by Calvin Baker
“Anything else I should know?” I asked sarcastically.
“That is all of it, except there is worse falling in this world than yours, so don’t privilege your own. Heaven has always and ever belonged to the blasphemous, who stray and somehow find their way again. Even the Buddhas have to pass through that, and only a fool would think to escape it. Embrace it, until you are done falling. After that fall no more, my friend.”
It was well-intentioned advice, however the sadness I felt was not repentance for doing something wrong, rather it was exactly for the freedom he spoke of. The terrific burden of knowing the heart was the only god of right action, and like any god it divined but did not discriminate, meaning if I gave up my rules I had no way of knowing where I would be led. Because my heart did not trust how radiant it was.
All I did know was what I thought I knew before no longer seemed true. I had no more earthly idea what I was doing.
BOOK III
21
On my return to New York I swore off meat, alcohol, tobacco, and sex in a fit of remorse. But nothing I did put me at rest, or made me feel any better. I even went to see Dr. Glass, but talking about my dreams seemed like a waste of time. My parents I had little to say about. My father because we had barely spoken to each other for as long as I could remember before he died. My mother I had no memory of at all.
I realized it had been more than a year since I had seen my Aunt Isadora, and went for a visit, hoping it might make me feel more grounded. But afterward, when I returned to my apartment, I was met by the same gloom. I realized then there was no need for me to be there. If I was ungrounded, I was also unbound and could do whatever I pleased.
The rhythm of life and sense of possibility in the south attracted me, so when my friend Drew suggested I spend some time down in Farodoro, I decided to make an extended stay of it.
In addition to Drew, it turned out I knew several others in the city. When I settled into my rented apartment, in fact, I soon realized the country was festering with expatriates. Some were there for the exchange rate, others for business; several claimed to be helping the world; but in reality all were taking advantage of the special status those from rich countries received in poor countries, unaware of the hidden cost they paid for the illusion by which the middling was called large, and the large declared great.
The only thing less sufferable were those intelligent enough to be aware of it, yet still happy for their different deals, because without that they would be what they were at home: industrious but second best, or talented but lazy. The natives did not complain. They accepted it as the way the world spins.
Yet nothing could mask the fact it was a place for the lost. Those who had let go the thread of their way, uncertain where they should be headed; what path had brought them here; whether they had it within themselves to push forward again; and, for the worst cases, whether forward was a virtue at all.
The things they saw and told themselves were shared delusions, referring to nothing but the world in front of their eyes; their own egos and insular experiences, subject to no other standard but what they themselves knew. These mirages displacing reality were tokens of the things they sought, but never possessed, which pulled them in ever deeper—not into that country, which they never saw—but into their own fantasies, and delusions of their place in the world, so that reality was left ever further behind.
For the permanently lost among them, those who had no meaningful place in that world, and no place in the one they had left, it was where they ended up when the illusion they nursed—that purpose could be instilled from without—finally ran aground. Here they would idle indefinitely.
For those for whom it was a temporary station, there would be a day of reckoning and quiet reproach as they grasped how ill-conceived the venture had been from the start, like pictures from an awkward age or a drunken vacation of which you wish every copy destroyed. They would blame their misfortune on youth, on others, on the country itself, and move to the next station with fanciful tales, painted exotic and glamorous. The past would then become more meaningful than the present. There in the past they had tried to be somebody, had dared something, and that shining fantasy shielded them from the brutality of the present in which they were only ordinary, and not special as they had been misled into believing. In the mind of the lost it is always the world that is upside down.
There were enough stepped-on dreams to bust your own, and they wore them on their sleeves. If I judged them harshly it is because I feared with every inch of my fiber becoming as lost and directionless as they were. Maybe they were right and direction did not matter. How easy it would be to stay there at the bottom of the world. I ran from that scene as fast as I could.
“He’s blond,” one of the guests, a spook I knew from D.C., with diplomatic cover at the embassy, said excitedly of his son who had been born in the country. “Here it means he can be president.”
I met the boy on a later occasion; he was a bright boy, and around other bright children might be shaped into something fine. In the ambiently corrupt hothouse of special deals and special pleading they were setting him up to be something less. Not only were they mediocre, they trained their children to be as well.
“You know the gentleman,” another guest, a local, asked after I left the conversation.
“He is an acquaintance.”
“How does he have so high a position in the State Department?”
“He works hard. He is pleasant to people, dependable, does not bellyache or wet the bed, and plays the game they give him. That beats most people.”
“Yes, but don’t they know he’s an idiot with no idea what is going on here?”
“Yes, of course, they know he’s an idiot. That’s why they sent him somewhere he can do no harm.”
“You know, they say he works for the CIA.”
“I had not heard.”
He smiled at me knowingly. “You are a friend of Drew’s?”
