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

by Tom Robbins

  She was getting slightly worked up, and Switters was enjoying listening to her tizzy. Misinterpreting his silence, she thought the moment had come to play her ace. “If you will spend the Noël with me,” she whispered conspiratorially, as if the stars had ears, “I will do something special for you.”

  Misinterpreting her offer, he said, “Are you trying to bribe me?”

  She smiled. “I will open up for you something only thirteen people on the earth—”

  “Thirteen? That’s quite a lot. Listen, honey cake, if you wanted to open the pearly gates for me out of affection, or even out of wanton lust, I’d gratefully accept. But as payment for helping you fend off holiday depression . . .”

  “You imbecile!” She rolled away from him. “Imbécile. You think for to have a Bing Crosby Christmas I would sacrifice my—I forget all your poetic names for it. No, jerko, I was talking about something altogether else.”

  “Calm down. You’re losing your English.”

  She did calm down. She even laughed. Sailor Boy would have approved. “It’s true, I suppose, that if you delay your departure, I might eventually find myself willing to experiment with one or more of those ‘other practices’ about which you were referring, but my bribe happens to be just this: on Christmas Eve, I will open up for your eyes the secret document that it has been the Pachomians’ fate to conceal and protect.”

  “All right, I get it. You’re offering to trot out the Snake. Forgive me. My rooster brain jumped the conclusion fence. But, Domino, think about it: I used to be in the CIA. I ate secret documents for breakfast. I’ve handled more secret documents than Maria Une has handled chickpeas. What gives you the idea that I might drool on the Persian at the prospect of seeing another one?”

  She sighed. “I, also, must be guilty of the wishful thinking.” She sighed again. “It’s just that you appeared to have at least a small bit of interest in the matter.”

  “What matter is that?”

  “The matter of the lost prophecy of Our Lady of Fatima. It isn’t lost, you see. We have it.”

  As October picked up speed, dragging its grape skins behind it, daytime temperatures had become marginally less sizzling, the nights increasingly chilly. Switters, who hated the sight of gooseflesh (had found it pathological even prior to being subjected to the old crone’s naked parrot in Lima), pulled a wool rug up to his chin as he propped himself against the tower-room wall and lit the last of the five cigars that had come in the most recent Damascus delivery. “Mmm,” he hummed. “Mmm. Yes. A cigar is a banana for the monkey of the soul.”

  Domino was the only lover he’d ever had who didn’t giggle almost automatically at his pronouncements. He wasn’t sure if that was a character flaw on her part or further evidence of her good sense and substance. More naked than any parrot could ever hope to be, even if plucked and singed, even if boiled and eaten, she stood in a far corner, washing her hands in a ceramic jar kept there for the purpose. He blew a series of smoke rings in her direction, jabbing an index finger through the center of each one as it floated away. “The Zen art of goosing butterflies,” he said.

  It was too dark in the room to ascertain if she smiled, but she definitely didn’t giggle. “Think about my proposition,” she said.

  He had thought about it. He was still thinking about it. He could smoke a cigar, make oblique remarks, admire her silhouette, and think about her proposition all at the same time. It was easy. Who did she think he was? Gerald Ford? John Foster Dulles? Pbthbt!

  In truth, Switters was not overwhelmingly interested in the third and final prophecy of the Fatima apparition. He was curious about most of life’s tics, quirks, mysteries, unreasonable passions, aberrations, fetishes, enduring enigmas, and odd-duck jive, and his encounter with the Fatima legend a year earlier in Sacramento certainly had piqued that curiosity, but it would have been difficult if not impossible to separate clearly his interest in things Fatiman from his interest in things Suzian. Had his little stepsister not been so keen on the subject, he doubtlessly would have rolled the Fatima story about in his brain tumbler a few times and then let it pass. On the other hand, in a universe he knew to be founded on paradox and characterized by the interpenetration of sundry realities, he didn’t believe in coincidence. Although it was an era of resurgent Marianism, a recent survey had found that 90 percent of Roman Catholics remained unfamiliar with this Fatima business, and the fact that it had resurfaced so dramatically in his own life—in a setting occupied by Matisse’s live blue nude and provided, at least in the beginning, by Audubon Poe’s provider, Sol Glissant, well, these compounding synchronisms left him scant choice but to take it seriously.

