by Robert Ferro
Later they drove to another factory on the other side of town. The monument lay on its back ready for carving. The first impression he had was that its shape was aerodynamic: a concave slab with tubular columns like pontoons on both sides. It seemed that properly powered it would fly. He touched the smooth, powdery surface and thought of Marie’s hands. He glanced at his father, who was standing back, his head tilted to compensate for the foreshortening. To get farther away from it, Max climbed up on a high stool. His father held him by the legs.
His point of vision was now six or seven feet above the monument. It appeared to float, to hover near the ground, light, buoyant and sleek. Then he saw for the first time that his name had been stenciled in pencil on the huge stone—D E S I R. He was aware that all the animals in the forest were watching him. This object below, which had been translated from paper into granite so magically—from doodles to stone as if in sudden stoptime—was, in addition to being his mother’s tombstone, his own. It was his, it was everybody’s tombstone he was looking at, whether he used it now, later or never at all. He recognized it as something with which he was already familiar, not only from the lost drawing but from recognition of the stone itself—as it was, as it seemed always and already to have been; as it would be when all of them were dead and buried beneath it. He saw somehow that even in the drawing they had got parts of it wrong. The top arc of the apse was drawn too high, the funereal motif of dead and wilted blossoms among the surround of flowers, while thoughtful, seemed lugubrious and did not exist in memory.
These changes were made and compliments exchanged. John seemed immensely relieved. On the trip home a delay forced them to circle Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens two and a half times. The sky was a clear, darkening indigo, just after sunset. At eight or ten thousand feet they dipped in a banked turn. Wheeling over the dazzling city, John said, The bridges look just like necklaces … diamond necklaces. Which they did. And the banality of the observation did not detract from the effect. Everybody off the planet, Max thought. We’re all going somewhere else, where everyone is like me.
In the terminal he looked for the man who had made him breakfast. They were going to meet in a hotel advertised on television. The directness with which they were going to have each other would astound even the jaded bellhop. While John was in the lavatory Max slipped into the coffee shop, his name and number written on a small piece of paper. But the man was gone.
XII.
HE IS AWARE THAT, AT THE LEAST, his life is half over, his bones have begun to settle. In a few more years the whole skeleton will shift like an old house. His hair will have further thinned, his gums receded, his lids drooped. His nose will not be as straight, with gray in his beard and on his chest; with lines everywhere, folds, pallor, disappointments. People will no longer turn to look at him, will see nothing but themselves being seen. The game will be over, then long over, and then just a memory. He thinks, like Keats, that his life is a thing in water. The evidence of his existence disappears completely, immediately behind him.
A voice teacher lives below them. Through the open window he hears the beginning wail of “Summertime” over and over, different voices experiencing the same tortured giftlessness; or ghostly exercises, bright high notes, long falling scales, short emotional triplets that seem in ascending repetition like vocal renderings of the perfect clitoral orgasm.
In the back he hears other music. Huge, chrome and vellum, big-band drums tumble as if hurled down flights of stairs. A piano, a saxophone; high up and reed thin, a flute presents the ideal liked a calm bird.
Several dogs belonging to the local supers live in the interstices of adjacent apartment houses. Two here are related, as the supers of the adjoining buildings are related. The dogs face off, through a hurricane fence that divides their territories, and snarl and rasp themselves into a stupor, arousing other dogs in the brownstone gardens down the middle of the block; the wild sound of maddened wolves fighting over meat. At other times a graceful Irish setter directly under their window has the habit of a single-bark announcement of its presence at two-minute intervals. Nick has been around to the other street to talk to the doorman, to find out the owner’s name. It is the super’s wife, Mrs Capitalia. Max throws open the window. The morning light blinds him. Capitalia! he screams. Capitaalia! The setter looks up at him with a dumb red beauty. The face of another woman on a higher floor looks across, sees a naked man in a rage. The dog, not having made the connection, barks again. Max closes the window, switches the heavy curtains, falls back on the bed in the dark.
