I dig into my pocket and hand them over.
“What a ridiculous production. You’re fussing over me like an old lady, Walter. It’s annoying. Really. I am absolutely fine.”
But when I try to stand, I almost fall over. Walter grabs my arm and steadies me, and we make our way through the moss and fern and out of the darkening woods.
Walter opens the front passenger door of his Volkswagen station wagon and makes me sit inside. As I take another drink, he expertly takes apart my rod, lays it carefully in the car’s trunk, along with my wicker creel and my fishing vest.
He tells Alfredo to get into the back seat.
Walter plops himself down behind the wheel.
“Now everything is fine again. Tip-top.”
The Itens’ cottage is tucked away in a twenty-five-hectare forest carve-out, where the wooded slopes come down into a pass of buttercup meadows, populated by bell-clanking cows and rimmed by a spring-fresh brook called the Zauberbach.
As we enter the eastern end of the pass, my phone begins to shake and vibrate. I look down. I have twenty-two calls and fifty-eight text messages. I dial Lisa.
“Are you hurt?” Her voice is tense.
“No. I was fishing and lost track of the time. Walter found me. We are heading to his house.”
“Was it a blackout?”
I am about to say no, but when I open my mouth, I find myself saying, “Possibly. I got lost in memories of my early life in Spain. Many I had forgotten—for good reason. It wasn’t pleasant. But I couldn’t find my way back here.”
There is a deafening silence.
“Lisa, please, I am fine. Just come and pick me up.”
“I’m on my way. Do you need me to bring anything?”
“A sweater. I’m cold.”
I turn to look out the window. We’re at the bottom of the pass, driving along the rim of the bog-and-birch basin. In the spring, the marsh ponds here are alive with frogs, croaking and moaning their love. Every year Walter invites me over in the evening for spring’s ritual frog hunt. I remember, then, the first time he invited me on the nighttime hunt, some twenty-five years ago.
We started in his cabin with a shot of eau-de-vie, to sear our innards and fortify our spirits, before heading out into the night with flashlights and small mesh nets. Our Wellington boots made a squelching sound in the sponge-like turf. An imperceptibly slow-moving stream, passing over the mossy carpet, was feeding fresh water into the shallow bog ponds alive with croaks.
Our flashlights began to pick up the blue-green incandescent discs that were frogs’ eyes. Before the blinded could blink and register our presence, we quietly stepped forward, dropped the nets into the reeking water, and scooped the frogs up. They were mating and, even when lifted in the net, they clung to each other in an amorous embrace, gulping with passion, their eyes bulging, fingers spread wide in astonishment. How touchingly and imploringly the red-throated males grasped the plump females, their lusty purring the music of the night.
We had, within an hour, seventy mating frogs plopped into the green-metal tank of sloshing water that Walter had strapped to his back. We returned to the cottage, its stone chimney sending up into the starry night undulating curls of birch smoke.
Sensors tripped the lights as soon as we came up the property’s front-facing rhubarb patch, flooding in bright light the trapdoor fish tank in the front grass and the glistening stone patio at the back of the cottage. Susi Iten had brought out to the patio sharp knives, wooden carving boards, and glass bowls filled with egg yolks and flour and parsley bread crumbs. Everything we needed for our feast was carefully laid out on the round table lit up by the nightlight.
Husband and wife exchanged the local Swiss-German patois, as Walter gently dropped the leather straps from his shoulders, easing the tank full of frogs onto the flagstone. He popped open its metal top and stuck a hand inside, emerging with two frogs, still locked in an amorous amphibian clasp and refusing to part. I stuck my hand into the tank and followed suit.
We held the frogs tightly by their hind legs, swung them up in the air, and then brought their heads smack down against the stone back wall. We bashed them a couple of times each, just to make sure the job was decisively done, and with each crack of bone and stone, frog blood splattered across the feldspar. Our arms twirled through the night air like we were Olympian discus throwers, rhythmically smacking the green heads down against the sharp-edged stone, and by the time we finished forty minutes later, Jackson Pollock splatters of red had been sent out in every direction of the black night.
