The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

by Michael Zapata

  * * *

  On the last page of the article, there was a yellow Post-it note with Maxwell Moreau’s telephone number and an address for him in New Orleans, given to Javier by Victoria Ortiz. Through an online Mexican newspaper archive, Javier had managed to find the article and then he had tracked down the Mexican reporter. Through her he was able to speak to Victoria Ortiz, who had developed a close friendship or maybe even more than a friendship (it was hard to tell) with Maxwell Moreau since their initial meeting in the Atacama Desert and had kept in regular contact with him until he left Chile in late March 2003. After that, she told Javier on the phone, she hadn’t heard from him again until April 2004 when he sent a postcard from New Orleans.

  Saul took out his cell phone and called Maxwell Moreau’s number. After ten or eleven rings, he hung up. Then he called again, but there was no answer.

  * * *

  That same night, at 7:15 p.m., Saul left The Atlas and walked down the street to the twenty-four-hour FedEx. The FedEx employee took the newly sealed box that contained A Model Earth, but then she glanced at the mailing address and told Saul that she couldn’t send the package. He then told her that this was the second time he had been unable to mail the package and she checked the computer to see if there were any errors, but there were no errors. No packages were being sent to New Orleans or really anywhere in the Gulf Coast that day and possibly even the following day due to the approaching hurricane.

  * * *

  Later, Saul, Romário, and two awestruck guests of The Atlas watched the Weather Channel on a lobby television as a meteorologist explained that there were mandatory evacuation orders in effect in coastal Mississippi, Alabama, and large areas of southeast Louisiana, including the city of New Orleans. Saul started to say something about Maxwell Moreau, about the package he still had to deliver, but then he fell silent, as did everyone else, when the screen switched from the meteorologist to a NASA satellite image. For two or three minutes, before the guests left The Atlas and Romário changed the channel to a sitcom, they all gazed silently at the approaching hurricane, at the swirling, hypnotic winds and the hopeless vacuum of the fatally becalmed eye.

  THE LAST PIRATE OF THE NEW WORLD

  September 1930–July 1933

  On September 7th the pirate arranged a funeral for Adana Moreau, which was attended by twenty people at St. Augustine and followed by a mournful but, at times, serene dinner at the house on Melpomene Avenue.

  After his mother’s funeral, Maxwell began to wander farther and farther away from home. Sometimes, in the morning, he would start out walking toward school and end up somewhere completely different, oblivious as to how he had gotten there, like he had walked through a portal.

  In late November, he stopped going to school altogether. Other times, he wouldn’t come home for two or three days, after which his father would interrogate, scold, and then starkly warn him that white men wouldn’t heed any of his reasons, justified or not, for wandering alone. Mostly he walked, but on certain occasions he hopped a train out of Algiers rail yards. On one such occasion, the train stopped near a pier on the Mississippi River and Maxwell got off the train and sat on the pier and watched workers dismantle a ship for scrap. On another occasion, he ended up in Baton Rouge, which Maxwell thought was a strange name for a city since it meant red stick in French. He walked around the city and when he was tired he sat on a bench near a large Creole Catholic church. After some time, a Creole woman in a blue and yellow floral summer dress stopped and gave him two slices of bread and a can of mackerel. He said thank you and ate quickly as the woman watched.

  He then hopped a train on the west side of the river and got off in a small town. He roamed the town for a few hours, but found nothing of immediate interest. He then followed a dirt path, which led to a worn plantation house near a sugarcane field. The field was sparse and dry and there were a few shacks scattered among the dying crops, in addition to a handful of old army tents. Maxwell guessed that transient men lived there, and before long he saw a small group of white men come out of a shack and peer west, in unison, like meerkats looking for prey. Maxwell avoided them and walked along the perimeter of the sugarcane field until he came to a half-collapsed wooden fence. He climbed over the fence, careful not to cut himself on rusted nails, and walked down a slight hill until he found a river. Maxwell crouched down by the river and washed his face and drank from its water, which was clear and sweet. He then followed the river east for an hour or so, thinking vague and sorrowful thoughts about his mother, until he came to a house on stilts on the bed of the river. After deciding that the house was abandoned, he entered through the front door, which hung loosely from two broken hinges.

