by Mark Helprin
With the aid of my pocketknife, we set about freeing the bluefin. I lifted a line to give it tension, and she snapped it with the blade. Just like the fish that had been freed before, those newly released circled once or twice and then propelled themselves with all their power toward the open sea.
Freeing the bluefin brought us closer. She was, after all, my sister. Our blood was the same. There was much that we shared in common without ever realizing it.
MY SISTER was staring through the cracks in the pier when I looked up and saw Santos-Ott coming toward us.
First I thought of pushing her into the water, but he would undoubtedly have come to her rescue and scolded me, and there they would have been, face-to-face, with my value as a mediator wasted. Then I realized that I didn’t have any value as a mediator. He was used to dealing directly and decisively with everyone and everything, and so was she.
When he was halfway down the pier, I thought of pushing him into the water. I didn’t have to think about it very long. I had seen quite a few unsheathed bayonets, and though at that age I had no fear of death, I made up for it with a dread of pain.
When he got to us, she was still staring at the remaining bluefin, and her straw hat covered her eyes. I bent down beside her and said so quickly under my breath that all the words may have compressed into only a few, “There’s someone here. Don’t say anything. Just shut up.” And then I added, “Don’t be a chatterbox.”
“This is my sister,” I said. I didn’t need to tell her who he was, but I did anyway. “And this is Santos-Ott.” I turned scarlet. He was amused.
When she looked up, and rose, I saw him change. Of course I can only speculate as to what moved him, but I believe that he felt admiration and goodwill for her youth. What is more endearing than a young girl on the verge of womanhood? For an old man, she lights up the world.
I was proud that she was so tall, that her eyes were bluer than his, that she was handsomer, and that she was absolutely uncorrupted and perhaps incorruptible. She put him in his place in a thousand ways, and he must have had to think hard of his fleet and his army just to be able to look her in the eye.
Even without my introduction she would have recognized him instantly, for, although I had hardly noticed, his straw hat and open shirt had given way to an admiral’s arctic-white uniform. He had so many gold stripes and stars on his epaulets that compared to him the commander of the navy looked like a rating, and he wore a huge medal on a red sash. Only one kind of man will take a solitary afternoon walk dressed like five field marshals, a different kind of man from the one who had talked to me about fishing.
“I can hardly believe my eyes,” my sister said without any sarcasm. Still, I thought this was disrespectful. So did he.
“How so?” he asked.
“Is it true?” she inquired, sliding gradually into the tone I had hoped she would avoid. “The caudillo is standing on my brother’s fishing pier, alone, without guards?”
“I don’t need guards,” he said.
“Have you left the palaces unguarded?” she riposted, as quickly as if she had been following a script. “Will you walk through the capital alone, through the Fourth District, for example, because you are so beloved of your people?”
I believe that she was at him so fast because, after her initial shock, she was relatively unimpressed. Perhaps if she had had less presence the weight of his own would have constrained her. Although I was upset, I was not really surprised: neither of them was any good at wasting time.
I tried to stop her by interrupting about the fish, but he gestured for me to be quiet. He tensed the muscles around his mouth and narrowed his eyes. How ugly and terrible a fault he revealed as he faced a young girl as if he were confronting thousands of men, horses, and field guns.
“My object isn’t to be beloved,” he said, “or to court public sentiment.”
“No?”
“No,” he answered, shaking his head. “Each country on this continent is braced to come apart in anarchy but for the one man who holds it together, the man who is appreciated only when he is absent. Then they call for him. But the people have short memories. In your case, because you are a child, you have no memory at all. My father died in the last civil war, as did hundreds of thousands of others. To you, it is prehistoric. You cannot feel it. You don’t even think of it. For me, it has never ended.
“And as for my courage,” he said, stabbing the air with his index finger, “I will, if I desire, walk through any district in the capital, and any valley in the mountains, completely alone. You underestimate me. Long before you or your parents were born, I had learned many a hard lesson.
“Put me in the mountains today with nothing but a peasant’s clothing and a sword, and I’ll again raise armies, confound my enemies, survive, and prevail. I don’t need those men,” he said, sweeping his left arm toward the soldiers in the sentry boxes, who almost came to attention at the gesture, “and they know it. If I did need them, even one of them, I wouldn’t be here. You know,” he said, shifting tone in a way that offered her escape if she would succumb to the shock of his onslaught, “I don’t have power because my portrait is on postage stamps. My portrait is on postage stamps because my power was born with me.”
I felt oppressed by the consistency of what Santos-Ott had said, and I understood even then that no answer could obliterate his point entirely. But, to my great surprise, my sister answered him, and she did it without the slightest hesitation, for she, too, was able to draw on passion.
Whereas his had had identifiable origins, hers had taken form instantly. But, then, power grows from accident as much as from discipline. As she addressed him I trembled, but she was as steady as a stone pillar.
“Caudillo,” she said, as if she were the chief of state, “you pervert logic for your own benefit. Perhaps because everyone is afraid of you, no one has corrected your error. Perhaps no one has even tried. Let me explain to you how you err.”
