The Man With No Borders

by Richard C. Morais

  This memory from long ago calms me down and allows me to be patient with Lisa. We have, I realize, disagreed on so many subjects over the years, and I remain calm even though she is challenging my right to decide how I end my life.

  “This is my last journey,” I say softly. “You must let me plan my final trip.”

  “You’re selfish, José María. Always have been. How can you leave me like this?” She holds the saucer under her teacup in such a way I think it might snap. “And what about your boys?”

  “Do you think I want to leave them? To leave you? This is how it is, Lisa. My time is up.”

  The tears come, then. She puts her cup down on the coffee table, blows into a tissue, and comes around the couch, to curl up next to me, her head in my lap. I stroke her hair. Her chest is heaving, and from it rises that faint and familiar scent of Bal à Versailles perfume, heading heavenward with her heat. But, finally, there is a profound sigh of surrender, a moan that seems to emanate from her gut.

  “It’s your life, José. Do what you need to do. I forgive you.”

  I am so moved, I cannot speak, so we sit like that in the fading light.

  “But please tell the boys you are dying,” she finally says. “I beg you. They have a right to know what’s going on. They’ll be so hurt that you have frozen them out—once again.”

  I look out the window. The night sky is clear and a silver moon is shining bright through the branches of the pear tree outside our living-room window. A few more leaves have fallen. A shadow moves and I discover we have a new neighbor, which I now see for the first time. It comforts me. A long-eared owl has moved into the ancient horse chestnut outside our house. He emerges from his lair, ruffles his feathers. His ears are tufted and pointy, and he rivets his head intensely to some sound down below, ready to take off and hunt the night.

  “I cannot tell the boys. Not yet. But soon. When I am ready.”

  Dying is so boring. No one ever warns you about that.

  Lisa is doing the dishes. I am watching her.

  She stops scrubbing the roasting pan, lowers her head, and weeps.

  “I think you need a vacation,” I say dryly.

  She can’t resist laughing. No matter how bad things got between us, we could always make each other laugh. Lisa lifts her apron to her face and wipes away her tears.

  “I don’t think a vacation would do it. Maybe heroin.”

  I put my arms around her from behind, and whisper in her ear that I am serious. She needs a break from all this. I insist she take some time off for herself. She should go to the opera in Zürich, spend the night at our Niederdorf flat, and get drunk with her strange English friend, the ugly-looking Jungian analyst who makes her laugh. I don’t stop until she agrees and goes upstairs to pack an overnight bag.

  I stand in the frame of the farmhouse’s front door and wave, as she backs out of the flagstone courtyard in the Mercedes and drives off to Zürich. I turn and head back up to the kitchen. A weight has lifted. Not only is Lisa’s perennial dark look a constant reminder of my approaching death, I realize, but she also watches my diet like one of those beady-eyed nuns of my childhood, which is, as my sons might say, a drag.

  So I embrace this momentary liberation from the tyranny of her diets, and head directly into the kitchen with a light step, feeling remarkably free. I pour myself a glass of white wine, hum a Basque song about independence, and make my kind of dinner: chorizo simmered in hard cider, and a blood pudding and cabbage dish as sharp and regal as the Spain from where I come. I feel like celebrating life—the life I lived, my way, regrets and all—and I open a fantastic Romeo “Contador” Rioja 2005, a gift from John, our restaurateur son living in New York.

  Then, toward the end of the meal, I cut myself a wedge of Asturian sheep’s cheese, which I smear over walnut bread and generously dribble with the honey we make on the farm. The salty-sweet flavors dissolve on my tongue, and I close my eyes, travel back to my long-ago childhood, where the Picos de Europa mountain range meets the Bay of Biscay in Northern Spain. I hear the Sella River gurgling at my feet and my uncle’s deep-throated roar as a salmon takes his fly and the reel screams. I can smell the rising sap of the scrubby spruce behind me, and the crackling skin of the suckling pig our cook, Conchata, is spit roasting over an open fire down on the riverbank.

  The memories, they are heaven.

