Come Sunday

by Bradford Morrow

  The air’s gathering around my legs. Warm against this animal. Going to have Christ’s own case of lice by the time we reach where it is we’re going. Back sore. Head pounds, and that son of a bitch not even five meters in front. My ring on his finger.

  All these children the same as I was all these children deeply involved committed to some stupid ideal, some idea that can’t come to be, the true beauty. But in a local war it must be impossible not to take sides. Your own sister will take you to her bed. Looks like Nini makes you fuck her and fuck her until you say yes god I’ll go I’ll go die and she’ll say you, brother, strong young warrior, now you have had this night of passion and it was good your manhood in me and you are stronger and a man because of this, can go defend our love, this bed, this house, your family. Bautista like he wipes his prick off in her long hair and goes to wage war—

  There! there! hear that! there’s that sound again for sure mortar or helicopter but farther away this time I wonder if the boy hears it, he must, low little bastard that fucks his own innocent sister.

  Nini, but no maybe that’s backwards maybe the violence’s more mysterious maybe there aren’t any ideas behind it at all, maybe just something older, something that has to do with the loss of innocence in isolation, the Indian faces all flat and knowing and noble not with ideas but maybe with just the old blood, Nini.

  So here I am, am I not, on this very small horse, this obscenely tiny. Here these shots are ringing around us what is this steep river this river, help me. Carlos, is that you. No no, he left long ago a long time ago. But the beast is working its way through this brown swirl, horse so tiny I should be carrying it. Where are those shots coming from. But maybe they are not gunshots at all just in my head.

  The eye of this poor beast it is white, must be blind in that eye, poor animal. Bautista seems not to be alarmed by those sounds. If there were ever the chance the right time to move is now in this confusion but I’d never find my way out of here—la diritta via era smarrita, can say that again, old professor Besone at the Liceo that face like something out of one of the frosty dark deep circles, Beson-beson-beson! caion-caion-caion! whee boom! Face like a fish, fingers like old men’s pricks. Besone? what are you doing with me here down in this mud-water? you who claw the air with your hands expressive nimble spiders as you?—feverish, explain Alighieri’s meaning in this canto in that, inferno purgatorio paradiso and what postlude for a fatalist no no choice at all. It will be up in Mexico City I will get a flight to Rome can go somewhere, Liguria, there Nini I think would take me in. How her beautiful blond hair her roots brown but not dark, and her eyes and her smooth skin, wondrous belly and how I wanted to make a baby. Good young woman so smart her mind her sentences even were alive in the potency of what all she knew and the conviction that was in every word, her tongue, black panties never a brassiere, her black pumps. How her pharmacist father hated me did everything in his power to keep her away from me after she graduated from the Classico. Our fathers such friends, like brothers almost how many hours they must have spent together lamenting my choices my idiotic opinions my hatred for my family my poor father especially, who probably didn’t deserve all the fire I leveled at him. Just doing his job and doing it better than most men. How’d mamá stand it? me that is. And Nini she would lie beside me and we would kiss so long in our clothes. After a while off the clothing would come pieces at a time. Sometimes nylon her hose. That sizzle sound as the insides of her thighs. Soft muscles shiny all her panties the same color but how we were incredibly virgin, I more backward maybe than, she was taken in by some pretty remarkable warnings: don’t ever let a boy put his finger down here or you will get pregnant. She believed those things her mother told her. The daughter of a pharmacist, too! But we never did it. I never did put my finger down. And how we really did remain virgins because of her mother’s miserable dicta—and what did it all mean?

  That is, it might never have meant as much to her as it did to me. Means to me still. She was the crossroads. I wonder whether she so much as thinks of me, now, Nini whom I never got to take the pain out and away from. We kept seeing each other that summer after Liceo but she went off to university in Torino study medicine met Claudio. Remember sad breakup saying goodbye and I knew too well the direction I was headed and it wasn’t medicine. Because what would perfect health mean to a mind swamped with Plato, More, Saint-Simon, Engels, Marx, Mao, all of them but still slaved by his own puny government? Torino where she met Claudio second-year student in medicine took no time to show my Nini babies are not made with fingers. How she came back at Christmas to visit and Claudio came with her. How she arranged in all innocence for Claudio and me to meet. In of all places Museo del Duomo, in that room where reliefs of the Cantoria, the Laudate Domini of beloved Luca della Robbia. She remembered I thought it was one of the greatest pieces of art in all Italy and how I thought about setting a bomb blowing it up would have been the easiest thing in the world. Or did I forget to tell her?

