The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  For one reason or another, Peter Sagamore often wants to kiss his wife. Just now it’s for the light quick way she has moved the attention off uncomfortable Simon, when P himself was in fact too mildly curious—about why a boy that age isn’t allowed aboard a boat—to feel properly the lad’s discomfort. May busses Katherine for the roses and explains that the car belongs to Marian’s mother, the woman who answered the phone earlier on. She’s back at May’s apartment doing business: a real mensch of a woman down from Baltimore to manipulate some people on the governor’s staff. We will love her. Katherine declares that Peter has got to get on with his errands in Fawcett’s and all, and that our boat is parked just over yonder, so why don’t they four ride around so Sy can have a look before they do the next thing. We two kiss good-bye and remind each other that we’ll rendezvous back at the Hilton around checkout time or in the Annapolis hospital maternity ward should the unexpected befall the expectant. Peter politely declares he’s glad to have seen May Jump again and met her friends. The Marian woman orders the Simon person to come on back there with her so that May’s friend can sit up front, but Kath says No, nonsense, and climbs in back, though the large boy says, half a measure too late, I don’t mind, in a way that—along with his certain shyness and, unless we’re imagining it, an air of disappointment that Peter’s not coming along with them—makes him seem to us possibly more likable than his unfortunate appearance suggests. Has May really adopted him, we wonder separately, or what? Katherine will soon learn, but Peter won’t until later in this lay day.

  They drive off, waving. P waves back and goes on into Fawcett’s Boat Supplies Inc.

  THIS IS OUR STORY,

  not simply Peter Sagamore’s, but we’ll stay with the man just now because he’s going into Fawcett’s Boat Supplies Inc.: a Harrods or Bloomingdale’s of retail marine supply stores, well stocked, pricey, and serious, specializing in sailboat stuff, which we both enjoy looking at. We buy at Fawcett’s only when we need an item sooner than the big discounteries in New Rochelle and Philadelphia can mail it to us; also when we need to soothe our consciences for so frequently using the place to inspect and ask advice about what we’re ordering from the cut-rate catalogues. This morning Peter admires a $610 two-speed self-tailing jibsheet winch, which we don’t need at all but is a beautiful piece of British hardware; an $800 autopilot, ditto, though it must be nice especially in long calm stretches of motoring, but then we don’t have a motor to motor us through such stretches anyhow, do we; a $900 roller-reefing-and-furling headsail system that reminds him of last night’s sail-shortening dream and would be good to have if we had nine hundred free bucks and were going to be doing more sailing than we’re used to rather than less; and three $3 nautical charts of portions of the upper Bay, two of which he buys to replace a pair of six-year-old ones aboard Story.

  As he examines one of these charts to make sure it incorporates certain recent renumberings of the main ship-channel buoys above the Bay Bridge, he hears a sailboat-looking young woman salesclerk ask a sailboat-looking middle-aged assistant-managerial man about the skinny gray-bearded old gent with the Down East accent who looked to her like a cross between Uncle Sam and the Ancient Mariner and who just bought a bunch of quarter-inch double-braided nylon and stainless-steel self-tapping screws. The man replies That’s Don Quicksoat, pronouncing the title Don as though it were a first name and the name as though it named an instant breakfast cereal. Everybody calls him Capn Don.

  There are few customers in the store. The managerial-appearing fellow has put on half-glasses to look something up in the library of manufacturers’ catalogues at the cashier’s counter, but he doesn’t mind pausing to tell the clerk and Peter (who has rolled his charts and joined the conversation) what he knows. Capn Don is regarded up and down the Intracoastal as a more or less engaging eccentric, one of many such migratory oddballs on that waterway: salty solitaries, usually late-middle-aged bachelors or widowers, usually singlehanding an old clunker as weather-beaten as themselves from winter in the Keys to summer Down East. Sometimes they’re serious passagemaking sailors, even ‘round-the-worlders, following in the wake of Joshua Slocum and Sir Francis Chichester; more typically they’re make-do drifters, following the plane of the ecliptic, taking it easy on both their vessels and themselves. Some eke out their retirement income with spells of pick-up labor in the boatyards along their leisurely way; most prefer to get along on their pension checks. For that reason, one doesn’t normally find their likes in list-price establishments like Fawcett’s; they prowl the salvage yards for secondhand gear and buy their maintenance supplies from the discount houses. Sometimes they steal.

