* * *
For his fifth birthday, Afraa bought Maxwell a gift. It was a copy of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night. His favorite story in the book was called “Tale of the Ensorcelled Prince,” which is about a ruler whose wife casts a spell that changes him into half stone, half flesh. One night, while his mother was tucking him in, Maxwell imagined that his flesh was turning to stone. He smiled and told his mother.
“What is that like, mi amor?” she asked, thinking of her parents and imagining that like her son she too was turning to half stone, half flesh, unable to see them or call out to them or reach them through the passage of time, which moves forward, always forward (or rather that was the impression it gave her), and masks existence.
Maxwell closed his eyes and imagined that his veins were cracks in stone and that his skin was hard and gray, but he fell asleep before he could answer.
* * *
Around this time, Maxwell learned how to write. Afraa taught him the following words: Maxwell, men, women, talk, stone, day, dog, sky, earth. It had taken him the most time to learn how to write the word earth, but once he did he wrote it ten times on a sheet of lined paper that he then slipped into his copy of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night. He then tucked the book under his arm and walked out into the yard and through the garden of sunflowers. Once he reached the yard with the dog, he patted the dog’s head and continued out into a street he had never seen before, a street with a brass and drum band dressed as skeletons and feathered birds of prey, a tremendous street that made tremendous noises, and it was there that he showed a skeleton the word he had written ten times, earth, a word that contained everything he knew and which he imagined was the shape of a human face, and the skeleton shrugged his bony shoulders, laughed, and marched on and Maxwell followed.
* * *
Just after Maxwell’s seventh birthday the pirate had a simple idea. Since they had been unable to completely cure Maxwell’s wandering disease, the pirate decided that he would go on long walks with his son. The walks worked, more or less, and Maxwell’s mother, who had started reading the letters of Rousseau, mentioned to her husband that maybe the world would be better if it adapted to the whims of children rather than the other way around. If streets, she said, followed the patterns and logic of children then there would never be such a thing as getting lost, there would be a certain madness, yes, but it would be a lovely madness, one capable of multiple dimensions.
At first, the pirate and his son walked up and down Melpomene Avenue. When Maxwell became bored of Melpomene Avenue, the pirate and his son walked the streets of the French Quarter, which were full of bars, delis, cafés, clubhouses, and brothels. One morning, as they walked, the pirate explained to his son that many of the poor people who lived in the French Quarter were from an island in the Mediterranean Sea called Sicily, a volcanic island inhabited for thousands and thousands of years, and that they had replicated some of that island’s feverish, elegant, and innumerable histories on the very streets they walked. Sometimes, Maxwell imagined that the French Quarter was a deep-sea jungle, and he held his breath and watched people on the streets as they moved like schools of fish, octopi, and sharks. Other times, the pirate took his son to cemeteries, which were good places to wander or get lost in because they resembled mazes without solutions. On days that were especially hot and humid, the trees and tombs offered shade. One late afternoon, while lost in one of these cemeteries, Maxwell asked his father where his father was buried.
“The sea,” replied the pirate.
“Oh,” said Maxwell, “so, he was a pirate like you?”
“Yes, my father was a pirate. Like me.”
“Was he a good pirate?”
“Yes. He was very profitable.”
“And his father?”
“Also the sea.”
“And his father?”
“Somewhere outside the city, in an unmarked plot or a public grave.”
Maxwell looked at a tomb and wondered what the man inside must have looked like and whether he had been rich or poor, tall or short, smart or dumb.
The pirate then explained to his son:
“Piracy gave us freedom, mijo. My great-grandfather, who was the first pirate in our family, was born a slave and his father was born a slave and his father was born a slave and his father was a born a slave in an unknown African village near the sea and that village will haunt our family until the last days on Earth.”
The pirate and his son found a bench under a cypress tree. Through the late-afternoon haze, the pirate pointed to a barely visible star in the sky. He then explained to Maxwell that the light of the star was dead and had been emitted millions of years ago, maybe even billions of years ago, before even the Earth existed.
“We are surrounded by dead light, mijo, by the past,” he said, “but a very useful past. My great-grandfather followed that same starlight to freedom. If the instruments on my boat ever failed me, I could still use that dead light to make my way back home. That is the first lesson learned by every pirate.”
Maxwell thought about faraway villages, a hole in the solar system where the Earth should’ve been, and dead light. He couldn’t understand if all light was dead or just light from the stars. Still, it was pleasant to think about. The pirate and his son were silent for a long time. When a soft wind passed through the cemetery, they both sighed the same way—deeply and with their eyelids half-closed.
* * *
One day while working, the pirate took his son to Delacroix Island, which, the pirate told his son, was not really an island at all, but was the end of the world, since it was only reachable through marsh and bayous and since the people who lived there were the type of people who would inhabit the world at the end of days. The Isleños, as the pirate called them, were fishermen, trappers, and bootleggers, but they had a proper grasp of history because they were the bastard children of the French and the forsaken children of the Spanish, and some of them, abandoned bastards that they were, spoke four or five languages and made more than even the governor.
