Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

by Tom Robbins

  So exhausted was he by the strenuous workout that he fell asleep after reading less than a page of Finnegans Wake. When he finally awoke, it was dark. His dinner tray had been left on the bedside stool, and alongside the cornucopiate pita sandwich, there was a large glass of red wine (tea, eat your heart out!) and a sprig of orange blossoms.

  He wouldn’t see Domino until morning, but when morning finally came (he had read most of the night), he seemed so hale and fit (the workout had paid a dividend) that she proposed a tour of the oasis. For the next hour, she pushed his chair around the grounds.

  Against the thick mud walls of the various buildings, yellow roses bloomed, and in the willows that surrounded the large spring that was the centerpiece and lifeblood of the compound, cuckoos sang. Irrigation troughs funneled water from the spring to gardens dense with tomatoes, cucumbers, chickpeas, and eggplants. In groves scattered throughout the oasis, there were trees that each in its own season bore figs, almonds, oranges, pomegranates, walnuts, dates, and lemons. Chickens scratched beneath jasmine bushes, as if doing a kind of archaic arithmetic; a solitary donkey swished its tail with such regular cadence that it might have been a pendulum for keeping the time of the world; and a few runty black goats bleated and chewed, bleated and chewed, in a manner that suggested they were eating their own voices. A great peace and a floral fragrance hovered about the place: it probably was at least a low-rent approximation of Eden.

  “The Syrian government doesn’t object to your being here?” Switters asked, recalling that no country on earth with the possible exception of Israel had experienced historically as many religious massacres as Syria.

  “Au contraire. Damascus loves us. It can point to our token convent as an example of its tolerance and diversity. We’re good, how do you say, PR for Syria. Damascus likes us better than Rome does.”

  Outside the arched and latticed doorway that led into the dining hall, Domino formally introduced him to each of the sisters. Each, that is, except for the one he most desired to meet. They ranged from Maria Une—the oldest, save for the elusive Masked Beauty—to Fannie, the youngest at thirty-four, and the most overtly friendly. In between, there was Maria Deux, taciturn and pinch-faced; ZuZu, who resembled the wine-jolly hostess of a TV cooking show; frizzy, foxy-eyed Bob, who might have been Einstein’s twin sister; Pippi, who was cinnamon-haired, heavily freckled, and wore a carpenter’s belt; and Mustang Sally, petite, plantain-nosed, and festooned with the kind of spit curls that hadn’t been seen on a Frenchwoman since BrassaÏ photographed Paris’s backstreet bar girls in the 1930s. In their identical ankle-length Syrian gowns, they might have been a culture club, a Greek sorority, perhaps, organized by mildly eccentric middle-aged Ohio housewives in a chronic pang of misplaced aesthetic longing. On the other hand, they were poised, tranquil, earnest, and highly industrious. They nodded politely when Domino informed them that their guest was fully recovered from fever, thanks to God and Pachomian charity, and would be departing their company on the supply truck the following day or the day after. His presence must have been a novelty, though whether welcomed or resented he couldn’t tell. Certainly, with the notable exception of Fannie, the women appeared anxious to return to their labors.

  Domino resumed the tour, pushing him out past the grape arbor, generator shed, burn barrel, and compost heaps, out to, and then around, the parameters of the high, solid wall that separated her gentle green island from the harsh sandy vastness that surrounded it. Eventually they arrived back at the great gate, and it was there, as she slowed to impart some fact or other (she seemed to enjoy wheeling him around: women love these fierce invalids home from hot climates?), that he noticed on the ground to the right of the gate a pair of wooden poles that had wedges attached to them about eighteen to twenty inches from the bottom.

  Switters pointed. “What are those?” he asked.

  “Those? Uh, in French they’re called les échasses. I can’t remember the English. The nuns use them to be tall enough to look through the hole in the gate.”

  “Stilts,” he whispered. “I’ll be double damned.” He swatted his brow smartly with the palm of his hand. “Stilts! Of course! Why haven’t I thought of that?”

  To Domino’s astonishment, he stood on the seat of his Invacare 9000 XT and had her, protesting all the while, lean against the upright stilts to steady them while he climbed onto their footrests. At his signal, she stepped aside, and off he clumped, moving the right stilt forward and then the left—before he went sprawling onto his face. He’d covered less than a yard.

