by Robert Stone
For a long time Holliwell stood by the water. A few yards away under the slate-blue rollers, the universe was being most spontaneously itself. Its play dazzled. It beguiled temporal flesh with promises and it promised all things from petty cheer to cool annihilation.
Things were a lonely and dangerous business and he was tired of them. He wanted clarity and it was not to be had. It seemed to him that one could not stand in clear light for the twinkling of an eye. Each moment was immediately overrun with chemical illusion flashing up from the sea and its dependent blood, from the great steaming jakes of the mind.
So one had always to wander through vapors among phantoms, one was always just out in it and it never stopped. Illusion compounding illusion, a limitless hallucination without end or reference point—desires, fears, dread shadows and pretty lights, one’s own delirium and everyone else’s. It was what kept you going. It kept you going until your heart burst.
He was in love, he remembered. With May. And she was being hunted down.
He lit a cigarette and smoked and turned to see her standing by the beach road. She was waiting for a jitney bus to pass, shielding her eyes from the sun. He flicked the filtered butt into a crystalline wave.
She came to him across the litter of desiccated palm leaves and dead kelp; his heart raced. What was it then? Love? Another yearning distilled of fancy, another drug in the salt blood. Another passion to whipsaw in the wet cave of consciousness.
Then she was beside him trembling in the morning sun, honey-haired—and you wanted to be with her, of course you did. You wanted to salve the loneliness. You wanted to break down, however you might, the entombed separateness of the two selves there, yourself and May. Anyone would.
He started to speak but the look on her face silenced him. Remembering it, he would think that she looked like a vision—a figure of some other stuff, suddenly manifest. The diluvian chaos he inhabited was alien to her. He thought that she must live in some secret arrangement with the world of things; her beauty was the beauty of inward certainties. Such a woman could live, die, make choices, all those things—with a quiet heart. She could minister, heal the sick, march with apocalyptic legions. She looked like a vision to that degree.
Now, she was certainty confounded. She could not bring experience to bear and she had no guile. Through innocence, she had set herself in his quarter of things where the earth trembled underfoot and there was only seeming. The Queen of Swords betrayed. Or simply common sense at its ultimate reduction, at the end of its tether.
In this aspect, she was a challenge and a provocation to the likes of Holliwell. The impulse stripped down was to love her or destroy her. Stripped further it was toward both those ends, to subsume her in flesh and spirit. It was predatory.
But he was an honest man, known to be such. He was capable of honor and sacrifice. As a result she presented to Holliwell something he dreaded far more than a challenge. She presented a choice.
He closed his eyes and opened them. His mind was unstrung with fear, sleeplessness and booze—not for the first time. He was seeing things.
“You did come back.”
“Of course I did,” he said.
They walked together across the sand and up the steps to the dispensary. There was coffee simmering on the heater; she poured them out two cups.
“I wonder,” he said after a moment, “if you could let me have a nip of brandy to go with this.”
She rose immediately from the chair she had taken. Still shaky, her face almost blank, she brought him the miniature brandy bottle.
“I drink,” he explained.
“I know you do,” she said. “I can tell by your face. Where it’s soft.”
Holliwell drew back, amused and stung.
“Your face is hard and soft,” she informed him. “It looks hard and sort of mean but in some places it’s soft.”
He nodded warily.
“I know your face pretty well by now. I’ve been thinking about you.”
He wondered who it was she thought about. Who she thought she saw.
“I felt very close to you last night,” she said.
“You were.”
“I know. You have to understand that’s a rare feeling for me. And I don’t know how to handle it.”
He drank the fortified coffee. Oh, May, he thought, I’m not your lost Tiger. He was the Adversary. He would not let her go now, although it was within his power. Shown flesh, the Adversary eats; presented with inner space, he hastens to occupy it. The Adversary is a lover.
He drew up the ends of the soft net she had stepped into. He said: “I fell in love with you. That’s the only way I can put it.”
He put out his hand and touched her. Gratitude, joy, remorse struck him all together. There were two hungers and an illusion of fulfillment. He thought he understood hers better than his own.
She did not know the drill and this made it awkward for him but exciting as well. He told himself that he was not trifling with her but taking honorable comfort in a friendly place.
It was not one of those times when one forgot the forest for the trees. She was there, always. If he abandoned her she would intrude herself; her expectations were limitless and she pursued their satisfaction without shame. The satisfactions she pursued were innocent and had to do with her idea of earthly love. At times he thought of her as Eve.
Over and through it all was the beating of her heart. Holliwell felt it throbbing in his own body; he caressed her heartbeat as a sexual exercise. He studied its measure under the warmth of her silken skin; he wanted to hunt it down inside her, to be inside her, where its cadence ordered the scheme of her gut and bone as primum mobile. He wanted to be mastered by her heartbeat. He wanted her heart in his hands.
It was difficult to make it last, he was so inflamed. Her intrusions on his selfishness helped, and he was ready when the time came for the thing he had rather dreaded. The ram beat against the shuddering gate, echoing along the walls. Again, again. She did not hide, she was there.