Later, when the pirate was finished in town, he told his son that he wanted him to meet someone.
“Who?” asked Maxwell.
“A very important Isleño,” the pirate said.
“Okay,” Maxwell replied and watched as a young girl sang a familiar song in a strange accent and hopped over a drainage ditch.
“An old pirate. One of the last. Maybe the very last,” the pirate said and watched his son closely.
“One of the last,” Maxwell repeated and nodded, somewhat distracted and perplexed by the young girl.
“Do you understand?” the pirate asked his son.
* * *
The old pirate’s name was Cesar, although all the Isleños called him the Last Pirate of the New World. He lived in a small shack near a large marsh in Plaquemines Parish. By the time the pirate and his son arrived, the sun was already setting behind the marsh, so the old pirate told them that they would have to spend the night. Then the old pirate gave Maxwell alligator jerky and passed a bottle of whiskey to his father, which he sipped slowly. The pirate and the old pirate enjoyed each other’s company immensely. As they drank, they talked about boats and boxing and the Jai Alai Club in Arabi, where the old pirate went to listen to jazz bands and to watch women sing, beautiful, clever women who reminded him of his ex-wife Cecile and who in ancient Zimbabwe or Ghana would’ve destroyed kings and the men who thought they were kings. They also talked about Prohibition, a boon to Plaquemines Parish, and the modernization of the South, which would eventually lead to a day of reckoning. But first they’d have to bring the Isleños a post office and some electricity.
“We can’t have a day of reckoning without some damn electricity,” the old pirate said and exploded into a fit of laughter.
The pirate laughed. He then looked out a window into the dark marsh and sipped from the bottle of
whiskey.
“And what about the boy?” the old pirate asked. “What about his modernization?”
“Mijo, what do you want to be when you grow up?” the pirate asked his son.
“A pirate,” Maxwell answered.
The old pirate got up from his chair and lit a few candles. He then explained to Maxwell that he was the Last Pirate of the New World and that he was the direct descendant of a long line of African pirates who had worked in the Atlantic Ocean and that his great-great-grandfather had come to the New World first not as a slave but as a freeman in 1809 in order to work under Jean and Pierre Lafitte in the Bay of Barataria and had died some years later in the Cartagena rebellion in Colombia.
He then told the boy that when he retired or died or when he disappeared (because death, he explained, is a great disappearing act, the ultimate Houdini trick), whichever came first, Maxwell’s father would become the Last Pirate of the New World. This was something he had thought long and hard about because his own son had been killed in the Great War by German mustard gas during the Meuse-Argonne offensive in the middle of a sea-green forest. He had even gone to the forest after the war to find signs of his son, but, of course, there hadn’t been any signs of his son, there hadn’t been any signs of his kindness or his terror or even his last thoughts. It had been a long, pointless journey.
Then the old pirate announced that after Maxwell’s father retired or died, piracy in the New World was all over. He had post offices and electricity to look forward to. It was the end of an era and that was that.
* * *
Later that night, when the old pirate and the pirate were drunk, they spoke of the true nature of the sea, which meant that they first spoke of the sea’s consciousness, its will, its intention (a vengeful intention and subterfuge like that of an Assyrian god), but during the Sino-Japanese War the old pirate had horrifically discovered that the deep maw of the sea, or Susanoo, as the Japanese sailors had called it, had no consciousness at all.
“For thousands of years,” the old pirate said, “we’ve been praying to a brainless watery nothing.”
* * *
At some point in the night, Maxwell woke up and he couldn’t fall back asleep. He was too tired and too excited. He got up from the bedding that the old pirate had laid for him on the floor of the shack and crept outside into the night. On the front porch he sat on a stool and thought about the old pirate’s dead son and listened to the bellow of insects coming from the marsh. After some time had passed, an isolated amount of time, as if time itself were an island or a planet the color of deep jade, Maxwell left the porch and found a path which led to the banks of the marsh. Once there, he thought about being a pirate, and stood like a sleepwalker and watched the moon, which was white and monstrous. He watched the moon for hours until it descended inexplicably into the marsh.
* * *
In the morning, they ate bread and cheese and explored the tributaries of the marsh on a flatboat. The old pirate pointed out ancient cypress trees, herons, and mud crevices where alligators had laid their eggs. He told the pirate and his son that due to the Great Mississippi Flood the city and its bankers were going to dynamite the Caernarvon levee and flood the parish. Thousands of people, including the old pirate, were going to have to find new homes and new lives. The bankers were scared of the flooding that was happening all along the Mississippi River and the business they would lose if they didn’t flood the parish.
“They’re trying to wash us away,” the old pirate said. “We’ll be refugees in our own land, but they don’t give a shit. They’re swine with fat pink bellies.”
“Bellies that never burst open,” the pirate said.