  Capn Don Quicksoat is an exception: likes to talk; buys good gear for his weathered old boat, which is reported to be soundly built and well maintained except cosmetically. Those self-tapping screws and that double-braided nylon, for example, he could have picked up ten or twenty percent cheaper at the general hardware store just a block away; but he had a question about swaged terminals to ask of Fawcett’s rigging specialists, and considerately purchased his other items while he was here. The man is said to pretend to believe that he really is Don Quicksoat, the old fellow in the book. He will explain to anyone who asks, the assistant manager has heard, that he and his boat have been blown by a certain magician all the way from Spain to the USA, and from the old days to now. People therefore reasonably assume Capn Donald to be daft, though the assistant manager himself has seen no evidence of daftness in him. He is also said to be rich and, if crazy, crazy like a fox. Others have wondered whether he’s an elderly drug-runner, of whom the Intracoastal Waterway has a few. He has even been reported to be a famous writer living incognito, gathering material for his next bestseller. In any case, he pays cash; he doesn’t shoplift; and he bathes more often than some others of his fraternity. The assistant manager sees him just about every spring and fall.

  His boat, says Peter, says “Montesinos.” Where’s that?

  The assistant manager looks over the tops of his half-glasses, pleased. I asked Capn Don that question once. He said if he knew where the hell it was, he’d go back there.

  P gets directions to the nearest bookstore and beats up Main Street against the remarkable wind, clutching his rolled charts. Annapolis clinks like a giant wind-chime under sky as blue as bottom paint: thousands of unsecured halyards thunking hollow aluminum spars. The Crown Bookshop has the Signet Classics edition of D.Q. He finds the Cave of Montesinos episode and rereads it on the spot—chapters XXII and XXIII of Part Two—to check his memory, then buys the book in case Katherine wants to reread it too. Downhill and downwind to Story, straining lightly against its docklines like all its neighbors. P boards, disconnects the battery charger, which has done its automatic job, and opens ports and hatches to freshen the cabin. The little motion of the hull is so agreeable, the cabin so familiar and inviting, he decides to spend the rest of this lay-day morning aboard after all instead of back in our room. Later he’ll transfer six years-worth of our annotations from the old charts to the new; just now he sets up the foldaway dinette table for a work surface and fetches out Story’s log to enter, let’s see, Charlie Smart, our separate message-light dreams, as many items as he can remember from Katherine’s bookmark exhibition, and what the Fawcett’s man has told him about Captain Donald Quicksoat. Such a Heartstone overdose, he agrees with Katherine as he writes, must surely beam the old fellow aboard before checkout time.

  PETER SAGAMORE IN THE CAVE OF MONTESINOS

  He has recollected the episode pretty well, though not certain of its arresting details. It is a full hundred fathoms of rope—six hundred feet—that Quixote buys to descend into the cave with; he and Sancho and their guide are obliged to hack a path through thick brambles to reach the entrance; startled crows fly out of the underbrush at their approach—also bats, a sign that they are on the right track and that that track is pretty scary. In all, a daring bit of amateur speleology, well warranting Quixote’s prayers to God and to
his lady Dulcinea before he descends. The cave is real and deep: A translator’s footnote remarks that local Manchegans believe it to run several kilometers, from its entrance-hole to the feudal castle of Rochefrías. The circumstance of that feudal castle, he supposes, together with the name Montesinos (a character from chivalric romance), inspired the episode. Cervantes has the retrieved and reluctantly awakened knight report that he came to rest upon the ledge of a cavity twelve to fourteen fathoms down, coiled the slack rope, and dropped off to sleep: not especially implausible for a man in his (seventeenth-century) fifties, exhausted by the strain of being lowered eighty feet down into a frightening black hole of unknown depth. He “woke,” Quixote declares, to find himself in a beautiful meadow, within sight of a transparent crystal palace or castle. To make certain he wasn’t dreaming, he tested himself carefully, as Peter often does in his own dreams, and satisfied himself that he was not.

