Tintin in the New World: A Romance

by Frederic Tuten

  "Quite adequate, quite a nifty little purse, silk-lined, I may add. Sufficient. Intellectuals require no more; thoroughly rounded, yet with a hint of the austere, the Spartan, the nonaggressive yet bountiful portfolio. You show good taste, Herr Naptha, nothing presumptuous, none of your shaky little deals, none. I, Peeperkorn, approve."

  "Disgusting," Settembrini screeched, "money kills thought."

  "I don't know too much about the way things are handled for me," Tintin explained, "a man in New York takes care of it, but some of the gold bullion Haddock and I discovered at Marlinspike several years ago is deposited in a Swiss bank. Isn't that so, Captain?"

  "Thundering clams! What? The tide's in, you say? Bring her to port and reef the halyards."

  "I think the captain is the wisest man here," Clavdia remarked.

  The comment was generally ignored, except by Tintin, who beamed at Clavdia's approval of his comrade. Before Tintin could thank her, Settembrini spoke again.

  "You have no faith in man, Herr Naptha, or in man's works. And as you have just admitted, your personal interests shape your vision of humanity as a whole."

  "As whose does not?" answered Naptha. "Is poverty truth's companion? I go further. History is the story of victims and victors. The question is, Which do you choose to be?"

  "Neither. Simply a just man. A man of faith and progress. Even you will admit history has its bright pages among the dark."

  "Yes," Naptha answered, "the days when each man knew his place."

  "Progress, sir, is the record of men who did not know their place."

  "You have just recited the story of Cain and Abel," Naptha said triumphantly.

  "All this means nothing to me," the lieutenant interjected.

  "You both explicate outmoded texts. We are a new world here and require new handbooks and histories, written by ourselves."

  "Yes," Peeperkorn said. "Yesterday has no meaning, and certainly not someone else's. Take the course as it comes. One's history begins anew each new day."

  "Rarely have I seen you so huffed, dear Peeperkorn, one would almost think you have grown serious here in these rare mountains."

  "My Clavdia, I take your observation as a just admonishment; one should not dwell on these matters or on any elevated chats for too long, except for the kind one would have enjoyed at the court of Urbino, when ladies and courtiers made their evening conversation all sympathy and wit."

  "But they spoke chiefly of love! No offense, sir, but we were on more significant issues," Naptha interjected, looking at the others for support.

  "Still, decorum, comportment, the economy of behavior, grace," Peeperkorn said.

  "Are mortified issues!" Settembrini exploded. "With all deference, you are referring to the most decadent of times; others tilled the fields by day, so that these splendid gentlepeople could converse at night. Madame Clavdia is wrong: You are never serious, Herr Peeperkorn."

  Conversation halted momentarily, while the waiter brought more coffee and the busboy cleared away the remaining dishes and little pots of butter.

  "Those words of yours, Señor Peeperkorn, 'decorum,' 'grace,’" said Lieutenant dos Amantes, "move me to memories of a comrade of my youth, the son of a rich Chinese family. He was born here and shared with us our dreams, though the color of his skin and his class origins made him seem alien to us. I loved him in the way young people are mad for those they wish to resemble. His was a grace and intelligence without mannerism; his calm presence alone shamed loudmouths and revolutionary braggarts among us. He went to the university to please his parents, to respect them, and he studied tropical medicine, but his education was wide, and he read English and French. I think he wrote poetry. Whatever he did, the revolution was always his calling, his mission.

  "For organizing workers in a paper mill, he was arrested and tortured. Fortunately his family was able to obtain his release by bribing officials. He returned to us much changed, very thin and very wasted, but he had no care for how he looked because he was seized by a new idea. 'While I was in my prison cell,' he said to me, 'I often had a strange vision — even when I was being beaten, I had this vision. I saw a wide river walled on either bank by huge, leafy trees. The river sent voices to me, telling me to wait by this wide river until I no longer need wait.'

