swept out the door but he

 

did not turn his head.

 

A healthy volcano is an exercise in the uses of pressure.

 

Geryon sat on his bed in the hotel room pondering the cracks and fissures

 

of his inner life. It may happen

 

that the exit of the volcanic vent is blocked by a plug of rock, forcing

 

molten matter sideways along

 

lateral fissures called fire lips by volcanologists. Yet Geryon did not want

 

to become one of those people

 

who think of nothing but their stores of pain. He bent over the book on his knees.

 

Philosophic Problems.

 

“…  I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it.

 

But this separation of consciousness

 

is recognized only after a failure of communication, and our first movement is

 

to believe in an undivided being between us.…”

 

As he read Geryon could feel something like tons of black magma boiling up

 

from the deeper regions of him.

 

He moved his eyes back to the beginning of the page and started again.

 

“To deny the existence of red

 

is to deny the existence of mystery. The soul which does so will one day go mad.”

 

A church bell rang across the page

 

and the hour of six
P.M.
flowed through the hotel like a wave. Lamps snapped on

 

and white bedspreads sprang forward,

 

water rushed in the walls, the elevator crashed like a mastodon within its hollow cage.

 

I am not the one who is crazy here,

 

said Geryon closing the book. He put on his coat, belted it formally, and went out.

 

Out on the street it was Saturday night

 

in Buenos Aires. Shoals of brilliant young men parted and closed around him.

 

Heaps of romance spilled their bright vapor

 

onto the pavement from behind plate glass. He stopped to stare at the window

 

of a Chinese restaurant where

 

forty-four cans of lichee nuts were piled into a tower as big as himself. He tripped

 

over a beggar woman

 

low on the curb with two children pooled in her skirts. He

 

paused at a newspaper kiosk

 

and read every headline. Then went round the other side to the magazines.

 

Architecture, geology, surfing,

 

weight lifting, knitting, politics, sex.
Balling from Behind
caught his eye

 

(a whole magazine devoted to this?

 

issue after issue? year after year?) but he was too embarrassed to buy it.

 

He walked on. Went into a bookshop.

 

Browsed through the philosophy section and came to
ENGLISH BOOKS ALL KINDS
.

 

Under a tower of Agatha Christie

 

was one Elmore Leonard (
Killshot,
he’d read it) and
Collected Verse of Walt Whitman

 

in a bilingual edition.

 

               
It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,

               
The dark threw its patches down upon me also,

               
The best I had done seemed to me blank and suspicious,

               
Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil.…

 … 
tu solo quien sabe lo que es ser perverso.
Geryon put evil Walt Whitman down

 

and opened a self-help book

 

whose title (
Oblivion the Price of Sanity?
) stirred his ever hopeful heart.

 

“Depression is one of the unknown modes of being.

 

There are no words for a world without a self, seen with impersonal clarity.

 

All language can register is the slow return

 

to the oblivion we call health when imagination automatically recolors the landscape

 

and habit blurs perception and language

 

takes up its routine flourishes.” He was about to turn the page for more help

 

when a sound caught him.

 

Like kissing. He looked around. A workman stood halfway up a ladder outside

 

the front window of the shop.

 

Some dark-colored bird was swooping at him and each time the bird came near

 

the man made a kissing noise with his mouth—

 

the bird somersaulted upwards then dove again with a little swagger and a cry.

 

Kissing makes them happy, thought Geryon

 

and a sense of fruitlessness pierced him. He turned to go and bumped hard

 

into the shoulder of a man

 

standing next to him—
Oh!
The stale black taste of leather filled his nose and lips.

 

I’m sorry
—

 

Geryon’s heart stopped. The man was Herakles. After all these years—he picks

 

a day when my face is puffy!

 

That was a shocker,
they agreed over coffee at Café Mitwelt later the same day.

 

Geryon couldn’t decide which was more odd—

 

to be sitting across the table from a grown-up Herakles or to hear himself using

 

expressions like “a shocker.”

 

And what about this young man with black eyebrows who sat on Herakles’ left.

 

They do have a language,
Ancash was saying.

 

Herakles had explained that he and Ancash were traveling around South America

 

together recording volcanoes.

 

It’s for a movie,
Herakles added.
A nature film? Not exactly. A documentary

 

on Emily Dickinson.

 

Of course,
said Geryon. He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.

 

“On My Volcano Grows the Grass,”

 

Herakles went on,
is one of her poems. Yes I know,
said Geryon,
I like that poem,

 

I like the way she

 

refuses to rhyme
sod
with
God. Ancash meanwhile was taking a tape recorder

 

out of his pocket.

 

He slipped a tape into it and offered the earphones to Geryon.
Listen to this,
he said.

 

It’s Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines.

 

We were there last winter.
Geryon put the earphones on. Heard a hoarse animal

 

spraying pain from the back of its throat.

 

Then heavy irregular bumping sounds like tractor tires rolling downhill.

 

Herakles was watching.

 

Do you hear the rain?
he said.
Rain?
Geryon adjusted the earphones. The sound

 

was hot as a color inside.

 

It was monsoon season,
said Herakles,
volcanic ash and fire were mixing in midair

 

with the rain. We saw villagers

 

racing downhill and a black wall of hot mud behind them twenty meters high,

 

that’s what you hear on the tape.

 

It sort of rustles as it moves because it’s full of boiling chunks of solid rock.

 

Geryon listened to the boiling rocks.

 

He also heard broken sounds like glassware snapping which he realized were

 

human cries and then gunshots.

 

Gunshots?
he asked.
They had to send the army in,
said Herakles.
Even with

 

lava coming down the hills at

 

ninety kilometers some people didn’t want to leave their homes—Oh here

 

listen,
Ancash interrupted.

 

He was fast-forwarding the tape then restarted it. Listen to this. Geryon listened.

 

Heard again the ripe animal growl.

 

But then came some solid thuds like melons hitting the ground. He looked at Ancash.

 

Up high the air gets so hot it burns

 

the wings off birds—they just fall.
Ancash stopped. He and Geryon were looking

 

straight into each other’s eyes.

 

At the word
wings
something passed between them like a vibration.

 

Ancash was fast-forwarding again.

 

About here—I think, yes—is the part from Japan. Listen it’s a tsunami
—

 

a hundred kilometers from crest to crest

 

when it hit the beach. We saw fishing boats carried inland as far as the next village.

 

Geryon listened to water destroying

 

a beach in Japan. Ancash was talking of continental plates.
It’s worst at the edges

 

of ocean trenches, where one

 

continental plate sinks under another. Aftershocks can go on for years.

 

I know,
said Geryon. Herakles’ gaze

 

on him was like a gold tongue. Magma rising.
Beg your pardon?
said Ancash.

 

But Geryon was taking the earphones off

 

and reaching for the belt of his coat.
Got to go.
The effort it took to pull himself

 

away from Herakles’ eyes

 

could have been measured on the scale devised by Richter.
Call us

 

we’re at the City Hotel,
said Herakles.

 

The Richter scale has neither a minimum nor a maximum threshold.

 

Everything depends on

 

the sensitivity of the seismograph.
Sure okay,
said Geryon, and threw himself

 

out the door.