“Instantly,” Mario said. He went to the kitchen and came back with a whisky and mineral water. “I think it is strong enough,” he said.
Should I shave now or wait until after breakfast? Thomas Hudson thought. I ought to shave. That’s what I ordered the whisky for, to get me through the shaving. All right, go in and shave then. The hell with it, he thought. No. Go in and do it. It’s good for your damned morale and you have to go into town after breakfast.
Shaving, he sipped the drink halfway through lathering, after lathering, and during the process of relathering, and changing blades three times in getting the two-week stubble off his cheeks, chin, and throat. The cat walked around and watched him while he shaved and rubbed against his legs. Then suddenly he bounded out of the room and Thomas Hudson knew he had heard the milk bowls being put down on the tiled floor of the dining room. He had not heard the click himself nor had he heard any calling. But Boise had heard it.
Thomas Hudson finished shaving and poured his right hand full of the wonderful ninety-degree pure alcohol that was as cheap in Cuba as miserable rubbing alcohol in the States and doused it over his face, feeling its cold bite take away the soreness from the shaving.
I don’t use sugar, nor smoke tobacco, he thought, but by God I get my pleasure out of what they distill in this country.
The lower parts of the bathroom windows were painted over because the stone paved patio ran all around the house, but the upper halves of the windows were of clear glass and he could see the branches of the palm trees whipping in the wind. She’s blowing even heavier than I thought. There would almost be time to haul out. But you can’t tell. It all depends on what she does when she goes into the northeast. It certainly had been fun not to think about the sea for the last few hours. Let’s keep it up, he thought. Let’s not think about the sea nor what is on it or under it, or anything connected with it. Let’s not even make a list of what we will not think of about it. Let’s not think of it at all. Let’s just have the sea in being and leave it at that. And the other things, he thought. We won’t think about them either.
“Where would the señor like to have breakfast?” Mario asked.
“Any place away from the puta sea.”
“In the living room or in the señor’s bedroom?”
“In the bedroom. Pull out the wicker chair and put the breakfast on a table by it.”
He drank the hot tea and ate a fried egg and some toast with orange marmalade.
“Is there no fruit?”
“Only bananas.”
“Bring some.”
“Are they not bad with alcohol?”
“That is superstition.”
“But while you were away a man died in the village from eating bananas when he was drinking rum.”
“How do you know he wasn’t just a banana-eating rummy who died from rum?”
“No, señor. This man died very suddenly from drinking a small amount of rum after eating a large quantity of bananas. They were his own bananas from his garden. He lived on the hill behind the village and worked for the route number seven of the buses.”
“May he rest in peace,” Thomas Hudson said. “Bring me a few bananas.”
Mario brought the bananas, small, yellow, ripe, from the tree in the garden. They were hardly bigger, peeled, than a man’s fingers and they were delicious. Thomas Hudson ate five of them.
“Observe me for symptoms,” he said. “And bring the Princessa to eat the other egg.”
“I gave her an egg to celebrate your return,” the boy said. “I also gave an egg to Boise and to Willy.”
“What about Goats?”
“The gardener said it was not good for Goats to eat much until his wounds are healed. His wounds were severe.”
“What sort of a fight was it?”
“It was very serious. They fought for nearly a mile. We lost them in the thorn brush beyond the garden. They fought with no noise at all; the way they fight now. I don’t know who won. Big Goats came in first and we took care of his wounds. He came to the patio and lay beside the cistern. He couldn’t jump to the top of it. Fats came in an hour later and we cared for his wounds.”
“Do you remember how loving they were when they were brothers?”
“Of course. But I am afraid now that Fats will kill Goats. He must weigh nearly a pound more.”
“Goats is a great fighting cat.”
“Yes, señor. But figure out for yourself what a full pound means.”
“I don’t think it can mean as much in cats as it does in fighting cocks. You think of everything in terms of fighting chickens. It doesn’t mean much in men unless one man must weaken himself to make the weight. Jack Dempsey weighed only 185 pounds when he won the championship of the world. Willard weighed 230. Goats and Fats are both big cats.”