  Speaking of blue nudes, Switters couldn’t help being struck at that moment by the similarity between the remembered figure in the painting, with its sapphire domes and midnight naves (a rambling plastic Gaudi cathedral pumped so full of huckleberry cream that its stained-glass windows were bulging out), and Domino’s bluish silhouette as it loomed now in that tower lit only by starlight. In shadowy profile, bereft of flaw and detail, the ex-nun’s body could have belonged to the queen bee of one of those North African harems that had set Matisse’s thyroid and brushes to throbbing—although it could just as easily, he supposed, have stepped down from a 1940s jungle movie poster: an untamed, thunder-titted She who ruled tribes of awestruck warriors and consorted with panthers.

  The minimalist spectacle of Domino’s maximalist contours was enough to justify his decision to tarry at the oasis awhile longer. But there were other reasons (or excuses), as well. Chief among them was the trouble then brewing between Syria and Turkey. Having protested for a long time that Syria was arming and financing PUK separatists who were seeking to carve an autonomous Kurdish state out of sections of Turkey and Iraq, an angry Turkish government had finally dispatched troops to the Syrian border. Syria responded in kind. Now, according to the Net, armies were massed along both sides of the Turkish-Syrian frontier, and the border was closed tighter than a young girl’s diary. Since Turkey was the only country from which he could legally fly home, Switters was rather trapped. Normally, the situation would have turned his crank—there were few things he loved more than that sort of challenge—but in a wheelchair or on stilts? . . . He could be reckless, but he wasn’t stupid.

  Any hope that Poe might pick him up somewhere along the Mediterranean coast was dispelled when Bobby informed him (in their personal Langley-proof e-mail code) that The Banality of Evil was plying the Adriatic and was likely to remain in those waters as long as the Balkan horror show shrieked on unabated.

  What the hell? Switters had no great reason to rush his departure, did he? Suppose he actually could locate Today Is Tomorrow again and convince him to cancel the taboo: what then? He lacked prospect for gainful employment anywhere on the planet, and out here under the vast desert sky, where primitive equalities prevailed, the notion of completing his doctoral thesis had come to seem downright silly. That the human species was apparently evolving beyond the civilized limitations of analogic perceptions, heading toward a Finnegans Wake state in which its thinking and acting would manifest in terms of perpetually interfacing digital clusters—well, that phenomenon continued to fascinate him, but he could ponder it without interruption beneath the pomegranate trees at the oasis; he didn’t require academic sanction or societal reward: “Having played for many years by our rules, Mr. Switters, you may henceforth call yourself Doctor, though please bear in mind the title is solely meant to massage your ego and does not qualify you to take Wednesday afternoons off or practice gynecology.”

  Moreover, although he couldn’t begin to explain why or how exactly, he still believed he was gaining some special insights into existence by observing it from two inches above the ground. If nothing else, a man on stilts was a man apart. So what if he was noticed only by a gaggle of aging ex-nuns?

  Thanks to President Hafez al-Assad’s cordial relations with Fidel Castro, fine Havana cigars were available in Damascus—but only at the lux
ury hotels. Transdesert truckers did not shop at luxury hotels. Switters had been brought cheroots manufactured in the Canary Islands. Like all machine-rolled cigars, they were in a hurry to burn themselves up, a kind of vegetative death wish, a plant-world version of self-destructive rock stars. Still, like those fey rockers, they had talent while they lasted. Switters spewed a stream of richly flavored suspended carbon particles toward the Milky Way, obscuring about three thousand of those five thousand stars to which human vision was said to be limited. And he said, “So, how soon can I peruse the Fatima Lady’s climactic fortune cookie?”

