Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise

by Paul Monette

  So it made a kind of cockeyed sense, to picture Hadrian retiring to his widow’s peak on Capri, in melancholy contemplation of stolen love. It certainly fit my fantasies, with Steve about to follow Roger through the portal from which there was no return. Imagine my confusion, then, when I sat down to write this story and turned to my classical reference books. No mention of Capri in any of the entries on Hadrian. I grew so anxious, so unable to tell the tale without proof, that Winston brought me home from the library a book-length bio of Hadrian. Capri was not in the index, or anywhere else. A skim of the text kept throwing up details—that relations between the emperor and the boy went on for nine years (and remember, the boy was drowned at twenty); that in fact there were more than five hundred busts and statues of Antinoüs still extant, more than we have of Hadrian himself. Pictures of Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli. The Pantheon. The obelisk on the Pincio.2

  I was mistaken, that was for damned sure. And in the process had learned more than I wanted to know about the times, preferring to see them through the mists. I’d always understood that Hadrian had had a peaceful reign, no foreign wars or barbarous invasions. But it seems he proposed to found a pagan colony on the site of Jerusalem, compounding the mess by outlawing circumcision. The ensuing revolt was fearfully bloody, leaving the Jews bereft of a homeland.3 And still I had no answer to who had built my villa on the cliffs. I began leaving messages, slightly crazy, for various scholars I knew; and was starting to dial Garry Wills in Illinois, sweating like a graduate student, when the name popped into my head: Tiberius.

  Of course. 14–37 A.D., a hundred years before Hadrian. A misanthrope, Tiberius, whose “reign was one of terror, with spying, prosecutions, vengeance and suicides. His life has been painted in the darkest colors by Tacitus …”4 Well, at least it began to make sense, those enemies flung from the eagle’s perch. I’d always had a difficult time trying to jibe such ruthless abandon with my image of Hadrian, the aesthete queer. And I suddenly felt absolved of any lingering guilt about stealing two chips of paving stone from the Villa di Giove. A bad guy’s lair.

  But it’s certainly made me reconsider what’s real in the facts department of my travels. They are seamless to me after all, tight as a Roman mosaic, those moments of thundering clarity on various peaks and temple sites. In the end they have come to be strung on the single thread of my sensibility, a sort of pearl necklace of wonders—and not very many of which allowed me much more than the fifteen minutes I copped on Capri.

  Oh, there are places I’ve gone back to numerous times, and always with a fervor to recapture, to drive the experience deeper—but that is something else entirely. And there have been occasions when I’ve found myself in the neighborhood of one of those places barely glimpsed, and so took a second shot. Santorini for one, the lip of the volcano; or the cloister of Saint Trophime in Arles. Second visits that were usually more in the nature of happy accidents than the keeping of a blood promise. We may make any number of silent vows to return, to relive the flash of the sublime and maybe even the glint of a lost self. But it’s like Frost’s oath at the fork in the wood, swearing he’ll keep the road not taken for another day—

  Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

  I doubted if I should ever come back.

  We are booked for a one-way passage, no return.

  The older we get, the more does it all sink in. That the trail of grain we’ve dropped in our wake like Hansel and Gretel has been snatched and eaten by crows. A postcard arrives from one of these magic places—dashed off by a friend who may even have gone there at our insistence—and the frozen picture is suddenly more real than our own recollection. Surely the tower was on the other side, and couldn’t you see the ocean from the top?

  All the more reason to get your fifteen minutes right, so the place will remain indelible, no matter if the fog of memory mirror-reverses the tower. We’re told that Gertrude Stein always sat with her back to the view, so everyone else would have to face her. She also says somewhere that all views pale after fifteen minutes. She may be right: that we can’t take in too much sublimity at once, or that our nature is to reduce all experience to banalities, shrink the world to postcard size. Myself, I’m after a different sort of quarter hour—a willed intensity that meets its destination halfway, at a certain romantic pitch. Not the historian’s way, by any means. Or the archaeologist’s, who tries so hard not to clutter the site with preconceptions; dispassion before all else. And certainly not Gertrude’s way, whose life was a sort of monumental site all by itself.