  I rinse and put away the dishes in the Bosch dishwasher. After the kitchen is cleaned up and wiped down, and the machine is humming, I heat some Armagnac in a crystal snifter held over an open flame. I enjoy its warmth in the palm of my hand, as I sit back on the living room’s leather couch and watch the late-night news on Swiss TV.

  I go to bed utterly content and at peace.

  The cracks of gastrointestinal thunder under the duvet make my limbs violently jerk and scrabble about. I fall out of bed three times during the worst attacks, crawl moaning back onto the mattress. The pain, it is like the devil himself has plunged his pitchfork into my intestines. I sweat through my pajamas. On my knees by the side of the bed, I clutch my stomach and swear in Spanish—“Shit on the milk! Coño! ”

  It is 4:15 a.m. I cannot stand this any longer. I use my knuckles to feel my way in the dark around the bed, cry out, “Lisa! Lisa!” even while knowing full well she isn’t here and won’t respond. But I can’t help it. The longing for my wife is so powerful that I actually see Lisa before me, that familiar and reassuring bedtime lump under the luminous duvet, just a few cockatoo-like tuffs of her bleached-blond hair poking out over the linen-white edges.

  Enough of this mierda.

  Rigid with pain, but determined, I manage to pull on some pants in the dark and pass from the bedroom. In the hall with the leaded windows, I sit down on the cool ceramic bench, over the oven that in winter is fed wood coal from the kitchen side of the chalet. I pull on a pair of battered boots and am again hit by a wave of pain.

  It passes and I carefully descend the wooden central staircase and let myself out the front door. The September night is still pitch-black, but clear, and filled with stars. I wipe the film of sweat from my forehead and look up at the bedroom where my wife and I have slept for the last half century, rump to rump, behind the top left shutters and window of our 287-year-old Swiss farmhouse.

  It is over, the life I had. Finalmente.

  The courtyard sensors under the chalet’s eaves are tripped, and harsh light suddenly filters eerily through the geraniums in the window boxes above my head. Alfredo, his Italian Spinone ears alert, hears and smells my presence, gets up and whines in his pen in the back of the house, urging me to let him out. It hurts greatly to do so—I want his warm comfort almost as much as I ache for my wife—but I ignore him. A man, in the end, must make this journey alone.

  My determination renewed, I cross the courtyard and enter the barn we converted into a three-car garage. There is a faint smell of Williamine in the air, as a few ripe pears have fallen from the trees standing at the farmhouse’s entrance. The fallen pears are squashed into the Volvo station wagon’s tire treads, as I slowly back the car out through the courtyard and into the lane. My arthritic hand has trouble getting the gear out of reverse, but I finally get the stick shift into first after a few grinding tries unleash another torrent of Spanish curses. I turn the car down the country road, toward the town of Ägeri.

  I cross the Rimmenfluss Bridge, bookended by sylvan copses of ash and birch. This is the stream where my young sons caught their first brook trout, and I suddenly see my three boys marching along the riverbank in parka coats and rubber boots and in descending order of height, each carrying a casting rod and a perforated tin box filled with worms.

  Tears blur my vision, but I peer intently through the windshield at the road ahead and where I have yet to go. A light mist hangs over the pastures and chapels like a curtain separating this world from the next.

  A few lights glow down in the town of Ägeri, nestled at the end of the lake between the Zugerberg and Morgartenberg mountain rang
es. Bäckerei Müller, the bakery just over the village’s stone bridge, is warmly lit up in the dark. I park behind the baker’s delivery van and haul myself up out of the front seat. Another sharp pain roars up from my pelvis, and for a few moments I think I might faint, but all that comes out in the end is a gasp, a slight exhale of breath into the night.

  I abandon the car and take the path along the town’s stream, under the covered passageway that connects the local inn, Das Goldene Kreuz, with its dining room overlooking the river. The smell of an already simmering veal stock deep inside the kitchen passes out into the breaking day.

