Chapter Six
And what you call dying is finally dying, and what you call birth is beginning to die, and what you call living is dying in life.
QUEVEDO: The Dreams
(July 18)
XXXIV/ We had just emerged from a fleecy bank of clouds still touched with daylight—amid truncated arches, crumbling obelisks, smoke-faced colossi—to descend into the dusk of the city whose lights were just coming on. Some of the passengers amused themselves identifying a stadium, a park, a main thoroughfare in this vast luminous geometry. Some were happy to be arriving, whereas it was with disturbing apprehension that I approached this world I had left a month and a half before by calendar calculation —but the immensity of the six weeks I had lived was incommensurable by the chronology of that climate.
My wife had left the theater for a new role: that of wife.
This was the great novelty that had brought me flying over the smoke of suburbs I never thought to see again, instead of getting ready to return to Santa Mónica de los Venados, where Your woman was waiting for me with the outline of the Threnody, which could now be developed on reams and reams of paper. To make the situation even more ironic, my traveling companions, for whom I was the great attraction on this trip, seemed to envy me. They all showed me newspaper clippings with pictures of Ruth in our home surrounded by reporters, or standing mournfully and gracefully before the displays of the Museum of Organography, or dramatically examining a map in the Curator’s apartment. One night at a performance, I was told, she had a presentiment. She went to pieces and had to leave the stage in the middle of her big scene with Booth, rushing straight to the office of one of the big newspapers, telling them she had had no news of me, that I should have been back at the beginning of the month, and that my old teacher, who had been to see her that afternoon, was really worried.
The reporters’ imagination did the rest. There were front-page articles with pictures of explorers, travelers, scientists who had been captured by savage tribes—with Fawcett in the foreground, naturally—and Ruth hysterically begging the newspaper to rescue me, offering a reward to the person finding me in that great green unexplored spot which the Curator had pointed out on the map as the geographical setting of my mission. The next morning Ruth’s pathetic figure was in the public eye, and my disappearance, which nobody had known of the evening before, became headline news. Different pictures of me were published, including that of my first communion—that first communion which my father had so reluctantly agreed to—on the steps of the Church of Jesus del Monte, and those in uniform before the ruins of Monte Cassino and outside Villa Wahnfried with the Negro soldiers. The Curator explained to the press, with lavish praise, my theory (which now seemed to me so absurd) of magic-rhythm-mimetism, and my wife had drawn a beautiful picture of our happy married life.
But what irritated me most was that the newspaper, which had so generously rewarded the aviators who rescued me, had taken the line that I was an exemplary person. The persistent theme of all the articles was that I was a martyr to scientific research who had been restored to the bosom of his admirable wife; that the domestic virtues were to be found in the world of the theater and art; that talent gave no license to flout the laws of society: vide the Little Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, remember Mendelssohn’s placid home, etc.
As I learned all that had been done to bring me out of the jungle, I felt a mixture of shame and irritation. The country had spent a fortune on me, enough to support several families comfortably for the rest of their lives. In my case, as in that of Fawcett, I was shocked by the contrast of a society that could be completely indifferent to suburbs such as those we were flying over, where the children were packed in under corrugated metal roofs, but which dissolved in pity at the thought that an explorer, ethnologist, or hunter might have got lost or been captured by savages while performing a task he selected of his own accord where such things are normal hazards, like a bullfighter’s being gored. For millions of human beings the wars menacing the world’s very existence had, for the time being, been crowded out of their mind by the news of me. And those who were prepared to greet me as a hero did not know that they would be applauding a liar. For everything about that flight, then coming in for a landing, was a lie.