“The way they fight, a pound is a terrible advantage,” Mario said. “If they were being fought for money, no one would give away a pound. They would not give away ounces.”
“Bring me some more bananas.”
“Please, señor.”
“You really believe that nonsense?”
“It’s not nonsense, señor.”
“Then bring me another whisky and mineral water.”
“If you order me to.”
“I ask you to.”
“If you ask, it is an order.”
“Then bring it.”
The boy brought in the whisky with ice and cold, charged mineral water and Thomas Hudson took it and said, “Observe me for symptoms.” But the worried look on the boy’s dark face made him tire of the teasing and he said, “Truly, I know it will not make me sick.”
“The señor knows what he is doing. But it was my duty to protest.”
“That’s all right. You’ve protested. Has Pedro come yet?”
“No, señor.”
“When he comes tell him to have the Cadillac ready to go to town at once.”
Now you take a bath, Thomas Hudson said to himself. Then you dress for Havana. Then you ride into town to see the Colonel. What the hell is wrong with you? Plenty is wrong with me, he thought. Plenty. The land of plenty. The sea of plenty. The air of plenty.
He sat in a wicker chair with his feet up on the extension that pulled out from under the seat and looked at the pictures on the wall of his bedroom. At the head of the bed, the cheap bed with the no-good mattress that had been bought as an economy because he never slept in it except in case of quarrels, there was Juan Gris’s Guitar Player. Nostalgia hecha hombre, he thought in Spanish. People did not know that you died of it. Across the room, above the bookcase, was Paul Klee’s Monument in Arbeit. He didn’t love it as he loved the Guitar Player but he loved to look at it and he remembered how corrupt it had seemed when he first bought it in Berlin. The color was as indecent as the plates in his father’s medical books that showed the different types of chancres and venereal ulcers, and how frightened of it his wife had been until she had learned to accept its corruption and only see it as a painting. He knew no more about it now than when he first saw it in Flechtheim’s Gallery in the house by the river that wonderful cold fall in Berlin when they had been so happy. But it was a good picture and he liked to look at it.
Above the other bookcase was one of Masson’s forests. This was Ville d’Avray and he loved it the way he loved the Guitar Player. That was the great thing about pictures; you could love them with no hopelessness at all. You could love them without sorrow and the good ones made you happy because they had done what you always tried to do. So it was done and it was all right, even if you failed to do it.
Boise came into the room and jumped up onto his lap. He jumped beautifully and could leap, without effort showing, to the top of the high chest of drawers in the big bedroom. Now, having leaped moderately and neatly, he settled down on Thomas Hudson’s lap and made loving pushes with his forepaws.
“I’m looking at the pictures, Boy. You’d be better off if you liked pictures.”
Who knows though but he m
ay get as much from leaping and from night hunting as I get from the pictures, Thomas Hudson thought. It is a damned shame he can’t see them though. You can’t tell. He might have frightful taste in pictures.
“I wonder who you’d like, Boy. Probably the Dutch period when they painted such wonderful still lifes of fish and oysters and game. Hey, lay off me there. This is the day time. You’re not supposed to do that sort of thing in the day time.”
Boise continued with his lovemaking and Thomas Hudson pushed him onto his side to quiet him.
“You have to observe a few decencies, Boy,” he said. “I haven’t even gone out to see the other cats, to please you.”
Boise was happy and Thomas Hudson felt the purr in his throat with his fingers.
“I have to bathe, Boy. You spend half your time doing that. But you do it with your own tongue. That’s when you won’t pay any attention to me. When you wash yourself you’re just like a damned businessman at his office. That’s business. That’s not to be interrupted. Well, I have to bathe now. But instead I sit here drinking in the morning like a damned rummy. That’s one of the differences between us. You couldn’t steer eighteen hours either. I can, though. Twelve anytime. Eighteen when I have to. Nineteen yesterday and this morning. But I can’t jump and I can’t hunt at night like you. We do some pretty damn fancy hunting at night though. But you’ve got your radar in your whiskers. And a pigeon probably has his Huff Duff in that incrustation above his beak. Anyway, all homing pigeons have the incrustation. What sort of ultra-high frequencies have you got, Boy?”
