Memoir From Antproof Case, Page 2

  "I be right back, a big promise," he says, and hops away. Of course, he doesn't go to the bathroom, he runs to my office to find out how to say something in English. Then he darts back, after asking, for example, "How you say the plural of goose?"

  He has become my slave in return for my constant availability, on account of which I must stagger my class and office hours to accommodate his schedule. Watoon survives by doing what I tell him. He stopped drinking coffee years ago. He runs errands. He supplied my lightweight bulletproof vest. If he dies, life will be very difficult for me. If I die first, he goes to the poor house.

  Without Nestor B. Watoon, the cadets of the Brazilian naval academy would not think that popcorn is a fruit. They would not have the opportunity of following in the footsteps of a young lieutenant who, attending an official funeral, approached the official widow, made a sad bow, and said, "Bon appétit. " They would not think that the opposite of cool was "worm," or that "turban" engines come in several "virgins."

  The defining moment of Nestor's life came when he accompanied an American carrier group for several days' patrol in the South Atlantic—I stayed behind, fearing arrest on the high seas. It broke my heart not to be able to sail with my compatriots, and to its everlasting mortification the Brazilian navy had to send Nestor Watoon in my place.

  The Americans seem to have enjoyed his company. I don't know what he did, though I can imagine. The cruise lasted only a short time, but the damage is to posterity, for Nestor took a notebook, and no matter what I say he will not correct or vary the usages he picked up. This book has become his bible, and its phrases will reverberate in joint exercises and in the careers of various naval attachés, tarring the Brazilian navy perhaps for centuries.

  In the Watoon holy book it is written, for example, that the English for Russian admirals is "shit-eating wussies." He was cordially received by all hands, as attested to by his entry, "Expression of general approval—yaw mutha." And since it is not unknown in this country for military men to rise to high political position, I can imagine a future exchange, long after I am dead, in which the American secretary of state requests Brazil to lower a tariff, and his Brazilian counterpart politely replies, "Suck my ass." His students slavishly imitate him, believing it is true when he tells them that he speaks the King's English. What king?

  I cannot pretend to be unmoved by the purity and innocence of the youthful naval cadets. They are the sons I never had, as is Funio. In observing them I often feel that I am watching a film in a darkened theater. There before me, as in a dream, the characters move silently, laughing, or their eyes sparkling with anger and animation. Sometimes in films you see the characters without hearing what they say, with music the only commentary. This I find most touching, for in my detachment I am sometimes closer to them than I would be in life. The audience watches from the darkness as if it has died and is revisiting all that it knew of life from a perspective even more benevolent than that of the disinterestedness of age. When your chances have run out and your prospects disappeared, and you are alone in the dark, looking back, you live life to the fullest and the clearest, and this is when, belatedly, you really know love.

  My cadets are far from this now, but the years will quiet them. They will be lost in making love, like Paolo and Francesca, for what seems like eternity. They will ride waves, stage coups or fight them, and raise children. They will struggle for fortune like salmon struggling against a snow-swollen river. They will know failure and triumph intertwining, locked in a braid of life and death. But eventually they will sit in a quiet room and understand that the bright days and fiercely contested struggles have been solely for the purpose of bringing them to this poignant and tender silence.

  What astonishes me more and more is that even after such moments, when the human soul is brought to its utmost purity, the play starts up again, the fight resumes, the illusions flood back. Even in an old man like me.

  I cross the bay before sunrise to confront several classes of strong-hearted boys who know virtually nothing but have the energy of saber-toothed tigers. I am fully engaged but I am also watching as if from a darkened room. I am angry, and I am touched. I laugh, and I am deeply moved.

  An image I see again and again lies at the heart of my artless confession if only because it is, somehow, the unadorned truth. I'm not quite sure what it means, but I cannot stop seeing it. A family is walking in the Jardim Botânico, in the depths of the trees, slowly making their way down a long sandy road that runs between ranks of impossibly high royal palms. They are alone, half in shade and half in weakening sunlight. It is not a dream, for I have seen it. Some distance behind his father and mother is a boy of three or four, walking with bare feet and wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. He pulls a plastic wagon on a white string, and all he knows is what is before him. Perhaps he is Funio and I am the father, although I think not, for the father is young, and my heart is broken because I will die when Funio is still a child.