“It’s all for nothing. The Mississippi’ll flood upriver. They’re little men who want to be millionaires, sometimes gods. They believe their greed creates the world when in fact it destroys it.”
For a few minutes both men were silent, and then Maxwell, who had been lost in his own thoughts—thoughts of other worlds and dinosaurs, in particular, the Iguanodon, which, he imagined, was gentle and had the same sort of snout as a horse—spotted an alligator. He yelled and the men watched as the alligator slipped by the flatboat, its eyes shining.
* * *
On Thursday, April 28th, 1927, the old pirate came to live with the pirate and his family on Melpomene Avenue. On Friday, April 29th, the city flooded his parish. The old pirate brought a few things—a small wooden chest, a suit, a few books—and he adjusted quickly to the small home. He took Maxwell on walks through the city, which generally lasted hours. Maxwell got the impression that the old pirate was a madman and he imagined that his words were a map to a dying, insane planet.
* * *
“The Pope is diseased,” said the old mad pirate to Maxwell on one of their walks. “Pope John XXIII, who was a pope from 1410 to 1415, and who was also a pirate, was particularly diseased. He had a disease where he thought he was Pope. All popes, as it turns out, have the same disease. Poets are also diseased. Most of them have syphilis, which is a sex disease that drives men to dementia. During the Sino-Japanese War, I met a famous Japanese poet who had syphilis. It was said that he hadn’t left his house in twenty years, which begs the question, how had he gotten syphilis in the first place? Not leaving your home for years and years is a different type of disease, I think. This proves that poets generally suffer from multiple diseases. How did I meet him? I was responsible for smuggling a case of his poetry books into China. The Chinese loved his poetry because it sympathized with them, or that’s what they thought.
“Then there’s a disease where you can’t feel pain. There’s no name for it as far as I know, but it’s still a disease. Once, I met an Indian boy in Bombay who suffered from it. He stood in the center of beggar circles and cut himself to pieces with a small, sacrificial Ram Dao sword. All the while smiling like someone who had just seen a god. He wasn’t blessed by a god, though. He died jumping off a roof for an English journalist when he was just sixteen. Turns out he was mortal, which is another disease. If you think about it, everything is a disease. Youth is a type of disease-in-waiting. Old age is a clear bottle brimming with chalky, liquid disease. Money is a disease. Conviction is a disease. So are cities. Then there are diseases that are like chain reactions. Those diseases are the worst because they inflict hundreds of men, sometimes thousands, sometimes millions. All white men have a disease like this. It’s called Manifest Destiny and it’s why they try so hard to drown us. Then there’s an Eastern disease that’s similar to Manifest Destiny. It’s called Amuk. The people who have this disease suffer a murderous rage, but then afterward they suffer from amnesia. It’s horrible! There was a village, I remember, off the coast of Borneo, or maybe in the Philippines. Or maybe it was the Island of Java. Anyway, one day all the men in this village went mad and tore down their homes and started killing each other. By the next morning, the town had been destroyed and hundreds of men had been murdered, but none of the survivors remembered anything. They presumed a great beast had come and laid waste to everything in sight. Can you believe it? I wouldn’t have, until I met a man from that village who had killed his brother. Such sadness in his eyes. Sadness. That’s another disease. One of the worst. But it’s not the worst. The worst is a disease called Koro, which is a disease where men believe their genitals are retracting into their bodies. Like turtle heads. This is the worst disease of all because the future of mankind resides in its ability to use its genitals. Imagine that! The future! When one day, if you think about it, all diseases will be cured or a great unknown disease will overrun mankind and condemn us all to hell.”
* * *
One added benefit to the old mad pirate moving in was that the Dominicana had more free time. During the mornings, she kept Maxwell home from school, which, she told him on more than one occasion when he pleaded to go, would only poison his mind. Instead, at the kitchen table, she went over Spanish, English, history, literature, philosophy,
sciences, and math with him. He particularly excelled at math. Once, when the Dominicana asked her son why he thought this was the case, he just shrugged, smiled, and told her that he could solve math problems either on paper or with his eyes closed, it didn’t matter which, and sometimes even in his dreams.
During the late afternoons and some evenings, while the old mad pirate and Maxwell wandered the city together, she went to the library and continued her studies with Afraa. By this point all Afraa had to do was suggest a novel or two and send the Dominicana off into a quiet corner of the library to digest it. She spent long, humid evenings reading until the old mad pirate and Maxwell came to walk her home, or, on some occasions, bring her dinner which they had bought in the city markets. When her husband wasn’t working, he came with Maxwell. On these nights, the pirate and his son would hide behind bookshelves in a variety of hide-and-seek and watch her read. The pirate would whisper to his son that he had a very beautiful and brilliant mother and Maxwell would nod. Then the pirate and his son would cough loudly, making their presence known, and the Dominicana would put her book down, playing her part as the seeker, the heroine.
The Lost Book of Adana Moreau Page 2