  The house was disheveled. In the front room, there were two wooden chairs, a table turned on its side, a cabinet stocked with canned food, and a fireplace filled with ash. In the back room, which smelled moldy, like a cave, he found one empty bed. The bed was narrow and hard. A kind of yellow and green weed stuck out of a crevice between the frame and the mattress. He also found a mirror on the floor. For a long time, he looked at himself in the mirror, as if looking down into a sunken lake. At first, he didn’t recognize himself. His black hair was tangled, his face thin and gaunt, his eyes vacant and wet. That’s me, he thought, but he knew it could have been anybody. He picked up the mirror to get a better look and cut his hand on the edges. He watched as six or seven drops of blood fell onto the mirror. Then he went looking all over the house for something to wrap up his bleeding hand and that was how he found Marie Brown’s The Imaginary Life of the Son of Kanada in a small closet lined with rotting magazines and books.

  Maxwell wrapped his hand in his shirt and sat near the riverbed, half-naked, with the novel. This is what he discovered: In the spring of 612 BCE, Kanada’s son is born in Prabhas Kshetra. At the age of five, his parents take him to the coast near Dwarka, where he almost drowns in the blue sea. Shortly afterward, his mother gives birth to a baby girl, who, his father tells him, is a gift of beauty and possibility. In his first act of rebellion, he refuses to admit his sister’s existence. In the years 599 BCE to 595 BCE, his father teaches him his life’s work, the Vaisheshika School of Philosophy, which proposes the idea of the paramˉanu, an indestructible and eternal particle of matter—the thing which cannot be divided up further. A paramˉanu, his father tells him, is like the smallest grain of rice or a speck of dust trapped in sunlight.

  The Son of Kanada is a good student; however, he’s much more interested in sensible matters: sword handling, the accumulation of wealth, how to seduce foreign women. At the age of eighteen, in his second act of rebellion, he renounces the Vaisheshika School of Philosophy. Then, in his final act of rebellion, and against his father’s deepest wishes, he leaves Prabhas Kshetra. He travels west through new empires, dying kingdoms. He briefly joins the remnants of a nomadic tribe, but is captured by the Babylonians and sold as a slave to a rich trader. In captivity, while crossing the Euphrates River, he watches helplessly as a yellow and black tiger hunts, kills, and devours a farmer. In a market in Babylon, he learns three modern languages and one forgotten language, taught to him by an old Theban poet with one black eye, one leg. In 590 BCE, he escapes and wanders north along the Tigris River, as if lost in the dreams of another man. While living like a street dog in the lonely ruins of the royal palace at Nineveh, he unearths twelve damaged clay tablets on which is written The Epic of Gilgamesh. The story gives him an unusual and acute joy, which he will preserve in the face of idleness and horror for the rest of his life.

  In the spring of 587 BCE, as a soldier of Babylon, he witnesses the siege and fall of Jerusalem. In the fall of 583 BCE, in a suburb of Jerusalem, he sees a total lunar eclipse and remembers his sister for the first time since leaving Prabhas Kshetra. I was wrong, he thinks with remorse. She existed and still exists and will continue to exist. She was a gift of beauty and possibility and her face is just like the red face of this moon. Some years lat
er, he starts a prosperous business as a trader on the island of Cyprus, in the Kingdom of Salamis. In 569 BCE, following the conquest of Cyprus by Amasis II, he falls in love with the widow of a Greek mercenary. Over the next ten years, he fathers three children with her, two girls and one boy, and transcribes The Epic of Gilgamesh with moderate, local success. Afterward, he donates one-third of his wealth to a public library and subscribes to various schools of philosophy in Salamis and Amathus. His efforts at philosophy are sometimes admired, sometimes held in ridicule.