  But then if it takes a whole lifetime for you to get to Mont-Saint-Michel, you have already watched the tide come rocketing in at thirty miles an hour—in your head, anyway—a hundred times. The towering rock in the bay has been waiting for you as long as you have been waiting for it. The spiral climb through the medieval quarter, the looming church at the summit, a labyrinth of stairs to reach it. What’s to disappoint? The wild romantic burnish you’ve endowed it with turns out to be the truth. In a minute you have peopled it with a flock of white-robed monks, and you seem to float in air as lightly as the Archangel himself when you gaze up at his gilded figure high at the top of the roof, seeming to spin on tiptoe, the pirouette of faith.

  Who needs dispassion?

  Not that it always works, by any means. In Noel Coward’s Private Lives, when Elyot and Amanda come face to face on their separate balconies, they’re on their honeymoons with different people. They talk inanely about what they’ve been doing since their messy divorce. Elyot stutters through the tale of his trip round the world, Amanda nervously filling in the gaps.

  AMANDA: And India, the burning Ghars, or Ghats, or whatever they are, and the Taj Mahal? How was the Taj Mahal?

  ELYOT: Unbelievable, a sort of dream.

  AMANDA: That was the moonlight, I expect; you must have seen it in the moonlight.

  ELYOT: Yes, moonlight is cruelly deceptive.

  AMANDA: And it didn’t look like a biscuit box, did it? I’ve always felt that it might.

  ELYOT: Darling, darling, I love you so.5

  There’s always that chance that you’ve traveled across ten meridians, only to find a biscuit box. It happened to me once in Greece, where otherwise all holy places met my expectant heart with garlands of laurel. Steve and I lay stupefied with jet lag in an Athens hotel, waiting to board the rusty tub that would take us round the Aegean. Dr. Monette decided there was time to rent a car and drive to Sounion, the cape round which all ships made their way to Athens, the headland crowned by a temple to Poseidon. We ended up in a belching Austin mini that smelled like a farmer’s truck, as if the previous lessee had been a flock of chickens.

  The suburbs of Athens went on and on, concrete-slabbed apartment blocks that looked like barracks. By the time we reached the sea we were at last in open country, though it was scarred by the grisly villas of the rich. I began to have that anxious gnaw that we wouldn’t be back in time, the bane of so many of my expeditions.

  Then we came round a bend, and there it was on the crest of a hill—a small hill, as it turned out—its eleven Doric columns honey-colored in the heat shimmer of the summer sun. We parked and walked up past a shady taverna to the brow of the hill, and instantly I had to rein the poetry in. Not that I was expecting another Parthenon; and the eleven columns are no less eloquent for being built to human scale. But I’d always assumed it perched on a high cliff, rather like the Villa di Gi-ove, so its beacon fires would be visible halfway to Crete.

  No such height. Really, a bare stone’s throw from the water below. And the columns themselves were covered nearly top to bottom with the names and initials of previous visits, scoring into the soft stone. Not exactly tagged by the spraycan sort of graffiti, but violated all the same. Unguarded, unprotected, an easy drive for a day-tripper. Not enough, not enough, my heart cried out.

  But I withheld from Steve the hollow of my disappointment, especially since he’d had enough after five minutes, and moved to take cover in the arbor of t
he tavema, nursing a Greek beer. I wouldn’t let him order any food—for Christ’s sake, he wanted a salad, an invitation to crypto and who knew what other microbes. It was why we traveled by ship in the first place: to exercise some control over the food, as much as to accommodate a steamer trunk of medicine. I sat with my back to the temple, surely a blasphemy against the sea god. Glancing over my shoulder, it wasn’t so bad; at least you couldn’t see the hieroglyphs of graffiti at this distance.