Finally, it was over. I was sweating and panting slightly from the exertion, but the hunt was a success. Our platter was heaped high with dead frogs. A few legs still twitched, sinewy nerve endings that refused to register the life gone.
I gently placed a frog on the wooden carving boards laid out on the patio table, and made a small surgical cut in its green back. I poked my fingers underneath the skin slit, in both directions, and then pulled off the sheaf of amphibian hide. It felt like pulling duct tape off a storage box.
We chopped off their hind legs, carefully cut away any remaining viscera that was still stubbornly attached, and then cast away their upper torsos. A downward crunch of the blade severed the clawed and webbed feet from the naked legs, before we gave them a final, ritual bath in fresh water and blotted them with paper towels.
In no time, we had a platter full of frogs’ legs—tiny bones, translucent membranes, stringy pink muscle. Into the flour the skinny legs went, then the egg, followed by the coat of crunchy bread crumbs. They were ready for the pan.
Susi hosed down the patio’s back wall, erasing all traces of our sins.
“Also. We are here.”
I come back. We are at Iten’s cottage.
“Why are we here?”
He furrows his brow, looks concerned again.
“We are waiting for your wife. She is coming to pick you up.”
The Swiss flag snaps smartly on the flagpole outside the cabin, as Walter pulls the Volkswagen station wagon under the tin-roofed carport. I have a little trouble lifting my legs and pulling myself out of the car, but I feel better as soon as I stand on the solid tar.
Terra firma.
Walter hovers at my elbow, ready to steady me if I should wobble. I can see he is eager to get me inside the house, so his wife, a nurse, can look me over.
But I stand stock-still in the path leading through the rhubarb patch. Alfredo turns to look over his shoulder, as if to say, Now what? It’s dinnertime.
“Walter. The tank.”
“Not today, José. You must come in and have a Café Lutz, to warm you up and revive you. I think you have a bit of shock.”
“Today is no different than any other. I won’t move until you show me.”
Walter, perhaps reassured I am not in such bad shape as he initially thought, kneels on one knee, next to the gray-green trapdoor buried in the grass, alongside the cottage’s stone path. He pops the lock and lifts the door, so I can peer into the stone-lined tank, fed by an underwater spring.
The biggest fish that day—silky and sulking—is a three-kilo pike with long gray body and round nose, sitting at the bottom of the tank. Around the pike, a few zebra-striped Egli, mountain perch; two nice-sized Felchen; and a half dozen brook trout Walter’s oldest son had caught with grasshoppers in the Zauberbach.
“Beautiful fish.”
“The pike is very small. All the big fish have gone.”
It is always so. Walter’s constant lament is how the fish are all disappearing. I have heard him go on in this way for the last thirty years.
“I remember, when I fished the Lake of Ägeri with my father, we never came home with pike below ten kilos. But those days are over.”
“Ja hallo. Wieso chömed Ihr neut inne?”
Susi Iten is standing in her floral housedress, hands on hips, demanding to know why we aren’t coming inside. Walter eases shut the trapdoor.
“What haf you
been doing, José?” Susi snaps at me. “You put a big fright in your wife bosom.”
“I am sorry to have caused such theater. I am fine. Just been out fishing.”
“Ja du!”
She stands back to let us through the cottage’s small door, and as I pass, she barks, “Let me look at you.” To my shock, she begins to squeeze and poke my arms and sides—“Does ribs pain?”—like I am a market chicken she might buy.
I have to fight an impulse to turn around and slap her.
“Please stop that. I did not fall. As I said, I am perfectly fine.”
But right then a wave of wood-heated air hits me, so warm and comforting that I sag at the knees. Susi and Walter lurch forward to grab me and guide me to the reclining lounge chair inside the cottage. They tilt the chair back, like I am at the dentist, and I am half looking at the ceiling.
Susi bustles about in the kitchen, filling a glass with water from their well, and putting the teakettle on. Walter turns to the glass-fronted cabinet and pulls out a bottle of homemade Pflümli-Wasser—a firewater made from plums—and pours a couple of fingers into the bottom of a ceramic mug, to which Susi adds hot tea from a small pot. They bring me the drinks, along with Bündnerfleisch, paper-thin cuts of beef dried in the mountain air, plus wedges of Gruyère and hard-crusted buns called Bürli.