  More than a few times, he dreams about a burning landscape full of towers and yellow and black tigers hunting men, men hunting each other. Still, he wakes early every morning and sees to his family, his business accounts, and his sailors who, as they unload wares, talk about women, magic, and a spring of clear water to the east which gives men immortality. In the evenings, he visits the public library and speaks with a priest who has studied in Athens and who dreams of returning one day. He reads and reads, his eyes in constant motion, like insects eating other insects.

  One morning in the fall of 550 BCE, while bedridden due to a strange feverish sickness, he glimpses a dizzying halo of dust forming over his nose and he sees in the dust irrefutable proof, as the Greek priest likes to say, of the paramˉanu. At first, he is speechless. He shivers with joy. Then, in his mother tongue, which he has not spoken since leaving his childhood home, he professes the Vaisheshika School of Philosophy. His youngest daughter overhears him and starts laughing. What are you saying, Father? she asks. With great effort and happiness, he calls her over and explains to her the thing which cannot be divided up further. Hours later he dies, but he doesn’t know that he has died or that many years later nothing will remain of his life except a book written by his youngest daughter.

  Maxwell read The Imaginary Life of the Son of Kanada from beginning to end in one sitting, sometimes aloud, sometimes laughing or yelling at the top of his lungs. When he finished, some long hours later, he dove into the river and swam to its silent depths, and if he hadn’t remembered to go back to the surface to breathe he would have stayed there forever, contemplating, like the Son of Kanada, the little green rocks and the black water with little paramˉanu-like particles of black mud, and planning his escape from New Orleans.

  * * *

  Later, at dusk, as he walked back through the dying sugarcane field with the book under his arm, Maxwell thought about how satisfying it would be to get home and sit with his mother at the kitchen table and tell her all about The Imaginary Life of the Son of Kanada, but then he remembered this was impossible.

  * * *

  On no few occasions, the pirate went looking for his son. The old mad pirate was convinced that the boy had a wandering disease, much like the mourning Sumerian gods or the 3rd century Chinese poet Pan Yue, who, the old mad pirate explained to the boy’s father one night at the kitchen table, paced to and fro amidst the graves and tombs.

  “He misses his mother is all,” the pirate said and looked down at his knuckles.

  Then the pirate asked the old mad pirate how he had survived the death of his son.

  At first, the old mad pirate didn’t say anything, but then he exploded into a fit of laughter, slamming his fists against the table so that it shook like a small earthquake, nearly coming to tears. Then he told the pirate that he hadn’t survived the death of his son. He said nobody ever survived grief. Then he said a few strange things about grief. He said that grief was an immortal samurai endlessly stabbing himself in the abdomen. He said grief was a sea-green forest in France. He said grief was Odysseus’ dog, Argos, waiting for his master to return, lying in a pile of shit.

  * * *

  One morning in March, the pirate and his son rose before dawn and drove to Lake Pontchartrain. At the shore they noticed a group of fishermen who were gazing into the sky as a small flock of gray herons were flying north, like a squadron of planes, maybe toward Mandeville; some of the fishermen pointed with their poles, then drew signs or letters in the air with their poles, communicating, imagined Maxwell, with the gray herons. Where are the fish? they asked. Why the hell should we tell you? replied the birds, Look how far you’ve already come on this planet. A logy heat moved sluggishly over the lake, but otherwise the water was still. The pirate and his son walked in silence together along the shore.

  “I have to leave to find work, mijo,” the pirate said finally.

  For a few seconds, Maxwell was silent. Then he said, “So, take me with you.”

  “I can’t,” said the pirate.

  “Why not?” he pleaded. “I’ve been to Baton Rouge, and farther than that, too.”

  “There’s no work for you out there,” said the pirate.

  In the distance, the fishermen pushed off into the water, their nets and tackle boxes slung up in the boat. As they walked, Maxwell lifted his gaze, and what he saw suggested the unknown world that existed beyond the city and the lake, beyond the marshes and the sand-colored horizon, a world inexplicably turned outward, a world with borders on the brink of conversion, erasure, and violence. Maxwell felt as if he could cry, but he didn’t want to in front of his father. At some point, the pirate drudged up a few bills from his pocket and gave them to his son. Maxwell shook his head and said he didn’t need the money.