  And so we wended our way back to Athens in a smut of traffic. The pang of Sounion had mostly receded within a day’s sail, as we crossed the Sea of Marmara to Istanbul. But a jumble of myth still rattled around in my head for a couple of days, the ashy taste of failure. For it was at Sounion that Theseus was meant to change his ship’s flag from black to white, to signal his father the king that he’d made it home alive from Crete and the Minotaur’s cave. When he forgot to change the flags, grief-stricken Aegeus threw himself off the Acropolis, to be dashed on the rocks below. Of course all of this transpired in mythic time, pre-history, and who knew if I had the facts right anyway, mostly a rehash of Mary Renault. But the feeling persisted, like a low-grade fever, that I’d somehow flunked my exam in ancient history.

  The curative for which is prescribed most movingly in Ca-vafy’s cautionary poem, “Ithaka”—

  As you set out for Ithaka,

  hope your road is a long one …

  May there be many summer mornings when,

  with what pleasure, what joy,

  you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;

  may you stop at Phoenician trading stations

  to buy fine things,

  mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony …

  Keep Ithaka always in your mind.

  Arriving there is what you’re destined for.

  But don’t hurry the journey at all.

  Better if it lasts for years,

  so you’re old by the time you reach the island,

  wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,

  not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

  Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.

  Without her you wouldn’t have set out.

  She has nothing left to give you now.6

  It is hardly Sounion’s fault, in other words, that it doesn’t quite measure up to one’s lush specifications. Perhaps the disappointments have their purpose too, to balance all those blurred mirages with a laser dose of focus. And anyway, it’s not the end of the journey yet. So you reset your sights and keep going.

  I needn’t have fretted at all, really. The next day out of Istanbul, we turned south along the coast of Asia Minor, passing the windswept site of Troy, now utterly vanished. We stopped in the channel that lay between Lesbos and the mainland, then headed inland through miles of tobacco fields to the citadel of Pergamon. I didn’t know a thing about it—neither a smatter of fractured history nor the slightest image, mirage or otherwise—and so I quickly reverted to the studious schoolboy, clamoring over the ruins and checking out every cistern, every cornerstone. It was just as Cavafy foretold, the pleasure and joy of an unknown harbor.

  So we circled the watery cradle of the Aegean, dolphins leaping about our bows, and nothing looked remotely like a biscuit box. The voyage even provided one of those rare second sightings, at Delos, where Roger and I had idled away an afternoon six years before. An island that’s uninhabited, the birthplace of Apollo, and a major center of commerce in the ancient world because it served as a crossroads for ships bound east or west. We landed just after sunup—Steve and I, his mother and sister—on the very first tender launched from the ship. So there was a moment when the first group of us had it all to ourselves, an unbelievable stillness as the sun caught fire and dazzled us with a whole world of ruins.

  Just inland from the harbor there’s the wreck of a colossal statue to Apollo. Two boulder chunks, one still faintly tracing the shoulders and chest of the god, the other his hips and buttocks. And if you needed another reminder that nothing gold can stay (Frost’s rueful formulation), the guidebook reproduces a drawing from 1673. Apollo still had his head then, and the pelvis supported his thighs, almost to the knee. Too big for the plunderers to carry away, and left to the surer plunder of wind and rain. Memento mori for days.

  But the lake of the god’s birth remains, weed-choked now, more mud than water. Guarded by lions sent in tribute from Naxos, a row of heroic marble beasts sitting on their haunches, mouths agape with roaring. Disintegrating in front of your eyes, two of them legless and propped up on steel rods, and yet the guardian stance and the roaring somehow seem immutable. Though the sun god has long since departed—streaking the sky in his chariot, shedding gold in his wake—the watch of the lions remains at full attention, profound as the saints on Gothic cathedrals awaiting the Second Coming.

  But enough slides of my summer vacation. You get the picture: a boy who never went further afield than a two-weeks’ cottage at Hampton Beach, just across the border in New Hampshire. All the while reading too many books about faraway places with strange-sounding names. And I know exactly why I’ve been pulling out the scrapbooks these last weeks, because the journey has suddenly stalled. The road doesn’t go any further, the bridges are all washed out, or maybe I’ve just gone overboard in a squall. So I gather all my memories of the places barely glimpsed, the stamps that litter my passport, and wonder if all together they prove that I went the distance.