  Domino was drying her hands. “How soon? Were you not listening to me? I said, Christmas Eve. If you stay, I will give you the Virgin’s message on Christmas Eve. It will be apropos, you know, a kind of—”

  “Yeah, I see. A gift for the man who has everything.” Exaggerating his pucker, he blew a smoke ring so large a Chihuahua could have jumped through it. “Very well. I’ll Adam this Eden for eight more weeks. And you’ll guarantee you’ll show me the goods?”

  “I promise on the Holy Bible.” Then she added for his benefit, “And on Finnegans Wake.”

  They sealed the bargain with a purposeful kiss, at the conclusion of which he gloated, “I outwitted you on that one, Sister, my love. I would have agreed to stay and celebrate Christmas with you even if you hadn’t promised to show me the prophecy.”

  “No, you big imbecile, I outwitted you. I would have shown you the prophecy even if you had not consented to make me a happy holiday. I would have shown it to you tomorrow or the next day. Now, you have to wait until Christmas.”

  He pretended to be miffed. “How typical of you mackerel-snapping snafflers. I should have known better than to deal with a tricky theophanist. I’ve become yet another sad victim of simony.” She ignored his ostentatious flaunting of vocabulary, and he became sincere. “But why, Domino? Why would you want to share your big holy secret with a virtuoso sinner like me?”

  After a long pause, she answered, “Because the nature of Mother Mary’s last words at Fatima has troubled us. We’ve never been quite sure if we interpret them correctly. Your—how do you call it?—input might be helpful. You look at religious issues in a most unique—What are you doing?”

  Switters was pretending to write on an imaginary notepad with an invisible pencil. “I may have been fired by the CIA, but I still moonlight for the Grammar Police. Unique is a unique word, and Madison Avenue illiterates to the contrary, it is not a pumped-up synonym for unusual. There’s no such thing as ‘most unique’ or ’very unique’ or ‘rather unique’; something is either unique or it isn’t, and damn few things are. Here!” He mimed tearing a page from the pad and thrust it at her. “Since English is not your first language, I’m letting you off with a warning ticket. Next time, you can expect a fine. And a black mark on your record.”

  Domino pretended to take the imaginary citation. Then, miming every bit as well as he, she “tore” it into shreds. As she tossed the nonexistent confetti into his face, he had to fight to conceal his admiration.

  True to her word, she would not show him the fabled third prophecy until Christmas. Why? Not because of peer pressure. The Pachomian sisterhood was far from unanimous in its enthusiasm to grant to its unruly male guest the privilege of handling, reading, and discussing the transcription around which their order had coalesced (ultimately, their custodianship of the Fatima revelations had knit them together more tightly than their advocacy of women’s rights or even their devotion to St. Pachomius), yet there was none among them who would oppose the will of Domino and the abbess. After all, if it wasn’t for Masked Beauty, there would be no transcript, no oasis, no Pachomian Order. Privately, some feared that their much adored Sister Domino had fallen prey to Fannie’s demon, but they’d respect her wishes, Asmodeus or no Asmodeus.

  Nor did Domino hold off out of mistrust. As inexperienced as she was in the area of romance, she knew in her bones that, for better or for worse, Switters cared too much to deceive her. He would never read the prophecy and then skip out.

  In fact, twice during November she offered to go ahead and show him the prophecy; she was becoming a bit anxious to get his reaction. Switters, however, insisted on waiting. He reminded her that they had made a pact. They must honor that pact, he told her, they must honor it even if it was frustrating, unnecessary, or outright senseless to honor it, because not to honor it would create more quaggy willy-nilliness in the world. They had to honor it because in honoring it, there was a certain purity.

  That was what had convinced her to wait. That was what had touched her. That was what had made her want to want what he wanted. It was the way that he said “purity.”

  She would not show him the prophecy until Christmas, but she felt free to provide some background, and he felt free to receive it. She told it to him the way that Masked Beauty had told it to her.

