by Paul Auster
Perhaps I should go to Quillia, after all, in spite of my reservations. I need to shake things up for myself, to breathe new air.
5/17. I have just spoken to R.B. Odd to hear that voice again after all this time, but he sounded vigorous, in top form. When I told him I’d decided to accept his invitation, he began shouting into the phone. Splendid! Splendid! What excellent news!
One month from now (in R.B.’s words), we will be drinking Samuel’s rum punches, taking turns filming the sunset, and having the time of our lives.
I will book the tickets tomorrow. Five days in late June. Subtract the two days of travel, and that leaves three full days on Quillia. If I’m having the time of my life, I can always extend the visit. If I find it unbearable, I don’t suppose three days will be too much to bear.
6/23. After a long flight across the Atlantic, I am sitting in a transit lounge at the Barbados airport, waiting for the small, one-propeller plane that will take me to Quillia two and a half hours from now (if it leaves on time).
Insufferable heat, everywhere a dense circle of heat closing around my body, the heat of the tropics, a heat that melts the thoughts in your head.
In the main terminal, a dozen soldiers patrolling the floor with machine guns. An air of menace and mistrust, hostility in every glance. What is going on? A dozen black soldiers with machine guns in their hands, and the crowds of grim, sweating travelers with their overstuffed bags and cranky children.
In the transit lounge, nearly everyone is white. Long-haired American surfers, Australians drinking beer and talking in loud voices, Europeans of various unknown nationalities, a couple of Asian faces. Boredom. Fans circling overhead. Piped-in music that is not music. A place that is not a place.
Nine hours later. The one-propeller plane was the smallest flying machine I have ever been in. I sat up front with the pilot, the other two passengers sat directly behind us, and the instant we took off, I understood that we were at the mercy of every puff of wind that might blow our way, that even the smallest disturbance in the surrounding air could throw us off course. We lurched and wobbled and dipped, my stomach was in my mouth, and yet I enjoyed myself, enjoyed the feathery weightlessness of the ride, the sense of being in such close contact with that unstable air.
Seen from above, the island is no more than a small dot, a gray-green speck of cooled lava jutting out of the ocean. But the water around it is blue—yes, the bluest blue water this side of heaven.
It would be an exaggeration to call the Quillia airport an airport. It is a landing strip, a ribbon of tarmac unspooled at the base of a tall, hulking mountain, and it can accommodate nothing bigger than planes the size of toys. We retrieved our bags in the terminal—a tiny cinder-block hut—and then went through the ordeal of customs and passport control. Not even in post–9/11 Europe have I been subjected to such a thorough examination of my belongings. My suitcase was opened, and every article of clothing was lifted out and inspected, every book was shaken by the spine, every shoe was turned upside down, peered into, searched—slowly and methodically, as if this were a procedure that could not, under any circumstances, be conducted in haste. The man in charge of passport control was dressed in a snappy, neatly pressed uniform, a symbol of authority and officialdom, and he too took his sweet time before letting me go. He asked the purpose of my visit, and in my mediocre, heavily accented English, I told him that I’d come to spend a few days with a friend. Which friend? Rudolf Born, I said. The name seemed to ring a bell with him, and then he asked (inappropriately, I believe) how long I had known Mr. Born. All my life, I said. All your life? My answer seemed to have thrown him. Yes, all my life, I repeated. He was a close friend of my parents’. Ah, your parents, he said, nodding in contemplation, apparently satisfied by my answer. I thought we had come to the end of our business, but then he opened my passport, and for the next three minutes he scrutinized it with the zealous, patient eye of a forensics expert, carefully studying each page, pausing over each marking, as if my past travels were the key to solving the mystery of my life. At last, he took out a form printed on a narrow slip of paper, positioned it at right angles with the edge of his desk, and filled in the blanks with a small, meticulous hand. After stapling the form into my passport, he inked his rubber stamp, pressed the rubber onto a spot beside the form, and delicately added the name of Quillia to the roster of countries I have been allowed to enter. French bureaucrats are notorious for their maniacal exactitude and cold efficiency. Next to this man, they are all amateurs.