THEY LIVE THE KIND OF LIFE they might have predicted and hoped for, but only in a general way. Financially and professionally, the effect is approximate. Nick has not moved beyond the level of a TV soap opera actor, and Max cannot integrate his talents and his needs. His fiction doesn’t sell, or doesn’t pay, and his job is demeaning. The apartment they have lived in for so long is prewar and large by modem standards, but compared to Hillcrest or his brother Jack’s place, it is simple, small and somewhat shabby. It is filled with the trophies and detritus of the Rome and Florence establishments, long since dismantled or, in the case of Rome, suddenly lost, snatched away as if by a roaring flood. Each of the surviving pieces sags in some way, either with its own recollections, its original bohemian intent, or its genteel life service. Max and Nick have lost interest in anything but an extravagant and impossible overhaul. Nothing is moved. All is evolved. After years of attention to detail the place coasts comfortably— like an old yacht—on proven design triumphs, in a sea of benign neglect.
He is working three or four nights a week for the caterer, plus the odd afternoons, waiting tables, tending bar, assembling hors d’oeuvres; at bar mitzvahs, cocktails, vernissages, dinner parties, bank openings. He wears a white shirt and black bow tie, a black vest, black pants and shoes, over all of which is juxtaposed a long white apron—the classic sartorial statement of the servant. He prefers to work in the kitchen or pantry, where he is safe from discovery and can make the rent money in peace. Often he has looked out from the equivalent of the wings and spotted a friend or even a table of friends among the guests. Everything he does as a pantryman or waiter is a distortion of his old expectations of being rich and glamorous. He is present at the experience but on the wrong side of the canapes.
As a waiter serving the crowd, he feels only humiliation at each small theft from his tray, offended by the oblivious disdain of social democrats. He does not exist, is not perceived. In the kitchen he is in disguise. All of them are moonlighting, but all of them are at least ten years younger. Even having confessed in this instance to thirty-five, he is, at that, by far the oldest. He has heard one of them say lately, Forty! Do you know what that means?
They come through the door with empty, ravaged trays. Max has a row of assorted arrangements ready to go: butterfly shrimp and snow peas, scallops and avocado, minted chicken on endive leaves, riddles wrapped in deep-fried enigmas, each tray garnished with a mauve orchid on a bed of kale. They talk about themselves, about sex and drugs, their dreams and moods, apartments, the phases of the moon, the crowd and its swinish habits. One of them comes in with the news that a famous guest is under the table, out cold. Another says, Sure, Tallulah. Another says, Really, to himself quietly every time he comes through the door. They are all actors, young and hopeful, or beautifully groomed models, or artists somehow. Because of their dreams for themselves they see the present circumstance in theatrical terms. At the end, when the guests have gone, they roll up their sleeves and put the place back together, as though striking a set.
But to Max each engagement, each one-night stand at the Clear Meadow Country Club or the Guggenheim was a repellent act of subservience for which he summoned in himself a calm and cynical demeanor. On his first jobs he had brought with him the enthusiasm and concentration of a domestically, yes, a homosexually inclined teenager helping his mother; wanting the evening to go well in the same way he wanted his life to go well. Everyone who worked there was
gay, and he thought it was because such people could be counted on to want to ingratiate themselves, and to do their jobs properly, that they had been hired—the Job interview, if successful, resembled a seduction—or because the owner wanted to work with his own kind; wanted even, and perhaps nobly, to provide jobs for a particular kind of person— someone handsome, who might know the difference between French and Russian service, who needed a job quickly and temporarily. It was an attitude that didn’t last long. The owner smiled and said hello to them, joked with them, thanked them, but did not pay them well and assumed they should be grateful. He wouldn’t, perhaps couldn’t, treat them like the anomalies they all were— princes of the stage, of the word, the voice, the face. After a while they either settled into an attitude of resigned efficiency or they quit. Few lasted more than six months. Max was considered a regular. He saw the next move, which a career in catering would dictate to someone so inclined, but did not make it. He thought perhaps he was kept on, aside from his skill in the scullery, because of his car, in which he was able to transport himself and four waiters to small, lucrative jobs out of town.