  But he insisted on trying it again. And again. Covering a greater distance each time before he fell. Domino was beside herself. “You’ll break an arm! You’re ruining your nice suit! How can you stand on these cotton-pick . . . , on these damn stilts when you can’t stand on the ground?”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll explain later. Let’s go. I can do this. I did it when I was a kid in Redwood City.”

  She couldn’t restrain him. He was like a puncture in a high-pressure hose, spurting in all directions, spuming with an irrepressible puissance. The longer he remained upright, the more excited he became. Soon—well, whether or not it was soon depended upon one’s perspective: to Domino it seemed longer than a journey across purgatory on a lawn tractor—he was staying up for two or three minutes at a time. He wobbled, he lurched, he teetered and toddled and sprinted. He scattered goats and chickens, crashed into a date palm, got entangled in a laundry line (Oh, those ancient bloomers!), and, through it all, cackled like a lunatic.

  Disturbed at their agricultural and domestic chores, the defrocked nuns gawked at him in disbelief and, perhaps, something close to alarm. Domino, running along behind him, pushing his empty chair, urged them breathlessly to ignore the spectacle. As if they could. Fannie, though, gave him an encouraging wink, and once, when he’d adroitly sidestepped a panicked nanny goat, Sister Pippi actually applauded.

  In the Gascony region of southwestern France, where Pippi was reared, stiltwalking was somewhat of a tradition. Gascony farmers had once used stilts to wade in marshlands and cross the numerous streams, and were said to be able to run on stilts with amazing speed and ease. Asked to build a set of portable stairs to enable the sisters to see through the sliding peephole in the gate, Pippi, in a fit of fun and nostalgia, had made these stilts instead.

  Struck by Switters’s persistence—he kept at it literally for hours—and delighted by his improvement—by late afternoon he was stilting with authority, if not exactly grace—Pippi beckoned him over to the roofed but open-air area at the rear of the storehouse where she maintained a small carpentry shop. “I’ve been saving these for a special occasion,” she said in her Gascogne French, and as Domino squealed “Non, non, non!” Pippi produced from beneath a lumber pile a pair of stilts more than twice as tall as the ones on which Switters had been practicing.

  “Wow!” said Switters.

  “Non!” said Domino.

  “You strap these to your legs,” said Pippi, “so that you don’t need to hold on to poles. But it takes good balance.”

  “My balance is unequaled,” boasted Switters, and he used the shorter stilts to boost himself onto the low rear end of the carpentry shop’s slanted roof. With Pippi and Domino holding the superstilts steady, he climbed aboard—and for a few breathtaking seconds, he jiggled, tilted, leaned, and swayed in slow motion, like a dynamited tower so in love with gravity it couldn’t decide which way to fall. After he took a few steps, however, he gained stability, and Domino removed her hands from her eyes. For her part, Pippi shouted instructions and beamed with approval as, over and over again, he circled the carpentry shop. Confident now, he was about to strike out across the compound when Pippi stopped him. Seemed she had another surprise.

  A couple of years before, Domino had purchased cheaply in Damascus a bolt of red-and-white checkered fabric. The idea had been to make tablecloths for “Italian night,” the once-a-month occasion when the sisters enjoyed spaghetti and wine as a f
estive break from their plain Middle Eastern fare. For some reason, the cloth had been shelved and forgotten—by all, that is, except Pippi, who’d snipped off a substantial portion of the bolt and stitched from it a ridiculous pair of skinny trousers whose legs were a good seven feet in length. “Voilà!” she exclaimed, and Switters instantly recognized and approved her intent.

  Once the checkered pants had been pulled over the stilts and fastened about his waist, and a tin funnel appropriated as a hat, he set off, head higher in the air than a streetlamp. It was so much like a one-man circus parade that he had little choice but to break into a booming, up-tempo rendition of “Send in the Clowns.”

  The sisters abandoned their duties to line up and cheer the funny giant. Even dour Maria Deux had to grin. And each time he staggered past the chapel, he glanced down to see a face pressed to an uncolored pane in the stained-glass window.

