Tintin in the New World: A Romance

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Tintin in the New World: A Romance Page 9

by Frederic Tuten


  And with him, sipping a glass of amber-colored wine glowing as if distilled from sunshine, a woman made from sunshine and red gold. She was youth itself, sweet as the muscatel wine she was drinking, wine made from the grapes of the count's ancient vineyard, several bottles of which rested in the hotel's cellar for the count's exclusive use. Clavdia had sipped this rare wine at the very table and chair where the youth was presently growing even more radiant from its powers. The count was now speaking to the young woman, half singing his words, one hand caressing her golden hair, the other tracing the contours of her face. Clavdia read his lips, read a text she had heard before when addressed to her, lines of endearment, sentences of love, phrases of longing.

  ''I'm pleased at your recovery," Clavdia said, speaking in English.

  "Ah! It is you, my dear Clavdia," he answered, also in English, seeming unsurprised to see her. "No, I am not much recovered, and I would be home reposing but for a visit from my niece here, who deserves a more charming atmosphere than the confines of my gloomy quarters."

  The young woman understood nothing of what they had said and remained smiling pleasantly throughout the exchange. Clavdia addressed her in Italian, noting how fortunate the young lady was to have so doting an uncle, especially at a time when her uncle, the count, had recently suffered such bereavements and griefs and had been all but interred in his castle because of them. What a soothing nurse she must be. The young woman's smile vanished and seemed to reappear, in exaggerated form, on the count, who was busying himself keeping the young woman from leaving the table.

  "Good-bye, Count, and best wishes to you, young lady," Clavdia said.

  She was leaving, too, the young woman said. In fact, would Clavdia mind if she joined her? And join Clavdia she did, all the way to Rome, where, in fact, she lived and where she had met the count in some dusty sculpture gallery. Hilda, for that was the young woman's name, and Clavdia became friends, sisters famous for beauty. The red and the gold, as they were known, broke hearts that fall and splintered several more until the following spring, when Clavdia took up with Hilda's brother, a golden youth more in love with Clavdia than the count had ever been, and called a truce to love and its battles. That was Clavdia's Italy.

  Now she would return there with Tintin and explore with him its ruins and the terrain of her memories. She would return to where youth and beauty held sway in all matters, for nowhere in the world did people love beauty as much as did the Italians, but now it would not be her beauty that won the day but the power of her money.

  Money ushered them to the best hotels. Tintin marveled at Venice from his terrace breakfast at the Gritti Palace and spent the afternoon shopping for gloves with Clavdia. In the evening they hired a gondola and glided along the canals and palaces. Tintin held Clavdia in his arms and looked up at the stars, where a strange and new constellation formed before his eyes. There, in the purple-black sky, was Snowy, with bone in jaw, climbing the higher reaches of heaven. Now he was there, fixed forever in human sight, with Bear and Lion and Dipper.

  The gondolier glanced to where Tintin was pointing out the dog's outlines to Clavdia and exclaimed in a voice loud and familiar: "Uffa, anche qua, non mi lascia mai in pace questa bestia."

  Now not even the romantic scarf — worn against the malignant night vapors of the canal, as he had explained to his passengers on their boarding — masking half the gondolier's face could disguise any longer Settembroglio-Settembrini. Tintin and Clavdia rose to him in that moment of recognition, but he had already steered the vessel to the quay, deftly alighted, and disappeared into the Venetian night.

  "What a night of miracles," exclaimed Tintin. "Snowy and Settembrini, what will fate think of next!"

  They left Venice in the mood of wonders, feeling them­ selves in a state of grace. Attentive to her as he always was, Tintin grew yet more solicitous of Clavdia as she seemed to tire easily and forget or misplace her eyeglasses, her hearing aid, her toothbrush. When they reached Rome, she recalled she had left her passport in Florence, but on phoning there, she discovered she had left her jewelry behind in the hotel safe and that her passport was in fact sewn into the lining of her Hermès jacket, a precautionary trick employed when she was young and traveling alone through wild cities.