Driving back to the city after one such assignment, Max saw a pair of eyes staring at him in the rearview mirror. He rearranged the logistics so that Rocco, sitting in the center of the back seat, was the last one to be dropped off. Rocco leaned back into the car, smiled, and asked if Max would like to come up.
The walls of Rocco’s apartment were hung with crests and maps and pictures of European kings and queens. Plaster casts and statues, among them Pope Pius, Napoleon, a Roman matron—perhaps Livia Augusta, with lipstick added—stood here and there amid the lesser junk, bric-a-brac, books, scrolls; amid dusty, colorless furniture that included a handmade octagonal coffee table painted over with thirty or forty heraldic crests: Rocco’s folks.
I can trace my family back to Venus, he said without the shadow of a smile.
Rocco was surrounded and obsessed by his history. He had delved into every comer of it. On the whole, because of his father, Italy was his principal point of reference; Italy and the church, a taproot to the juices of the world. Through his mother he had only slightly less serious backup claims elsewhere. He preceded Juan Carlos in his right to the Spanish throne, but admitted that three or four cousins preceded them both with better. Prince Charles was ancillary, the Queen a tangent. Rocco’s potential was worldwide. Beyond a certain vertiginous point, he said, everyone was related to everyone else.
In Italy he was a Colonna and an Orsini, from which family according to papal decree there must always be five sitting cardinals. He was a Borghese, who controlled Napoleon. He was a Doria and so by immediate extension, a Pamphilj. He was of course a Savoy, an Altavilla, a Farnese and an Este of the thousand fountains; he was a Cangrande who were the Doges of Venice and wore the head of a dog as a hat, an example of which hung like a stuffed pet on the wall. He was even a Defilippo, like Max, the which fact had ignited Rocco’s interest
Showing his insouciance, Max is sprawled naked in a high-backed wood and velvet chair. On the floor in front of him, beneath the octagonal table of crests, is a street cobblestone. Max puts his foot out and rests it on the stone.
Do you know what that is? Rocco asks, more than willing to talk, passing the reefer. Max stifles a clever but inexpensive reply.
I will build a fortress on that rock, Rocco says calmly.
In the Pines or the Grove?
Rocco’s face remains expressionless, but the pain in his eyes marks this latest failure to be taken seriously. They are not naked. They have not Just fucked like deaf mutes. His eyes say, Here is a person who doesn’t believe in the King of Italy. Boredom, rancor, buona notte.
He leaves, while Rocco is in the kitchen, taking a piece of paper on which Rocco had written Max’s family names: Defilippo, Desiderio, Leone. He is taking back his grandfather, his grandmother in the factory, his uncle, all of them.
MAX ONCE MET A MAN IN LONDON who was a librarian at the British Museum. He took Max home and after they had made love, they discussed the differences in their lives. The Englishman, whose name was Arthur, said Max had lived an enviable existence, having been well fed, well educated and encouraged to travel, while he, Arthur, had had to struggle for what little he had and had never been anywhere but Wales. As for sex, he had always thought Americans were the best, but had never dreamed one could do all that.
Led by this to a point of illustration, Arthur told Max a story he had read recently in an old journal in the museum’s collection. The journal was the work of a British colonel, John Braithewaite, who was later an aide-de-camp to Lord Gordon, and who had sailed in his youth with Darwin in 1831, on the first voyage of the Beagle. In this journal; which ran to fifty volumes, Braithewaite had recorded his service as a merchantman aboard the Beagle. He was nineteen.
In Buenos Aires, he saw a man whom he described in this way, imitating the slightly subjective style of the expedition:
A finely built Caucasian, about thirty years of age, six feet tall, with gold hair, fair skin turned by the sun the color of clover honey, large bright blue eyes, blond mustaches, the hair worn long and loose. Came aboard with Darwin for sherry.
From the way it goes on, Arthur said, you can tell Braithewaite fell in love with the visitor.