“Eat!” Susi barks.
The protein of the meat and the fat of the cheese and the hot tea with spirits—it does, just as they said it would, make me feel better. I am less light-headed.
I must have dozed for a while, after the food and drink, because when I open my eyes again, Walter and Susi have taken their concerned looks away from me and are silently going about their chores in the small cottage.
Susi is in the open kitchen at the back. She is moving along the counter, between bowls and knives and platters, preparing the night’s dinner of pan-fried pike. Across from her, under the lamp hanging low over the wooden dining-room table and the curved bench, Walter has his head down, repairing a reel.
The reel’s barrels and drums and springs are laid out on a cloth, and his thick fingers are inside, with fine rag and oilcan, cleaning out sand and relubricating the gears and joints. The smell of birch wood is in the air, as the potbellied stove in the corner crackles with fire. I look at the Swiss couple, each unselfconsciously at ease in their corner, and my tumor-pressed mind begins to pulse.
This is their home. This is their home. This is where they belong.
It is dark outside and car lights sweep the front path.
Walter lifts his head, like a dog listening for his master coming down the lane. He slides from behind the table and is out the door. I look out the cottage window, past the rhododendrons, and see Walter heading down the cottage path, tripping the lights, as Lisa comes up from the carport.
They stop, face to face, and look at each other. My wife then slowly drops her head against Walter’s chest. He puts his arms around, tenderly, and caresses her back. They stand like that for a few moments, hugging, giving comfort to each other.
“Drink!”
Susi is thrusting another glass of water at me.
“You are dehydrated. Make you light in the head. Drink!”
And then Lisa is in the cottage. She is magnificent, like an avenging spirit coming to retrieve me from this dark forest and bring me back into the light of our life together. Walter and Susi stand respectfully and silently to the side, as Lisa strides full of purpose, in jeans and quilted Barbour vest, across the entire length of the cottage. She possessively places a gold-bangled hand on my shoulder, bends down, and kisses me, hard and full on the lips, like she needs to taste that I am really here and have not yet left her.
I am so relieved, so relieved to see her. I reach out and hold her as tight as I can.
Lisa whispers in my ear, so the Itens can’t hear. “Let’s take you home, José. Where you belong.”
I cannot speak, when I hear the love and concern and tenderness in that voice. All I can do is nod, nod like a child, and gratefully clasp her hands back. And in that moment, I give myself entirely over to my wife, in the hope of hopes she can, as she promises, take me home.
I sleep a solid ten hours. I haven’t done that since I was in my forties.
I shuffle in my robe and slippers, slightly dazed, to the informal living room adjoining the kitchen. Alfredo is half asleep in his basket, but his tail stump works furiously as soon as I come into the room. He licks my hand when I pat him.
Lisa has been up for hours already, a complete reversal of our usual habits. She is reading the International New York Times, her feet up on the couch. Lisa has my breakfast laid out in the breakfast room, along with the stack of pills and vitamins that are now my daily regimen, and she rises from the couch, kisses me full on the lips, and then steps into the kitchen, to fire up the espresso machine.
“How did you sleep?”
“Like I was dead.”
Lisa has her back to me, through the kitchen doorway.
“Well, you’re not. Not yet.”
I change the subject, ask her what’s in the paper. We talk about the things far removed from our little world: about how another EU member state is desperately trying to hold its national borders together, as yet another of its cities demands independence and declares itself a twenty-first-century “City State” with direct representational links to the EU; and about the dangerously escalating Chinese-Russian-US naval skirmishes over the rights to fish for black cod in the Bering Sea.
We move into the breakfast room. Lisa has set me a place, with linen and silver and the indigo-and-gold demitasse that I bought her years ago in Paris. We sit for quite a while, husband and wife, sipping coffee at the table.
