Mortals

by Norman Rush

  He had to digest his shock. He got out of his umbrella-tent and laid it carefully aside so that he could reenter it when he had gotten the Coleman lantern going. He needed light. He needed more light. He had to understand this or die.

  He was ready. The lantern was going. He was back in the umbrella-tent. He had put a pillow on the seat of the camp stool. It was necessary to keep the shank of the umbrella clamped between his knees and he had to hold the paperback at a difficult angle to catch the lantern light. He was not comfortable. His back had begun to hurt already. But he had a water bottle. He would be fine.

  He thought he knew how she could have innocently put Bovary in with his other reading matter. It could be there because she was scrupulous about keeping her eye out at jumble sales for cheap copies of classics that he had admitted to her he hadn’t for one reason or another gotten around to finishing earlier in his reading life. She had found a Vanity Fair, for him, for example, and either Bleak House or Dombey and Son. She loved him. She wanted him not to have lacunae, was what was behind it. And he had, he knew, mentioned that he had started Madame Bovary and not finished it. It must have been in the early years of their marriage. He hadn’t said why he hadn’t finished the book. He wasn’t sure she’d asked. But he knew why. Partly it was because the idea of a wife committing adultery was upsetting to him. But he hadn’t liked the book for other reasons. He had concluded that the main character was an idiot, and that what the book looked like was a beautifully written sequence of repetitions to show how stupid she, and any woman like her, had to be, any woman captured by romantic sentiments. He remembered thinking how smug the book was. He was sure that Bovary was from ovary, not that he could prove it. The book was against women. A woman had given Flaubert syphilis, thus his attitude. The men were fools, too. He had gotten as far as the liaison with Rodolphe and given up.

  He began paging along, reacquainting himself with what he had read, the part he remembered. The school business was still vivid to him. Charles Bovary’s first marriage, that too he had clear. His eye snagged on the last paragraph on page 36.

  Before marriage she thought herself in love; but the happiness that should have followed this love not having come, she must, she thought, have been mistaken. And Emma tried to find out what one meant exactly in life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books.

  His heart was beating too hard. The struggle was going to be to find out if Iris was speaking to him through this book, and if so, if so, if so, then what she was saying, exactly?

  He was going to have to speed-read the rest of this thing, because he had to understand. He had to verify that the story was what he had assumed or picked up through his reading it was.

  Emma had been put in a convent where she read contraband romantic novels and poetry. Then she had married a clod who became a successful country doctor doing his best and she had hardly been able to wait to betray him, first platonically, so to speak, with a young clerk, as he recalled. She was always waiting for something to happen. She has a child by her husband but sends it off to a wet nurse. She had hated the child for being female. She had gone to live in a provincial town, Yonville, inhabited exclusively by fools and jackasses. Over and over human stupidity was presented against landscapes of terrific natural beauty.

  Ah, page 116, “What exasperated her was that Charles did not seem to notice her anguish.” And there was no sex in the fucking thing, no described sex. He wasn’t up to Rodolphe yet. Léon, the first guy, had been a tease. Was it possible Iris was saying she was at the Léon stage and she needed to be stopped before Rodolphe? That was probably insane. He didn’t know. He was up to Rodolphe. Rodolphe was introduced as a cad. Could Iris be saying Morel was a cad, using Rodolphe, making a cry? He would hold the thought. He had reached the point at which he’d stopped years ago, he was pretty sure. He mustn’t seize on details prematurely. He had to conclude on the basis of themes, or something. He had to finish reading this thing, at once.

  By page 196 she was well into it with Rodolphe.

  Everything in Charles irritated her now; his face, his dress, what he did not say, his whole person, his existence, in fine. She repented of her past virtue as a crime, and what still remained of it crumbled away beneath the furious blows of her pride. She revelled in all the evil ironies of triumphant adultery. The memory of her lover came back to her with dazzling attractions; she threw her whole soul into it, borne away toward this image with a fresh enthusiasm; and Charles seemed to her as much removed from her life, as absent forever, as impossible and annihilated, as if he had been about to die and were passing under her eyes.

