Tintin in the New World: A Romance

by Frederic Tuten

  The disappointment on the lieutenant's face pierced Tintin.

  "Yes, there is more to say, which you and your goodness deserve, my lieutenant: Know that 'the earth revolves, men are born, live their time and die; communities are formed and are dissolved; dynasties appear and disappear; good contends with evil and evil still has its day; the whole, however, advancing slowly but unerringly toward the great consummation, which was designed from the beginning and which is certain to arrive in the end.... The supreme folly of the hour is to imagine that perfection will come before its stated time.’"

  "Well, then, Señor Tintin," the lieutenant said, "let us now truly be on our way."

  — Chapter XXII —

  [One month later. Lima. Dusk.]

  On the Plaza de las Armas, near Lima's antique cathedral, where Don Francisco Pizarro's leathery corpse lies in an alcove, protected from the touch of the curious and the ravages of polluting air by an enclosed glass vault, on this plaza where Tintin sat cross-legged, begging his meal, passed at dusk a woman in a Castilian mantilla and jeweled peña, her long, close-fitting black dress swirling along the pavement.

  "¿Qué pasa?" her sleek-haired, youthful companion inquired as she paused before the mendicant.

  "Nada, aspereme un momentito," she replied, leaving his side to address the bearded and tattered young man. "It is you, isn't it?"

  "Someone like that," answered Tintin, slowly lifting his eyes to Clavdia Chauchat's troubled face.

  "I think of you often, Tintin. And do you me?"

  "When I feel ill, since you are my illness."

  "As for myself," the woman hissed, "ever since the calamity, 'nothing is left me but to brood, brood, all day, all night in unprofitable longings and repinings.' I cannot be with you, or with myself. I'm emptied. Since you cannot kill my emptiness, kill me, its vessel."

  "I would kill you if it would help you. It is an indifferent matter to me, killing you now. Once I would have killed us both; once, after the merge, I would have done it with all the passion of my humanized heart. I would have killed us with such love that all the uncombined elements of this world would have envied our union. To kill our flesh and join in spirit, how I longed for that once.

  "But not today. Do not ask now, 'Tintin, kill me.' Say, 'Tintin, execute me.' And I shall, as if you were some animal in pain. Shall I send a smooth bullet through your temple or heart? Shall I cave in your brains with Lima's curbstone? Say now, Clavdia, what to do, for there is yet some kindness in me to treat you with charity. Presently it will require your own lonely hand to do you this service and this mercy."

  Clavdia stiffened. "Your new heart has acquired a taint of the vindictive, a taint making you truly human — grown-up, that is."

  "Yes," said Tintin after a long, meditative pause. "You are right. I deplore my unkind words and the bitterness of my heart. Forgive me, Clavdia. Some lives are marked for sadness, and I have become so marked, though perhaps I shall emerge from this phase as I did from my former carefreeness. But for now the sadness in me is magnetlike and attracts the general misery of the world, sad for everything that exists, seeing, as I do, the metamorphosis of all things in creation. My eyes have gone alchemist, transmuting the smooth faces of children into the lines of their old age, seeing in the most youthful of mountains, raw, giant juniors of the earth, their decline to hills, boulders, rocks, pebbles, the crumbling away to mere sand, dust, and motes.

  "Since all changes, all saddens me. I see the years slide you down the chute of eternity, a decay winnowing you from living to dead cells and thence to powder and vanishment. What will recriminations and broodings serve us then? Perhaps one day in the kind reach of eternity my indifferent atoms will circuit yours. Let us hope and strive for no more."

  "Your words serve only to infuriate my blood — to use an expression you yourself might employ in your newly extravagant diction," Clavdia answered. "And because of your cruel words I elect to live and to outlive you. Let's see then how our little story finishes," Clavdia said, beckoning her pomaded escort from his impatient vigil.

  Tintin looked on as the two entered the cathedral. Then, counting the coins in his hand, he made his way deeper and deeper into the city's slums.

  — Chapter XXIII —

  [One month later. One hour after dawn. Belem, Brazil.]

  A laundry shop some three meters from a quay on the eastern bank of the Para, formerly the scene of much commercial activity, when cargo ships ran the river, holds loaded with rubber and coffee beans, ships from Europe and North America, from Iceland and Mozambique.

  Tintin entered. The old Chinaman behind the counter studied the youth for some long moments, then rose and bowed. "What language shall we speak?" the laundryman asked in Portuguese.

  "Whichever you prefer," Tintin answered in Portuguese. "I hope I have not kept you waiting long," Tintin added.

  "Waiting. Yes, I have been at that some while, but that is finished now. And now that you've come, I am free to return to my country; there are one or two old friends I wish to see. "

  "The good Lieutenant?" Tintin asked.

  The Chinaman smiled. "Oh! Yes, he is one."

  "That we should meet, that you possess the last link of knowledge between me and my fate, I have recently divined," Tintin said. "Let us now open and conclude our matter. I board the mailboat within the hour."

  "Let boat and plans go," the Chinaman said gently, making preparations for tea.

  Tintin excused himself for his rudeness and bowed to the older man. "Unfortunately there is still left in me some of the former self, which contrition and thought may yet purge," he said, bowing again.

