Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise

by Paul Monette

  So what was I supposed to do now, give all that up for a lawn chair and a lap robe? Waiting for a nice cup of bouillon, to be served by one of these ridiculous waiters in Swiss costume. The big event of the day being the blowing of a ten-foot Alpine horn on the near shore, “God Save the Queen” barely distinguishable from “Amazing Grace.”

  O Canada. Winston and I both did our damnedest not to let it separate us, trying to keep me from feeling left behind. He who had the force and energy to climb these peaks to the sky, but mostly chose to stay by me. We pretended it didn’t much matter, the view from the top. And made the return trip by way of Banff National Park, the road through the vast old-growth forest quickened by elk and bighorn sheep grazing the verges without fear. We were a zoo to them, I suppose. There certainly wasn’t any doubt who was caged and who was free.

  Home again after six days’ northern passage, we finished the Canada roll of film on the front porch, mugging in our tuxedos because we were on our way to a benefit. It was those prints that couldn’t lie, that seemed to show the first faint trace of the skull beneath my skin, no matter how wide I grinned. Not that I wasn’t grateful for the journey, energized even, but this was the trip that would always bear an asterisk, proof that I couldn’t leave AIDS behind. I remember the exact evening in ’84 when Cesar announced, I’ve traveled enough—a man whose life map was a veritable pincushion of countries traversed and holy sites. Whose only destination out-of-town from there on in—besides Death, that is—would be our house, a quick shuttle hop from San Francisco. I remember promising Roger we would get to Paris again somehow, even after he’d lost his sight and mostly lay curled asleep, Puck on the floor beside him as if they were having a sleeping contest.

  Did I believe that promise? I suppose I didn’t. More than anything it served as a goad to memory and happier days. Besides, I saved my deepest passion of disbelief for the opposite scenario, that our traveling days together were over—that we had no way anymore to change our ideas, as the French would put it. Grounded.

  I was beginning to dread that I’d have to venture alone along the next leg of the journey, but not prepared to concede the point. For the lie to my intrepidness was this above all: that it wasn’t any fun to be anywhere without someone to share it. Hardly the sort of attitude that will see you solo through the jungle or up past fourteen thousand feet. I’d certainly done my share of that sort of thing in my closeted days, sitting hugging my knees as I took in the view from the High Corniche, or the coral chambers visible far out to sea from a hilltop in the Bahamas—lonely, lonely, lonely. No escape and no vacation.

  Somehow it all got intertwined with being in love. It surely was no coincidence that traveling changed from the dutiful checklist of masterpieces, confided to my journal to somehow make it last; changed the day I met Roger, like everything else. After that it didn’t signify anymore what the destination was. Paris through his eyes, England through mine, and then we were in uncharted waters, sailing along in our sub-sub-compact—the deal being that the one not driving was navigator and guide. Maps so cumbersome they needed a charthouse to be laid flat, flapping about till neither of us could see the road ahead. Or reading aloud the deathless prose of the Green Guide so we’d know what to look for when we arrived.

  Once, on a delirious ride through fields of lavender and the dusty green of olive groves, I read to Roger from Ford Madox Ford, his love song to Provence:

  It is no doubt that illusion [of the permanence of London] that made my first sight of Provence the most memorable sensation of my life and that makes my every renewal of contact with those hills where grows the first olive tree of the South almost as memorable. It is as if one wakened from a dream of immortality to the realization of what is earthly permanence.7

  Or the sudden detour into Wales to check out the ruins of Tintern Abbey. I bought us a pocket Wordsworth before we left Bath, and Roger in his mild voice recited the great poem of return:

  LINES

  COMPOSED A FEW MILES ABOVE TINTERN ABBEY,

  ON REVISITING THE BANKS OF THE WYE DURING

  A TOUR, JULY 13, 1798

  We crossed the mouth of the Severn just after Bristol—its tall industrial chimneys clouding a sulfurous sky—and entered Wales. Immediately the landscape changed, electric green and pastoral, as if we had crossed the border into a reverie.