  "That was all he ever told me of his prison experience, and that was the last time I ever spoke to him. When last heard from, he was in Brazil, on the bank of an Amazon settlement, working in a laundry.

  "Bueno, forgive my nostalgia," Lieutenant dos Amantes said, returning to Peeperkorn's earlier remarks on the need to reject the past as influence on the present. "You urge us to live without your history at our backs, but first you drenched us in Christ's blood, teaching the Indian to be meek, to suffer his disgusting life with eyes rolled heavenward, now you extol him to take up the gun in order to create a radical paradise on earth. You Europeans have bestowed on us all your failed dreams, hoping they would sprout and flourish on this new, fertile continent."

  "In truth, Lieutenant," said Settembrini, "you are in error. Look to your New World brothers of the North. Our little infections, as you term them, are mild colds compared with those the Yankees have shipped you — real poxes and plagues. One bottle of Coca-Cola contains more spiritual microbes than all the boatloads of Marx and Engels."

  "Incidentally, do you know," playfully inquired the officer, "that we have our own carbonated beverage, Inca Cola?" All laughed or smiled indulgently, except Captain Haddock, who napped in his chair, dreaming of crystal skies and steady winds, his schooner, with spinnaker ballooning prow-ward, quaffing the sea.

  "Why not learn from us, Lieutenant?" Settembrini asked. "Surely our history cannot count for nothing. All men at all times have been prone to error, but we have had our noble, inspired moments worthy of emulation by a people intent on progress and justice and harmony."

  "You are a worthy man, Señor Settembrini. Yes, an honest man. I do not dismiss your history; indeed, I have read something of it. But nothing, no, little of what you have achieved is of value to us. We are a different people, a different race, a different destiny. Old World analogies do not apply."

  "I agree" — Naptha nodded — "but I would go further. Nationalize, socialize; preserve and create your cultural boundaries, build new highways, tame and drain the Amazon, feed the poor, educate them, and give them newspapers. And so? Will you have altered men's souls? Will you have made them less aggressive, less murderous? No, you will only have made more men discontented, each wanting more than his neighbor, and there is no end to wanting."

  "When our people want to live, you call us bad," the lieutenant answered, "but when your people grow rich in the manner we wish to pursue, you call it good. What you allow us is our misery, because misery is so cheap that even the poor can afford it."

  "Don't listen to him, Lieutenant. Don't trouble yourself, fortunately his mischief is harmless," Settembrini said. "As you know, I have apprehensions about the chauvinism of your programs, but I do not doubt you will find your way, as have others in the past."

  "The past, our past, may indeed point the course of our future, Señor Settembrini. There is a story, dating to the preconquest, a part of which I'm sure you know. Long before the Spanish arrived, the Indians believed that one day a man with golden hair, a man half-animal, would appear from the West, sent by Viracocha, the Creator. Pizarro was taken to be that demigod of their legends, and even the great Inca Atahualpa believed, when he heard reports of the existence of white men on the coast of what we now call Panama, that the prophecy had come true.

  "But this is only a fragment of the story. According to another, a heretical account, the arrival of this golden god would bring disorder, destruction, and subjugation, but his reign was predetermined to last only several centuries. During this period the Indians must endure their fate, keeping as much as they can of their language and their culture. For one day, another, more powerful god will appear, to unite them and all their kind from Tierra del Fueg
o to the northernmost limits of their culture. And this divinity will restore to them their rightful lands and their ancient arts, and afterward he will vanish like rain in the desert. One variation of the story claims that this divinity will unite all the races — that is, all those who now live in the Americas — and that a new kind of man shall emerge.

  "Some say this new god is a man; some, a woman; some androgynous. Some believe he will be very young or very old, or both at once. The signs of the coming are known to a few, only by Indians who have had the secret transmitted to them from a line of descent extending back before the great empires of the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas, before the civilizations of the Toltec, Olmeca, the Chimu, from the time after the great fire and flood, from the time we were first baked from God's clay."