Without doubt, no one had spoken to him like this in more than half a century. I knew that save some miraculous intervention my sister was going to die. She also knew, but she went on as fluently as a columnist in La Prensa. She neither faltered nor hesitated. Her voice did not break, her eyes did not leave his for a moment.
Though I was astounded and proud, I feared for my father and mother. I knew that whatever happened they would suffer most, and I began to cry.
“You present two alternatives,” she stated, like a prosecutor. Where she had picked up the firmness and speed in her voice I do not know. “The first is anarchy, and the second is your absolute authority. You say that to avoid one we must have the other. What would you say, then, to an anarchist who put it in the same light: ‘To avoid despotism, we must have anarchy’? Both of you will fight till kingdom come and, if need be, flip positions as readily as you flip temperaments. When the anarchist unseats you, he will be the strictest authoritarian. When you are unseated, how quickly you will become Santos-Ott, anarchist.”
“Do you realize the cost of this outburst?” Santos-Ott asked almost tenderly, as if he had visualized not only what was going to happen but his regret as well.
“Yes, I do!” she shouted. “My life. So you’d better listen.”
“I cannot believe that you have not been schooled deep within the opposition,” he stated, coolly. “I cannot believe that you have not been raised on hatred and bitterness.”
“Of course you can’t,” she replied, matching him in tone as if to show that he had no more self-control than did she. “If you believed any differently, you’d have to quit. Most people, Caudillo, do not oppose you: they are merely injured by you.”
“Do you understand what you have done?” the caudillo asked, relishing the mortal blow he was about to deliver. “Obviously you could not have thought up such things yourself. Your parents should have been more careful.”
“What do you mean?” Claudia asked. “Be clear.”
I could hardly believe that my sister had inst
ructed Santos-Ott to be clear.
He slowly nodded his head, as if he had confirmed his own notion, and he said, “I mean that revolutionaries should not keep parrots. That’s what I mean.”
He turned his back on us and walked away. No matter what his sins or powers, he had the air of a man who had been deeply hurt.
FOR A MOMENT we were stunned, but then, as if it were a way out of the bind into which Santos-Ott had put us, we began again to cut the bluefin loose. Each time a fish broke from captivity it circled in puzzlement with none of the easy grace it had had in the freedom of the sea. But when it got its bearings and knew exactly where to go it picked up speed and swam as straight and powerfully as a torpedo, cresting the foam where the breakers caught the reef and then disappearing into the ocean’s comforting infinitude.
When we had seen them leaping in the open sea, and could see them no more, our momentary satisfaction gave way to fear. Neither she nor I felt like standing on the pier in full view of the sentry boxes and the soldiers, and we went into the groves on our side of the wall.
Sheltered from the midday sun, we stood in the shade and looked up through the branches of the citrus trees. Their leaves were dark green, as shiny as a newly waxed automobile. Not one was ragged or about to fall. Through them we could see the far more perfect deep blue sky. We were near a pool of light, and everything else under the trees seemed like black lacquer. It was cooler in the dark, and I felt as if my heart were beating as fast as the wings of the glistening insects that flew among the leaves like creatures of polished gold.
“What are we going to do?” I asked, not fully able to separate what was happening from what might have been had it been a game.
At first she made no response, and then she said something remarkable, in that it showed that she had already come to terms with her situation and with herself. She said, “What I regret the most is that I have never been in love with anyone who loved me. I thought it was only a matter of time. It probably was.”
“You’ll have it,” I said, ashamed of lying to someone who could see so clearly.
“No,” she answered. “I won’t.”
Then we heard footsteps. In my childishness, I thought it would be armed men. But it was my father, walking on the lighted paths between the trees, having come to summon us to lunch. Despite the heat, he was in a tweed jacket, the same one that he wore on weekends in the city. It was light in color, almost white, and with the sun shining off it I had to squint to look at him. He passed by, missing us in the shade. He called for us, and as he was calling my sister’s eyes filled with tears. She ran out from the trees. “Here we are, Daddy,” she said, and went to him, flinging herself into his arms.
This was strange behavior for a girl who had passed the summer in an adolescent sulk, but my father quickly embraced her, as if she were a child, for she was, after all, his child, his firstborn.
AND NOW I HAVE RETURNED, more than half a century later, to the edge of the sea where, a few days after we stood in the pools of light and dark under the citrus trees, my sister drowned herself. Though it is autumn now and I am sitting in the shade, in my house, in the Sixth District, I feel as if I am on the beach in full light, staring out at the water, right next to the waves. It is a very strange feeling. All I have to do is close my eyes, and what I see is more real than what is real.
In fifty years there has been no forgetting. All the trips to glaciers, fjords, and ancient cities have been to no avail, for somehow I have always been at the Mar Nueva. I might as well have gone there every summer.
Though we maintained superficial connections, I was driven from my father forever. Despite my youth, he could never forgive me for not warning him, and from then on he thought of me as intolerably stupid. But he was wrong. We would not have been able to leave the country, and if, as he had imagined, he had gone to the caudillo to offer himself as a sacrifice, the caudillo, I am sure, would have killed them both. The caudillo, after all, ruled all his life and died a natural death. Garcia, who had succeeded him, was overthrown shortly thereafter, but not Santos-Ott, for Santos-Ott knew best of all how to obliterate opposition—efficiently, almost automatically, irrevocably.