  When we reached the Abbey itself, there were no other cars and no guard in the kiosk. I hadn’t realized how lofty the ruins would be. Though all the stained glass had been ripped from its windows when the abbeys were routed, the tall Gothic windows were filled instead with the green of the hills surrounding. The roof and its beams were gone, long burned away, a conflagration that took the wood paneling off the walls, along with the choir stalls and the altar. But the bare stone of the great nave was otherwise unbroken, buffered by graceful side aisles. And someone had had the aesthetic sense to mow the grass that had overrun the floor paving, so that you walked through the soaring ruins on a carpet of velvet lawn.

  It was such a perfect realization of the poet’s faith, the Divine-in-nature—a pagan temple now, given over to the earth, monument to the ecstatic urge of life:

  … something far more deeply interfused,

  Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

  And the round ocean and the living air,

  And the blue sky, and in the mind of man …8

  Roger and I wandered around with our heads tilted skyward, tracing the noble arches and gables against the cloudless blue. I must’ve stopped at a windowsill to jot a note in my journal—still trying to freeze these spots of time, maybe even outdo the poet himself. Such vaunting self-assurance in those days. I finished mid-sentence, hitting the wall of clichés perhaps, but mostly trying to catch up with Rog. Behind the church proper were the briefer remains of the dormitories and kitchens and stables, easier for the anti-papist vigilantes to pull down and obliterate. You could just make out traces of a cloister, with a well in the center.

  I don’t remember what sparked it, but suddenly I was in a panic that I’d lost Roger. I called his name in the green stillness, then started racing about—the camera like a millstone round my neck, my journal as dead as Latin. In seconds I had him tumbling down a well, or crushed by a falling gargoyle. No other tourists, still no guards, and the fear of being alone more overwhelming even than the worry. I kept crying out, through a choke of sobs, the green river valley and the godless church as alien as the moon. Please, please, don’t let him be hurt.

  And then he emerged calm as you please from the restrooms by the kiosk, his smile fading as he walked toward me, seeing the wrench of relief in my tear-streaked face. Of course I felt a fool by then, but he gently soothed my residual hysterics, promising over and over that he was fine. I still don’t know where it came from, some long-forgotten memory of being separated from my parents in a crowd. But eight years after Tintern Abbey—when Roger was running the gauntlet of tests at UCLA, on the brink of his diagnosis—the rattle of the same terror overtook me like an old wound leaking pus. Except this time it went on and on, unrelieved, for the whole twenty months of his illness. And I often think that Tintern Abbey was by way of an AIDS rehearsal, a premonition of mortality that I had no words for yet.

  The incident doesn’t appear in the postcards we sent, nor anywhere in the travelogue we regaled our friends with. Tintern Abbey still stood in its emerald vale—stands there yet—consecrated to Pan and a host of nymphs and satyrs. The “something far more deeply interfused” lies in its green reassurance that nature stands apart from the sully of human fret and bother. In other words, the canker in the rose was all mine, baggage I brought with me. What I would lose if Roger disappeared was the reason to go in the first place.

  This is a problem inherent in mixing up the journey with being in love, but it’s the price you pay for being a certain breed of romantic. The “earthly permanence” slaps you in the face, mocking your little span of seasons, your fleeting embraces.

  So
it ought to come as no surprise that the world is vastly bigger than all your travels, but it does. Maybe it’s like reading. Starting as far back as my twenties, when my nose was always in a book, I recall the particular shiver of melancholy, realizing I wasn’t going to get through the whole of Henry James. Or Dickens or Proust or Tolstoy. There just wasn’t time. Even at a clip of a hundred pages a day, a vivid sense of my own limits. But I shrugged it off, assuming that was one of the boons of getting old. A rocking chair on a white picket veranda, dozing your way through The Wings of the Dove.

  And then to be startled to find that life has become more interesting than books. Besides, you get by perfectly fine on the ones you did read. Even as the details start to go, you can talk with practically anyone on sheer enthusiasm alone, from Persuasion to David Copperfield. In the end it becomes enough to say how marvelous something is, how true and close to the bone. After all, the people you’re talking with have mostly put off from the shore of books themselves, paddling through the shoals of life with barely a thriller on the nightstand.