  But knew I just knew no one would miss it same way they would piss and moan over losing the Pietà . How that (who was that?) Lazlo Toth the mad Hungarian shouting, I am Jesus Christ, sono Gesú. He took this hammer to Michelangelo in Rome broke the bitch’s nose in seventy-two. How even if it had been a political action not a renegade gotten free of his straitjacket nothing would have been accomplished would it? How despite everything I liked Claudio. He was at least communist, outspoken one too, but Nini’s parents found that preferable to me, a radical, an anarchist. And how Claudio gave me a fancy copy of Dante’s Vita nuova floridly inscribed. I thought florid that is for a communist making a present of this token object this bit of property to make amends for having appropriated as he saw it my Nini. Her love, but he was as much a communist as I was a real anarchist, not really, I was, I was, I had that strength of character in the beginning didn’t I? then just lost it? I, just a worm is all I was just a worm and look at this same thing worm in my own wood have made such a mess of things. That night Vide cor tuum, behold your heart, study your heart. Claudio. Where is he now? maybe in Sorrento, somewhere south, the ocean green like gray out to the salt the palms in the white breeze and each day a perfection. Me in my white shirt ironed down the sleeves, and cuff and the collar starched stiff like when I was young so that wearing such a shirt was an honor. Was like marble cut by the great della Robbia, young in the school uniform, a new name, young all over again, a fresh life, una vita nuova …

  —then, movie was over abruptly as it had begun. His eyes came back to focus on how the pilgrimage progressed.

  The sun was brighter than before. The horse sputtered. A sense of well-being had settled in with Lupi, although he knew there was no sensible place for it. World, beautiful as ever.

  Bautista had slowed the pace, increased it, slowed it again. They stopped at the edge of an extensive clearing, hidden within the lower forest. Lupi studied his guide’s agitation. Bautista scanned the farthest perimeter of the field. Lupi, used to half-watching Bautista; looked out over the sunlit land, out in the same direction as the boy, and saw the rows of shabby stalks of a harvested crop of corn. A scarecrow presided over the spent puzzle, dead red rag, a tassel really, turning ever so gently in the air just beneath the tarsus of a crow. The crow, like Bautista, studied the field and was dismayed at the prospect of finding nothing in it. With a click-luck of the teeth he spurred on his horse. Three hours later the same scene was played again. This time, no scarecrow, no crow, but a small hut at the upper boundary, thatch-roofed; no smoke, but a man sitting on the cool clay porch.

  Krieger is waiting for them when they reach this hut. His khaki pants are fraying at the cuffs and have two rectangular pockets sewn like cloth boxes to the thighs. They puddle over a pair of floppy black tennis shoes and burgundy socks. White shirt, cuffs rolled up, a scuffed-aristocratic quality about him, but ready to get to work. He offers his hand like an old friend. A firm grasp.

  His eyes are quick to take in Lupi. Their irises are the color of lettuce,
crisp and fresh in a farina-white face. “All right, okay, how come you two are so late? Never mind, I don’t want to hear it. You look the worse for wear, not the world’s smoothest ride these goddamn puny skeletons. Your ass hurt?”

  “Yes,” he began to answer, looking to Bautista for some measure of how he ought to behave. The boy had already gone around behind the hut in search of something to feed his horse.

  “Well, Lupi, can I call you Lupi? you’ve come such a long way to see our possession, our product, what it is we have to offer that no one else, absolutely no one has to offer. You must be, what, excited, little puffed-up maybe, to be involved in such a project as this, even though your part may seem to be tangential.”

  “Project?”

  “No need to work yourself into a lather—”

  “I’m not in any lather.”