I stepped out into the broiling four o’clock heat, expecting to find R.B. waiting for me, but he wasn’t there. My escort to the house was Samuel, the handyman-caretaker, a strong, well-built, exceedingly handsome young man of around thirty—with exceedingly black skin, which would suggest he is not descended from that band of Scottish sailors marooned here in the 18th century. After my encounter with the remote and taciturn men at the airport terminal, I found it a relief to be smiled at again.
It didn’t take long to understand why the job of accompanying me to Moon Hill had been given to Samuel. We rode in a car for the first ten minutes, which led me to assume we would drive all the way to the house, but then Samuel stopped the car, and the rest of the journey—that is to say, the bulk of the journey, the more than one-hour journey still in front of us—was made on foot. It was an arduous trek, an excruciating climb up a steep, root-entangled path that sapped my strength and left me gasping for breath after five minutes. I am a person who sits in libraries, a fifty-three-year-old woman who smokes too many cigarettes and weighs twenty pounds more than she should, and my body is not cut out for exertions of this sort. I was thoroughly humiliated by my ineptitude, by the sweat that poured out of me and drenched my clothes, by the swarms of mosquitoes dancing around my head, by my frequent calls to stop and rest, by the slippery soles of my sandals, which made me fall, not once, not twice, but again and again. But even worse, far worse than my petty physical woes, there was the shame of watching Samuel in front of me, the shame of seeing Samuel carry my suitcase on his head, my too heavy suitcase, loaded down with the weight of too many unnecessary books, and how not to see in that image of a black man carrying a white woman’s possessions on his head the horrors of the colonial past, the atrocities of the Congo and French Africa, the centuries of affliction—
I mustn’t go on like this. I’m working myself into a lather, and if I mean to get through these days with my mind intact, I must maintain my composure. The reality is that Samuel wasn’t the least bit distressed about what he was doing. He has been up and down this mountain thousands of times, he carries provisions on his head as a matter of course, and for someone born on an island as poor as this one, working in the house of a man like R.B. is considered a good job. Whenever I asked him to stop, he did so without complaint. No trouble, ma’am. Just take it nice and easy. We’ll get there when we get there.
R.B. was napping in his room when we reached the top of the mountain. Incomprehensible as that might have been, it gave me a chance to settle into my own room (high, high up, overlooking the ocean) and pull myself together. I showered, put on a fresh set of clothes, and did my hair. Minor improvements, perhaps, but at least I didn’t have to live through the embarrassment of being seen in such a sorry state. The walk up the mountain had nearly destroyed me.
In spite of my efforts, I could see the disappointment in his eyes when I entered the living room an hour later—the first look after so many years, and the sad acknowledgment that the young girl of long ago had turned into a frowsy, none-too-attractive, postmenopausal woman in late middle age.
Unfortunately—no, I think I mean fortunately—the disappointment was mutual. In the past, I had found him to be a seductive figure, good-looking in a rough sort of way, something close to an ideal embodiment of male confidence and power. R.B. was never a thin man, but in the years since I last saw him, he has put on considerable amounts of weight, a truckload of excess poundage, and as he stood up to greet me (dressed
in shorts, with no shirt, no shoes or socks), I was astonished to see how large his stomach had grown. It is a great medicine ball of a stomach now, and with most of the hair gone from his head, his skull reminded me of a volleyball. A ridiculous image, I know, but the mind is always churning forth its quirky nonsense, and that was what I saw when he stood up and approached me: a man composed of two spheres, a medicine ball and a volleyball. He is much bigger, then, but not whalelike, not blubbery or drooping with flab—just large. The skin around his stomach is quite taut, actually, and except for the fleshy creases around his knees and neck, he looks fit for a man his age.
