The Carp Castle

by MacDonald Harris

  He had no use for the camels and he sold them to the farmer to be slaughtered for meat, which was in short supply at this time. With this small capital he bought other animals, hired an unemployed cabaret dancer as his assistant, and scrounged up a second-hand tent. He trained the farmer’s son, a former soldier like himself, to care for the animals and to assist him in training them. In no time he was the proprietor of his own circus and ready to take it on the road. The cabaret dancer learned to do pirouettes on top of the farmer’s draft horse, and also trained the Tibetan goats to dance with her on their hind legs. The farmer donated his horse and a cart in return for a share in the venture, and Cereste and the farmer’s son built a grandstand out of a demolished fence. In addition to his gift with animals, Cereste was an excellent business man; he drove a hard bargain with his suppliers and he was adept at wheedling for nothing things he couldn’t afford. In a few years the circus was prospering, with a new tent, a troupe of twenty including a Balinese trapeze team and a four-man band of black American jazz players. For a while he led the circus in his prisoner’s striped clothes and pillbox hat, a costume which, he thought, had a certain gaiety, then he bought an impresario’s outfit like the one he had worn in the circus before the War. Since he found it in a pawnshop it may even have been the same one. He called his circus Legrand’s Universal Traveling Pantechnicon.

  The circus traveled every year on a circuit that led it through Belgium, France, and the Low Countries. He avoided Germany, because in these times of famine the hungry Germans would have appropriated his animals and slaughtered them for meat, like the unfortunate camels. Cereste’s attitude toward his animals was complex and ambiguous. On the one hand he reveled in his mastery over them. He felt himself to be the lord of the animal world; he could compel even a boa constrictor to form letters of the alphabet on an easel, and his pyramid of animals topped with the cockatoo was the admiration of Europe. On the other hand, he felt a sense of responsibility toward his animals as their defender and mentor in a world dominated by humans. He had rescued them from the disasters of the War; now he was saddled with their fate and welfare. He had never married and had no children. He couldn’t guess what the feeling of a father toward his children was, but he imagined it was a combination of love, exasperation, and a vast instinct of protection toward them against the perils that beset all the living creatures of the earth. He and the lioness, locked eye to eye, were in a state of perilous equilibrium of wills, and yet they shared an understanding of their separate roles, and of a force something like love that locked them together. If it was not a gentle force, neither was love sometimes; he and the lioness were far gentler with each other than the lioness and her mate when they coupled. He had elevated the animals in the Heavenly order. The Tibetan goats stood on their hind legs, and the cockatoo spoke French. He imagined they were grateful for it. If not, his life had little meaning, and he was merely a vendor of banal spectacles to a vulgar public.

  In time the world grew tired of Legrand’s Universal Traveling Pantechnicon. The horse-drawn cart couldn’t travel far in a year, and everybody on the circuit had seen the show. People were now flocking to the movies, which were being shown in every town; they preferred the sight of richly clad Americans kissing, even though it was an artificial one on a screen, to that of a real boa constrictor forming the letter Q on an easel. Fewer and fewer towns were willing to let him set up his tent on their commons, because of the smell and the noise, and the bad influence of the performers on the children. (One of the trapeze artists was a pedophile, and the cabaret dancer changed costumes with her door open). The farmer died and his son left the circus to take care of the farm. The jazz band left him to perform at a club in Paris. Cereste was in debt and saw no way out; he had never done anything in his life except train animals in his cutaway coat and stand-up collar.

  One day he had set up his tent in a field on the outskirts of Brussels, not far from where he had first found his animals in the street after the War. The performance of the day was over and the tent was empty. He had no money to move on to the next town. Smoking a cigar and staring morosely at a llama, one of the few animals he had left, he saw approaching over the field a pair of ladies looking for a place to hold their religious revival. After some bargaining, Moira offered to rent his tent for a single night, for a fee large enough to keep, him going for a little while and feed the llama. The tent was spotlessly clean, the grandstand was newly painted (by the farmer’s son just before he left for home), and fresh straw was strewn over the ring in the center of the tent. In addition, Moira was impressed with his business sense and his acumen. He bargained with her (or more precisely with Aunt Madge Foxthorn, who handled this part of their affairs) so shrewdly that they ended by paying him twice what they had originally intended, on condition that he would oversee the lighting for the séance and arrange for an electric wire to be strung to the tent from a nearby inn.

  Just as an amusement, after they had settled on the terms, Cereste made the llama sit down one end at a time, then lie on its side, then turn onto its back with all four feet in the air. A Ulysses, a man of many expedients. Moira was determined to have him for her manager. She took Aunt Madge Foxthorn aside and whispered to her, and she agreed.

  SEVEN

  It is a clear morning in Croydon with a little mist clinging to the ground. Underneath the League of Nations the ground crew busies itself with its mysterious duties. The crew and passengers are on board and a crowd of spectators watches from behind a temporary barrier. The engines start one after the other, each with a cough, a spat of black smoke, and a stutter that settles into a hum. All four are running now and Chief Engineer Lieutenant Günther, from his post at the engineering station where he can catch glimpses of them through the hatches, contemplates their power, their efficiency, the beauty and complexity of their design, and their streamlined shape, thrust out on insect-legs into the air they are soon to overwhelm with their whirling swords.