  “You are. No need to get worked up over it get those glands dumping epinephrine in the blood, but yeah, pride pride, and anyhow it’s merely a factor of ignorance on your part at this stage, and we’re here to clear that all up for you give you a good understanding of what this is about.”

  “Ignorance …”

  “I mean, not ignorance as such, not that, but what I mean is we’re about to remedy that and then, as I say, certainly excitement maybe pride, you may feel it. It would be good, these feelings, utterly justified too,” and he tossed his head and the shock of hair that had drifted down over his brow found its place along the thin pate of his head.

  “The fat one back there, what does he have to do with it?”

  “Ah, ah, cautious—well, and why the hell not? I myself’ve been known to go to extraordinary lengths in order not to have to see my colleague. You can’t just pick and choose the people you work with, got to take the bad with the good, etcetera, am I right?” Krieger chuckled, a soft knowing burst of breath. “It’s not like I haven’t seen all this before. The necessary caution, the cynicism. Old Nicaragua, he’s a difficult sort but he’s a dependable mind, little sour maybe, little sour, look at his situation here you get shunted out of the good life, kicked from the upper echelons of Somocistas right down into the sump he lives in now, and, well you learn not to trust very many people, right? Taken me years to know him as well as I do and even at that … well, but no matter whatever else you want to think about him you got to admire he’s a student of history, see, has read all about it. History, that is, and I expect he’s come to form an opinion of people based on his readings, his interpretation of history. Madagascar, Micronesia, the Orkneys, Borneo, etcetera” (Krieger snaps his fingers) “—he’s got them, their history by heart. Once we were together where was it maybe in Panama City, no it was, it was São Paulo, and we’d drunk too much, but he’s a very funny drunk in the sense he’s odd, the more loaded he gets the more coherent he gets, must be in the high breeding you catch my drift?”

  “Loaded?”

  “Drunk, drunk, and anyway here he was very drunk and begins a recital of every major betrayal in all history beginning with Judas Iscariot, Brutus and on down, but to cut a long story his own thesis was at the least pretty compelling, that is at least it was to me on a very warm night some years ago, down in Brazil.”

  Lupi interrupts. “Mr. Krieger?”

  Krieger is a case study in tics. The constant jerk of his head to flip back that unruly length of hair, the quickly batted eyes, the fingers at his shirt buttons. These are heightened to Lupi’s scrutiny within the placid green environment, against the sounds of the horses spluttering and of the cicadas and birds. Bautista comes around with a pail of red water (which makes Lupi realize how thirsty he is). Krieger asks does he intend to give the water to the horses before it has settled. The boy either ignores him or has not understood. Americans seldom speak any language but their own, Lupi considers as the diminutive horses press their heads together at the surface of the water and begin to drink. Bautista goes into the hut in search of food for them. Krieger’s lettuce eyes casually revert to Lupi, who is speaking, his voice wetted by the water he has just drunk from the pail, against Krieger’s advice.

  “Your product,” he was saying, wiping his lips with his hand, “this possession as you’ve called it, I need to know, that is I am glad you have told me these things about your, the other man”—Krieger’s forehead knits—“that other man, your historian-friend back in Nicaragua, the fat one? but this product, there is no way for you to have heard that I’m no longer in on this project, you see. There were so many—that is I thought that we, that I was not right for your people and I already quit.”

  “You quit?” says Krieger, who tosses the long hair off his brow again as he steps back.

  “Quit yes, it’s just it seemed to me I wasn’t doing anything right and that this other man, he—”

  “You don’t quit. You’re in. You’re in with us.”

  “It’s just he didn’t, wasn’t very happy with what I did.”

  “Don’t give my friend another thought. My colleague, he likes you, I’m sure he trusts you completely. Listen. Listen to me, I want you to look at it this way, this is an important thing we are trying to do here, a project, something that will come to be seen as a major turning point in the history of science of medicine, the history of, you cannot overestimate it, history of history. What we have here, in time it is going to affect the lives of thousands, maybe even millions of people. It is a matter of, how to express myself? of presentation.” His fingers work the top button of his shirt, buttoning, unbuttoning, rebuttoning.