  Is that how traveling goes, once you realize you’re not going to make it to Benares (those burning ghats) and Machu Picchu? Do you just fall back on where you’ve been, embroidering your stories till everyone you know has heard them twice over? Or do you prove you’ve gone the distance by becoming a small authority on the 7th Arondissement, or all the bronzes of Florence? Making up in sophistication for what you lack in mileage. Well, whatever works to dull the longing for what you’ve missed.

  And anyway, you’ve eavesdropped enough in cafés to hear a lifetime of witless remarks by people who scarcely notice where they’ve been, just a string of hotels and bad meals and the shopping terribly disappointing. Like the man who approached the moral philosopher Sidney Smith9 and rapped his walking stick on the pavement. “You see this stick, sir?” the gentleman boasted. “This stick has been around the world.”

  “Indeed,” replied Smith. “And yet, still only a stick.”

  Sometimes what catches your fancy is the oddest detail, yet it leaves a deep notch on your walking stick. In Crete in ’84, Roger and I took a solitary tour of the wrecked Minoan palaces from the Bronze Age. Four altogether, I think, and all destroyed at once, circa 1400 B.C. The palace of Knossos being the most impressive, excavated and partially restored by Arthur Evans—throne room intact and the dolphin frescoes swimming in a stairwell. So many rooms and corridors that one story has it that Knossos itself was the Labyrinth of myth. And all obliterated, so the theory went, when the great volcano blew in Santorini ninety miles away, causing a tidal wave that reached Crete within six minutes, wiping out the whole Mi-noan civilization. Stupendous past indeed.

  Contemporary scholars have questioned the drama in all of this, convinced that the decline of the palace culture was slower, a matter of centuries. True though that may prove to be, I find I prefer the feeling truth of tidal wave and wipeout. But then, don’t come to me for the facts.

  Some miles inland is the palace of Phaestos, high above the Mesara Plain, and exquisitely unrestored. We had that one all to ourselves as well—pure luck of the draw in the Ithaka business. Up the great stone staircase into a maze, most of it leveled to the bare foundations. And in the rubble of a storeroom, according to the pidgin English of the guidebook, had been found the so-called Phaestos Disk. The sole surviving evidence that the Minoans had a written tongue as far back as the Second Millennium B.C. (but still no clue what it said).

  Later that day in the Heraklion Museum, our eyes glazed over by rooms full of potsherds, we came to the dusty case where the Phaestos Disk, the thing itself, was on display. About the diameter of a Frisbee, the clay perhaps two inches thick, and the whole surface deeply incised with pictographic signs laid out in concentric circles. There were learned guesses as to what it might say, but none held water. No one knew whether it was meant to be read from the center outward like ripples, or spiraling in from the rim.

  All I know is that it possessed me, holding me fixed as Roger moved on to the snake-goddess fetishes. For a little while there I actually convinced myself I could crack it. Without the slightest training in hieroglyphics, this layman who could scarcely keep Hadrian and Tiberius straight thought he could best the experts. Spellbound, getting nowhere, I must’ve stood there fifteen minutes waiting for a brainstorm. And then I left it with that same look over my shoulder, regret/desire, with which I’d walked away from the brink in Capri. Knowing how way led on to way; knowing I’d never be back.

  The feeling returned full force a couple of years later, when a friend who’d studied Greek at Oxford told me about his tutor. An ancient dusty man with patches, wreathed in pipe smoke, whiskers in his ears, and fluent in an astonishing range of dead tongues. He happened to mention one day that he was working harder than he ever had, trying to translate all that was left of some nameless forgotten language, a slew of clay tablets somewhere between Sumerian and Aramaic. For decades he’d tried to pass it on, but it was too hard for even the best of his students. Apparently you had to know everything else to get that far.

  The truly lost, the undeciphered, constitute a kind of backlash as you gather in the world, destination by destination. I never expected in my lifetime to watch a country disappear—and then the bloodshed exploded in Yugoslavia. But wait. What about our day in Dubrovnik—Steve and I—the pristine medieval port, pride of the Adriatic? Clocktower and lion fountain, steep cobbled alleys radiating off the square, old women watering their windowboxes, or leaning on the sills and smiling like cats dozing in the sun.