Boise lay there heavy and solid and long, purring silently and very happy.
“What does your search receiver say, Boy? What’s your pulse width? What’s your pulse repetition frequency? I’ve got a magnetron built in. But don’t tell anybody. But with the consequent higher resolution attained by the UHF, enemy whores can be detected at a greater distance. It’s microwave, Boy, and you’re purring it right now.”
So that’s how you kept your resolution not to think about it until we get going again. It wasn’t the sea you wanted to forget. You know you love the sea and would not be anywhere else. Go on out to the porch and look at her. She is not cruel or callous nor any of that Quatsch. She is just there and the wind moves her and the current moves her and they fight on her surface but down below none of it matters. Be thankful that you are going out on her again and thank her for being your home. She is your home. Don’t talk nor think nonsense about her. She is not your trouble. You’re making a little more sense, he told himself. Although you don’t make too damned much ashore. All right, he told himself. I have to make so much sense at sea that I don’t want to make any ashore.
Ashore is a lovely place, he thought. Today we would see just how lovely it could be. After I see the goddamned Colonel, he thought. Well I always enjoy seeing him because it builds up my morale. Let’s not go into the Colonel, he thought. That’s one of those things we are going to skip while we have a lovely day. I will go to see him. But I won’t go into him. Enough has gone into him already that will never get out. And enough has gone out of him that they will never get back in. So I thought you weren’t going to go into him. I’m not. I’m just going in to see him and report.
He finished the drink, lifted the cat off his lap, stood up and looked at the three paintings, and then went in and took a shower. The water heater had only been on since the boys came in the morning and there was not much hot water. But he soaped himself clean, scrubbed his head, and finished off with cold water. He dressed in white flannel shirt, dark tie, flannel slacks, wool socks and his ten-year-old English brogues, a cashmere pullover sweater, and an old tweed jacket. He rang for Mario.
“Is Pedro here?”
“Yes, señor. He has the car outside.”
“Make me a Tom Collins with coconut water and bitters to take. Put it in one of the cork holders.”
“Yes, señor. Don’t you want a coat?”
“I’ll take a coat to wear back if it gets cold.”
“Will you be back for lunch?”
“No. Nor for dinner.”
“Do you want to see any of the cats before you go? They are all out in the lee of the wind in the sun.”
“No. I will see them tonight. I want to bring them a present.”
“I go to make the drink. It will take a moment for the coconut.”
Now why in hell wouldn’t you go to see the cats? he asked himself. I don’t know, he answered. That one I did not understand at all. That was a new one.
Boise was following him, a little worried at this going away, but not panicky since there was no baggage and no packing. “Maybe I did it for you, Boy,” Thomas Hudson said. “Don’t you worry. I’ll be back sometime tonight or in the morning. With my ashes dragged, I hope. Properly, I hope. Then maybe we will make a little better sense around here. Vámonos a limpiar la escopeta.”
He came out of the long, bright living room that still seemed enormous and down the stone steps into the even greater brightness of the Cuban winter morning. The dogs played around his legs and the sad pointer came up grovelling and wagging his lowered head.
“You poor miserable beast,” he said to the pointer. He patted him and the dog fawned on him. The other mongrel dogs were gay and prancing in the excitement of the cold and the wind. There were some dead branches broken off the ceiba tree that grew out of the patio and they lay on the steps where they had fallen in the wind. The chauffeur came from behind the car, shivering exaggeratedly, and said, “Good morning, Mr. Hudson. How was the voyage?”
“Good enough. How are the Cars?”
“All in perfect shape.”