  The vision-adventure that follows, in Quixote’s account, strikes P as only mildly interesting: Quixote is welcomed into the crystal palace by Montesinos himself, who at the battle of Roncesvalles five hundred years earlier, according to legend, cut out the heart of his mortally wounded cousin, Durandarte, at the latter’s request, and delivered it to the slain knight’s Lady Belerma. All three principals, much aged, are present in the palace under Merlin’s ongoing enchantment: Faithful Montesinos has become a white-haired sage; noble Durandarte is laid out upon his own sarcophagus like a corpse embalmed, except that from time to time he repeats in verse his dying request, as if it had not long since been carried out. The peerless Lady Belerma, aged and ugly, appears in mourning, carrying her dead champion’s pickled heart in a lace handkerchief. Montesinos explains to Quixote, who explains in turn to his “rescuers,” that while the Enchanted neither eat nor sleep nor void excrement, much less die, they age, grow hair and nails, and—witness Lady Belerma—undergo the menopause.

  They also suffer want, as the charming and unexpected end of Quixote’s narrative-within-the-narrative attests. Montesinos and his visitor step outside the crystal palace into the meadow, where Quixote espies three peasant girls leaping and cavorting like frisky she-goats. One he recognizes to be none other than his own lady, Dulcinea del Toboso, under the Enchanter’s spell with her maidservants like the rest. He calls to her; she flees from him—but then one of her maids comes saucily back to beg from him, on her mistress’s behalf, a loan of six reales, offering Dulcinea’s new dimity petticoat as collateral. The request astonishes Don Quixote, as this touch of Spanish realism astonishes and delights Peter Sagamore. Poverty, explains Senor Montesinos, extends even unto enchanted ladies of quality. The noble knight refuses the surety and gives the maidservant all the money he has: four reales, disbursed to him earlier by Sancho Panza to give as alms to the poor along their way. The mischievous maidservant takes the money and, in lieu of curtseying her thanks, capers six feet straight up into the air.

  And that is the end of both Quixote’s adventure (which he swears filled three whole days, not a mere half-hour) and his account of it, for at that moment in the former he awoke to find himself hauled up by Sancho out of cave and vision alike, and at this moment in the latter Sancho interrupts with protestations of utter disbelief. The knight’s conviction remains unshaken: Another time, he patiently pledges, he will tell his squire such details of this cave-adventure as to compel belief. But he never does; at the novel’s end, that pledge is still as outstanding as Quixote’s loan of four reales to Dulcinea’s saucy maid.

  Peter Sagamore believes that he understands this curious story, not as a critic but as a fellow storyteller might understand it: fellow to both the enchanted Don Quixote who told it and the enchanter Miguel de Cervantes who dreamed it up and wrote it down. The realest parts of any dream are those strong details that waking leaves unexplained, or that no amount of waking explanation explains away. The sharp sensation of the double distance of that light in Peter’s early-morning dream, for example—its being simultaneously two or three and two or three thousand yards away—he still feels in his nerves as clearly as he feels the present rocking of the boat and hears wind whistling through shrouds and stays; it is as real as they are. What pricks up the storyteller’s ears about Quixote’s Montesinos dream is not that business of three-day sojourns underground like Christ’s and Dante’s; not that chivalric baggage of crystal palaces, disheartened knights, weeping ladies. It is the combination of that homely beggary—hitting the old guy for four reales in mid-vision—and the fantastical detail of three women capering like she-goats in that meadow, bounding six feet straight up into the air! Peter’s point, which he now enters in Story’s log, is that that irreducible, unforgettable detail goes as unexplained in Quixote’s vision as the vision itself goes unexplained (and uncompleted) in Don Quixote.

  Whatever his recent and current narrative hang-ups, Peter Sagamore is a professional. It would not be difficult for him to imagine endings to this story, even without the provocative presence in Annapolis Harbor of Capn Don and Rocinante IV. Indeed, without violating his pledge to Katherine, he permits himself a few lay-day notes. Seafaring is as alien to dusty Don Quixote (though not to its author, proud veteran of Lepanto) as landfaring to The Odyssey, its opposite number in other respects as well. P recalls hitchhiking across the Manchegan plains, en route from Granada to Madrid, over earth the color and texture of broken roof-tiles, through air as hot as a brick-kiln’s and so dry that blinking actually scratched his eyes, as swallowing scratched his throat. Yet Odysseus ends his odyssey with an epic trek inland; and a central theme of Quixote Part Two is Sancho Panza’s governorship of the Isle of Barataria: reality mimicking chivalric fantasy. . . .

  He writes no further. Stung by imitators who leaped with Quixotes of their own into the ten-year breach between Parts One and Two of his novel, Cervantes not only kills his hero unequivocally in the final chapter of Part Two, supplying even a notarized death-certificate against spurious literary resurrections, but closes his book with the author’s farewell to his pen, which he enjoins from ever writing again of Don Quixote. Where the master stopped, dare the apprentice go? Deeper yet into that cave, beyond the fourteen-fathom ledge, to the end of Quixote’s rope?