  Voices call back and forth from the ground to the airship. A little water ballast falls from the nose, and at the same instant the dirigible is released from its mast. Like a carp floating to the surface, it rises with its nose a little high. In the morning stillness there is a tingling of engine telegraphs. Seen from the dirigible, the spectators shrink together and become so tiny that they are almost invisible, then they slide away behind. Turning away from the south wind, the dirigible describes a wide circle over Wimbledon and Richmond; it crosses West London at an altitude of two thousand feet. From the tail fin the silken banner drops with a shimmer and ripples away in the breeze; in the streets people look up to see the heart-shaped globe described in the newspapers.

  “Some day,” says the Captain, “that thing is going to get caught in the fin-cables, and we’ll have a real crock of shit.”

  “Ja, Herr Kapitän.” Erwin is hardly paying attention. He is watching the compass card as it creeps slowly around under the glass; the aluminum wheel is light in his fingers.

  “What do you think that thing means, Erwin? That the world is a big heart? Eh?”

  “I don’t know what it signifies, Herr Kapitän.”

  “Oh ja, Schiller again. Dass ich so trau-au-rig bin,” the Captain intones mournfully. “What do you think it means, Starkadder?”

  “I beg your pardon, sir?”

  “That heart in all different colors. What does it mean?”

  “It’s Madame Pockock’s flag, sir.”

  “Ah, very well, now that’s settled. Sharp on your marks, you two! Course zero one three. Steady on two thousand.”

  The Captain looks out ahead at the dreary north. He sends for his fleece-lined military coat and puts it on.

  *

  Most of the passengers have gathered at the windows in the lounge to watch the departure. After an hour they tire of this; there is little to be seen but the smokestacks of the Midlands, each with its plume of soot dangling from it. Günther, leaving the engines to his sub-officer and the four robots in the gondola
s, comes into the lounge rubbing his hands and smiling. He is hoping for someone to ask him to play the piano. No one does, so he sits down anyhow and plays the slow movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” weaving his head back and forth and closing his eyes at the more moving passages. Then it is the turn of the Lake Sisters, who play four-handed at the piano and sing along with it.

  Oh don’t you remember Alice Ben Bolt,

  Sweet Alice whose hair was so brown;

  Who wept with delight at the sight of your smile,

  And trembled with fear at your frown.

  There is polite applause. Günther smiles, secretly and dreamily, as though this was just his idea of a girl. Joshua Main says, “D’you know this one, lass?” He doesn’t seem to notice that there are two Lake Sisters and addresses them as if they were one person. He hums a few bars of “The Road to Mandalay,” and when they catch on and find the chords, he makes the lounge ring with the dawn coming up like thunder out of China cross the Bay. Before he is persuaded to sit down, pulled on the sleeve by Aunt Madge Foxthorn, he finishes with:

  Some have their girl on the old Tenderloin;

  That’s their ace in the hole …

  This makes the Lake Sisters blush. They get up from the piano and disappear into the passenger quarters.

  *

  Eliza and Romer sit on a sofa in the lounge, holding hands and turning the pages of a magazine on English country life. They sit there apparently enraptured by the cows, the hunting scenes, the gardens, the model dairies, but in reality spellbound by the proximity of their bodies on the sofa. Eliza’s little motor is running, sending its thrum through the particles of her blood. Aunt Madge Foxthorn has her eye on them from the other end of the lounge. Joan Esterel is at the window, with her chin on her hand and her bird-like rump stuck out, looking at the scenery.

  “She’s sure to stay there for an hour.”

  “Who?”

  “Joan Esterel, you fool!”

  “It’s too risky. John Basil Prell might stay away from my cabin for an hour—he’s over there reading a novel—but he might come back for his handkerchief or something.”

  “Anyhow I don’t fancy going to a men’s room.”

  “A men’s room?”

  “A room where two men live.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake.”

  Eliza becomes aware of an odor of smoke, still faint but pungent and nostril-wrinkling. She noticed it a moment before, and now it has become stronger. At first she thinks it’s the lunch being prepared in the galley, but it has a bucolic flavor like a bonfire. Perhaps it comes from the pages of the magazine they’re reading.

  Finally they get up and go see what it is. In West Yorkshire a farmer has set fire to a field, sending up a tall pillar of smoke that hangs in the dirigible’s wake. The League of Nations has just passed through it, sending the aroma penetrating into its passenger spaces. It seems uncanny that this odor should rise so high in the air where the dirigible had seemed invulnerable to all the processes of the earth. The burning field draws astern and they have to look back at a slant from the window to see it. Little scabs of orange fire can be seen at its base. Romer seems to be staring at Eliza oddly. Then he shakes his head and smiles.

  “What is it?”