  Now she and Tintin walked through the Campo dei Fiori, where she had lived at nineteen or eighteen, tutta sola, all alone and happy in that quarter of flower stalls and fruits. And there above them now was the very apartment, the balcony lined with flowers in terra-cotta pots, the French windows gleaming. She had left her youth imprinted there on terrace and marble floor and apartment walls. Perhaps, she mused, she could scratch some flakes of her sojourn from the walls and retrieve from them the molecules of her youth.

  They lunched, then continued the tour of personal and historical sites, stopping many times to rest. Against Clavdia's objections, Tintin finally called the hotel for a car, which drew up smartly before the café where they were again stopping to rest. Clavdia wanted to see the Catacombs of St. Calixtus before calling it a day. She had been there once, and it had left a deep impression on her — or a man she had met there had left an impression on her, Tintin did not quite understand which — and so they went, down into the caves where in coves and niches the remains of monks had been stacked like dried codfish. A sarcophagus held a desiccated monk still in his moldy habit, his teeth intact under a horrid grin.

  Resting on his chest, a placard, on which he had written, some two hundred years before, the legend: "As you are, so I was. As I am, so shall you be." Rather than sadden or depress him, Tintin found the communication apt and vital. The force of the truism proved tonic. His spirits lifted, as indeed, they had during the whole of the journey. "How noble, and how beautiful death is when cast in the role of truth teller, more beautiful than that which lives and lies," he pronounced.

  "Never to see the sky and never to drink the wines of spring, never to buy gloves, and never to bathe in the afternoon glare of the sun as you and I fall asleep in a sweat of love, no, Tintin, not noble," Clavdia said in the car on their way back to the hotel. "Never to see Marlinspike and the sea where the captain made his last fiery voyage, nor hear the waves crash on Marlinspike's shore when in the night I turn to you and see your sweet face and smell your honey smell," she added in the elevator. "And never to see your Tintin face," she concluded, gasping in the giant hotel bed, where her breath and her life forever left her.

  Tintin carried her ashes to Marlinspike and scattered them over the sea and through the forest lanes where they rode, keeping a portion of her dust in an urn, which he buried beside Snowy and the headstone of the captain's empty grave.

  Little Tintin reappeared with wife and children, and after some consoling words broached the subject of Marlinspike's subdivision, citing especially the hugeness of the estate and the presently reduced number of inhabitants. Tintin was weary and promised never to consider the matter in his lifetime or at any time thereafter. Litigation it would be then. A battle in the courts, the last recourse left him, Little Tintin declared. He and wife turned away and left. Tintin imagined he heard in their departing footsteps the thunderous booms of dynamite exploding Marlinspike with its parks and sea dunes. He watched, as he had years before, his son's car, the most expensive ever made, speed away down the long drive­ way, and then he went to the upstairs galley and set about uncrating and hanging the artworks he had collected in his youth.

  He once had thought of paintings as colorful decorations, priceless wall coverings for the many naked walls of Marlinspike. Even after Clavdia had come to live with him and imposed beauty and order there, Marlinspike's walls still remained largely bare, paintings meaning little more to Clavdia than to Tintin. Now he roamed his collection and devoted hours to studying each of the paintings, waking up at times in the early morning to look again at a picture that had flashed through his head even as he slept. A large Matisse canvas drew him back many times. There figures nude and free danced on a field of blue, women and men t
heir arms held above them, hands joined in a whirling slow dance through the sluggish air of time. Of youth and life it made him think, naturally; of the dance of life, too, and the way that the dance slows and speeds; of joy and its sad twin it made him think; and finally, and at the heart, of Clavdia, death, and beauty it made him think.

  The soul of beauty takes many forms, he thought, as the tower was rising. Stone by stone it rose at the tipmost edge of the highest cliff overlooking the ocean. He went to it every day to watch the masons and carpenters turn the stones into his other, circular home, his tight room fronting the sea with a glass so thin as to seem invisible. There he slept and woke, with no earth beneath him, suspended in the fullness of sea and sky, the weld joining each a narrow scar his eyes did not distinguish.