  He was reading furiously.

  Rodolphe ditches her. Every line in his farewell letter is a lie.

  Madame goes into a collapse. Rodolphe is gone but Léon is back and this time it’s not platonic.

  Emma was bankrupting her husband and trying to borrow money from Léon … and then there was this, page 316 …

  “Morel is to come back to-night; he will not refuse me, I hope” (this was one of his friends, the son of a very rich merchant) …

  Morel. Morel! … but it could mean nothing.

  Back to Rodolphe. She is desperate for money and can’t get any.

  Then death. She takes poison out of remorse at what she had been, a fool. Her daughter ends up in child labor. She leaves a ruin.

  He had no idea what to think. His mind was all over the place. There were no checkmarks or underlinings or nota benes anywhere in the volume, no page corners turned down. What was the signal, the message? Was he Bovary, a fool distinguished by the fact he believed every lie she told? Was he on page 363?

  Besides, Charles was not of those who go to the bottom of things; he shrank from the proofs, and his vague jealousy was lost in the immensity of his woe.

  In the scene prompting that characterization Charles has construed an explicit love letter from Rodolphe to his wife as probably suggesting a platonic relationship only.

  Was Madame Bovary a communication to him, was the question. He had to assume it was, since even if she’d put it in his pack by accident initially something would have gone off in her mind to say stop, halt, this will cause Ray to freak, what was I thinking?

  So there it was. She was neither stupid nor cruel. So there it was. How he took Madame Bovary was critical. What kind of book was it? You could take it as a Christian homily if you wanted to, a tract saying marriage is an ordeal but violating your stupid vows is even worse. But that was farfetched. He had learned something by suffering through this book, which was that the TLS could be wrong. He remembered reading someone very authoritative writing in it that there was only one major novel, a thing called The Golovlyov Family, a nineteenth-century Russian novel Ray hadn’t read, in which every character presented, without exception, was loathsome. Surely Madame Bovary belonged in that category, if you didn’t count the poor child. Every adult in the book was vile.

  He had to know if he was supposed to see himself in Charles Bovary. Every detail seemed to answer in the affirmative. For example, what did it mean that her husband botched an operation on some poor devil with a clubfoot, making it worse, making him lose his leg? Poor Charles does it out of hubris stoked by delusions about what he was competent to do. So was the analogy the agency, the agency’s interventions, the agency’s hubris, and his part in what she might think the agency was up to? He was feeling paranoid. He was hoping this was paranoia. He had to get up and move around. His back was killing him.

  He walked in a circle around the dying fire. He was still enclosed in the quasi-tent, carrying it with him like a fool of some kind. He needed to list the options he had for interpreting what she had done to him, putting Madame Bovary in his hands. But fire interrupted him, a bloom of flame declaring itself around him, dragging the breath out of his lungs. The netting had gone up. He had dragged it across an ember. He pitched the burning mass away. He was all right. He was trembling. His hair had gotten singed in back, was
all. He had made a spectacle. Keletso was coming to him.

  Nothing in Africa is fireproof, he thought.

  It was morning and somewhere in their cargo was a magnifying mirror. He needed it.

  He found it in among the first aid paraphernalia. His reflected image was not gratifying. He was less presentable than was good and less presentable than he’d expected. He had a mild burn on the back of his right hand that looked worse than it was because the Vaseline he’d smeared on it seemed to highlight it. He touched it and it hardly hurt. If he ruffled his hair he could still produce a shower of black specks, bits of charred hair. A good shampooing would take care of that. He would never understand why people insisted on saying they had circles under their eyes, dark circles, when what they had were semicircles. No one had circles under their eyes. The lashes of his right eye were mostly gone. He asked himself if it might be a good idea to trim off the lashes of his left eye in the interest of symmetry and the answer was no, it was an extreme idea and in addition his hands were too unsteady. That would pass, like everything. He could keep the idea under advisement.

