I checked in and took a table for dinner, which overlooked a fast-running river and, downstream, an abandoned mill, whose facade was illuminated like a movie set by a bank of lights. From where I sat, you could hear the water sluicing over the dam. I treated myself to an overpriced Pinot Noir, Oak Knoll ’92, and just the expectation of its arrival cheered me up. After a glass and a bit the fireflies came out. The candle flames wavered like caramel. The dining room seemed warmer, the people pleasant and animated.
Near eleven I repaired to my room. I was a little wobbly from the wine and a heated cognac, and for a while I sat on my bed, looking, I’m afraid, like Jack Nicholson near the end of The Shining. But in truth I was trying to explain to myself, to track down the reasons for that bout of sadness that had struck me so poignantly in the parking lot. And after a while I recalled an event that had happened near the beginning of my career. I had gone to Budapest to give a lecture on the fraudulent French poet Lautréamont, an authentic no-talent who, for some bewildering reason, had come into fashion in the sixties. (Of that suicidal bunch only Arthur Rimbaud was the real item.) It was a very prestigious invitation, or so I had persuaded myself at the time. (In the world of academia, when you describe your colleagues as brilliant and an occasion as prestigious, you are inevitably talking about yourself and where you belong.) De toute façon, an hour before I was scheduled to take the podium, I found myself wandering in the old quarter of the city. Everything was decaying, parapets, churches; the narrow lanes mouldy and wet. I saw a child pulling a wagon over the cobblestones, his face a dark, unsmiling tulip, and suddenly I was steeped in sadness. Memories from my childhood illuminated themselves like small films: a flag drooping on a schoolyard pole, a girl in a square dress running across the kindergarten playground, a fat man oiling my tricycle. Other memories crowded in.
I walked and walked and saw nothing of old Budapest. What is wrong with me, I wondered, why am I so sad? Finally, staring sightlessly into the window of a second-hand bookstore, I realized what it was: I was scared. Scared that my lecture might fall on unsympathetic ears, that my audience might find in it confirmation of what I already knew, that I was second-rate.
Sitting motionless in my hotel room thirty-odd years later, the river running by the old mill, I realized I had fallen into that familiar pond again. I was frightened.
Still, it was time to go.
I roused myself and went down the back stairs, out the side door, and circled the magnificent hotel, avoiding its floodlights until I found my car. I drove back to the city in silence.
I parked ten blocks from my house. No one was about. It was a humid night, the air, especially after the country, clammy and dead. I cut through a back lane of rundown garages and unlocked a wooden door that led into my backyard, crossed the damp grass quickly and sought cover in the lilac bushes near my kitchen window. I opened the plastic grocery bag. I could smell the tenderizer. I eased my hand in and removed a baseball-sized patty.
A light went on in an upstairs window. I withdrew deeper into the bushes. A woman looked out over the yard. From the desk lamp beneath her you could see she had red, almost electrified hair. I hadn’t expected a woman. She was talking to someone in the room, smiling and looking over her shoulder. Then the other person stepped into the frame. With blonde hair and a sharp nose she reminded me of Emma, the way she held herself, the slightly rounded shoulders, the head jutted a bit forward. The desk lamp went out; the backyard fell back into darkness.
I waited five minutes, maybe longer, then lobbed the patty into the yard. Then a second one. I returned quickly to the car, wiping my hands on a rag in the trunk. I should have worn gloves. All the way back I could smell the hamburger on my hands. I couldn’t help sniffing my fingers to see if it was still there.
Back in my hotel room it was three in the morning. A bird chirped nearby. I poured myself a cognac from the mini-bar, opened the windows, lay on the bedspread and stared out at the starry night, my glass on my chest. The river raced downstream. At daylight I could still smell my hands.
