No Enemy But Time

by Michael Bishop

  “There you go,” said Jeannette Monegal, thumping his back. “You just haven’t readjusted to the pleasures of fine food and drink yet. What have they been feeding you at the hospital?”

  “Rice.”

  “What else?” she asked rhetorically. “I wrote you a letter, Johnny.”

  “A letter? Why?”

  “In case they wouldn’t let me see you.”

  “They did, though.”

  “Amazingly. Through Dr. Kaprow’s good offices. Neither the Air Force nor Alistair Blair nor the Zarakali government wanted to let me in. My book on Spain—it’s just come out—has already given me a reputation as a caustic international muckraker. I had to sign a document declaring that I was coming to Zarakal solely as a tourist. Supposedly, having signed the damn thing, I can’t even publish a travel article without first clearing it with the American Embassy and two or three local ministries.”

  “You agreed to that?”

  “To see you, yes—I certainly did.” She withdrew an envelope from her large straw purse. “Here’s the letter. Please don’t read it till I go. If you have any questions, you can write me in care of Anna in Newport News, Virginia. She and Dennis Junior are visiting in-laws. Here’s the address. I’ve got your APO number. We’ll stay in touch, okay? If you remove yourself from my life for another eight years, John-John, I’ll be an old woman when next we meet. So stay in touch, okay?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She slid a bill of large denomination across the table and stood up. He rose, too, but she would not permit him to accompany her to the airport, insisting that an airport farewell would “demolish me utterly,” phraseology he had never before heard on her lips. They had both changed in eight years, eroded or subtly augmented by the sweep of time’s river. The rattle of wine glasses and silverware, the background babble of English and Swahili—Joshua suddenly felt isolated and bereft. He wanted his mother to go quickly because he did not want her to go at all. She kissed him on the forehead, the blessing of a matriarch on one of her smallest and most beloved.

  “Ciao, Johnny.”

  “Cao,” he responded automatically.

  Jeannette laughed. “I hope I’m not supposed to construe that as a slur. Even if I deserve it. ’Bye, honey. Be good.” She threw him a kiss and, carrying her own bag, stooped into the rear seat of a minicab parked about a quarter of a block from Karsanji’s. When the cab came cruising past the restaurant, she gave him a faint smile before stoically averting her gaze.

  He ate the remainder of his crêpe, drank the last few sips of his wine, and, buoyed by the money she had left, ordered a custard and another bottle of Chablis. He was already high, and many of the people around him undoubtedly attributed his furtive glances at the street, his maniacal alertness, to the quantity of wine he was putting away. Or maybe he was involved in an illicit affair and both his drinking and his nervous watchfulness were inspired by guilt. The predator for which he kept watch might be his paramour’s cuckolded husband.

  Actually, he was thinking of Helen and wondering what she would have made of this bizarre scene. The primeval savannah underlay nearly thirty square blocks of concrete, stucco, and glass. Males in cutaway jackets and leather sandals brought food to you at a table. The streets were full of unimaginable noise, and the women walking upright past the shop windows wore plumage as bright as, or even brighter than, that which the males wore. . . . Joshua was glad Helen had not survived to witness the benign horror of civilization, equally glad he had survived to re-experience it. To dislodge Helen from his mind, he opened his mother’s letter—which, over a year and a half ago, she had composed in longhand in Madrid.

  Apologies and a quiet plea for reconciliation dominated the first page or so, shading away into news about Anna and her handsome new son. Johnny was an uncle; she, Jeannette, a grandmother. They would be a real family again when he and Dennis Whitcomb returned from East Africa—for Anna had ignored Johnny’s advice and spilled the beans about his assignment to Russell-Tharaka Air Force Base.

  Well, of course she had. Joshua had belatedly realized that she would, driven by her sense of family and her respect for family hierarchies. It was all right. Joshua forgave Anna her trespass, which was less against him than against the Air Force and the sovereign state of Zarakal.