  “Presentation,” he echoes, and turns a stone over with the tip of his shoe.

  “Good boy, of presentation. Presentazione. You were approached for a reason. Scrutinized, carefully considered, a candidate among dozens, qualified men believe me. Lupi, this is science and industry, pinch of bad pinch of good. Our part in the larger process is relatively small, groundbreaking yes, but relative, and not so simple as you’d like to think.”

  He continues to stare at his shoe, guessing it is better not to look the other in the eye. “The possession, the product? show me.”

  “Well, are you in with us?”

  Lupi has not intended to display his exasperation. A smile, one in which his teeth are briefly uncovered, breaks over his face by way of coaxing Krieger to get along with his program. This smile is seen to vanish, but even for the moment it played there on his face it felt foreign. It was almost (Lupi senses) improper. He squints out over at the sun.

  Krieger is intransigently silent. Lupi opens his mouth, and is interrupted.

  “Come,” he says, but Lupi has seen too many motion pictures not to note a quality of fantasy, the theatrical nature in both Krieger’s toss of the head—jerked this time not as part of the sequence of unconscious nervous spasms, but to indicate direction—and also a scripted quality (as in, acted) of that one word: “Come.”

  4.

  IN THE MORNING Lupi wore Bautista’s field glasses. Their sharp strap dug into the skin at the back of his neck. He and Krieger climbed through the foliage. Up ahead of them Bautista carried a machete, which he used to cut through the underbrush, full and heavy. They had spent the night in the hut. From Danlí, Krieger had brought provisions and they had eaten corn tortillas, chicken, and a communally shared Coca-Cola, which Bautista savored. Happy, he smacked his lips, allowing another of the few displays of real youth Lupi would ever see of him: the rest of the time he acted like an old man that had been horsewhipped by years and fate into utter catatonia. Lupi was so struck by this strange, sudden change in his behavior that he let the child drink the rest of the soda when the bottle was passed to him. Bautista was wary. You do not get your ring back, he said in Spanish.

  It was an overcast day, but so bright that particles of sky falling through the branches and leaves were silver. Krieger made the ascent with animal ease. He spoke continuously, or so it seemed, throughout the two hours it took to make the crest. Blood sang in Lupi’s ears as his heart pulsed under the strain of the climb. He drank in air through his mouth
and the air itself weighed down on his shoulders.

  “We first heard about him nine or so years ago, that was back in New York.”

  “New York,” breathing through his dry mouth.

  “Where else possibly—it was my not-yet-then-colleague’s dozenth visit there, diplomatic corps, his family goes back generations as I understand it, part of this very substantial English-speaking community originally lived out there along the eastern coast of Nicaragua”—he gestured vaguely in a direction—“colony there very settled, very rooted, remnants of the British colonialists but some of the Indians too, along the Coco, did you know the word Indians? cowboys and Indians, comes from Columbus’s mistake thought he had arrived in India.”

  “I did.”

  “You did what.”

  “Know that, about India and Indians.”

  Was he done? had he finished? Krieger picked up, “Good for you but anyway pockets of them all up and down the coast and like cancer, coming inland actually all down the Americas, of course mostly confined to seaboards, French, British, Portuguese, not many of you wops represented.”

  “Well, no, yes. We haven’t had that much a role down here I guess, except …”

  “Pizza hasn’t infiltrated the Caribbean in other words, right?”

  With difficulty Lupi drew breath.

  “Hey Lupi, here’s a good one. What kind of sound do flat tires make in Italy?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Dago wop wop wop.”

  “Huh?”

  “—where was I? pizza, Portuguese, anyhow first time we heard about him was in a small coffee shop on MacDougal Street, sitting outside it was in the middle of the day. I’m still not sure in what capacity precisely it was my partner was there, must have been something, oh I know it had something to do with cultural affairs. There was this other kid, you probably won’t meet him but his father’s very interested in what we’re doing down here, anyway, this Jonathan Berkeley kid, straight out of college, spoiled, sort of a richy back-to-the-earth type, grumbling about how his father’s blowing all this inherited money into artifacts—the father a gerontologist and some kind of wacky number—”