I was in the bar where the Kappellmeister had been laid out when, from the other end of the earth, Ruth’s voice reached me over the telephone wires. She was crying and laughing, and there were so many people around her that I could hardly hear what she was trying to tell me. Then suddenly there came words of endearment and the information that she had left the theater to be with me always, and that she was taking the first plane to join me. Terrified by this plan, which would bring her into my territory, to the very antechamber of my evasion, there where divorce is extremely long-drawn-out and difficult because of Hispanic laws that include laying the case before the Rota, I shouted to her that she was to stay home, and that I was the one who would take the first plane. In her confused good-by, interrupted by extraneous noises, it seemed to me that I heard her say something about wanting to become a mother. Afterwards, mentally reviewing what I had been able to make of the conversation, I asked myself if she had said she wanted to become a mother or was going to be a mother. Unfortunately, this latter possibility was not to be discounted, for we had had our last routine Sunday rites less than three months before.
It was at this moment that I accepted the considerable sum offered by the newspaper that had arranged my rescue for the exclusive rights to a pack of lies—fifty pages of them. I would not describe the wonders of my journey, for that would have put Santa Mónica and the Valley of the Plateaus at the mercy of the most undesirable visitors. Fortunately the pilots who found me had alluded only to a “mission” in their reports, following the custom of calling any remote spot where a friar has erected a cross a “mission.” And as the public was not particularly interested in missions, I could keep many things to myself. What I would sell was a tall story to which I had been putting the finishing touches during the trip: I was held prisoner by a tribe that was suspicious rather than cruel; I finally managed to escape, crossing, all alone, hundreds of miles of jungle; finally, lost and hungry, I reached the “mission” where they found me. I had in my suitcase a famous novel by a South American writer, giving the names of animals, trees, native legends, long-forgotten events, everything needed to lend a ring of authenticity to my narration.
With what I was to be paid for it, which would guarantee Ruth about three years of comfortable living, I should feel less remorse at asking for a divorce. There was no doubt that my situation was now worse, from a moral point of view, with this matter of her pregnancy—which would explain her sudden abandonment of the theater and her desire to join me. What I would have to face was the worst of all tyrannies: that exercised by those who love over the person who does not want to be loved, abetted by a tenderness and humility that disarm violence and silence the words of repudiation. There is no worse adversary in the kind of fight that confronted me than one who shoulders all the blame and begs forgiveness before he can be shown the door.
I had barely stepped down from the plane when Ruth’s mouth had come to meet mine, and her body to seek mine in that unexpected intimacy created by the unbuttoned coats brushed aside. I recognized her breasts and belly beneath their thin covering—and then came the weeping on my shoulder. I was blinded by a thousand flashes like broken mirrors in the twilight of the airport. Then it was the Curator, who threw his arms about me; there came the delegation from the university, headed by the Chancellor and the deans of the faculties; several high government and city officials; the managing editor of the newspaper—weren’t Exteeaych and the painter of ceramics and the dancer there, too?—and, finally, the staff of my studio, with the president of the company and the public-relations agent, who was already completely drunk. Out of the confusion and bewilderment that lapped me around, I saw many faces emerge, as though from a great distance, which I had forgott
en, faces of so many who had been close associates for years, working together, or meeting at the same places, and who, after I had not seen them for a time, had disappeared with their names and the sound of the words they spoke.
Escorted by these wraiths, I set out for the reception at City Hall. I watched Ruth under the chandeliers of the portrait gallery, and it seemed to me that she was playing the best part she ever had in her life. Treading the measures of an endless arabesque, little by little she became the center of the stage, its focal point, and, stealing the show from the other women, she assumed the functions of the mistress of the house with the grace and agility of a ballerina. She was everywhere; she disappeared behind the pillars, to appear somewhere else, ubiquitous, intangible; she adopted the right gesture for the photographer snapping her; she relieved an important headache, finding the needed tablet in her purse; she came toward me with a tidbit or a glass in her hand, gazed raptly at me for a moment, brushing against me with a gesture of intimacy which each of those present thought that he alone had noticed; she came, she went, adding the sparkling comment when someone quoted Shakespeare, made a brief statement to the press, said that she would go with me on my next trip to the jungle; stood slenderly erect before the newsreel camera—and her performance was so subtle, so varied, so suggestive, surrendering while keeping her distance, arousing admiration while showing her utter devotion to me, employing a thousand skillful devices to convey the picture of connubial bliss, and all so perfectly staged that I felt like applauding.