  Do the places you’ve visited still exist in your head if they’re reduced to smithereens? Are they anything more than postcards after all, doomed to go to the grave with you? People sigh over Beirut, the Paris of the Middle East, a distant look of confusion in their eyes, bereft of words. Or the old Tibet of the monks, the vision of Lhasa riding the clouds, the palpable Zen of desirelessness. Before China began the genocide.

  Now we hear that the Muslim fundamentalists in Egypt want to rid the place of all Dynastic monuments, from the Pyramids and Sphinx to Karnak and Abu Simbel. Graven images and, sin of sin, built before Mohammed. Or the leveling of the temples in Cambodia, of everything in Cambodia, a whole country committing suicide till the ground was sown with salt. There is no end to this, of course. The world is coming apart at the seams, and traveling at all becomes more rarefied every year, increasingly a fixed route to places certified intact and free of terrorists.

  Elitist almost by definition, a sort of Orient Express in spirit if not in fact—brass-fitted and bottled snowmelt and turndown service at night. The planet as theme park, Disneyized. McDonald’s at the intersection of Boulevards St. Germain and St. Michel, across from the ruins of the Cluny Abbey, itself built on the ruins of a Roman bath.

  My cousin Harry came back from Orlando in a cosmopolitan rapture: “First night we had dinner in France, next night in It’ly, then England …”

  And his wife piped up, “Don’t forget Japan.”

  This is not the same, itinerary-wise, as Marlene Dietrich standing on the rail platform, face like alabaster in the night, declaring: “It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily.”

  The sure sign of a travel snob: been there, done that. The world-weary affectation, preferably in profile and white dinner jacket. It’s not till much later, the end of the line, that you realize what a wandering quest it’s been, willed or not.

  And when life brings the journey to a halt—by incapacita-tion, or the fares grown too stiff, or maybe just sheer exhaustion—it doesn’t matter whether you’re my cousin Harry or Shanghai Lily. No extra points for mileage covered or trekking the inaccessible. The bags go up in the attic, you let your passport lapse. You can actually feel the loss of motion. Then you look out the window and realize here’s your Ithaka: home at last. Cavafy again, the final stanza:

  And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.

  Wise as you will have become, so full of ex
perience,

  you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.10

  Not that I’ve come to a full stop, not quite yet. Two weeks after Canada we were on our way up the coast to Big Sur, the place I’ve returned to most, the one that never disappoints. Not fifteen minutes but days and days over the course of two decades, till I could trace every mountain slope and rocky point blindfolded. But if Canada broke the denial that AIDS could be left behind, the Big Sur trip took it further—a conscious flight from the war zone, hobbling like mad, bandages trailing like streamers. An old friend had died of AIDS the week before—and then a week after, one of my doctors. Both were diagnosed at the same time I was. We’d been on the very same tightrope without a net, like the Flying Wallendas, and now I was teetering all alone. I went to Big Sur to convalesce a failing spirit, but knowing full well it would be no cure.

  Still, the first two days were a breath of air. By dint of prosthetics—Polish stocking and garter belt—I managed the full two miles to Molera Beach, where I sat propped on a driftwood log with Winston at the mouth of the Big Sur River. Neither of us haunted by goodbyes or the last look over the shoulder. The wildness didn’t mock us or embrace us. It simply let us be. But by the third day there was business that wouldn’t wait—matters of the will, the charitable trust, the selling of the house in a mummified market. Death and Taxes. Necessary though it may have been, it left us shaken and out of sorts, squashed by details. We hiked back to Molera the next day, more somber, more distant. The landscape withholding entry into the full sublime—the hawk’s slow circle, the pound of the sea, the place where the deer lay down their bones.

  This last a sanctuary that Robinson Jeffers stumbled on while hiking one day, a dappled glade with a clear stream running through, the ground littered with rotting bones and antlers—where the old and wounded came to die.