  At which point the letter shifted gears again, moving from the topic of family bonds to that of blood relationships. A subtle, even disturbing shift. Joshua’s hands began to tremble—not merely from the heat and the wine—as he continued reading what his mother had written:

  After doing my one and only novel (which did not of me an Agatha Christie or a Barbara Cartland make—so quickly back to nonfiction), I contracted with Vireo to do The Reign in Spain: Life and Politics in Post-Franco Iberia. Then I came here to research and write my book. Or, at least, the book was my ostensible reason for coming. The truth is that I thought you might be here, too, searching for a part of your own past you never had the opportunity to verify on your own.

  Do you remember, when you were in your early teens you sometimes used to flaunt the nom de guerre Juan Ocampo? Usually you were pretending to be a Latin American shortstop on some major-league baseball team, but you also liked to sign that name to poems, to secret pacts with your boyhood friends, and to confidential Declarations of Independence from the tyranny of Mother and Father Monegal. These last documents you often managed to leak to the tyrants themselves by “caching” them in such out-of-the-way places as my American Heritage Dictionary or the catch-all drawer in Hugo’s workbench in the utility room.

  Anyway, this behavior led me to suppose that you cherished the idea of an identity separate from the bourgeois one with which we had saddled you, and that one day you might try to inherit this alternative life. Maybe, in fact, this submerged identity would free you from the dreams that so frequently estranged you not only from us but from yourself. If he thinks that being Juan Ocampo will free him (I reasoned), he is very likely to go to Spain in search of the latent Juan Ocampo in his heart. The idea for the book I am now working on came to me as a pretext—a literal pretext—for following you to Spain.

  And then Anna wrote to say you were going to Zarakal, shattering my hopes of finding you here and sentencing me to six months at hard labor on this brilliant book of mine.

  The Reign in Spain (by Eliza Doolittle).

  Anyway, I decided to find your mother. If she still happened to be alive. My researches were going to take me to Andalucía and Sevilla, in any case, and I might as well combine book business and my quasi-maternal curiosity to see what I could see.

  Does the name Carl Hollis mean anything to you? Undoubtedly not. He was the intelligence agent who declared—during our interview in Colonel Unger’s office at Morón AFB almost a quarter of a century ago—that Encarnación Ocampo had disappeared, probably forever. I never knew if by that he meant that she was dead or that she had simply vanished into the concealing vastness of the countryside like a guerrilla fighter. Because the former assumption pretty much preempted hope, I decided to proceed on the latter.

  A good thing, too, for, John-John, I found your mother.

  Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe have nothing on me, son—not, at least, when it comes to tracking Missing Mothers. (Missing Sons I am not so good at, even when they take up residence within spitting distance of their fathers’ last duty assignment. In a couple of other senses, though, I am damned adept at Missing You.) I won’t go into the details here. Suffice it to say that I returned to the tenement where Encarnación lived with you in 1962–63. Because I was obviously not a policewoman or a pusher of some vampirish sort, a surprising number of people talked to me. In many ways, after all, Encarnación was—is—a memorable figure, menacing or plucky depending on your point of view. I had always leaned to plucky—because, when she might have surrendered you to her despair, she saw you to the safety of Santa Clara.

  Anyway, my informants—three of them, John-John—remembered your mother very well and gave me s
ome profitable leads.

  I traced Encarnación to an Andalusian village called Espejo. Here she is living today, Johnny, no longer either a prostitute or a black marketeer. She has redeemed her life in an extremely old-fashioned way, at least for the female of our species, and I will not presume any sort of political comment about this fact. Not, at least, in this letter. You see, she is married to a robust, red-haired barkeep and bodega owner named Antonio Montaraz, who appears in his boisterous way to dote on her. She must be approaching the change of life, but she has had at least nine children by this man, the youngest a babe-in-arms whom she suckles between stints as a barmaid in Señor Montaraz’s dingy but prosperous hole-in-the-wall tavern. The children also help their father, and although there is a lot of public bickering and noise, the barkeep’s regime seems to be popular even among the older siblings. This is a tight-knit family, with both Antonio and Encarnación in stolidly traditional roles. It looks suffocating to me—pardon me, my slip is showing—but your mother seems to be more than content with her lot.

