Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

by Tom Robbins

  There wasn’t a great deal more to hear, as it turned out. Regarding the Fatima Lady’s prophecies, Suzy was short on detail. “Wars and big floods and, uh, famines and earthquakes and stuff.”

  “That figures.” Switters nodded. “Death and destruction are a prophet’s bread and butter. Nobody ever grabbed much ink predicting bountiful harvests, lovely spring weather, or that a good time would be had by all. Even the Second Coming is billed as ‘Doomsday.’ “

  “She said that some great war was going to end in the next year. That was nice. But that if people didn’t heed her words, another greater one would come along soon.”

  “Those would have been World Wars One and Two.”

  “Whatever. She was right, wasn’t she?” In the Early American rocker angled next to his wheelchair, Suzy maneuvered a bare shin beneath the other knee so that she was balanced, more or less, on one of her lean, tanned legs, a position that thrust her upper body slightly forward until he could feel her breath upon his neck. She smelled both clean and dirty, sour and sweet, like a child. The reverie of childhood—its seamless daydreams, its gamelife and toylife, its timeless aura of magic happiness—was there in her aroma. Whatever that little bastard Brian might be doing to her (or she to him), she still smelled like the punch line in a nursery rhyme. “She couldn’t be wrong,” Suzy continued. “She was Mother Mary.”

  The precise logic of that declaration eluded Switters, but he thought he knew where it was coming from. Many human females, as they approached puberty, as the first hormonal waters—the precursor of the adolescent geyser—began to bubble up through their private earth, became enamored, to greater or lesser degrees, with horses and/or the Virgin Mary. Unlike human males, whose fixation on sports figures, explosions, horsepower, and vulgar comedy could muddle their minds into early middle age, and in hard cases, even beyond, the equine and Marian fantasies of healthy girls tended to wane and then peter out (so to speak) altogether once they became sexually active. The most cursory familiarity with Freudian psychology could explain the girlish preoccupation with horses; the infatuation with Mary, particularly on the part of non-Catholics, was more complicated, although he guessed it could be attributed to her status as Super Virgin: she conceived without coitus, gave birth without pain, commanded the affection and admiration of men without being corrupted by them; which was to say, she triumphed gloriously over the terrors, dangers, and uncertainties facing young females as they came “of age.” The fact that Mary broadcast a monstrously mixed message—motherhood is divine, sex a sin—could not be underestimated for the damage it was capable of inflicting on a developing psyche, but given the discrepant nature of reality, the myth of the Virgin Mother might be said also to provide basic training in the acceptance of life’s contradictions; and most girls did eventually escape her misogynistically generated web, though frequently secretly scarred.

  That Suzy was bright and spunky, that she had an open heart and generous spirit, that she was physically attractive and therefore did not have to retreat into doctrine as a form of compensation, all indicated that she would soon outgrow Marianism. For the time being, however, especially as they prepared her term paper, he would accept it just as he accepted her limited vocabulary and imprecise speech. Hey, Mary might have been his own patron saint had not her innocence been commandeered as a front for a rapacious institution. He tried to picture what Mary (known then as Miriam or Mariamne) must have been like before she was hijacked and haloed by the patriarchs, back when she was Suzy’s age, a dusty-footed, chocolate-eyed Jewish filly, swelling with a fetus of suspect origin—but the Virgin that unexpectedly filled his mind’s eye was the Little Blessed Virgin of the Starry Waters, a scruffy dory bearing him ever farther up a steaming jungle river toward a destiny almost too queer to comprehend.

  He shook it off. “Very well, cupcake,” he said, “here’s what we must do. First, we’ll take the broad overall view. Research the subject generally but thoroughly. Then, we’ll narrow our focus down to something manageable and particular and original. For example, the significance of the number thirteen in the Fatima visitations. We’ll research that specific area with even greater thoroughness. Then we’ll organize our material, make an outline of the salient points we want to cover. After that, we’ll write a first draft. Submit it to ruthless scrutiny. Edit it to perfection. And bingo! Final draft. An A-plus paper. Scholarship to Stanford.”