  On waking he had found himself in possession of the conviction that yes, providing Madame Bovary had been deliberate, but that the point of doing it had been precisely to show him that she was fundamentally innocent, so innocent that she felt free to include the inflammatory thing in his reading because, precisely because, it meant nothing and was there only because it was something he had in fact said he hadn’t finished reading. So it had been a deliberate declaration of innocence. But that conviction had proved to be delicate. He had lost it. He had lost his grip on it during breakfast. He had held it too hard. He had crushed it.

  But he had gotten rid of the Bovary enigma anyway, another way. He had gotten rid of it the way Johnson refuted Bishop Berkeley, in that spirit, at least. He had been creative and burned the thing, pushing it into the embers of the breakfast fire. He resented mystery and he had dissolved that one by destroying the occasion of it, the object, the evidence. He knew himself. Know thyself, he said to himself, for reinforcement. If he had hung on to Bovary he would have returned to it for obsessive research. So he had saved himself. And already it was easier to stay longer with the idea that the whole thing had been a mistake, a bêtise on her part, something she had done automatically in the rush of throwing his personal supplies together for him. He had to focus on how much she wanted him not to limit his leisure reading to crap, even the better sort of crap, vintage Penguin mysteries, Dorothy Sayers and Simenon, and how much she wanted him to use that for filling holes in his lacunae, which was an incorrect construction, a bêtise, like saying someone has a loophole up his sleeve, but not exactly like it. Iris had made up the loophole phrase, being funny. He was losing a funny woman.

  He was looking gaunt, there was no question about that. But a good bath would help and a careful shave would help and the end of the world would help.

  Keletso had taken a chance. And then Ray had taken a chance. And it had been because they were both a little desperate for fresh fruit.

  They had noted a solitary homestead just off the road, very tidy-looking, two rondavels inside a low mud wall painted in a red and black checkerboard pattern, and Keletso had decided it looked abandoned and that therefore there was no reason not to stop and go in and knock down a couple of pawpaws growing on a tree next to the main rondavel, the one with the trimmed thatch, the male rondavel, as they were called. Rondavels with untrimmed thatch, sometimes called weeping thatch for no reason Ray could think of, were considered female. They had passed other abandoned compounds along the way, more than a few when you added them up, especially in the last week.

  How Keletso had been able to tell the compound was abandoned rather than merely vacant while its occupants went about their business elsewhere out in the bush had been unclear to him. And Keletso’s conviction about it had been called into question by the celerity with which he had vaulted the wall and hauled himself up the tree and cut the fruit down and then gotten the hell out of there. And then there had been his not wanting to cut the fruit open until they were almost a kilometer, by Ray’s reckoning, from the compound.

  Keletso had come back with two papayas, large ones, brownish and withered-looking. When they had stopped and rather feverishly cut them open, Keletso had rejected one of them as dubious but declared the other one, which looked identical to the one rejected in every way, fine to eat. The flesh of the supposedly fine pawpaw had been dark and hard and, in Ray’s opinion, soapy to the taste, but to be companionable he had eaten some, a small amount, while Keletso had eaten a lot, chewing heroically, and was now sick, vomiting, behind the vehicle.

  But he himself was fine. In fact he was in an elevated state, he might say. Burning Madame Bovary had helped him deeply, somehow. They were in a broad, dry valley. They were suffering with the universal dustiness, but he wasn’t minding it. At some point in antiquity a river had run through this desert. It was impossible to imagine what that must have been like, not that he was trying very hard, because he was feeling elsewhere, he was feeling above things. He could enjoy small things like the rare moments of coolness when a cloud passed over. And also there were golden knobs of something, horse droppings, in the road, that looked aesthetic, at that moment.

  He put his head out of the vehicle and asked, loudly, if he could get something for Keletso.

  “Nyah, rra,” Keletso answered, with some difficulty. He wasn’t through retching.

  Ray wanted to be cremated when he died. Definitely.

  It had been the best idea, burning Madame Bovary. And he had another idea, a fine idea, and he was going to carry it out before anyone could object. He needed to hurry.