  When I came here I was already a grown man. I had long finished with being a soldier, and was just finished with being a thief. I had a mustache that was blond, not white, and I was as strong as an ape in the Bronx Zoo. The ape is an animal that you hope, as you watch it accomplishing its isometrics against the iron bars restraining it, will break through even if it means that it may turn its attention to you, because you have enough idealistic principle left, planted by nuns, priests, or rabbis, to wish for his freedom. He does deserve freedom. That we put him in a cage is beneficial to us but a rather obvious transgression of the golden rule.

  I went free. I escaped. I contradicted laws, disappointed expectations, and defied balances. I was fifty years old. Marlise was twenty, but I hadn't met her yet. I met her when she was twenty-three. She didn't know a goddamned thing, and she was so beautiful she didn't have to. Our simple appreciation of one another created a spark that in its white brilliance and its breathlessness answered riddles, settled questions, made us happy. We surrendered, one to the other, but in private, according to the rhythm of a hundred million years rather than to satisfy a semipolitical requirement, as is so often the case today with men and women.

  When I arrived here I felt as if I had burst into another dimension. For years I did not long for home, because I thought I had suddenly popped into heaven. Rather than lose myself in the illusory treasures of the flesh, I fell in love with a girl thirty years my junior, and treated her with extraordinary tenderness. In those days I spent a lot of time upon the outcroppings that lead to São Conrado, watching the waves strike the base of the gray glacier of rock, feeling the wind, and eyeing the beach beyond.

  Whatever brought me here may be the same thing that enables a man to look death in the face. That I was allowed to live the rest of my life was not my good fortune but rather my customary burden, something I never feared would leave me, if only because I wanted it to. Let me, however, return to specifics: I hate to look too deeply into myself, because looking too deeply into yourself makes you into a myopus.

  I met Marlise when she was working as a teller of the Banco do Brazil in a branch at the bottom of the hill in Santa Teresa, where I lived, in 1957. I wanted to deposit some money and was directed to the window behind which Marlise had been imprisoned for a year. When I saw her, I dropped my deposit slip. I didn't know what to say, so I blurted out the truth. I told her that I loved her.

  She thought I was crazy, and spoke to me in the effective and insulting language that banks supply to lovely female tellers for use in such circumstances.

  "Marlise," I said, for her name was engraved on a block that pivoted in front of her window, "Marlise, I love you. I say so directly, because I have twenty-five or thirty years left, after fifty in which I have been a soldier, and a prisoner of war, and God knows what else, in which, like everyone, I have lost and I have loved, and I understand now that I have no time to waste, Marlise, and that, though you are young, neither do you."

  It may have been the in which construction, it may have been a ch
urch bell that was ringing and calling to the depth of everyone's heart, even as they were standing, as I was, in a bank line. It may have been the hour, or the day, or her fervent desire, or the simple fact that I was telling the truth, but she believed me, she accepted what I said, the bell rang, she kissed me through the bars, the manager popped up like a pheasant, and we were married, quite impractically, that afternoon.

  Can you imagine a bank teller, a beautiful girl of twenty-three, kissing a customer through the bars? This is what the countries of the north have grown great in imagining and lacking—but I had it. We kissed, and we had a moment of truth, as in the chiming of a bell, or maybe a bull fight, that has kept us together through all the subsequent and difficult years.

  I don't approve of liaisons, much less marriages, between people of vastly different ages, but I couldn't resist her, and I pledged myself to her as few young men could, not knowing themselves well, or having been deeply wounded. If she had married a younger man other than a Jesuit or some other kind of priest, who knows what might have become of her?