  The principal question now in your mind is probably this: Did I talk to her? Tell her about you? Trot out my own maternal experiences as a counterweight to your mother’s? The answer to this question—these questions—is No, of course not. You see, Johnny, to the cheerfully busy Montarazes I was a dowdy/doughty Englishwoman, with a phrase-book command of Spanish, who had stumbled off a tour bus disastrously misrouted out of Córdoba. I did not try to correct this false impression.

  Suppose that I had blurted out my story to Encarnación. Would she have recoiled from me as an evil messenger intent on destroying her present life with lurid tales of her past? It’s quite possible. Or suppose that my mentioning you, out of the hearing of her husband, had afflicted her with a terrible anxiety about your whereabouts, your safety, your happiness. Because I still cannot completely reassure myself on these points, I could not have reassured her, either. So I pretended to a tourist’s illiteracy and spoke only a little.

  Do you, there in exotic Zarakal, remember your Spanish? Even a little? Well, the surname Montaraz means “wild, primitive, uncivilized,” and to some extent this is a perfect characterization of your little half-brothers and half-sisters. None is as dark as you, John-John, and I doubt seriously that any of them ever suffers cripplingly vivid dreams about prehistoric East Africa, but, in many respects, they are nevertheless a feral crew. Their mother signals them with rapid-fire hand gestures, which, even though they can all speak, they relay to one another with remarkable deftness, cutting their eyes for emphasis. They communicate as effectively without words as with them, but they are noisy for Antonio’s sake. He is a raconteur and yowler who cannot keep his mouth shut.

  I don’t think this is a milieu you would find especially compatible, but one day you may want to visit the Montarazes and decide for yourself. The address in Espejo is 17 Avenida de Franco. I caution you, however, to think about the likely impact of such a visit. The ramifications go far beyond the mere satisfaction of your filial curiosity.

  That Encarnación is alive and happy in a world such as ours strikes me as a miracle, and miracles are their own justification. Although hope, faith, optimism, and the formidable power of what the late Dr. Peale liked to call “positive thinking” are clearly essential to the progress of our species—toward what? toward what?—only a fool ignores the potential wartiness of both circumstance and the human heart. As a matter of fact, I approached my search for your biological mother as something of a fool’s errand, expecting from the outset to learn that she had hanged herself in an abandoned building, or suffered a fatal beating at the hands of a psychotic client, or surrendered to the ravages of venereal disease, or maybe even walked beneath a construction platform from which a scuttle of bricks had just fallen. I did not like to believe any of these possibilities, of course, but until my search ended, each seemed as likely as what has actually occurred. More likely, in fact, given your mother’s unpromising background and the prejudice against her as a bruja morisca. So cherish this miracle, Johnny, and think very carefully about your biological mother’s present happiness.

  I also know what happened to your biological father, Lucky James Bledsoe. No miracle here. The bad news is that as a member of the Army’s First Cavalry Division he was killed twenty-one years ago in the Ia Drang Valley in South Vietnam. He had just turned eighteen. I discovered his fate by tracing his parents’ whereabouts through the Air Force locator service at Lackland.

  The Bledsoes live in Little Rock, Arkansas. You would probably be a welcome visitor to their home, should you decide to approach them. Photographs of their son in his Seville Dependent High School Basketball uniform, his letter jacket, and his senior cap and gown—from a segregated civilian school in Montgomery, Alabama—decorate the walls of the Bledsoes’ paneled living room. I visited them five years ago, when I still had no inkling where you were, on the chance that you had somehow contrived to find them before I did.