  "That is a charming tale," Settembrini said, "one perfectly inspirational in keeping the masses in servitude. Its message: Practice stoicism until the messiah delivers you out of bondage. And notice the Pan-Americanism of it, race and nationalism over again and, of course, the mythic leader. Frankly, it makes me ill."

  "Race is the common denominator of all our allegiances after the family, and the nation after that," Naptha retorted, sneering.

  "My friends, not again, please," Peeperkorn pleaded. "We have such charming, lucid company with us this afternoon. Lieutenant, you are to be thanked for entertaining us with such an unusual tale, a story enriching all who have listened. But now to some champagne and cold beef."

  "I thank you, too, Lieutenant dos Amantes," said Tintin shyly. "Since I've arrived in your part of the world, my mind seems to be drifting willy-nilly, and I've dreamed of a stable bed on which to fix my wayward thoughts. So fascinating is the subject on which you speak that I expect to give it some study and, thus, perhaps ground myself in thoughts historical and cultural pertaining to this new world."

  Lieutenant dos Amantes nodded gravely at the conclusion of Tintin's appreciative words.

  "One day I would welcome hearing more of these mystifications," Settembrini intruded, "seeing, after all, that we are respectful guests in your enchanted country. Fables apart, however, as I began to say earlier, there are historical models in our European culture for the kind of society one should wish to realize in the future."

  From there Settembrini declaimed on the nature of republics and on the origin and history of the loftiest, Venice, the diadem of the Adriatic, the saving beacon in a sea of feudal darkness.

  And wasn't, Naptha parried, Venice more a lesson of how the good fall into debasement, and wasn't Venice, then, with its dungeons and police spies the proper paradigm of man's rotten, spoiled nature, and didn't it further corroborate the evidence of man's fall from grace?

  "That," Settembrini protested, "was when Venice had ceased to be herself, for she flourished without blemish well into the eighteenth century, evidence enough that other, yet greater societies might endure still longer. Civilization's lights were only recently sparked, a mere two thousand years."

  An old argument, a stale apology: Venice spoke only for man's contemptible state, his vile and wormy lusts, man, man, man was shit, and, Naptha sputtered, Settembrini was shit, too.

  ''And," the Italian returned, "you, Naptha, are a spiteful, stunted crookback."

  "A little arthritic in the shoulder, yes. That was God's work. But spiteful, no."

  "Yes, spiteful," Settembrini said, "paying the world back for the hump of wrongs it so justly bequeathed you. Miserable you are, not man, but you, spewing bile on mankind's clean flesh."

  ''I'll have no more!" Peeperkorn bellowed. "This misrule I deem unfit for our friendly company. I enjoin you both to extend hands and clasp them in a show of goodwill and fellowship."

  The combatants made wry faces and turned from the table.

  "Apologize each," Clavdia said, "or I shall be very put out with you both."

  "Very well, but I extend this hand under protest and because you, Madame Clavdia, have asked it," Settembrini said. "Infamy resides in that man, Signor Tintin, and it is better you know his true nature and let not yourself be corrupted by his lies. I shall place my hand atop his, but for an instant only."

  "Watch, all," said Naptha, "for this meeting of hands shall happen so quickly as to seem never to have happened."

  "Settled, then," Peeperkorn said. "And to settle all discontents, I enjoin you to join hands all. Let's ring this table with a circle of hands entwined and let harmony reign where discord once visited."

  The circle of hands was formed over Naptha's and Settembrini's scowls and rumblings. In whose hand his left hand resided Tintin did not know, so far away from him was his hand on that side of his body; indeed, so distant from him felt the whole of his body, except for his right hand, which was now clasping Madame Clavdia's and which was receiving a gentle pressure from her source. Moments later, when all had untied the knot of harmony ordered by Herr Peeperkorn, Tintin, embarrassed, found his hand still locked in Madame Clavdia's in some bond whose name he did not know.

