“They are like elephants. They never forget.”
“Ukh.” he said, through clenched teeth. “My God. Uff. Jesus…”
The card was suddenly, swiftly, snatched from his hands. He looked up, still in a state of shock, to see Doctor Rafael tearing it into pieces.
“Doña Sana!”
A moment. Then the housekeeper, old, all in white. “Doctor?”
“Burn this.”
A moment passed. Just the two of them again. Then Rafael, in a tone which was nothing but kindly, said, “Jack, you are still young and you are still healthy. My advice to you: Go away. Go to a cooler climate. One with cooler ways and cooler memories.” The old woman called something from the back of the house. The old man sighed. “It is the summons to supper,” he said. “Not only must I eat in haste because I have my clinic in less than half-an-hour, but suddenly-invited guests make Dona ’Saña very nervous. Good night, then, Jack.”
Jack had had two gin drinks. He felt that he needed two more. At least two more. Or, if not gin, rum. Beer would not do. He wanted to pull the blanket of booze over him, awfully, awfully quickly. He had this in his mind as though it were a vow as he walked up the front street towards the Cupid Club.
Someone hailed him, someone out of the gathering dusk.
“Jock! Hey, mon Jock! Hey, b’y! Where you gweyn so fahst? Bide, b’y, bide a bit!”
The voice was familiar. It was that of Harry Hazeed, his principal creditor in King Town. Ah, well. He had had his chance, Limekiller had. He could have gone on down the coast, down into the republican waters, where the Queen’s writ runneth not. Now it was too late.
“Oh, hello, Harry,” he said, dully.
Hazeed took him by the hand. Took him by both hands. “Mon, show me where is your boat? She serviceable? She is? Good: Mon, you don’t hear de news: Welcome’s warehouse take fire and born up! Yes, mon. Ahl de carn in King Town born up! No carn ah-tahl: No tortilla, no empinada, no tamale, no carn-cake! Oh, mon, how de people going to punish! Soon as I hear de news, I drah me money from de bonk, I buy ahl de crocus sock I can find, I jump on de pocket-boat—and here I am, oh, mon, I pray fah you… I pray I fine you!”
Limekiller shook his head. It had been one daze, one shock after another. The only thing clear was that Harry Hazeed didn’t seem angry. “You no understond?” Hazeed cried. “Mon! We going take your boat, we going doewn to Nutmeg P’int, we going to buy carn, mon! We going to buy ahl de carn dere is to buy! Nevah mine dat lee’ bit money you di owe me, b‘y! We going make plenty money, mon! And we going make de cultivators plenty money, too! What you theenk of eet, Jock, me b’y? Eh? Hey? What you theenk?”
Jack put his forefinger in his mouth, held it up. The wind was in the right quarter. The wind would, if it held up, and, somehow, it felt like a wind which would hold up, the wind would carry them straight and clear to Nutmeg Point: the clear, clean wind in the clear and starry night.
Softly, he said—and, old Hazeed leaning closer to make the words out, Limekiller said them again, louder, “I think it’s great. Just great. I think it’s great.”
Afterword to “Manatee Gal, Won’t You Come Out Tonight”
BY LUCIVS SHEPARD
The literature of the expatriate has a proud tradition in English and American literature, marked by names such as Conrad, Lowry, Kipling, Bowles, Greene, and Stone, and by some of the best novels produced in the language, novels such as Under the Volcano, Lord Jim, and The Sheltering Sky. Its classic themes are loneliness, man’s folly, and the inimical nature and mysterious laws of a place not one’s own. But more pertinently, in every instance the literature is marked by a writer’s fascination with the place in which he—and his protagonist—have chosen to live, and with his love for that place, even though he may depict it as vile and treacherous and sad.
In his story “Manatee Gal,” Avram Davidson engaged the classic themes with the quirky eloquence for which he became known, incorporating as well many tropes of the great adventure stories—: embracing all his characters, whether villain or naïf or boor, with a kind of splendid, generous crankiness that makes plain his affection for the setting of the story—British Honduras, or Belize. The sense of place he gives us in this and in all the Limekiller stories is pungent, lustrous, sensual in every regard, a feast for eye and nose, ear and palette, and though Jack Limekiller is a wonderfully drawn character, it is ultimately Belize that is the dominant character of the tale, with its dancing butterfiles and magical lizards and mystical coves, all illuminated by the exotic precision of the speech of its citizenry, which Avram rendered in such loving detail. It, Belize, is a great character, as palpably individual as Conrad’s Borneo and Stone’s Vietnam, and I only wish Avram had done more of these stories, or had expanded his territory to include the surrounding region. Had he done so, I believe his name would have been more widely known while he was alive—as it most certainly will now that he has passed away—and we might have seen something even more remarkable from his pen, for I believe he had barely scratched the surface of what he had to tell us about this beautiful, devious, and subtle stretch of beach and jungle and cay.