He thought that he could share her pain. The stabbing aside of virginhood was as it should be—his extended flesh prodding after habitation, inching through blood and tissue after her quickening heart. They experienced it together, an enacted metaphor.
Once inside her he was free. For a moment he could make himself believe that the walls of self were melted and identity overthrown. It was all lyric for him, bloody, lubricious. Her heart kept beating faster and faster. They finished as a process of ocean.
Not for some minutes afterward did he realize that she had eluded him after all. He could not understand how it had happened. He turned to her on the mat beside him and saw that he had lost her. Her teeth were bared, biting into her upper lip. Her eyes were bright with tears. Of course he had expected too much of the act; it had been strangely naïve of him. They had both expected worlds too much.
Stupidly, he asked the tedious questions. Whether it had been all right, if she was hurting, whether she had, as he said, enjoyed it. He was pushing her away, he whose science was Other. Each tedious question, each polite reassurance put them farther apart.
He got up, drew water from the sink to wash himself and walked to one of the windows. She had closed all the shutters. He unfastened the one at the window where he stood and looked to the ocean again.
The sea on one hand, the woman on the other. Himself in between. All separate again in their loneliness and fixedness, illusions of union fled.
When he turned to face her she was sitting on the bed wrapped in the sheet. His eye fell on the bloodstains and he looked away. There was a strange smile on her face. When she spoke it was in a small somehow disembodied voice.
“A Wife—at Daybreak I shall be—” he heard her say. “Sunrise—Hast thou a flag for me?” She looked him in the eye with the cool despairing smile. “Nothing ever goes the way I think it will,” she said.
He turned back toward the ocean.
“I wish you hadn’t said that.”
“Oh no,” she said. She stood up with the sheet draped around her and came over to him. “Oh no. Please don’t misunderstand me. It was pleasurable. It was very pleasurable.”
When he turned his face to her, she stood on tiptoes to kiss him on the cheek.
“Very nice, sir. Very nice and new.”
“It hurt,” he said. “It wasn’t what you expected.”
“That wasn’t what I meant,” she said. “I just didn’t think it would happen like that.”
“Neither did I.” He clasped his hands round the nape of her neck and looked into her tears. “It didn’t happen. We did it.”
“Yes,” she said.
Her body was still when he held her. She delicately stroked his shoulder with three fingers as one might pet a cat. It was an odd hit.
“Wait for me,” she said, gathering the sheet round her. “I have to wash.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
He leaned in the window, smoking, watching the road. He could hear her crying in the shower.
She came out wearing an unadorned light blue dress and her hair was tucked up in a matching scarf. A nurse’s uniform—almost a habit.
“You really are in trouble,” Holliwell told her. “Very serious and dangerous trouble. You’re being watched by some very bad people.”
Justin was looking down at her warped reflection in the surface of a wheeled metal table.
“I know that.”
“Do you know who they are?”
“Sure. The Guardia Nacional and people who work for them.”
He was silent for a moment.
“There are others,” he told her. “Foreigners. They could be the local CIA station assets. They’re cowboys.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means no one much cares what they do. And they’re after you.”
She managed to smile. “Me specifically?”
“They think you’re a subversive element.”
“I am. But I’m not very good at it.”
“Well, you’ve attracted their notice. They want you.”
“Come on,” she said, “it’s not me they’re really after.”
He watched her slowly raise her fingers to her lips.
“Yes, it is,” he said. “It’s you.”
He would not be able to explain it to her. She had aroused an appetite in them as she had in him. He called his hunger love, what they called theirs he had no way of knowing. It was malice, shame—the desperado’s rage at innocence and grace, the villain’s abhorrence of love and life and goodness. Names and words were of no account; it was an old game, older than words.
He thought of her heart beating next to his and the notion came to him of that heartbeat pulsing across silence, its brave flutter sounding in the inward ear of those men like the lateral rhythms of a lost sea creature among the reefs. Of her heart as a magical beast bringing the hunt upon itself. A unicorn.
“Let them be after me,” she said, still staring at the tabletop. “While they’re after me, the people who are really doing something can take this country from under their noses.”
“Are they wrong about you then? Aren’t you involved in any real activity?”
“They’re not wrong. I was involved in the fight here. Was. Formerly. I knew they were casing me. I pulled out. I’ve told the people concerned.”
He shook his head. “It’s too late,” he said. “We have to get you out of here.” He looked down at the road. “If you leave with me we might make it.”
“Oh, Frank,” she said, “I can’t, you know.” She shrugged her shoulders with a wan exasperated smile. “I’m responsible for Father Egan. I’m responsible for everything here.”
“You have to, May. They’ll hurt you.”
She looked at him sharply. She was frightened and angry because of it.
“Why do you keep saying it’s me?”
“It’s you.”
“No,” she said uncertainly, “I’m nothing in this.”