C H A P T E R 6
I’ve always thought I was going to die in a plane crash, but a kind of beguiling calm overtook me this time as the wheels lifted from the tarmac and we arced sickeningly upwards. I saw my life as something falling away from me like the earth below and I thought, yes, maybe now’s not such a bad time to go. I looked around the cabin and wondered if people about to die in a plane crash look different from regular passengers. I looked for a pallor, a horror, an animalism. But it wasn’t there. It was a cheerful crowd, secretaries and their rat-tailed boyfriends all tired, all mildly anxious, just like me.
I ordered a Bloody Mary. I dumped in the whole ounce of vodka, gave it a stir and took a sip. It was strong and made me shudder with disgust. But I persevered, and by midway through the drink I felt something loosen in my shoulders, something kick free in my head, as if a rope had been cut and the boat had drifted out into the stream. But travel is a terrible aphrodisiac, all that worry, the bouncing about, whatever, and before too long I caught sight of a skinny, flat-chested young woman sitting on the aisle a row up from me. I don’t quite know how to put this intelligently, but there was a kind of chipmunk cuteness about her that quite hypnotized me. She was travelling with her husband and she half slumbered on his shoulder while he read a magazine. He looked like a pleasant chap, really, with a small, handsome head and bright eyes. He turned around at one point and I dropped my glance so violently I startled the woman next to me.
But I couldn’t keep my eyes off her, as if, by staring long enough and hard enough, I could somehow neutralize her terrible power. I imagined the most graphic images of her body. I wanted to devour her naked feet. By the time the plane landed, my hands were shaking and I felt such a sense of urgency, panic even, that I broke the line and stepped over the rope barrier to buy a package of cigarettes in the airport bar. After a few puffs I could feel myself grow calmer, dreamier, as the tobacco stole into my blood. I took a deep breath and looked around. I couldn’t see her anywhere. I felt a dull stirring of relief, as if I had just gotten out of trouble or solved a problem.
I cleared Customs and walked across the tarmac to the bus, the jungle screaming green, the birds screeching, everything hollering hurry up, hurry up. It took a couple of hours to get to the hotel, but it seemed interminable, a life chapter almost, the scorching highway, the compulsory rainfall (how depressing the tropics are under a cloudy sky), the exquisite sunset and so on. I hurried to the front of the check-in line, stepping over golf bags and expensive suitcases. I may even have elbowed a grandmother out of the way, but I wanted to get to my room, and quickly. That’s the great illusion of travel, of course, the notion that there’s somewhere to get to. A place where you can finally say, Ah, I’ve arrived. (Of course there is no such place. There’s only a succession of waitings until you go home.)
I threw my bag and my feather pillow (I always travel with my own pillow, it tricks my body into thinking I’m at home) onto the bed, turned on the air conditioner, ignored the damp smell in the room and hurried down to the bar.
It was an outdoor patio. Cicadas shrieked in the moist foliage, tourists moved in worried clumps. The heat was terrible. I pried myself between two red-faced Brits. I ordered a beer and tried to light a cigarette, but my fingers gummed up the paper and it shredded. I lit another. I took an enormous drag, smoke funnelled into my lungs and a kind of nausea filled my whole being. Everything went flat and grey. Turning my back to the crowd, I stepped away from the bar and retched. My eyes watered. I stepped discreetly behind a tree and threw up in the bushes. Welcome to the Caribbean.
I went back to my room, thought perhaps I’d wait until the nicotine lifted and then give the evening another shot. But I didn’t like the way my room smelt; it was musty or something. I sneezed, then sneezed again. I looked at myself in the mirror. My face was bright red. I opened the doors and turned off the light and got into bed and tried to sleep. I imagined a particularly intimate act
with the flat-chested girl on the plane. That often does the trick, but I was too itchy, especially the soles of my feet. I scratched one foot with the other, to no avail. It was as if there were sand fleas under the sheet. Or ticks maybe. I got up and shut the window. Perhaps they were coming in off the beach. I got back into bed. For a second my feet stopped itching and I lay in peace, but then there was a bang right below me and the sound of grinding metal. I opened the French doors and looked down. On the floor below me, the second floor, I saw a light spread out on the sand. The clanking and banging continued. It was an air conditioner, a faulty air conditioner. It clanked and rattled all night. I could get hardly any sleep.