  “Wow! Hello? Sister Francis didn’t tell us all that. Sounds like a lot of work. Are you sure that’s how people write term papers?”

  “Absolutely. Some novelists even write books that way. The more dronish ones.”

  “Okay,” she sighed. “You’re the brain.”

  “You’ve got a brain, too, and don’t forget it. If you develop it, it’ll be around to enrich your life long after your tits and ass have declared bankruptcy.”

  “Switters!” His mother looked up from her fashion magazine and shook a crimson-nailed finger at him.

  “It’s cool,” Suzy assured the older woman. “He knows what he’s talking about. He’s, like, the smartest person anywhere.” She planted a vigorous kiss that very nearly slid off his cheek and onto his lips.

  “I don’t know about that,” grumbled Eunice, although whether the source of her uncertainty was Switters’s intellect or Suzy’s kiss remained unclear.

  Cranking up the search engine on the family computer, they commenced their investigation that very evening, discovering, to their mutual astonishment, twenty full pages of entries relating to Fatima. They failed to make a dent in the list, however, because when Suzy noticed that her Tweety Bird wristwatch read ten o’clock, she insisted that Switters go to bed. He protested energetically. “I was riding herd on these domesticated electrons before you were potty trained,” he said. “As much as I loathe computers, I can drive them all night long. I mean it. I’m good until dawn.”

  “No, you’re not,” she responded. “You need lots of rest and stuff. I’m in charge here. I’m the nurse, and I’m going to take care of you, no matter what you say.” She switched off the computer. “We can, like, do this tomorrow.”

  “All right, then, Nurse Ratchet. As long as you’ll come straight home from school.”

  She frowned at this but agreed.

  “Are you sure you can’t tell your own family what’s wrong with you?” his mother asked, not for the first time.

  “He can’t,” snapped Suzy. “It’s a governmental secret.”

  “That’s correct, Mother. And if you don’t quit prying, I’m going to suspect you of being in the pay of a foreign power. I’ll bet Sergi is putting you up to it.”

  “Don’t you dare mention that name in this house,” she said, reddening. Sergi was one of her previous husbands.

  Suzy pushed him out of the den. In the hall she asked, “Switters, there really is something the matter with you, isn’t there? It’s not some kind of, like, CIA trick?”

  Oh, God! Here’s my chance. I can just give her the whole story and be done with it. But he didn’t. “It’s no trick, darling,” he said, agonizing as he said it.

  “You promise you can’t stand up and walk?”

  Come on. Tell her the truth. Or have you worked for the company so long you’re only comfortable when you’re lying? He clenched his fists. He bit his tongue. “I promise,” he said.

  She rolled him into the bathroom. “Get ready for bed,” she ordered. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  Not being in the right frame of mind for prolonged maintenance, he was already in bed when she returned, bearing a glass of milk and a bowl of oatmeal cookies. Having had his sweet tooth shattered by a rifle butt in Kuwait, he’d left her earlier delivery of brownies virtually untouched on the bedside table, but she pretended not to notice.

  Suzy smoothed his covers. Then, very gingerly, so as not to disturb his “injuries,” she lay down on top of him. “Here’s your good night kiss,” she said, but instead of one kiss there was a series, a staccato series, repeatedly s
tabbing, as it were, his mouth with the wet pink dagger of her little tongue.

  Through the Early American patchwork quilt, through the floral patterned sheet, he could feel her rosy biological heat, a smokeless fire that enveloped the vestigial dollhouse and charred the residual mud pie; a soft, ancient, mindless burning emanating from a source oblivious to cultural conditioning; that neither knew nor cared that “civilized” girls no longer married at twelve, that unscrupulous older males might take advantage of its urgings, or that shrill neurotic voices might rage against it. Broiled by it, Switters centered himself and lay motionless, except to rest a cautious, non-probing, non-squeezing, rather avuncular hand lightly on her small, ripe rump.

  “Tell me something about yourself,” she demanded.

  “Okay. Shoot.”

  “No, I mean, like, tell me something true about you that I don’t already know. A secret fact. That nobody else knows.”