  “The smell of smoke.”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s just—an experience I once had. This happens to evoke it. It’s not important.”

  He turns from the window and stands for a moment wrapped in thought. She can see that he’s not going to tell her about it. He is so proud! He will never tell her anything.

  *

  After he finished the university and before he started graduate school, Romer went to pay a visit to his parents in Venezuela. The ship carried him to Caracas, then he started the long train journey into the interior. All day and all night the train crawled over a landscape of lakes and marshes, then it crossed a range of hills into the plateau beyond. The next morning, at Buen Jesús on the Taguay River, he got off and hired an ox cart to take him the rest of the way to the plantation. It was winter in South America and he shivered in his thin student clothes. He had with him only a small imitation-leather valise with his meager possessions and presents for his mother and father. The thin winter fog of the plateau, the tramontón, lay over everything, bringing with it malaria, catarrh, fevers, bilious disorders, and rheumatism. Romer remembered it from his childhood as though it were an old dream.

  It was seven miles to the hacienda, three hours by ox cart. Just beyond La Vigía, a lonely calvary on a hillock, the sun burned away the fog and he saw the plantation ahead at the end of the wheel tracks in the dust. It was almost hidden in a haze of smoke that clung to the trees and enveloped the house so that only the roof showed.

  There was an odor in the air that made his nostrils crawl. He looked questioningly at the carretero but the man only shook his head. The plantation was large; it extended for a mile up the slope to a low range of hills and it followed the dry riverbed for as far as the eye could see. The oaks were planted in rows that followed the contour of the hills, and along the river they formed a broad avenue that his father had laid out with his surveyor’s instruments. They were thirty years old, older than he was. They had already produced their first cork, and would be ready for cutting again in a few years.

  The smell of burning grew stronger as he approached the plantation. At the end, the wheel tracks mounted a shallow ridge with a pair of junipers on it and came out in the courtyard before the house. His father was standing in the courtyard in dungarees and an American woolen shirt, the only clothes he wore. The suit in which he had come to Venezuela from America as a young man hung in his closet, full of moth holes.

  Romer paid the carretero and the man turned the cart around without a word and set off back down the dusty road. Romer and his father went into the house. It was a large bungalow with overhanging eaves and a porch in front. A few spots of white paint clung to the grayish wood. Inside, the rooms were spacious. One was full of books, another contained a grand piano, now dusty and unplayed. A solarium faced south through slanted windows, and a few sickly plants stretched up as best they could toward the rays of the winter sun. The kitchen was immense. When Romer was a child, there had been servants. His parents had a bedroom fitted with a large four-poster bed with a canopy and curtains, imported from Europe. His own room was just as he had left it, first to go away to school at Buen Jesús and then to the university in America. His bed was made and there was a sprig of heather in a wine bottle on the table.

  He turned to face his father. For the first time they embraced. His father had the same kind of body that he did, sinewy and elongated, with a narrow face and long hands. His complexion was lighter and his hair brown; Romer had the complexion of his Spanish mother. Both men’s faces were marked by the scars of acne. His father’s teeth were poor; there was no dentist in Buen Jesús and he would have to go to the provincial capital to have them fixed. He gripped Romer fiercely but wordlessly for a moment, then let him go.

  “Come and see your mother.”

  His mother was sitting in an armchair in the solarium, facing the sun. The smell of smoke penetrated even here into the house. Everything was dusty except the armchair, which was polished and shiny so that it reflected her hand lying on the arm. She had an old rag rug over her lap. He bent to kiss her as well as he could in her seated position. She was grossly overweight, with a moonlike damp complexion. Her hair was gray and a strand of it dangled on her cheek. Even over the smell of smoke he could detect her nutty, slightly corrupt odor which he remembered from his childhood. He released his grasp of her shoulders and straightened up.

  “Hijo.”

  Not knowing what to say, he asked her how she was.

  “Muy mala.”

  When Romer left to go to the university in America, only four years ago, she and his father spoke English together. Now she had reverted to Spanish. Romer had learned Spanish as a child, but now he spoke it wi
th a strange labor as though he were chewing taffy. It struck him that mala meant either sick or evil, depending on the verb it was used with. He tried to think of some banal questions to ask her about her health. She replied only with phrases about la merced de Dios and las ultimas cosas. He had never before known her to be religious. She didn’t seem to remember his name; she called him only hijo.

  His father took his elbow and led him from the room. In the kitchen he poured two cups of coffee and they drank it silently.

  After a while he said, “She is very bad, as you can see. She never stirs from that chair. She would be better if she walked around a little bit. I bring her the bed pan. At night I take her to the bed, and I lie beside her until it’s daylight and I get up. Nobody knows what’s the matter with her. It’s too far to take her to a doctor. Anyhow I haven’t got the money. She doesn’t eat much. She’s nourished by her sickness. She drinks her sickness like wine, and after a while she has to have more and more of it. She will live as long as the moon. She will never die. I will die first.”

  “And how are you, father?”

  “Muy bueno.” He smiled.