In the morning I complained to the concierge. He offered to move me but couldn’t; there were no spare rooms, only villas at the far end of the property. But they were two hundred U.S. a night. I went down to the pool and read and stared about and saw, to my horror, the girl from the plane walk across the hot patio and sit in a lounge chair right in front of me. Her husband followed soon after. I moved my chair to face the ocean, but I couldn’t stop looking at her. She wore a sleeveless white T-shirt, and I knew that in a second she was going to do something that would make me feel quite ill. And it did.
Settling in her chair, pointing it this way and then that, she put her hands behind her head and closed her eyes. But then, with a sudden gesture, as if startled, she sat up and ripped off her T-shirt. It was one of those awful places where women don’t wear tops. Christ, the stress of it! My pale, skinny friend sat forward in her deck chair and began to cover herself, her small breasts, under her arms, her neck, her thighs with suntan lotion while her husband flipped through what appeared to be a copy of The Economist. Really, I thought, if he were half a man he would take her upstairs … well, never mind. After a while I got up and staggered a few steps (the sun had zonked me), pretending to go to the bar but really so I could see her up close. A trickle of sweat ran down her rib cage onto her stomach. I went straight back to my room, bringing with me a tube of coconut oil, a product that I can’t smell to this day without experiencing a kind of erotic dread.
I took the hotel bus into town after lunch, bought the usual junk, even explored a local hardware store, hammers, ladders. I felt as if I were looking for something, but I didn’t have a clue what. And then suddenly I was sleepy, so sleepy I couldn’t wait for the bus but took a taxi back to the hotel and stumbled to my room.
I collapsed on my bed. I turned the air conditioner on full blast. I read Georges Simenon for a few minutes, then rolled over and scrunched down in the cool air. I closed my eyes. I thought about this and that, but gradually I began to notice a strange smell issuing from my pillow. Still, I was happy and comfy and sailing downwards when the clanking began. I could feel myself waking up. I yanked open the French doors and looked down. Sure enough the air conditioner on the floor below had started up again. I looked to my right and left: there were rows upon rows of air conditioners, all humming and dripping in a quiet, civilized manner. How perfect that the only person in the hotel who truly needed his rest (that business with the dogs had put quite the strain on my system) was the only person who was going to be deprived of rest. I lay on my bed listening for a while longer, but then, in a spasm of anger, I leapt up with a curse, thrust myself into a pair of shorts—Lord, I was putting on weight!—and went outside into the blinding sunlight.
The tiles were scorching hot, so I walked very briskly to the ground floor and hotfooted it around back of the hotel, making my way over the stinging grass until I spotted my red bath towel hanging on a balcony. And there, below it, was the offending air conditioner. It seemed a rather beat-up thing, missing teeth in the protective grate while inside the blade whirred and clanked. I looked for an outside wire to cut. Nothing. I daydreamed about throwing a ski pole into the works, but where might I find a ski pole in this climate? I approached the wall. Even if I climbed onto the balcony railing of the first-floor room (which might well get me shot as a thief), I still couldn’t reach the machine.
It was a puzzler, and I came back to my room to think about it. It seemed unsolvable. Finally, near dinnertime, soaked in sweat, my face red as a beet, I knocked on the door of the room below. A blond man, very tanned, answered. He was wearing one of those disgusting thong bathing suits. I could see his mahogany brown wife in the background.
“Excuse me,” I said. I introduced myself, shook hands and explained about the air conditioner, about the racket it was causing.
He squinted at me. “But vee must have zee cold air.”
Yes, well, that’s true, I said with a laugh, an indulgent laugh, but you see it’s ruining my holiday because I can’t sleep. He called his mate over, meaty brown legs, also in a thong, her sandals making a sucking noise on the tiles. He said something to her in German. She replied with a wide-eyed shrug.
“Vee must have zee cold air,” he repeated sorrowfully.