  — Chapter VIII —

  [Dusk, the same day. Tintin and Clavdia are seated beside each other on a veranda facing the mountains and the darkening jungle. Clavdia clears her throat and begins to speak to the young man, whose flushed face is averted from her.]

  "Well, Monsieur Tintin, from all that I have read, you are among the most active of ... well, men, yet here you lounge about and seem of no apparent purpose."

  "Yes, I do see your point," Tintin said laughingly. "But I've more than made up for my lack of motion with the terrible activity of my newly acquired mental life. I can scarcely sleep at night for all the ideas spinning in my weak head. How do you manage, Madame Clavdia?"

  "To keep my head from spinning or how to keep an entire idea in my head? I'm not sure which you mean, but neither question is quite flattering. No, no, don't protest ... I do fathom what you are saying. I was merely hunting for compliments — small game, to be sure — but yes, I have found a way, when the channel is too rough, as your companion the captain might say, to add some ballast to myself and make the passage smoother. Your face, Monsieur Tintin, has such a pretty glow, radiant of health, I assume.

  "What were we saying?" Madame Chauchat asked. "Who cares! Radiance, youth, the robust form! How wonderful. How unlike the ideal of another time, when character and charm and the quality of the mind counted for nearly all. Personality, that was the thing! Personality is so wonderful. When I was a child, no more than the age you have now, my mother, her whole circle, in fact, spoke vividly of personality as we do today of celebrity. My mother would note of someone that he or she had personality or that some other one lacked personality, and that would be all there was to say. My father did not have personality, my mother declared, and search as she might, she found that I did not have it either. I tried to develop some, for it mortified me to think I would go through life without it and to realize that whatever exceptional thing I might do my mother would not value it much or love me more than the halfway love she gave me because, you see, I lacked personality, and lacking it, I lacked the cause for love in others, for real love, I mean. Affection, respect, tenderness, concern, none of these did my mother deny me, and even until she grew old and her eyes almost too feeble to cross a stitch, she continued to knit sweaters for me and send them, in brown-paper parcels tied with leftover old string, to wherever I happened to be, even, as was once the case, in the tropics — well, Belem is tropics enough for me, unless you consider the sun steaming the river by seven in the morning not tropics enough. It's uncanny how you devour words, Monsieur Tintin; you seem famished for them. Is there nothing I have said you find dull? Oh, please don't do that with your eyes; you make them so round I think they shall pop out and roll away. Yes, that is better, thank you. I like normal things and disdain oddities especially of the physical sort."

  "You must find me very queer then, Madame Clavdia. I'm sorry if I disconcert you," Tintin said, his voice low, his eyes downcast.

  "Somehow," Clavdia replied after a long pause,
"I feel that I remember having answered you once before, long ago, in the same way that I shall answer you now: Forgive me, dear, sweet, young man for my thoughtless words. But I exclude you from my idea of the odd and have never considered you in such category from the moment my eyes contracted yours."

  "Compacted mine? When was that?"

  "That time, 'long ago and far away' — "

  "When dreams were dreams of yesterday?"

  "Yes, exactly. For today persons will believe anything, but rarely will they concede that love begins, is waiting for the love object long before the object is met ... if it ever is to be met. That may or may not be the present case here, yet I do know that you do not depress me. For when I find myself in the company of ordinary, honest, good folk, I am not simply, as would be expected, bored. You must understand, Monsieur Tintin, as you will should our acquaintance ever ripen, that the company of ordinary people frightens and depresses me, the abyss, in short. To be with any less than the exceptional is a form of extinction. I feel pains in my chest, I grow dizzy with anxiety, with the thought that perhaps I will be condemned to the company of such as these for the rest of my life ... 'these,' meaning, as you may gather, these human failures. Failure is worse than death, for death is final, but even in death there are traces that you have once lived. Failure, however, is extinction in the present, the never having lived, never having existed."

  "I'm astonished, Madame Clavdia, and sad at the thought that anything can move you to unhappiness, you who require, indeed deserve, the buoyant and the famous!"