  His passport was in the glove box. He extracted it and looked at it. He liked the color, navy blue. And he was proud of its thickness. Extra pages had been incorporated into it because he had used up the available space for visa stamps.

  He got out of the vehicle, taking his passport with him. He walked up the road, toward a bobbing cloud of gnats. They would have to drive through it later.

  He knew what Iris wanted. She wanted a different man. He could be a different man. When he returned he could be a different man.

  Nothing could happen to him if he had his passport with him. That was factual. Nothing could touch him once whoever came to oppress him, as people liked to say, saw his passport. The iron wings of the United States were over him, gently beating, wherever he went, so long as he had his passport to wave in the face of anyone who knew what was good for them. There was a skit going on. They were seeing evidence of fire again, lines of smoke, four of them at one time, once. The omens were that trouble was coming to meet him face to face. His passport made him a prince.

  Keletso was part of his armor, too. And Keletso was going to have to go back. He set the passport on the ground, open, spine up, and with his cigarette lighter set the interior pages on fire.

  He was proud of himself for a stupid reason. He had never memorized his passport number, a ten-digit thing. He didn’t know what his number was. But he had resisted the temptation to take a look at it before burning his document. He could pick things up in a flash. He was trained to do that. He would have remembered it and he would have been able to recite it if need be and that could have been a loophole, a loophole up his sleeve, conceivably. But he had resisted.

  The pages were burning satisfactorily but not the cover, which was a plastic sort of fabric. He tried harder to get the cover to burn, picking it up and holding the lighter flame steadily at one corner. The cover began to curl and blacken and finally it began to melt. He was burning his fingers a little. He was succeeding. It was unrecognizable. Half of it was viscous. He mashed whatever was left of his passport into the sand.

  Keletso surprised him. He stood up and faced him. Keletso looked ghastly and he would want to know what was going on. He hadn’t thought ahead.

  “Rra, are you all right?” he asked Keletso.

  “Ehe, rra, but I am emp
ty and you must drive.”

  “Of course.”

  “Only until such time as I am recovered. I can have tea, I think. But what is this fire?”

  “This fire is … a fire I just made.”

  “Ehe, but why? What is it about?”

  “Ah well, while I was waiting I saw these gnats and I thought while I was waiting I would go and smoke them out, smoke them away.”

  “Nyah, that is just foolish, rra.”

  “Yes, because you see they are still there. But it was just, what shall I call it, passing time till you came back.”

  Keletso shook his head. He looked searchingly at Ray. He wanted to say something, clearly, but was thinking it over.

  “I feel great,” Ray said.

  “Nyah, it is not right. But come out of this sun. I must wash my teeth.”

  Ray got back into the Land Cruiser. A blister was rising on the pad of his thumb.

  He was going to feel elated, he knew it. He had done it. There was no color of protection in his remaining documents, his driver’s license, his letters of reference and authorization. Without a passport to accompany them, they would automatically be suspect. They would prove nothing.

  He expected to feel fine soon, very soon.

  25. Cries and Chants for Sale

  Keletso was asleep, which was good because he disapproved of Ray reading himself to sleep with the aid of a flashlight, because it was wasteful of batteries. He had never said anything directly, but Ray could tell how Keletso felt. There were plenty of batteries left anyway, and if not there should be batteries available in Nokaneng in whatever travesty of a general store they would find there. They would make it to Nokaneng easily tomorrow. Alternatively it was possible that the light from Ray’s reading activities made it hard for Keletso to fall asleep, not that there was the least evidence of that. Africans seemed very adapted to total darkness. In the villages you could find them sitting around having discussions in total darkness. Maybe their eyes were better. His eyes were still good. He was going to be forty-nine and his eyes were still good, knock wood. But there was no wood to knock. Forty-nine is not fifty, he thought. His eyes were better than Iris’s. She owned reading glasses but she was, he would say, a little furtive about using them, like someone in politics. Her eyes were beautiful things. When they got to Nokaneng he would begin to machinate to send Keletso home, out of this, out of the fire. He had to.