  "My prince," the Chinaman began, himself returning the bow, his face radiant, "I am to tell you ... "

  The Chinaman spoke until afternoon, when Tintin curled himself up on a mound of laundry and went to sleep. When he woke, it was dark; his companion had already lit the night lamps and had prepared tea and rice. Now they both spoke, their discussion drifting through the night but returning always to Tintin and to the revelations waiting for him.

  — Chapter XXIV —

  Some say they saw Tintin at the mouth of the Tocantins, on a red riverboat plying the muddy stream. Bearded and sun-tanned, a silk green kerchief, the color of the rain forest wall, circling his neck, chameleon he had become. In some light his skin was honey and copper; in other light, pale yellow; and in the shade of a tree or beside the wall of a river mud hut, purple-black.

  Whatever his color, all welcomed him and were honored by his visit: The sick were cured by his healing touch; the blind had sight; the mute spoke; the tormented were calmed. Many spoke of his special fondness for dogs, the rheumy and the quick, and how they would greet him in the villages, barking an exultant howl, and rush among themselves for his gentle words and caress. But he was no stranger to all the breeds and races of plants and animals. The shy mimosa opened at his glance; the spiky maguey drooped at his touch, its barbs turned soft and pliant. Of all the creatures he encountered or that came deliberately to see him, the mole and the anaconda, the tapir and the spider monkey, the eagle and her nervous children, of them all, the jaguar he heeded most.

  He spent hours in their lairs, preaching to them during their bloody, jaguar repasts the virtue of leaf and grass, for it was known he ate only that which grew in the soil and turned to the sun. He was, many in the villages said, the jaguars' prince.

  He crossed the Gran Chaco on foot, paddled his way in a batelao up the Pilcomayo, following the trail of the explorers Crevaux and Ibaretta and Thouar, the Frenchman, who had made the perilous journey from the Upper Pilcomayo to Asuncion on the Río Paraguay, and there on the salty swamps of the middle-river journey, he sojourned with the fierce Tobas, whom he taught the use of rare plants and herbs that cured the suffering and disease the chill south wind always blew them. On his departure the Indians trained women and children in the lost art of the blowgun and began to set large stores of poison to tip their arrows and shafts. Passing through
the vast hardwood quebracho forests in the southern part of the Chaco, Tintin lived among the native workers in the tannin factories, addressing the men during siesta on the virtues of the noble, stately trees from which they drew their meager subsistence, explaining that presently the timber would be all gone, the way of the brazilwood, the distant redwood.

  "Noble they are, noble, quite — your brothers." Some workers armed with rifles quit the factories and ranged the hardwood tracts, preaching to the loggers the virtues of the forests and threatening to shoot their overseers. Production halted temporarily.

  On June 21, the Inca festival of the sun, two thousand tribes, many who had never known the existence of the others and others who had been ancient, murderous enemies, joined in harmonious union, gathering in a vast plain where many rivers crossed: the Xingús with their stone axes and knives made from the teeth of the piranha, the passive Muras of the lower Amazon, their bodies caked black with river mud to protect them against mosquitoes, the Yuracarés from the banks of the Río Chapare in eastern Bolivia, with bow and long arrows, the seminomadic Zaparos from the Napo Valley in Ecuador, Salome Indians from the state of Morales, Mexico, in white suits and huaraches, bearing Winchesters and machetes, the plateau and mountain people of the Andean plateau and the Cordillera Real, the remnants of the ferocious Argentine pampa tribes exterminated by General Roca in 1879; sullen and silent, the remaining fifteen Tehuelches of the Patagonian plains, who practiced throwing the bola, the Caraios of the Orinoco basin, who carried blowguns and grenades in their long war canoes. Standing on a knoll at a crossing of several giant rivers, his arms outstretched in a gesture of embrace, Tintin addressed the multitude in a forgotten ancient language once common to all tribes, a language they suddenly, joyously recalled, and he shared with them his vision.

  Some weeks later, alone once again, Tintin sat cross-legged by a grassy embankment, regarding the Amazon for three days. When, at last, he could see all the algae and the amoebas and spirogyras, when he could see all the microscopic cells and their molecules and the molecules of water and its atoms, the two of hydrogen and the one circuit of oxygen, when he could see the neutrons, protons, electrons, and the stars brilliantly shining beyond them like a vast wall of blue shimmering and pulsating through the universe, he undressed completely — except for a red macumba pouch strung about his neck — immersed himself in the water, and streamed away into the ribboned darkness and light.

  — The End —

  — ABOUT THE AUTHOR —

  FREDERIC TUTEN is the author of five novels: The Adventures of Mao on the Long March; Tallien: A Brief Romance; Tintin in the New World; van Gogh's Bad Café; and most recently, The Green Hour.

  He has written on art, film and literature for such publications as Art Forum, Art in America, and The New York Times. His short stories have appeared in Tri-Quarterly, Fiction, The New Review of Literature, Fence, Conjunctions, and Granta. He has published essays on the artists R.B. Kitaj, David Salle, Roy Lichtenstein, Eric Fischl, and John Baldessari.

  For fifteen years, Dr. Tuten directed the Graduate Program in Literature and Creative Writing, which he helped found, at the City College of New York, where he is currently Professor Emeritus, and where he continues to conduct graduate seminars in fiction. He also leads literature seminars at the New School University.

  Tuten has received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing and an Award for Distinguished Writing from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.