  I understand that there isn’t a final exam for this. The map studded with pins is purely subjective, and in any case nowhere near the driven pace of travelers like Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin, who seem to live exclusively on trains and tramp steamers, or riding camelback up the sacred mountain. And needless to say, they don’t stop for fifteen minutes once they get there; they stay until they’ve drunk it to the lees. Graham Greene in Haiti, or making the rounds of the leprosaria in the Congo. D. H. Lawrence in Italy, Joan Didion in El Salvador. Exploring the places where people live beyond the end of the road.

  Of course it’s no secret why my ticket has expired. Because of AIDS, the borders have narrowed further and further, till whole continents are now in the red zone. Forget Africa, or China or India, the Middle East, any place equatorial. Even when I was asymptomatic, still juggling a hundred T-cells, I crossed off half the world for being too dirty. Couldn’t eat the meat or the milk or the fruit, let alone drink the water. There was something almost xenophobic in all this, an overcaution that looked at the world through a glass bubble of paranoia.

  As if one couldn’t get just as deadly sick in one’s own backyard. A doctor friend has warned me never to order water in a restaurant, or anything with ice, comparing such recklessness to dipping a cup of water from the Nile. For a year and a half I haven’t touched a shred of lettuce. As soon as I heard the only safe way was to put the leaves in a sinkful of water with a tablespoon of bleach, I went off salads entirely. Odd, because I always thought of myself as rather intrepid.

  Not anymore. What amazes me now about the memory of Capri is that stride up the rocky path, especially the final burst to the summit. That’s the real Dr. Monette, prepped for so many years by his daily trot on a treadmill, never out of breath for a minute, no matter how steep the trail. Now it’s all come down to this swollen leg of mine, too much exertion reducing me to a hobble by day’s end. Even with the addition of a stretch surgical stocking, refined last week with a garter belt that girdles my waist and clamps the stocking in place. Till I am something of a cross between an atherosclerotic old lady and a genderfuck chorus boy in a kickline. Winston calls the orthopedic shop—staffed as it is by a trio of sturdy Eastern European women—Frederick’s of Poland.

  We still hope the new chemo is going to work, shrinking the KS lesions in the lymph system so that the dammed blood will circulate again, flushing the swamp of edema. And I mustn’t complain too much, because I’ve made it to the next breakthrough—a chemo regimen that has no debilitating side effects. After four doses i
t has flattened out and faded most of my surface lesions to mere gray smudges, but it hasn’t yet drained the swamp. That tenacious “leg thing” again, so far eluding all the tricks of oncology, leaving a whole division of us limping about.

  This may be the best we can do with it, sighs Dr. Thommes, pressing his thumb to the swell above the knee, leaving a dent in the flesh. Just keep it from getting worse.

  These strange plateaus of dying, where you bargain away your dancing days as long as it doesn’t get worse. If that sounds like rank self-pity, it’s not intentional. I’ve watched this swelling go up and down for nearly a year with a certain abstractedness, testing my body mechanics, still trying to outwit the creep of complications. Staying in charge, riding my illness as if I was breaking a horse, till lately anyway. If there’s one specific moment when I got it, all my denial suddenly in tatters, it would be last month in the Canadian Rockies.

  Still on course for Ithaka, even then. A new direction—due north—and a territory unexplored, at least by the likes of me. We flew to Calgary and then headed by car for Lake Louise. We put up at the old railroad hotel at the southern end of the lake, a drop-dead view from our room of mountain peaks on either side and the glacier itself pouring slowly over the northern ridge. It was the runoff that had created the opalescent green of the water in the valley. Picture-perfect.

  And for some reason I had neglected to factor in my limitations. Though I could stroll along the shore for a quarter mile or so, hiking was out of the question. But that was the way I’d always done it before—trailing up out of the valley in hiking boots, bound for the high country. In Yosemite with Roger, straight to the top of Bridal Veil by switchback. Or the Lake District, the high green hills above Grasmere, no one else at the top. The hiking having the salutary effect of letting the mind go blank; or if lost in thought, with none of the petty clutter of the quotidian.