The Heat of the Sun

by Rain, David

  The commissioner reads out the marriage contract. Bride and bridegroom sign their names. The joy is general. Wily Goro has been nothing but thorough. Food and drink flow. The house spills over with guests. Look at the girl’s relatives, feasting with abandon! Look at that old rogue Uncle Yakuside, carousing drunkenly at the American’s expense!

  The girl’s face is filled with joy. Does Pinkerton not believe he really loves her? What thought has he for the attritions of time? There is only this moment, with its promise of bliss. And Sharpless, what feelings stir in Sharpless? Envy, undoubtedly – for must he not love the girl himself? But sorrow too, a soul-harrowing sorrow, for the destiny that awaits her.

  An intruder bursts upon the scene. Look at his rage! Look at his fury! Is it a madman? It is the Bonze, Butterfly’s most eminent uncle, a holy man of high degree. Word of his niece’s apostasy has reached him. Wicked girl, to betray the faith of her ancestors! He curses her. Pinkerton laughs at the madman. But Pinkerton does not understand. The girl’s other relatives join the denunciation. Even the drunkard Yakuside is filled with righteous indignation.

  Wicked girl! Cursed be the girl! To betray her ancestors!

  Pinkerton, growing angry, clears the house. Butterfly sobs. What has she done, to marry an American? What has she done, to forget her race and kindred? But she loves Pinkerton too well to be downcast for long. His caresses restore her. All will be well, won’t it? Weep no more.

  Three years pass.

  How rapidly Butterfly’s happiness has flown! For, of course, a few months after the marriage, the Abraham Lincoln sailed away. Pinkerton said he would return when the robins nested in spring. Lightly enough he flung out the words, and Butterfly believed him; though robins, she fears, may nest less often in America than in Japan.

  Seasons come and go. The funds left by Pinkerton dwindle. Penury awaits. Butterfly tells her maid, Suzuki, that Pinkerton will come back. One fine day, she declares, we’ll see a thread of smoke above the sea, coiling up from the far horizon; closer and closer the ship will come, until cannon thunders in the harbour, signalling its arrival; one fine day I’ll wait for the man who climbs Higashi Hill from the crowded city below; at first a speck, he will grow and grow in my sight, and at the summit of the hill he’ll call my name. One fine day.

  Suzuki does not believe a word of it.

  Enter Sharpless, the consul. He has received a letter from Pinkerton, who is returning after all. Still, Sharpless is grave: Pinkerton has married an American lady and has asked his old friend to break the news (gently, of course) to Butterfly. Sharpless, for now, has no chance to proceed. Goro the nakodo is here again; Butterfly, the marriage broker insists, must take another husband. Look at the fine suitor he offers her this time! It is Prince Yamadori, a Japanese nobleman who has lived much abroad. Yamadori is a posturing fool. Absurdly, he pleads his cause. Yes, he has made other marriages, it is true, but all his other wives he will cast aside for the love of Madame Butterfly.

  Outraged, she refuses to listen. She has a husband! And her husband will return! Sharpless despairs. What, he asks Butterfly, if Pinkerton is not to be trusted? Perhaps, he ventures, she should accept Yamadori. She turns from him, affronted. She will never give up Pinkerton. And, as if to prove that Pinkerton must be hers again, she runs to fetch the little boy of whose existence neither Pinkerton nor Sharpless has been apprised before.

  The boy’s name, declares his mother, is Trouble. But on the day of his father’s return, his name shall change to Joy.

  Now comes the sound of cannon from the harbour. A ship! A ship! Butterfly rushes to the terrace. The vessel flies an American flag, and, looking through the telescope she keeps for this purpose, she sees that its name is the Abraham Lincoln.

  Pinkerton has returned! Deliriously, Butterfly calls to Suzuki. They must celebrate his homecoming! They must strew flowers throughout the house! For hours they work in the garden, cutting every flower; soon, flowers fill every space; petals carpet the floor; the fragrance is overwhelming as Butterfly arrays herself in her wedding garments and decks out Trouble in his finest clothes.

  Night falls. Oh, when will Pinkerton come? In the shoji screen that is drawn against the darkness, Butterfly, Suzuki, and Trouble make three holes, and through the holes they watch expectantly. Hours go by. Trouble sleeps. Suzuki sleeps. Butterfly thinks none should sleep. Her vigil can end only when Pinkerton returns. Slowly, a new dawn bleeds into the darkness.