At this reception Ruth displayed the tremulous joy of the bride about to embark—this time without the pain of deflowering—on a second honeymoon; she was Genevieve of Brabant back in the castle; she was Penelope listening to Ulysses speak of the conjugal couch; she was Griselda ennobled by faith and patience. Finally, when she sensed that her repertory was wearing thin, and that repetition might take the bloom of! this Leading Lady act, she referred touchingly to my fatigue, to my desire for rest in the intimacy of the home after so many and such cruel tribulations, and they let us leave. The men winked knowingly as they watched my wife, in her clinging dress, descend the stairway of honor on my arm. I had the impression as we left City Hall that the curtain was about to be lowered and the footlights turned off.
I felt remote from all this. I was so far from all this. When, a few moments before, the president of the company, had said to me: “Take yourself a few more days of rest,” I had looked at him strangely, almost in indignation at the thought that he felt he had any rights over my time. And then I found myself in what was my house, as though I was stepping into that of another. None of the things I saw there had the meaning for me they once had had, nor had I the least desire to repossess any of them. Among the books lined up on the shelves of the library, there were hundreds that were dead as far as I was concerned. An entire literature that I had considered the most intelligent and subtle of the epoch had toppled with all its false wonders. The special smell of this apartment took me back to a life I did not want to live a second time. . . .
As we walked in, Ruth bent over to pick up a newspaper clipping that someone, a neighbor no doubt, had slipped under the door. Its contents seemed to cause her mounting surprise. I gave thanks for this distraction, which would delay the dreaded gestures of affection, giving me time to collect my thoughts for what I wanted to say to her, when with a violent gesture she turned to me, her eyes flashing with anger. She handed me the clipping, and I shivered at the sight of a picture of Mouche talking with a reporter of one of the scandal sheets.
The title of the article spoke of “revelations” about my trip. The writer told of a conversation he had had with my former mistress, who had coolly informed him that she had been my collaborator in the jungle. According to her, while I was studying the primitive musical instruments from the point of view of organography, she was observing them from the astrological angle, because, as was well known, many nations of antiquity related their musical scales to the order of the planets. With the most unabashed boldness, with errors that would have provoked the mirth of any specialist, Mouche spoke of the “rain dance” of the Zuñi Indians, with its species of elemental symphony in seven movements; dragged in the Hindustani ragas, referred to Pythagoras with examples that she had clearly picked up from Exteeaych. And it was not without skill, this display of phony erudition, designed to justify her presence on the trip in the eyes of the public, completely covering up the real nature of our relations. She presented herself as a student of astrology who had taken advantage of this mission entrusted to a friend to acquaint herself with the cosmogonic concepts of the most primitive Indians. She wound up her tale by stating that she had been forced to give up her undertaking when stricken by malaria, and had returned in Doctor Montsalvatje’s canoe.
That was all she said, knowing that it would suffice for those who could read between the lines. This was her revenge for my flight with Rosario and for the fine publicity my wife was getting in this great hoax. And what she did not say, the reporter managed to convey with vicious sarcasm: Ruth had stirred up the whole country to rescue a man who, if the truth were told, had gone off to the jungle with his mistress. The equivocal aspect of the story was borne out by the silence of the one who had reappeared out of the shadows with the sliest opportunism.
Suddenly the conjugal drama my wife had put on fell from the sublime to the ridiculous. She looked at me with unspeakable fury; her face seemed the papier-mâché of a tragic mask, and her mouth, contracted in a sardonic grimace, showed her set teeth. Her tense hands were clenched in her hair, as though looking for something to tear to pieces. I realized that I had better forestall the rage that was on the point of exploding, so I precipitated the crisis by-blurting out what I had planned to hold off for several days, when I could employ the coarse but undeniable argument of money.