  That afternoon the sky went gray, and great sheets of rain made a waterfall of his window; red lightning cracked through the great broil of sea sky, and thunder boomed through the vast park. The tower shook and slightly swayed in the rushing winds. Tintin first feared that stone and glass would tumble into the mad sea below, but then he thought he would welcome the plunge and let the elements take him where they would. He'd ride sovereign over them on a matchstick or they'd break him and whirl him into a jelly of bones and dreams. Toward midnight the storm abated, and the night turned into a crystal dome.

  Tintin searched the sky for Snowy and found him there, but the bone in the dog's mouth had disappeared, a glove dangled in its place, and farther along in the direction of Snowy's climb, or, indeed, what Snowy was mounting toward, stretched the hand of the inclining and waiting Clavdia.

  — Chapter XI —

  In the chill night before dawn they briefly woke. Not fully, not with the clarity of waking that brings the new day sharply to life and leaves the dream of sleep forgotten in the haze of the past. They woke with the recognition of what they had dreamed, each feeling they had lived the dream as fully as if they had experienced it in waking life. They had experienced it, and it was now etched forever in their living tissue, though perhaps not forever in their living memory.

  For a moment they looked at each other in the full wonder of what they had just dreamed — had lived — and with the drowsy indulgence of those who would wake and continue living, they returned to sleep, the memory of their dream fading with each breath.

  — Chapter XII —

  That morning, when he finally woke, Tintin found himself — how he did not remember — returned to his own room, to his own bed. For his bed mate, he had not Clavdia but Snowy, who, chilled in the dark chill of early morning, had crept under the covers of his master's then empty bed. It was to Snowy's woolly ear that Tintin's sighs and vows of love had been made in the razor light of dawn, not to the woman who had ushered him, still in the drowse of sleep dream and love, to his own quarters.

  Haddock's banging at the door brought Tintin away from his sleep sharply. It was breakfast time again. Too soon for Tintin, as was anything so ordinary after an evening of miracles. But to breakfast he went and to the very table and with the very companions of the previous day. (A day? A whole life had passed and another had begun in the span of those several hours!) Silence and torpor ruled, the meal consumed at a sluggish pace. Tintin lifted his eyes several times from his plate to direct them at the woman who sat erectly and distractedly opposite him, her hand grazing from time to time the sturdy hand of Herr Peeperkorn.

  Silent, languid, dull, the morning meal, yet for Tintin it bespoke activity. When he first saw Clavdia at the table, he was on the open sea, sails straining in the full, heady wind. She soon joined him at the wheel, the two riding the plunging waves, their swift schooner shivering beneath them as she ran the storm. Still later, while the others dawdled over coffee, Tintin was in his prison cell, alone, in his usual solitary confinement, where he had been born and where he was destined to die. Suddenly the cell door sprang open, and now he was waving his farewells to those envious inmates left behind in their iron cages, now he was descending the metal stair leading directly to the warden's office, where a huge, bearded man rose from behind his fatherly desk to greet him and warmly send him off into the world ready for the enterprise of happiness.

  Before yet further adventures ensued, the meal was pronounced over, done, finished, quite. Everyone agreed, Tintin as well, that a stroll was in order, an excursion at once touristical and tonic over the hills and declivities of the Inca ruins.

  Single file and slowly they climbed, Naptha in the lead, followed by Settembrini, Clavdia between Peeperkorn and Tintin, holding the hand of each, Haddock and Snowy trailing behind, until they reached the pinnacle of Huayna Picchu, the ancient lookout post of the Inca city. Snowy skirted the edge of the precipice, anxiously peering down the vast space to the jungle and river below. He whined and breathed shortly.

  "Snowy, what's the matter, old boy? Why this fit?" Tintin asked, breaking the morning silence.

  "As do all animals," Naptha answered, "your dog senses blood. From this very cliff Inca justice hurled Inca criminals two thousand feet to the floor below."