  Waking, Suzuki persuades her mistress to rest at last: is she not to look her best when her husband comes? (Poor Suzuki! She has had the measure of Pinkerton from the first.) Suzuki sends Trouble out to play in the garden. But look, here comes Sharpless – and Pinkerton is with him! Suzuki is startled: were Pinkerton’s promises true after all? Receiving him warmly, she tells him how her mistress has prepared for this homecoming: the costumes, the flowers, the vigil. What joy will fill her now!

  Every word is a dagger in Pinkerton’s heart. He had only wanted Suzuki’s advice on how to break the news to Butterfly of his marriage. Suzuki sees that something is wrong and, turning towards the garden, she becomes aware of a lady standing there: a foreign lady, in a sweeping gown. It is Kate Pinkerton – and perhaps, even now, her gaze lights upon the boy called Trouble; and Trouble, leaving off his play, looks up at her wonderingly.

  Kate Pinkerton sails into the house as Butterfly, alerted by voices, emerges from her chamber, filled with excitement to greet her husband again. Instead, she stops and stares.

  She sees Kate Pinkerton. And, in a trice, Butterfly knows.

  Despair fills Sharpless. The tragedy, he thinks, is upon them now, but he is precipitate. Butterfly is calm, surprisingly so; it is Pinkerton, bidding farewell to the life he knew in this house on Higashi Hill, who is overcome with emotion. What a carefree fellow he has been! All that has gone now. Never, he realizes, shall he be free from remorse. Never, he realizes, shall he forget Butterfly’s eyes, gazing at him in sorrowful reproach. He is ready to curse himself. He is ready to break down. But the women display exemplary calm. Is Kate Pinkerton shocked by her husband’s past? Not a bit of it! The little Japanese girl is a charming plaything, delightful; as for the child, they must take him back to America and bring him up as their own.

  Butterfly takes this in. Of course: Pinkerton shall have the child, if he only comes back in... oh, half an hour. The Americans go. The calm, they know, is only on the surface: Butterfly’s heart is broken. Pinkerton knows it, and knows he will always feel shame for what he has done. Kate Pinkerton knows it, but steels herself. Sharpless knows it, and for the rest of his life will feel a sense of failure, exile, and loss. Perhaps he guesses what will happen next.

  Butterfly is alone. What has she done that she must pay this price? The Bonze has cursed her, and his curse has come to pass. She has abandoned her religion. She has betrayed her country. She has trusted in love, and love has let her down. She takes up the dagger that her father used to commit ritual suicide. She unsheathes the blade and kisses it. She recites the words engraved on it: Die with honour when you can no longer live with honour.

  The time has come. But now Suzuki pushes back a screen to admit the boy called Trouble. He rushes to his mother. She sweeps him into a last embrace. She loves him: loves him. Oh, let him look into her face – deeply, searchingly, never to forget her! It is for you, she tells him, that I do what I do. It is for you, little boy, that you may go across the sea. She breaks from him, ties a blindfold around his eyes, then, with her gaze still fixed upon him, retreats behind a screen, where again she takes up the dagger. She plunges it into her bosom and emerges, tottering; she falls, but just has strength enough to drag herself across to the boy and embrace him again, before she sinks down.

  Returning, Pinkerton and Sharpless find her lying dead.

  ACT THREE

  After Tokugawa

  The world is webbed by imaginary lines: latitude, longitude, the lines are not there, but seem as real to us as mountains, rivers, coasts. Spin a
globe to the Pacific, and all the way down the watery hemisphere runs the International Date Line. As a boy I thought of it as a seam, as if planet earth had two halves, tacked jaggedly together. Travel westwards, and at one moment it is the date in America, at the next (jump!), the date in Japan, a day later. We have passed through a barrier. We have entered another world.

  ‘Tell me again – temples and pagodas?’ I said, as our ship drew into a long, thin harbour.

  ‘Great Temples of Kyushu, that’s what the Geographic’s paying for.’ There was an edge in Le Vol’s voice. This was the first of our commercial projects that he, not I, had arranged. I had thought it odd when he suggested it, and wondered why it appealed to him. ‘Mysteries of the Orient. Buddhist chanting. Incense. Gongs. Think you can work up something on that?’