  The stream runs into the town canal. Wooden boathouses emerge before me in the morning’s mist like miniature Swiss chalets. They are nineteenth-century follies with slate roofs and neatly painted trimmings, and a small wooden door facing the canal’s path. My arthritic hands are stiff with morning cold and so it takes me some time to unlock the door of my boathouse.

  Inside its wooden gloom, adjusting to the dark, I smell gasoline and river grass, hear the water gently lapping against the boat launch. I think of those long-ago February nights, when my boys were young and the boathouses were festively strung with lights on that one night of the year when the Swiss villagers drop their normal reserve and set up tables against the snowbanks opposite the boathouses. On such occasions, all the town’s fishermen, professional and amateur, gather together in the snow to grill bratwurst over wood fires and toast next year’s fishing with shots of kirschwasser, before solemnly engaging in the torchlit procession down to the lake and the ritual of pushing a paper boat filled with fish bones into the black water, all blessed by the local Protestant and Catholic clergymen, a pagan-Christian offering to God for good fishing in the year to come. How my sons—Rob, my youngest, in particular—loved that ritual, so utterly unique to our small mountain village.

  My boat is hoisted on chains, hanging just under the darkened pitched roof. I turn on the light and throw the big switch mounted on the post. An electric motor begins to whirr, chains grind, as the wooden craft overhead is lowered to the water. I have, then, a pang of earthly regret, for the boat is so sweetly handsome, with its white trim, bottle-green sides, and shellacked hull.

  I wish I was a Viking. I want to be buried with my boat.

  Two casting rods and a large net are sitting inside it. From the tidy rack on the wall, I take down the spare anchor, and, grunting with effort, drop it with a clang into the bottom of the vessel, alongside the one already resting in the bow. I gingerly step in and the boat rocks, as I make my way back to the engine. I push off, through the boathouse opening, and ease into the canal. A touch of the starter and the twenty-five-horsepower Evinrude engine begins coughing into the dawn.

  I pull at the tiller, give a little gas. I want to remain anonymous, in the undercover of night, but dawn is coming fast as the boat crawls up the canal, past the village’s low-rise apartment buildings and the town’s football pitch.

  I turn at the bend. Ägeri’s fishmonger, Walter Iten, is putt-putting back down the opposite side of the canal, after having just checked his nets in the predawn.

  This is not what I want. Normally, Iten and I will cut our engines and drift alongside each other, exchanging a few words before we continue on our journeys. It is during such times that I ask Walter what his nets have yielded, and he usually sighs and makes a small speech about how the Felchen—a bony Swiss lake fish that looks like carp but is in fact distantly related to the trout and very good eating—aren’t as plentiful as they once were. But he always finishes by offering a valuable tip on where I might fish the lake that day.

  This morning, however, I keep my boat hugging the right bank, bow pointed to the mouth of the canal, my hand held up in acknowledgment as I increase the throttle, indicating I’m not stopping today. Walter nods and respectfully holds up his hand in return—and so we pass.

  A Jugendstil villa, with stained-glass windows and its own boathouse, marks the canal’s entrance to the lake. The grand house passes to my right, the canal opens out, and I open the engine full throttle.

  The mist hovers in ephemeral wisps atop the water, hesitant, like the air itself is somehow conscious its time on earth is limited. The bow of the boat lifts slightly, and we surge through the mist and flat water, not even a ripple of wind evident across its platinum-gray matte.

  I am full of pain, and though I can’t tell at the moment whether this internal searing is physical or mental, I do know something must be done—this state of affairs simply cannot continue. So I point the bow toward the stone gates at the far end of the lake, a memorial to the fourteenth-century battle of Morgarten, the pass where fifteen hundred fierce Swiss mountain men fought for their independence against the Austrians and gave birth to this tiny country. But as the mist lifts in the dawn, I see that a handful of fishing boats are already clustered at that end of the lake, and, wanting solitude, I abruptly turn the engine handle to the right, sending the boat careening left toward the old tuberculosis sanatorium sitting up on the mountain.