And he did. My sister died. My parents, who had never liked Santos-Ott but had never done anything to oppose him, were broken. They lived and died in defeat. Of course, he gave them every reason to go against him, but he was clever enough to paralyze them by leaving them their son. And what do you think that did to me? The answer is that I have remained a quiet man all my life.
Claudia drowned in the deep blue, but the tides brought her home. I found her early one morning, in the shallows, her back rising above the little waves, her hair all tangled as it moved with them, and now she has a grave. Still, in December when I returned to the Mar Nueva the first thing I did was to go down to the water and report to her there, for I believe her soul and youth are in the sea.
I told her how much my parents had loved her, and how they had never forgotten, not even for a moment. I told her of my life, and how I had lived it, and of my sorrow. And I told her of how, once, not long before her death, I had seen her when she thought she was unobserved, with her arms around herself as if someone were holding her.
Rain
IN HIS ENDLESS GRIEF, the deputy inspector of customs often thought about St. John’s Park. For in the months before Mackie, at age eighteen, put a pistol to his head and died in his father’s house on the tenth of September, 1867, St. John’s Park had been torn up, and in its place had risen the Hudson River Railroad freight depot. The park had been as flat as a stone floor and full of widely spaced trees as straight as the white columns of St. John’s Chapel. Fine houses separated by spacious gardens had surrounded it. In the winter, at dusk, the newly appointed deputy inspector and his son had sometimes walked through in the cold wind, while lamps and fires flickered in the houses on the perimeter. And when darkness settled they had broken the winter stillness with their difficult conversation. Mackie was troubled, and his father, who though he tried could not plumb even the shallows of those troubles, was frightened.
As long as the park had been inviolate, and as long as there were in the city itself so many quiet, empty streets, and a tranquillity like that of the Berkshires or the plains that feed cold winds into Albany, the deputy inspector of customs believed that the glory, order, and commanding silence of the past could come forward to smooth the roiled waters of the present in an omniscient velvet tide.
But the park had been broken in a season or two, subsumed in industry, the value of the houses surrounding it destroyed, the fortunes that had built them forcibly evaporated, and the memories that once had rested lightly on the snow-covered field buried as grimly as the dead they had kept lively in the souls of the living. Mackie, just eighteen, a clerk in an insurance office and newly enlisted in a National Guard regiment, somehow had felt such unbearable heaviness that he had put an end to everything.
His father, who for so long a time had had to face the deaths of his relatives, friends, and dreams, one following upon another and never seeming to cease, was now defeated utterly. The passing years made no difference to him as he waited to sail out, living gracefully when he could, but only for the sake of those he loved and not for his own, and to reflect as much as possible before the moment of his obliteration.
Reflection and contemplation had come easily and inescapably to him, like the flow of the Hudson past the town of Hudson, or the rise of the Catskill eagle on March winds: reflection and contemplation for their truth and nothing else. He was far less useful in almost any other way, though he was able to do things, and had done them capably. But what he had done, and what he would do, his immersion in the fires of activity, seemed only a distraction from the pull of infinite, actionless darkness. Reflection had been to no avail, for in the end he found himself swept on the same great current and as helpless and bewildered as the most unreflective man alive.
EVERY MORNING on his way to the customs house he passed
a bookseller on a side street far from the crowds on the avenues and yet, even accounting for that, mysteriously inactive. Many stores manage somehow, day after day, to exist without customers, and so did this one. He had never seen anyone in it, not even once, although he himself had discovered there a copy of Typee, pushed back in the shadows, low on the geography shelf, damaged, spine out. Of all his books, this was the one that represented him least, and there it had stood for at least four years, and might stay forever.
In the window of this strange shop sometimes attended to by a heronlike balding man whose resentment of everything was flawlessly communicated even when all one could see of him was his back, was the Bird’s Eye View of the City of New York. A highly detailed, hand-colored lithograph ten years out of date, it showed New York from aloft, gripped in the frenzy of commerce. Despite problems of perspective that made an unsuspecting horse near the Brooklyn Navy Yard as big as a five-story building, it was majestic overall. One could see at a glance why, with a great engine such as New York supplying the armies with shot, shell, ships, and men, the Union could only have prevailed in the War of Rebellion.
Ships swarmed at the docks, anchored in the rivers, moved out to sea, and came into the harbor. The plumes of white sail or steam that identified them for what they were, were matched in signaling power by billows of smoke from factory chimneys, running full out with the wind. And like the engraving itself, fading in the sun year after year, the clouds dispersed and went pale, their substance fleeting even as their motion was frozen.
On the way to the customs house every morning, quiet and inconsolable, he stopped before the fading lithograph to peer into the muted streets of Brooklyn. There, sometimes, on a winter morning, he had turned the corner on a prospect both empty and long, its buildings stolid and patient in the cold air and pale sunshine. With everyone at work or inside by the fire, these houses were as quiet as headstones.