  Gentle hills, blue in spring, rose over a clutter of port and town. As we lugged our suitcases down to the quay, I wondered if anything in Nagasaki would stir my memory. I supposed not: I had been an infant, barely more than a baby, when my father was the consul.

  Le Vol had changed his shirt and shaved for our arrival. This surprised me, but I was not surprised at all when he discoursed knowingly about the Mitsubishi shipyards, which loomed, grey and forbidding, on the other side of the harbour. Did I know, he demanded of me, how much Japan spent on ships, tanks, and airplanes? Without them, the war in China could barely have begun.

  I sighed; I was tired of the war in China. It had become Le Vol’s subject, his idée fixe. For six years, Japan had fought a war of conquest on the mainland; by now, much of China lay under Japanese occupation. Western powers, imperial to the core, were outraged at Japan’s imperial expansion. But Japan would not listen, withdrawing indignantly from the League of Nations.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be researching temples and pagodas?’ I said.

  ‘That’s your job. I just take the snaps.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ In my suitcase was a Baedeker and an illustrated book called Mysterious Japan.

  Evening gathered pinkly in the sky. Our ship, a merchant steamer, had deposited us at an inauspicious dock, all slithery timbers, tangled hawsers, and brown wiry wharfmen hurrying in every direction. High above, cranes held crates suspended by spidery threads; shadows, black and boxy, slithered over pungent clutter, and I wondered if I should have entrusted the arrangements to Le Vol. He was not the most reliable of business partners.

  We had just completed customs formalities in a shabby timber office when a fellow in a chauffeur’s uniform slipped towards us, grinned and bowed, took our luggage, and ushered us in the direction of a stately Lincoln sedan. Deep wrinkles seamed his face and his teeth were yellow, waggling pegs.

  I said to Le Vol, ‘A step up from our usual welcome. Good hotel?’

  ‘Let’s just say I’ve exceeded myself.’

  The Lincoln – brown and gleaming like shoe leather, inside and out – swept up hilly, winding roads above the harbour. Cherry blossoms burgeoned in a fleshy, pink riot as we turned smoothly this way and that.

  It had been some years after the Blood Red Ball when I ran into Le Vol again at a diner in New York. Then, as now, he was the shabby fellow he had always been, red-haired and gangly, only a little more weather-beaten and wrinkled about the eyes, as if he spent too much time squinting into the sun.

  ‘Still taking snaps?’ I had asked him, and he had looked at me almost pityingly and informed me that he was in town for the opening of his new exhibition. He was ebullient. The Crash (to most, a calamitous end) seemed to him an exciting beginning, the final crisis of capitalism that preceded a new order. Bemused, I listened to his analysis for a good half-hour before he realized he had asked me nothing about myself and demanded to know what I had been doing.

  I hesitated to tell my story. What had I become but an ageing journalist, hustling for freelance work, living in a single shabby room in Greenwich Village? Wobblewood was no more. The Queen of Bohemia, surprising all her circle, had found her ideal friend at last in the form of Grover Grayson III, the radio millionaire. Following a lavish wedding at the Plaza, the couple decamped to California, where Mr Grayson was building up his interests in the movies. I could have gone with them; Aunt Toolie insisted, but I demurred. It was time I made my own life. Yet what was my life to be? I had left Paris too late. The Crash seemed only to confirm that an era had ended. Boatloads of Bohemians made reverse Atlantic crossings. The Lost Generation was finding itself again. I knew I would never write Telemachus, Stay.

  Le Vol, a little hesitantly, asked me what had become of Trouble. I tried to explain what had happened at the Blood Red Ball.

  ‘How his father must hate him!’ Le Vol drew on his pipe.

  ‘He said he loves him.’

  ‘But the cat landed on his feet. He’s all right?’

  ‘Depends what you mean by all right.’

  Trouble’s fall had left him with a concussion, fractures of his right hip and thigh, and extensive bruising. For six weeks he lay in a hospital bed; Kate Pinkerton visited him every day, and so did I. The senator’s contrition was piteous, but his son refused to see him: not clamorously, but coolly, calmly.

  One day I came upon Kate Pinkerton sobbing. Trouble’s bed was empty. Seeing me, she sprang up and left, not speaking, and I burned with shame, as if I had assisted his escape.

  Le Vol said, ‘So he walked out into the night?’

  ‘And hasn’t been seen since. Do you ever imagine just walking out on everything and starting a new life?’