  The lake here, I know, is green-black deep, as the mountainside drops almost straight down into the water. I cut the engine two hundred meters from the shore, just under the watchful gaze of the nineteenth-century sanatorium, now an incubator for technology start-ups coming out of universities across the country. The boat glides for a few moments, until the utterly still lake slowly drags the wooden skiff down, and it comes to a lapping, lulling rest in the glassy reflection of mountain and sanatorium.

  I sit for a few moments. The morning is very still and quiet, but for the cry of ravens in the yellow-leafed chestnut trees along the shore.

  As I bend down, another wave of pain shoots up from my pelvis, but this time it is lighter and passes quickly. I move onto the seat at the bow, and, with wheezing effort, tie the blue nylon anchor rope tightly around my right ankle. I tug at it, make sure it is secure. On my left ankle, I wrap the chain of the reserve anchor, and push shut the lock. It bites the flesh.

  I swing my legs over the boat, both anchors held tightly in my swollen fists. The anchors and me—we are balanced precariously on the wooden rim. I stare into the green water, and a rippling bald head and set of arthritic hands grimly gripping anchors stare back at me. The man I once knew, with a shock of long black hair slicked back with pomade—he is entirely gone.

  I close my eyes and say a silent prayer for Lisa and the boys, my brother, and—this surprises me—Miguel. Then, slowly, I gather my courage, for the final drop into the dark below.

  But something, I’m not sure what, makes me open my eyes. The sun is visible over the ice-capped Alps at the other end of the lake, and it sends beams of light skittering across the water. I look down.

  A silver shadow is spiraling slowly up to the water’s surface.

  It is a massive brown trout, rising from the deepest recesses of the lake, coming to rest just a meter from the boat. I hold my breath. Walter Iten once showed me pictures of one such prehistoric-looking fish caught in his net two decades earlier. It weighed nine kilos and was black with age. But such massive lake trout are very rare, and never in my five decades fishing the Lake of Ägeri have I witnessed one of these near-mythic fish.

  But here one is. It has risen slowly and majestically up from the depths, settling into a slow-finning stillness near my feet.

  I sit clutching the anchors, afraid to move while the fish hovers just below the surface, a mere meter away from me. It is ancient as time and scarred, its black back the length of my leg and raked with wounds, the old markings of eagle attacks or the narrow miss of a net.

  The trout is so close now that through the water I can make out the golden and red-rimmed spots flecking its fleshy flanks, like blotches from a Miro painting, its pale underbelly glowing luminously silver through the dark water. I can’t take my eyes from the fish’s many wounds, the net markings and fish eagle scrapes, the scars of its life, and it is like I am looking at an underworld reflection of myself, at all the things I have dee
p within me but have never fully examined or looked at. There they suddenly are, up from the deep.

  Before I can ponder this strange notion further, however, a nymph, almost impossible to see with the human eye, comes floating down the undercurrent. The great beast darts forward a few centimeters, sucks the nymph into its gaping mouth, and then languidly drifts back into its exact former position, hovering in the invisible crosscurrents of underwater life.

  My chest is swollen to bursting. To see this rare and mysterious creature rise from the darkest part of the lake, at this particular moment, it is almost too much for me to bear, and a voice, from deep inside me, similarly rises to the surface, slowly repeating, again and again, the same lines. You have unfinished business. Unfinished business. That was not a true penance.

  My mother appears in the lake ether before me. She is dressed all in black, her hair in a tight bun in the back of her head, her skin the color of turbot. She is sitting in her favorite armchair in the San Sebastián living room, near the gray light of the bay window, her head bent over her embroidery.

  “No good will come of this ending,” my mother tells me in a clear voice. “Trust me. I know of what I talk. No good. You must take the entire journey, properly, to make it all worthwhile.”

  The fish and I sit there for what seems like an eternity, my head bowed like a penitent in a church pew, awed before God by a powerful mixture of shame and strange elation. There we are, together: I, gripping the anchors that still rest on the boat’s lip and are meant to drag me to my death; and the great trout, hovering just below the water’s surface, hearing my confession.