  Sometime during 1960, Pope John XXIII summoned the bishop of Leiria to the Vatican. The Portuguese bishop, whose diocese included Fatima, was barely off the flight from Lisbon when the supreme prelate drew him aside and whispered his intentions to open the envelope in which Lucia Santos (then Sister Mary dos Dores) had sealed Our Lady of Fatima’s final prophecy. Assuming that Lucia had written down the prophecy in Portuguese, Pope John was going to need the bishop’s assistance.

  That afternoon, following an austere private lunch, the two men retired to the papal study, prayed to God and to Mary, and slit open the envelope (which had been held for three years in the study wall safe) with a jewel-encrusted blade. The contents, surprisingly brief, were, indeed, handwritten in Lucia’s native tongue. At that point, the bishop confessed what the pope already had deduced from their unsteady lunchtime conversation: his Italian was more than a little rusty. The pope had no Portuguese at all.

  It was imperative that the translation be exact, every particular fully rendered, no subtlety or shade of meaning glossed over or ignored. The bishop had a suggestion. He was fluent in French, could read it as precisely as he read Portuguese. Suppose he translated the prophecy into French? His Holiness grumbled that that was a start, then left the study briefly to make a telephone call.

  Working with extreme care, the bishop of Leiria spent approximately two hours translating the few lines of neat, if childlike, script. No sooner was the task completed to his satisfaction than there was a discreet rap at the door, and a third man joined them in the study. The newcomer was Pierre Cardinal Thiry.

  Unsure of his own French, Pope John had decided to entrust the Parisian red hat, whose Italian he knew to be eccellente, with the job of moving the text perfectly from French into Italian.

  With the bishop looking over his shoulder, Cardinal Thiry went to work. The pope went next door to his bedchamber to rest his nerves. In less than an hour, Thiry had produced a translation that, while mystifying and somewhat disturbing, nonetheless satisfied both him and the bishop with its accuracy. On the page, however, it was aesthetically displeasing, so Thiry made a fresh, tidier copy for Pope John, absentmindedly folding the messy copy and inserting it between the pages of his Italian dictionary.

  John XXIII, roused by a tiny silver bell, returned to the study, where he shambled to the tall, leaded window to read at last the notorious Marian prophecy by the fading light of the sun. Moments later, he rotated slowly to face his subordinates with the look of a man who had just learned that he had eaten his grandmother’s parrot. No, it was worse than that. It was the look of a man who had just learned that he had eaten his grandmother.

  After being repeatedly assured by the bishop and the cardinal that nothing, not a trace nor a tense nor a tinge, not a prefix, a suffix, nor an inflection had been lost in translation, Pope John again left the study, commanding the others to wait there. They did. They waited all night, dozing in the voluminous leather armchairs that were said to have been a gift to an earlier pope from Mussolini. A good twelve hours passed before John burst into the room, as haggard and red-eyed as a Shanghai rat. Th
e pope obviously had not slept. The salt of dried tearwater streaked his cheeks. A flunky followed him in and lit a fire in the fireplace before departing.

  John crumpled up Thiry’s Italian translation and dropped it into the flames. He ordered the bishop’s French translation burned as well. Then, with some apparent misgiving, glancing sorrowfully, almost appealingly, about the study, as if hoping the others might dissuade him, he fed, with trembling white hands, Lucia Santos’s original to the indifferent fire.

  The bishop must have felt that a portion of Portuguese history was going up in smoke, but he did not vocally object. In a few minutes, after the ashes had been scattered in the grate, he followed Cardinal Thiry out of the apartment. Pope John returned to his bed, where, according to Vatican gossip, he wept for several days.

  At that juncture, the alleged third and final prophecy of Our Lady of Fatima existed in just two places: in the memory of Sister Mary dos Dores (then aged fifty-three and cloistered in Spain), and in a French translation concealed inside Pierre Cardinal Thiry’s dog-eared old Italian dictionary. Whether the cardinal deliberately smuggled the document out of the Vatican for reasons of his own, whether he acted on sudden impulse, or whether he simply forgot about the extra copy in the swirl of the moment, discovering it when he got home, Masked Beauty was never to learn.