  Switters paraded. He pranced. He teetered. He waved. He sang. And everyone seemed enchanted. Everyone, that is, except Domino Thiry.

  By the time Switters relinquished the stilts, dusk was settling onto the oasis like a purple hairnet through which a few stray strands of blondish daylight curled. After Pippi congratulated him on his performance, she hurried off to crank up the generator. Domino pushed him back to his room, through an archaic pastoral gloaming: cuckoos cooing themselves to sleep in the willows, chickens marching dumbly to the roost (one young hen lingering behind as if wanting to stay up past her bedtime and watch chicken MTV); the comforting, almost touching sight of people quietly performing their evening chores; the pappy air quickened by the fairgrounds smell of frying onions; everywhere a winding down, an innocence, a rhythm, a timelessness, an anticipation of stars, a secret fear of midnight.

  The pair didn’t speak. Switters was exhausted, undoubtedly, and Domino seemed in a bit of a pique. In silence they let themselves be swabbed by the curative sheep tail of bucolic twilight. Were they a normal couple in such a setting, they might be looking ahead to supper and wine and parenting and sex and prayers and dreams. As it was, Switters was imagining the possibilities that stilt walking might hold for him (between then and the autumn when he would return to Amazonia), and Domino was wondering how the hell he could walk on stilts in the first place.

  That was the very question she fired at him—arms tightly folded, face all aglower—once she had shoved his chair across the threshold with just enough extra force so that he’d been obliged to brake to keep from crashing into the opposite wall. He turned slowly to stare at her, fatigue and just a touch of merriment tempering the fierceness that might otherwise have kindled his eyes. “Un moment,” he croaked, so parched and hungry he could scarcely speak. He tipped the water pitcher, drinking from it directly and not stopping until it was dry. Then he rolled to the crocodile valise, from which he withdrew a half-stale Health Valley energy bar, which he devoured in four mighty chomps. During the time he took to refresh himself, she changed neither position nor expression.

  Wiping his mouth with the torn sleeve of his jacket, he turned to her once more. “Okay, Sister—if I may still call you that. . . .”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake! Can’t you just say Domino!?” She must have surprised herself with the heat in her voice because she immediately softened her face and her tone. “In the Middle Ages, a domino was a black-and-white mask that people wore during carnival. So, you see, my name connects me to my aunt in still another way.”

  “Okay. Cool. Did you notice, Domino, that each and every time I fell off the stilts, no matter how hard I fell or in what position I landed, I managed to bend my legs so that my feet never touched the ground? No? Yes? You’re not quite sure? Well, I did, and they didn’t. You are now about to find out why.”

  After the painful experience with Suzy, it was unthinkable that he would lie to Domino. (Maybe he couldn’t lie to the Devil or God.) Nor was he inclined to offer her the abridged version that he’d related to Maestra and Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald. No, he gave her, as she stood transfixed in the doorway, the full account, complete with Sailor Boy stew and penis-jab, although he did first warn her, much as he had Bad Bobby, that what she was about to hear was so unbelievable that he scarcely believed it himself. And he left purposefully vague the precise outlines of Today Is Tomorrow’s head: there would be limits to her credulousness.

  The telling took the better part of an hour, and when at last he slapped his now permanently soiled trouser legs as if to punctuate the end of the story, Domino seemed, well, not so much perplexed as hypnotized, not so much stunned as drunk, her customary radiance restored, even intensified, like the sultan’s chronically sick wife who was miraculously restored to health by the stinking beggar’s fairy tales. She said little, however; just looked kind of goofy in a dignified way and then excused herself to try to digest the strange and perhaps tainted ambrosias he’d just fed her.

  “I’ll be packed,” he called after her. “In case the truck to Deir ez-Zur comes in the morning.” And to himself: But I’ll be damned if I’ll blow this falafel stand without having a peek at Masked Beauty.

  As it turned out, however, by 7:30 A.M., when Domino knocked with his breakfast tray, something had happened that put a spin—positive or negative, he honestly couldn’t say which—on his desire to meet the once blue nude. Life was Finnegans Wake, to be sure, except for those times when it was Marvel Comics.