  He pondered this for a moment or two. Then he declared, “The more advertising I see, the less I want to buy.”

  For some reason, Suzy found this the most radical, outlandish, unexpected, and witty remark she’d ever heard. Giggling, and shaking her head in wonderment, she slipped carefully off him and moved to the door. “Gotta go now. Remember, if you need anything, just ring that little bell.”

  He glanced at the quasi-antique copper bell on the table beside the milk glass but said nothing.

  “You’re amazing,” she said. “I only wish that—” She broke off abruptly and left the room.

  He lay awake most of the night, trying to finish her sentence for her.

  The California State Library was located in Sacramento, appropriately enough since Sacramento was the capital of that state. Glamorous, greedy Los Angeles had its Hollywood sign; picturesque, kooky San Francisco had its Golden Gate Bridge; provincial, authoritarian Sacramento—in which the true pulse of America pumped a steadier beat—had its Capitol Mall. Within that mall, beneath the huge gold dome of the capitol building and at the end of a broad, tree-lined avenue, the state library sheltered its precious charge of books.

  Although he anticipated—correctly, as it turned out—that the library would be home to a minimum of volumes pertaining to Our Lady of Fatima and that they must turn to the Internet for the bulk of their research, still he wanted Suzy to have the library experience, to undergo the sheer bookness of the place, to taste the “seepage,” as he put it: the information and beauty that tended to leak from shelves of books even when the books went unread.

  “Virtual reality is nothing new,” he told her as she guided his chair up and down the rows of stacks. “Books, the ones worth reading, have always generated virtual reality. Of course, unless one can get past its cultural and sensorial levels, what is reality but virtual?”

  Suzy was silent, but he imagined he could hear tiny luminous thought-worms chewing roadways in her half-green apple. DNA was certainly devious in that it ripened the body before the brain.

  On the way back to the suburbs, feeling tome-toned and opus-pocused, Switters piloting his rented convertible, Suzy playing navigator, nurse, and tour guide, they debated whether the fact that Sacramento was noted for its manufacture of missiles, weapons systems, cake mixes, potato chips, and caskets did not qualify it as the quintessential American city. “Okay, but, like, Sacramento’s also called the Camellia Capital of the World,” she reminded him.

  “A few weeks ago, I was in the Dead Dog Capital of the World. I have to say, camellias are an improvement.” Sensing that she was trying to form some connection in her mind between a place so vile it was renowned for dead dogs and his presumed wounds and injuries, he sought to restore a more poetic and, he hoped, romantic mood by reciting a Buson haiku:

  “A camellia falls,

  Spilling out rainwater

  —from yesterday.”

  “Could you pull off over there?” she immediately asked, pointing not to a motel as he at first thought but to a gas station. “I really have to use the bathroom.”

  “Say toilet, would you, darling. I don’t believe bathing is one of the services Texaco provides.”

  “Whatever.”

  “No, it’s not unimportant. Intelligent speech is under pressure in our fair land and needs all the support it can get.”

  He spent the five minutes that she was absent trying not to picture her camellia spilling out yesterday’s water.

  She made him rest when they got home.

  After dinner they went computerside and uncorked the Fatima jug. Quickly their cups runnethed over.

  The children were Lucia, age ten, Francisco, nine, and Jacinta, seven. They were poor and completely uneducated. When they returned from the pastures that spring evening in 1917, they seemed to be entranced, almost in a state of ecstasy. Lucia ate her supper in blissful silence, and Francisco, too, was distracted and quiet, but little Jacinta was too young and excited to contain herself. The cat she let out of the bag, and which in time grew larger than a tiger, was that they had been visited on the northern slope of the Cova da Iria (where her uncle, Lucia’s father, leased pastureland) by a beautiful woman enveloped in blinding light. She appeared to them, following several flashes of lightning (it was a clear, sunny day) from a point some meters above their heads, in the top branches of a stubby tree. As Switters read aloud Lucia’s later description of the woman, her dazzling white tunic that gathered at the waist without benefit of belt or sash, her graceful hands folded prayerfully at her breast and wound round with a pearl-beaded rosary, her exquisitely refined features, the sadness and maternal concern that showed in her countenance, the loveliness that exceeded anything to which a bride might aspire, the light that she radiated (“clearer and brighter than a crystal cup filled with purest water penetrated by the most sparkling rays of the sun”), he noticed that Suzy herself was becoming enraptured. For any number of reasons, he thought, this is probably not a good sign.