“I’ll bet,” Thomas Hudson said in English. Then to Mario, who came out of the house and down the steps to the car carrying the tall dark, rusty-colored drink, wrapped round with a sheet of moulded cork that came to within a half-inch of the rim of the glass, “Get a sweater for Pedro. One of those that buttons in front. From Mr. Tom’s clothes. See that the steps are cleaned of this trash.”
Thomas Hudson handed the drink to the chauffeur to hold and stooped to pet the dogs. Boise was sitting on the steps, watching them with contempt. There was Negrita, a small black bitch going gray with age, her tail curled over her back, her tiny feet and delicate legs almost sparkling as she played, her muzzle as sharp as a fox terrier and her eyes loving and intelligent.
He had seen her one night in a bar following some people out and asked what breed of dog she was.
“Cuban,” the waiter said. “She’s been here four days. She follows everyone out but they always shut the doors of their cars on her.”
They had taken her home to the Finca and for two years she had not been in heat and Thomas Hudson had thought she was too old to breed. Then, one day, he had to break her loose from a police dog and after that she had police dog pups, pups from a pit bull, pointer pups, and a wonderful unknown pup that was bright red and looked as though his father might have been an Irish setter except that he had the chest and shoulders of a pit bull and a tail that curled up over his back like Negrita’s.
Now her sons were all around her and she was pregnant again.
“Who did she breed with?” Thomas Hudson asked the chauffeur.
“I don’t know.”
Mario, who came out with the sweater and gave it to the chauffeur, who took off his frayed uniform coat to put it on, said, “The father is the fighting dog in the village.”
“Well, goodbye, dogs,” Thomas Hudson said. “So long, Boy,” he said to the cat who came bounding down through the dogs to the car. Thomas Hudson, sitting in the car now, holding the cork-wrapped drink, leaned out of the window and touched the cat who rose on his hind legs to push his head against his fingers. “Don’t worry, Boy. I’ll be back.”
“Poor Boise,” Mario said. He picked him up and held him in his arms and the cat looked after the car as it turned, circling the flower bed, and went down the uneven gully-washed driveway until it was hidden by the hill slope and
the tall mango trees. Then Mario took the cat into the house and put him down and the cat jumped up onto the window sill and continued to look out at where the driveway disappeared under the hill.
Mario stroked him but the cat did not relax.
“Poor Boise,” the tall Negro boy said. “Poor, poor Boise.”
In the car Thomas Hudson and the chauffeur went down the driveway and the chauffeur jumped out and unchained the gate and then climbed back in and drove the car through. A Negro boy was coming up the street and he called to him to close the gate and the boy grinned and nodded his head.
“He is a younger brother of Mario.”
“I know,” Thomas Hudson said.
They rolled through the squalor of the village side street and turned onto the central highway. They passed the houses of the village, the two grocery stores open onto the street with their bars and rows of bottles flanked by shelves of canned goods, and then were past the last bar and the huge Spanish laurel tree whose branches spread all the way across the road and were rolling downhill on the old stone highway. The highway ran downhill for three miles with big old trees on either side. There were nurseries, small farms, large farms with their decrepit Spanish colonial houses that were being cut up into subdivisions, their old hilly pastures being cut by streets that ended at grassy hillsides, the grass brown from the drought. The only green now on the land, in this country of so many greens, was along the watercourses where the royal palms grew tall and gray, their green tops slanted by the wind. This was a dry norther, dry, hard, and cold. The Straits of Florida had been chilled by the other northers that had come before it and there was no fog and no rain with this wind.
Thomas Hudson took a sip of the ice-cold drink that tasted of the fresh green lime juice mixed with the tasteless coconut water that was still so much more full-bodied than any charged water, strong with the real Gordon’s gin that made it alive to his tongue and rewarding to swallow, and all of it tautened by the bitters that gave it color. It tastes as good as a drawing sail feels, he thought. It is a hell of a good drink.
The cork glass-holder kept the ice from melting and weakening the drink and he held it fondly in his hand and looked at the country as they drove into town.
Islands in the Stream Page 24