  “Look at this,” Switters muttered, barely glancing up from the computer over which he was hunkered, and on the screen of which a message from Maestra dully shimmered in a state of inkless, bloodless, ephemeral, somehow untrustworthy electronic quiddity. Squinting, Domino read over his shoulder, slowly extracting the salient facts from the hard-nosed rococo of Maestra’s prose.

  It appeared that the Matisse oil that had hung for so many years over Maestra’s living room mantel; the painting that had enlivened certain of Switters’s boyhood fantasies and that briefly had seemed destined to become his own; the ace up his grandmother’s filmy financial sleeve; the innovative razzmatazz ramble of flattened pigment inspired by the naked body of Domino’s aunt, was, in a word—in two words, to be exact—stolen property.

  And when the painting was reproduced in the auction house catalog, its rightful owner had come forth.

  In January 1944, five months before Allied troops landed at Normandy, the last prominent Jewish family left in the south of France had been finally discovered and arrested. Their hiding place, an abandoned mill, was comfortably, even elegantly furnished, and among articles confiscated there by the Nazis were artworks that the cultivated fugitives had continued to accumulate, even in their time of peril. A few weeks later, Matisse’s Blue Nude 1943 was loaded aboard a train that departed Nice, bound, presumably, for Berlin. That was the last that the family, imprisoned and tortured, or Matisse, aging and forgetful, was to hear of it. Until, that is, it turned up at Sotheby’s just now, where it attracted the attention of the lone surviving member of that persecuted family, who immediately laid claim to it.

  The good news for Maestra was that the grateful owner was presenting her with a two-hundred-thousand-dollar reward (a fraction of its worth) for having “protected” the painting for all those years and for surrendering it without a legal battle. The interesting news for Switters was that the owner turned out to be Audubon Poe’s patron, the Beirut-based businessman, Sol Glissant.

  “That is interesting to me, as well,” said Domino. “Not only because of the picture and its connection to my aunt but because Sol Glissant happens to be the benefactor who donated to the Pachomian Order this oasis!”

  “Are you jiving me? Enough, already! If the world gets any smaller, I’ll end up living next door to myself.”

  “Oh, but I am beginning to find these . . . these coincidences involving you and Masked Beauty and the painting and all of us to be exciting, to be meaningful. Suppose they are omens? Operating instructions from the Almighty? This news from your grandmother, it only makes me more confident that what I am about to propose t
o you is the correct decision.”

  She had his full attention then. Clicking off the computer, he gazed at her directly, finding her at that instant more than usually vivacious.

  “We spoke of you last night after dinner and again this morning, all of us, including Masked Beauty, and we have decided to ask you to stay on with us here at—at the convent. If I may still call it that.”

  Switters felt something subtle slither out of his nether regions and up his spine, but he would have been hesitant to label it kundalini. Even before she revealed the reasoning behind this surprising request, he could sense his vision of getting Seattle’s Art Girls involved with stilts—stilt-making, stilt-racing, stilts for stilts’ sake—fading into vacancy.

  Domino’s reasons were both practical and philosophical.

  Switters excelled at languages. He had advanced computer equipment and a satellite telephone. He was adept in their use. Isolated more than ever from the world at large, the sisterhood would benefit in numerous ways from establishing electronic and telecommunicative links with those it wished to influence, assist, save, or solicit for funds. Because of his experience in the CIA, he might also be helpful in dealing with Middle Eastern political situations and the never-ending whirlpool of Vatican intrigue. He would become their communications expert, office manager, and security chief. He’d put the thorn on their rose and the skin on their drum.

  Quite aside from that was his gender. The nine Eves had judged that it might be a good idea, after all, to admit an Adam to their little Eden. No longer bound, except by choice, to their vows, some among them had suggested that it was not merely elitist but cowardly to shun all masculine contact. What were they afraid of? Did they lack confidence in their choices? They were feminists of a sort, but well aware that reviling half the human race was a component neither of true feminism nor the Christian faith. Wasn’t Jesus a man? (They weren’t so sure about God.) Hadn’t men (St. Pachomius, their fathers) begat them, figuratively and literally? They were in general agreement that they could use a dose of healthy male energy in their lives. It had to be said that Domino, for one, was not entirely convinced that Switters was a healthy manifestation of male energy, but that question would resolve itself in time.