How can you tell that? Max said.
From between the lines, Arthur replied. One always has to read between the lines for the queer bits. He thought the blond man was the most beautiful specimen, of anything, that anyone had seen on the expedition—a perfectly formed golden god in the center of the dark wild, the first white man to go into the Mato Grosso.
Which is where? Max inquired.
The Amazon Basin, Arthur replied.
But the church sent missionaries into the Amazon a hundred years before the Beagle, Max corrected smoothly.
But no one had got into the Mato Grosso yet. And no one got into parts of it for another hundred years afterward. That was the point.
The blond man appeared one afternoon while specimens were being taken aboard, Arthur said. He stood on the dock looking over the Beagle and the goings-on. Darwin came out and invited him’ aboard to hear his story. The blond man was British. He said he had been shipwrecked off the Brazils; with one thing and another he had been some months in the interior and had seen a number of settlements. He said the natives there lived much as the Jivaro before the church arrived, but were more primitive. Throughout this time he had been mistaken for a river god, he believed, and had been escorted through the area on a kind of ceremonial tour, taking part in native rituals. When he thought the tour was ended, he had done his best to leave quickly and in the most godlike manner. The tolls for the journey out had been paid with gifts presented to him in the ceremonies. He had arrived in Buenos Aires with nothing. He now asked Darwin for passage to England, in exchange for which he would provide a detailed account of his experience in the jungle—a story, he said, much rarer than any of Darwin’s collectibles. Regretfully Darwin refused, saying they would be another year charting the South American coast, after which the Beagle was bound for the Pacific.
The next day the blond man returned and asked to speak again to Darwin. He had decided that despite the refusal of passage, he wanted Darwin to know what had happened in the interior. He had spent the night writing it down. He held out a sheaf of papers; but before relinquishing them, he made Darwin promise not to destroy them if he found them offensive, which he would.
I am a scientist, Darwin said.
Exactly, said the blond man.
Darwin promised and accepted the pages. The next day the Beagle sailed, leaving the man behind. Darwin read the pages under way, and subsequently threw them overboard.
MAX IS WRITING IN THE AFTERNOONS, sleeping late after work. He is writing a story about Arthur’s blond man, walking through the Amazon in 1832, traveling from tribe to tribe as a sexual deity. To Max the sensibility at the heart of the story is no less personal than a journal, although the man in the
story does not look like himself, being blond, with a blond mustache and bright blue eyes.
THE TRIBE
I address this account to Mr Charles Darwin, Botanist aboard Her Majesty’s Ship Beagle, Buenos Aires, 30 January, 1832.
I had brought myself deep into the Amazon jungle with an Indian guide hired in Manaus for his appearance. After some weeks on the river, using a series of shuttles and local pilots, we reached a point from where we went on alone by foot, stopping each late afternoon to choose a tree in which to make a nest, like apes, for the night. My clothes and few possessions had been abandoned; I wore only a leather thong and pouch for protection, and stout boots which I seldom removed.
One morning the guide ate something he shouldn’t have—apparently fruit he had just picked; although from what happened subsequently, he may well have been poisoned, perhaps with a dart—for suddenly he fell dead at my feet. After sitting with him for some time, I covered him with banana leaves, a custom it is believed here that greatly increases one’s chances of returning as an esteemed banana tree. Marking the trees occasionally to maintain a straight line, I continued in the direction we had been traveling—west, into the fathomless jungle, within the outer web of the river’s vast basin.
I had not been walking long when I heard distant drums ahead, which then were swallowed up in a sudden downpour—a daily occurrence in the afternoon—that clattered on the jungle canopy like polite applause. When the rain ended a few minutes later, the drums were gone.
In the evening I did as the guide had done and selected a tree, gathering leaves and moss to make a nest. I lay in sudden darkness, in the auspices of the tree, in a space filled with sounds receding and receding. Hungry and exhausted, I fell into a deep sleep, into a dream from which I cannot say that I have ever properly awakened. I dream it still.