An instant after I saw it, the crestfallen look vanished from his eyes. With all the aplomb of a practiced diplomat, R.B. broke into a smile, opened his arms, and hugged me. It’s a miracle, he said.
That hug proved to be the high point of the evening. We drank the rum punches Samuel prepared for us (very good), I watched R.B. film the sunset (I found it inane), and then we sat down to dinner (heavy food, beef drowned in a thick sauce, inappropriate fare for this climate—better suited to Alsace in midwinter). The old cook, Nancy, is not old at all—forty, forty-five at most—and I wonder if she doesn’t have two jobs in this household: cook by day, R.B.’s bed partner at night. Melinda is in her early twenties, and therefore is probably too young to fill the latter role. She is a beautiful girl, by the way, as beautiful as Samuel is handsome, a tall, lanky thing with an exquisite gliding walk, and from the little looks they give each other, I would guess that she and Samuel are an item. Nancy and Melinda served us the food, Samuel cleared the table and washed the dishes, and as the meal wore on I found myself growing increasingly uncomfortable. I don’t like being waited on by servants. It offends me somehow, especially in a situation like this one, with three people working for just two others, three black people working for two white people. Again: unpleasant echoes of the colonial past. How to get rid of this feeling of shame? Nancy, Melinda, and Samuel went about their tasks with stolid equanimity, and though I received a number of courteous smiles, they seemed guarded and aloof, indifferent. What must they think of us? They probably laugh at us behind our backs—with good reason.
The servants got me down, yes, but not as much as R.B. himself did. After his warm welcome, I felt as if he no longer knew what to do with me. He kept saying that I must be tired, that the trip must have worn me out, that jet lag is a modern invention designed to ruin the human body. I won’t deny that I was exhausted and jet-lagged, that my muscles ached from my battle with the mountain, but I wanted to stay up and talk, to reminisce about old times as he put it in one of his letters, and he seemed reluctant to go there with me. Our conversation over dinner was brutally dull. He told me about his discovery of Quillia and how he had managed to buy this house, discussed some of the particulars of local life, and then lectured me on the flora and fauna of the island. Mystifying.
I am in bed now, encased in a dome of white mosquito netting. My body is smeared with an odious product called OFF, a mosquito repellent that smells of toxic, life-threatening chemicals, and the green anti-mosquito coils on either side of the bed are slowly burning down, emitting curious little trails of smoke.
I wonder what I am doing here.
6/26. Nothing for two days. It has been impossible to write, impossible to find a moment’s peace, but now that I have left Moon Hill and am on my way back to Paris, I can pick up the story and push on to the bitter end. Bitter is precisely the word I want to use here. I feel bitter about what happened, and I know I will be tasting that bitterness for a long time to come.
It started the next morning, the morning after my arrival at the house, the 24th. Sitting over breakfast in the dining room, R.B. calmly put down his cup of coffee, looked me in the eye, and asked me to marry him. It was so far-fetched, so utterly unexpected, I burst out laughing.
—You can’t be serious, I said.
—Why not? he answered. I’m all alone here. You have no one in Paris, and if you came to Quillia and lived with me, I would make you the happiest woman in the world. We’re perfect for each other, Cécile.
—You’re too old for me, old friend.
—You’ve already been married to a man older than I am.
—That’s just it. Stéphane is dead, isn’t he? I have no desire to become a widow again.
—Ah, but I’m not Stéphane, am I? I’m strong. I’m in perfect health. I have years and years ahead of me.
—Please, Rudolf. It’s out of the question.
—You’re forgetting how much we adored each other.
—I liked you. I always liked you, but I never adored you.
—Years ago, I wanted to marry your mother. But that was only an excuse. I wanted to live with her so I could be near you.
—That’s ridiculous. I was a child back then—an awkward, undeveloped child. You weren’t interested in me.