  He was tempted to suggest that they launch a botanical probe into the bush that the Lady had selected as her landing pad. In Portuguese, it was called carrasqueira, in English, holm oak. By any chance did it have psychotropic properties? Might the children have chewed its leaves or, perhaps, inadvertently inhaled its pollen? Alas, even were Suzy open to such an approach, Sister Francis would likely have a Sacred Heart attack, in which case an A-grade might be out of the question.

  When, however, they learned that the Fatima children had twice in the previous year been visited by an angel, Switters couldn’t keep quiet. “No television, no radio, and they were illiterate. Kids sometimes have to provide their own entertainment. It was always Lucia, the eldest cousin, who saw these holy apparitions first, and it was with her that they spoke. Maybe little Lucia had an active imagination, a fantasy life fueled by Bible stories, the only extraordinary material to which she’d ever been exposed, and she pulled the younger kids into her fantasies, much the same way that Tom Sawyer pulled in Huckleberry Finn.”

  Suzy protested. “I don’t know why you have to be so negative. Don’t you believe in miracles and stuff?”

  “Well, I know from first-hand experience that the universe is a very woo-woo place, and that so-called consensual reality is not much more than the tip of the iceberg. But my credibility alarm starts to jangle a bit when the Virgin Mary shows up speaking flawless Portuguese and looking like a Roman Catholic Sunday School portrait instead of the Middle Eastern Jewish matron she was at the time of her death. If I remember it correctly, rosary beads weren’t introduced until more than a thousand years after Christ, so why—”

  “Hello? God’s time isn’t the same as our time.”

  She had him there. Certainly he wasn’t going to argue on the side of linear time, not after what he’d been through. Today was tomorrow, wasn’t it? Or, at least, the future leaked into the present on a fairly routine basis. The past, as well.

  “Anyway, like, what about all the people who saw the sun dance in the sky and stuff? On October thirteenth. They weren’t Huckleberry Finns.�
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  “Hmmm,” hmmmed Switters. “That’s interesting in itself. Of the seventy thousand people who joined the children in the Cova da Iria pasture for the Lady’s farewell performance and prophecy session, roughly half claimed to have witnessed a meteorological light show of staggering proportions. The other half saw absolutely nothing. What does that tell us, darling? That fifty percent of humanity is susceptible to mass hallucination?”

  “Or that fifty percent are pure enough to see God’s miracles and the rest are like you.”

  “Fifty percent purity? Man, I wish the figure was even a fraction that high! As for me personally, I witness a divine miracle every time you enter the room.”

  “Oh, Switters!”

  When she tucked him in a short while later—he wasn’t tired, but he didn’t object—she loaded a full package of tongue into their good night kiss.

  Asked in an interview in 1946 if the Lady of Fatima had revealed anything about the end of the world, Lucia (by then Sister Mary dos Dores, a lay nun) responded rather like a CIA officer with cowboyish leanings. “I cannot answer that question,” she said through tight lips. Lucia did not, as far as has been reported, add, “for reasons of national security.”

  Whether or not the Lady had been forthcoming about a possible final curtain ringing down on the Homo sapiens revue—and none but Lucia had actually heard her prophecies—she was not exactly a bubble of optimism in regard to our planetary prospects. For example, that spectacular celestial cha-cha that thirty-five thousand people claimed to have observed, along with Lucia and her cousins, on October 13, 1917, was executed, she said, not by the sun but by a preview of a flaming comet, a fireball that according to the Lady (and disputed by astronomers everywhere) would return someday to dry up oceans, lakes, and rivers and shrivel a third of the earth’s vegetation. No, not precisely a planetary death sentence, but considerably more severe than a stiff fine and a hundred hours of community service.