“Yes. You know her husband, Diego?”
“Since we were tadpoles, this high.” He held his hand a foot from the floor. “How do you find the country?”
“What I’ve seen I enjoy.”
“If you truly wish to know a country and her people you must know the land. Our villages in the Islas del Lemuel are especially pleasant this time of year. Tell Diego if you decide to go. I will have my uncle and aunt show you around. It is the perfect place to rest and relax.”
It was high summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and the locals had all decamped to the coast and highlands, and after a few more days in the city I decided to follow their example.
Drew and Diego helped me arrange a house on an island up river, which promised good air and the peace of the water. I booked passage out of the city by train, and Farodoro was barely a memory by the time the ferry buzzed to a floating halt next to a dock in late afternoon, as the passengers scampered ashore before the gap between the boat and jetty grew too wide. If this happened, the pilot would go out into the river and back up to the landing stage again, yelling all the while at whoever was responsible, as the other passengers, who were forced into this time-stealing routine every time a greenhorn left the launch, regarded the new arrival with righteous annoyance for keeping them from their holidays and barbecues and sport and friendships and lovemaking.
Mornings I went swimming off the jetty behind my rented cottage. There was also a rowboat for my use that I liked to take out on the river, to fish at high tide. My second day there, though, the tropical rains came and the river overwhelmed its banks. I took the precaution of bringing the boat in from the dock, to tie it up in the yard before the storm, and set out early the next morning to row around the island. Besides mine there were only three other houses, all weekenders and empty, and I was alone that gray, watery morning with no idea or care for what would happen to me when I went back to New York. I was a free man in a free country, my own life in my own hands, and I was content with how simple and beautiful life could be, th
e way certain mornings make you want to live forever.
When the high water receded I discovered a trail that circled the inner perimeter of the island, which made for good exercise and nature-seeing whenever I was in a less amphibious mood.
I kept more or less to this routine, until I was told after the storm, by Doña Iñes, the woman who kept the market on a neighboring island, to be careful because someone had spotted a jaguar on one of the islands. They were native to the area, but no one had seen one in years. Whether it was a rumor or the truth, her warning had the opposite effect. My curiosity overrode my fear, and the possibility of spying such an elusive animal on its own terms made me add evening walks to the morning ones I already enjoyed, hoping to catch a glimpse.
I never saw the jaguar, only the woodpeckers and herons singing their Magellanic morning song, and sometimes a Pampas cat or two in the feral loneliness of dusk.
After my second weekend the other houses all closed down for the season, their inhabitants returning permanently to the city from the winter holiday, leaving me with the entire island to myself, which pleased me fine. I had brought books, and there was also an athletic club and bar on a neighboring island, which I would row to on those evenings when isolation overcame me and I required company. But mostly I swam and fished and enjoyed the watery sunsets and walked the land, trying to tame the hollering tempest within.
In the middle of my fourth week I made a trip to the main island to get supplies. I was back home, still in the kitchen after putting away my groceries, and reading to myself aloud from a book I had been trying to get through since college—watery consciousness, dirty language, fall from grace, a writer’s journey, a wife’s journey, golden bonds, a rock a tree a river circle and alchemy of life—when I saw a silhouette out beyond the screen door.
“May I help you?” I asked.
“Señor Roland?” A woman’s voice called.
“Yes,” I answered in Spanish. “How do you do?”
“We are friends of Diego’s family who live at the other side of the island. We saw your lights, and called the owners who told us you were still here. I’m Mrs. Saavardra and wanted to invite you to our place for an asador.”
“That’s kind of you, Señora.”
“Any night you wish, just come by. We usually take dinner around nine o’clock.”
“That’s very good of you.”
“This weekend we will have visitors from the city, so perhaps you might like to come by then. It should be a marvelous time.”
“Thank you,” I said. Señora Saavardra set back out for her side of the island, as I tried to decide whether she only meant to be good mannered, or was being busy, or whether it was the local custom and I was obliged to go. I thought to call Drew in the city to ask, but decided in the end I could not be obliged to do anything. I was there to be with the reality within myself. I no longer cared about how I was expected to behave, or what I was obliged to do, but simply where I was and how I would be with myself.
22
The local market was poorly stocked and I had taken the rowboat downriver toward the sea to try and earn my supper. By the time the sun began setting over the brackish water I still had not had any luck, and was dreading another meal of rice and lentils as I rowed back upstream.
When I reached the island the Friday ferry was docking at the little pier, and I bobbed in its wake while the passengers from the city came ashore. It was a bank holiday in Farodoro, and the residents of the other houses had returned for the long weekend, waking the island again with the buzz of laughter and activity. As I tied my boat and came ashore I saw everyone had left the dock except a woman sitting on top of her luggage with her back to me, looking around for her host.