“You could come with me up to Miami. After that … I don’t know.”
Nor did he. He could not imagine a time beyond the moment. He felt her eyes on him.
“That would be something, wouldn’t it?” she said.
“Let’s try it, May.”
“It would be something. But it’s not possible. I can’t leave a sick old man alone. I can’t walk out on people who trust me.” She shook her head slowly. “No, Frank. Not now. I have to tell my friends what you’ve told me. And then I’ll think of something clever, I guess.” She was staring at him wide-eyed, the way she had the night before. “How do you know all this? About these people and who they are? These cowboys?”
“I know one when I see one. I was in Vietnam once.”
“Is that where you got that little scar?”
He touched his earlobe.
“That’s right. In the mountains there. It’s a piki scar.”
“You said … somewhere else.”
“I lied.”
“It must have been bad there,” she said. “Was it bad?”
You’d have liked it, he thought.
“It was all right.”
“I don’t know who you are,” she said.
“May, for Christ’s sake! Let’s get it together and get out!”
“Do you think I’m too dumb to be frightened?” she asked. “I’m plenty frightened. Yes, I’d like to run. I’m scared and I’d like to run. Don’t you see that it isn’t possible?” She shivered and raised her upturned palms. “It’s not possible. I can’t do it.”
She started toward him, he moved to her and held her. She stood in his arms with her shoulder to him, very stiff and frightened, facing the open window. Then he heard her say: “My God, they’re here.”
He released her and stepped back.
“Who?”
Going carefully to the window, he saw a young woman in braids and native dress—a Carib, he thought—walking along the road.
“Who?” he asked. “This Indian kid?”
“She isn’t Indian. She’s from town. She’s my contact.” Justin swallowed and squared her shoulders. “I sent them a note last night that I was pulling out. They wouldn’t send her out here in broad daylight unless something was up.”
“Can you keep her outside?”
“I don’t think so.” She looked at him ashamed. “You’ll have to hide. Sneak out.”
Like a man in a bedroom farce, Holliwell left through a window in the washroom, sliding down a hardwood buttress that anchored the dispensary wing to the overgrown hillside. He made his way through the brush to the trail that ran along the creekside and started inland. He followed the trail for about five minutes and then stopped, sat down under a cocobolo tree on the bank and watched the water insects skim the brown surface of the creek.
He understood that she would not go. He had neither the force nor the moral authority to persuade her. He was in danger himself now; he had gone along too far. What it came to, what he had to face, was that he had somehow supposed that he could run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. Informally of course. In the name of communication. He had imagined a place for himself in the business and then assumed that the place existed.
There would be regrets now and they would be deep and bitter. He knew vaguely that his life would be changed somehow. Whatever happened, he thought, he would not be wiser. He did not suppose that his judgment would improve.
The forest enfolded him, shutting out the mission and the sea. Drawn into its silent airless ambiance, he moved through the shady perfumed spaces like a dreamer. The trail and the river kept him from losing his way.
When he had wandered on for about a quarter of a mile, he was brought up by the prospect of an open space ahead; there were hills beyond it and then a precipitous wall of mountains. In the space were three stelae in a staggered row, quite exposed, as clear of earth and vegetation as though they were on exhibition. The one nearest him was discolored from frequent rubbings. If it was not pr
otected, he thought, it would soon be lost altogether.
He advanced and studied the clearing. One of the hills behind it, Holliwell saw from the contour, was a pyramid covered in jungle. There might be more. It was an impressive site; the manner in which it lay half excavated and unprotected was a measure of the government’s barbarity. Whoever had made the rubbings might just as easily have unearthed the entire stela and trucked it away. He was surprised that Oscar Ocampo had not got round to it; there was a fortune to be made here.
The clearing itself was curiously infertile and the meagerness of soil had helped to keep the stones exposed. The ground was sandy and covered with shells—there would be salt or brackish water only a few feet down and the limestone crust was sterile. Perhaps there was some priestly curse over it.
As Holliwell started from the cover of the forest, he saw a young man asleep on the far side of the clearing. He stayed where he was and then began to back toward the tree line.
In the shadow of the mission building, Holliwell found himself a hiding place beside the creek from which he could see the beach road. Above him, he could hear Sister Justin in conversation with her visitor; the discussion sounded businesslike and cordial.
At length he heard a light sandaled step on the porch stairs and the girl in braids went past him on the road toward town. He waited until she had gone some distance and then went around to the front of the building and up to the dispensary wing. On his way up the steps, he saw Father Egan—in pajamas—standing at the kitchen window, blinking in the hard sunlight. Egan saluted him with a soft disjointed wave.
He found Justin standing where he had left her, beside the window. She watched him come in with a sad smile.
“There are people back at your ruins,” Holliwell told her. “They don’t look very reasonable.”
“We have everyone back there,” she said. “It doesn’t matter now.”
Something about the way she said it frightened him.
“What went on?”
She took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly.
“I’m … back in it, I guess.”
“What do you mean, May?”