  “Keep it, mijo,” said the pirate, “you have to take care of yourself now.”

  Maxwell nodded and put the bills into his back pocket.

  On their way home, they stopped by the cemetery where Adana Moreau had been laid to rest. They stood in front of her small plaster and brick tomb, where, surprisingly, someone had laid fresh yellow roses, in all likelihood an admirer of Lost City, possibly even Afraa. The pirate and his son were vaguely embarrassed, but also glad someone else had thought of her. For fifteen or maybe twenty minutes, they stood there in a silence fraught with memories of the Dominicana and questions about the boy’s future that not even the insects of the cemetery could disturb.

  * * *

  So, in the spring of 1931, the pirate left New Orleans and Maxwell went looking for a job. At first, he walked around the Barracks Street Wharf, where he hoped he could get a job on a fishing boat, but a skipper who smelled like sweat and clay told him that there were no jobs and then chased Maxwell away with a fisherman knife when he asked again. On Dryades Street, he found a run-down YMCA where a group of stone-faced middle-aged women told him the best they could do was feed him, after which they handed him bread and a bowl of tomato soup. In the French Quarter, he ran into a group of older boys, who were all immigrant and first-generation Sicilians but who had taken on the air of Americans, an air of baseball games, gangsters in tight suits, and early risers, older boys who, thought Maxwell, dreamed of newspaper empires and leather suitcases stuffed with green cash. They took one obstinate look at him and told him “good luck and fuck off,” and in that order, because even luck, they explained to Maxwell, was something that eventually ran out.

  * * *

  A few days later, after some careful pleading on Maxwell’s part, the old mad pirate found him a job at a speakeasy called the Three Junipers on the chaotic corner of South Rampart Street and Perdido Street. The speakeasy’s owner, Salvatore, was an ex-sailor who had dark tattoos running along his arms and neck and who had served in the Great War on an L-class submarine, which, according to the old mad pirate, had basically done shit-to-shit and had been ordered to wander the deep waters of the Skagerrak Strait looking for an enemy that never materialized. In short, Maxwell was hired because Salvatore owed the old mad pirate a favor.

  “The most valuable thing in the world,” the old mad pirate explained to Maxwell, “is a favor. Better than cash or gold.”

  In the mornings, after breakfast with the old mad pirate, Maxwell went to the library to search for other books by Marie Brown (there were none) or sit at a long, crowded table to read The Great Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Physics, which, to his irritation, d
idn’t include any entries on Kanada, but did, to his utter and happy astonishment, include entries on Hypatia, Ibn al-Haytham, Kepler, Einstein, and Schrödinger. Afterward he worked ten-hour shifts at the Three Junipers, dusting, mopping, and helping weathered men unload boxes and barrels of whiskey, gin, and sacramental wine. As they worked, the men talked about types of swamp birds, films, “Blonde Bombshell” Jean Harlow, Marlene Dietrich as Lola-Lola, mistresses, detectives who moonlighted as whores and whores who daylighted as detectives, the failure of politics, the brutal events taking place in Berlin, murder, illusions, work, and waiting for the vague, dense redemption of work. Sometimes, they told Maxwell that a mixed black boy like him was lucky to have a job, even if it earned a pittance, an opinion the young introspective Maxwell listened to, his sweaty hands on a barrel, without saying a word. Still, on some nights after finishing a particularly grueling job, one of the men, usually a younger Creole man but sometimes an older black man who said his name like his father, called Maxwell over and slid a dirty coin into his palm.

  * * *

  Sometimes, his shifts at the Three Junipers coincided with one of the illicit meetings Salvatore kept throughout the neighborhood in order to keep his speakeasy running smoothly, and then he would ask Maxwell to watch over the place for a few hours, almost always without advanced notice. The only advice Salvatore ever gave Maxwell about running the speakeasy was this: regulars come here for two reasons: a good drink and a silent listener.