  "Death rituals interest me," Peeperkorn declared somberly, his expression pinched. "I have seen many kinds of deaths in my time, quite. Your ordinary deathbed variety — a little crackle and wheeze, the raspy expiration, very commonplace that signaling off into eternity, and very orderly is that death, a little whisk of the broom and the matter's clean and gone, whereas your suicide's usually a messy affair. Very few go out with grace; most leave their carcasses behind for someone else to clean up, like the weekend guest who's befouled his room and leaves you, smiling, suitcase in hand, to discover later the debris of his stay."

  "Blinding planks, briny pegs — 'nother squall approaches," Haddock interjected, his eyes skyward, as if reading the clouds.

  "It's a perfectly clear day, Captain. What are you saying?" Tintin asked.

  "That's his little joke on me," Peeperkorn said good-naturedly. "Have I been meandering again, my good captain? You are quite right to drop anchor on my drifting discourse."

  "No offense, Mr. Peeperkorn. Just that when you fellows set to tacking morbid channels, I feel the wind leave me sails. Becalmed I am in a cold sea of sleepy weeds and sloshy brine, and I go whistling at me boots."

  "To the Incas," continued Naptha, pretending to disregard the interruptions, "a criminal was beyond the pale of under­ stood humanity, a creature merely retaining the form of the man known before venturing into the illegal act, a contagion to be exorcised. And to this end there is no telling the passion of the community prior to the execution — the laments and shrieks of the man's family, the wailing of his former friends. The mountains clamored with howling dogs and bawling children. Timbrels, drums of stretched tiger skin, silver flutes, jade whistles marched in procession along a course lined with priests, nobles, artisans, while the criminal sang his death chant, the song of his expiation and his hope: 'Receive me, earth, receive me, sky, to one and all I say good-bye.'

  "And then to the cliff, the binding of the arms and legs, the fateful shove and final fall. At once all return to their accustomed lives — the twisted faces of the mourners now placid, the howling children now still, the world again as before, ordered, reasonable. None claim the corpse; none bury or burn it or drape it in trees. Far away from the city, it remains to rot and to be eaten and picked away, so far below that no reminding stench wafts to the sweet living mountains where men and women till the hillsides and tend children and fires."

  "I tell you, gentlemen and lady," Settembrini said heatedly, "that this is sheer fantasy! Another of Herr Naptha's insane fabrications. Amazing how he distorts, to suit his rabid reactionary head, the facts concerning a culture he knows full well was a model of tyranny, repression, whose aim was the subjugation, not the elevation, of the human spirit."

  "And I assure you all," Naptha answered, "that where there is order the spirit rises. Order, however, produces no pendulum swings from despair to joy but instills in the individual and in the community soul a mood of con
stant well-being, which, after all, is an elevation from the normal condition of those living in disorderly societies, the mood, that is, of daily uneasiness and unwellness. The democracies breed such morbid feelings, leaving the individual to believe himself free when this freedom is merely his right to confusion and misery."

  "Oh, my!" exclaimed Settembrini, holding his head in his hands. "Oh, yes, the goodness is in you but so bound with meanness and anger. To hear you say those words fills me with hope, for you must admit, finally, that democracy may breed reform where it once lay broken. May your goodwill ever reign, Herr Naptha."

  "In our time," continued Naptha, disregarding the Italian's benediction, "we have seen the wise application of the laws of human nature employed in a much-maligned state, one that gave broad room to the dynamism of those who, by dint of intelligence and will, would make their way to high economic and social planes, a state that rewarded a person's love of family and homeland, a state that defined human dignity as that balance between individualist license and responsibility to the community.

  "You, Settembrini, condemn Fascist Italy and dismiss its achievements, the very achievements that had they been made under the aegis of state capitalism or democratic socialism, you would be savoring and pronouncing their virtues. Instead you call II Duce a murderous buffoon and denigrate the social reforms he engineered as mere sops to keep the bourgeois in power."

 

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