I laid the blame on her theatrical ambitions, on the vocation that she had put ahead of everything else, our bodily separation, the impossibility of a married life reduced to fornicating every seventh day. And, swept along by the vengeful need of adding the knife-edged detail to what I had already said, I told her that, one fine day, her flesh had become indifferent to me, that her body had turned into the mere image of a duty performed because of the unwillingness to face the problems involved in an apparently unjustified rupture. Then I told her about Mouche, about our first meetings, about her studio with its astral décor, where at least I had found a kind of youthful abandon, a gay shamelessness, with that touch of the animal which for me was indispensable to physical love. Ruth, sunk to the carpet, panting, all the veins of her face traced in green, kept repeating in a kind of hoarse moan, as though to bring to an end an unbearable operation: “Go on . . . go on . . . go on.”
But I was now up to my break with Mouche, my disgust with her vices and lies, my contempt for all her misguided ideas about life, for her profession, which lived by deceit, and the eternal confusion of her friends taken in by the deceptive ideas of others equally deceived, ever since I had seen things with new eyes, as though I had returned, my sight restored, from a long sojourn in the house of truth. Ruth had risen to her knees to hear me better. And I saw in her eyes the spark of too facile a pity, of a generous tolerance that was the last thing I wanted. Her face was softening into an expression of understanding at the thought of weakness so severely punished, and in a moment a hand would be held out to the strayed sheep—and then tearful, magnanimous forgiveness. Through an open door I saw her bed all decked out with the best sheets, flowers on the dresser, my slippers standing beside hers, in anticipation of the foreordained embrace, which would undoubtedly be followed by a delicate dinner that was probably ready somewhere in the apartment, with its white wines already chilling.
Forgiveness was so close that I felt the moment had come for the coup de grâce, and I brought Rosario out of her hiding-place, presenting this new dramatis persona to Ruth’s astounded eyes as something rare, remote, exceptional, incomprehensible for those back h
ere, for a special code was necessary to understand her. I painted her as a being who had no point of contact with our values, whom it would be impossible to hope to comprehend through the usual approaches; she was an arcanum made flesh who had set her seal upon me after trials whose secret must never be revealed, like those of the knightly orders. In the midst of the drama that had this familiar room for its setting, I was taking a perverse delight in further disconcerting my wife by the Kundry-like air my words were lending Rosario, surrounding her with the props of a Garden of Eden, the boa that Gavilán had tracked playing the part of the serpent. I was so carried away by this verbal invention that my voice acquired so firm and steady a ring that Ruth, in the face of a real threat, drew closer to give more attention to what I was saying. Suddenly I let fall the word “divorce,” and, as she did not seem to grasp it, I repeated it calmly several times in the resolute, unruffled tone of one who states an irrevocable decision.
This was the great tragedienne’s cue. I cannot recall what she said during the half-hour she held the stage of our room. The thing that most impressed me was her gestures, the gestures of her slender arms, which moved from her rigid body to her masklike face, underscoring her words with pathetic restraint. I now suspect that all Ruth’s dramatic inhibitions, her having had to play the same role year after year, her never-achieved desire to flagellate herself, living the sorrow and the fury of Medea on the stage, suddenly found their outlet in that monologue, which rose to a paroxysm. But all at once her arms fell, her voice descended to the lower register, and my wife personified the Law. Her language became that of the bench, the prosecuting attorney. Cold and implacable, assuming the attitude of accusation, stiff in the blackness of the dress that no longer molded her figure, she warned me that she had it in her power to keep me chained to her for a long time, that she would put every obstacle in the way of a divorce, that she would lay every kind of legal snare for me, dragging out the proceedings endlessly to prevent my return to the side of the woman to whom she applied the ridiculous name of Your Atala. She seemed a majestic statue rather than a woman, standing there on the green carpet like an inexorable Power, like the personification of Justice.
The Lost Steps Page 24