  I was fifty-three and as lean and solid as a weight lifter. I had fifteen sound years left during which I ate mainly endive, tuna, shrimp, and fruit. I didn't smoke, drink, or use drugs, and in spitting in the devil's eye I get strength.

  Until she was thirty she didn't even know the difference. In frequency perhaps, but not in hallucinatory intensity. I made up in gratitude what I lacked in vigor, and I could tell her stories. When we finished, I would embrace her as if my life depended upon it, which it did.

  When Marlise entered middle age and I became old we looked at one another askance. This red-haired bank teller with huge tremendous bosoms and teeth, who still fit trimly in a bikini, was like a steadily burning coal, while I was like the ash at the end of a cigar. She began to have affairs. I forgave her, I forgive her, for she brought me Funio, and Funio, though of another man, is like a son to me.

  About eight years ago, we went looking for Marlise's father, who was a priest and who, rather than leave the priesthood, gave her up. I have always said that he made one wrong decision after another. The first was to take his vows, the second to break them, and the third, not to shatter them completely.

  For Christ's sake, what are angels? Here was a man whose heart rose, it is safe to assume, in contemplation of saints and angels, and when an angel was actually delivered to him—even if by his indiscretion—he should have taken that angel in. I took Funio that way, though he was not mine. After one tear, literally, one single tear that I shed because of Marlise's betrayal and my old age, I allowed his raw cry to fill me full of life. But I'm pulling ahead of myself.

  We went to the North, which is like a country in Africa—vast, dry, hot, and poor. The air smells of mangoes, carrion, and the sea. We had heard that Marlise's father was resident in a parish somewhere near Natal, and for two days we traveled by bus, boat, and on foot to a forgotten strip of coast where the Atlantic drives upon the shore in great white bales of brine that have been propelled across the vacant ocean from the Bight of Benin. The beach was thirty miles long and backed along its entire length by a mile of pristinely white marching dunes as soft and dry as talcum.

  We drank bottled water and ate fruit that we washed in the waves. Church and parish house were twenty miles up the beach and just behind the dunes, where a river made a wide bend before it breached the walls of sand to pour into the sea.

  "How do we get there?" we asked at a little town north and west of Natal.

  And they said, "You walk."

  "On the road?"

  "There is no road."

  "No road?"

  "No."

  People from country places sometimes honor me with a reply, perhaps because I look like one of them who has survived into old age. And, if you call the fields in the midst of which I was born country, which they were then but are no longer, I suppose I am. I closed one eye and skeptically cleared my throat.

  "No road at all," was the response.

  "How do they get their produce to market? How do they get mail and supplies?" I asked.

  "By boat."

  "Then we'll go on the boat."

  "If you want to wait six weeks."

  "What about a fishing boat?"

  "You can walk twice as fast, and walking costs nothing."

  "A jeep?"

  "No way to get across the river."

  "A raft."

  "Two and a half days to build it."

  "How do we get across the river?" I asked.

  "You swim."

  "Why not go in a canoe?" By this time the whole village had gathered around us, more toothless mouths than I had seen in years, and the people were enjoying our ignorance immensely.

  "If you want, grandfather, you can cross in a canoe, but you will have to swim in the ocean a hundred times to keep cool, so why waste effort by not swimming?"

  We sensed that this might be an elaborate joke, that just beyond the dunes was a superhighway with air-conditioned bus service, or a Swiss-made monorail with complimentary chocolates on the seats. But we did like the idea of walking twenty miles on a deserted beach and we entered the river with the whole village watching, our fruit and bottled water in plastic net bags floating beside us.

  When we emerged, our clothes were fresh and clinging, our hearts beating. After a few minutes of walking by the edge of thundering surf as high as a house we were alone in a place where we would not see a single soul or the work of man for the rest of the day.

  Nothing stopped us and no one could hear, so we sang. I have a strong voice even now, but it is Marlise who sings precisely, sweetly, and well. And we did swim a hundred times. Ever since I was a boy I have loved the idea of swimming in my clothes, so that I could cross a river or a lake and keep moving after I had emerged from the water. I like the way a wet shirt feels on a hot and windy day, and khakis crisp with sun and salt, as stiff as a starched army uniform.