There is good reason for my silence. There’s an interesting development in my mental state—and it’s hard to avoid. That young man I saw at the church in Zürich, his long hair smelling of Suavecito, is in the farmhouse, sitting in the armchair in the corner of the breakfast room, next to the antique linen closet. He is half in darkness, just watching me with his black eyes. I cannot look at him, but even with my head studiously averted, I can smell him, that smell of pomade, like flowers decomposing in a vase.
A cloud must have passed somewhere above the pear tree outside, because a rectangle of light comes pouring in through the window, bright and clear, illuminating my wife. She turns the angle of her chair, so she can feel the sun on her face, and lazily asks, “What d’you want to do today?”
“I will take Alfredo for his walk. And then I will clean up my study, like you have long asked me to do. I think it is time I threw some stuff out.”
“There was a time when I would have been happy to hear those words. Not so much now.”
I don’t say a thing. Just slice my pear.
“Were you serious about moving out of our bedroom and down to the study, like you told the hospice director? I mean, when it’s time.”
“Yes.”
Lisa looks out the window. After a few minutes, she turns back and says, “Do you want help cleaning out the room? I could help.”
“No. I must do this myself. But I’ll need some garbage bags.”
The look of hurt in her face, it is almost unbearable.
She turns her head from me, stirs her coffee. “This is what you always do. To all of us. The boys. Me. Any of us who care. Shut us out. You are always so secretive.”
I look down at my hands. “Mujer. It is the way it is. Even with the best of intentions, you cannot take this trip with me. This—we all do alone.”
“You don’t get it. You just don’t get it.”
Lisa stands and carries our plates to the kitchen sink.
I stand myself, to go downstairs to my study, but the young man is suddenly standing in the darkness of the doorway, his arms crossed, looking darkly at me. He is blocking my exit. His presence, it triggers both fear and an equally steely determination to push past him, but I falter after a few steps, lose my nerve. He is resolute. I see i
t in his face. He will not let me through.
He’s waiting for a proper atonement. Like at the church. I feel it.
“Lisa,” I say, my voice shaking slightly. “What I am going through, it is hard to describe. Strange things are happening to me, to my mind, and one day soon I probably won’t be able to talk at all. I should say now what I might not be able to say in the near future.”
I turn in her direction. She is still facing the sink, which somehow makes what I have to say a little easier. “I am not a man who expresses his feelings well. You know this better than anyone else. But please know how grateful I am to you—for creating such calm in this house, for almost single-handedly bringing up our fine sons. I have always loved you, even when my behavior at times seemed to suggest the opposite.”
I move closer, whisper into her back. “Without you—I would have been nothing. Discúlpeme. Forgive me. I beg you.”
Lisa does not turn around. She is still facing the sink.
“There is nothing to forgive. I knew what I was marrying.”
She bends down, to rummage under the sink, and emerges with a single black garbage bag. “It’s the last one. I’ll bring some more down in a few minutes. They’re in the supply closet.”
I stand at the threshold of my study, clutching the garbage bag, not sure how I should proceed. Alfredo ambles over to his rug in the corner and plops himself down as I take stock of my room: The marble-topped coffee table, made from blue-and-gray stone, matching the couch and armchairs in crushed velvet. They stand before the French doors leading into the garden. From the leather swivel chair, behind my glass-and-chrome desk, I can look out the French doors and see the stone fountain, the bird feeder hanging from the overhead eave, and the beds of Apricot, Falstaff, and Cherry Parfait roses lining the garden’s flagstone path.
There are some eight hundred books on fish and fishing, a brass-railed ladder, and a nineteenth-century globe in the corner library. One panel of the library is a disguised door, and behind it is a full bathroom with Finnish sauna. Next to that, my vanity wall: framed photos of me fishing for trout in Canton Uri, high in the Swiss Alps; after sea trout in County Mayo, Ireland; Spey casting with double-handed rod on the Dee in Scotland; hunting sea trout in windswept Patagonia; with the boys on the Kjara River in Iceland, the banks behind us a killing field of slaughtered salmon; and on the Eagle River in Labrador, Canada, the bears across the river eyeing our fish.
The Man With No Borders Page 12