  Because LaVoy, Lucky James’s father, remembered Hugo from the days of their professional relationship on the flight line at Morón, the Bledsoes accepted me into their home. Neither LaVoy nor his wife Pauline believed that I had sought them out solely to renew an acquaintance that had never been very close to begin with. When I told them of Hugo’s death, they commiserated in a touchingly heartfelt way—but, while Pauline plied me with whiskey-and-7-Up cocktails, LaVoy asked harder and harder questions about the trouble I had gone to to find them, and I finally confessed that their dead son had a living heir.

  This news did not shock or upset them. I think they were almost grateful for it. Which is why I believe you could step into their lives without wounding or discomfiting the Bledsoes. They are your grandparents, Johnny, and that night, when they asked me where you were, I had to confess my ignorance, my guilt, my sorrow. I wept unabashedly for ten to fifteen minutes, and Pauline—bless her—wept with me. We have written each other or exchanged telephone calls at least once a month ever since my visit, but I have not yet told them you are alive and presumably safe in another country. (Anna, after all, was not supposed to tell me.) That remains for you to do, if you believe they deserve this small consideration. To my mind, they do.

  Lord, look how long this letter has grown. I’ve been working on it for three straight hours—while the streets of Madrid seem to be washing away under a heavy April rain. Después de Juan Carlos, el diluvio. The reign in Spain, I fain would claim, is not mainly on the wane. Nor the rain, either. But I am growing giddily weary of writing, as my prose shows, and I had better close. Scratch this entire paragraph, Johnny.

  —Eden in His Dreams.

  See how stubbornly I resisted writing those words, how tenaciously I delayed the inevitable. Between writing “Scratch this entire paragraph, Johnny” and the next four words, nearly an hour passed. The sky is perceptibly lightening, the rain slackening. And I have finally written the phrase upon which this entire epistle teeters, even if that four-word fulcrum seems more than a tad off-center.

  Johnny, forgive me. You will never fully understand how much I regret what I did, nor how dearly you have made me pay for that error. I am sorry for the pain I caused you, sorry for the pain I have reaped myself. If we should ever see each other again, I will probably not be able to speak of some of these things. This is why I have written about them at such stupid, even stupefying, length. You have an immense extended family, but though I have hurt you with one ill-considered act, and bewildered you by evolving from one sort of person into another (as I had to do), I hope that you will not exclude me forever from a place in this family. I belong there, too. In spite of everything, Johnny, I belong there, too.

  All my love,

  Mom

  Joshua reread the letter twice, slid it back into its envelope, and put the envelope in an inside jacket pocket. He was wearing civilian clothes because off-duty American personnel, by treaty stipulation, were not permitted to wear their uniforms in either Marakoi or Bravanumbi. No one on either side wished to
foster the impression that the Americans comprised an occupation force. Joshua therefore resembled an ambitious young native politician, a newcomer to the WaBenzi tribe. Although his nervousness distinguished him from most of the other smart go-getters drinking their lunches at Karsanji’s, he had not yet drawn undue attention to himself.

  His mind turning like a merry-go-round past all the items in his mother’s letter, he drank, ordered more wine, and drank again. The last shuttle back to base left the embassy grounds at midnight; he could spend the next ten hours right here. For dinner, a kidney pie and a mug of thick Irish stout; then back to wine again. If he could not decide which long-range goal to pursue now that White Sphinx had ended and a thousand conflicting options vied for his approval, at least he could kill the remainder of the day. Effortlessly. Painlessly.

  “May I join you?”

  Joshua looked up to see Alistair Patrick Blair standing beside the chair his mother had deserted. Unenthusiastically he nodded the Great Man into the empty place.

  “Where is Mrs. Monegal?”

  “Leaving the country.”

  “So soon?”

  “She’s supposed to begin a promotional tour for her new book. Her visit here required her to drop four stops from her schedule, and her publisher did not exactly smile on the deletion.”

  “She should tell her publisher to go to blazes,” Blair said amiably. “I never tour for my books.”