I thanked them. Germans never understand diplomacy, the Baader-Meinhof kids got that right, and I went back to my room. For a while I lay there, staring at the ceiling. Then, hearing a swish, I got up and looked for the source of the noise. Someone had slipped a handbill under my door. There, in five languages, was an announcement, a cabaret in the dining room tonight, all guests invited. Of course I wouldn’t be able to go, I’d be too exhausted. I sat on the side of my bed and thought some rather lugubrious thoughts, clank, clank in the background. Then suddenly it stopped. The Krauts had left their room.
I nipped out on the front balcony and looked over. Yes, there they were, clip-clopping to the bar for an early drink. I looked at my watch. Seven o’clock. You’ve given them fair warning, I thought, that’s all one can expect in this life. Fair warning. I put on a shirt and my moneybelt and went down to the lobby and flagged a taxi. He drove me into town, ten miles. I knew he was going to overcharge me, but I saw it all now as a necessary expense. Arriving in the main street, I had him drop me off at the hardware store, open till eight, thank you, and asked him to please wait while I shopped. I bought a large plastic tube of wood glue—it was right by the front door, a good omen—and a small portable ladder I’d seen that afternoon. Fifty dollars U.S. for both. Still cheaper than moving hotels. I threw the ladder into the trunk of the car (held down by a hunk of wire) and returned to the hotel.
After dark you could hear the excitement on the other side of the hotel, the guests milling about for the cabaret, perfumed and expensively dressed. Just before the first song went up, “Cabaret” (how perfect), the Krauts left their room downstairs. The light clicked off; the air conditioner stopped. I waited ten minutes, just to be sure they hadn’t forgotten something, cock ring or nipple pincers, whatever, and then, taking my ladder, I hurried down to the ground floor and around to the back of the hotel, located my red towel and leaned the ladder against the wall. I measured the distance with my eye. It was perfect. The last step allowed me to reach the bottom of the air conditioner. Then, very quickly (time was short), I ran full speed back to my room. I pulled a pair of black dress socks from my suitcase, unfolded them over a day-old copy of The New York Times and soaked them in yellow glue.
I hurried back down to my ladder, sock in one hand, and climbed upwards. First things first. When I got to the top of the ladder, I placed my driver’s licence on the top of the air conditioner. That way, if spotted, I could claim to have borrowed a house ladder to retrieve my driver’s licence, which had fluttered out of my hand on the upstairs balcony and landed, lo and behold, on the top of their air conditioner. Then, parting the broken teeth, I stuffed the glue-soaked sock into the heart of the machine and wrapped it around the propeller. By now I was so excited I could feel the ladder shaking under me. I hurried back down, clank, clank, clank, scooped up the ladder, forgot my licence, put the ladder back, raced up the rungs, got my licence, and then brought the whole works back upstairs to my room. The whole business had taken less than three minutes.
I had a shower, ambled over to the cabaret. I didn’t sit nea
r the Germans but over at the side by myself. I may have had a bit too much to drink that night, because I can’t quite remember leaving the patio. But I seemed to sober up as I climbed the stairs to my room. I came down the hall; I opened the door with an unsteady hand; I listened. Silence. I passed through the dark room and pushed open the doors. I heard the ocean, the wind, but nothing else. They weren’t home yet. I lay on the bed and fell into a deep sleep.
Sometime later, near two in the morning, I heard a commotion downstairs and the outside light went on. I got up quietly and tiptoed over in the dark. There was a click, then another click. Then the sound of confused German. They were trying the air conditioner. Click, click, then silence. Then more clicks, then more German. Finally I crawled back into bed. I think I even laughed into the pillow so they couldn’t hear.
Near three I woke up. I was itching like mad. I took a table fork and scratched the bottoms of my feet; they were on fire. I scratched and scratched. Then my scalp went off, then a patch on my back that I could only reach with my hairbrush. My pillow smelt funny. There must have been some kind of fungus in my room, a tropical fungus I was allergic to.
Sparrow Nights (v5) (epub) Page 5