  ‘I’ve got one, in case you haven’t noticed.’

  ‘Maybe I need one too.’

  ‘Oh? I’m heading west again,’ Le Vol began, and, lighting his pipe, he informed me that a writer he had worked with for the last three years had just defected to Hollywood. ‘The fool! He’ll be sorry. It’s a new world. There’ll be no burying our heads in the sand any more.’

  ‘I suppose you think I’ve been doing that,’ I ventured.

  ‘We’re heading into a key period of history. Someone needs to document it. We’d make a good team: Le Vol, the man who does the pictures; Sharpless, the man who does the words.’

  Destiny, it seemed, was calling me again, and this time I answered. In those years of Depression and New Deal, Le Vol and I crisscrossed America. We sought out breadlines and soup kitchens. We stood in fields where the soil had blown away. We travelled with hoboes in boxcars. For the Public Works Administration, the Works Progress Administration, the American Federation of Labor and the Tennessee Valley Authority, we chronicled the construction of dams, roads, and railroads. Several of Le Vol’s pictures became iconic images: young men in the Civilian Conservation Corps digging mud in a field in North Dakota, like Russian peasants, anonymous and enduring; oil raining from a gusher in Texas, drenching jubilant workers black; a dust storm approaching an Oklahoma farmhouse, while a Model T in the foreground struggles to escape along an arrow-straight highway.

  We staged exhibitions, published books, and contributed copiously to federal archives; critics – and more than a few political activists – valued our work highly, but neither of us earned much money. Inevitably, we were forced to supplement our income with commercial work. Le Vol was dubious, even disgusted, when I urged these projects upon him. Often, I knew, he was tempted towards sabotage, and I did my best to make sure he did not turn the tourist guides, industry promotions, and magazine features that paid for more than gasoline and steaks in cheap diners into parodies of what they were meant to be. Resignedly, he followed me to Alabama for a piece on beauty pageants (‘Miss Southern States’), to California for a guidebook to Beverly Hills (Mansions of the Stars), to Lake Superior for a brochure on a shipping line. For Life we went to London; for National Geographic to Anchorage, Havana, and Guatemala City.

  Then came Nagasaki. It was April 1937.

  ‘What is this place?’

  The Lincoln had come to rest on a gravelled drive. The chauffeur held open a door for us. With an air of triumph, he gestured towards a veranda wreat
hed in vines. The house was modest but prosperous.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you?’ said Le Vol. ‘I wrote to the American consul. He insisted we stay.’

  The chauffeur, waddling ahead with our luggage, led us into the long, low bungalow. On the threshold of the hall, following his lead, we removed our shoes. Lining the walls were framed photographs of past consuls, stiff-collared gentlemen with moustaches. My father’s eyes watched us, and I wondered that Le Vol should not exclaim, startled by a picture that looked so much like me; but then, I had no moustache and wore no stiff collar.

  My room was comfortable, if furnished sparsely: whitewashed walls, white-quilted bed with mosquito netting, cherrywood dresser with spindly legs. Beside the bed was a bookcase. Briefly, I inspected sun-faded spines: Alain-Fournier, Le Grand Meaulnes; E. M. Forster, The Longest Journey; Henry James, The Ambassadors; Pierre Loti, Madame Chrysanthème.

  The blinds were drawn and I raised them, revealing a broad lawn that stretched to a line of conifers: my father’s lawn. Breathing deeply, I imagined rain that had slithered down the glass in the days when Teddy Roosevelt and Emperor Meiji were alive, and so was my father.

  Far out on the lawn, a lean gentleman stood against the sunset. He had set up an easel and stood painting; what he painted I was too far away to see, but I imagined the subject as suitably Oriental: sprays of pink blossom surrounded him on the trees. Dressed in a cream suit with a panama hat, he had about him the air of an imperial official, retired to indifferent leisure. He stepped back, surveying his handiwork, before, as if he sensed me watching, he turned towards the house.

  That night we dined on mats at a low table, where a bent-backed old woman supplied us abundantly with noodles, rice, seaweed, and fish in delicate strips. The consul, whose name was Clifford T. Arnhem, had assumed a silken robe and sat comfortably in a half-lotus; beside him, with downcast eyes, a Japanese girl of the geisha type knelt, unmoving. Scented breezes blew in from the gardens; lights flickered in paper lanterns.