  Such must be P.S.’s future considerations, when the time comes for him to set down the story of Capn Don and Rocinante IV. What halts his pen now (that is, toward the end of the paragraph before the paragraph before this) is that word mimicking, which, the moment he writes its first three letters, reminds him where he saw once before, two years ago, that woman in May Jump’s borrowed car, May Jump’s new lover, that Marian, who looks to us like a punked-out version of Carol Kane in the movie Hester Street. I’M SO HAPPY I COULD JUST SHIT, her then T-shirt had declared, in that Fells Point bar where, following Douglas Townshend’s lead, he had passed her on his way to meet the Prince of Darkness. Doug had spoken her name and courtly kissed her cheek: Mim. Her hair had been different then, teased out. She had glanced at Peter with those unhappy eyes of hers and gone her way, and he had gone his, upstairs to speak with Doomsday Factors in the pleasant room above . . . Carta’s Cavern.

  Carla B Silver. Franklin Key Talbott, that Frederick’s brother, that CIA-exposer, that sailorman, and his wife, Somebody Silver, that sharp-looking American Lit lady, Leah Silver, yeah, at Doug’s Georgetown dinner party a hundred years ago. That Simon boy’s aunt and uncle, the big-deal cruising sailors, sure. Peter is out of the cabin in a hurry, blood ahum—Where’s a pay phone? Way over there—hoping he has twenty cents change and that May Jump’s number’s not unlisted. He has; it isn’t; Jump, M.; the phone bell rattles in some crosstown flat. Wind blams the booth. Our man unfairly curses all lesbians from Sappho through Willa Cather and Gertrude Stein to Carson McCullers and Charlene Smart. No way gay May could have known about the John Arthur Paisley connection, whatever it is, but screw that: That is his Katherine she’s got in the clutches of her freako girlfriend’s Gypsy-looking mother, whose missing common-law sonofabitch CIA spook of
a husband once scared this Sagamore shitless with that poisoned mint-tea trick or nontrick. Peter wants to kill.

  His watch says just past eleven. Amazing: He was down in Story’s cabin as long as Don Quixote was down in the Cave of Montesinos. Phone rattles on; wind goes blooey; P pounds back at it from his side of the glass, hangs up, steps out of the booth half frantic, wondering whether to run back to the Hilton or what. Remembers Story’s cabin is open; screw Story. Glances over that way anyhow and sees his great-bellied wife and that Carla B Silver person stepping out of that silver Jaguar down by the municipal transient slips! He sprints, then forces himself down to a jog toward them. Is that—Sure it is; let’s hear it for Jean Heartstone: It’s Donald Quicksoat standing on the sidewalk staring at Story, toward which the two chatting women stroll. Katherine holds her maternity skirt down against the wind: a dignified womanly gesture that touches Peter’s heart. Where are May Jump and the others? The white-pants-suited Silver woman gesticulates with both hands. By when Peter reaches calling range, they and Capn Don are almost together.

  He shouts his wife’s dear name. She turns. He sees her smile at sight of him and say something aside to that Carla B Silver. Capn Don looks as if about to address them, but with so furious a rush does our man come on, the old fellow backs off a step.

  Kate wonders aloud whether something’s the matter.

  Bursts back Pete ‘Sthat Fells Point Doomsday lady! and thrusts himself between them as if wife and children were about to be physically assaulted, taking rough care not to bump the latter in his haste. Kate complains Peter, three dots and a period in her voice; the Carla B Silver person cocks a black eyebrow, but looks on approvingly. She’s already explained, Katherine says. Says the Carla B Silver person Some things, anyhow. Donald Quicksoat approaches, smiling dolefully, one forefinger raised, his left eye winking and his eyebrows twinkling, as if to introduce himself. Not now, brusque Peter tells him. Begins Katherine That nice couple we met at Doug’s first dinner party. P cuts her off: He knows, he knows; let him close up the boat and let’s check out of here. Honey, you’re being rude: Miz Silver’s lost her son and her husband too. Rude Peter says pointedly to the Carla B Silver person I’m sorry about your son. The woman flinches, but says evenly Let me buy lunch for the three of us. No mint tea.