  When my plane went down in the Mediterranean in 1943 I swam at least ten miles to shore, and here, with no mirrors in which to see myself, and a heart buoyed by bright sun and the surf, I felt almost as free, almost as triumphant.

  The difference was that now I was old, and the death I had escaped had become, once again, not always so unpleasant to contemplate, except that I had Marlise, who at forty-two was at the peak of her glory. I will never forget her as she walked in the wind, barefoot, disheveled, and perfect. I will never forget the streaks of salt that curved down her back and whitened upon her shoulders. Nor her dancelike movements as she strode through those magnificent hours. When the wind changed, and blew her hair in front of her face, she tied it in a thick rope that was as red as her lips, and I thought to myself that I had done the right thing, that had I stayed in the office and risen high in the esteem of others I would not have had a hundredth of what I had here—the clean sea air forced into my lungs as if I were drowning in it, and midday as bright and hot as a lamp.

  After we came to the river, beyond which the beach continued to stretch as if to infinity, we turned inland and walked a mile or two through irrigated fields that were so still we could hear the ocean singing in our ears long after we had left the sound behind.

  We found the priest in the wooden rectory of a wooden church. He was drinking coffee and reading the Bible. I grasped my stomach, pivoted, and sought the outside.

  He rose immediately, assuming that I had come to him, as undoubtedly some did, to seek last rites, but Marlise took him aside and whispered, gesturing with her hands. Then she gave him one of the strong mints that she carries for the purpose of ... well, I think you know by now. I have heard only the beginning of her practiced monologue, because I always absent myself after the words, "Forgive me, but my husband is a crazy person."

  It's mortifying, especially in light of the fact that I am right and they are wrong. And I'm hardly the one who's crazy. Catherine the Great, who looked no more like Ingrid Bergman than I do, but was in fact a dead ringer for Edward Everett Horton,
used to make her own coffee when she arose—as I arise—very early in the morning. Her customary recipe called for one pound of ground coffee to four cups of water. She was known to be a jitterbug, and now you know why.

  I knew immediately that the priest was not Marlise's father. He was a midget and she is statuesque. He was many shades darker than she, though she had been in the sun and he had not. He had deeply socketed pop-eyes and caterpillar eyebrows, whereas her eyes are wide and almost oriental, and her brows ride above them as high and delicately arched as single willow branches.

  Either his lack of physical resemblance to her or her diplomacy in getting him to pour his coffee down the drain had temporarily driven from her the question we had come to ask. But when I returned and the three of us stood in the cool shade of the rectory front room, it returned, probably because of her strong sense of mission but possibly because we had come such a long way.

  "Father," she cried, sinking to her knees, in tears.

  "Yes my child," he answered, in requisite but puzzled compassion.

  "Are you my father?" she asked.

  "Yes, of course."

  "Literally?"

  "Why do you ask?"

  "We heard a rumor."

  "Where?" he asked indignantly.

  "In Rio."

  "Rio! I've never been to Rio. From whom did you hear this rumor?"

  "From my mother."

  "I don't know your mother, I never broke my vows, not even once, and if I had it is unlikely that the child of such a union would have been like you, unless the mother was..."

  "How about a giraffe?" I asked, cruelly, but the smell of coffee does make me cruel. Marlise hit me in the stomach, with many times the impact of an assassin's .12-calibre bullet (but sans penetration), and I went down. She's sensitive about her height.

  Then came the first inkling I had of Funio, because, out of nowhere, Marlise announced, "I'm a pregnant giraffe."

  Constance had been too busy to have a child, and Marlise had had such a miserable upbringing herself that she could not bear the thought of bringing a baby into the world, until, evidently, just before the wire—for she was of an age when these things cease to be matters of concern except in retrospection. I had reconciled myself to dying without an heir.