I was so used to spending my time alone by then it did not occur to me to help her, and I walked away absent-mindedly, until I saw another resident stop and offer her directions and help with the bags. Her host, a white-haired gentleman in late middle age, had arrived by then, though, and they embraced familiarly before starting out for the other side of the island.
When she stood I saw clearly how striking she was, and the flash of beauty reminded me of what vanishes, time past and what was in it; and in the embrace I saw what remains, also time and what is in it now, and what might be in the fullness of the future for those with courage to seize and hold fast. I realized how much road was ahead of me still, and it was then I was stirred to go to the Saavardra’s party and no longer simply shut myself away.
The island was crisp from a breeze blowing in from sea, and the evening light the color of old cognac as I walked through the forested interior to their place. The lights from all the other houses were aflame, and every so often the sound of merriment was on the air. Other than that it was only the cerulean sky above.
The Saavardra spread was built facing the water, with a high, formal gate that led up a path on the island side through the landscaped grounds. It was overgrown with vegetation, blending so discreetly with the surroundings that I had not noticed it on my wanderings. There were two outer buildings immediately inside the gate, between them the blood-red clay of a tennis court, and then a wide expanse of manicured green lawn, still sodden from the last rain. There was no buzzer or knocker on the front door, and I rapped my knuckles against the hardwood, listening as it echoed inside the house.
“Buenos tardes, Señor Roland. Bienvenido,” Mrs. Saavardra greeted me. “You are just in time for drinks.”
She walked me through a set of pleasant rooms, grand in proportion but comfortably furnished in a way that attested to freedom from care. Out on the veranda at the front of the house, Mr. Saavardra sat alone smoking a cigar, listening to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata playing softly, and watching the birds flock in the diminishing light to nest.
“How good to finally meet you,” he said convivially.
“Thank you for the invitation,” I replied. “I hope I am not too early.”
“No. I am always happy whenever we have guests. You see, this house was my wife’s idea, and it is always lonely for me here.” He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “I detest nature.”
He was in his early seventies, with a dignified, easy manner which I liked immediately. “Why did you build the house, if you do not enjoy it?” I asked.
“Because my wife told me to,” he sighed, pouring two glasses of chilled red wine, and handing me one. “Men who want peace do ninety percent of what their wives ask them. The secret to happiness, of course, is finding a woman who wants from you mostly what you want from yourself.”
“And the other ten percent?”
“Five percent is eternal mystery,” he said. “The other five percent depends on the type of man you are.”
We drank our wine, which was good, and I complimented him on it.
“My father and uncles used to make this wine,” he told me, not without pride. “Now my cousins make it. The wine is the same. Only the people change.”
He freshened our glasses and we went down the veranda to the front lawn, where there was a pitch of dry sand and bocce balls, which we picked up and started playing.
“You are a journalist?”
“I was,” I said. “That part of life is behind me.”
“It is good for young men these days to have more than one career,” he nodded. “There is so much to be curious about. You are in your prime, and so you must embrace all of it. Young men should want to change the world. Old men need it to stay the same.”
“I try as best I can.”
“Don’t try, caballero. Do. You are in your prime, and master of your horse. You know its power, it knows the power of the rider, so will finally go wherever you instruct. Jump as you command. In five years more, if you have not already, you will have taught your horse to somersault and fly. Five years from there you will no longer need the horse.”
“What business are you in, Señor Saavardra?”
“My grandfather poured his life into a piece of land in a desolate part of the
south. My father hired men to work the same land for him. Now my brothers manage a company exporting what comes from that land. When I turned seventeen I knew I did not want anything to do with the dirt. I left for university, and later joined a bank, where I spent the next forty years of my life buying and selling companies that farmed and mined the land.”
“Fate. Was it a good business for you?”
“It was not bad. I have no complaints. I married young, though, and now our children are all abroad and my wife somewhere made her own life, so now I am just another old man who does not know what to do with the days.”
“You did not have things you wished to do in your retirement?”
“No, that is a problem, you see. In my family the men all died young, and I never considered the idea of retirement. I know now that eventually I must end up back on the land.”
He had lived in Boston as a student, and when I asked if he enjoyed his time there he frowned faintly. “Yes. It was a very pleasant city,” he answered diplomatically. “Beautiful, clean. The people were a little racist, but what can you do? That was when I was there, of course. I do not know how fast such things change. Always they hear an accent and think certain things about you, and you are not supposed to notice, and if you say something they will deny it. Or they see that you have some money, and then you are a man, or only another dollar. They wish to do business, but it is a sullied affair by then and they do not even know it, so you must decide if it is worth it. Whether you will exercise your indifference, or decide to demonstrate the superiority of your discipline, or else show them the magnificence of your heart.”