—It was all working so well. It was about to happen, it would have happened, the three of us wanted it to happen, and then that American boy came to Paris and ruined everything.
—It wasn’t because of him. You know that. My mother didn’t believe his story, and neither did I.
—You were right not to believe him. He was a liar, a twisted, angry boy who turned against me and tried to wreck my life. Yes, I’ve made terrible mistakes over the years, but killing that kid in New York wasn’t one of them. I never put a hand on him. Your boyfriend made it all up.
—My boyfriend? That’s a good one. Adam Walker had better things to do than fall for someone like me.
—And to think . . . I was the one who introduced him to you. I thought I was doing you a favor. What a miserable joke.
—You did do me a favor. And then I turned around and insulted him. I called him a crazy person. I said his tongue should be torn out of his mouth.
—You never told me that. Good work, Cécile. I’m proud of you for showing such spirit. The boy got what he deserved.
—Deserved? What does that mean?
—I’m alluding to his hasty departure from France. You know why he left, don’t you?
—He left because of me. Because I spat in his face.
—No, no, nothing as simple as that.
—What are you talking about?
—He was deported. The police caught him with three kilos of drugs—marijuana, hashish, cocaine, I can’t remember the substance now. They were tipped off by the manager of that putrid hotel he lived in. The cops searched his room, and that was the end of Adam Walker. He had two choices: stand trial in France or leave the country.
—Adam with drugs? It isn’t possible. He was against drugs, he hated them.
—Not according to the police.
—And how do you know that?
—The examining magistrate was a friend of mine. He told me about the case.
—How convenient. And why would he bother to talk to you about a thing like that?
—Because he knew I was acquainted with Walker.
—You were involved in it, weren’t you?
—Of course not. Don’t be silly.
—You were. Admit it, Rudolf. You were the one who got Adam kicked out of the country.
—You’re wrong, my darling. I can’t say that I was sorry to see him go, but I wasn’t responsible.
—It’s so far in the past. Why tell lies about it now?
—I swear on your mother’s grave, Cécile. I had nothing to do with it.
I didn’t know what to think. Perhaps he was telling the truth, perhaps he wasn’t, but the moment he started talking about my mother’s grave, I realized that I didn’t want to be in the room with him anymore. I was too upset, too close to tears, too distracted to go on talking. First his insane proposal of marriage, and then the ghastly news about Adam, and suddenly I couldn’t sit at that table a second longer. I stood up from my chair, told him I wasn’t feeling well, and quickly retreated to my room.
Half an hour later, R.B. knocked and asked if he could come in. I hesitated f
or a few moments, wondering if I had the strength to confront him again. Before I could decide, there was another knock, louder and more insistent than the first one, and then he opened the door himself.
—I’m sorry, he said, as his large, half-naked body lumbered toward a chair in the far corner of the room. I didn’t mean to unnerve you. I’m afraid I took the wrong approach.
—Approach? Approach to what?
As R.B. lowered himself into the chair, I sat down on a small wooden bench just below the window. We were no more than three feet apart. I wished he hadn’t walked in on me so soon after my abrupt exit from the dining room, but he looked sufficiently contrite for me to think that further conversation might be possible.
—Approach to what? I repeated.
—To certain . . . how shall I put it? . . . to certain future . . . to certain possible domestic arrangements in the future.
—I’m sorry to disappoint you, Rudolf, but I’m not interested in marriage. Not with you or anyone else.
—Yes, I know. That’s your position today, but tomorrow you might have a different view of the matter.
—I doubt it.
—It was a mistake not to share my thoughts with you. I’ve been living with this idea ever since I received your letter last month, and after turning it around in my mind for so long, it felt real to me, as if all I had to do was say the word and it would happen. I’ve probably been alone too much these past six years. I sometimes confuse my thoughts about the world with the world itself. I’m sorry if I offended you.
—I wasn’t offended. Surprised would be the appropriate word, I think.