Sad to say, Avram’s Belize no longer exists, as it is currently being inundated in a wave of American and British commercialism, which may one day soon transform it into something grotesquely Cancun-esque. But that, of course, speaks to the other virtue of the expatriate writer: his ability to preserve a corner of the world and of time for our enduring pleasure. So here, in all its pervasive sweetness and Gauguin-like brightness, embellished by colorful bromeliads and majestic garobos and trees older than most nations, is a real place and time now elevated to the realm of the fantastic and the legendary, caught at the moment when its innocence was just about to be swept away, a place in which every oddly shaped rock had a story attached to it and the lore of jungle and sea was a vital element of people’s lives, and bandits who robbed chicleros had not yet been replaced by Colombian cowboys with aluminunm suitcases and small black guns.
When I was starting out as a writer, I wrote Avram a letter telling him that I had recently finished a couple of stories set in Central America, and that I was a bit concerned that, because of the Limekiller stories, people were going to think I was stealing his act, and that I hoped he didn’t think so. It was a terribly naive letter, one of those you wish to God you hadn’t mailed the second you drop it through the slot. A couple of weeks later I received a reply wherein Avram, utilizing that generous crankiness of which I’ve spoken, informed me that “yes, you are absolutely right. The Caribbean littoral is my exclusive preserve. No one could possibly illuminate it as well as I …” Of course I knew he was kidding.
Now, having just reread the story you have read, I’m not so sure.
Naples
INTRODUCTION BY WILLIAM GIBSON
I once told Avram Davidson that I was very busy, finishing a first novel. “But you mustn’t do that,” he wrote back, “you’ll be letting down the side.” Eventually I found myself writing a second novel. I told Avram. He sighed. “But I’ve told you that you mustn’t do that.”
He was a very droll man, was Avram, and one who knew a thing about the perils of literature, and a thing about the giving of encouragement.
I miss him. I missed him quite sharply, and unexpectedly, one afternoon this past winter, when I was forestalling the completion of yet another novel with an A-to-Z reading of a facsimile edition of the Lexicon Balatronicum, 1811, otherwise known as A Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University Wit, and Pickpocket Eloquence. Deep in the W’s, my day a dead loss, I had just discovered the following entry:
WOLF IN THE BREAST. An extraordinary mode of imposition, sometimes practised in the country by strolling women, who have the knack of counterfeiting extreme pain, pretending to have a small animal called a wolf in their breasts, which is continually gnawing them.
Now the truly stunning peculiarity of that, its sheer lack of context, is quite phenomenal. Extraordinary mode of imposition. Strolling women. Counterfeiting
pain. Wolf in the breast. And the instant of my missing Avram, and very precisely Avram, was the instant of my running down the full and lifetime list of my available human resources, frantic for someone to whom to take this mystery, this marvel, this extraordinary mode of imposition, and finding that, of course, there was Avram, and only Avram. Avram who could at the very least have invented a context for a small animal called a wolf, or who might even have known, somehow, through the vast and trackless courses of a lifetime’s reading and remembering, what it possibly was that these strolling women were about.
And remembering that Mr. Davidson, the sum of however many whole Borgesian libraries stored so casually in his head, was no longer available for consultation.
But still. That same Mr. Davidson had himself let down the side, and most handsomely, very many times, and one of these was with the story you are about to read, which won the World Fantasy Award, and well it should have done, and many others he wrote as well, had such things existed when he wrote them.
“Naples” is a story that knows something of the wolf in all our breasts, something of addiction and quite possibly of love, and of that coin in which the very oldest things are trafficked.
A wonderful, grim, dark thing.
NAPLES
IT IS A CURIOUS thing, the reason of it being not certainly known to me—though I conjecture it might be poverty—why, when all the other monarchs of Europe were still building palaces in marble and granite, the kings of that anomalous and ill-fated kingdom called Of Naples and the Two Sicilies chose to build theirs in red brick. However, choose it they did: These last of the Italian Bourbons have long since lost their last thrones, no castrato singers sing for them from behind screens to lighten their well-deserved melancholy anymore, and their descendants now earn their livings in such occupations as gentlemen-salesclerks in fashionable jewelry stores—not, perhaps, entirely removed from all memory of the glory that once (such as it was) was theirs. But the red-brick palazzi are still there, they still line a part of the waterfront of Naples, and—some of them, at least—are still doing duty as seats of governance. (Elsewhere, for reasons equally a mystery to me, unless there is indeed some connection between red bricks and poverty, buildings in the same style and of the same material usually indicate that within them the Little Sisters of the Poor, or some similar religious group, perform their selfless duties on behalf of the sick, the aged, and the otherwise bereft and afflicted; and which is the nobler function and whose the greater reward are questions that will not long detain us.)
Some twenty years ago or so, a man neither young nor old nor ugly nor comely, neither obviously rich nor equally poor, made his way from the docks past the red-brick palazzi and into the lower town of ancient and teeming Naples. He observed incuriously that the streets, instead of swarming with the short and swarthy, as foreign legend implies, swarmed instead with the tall and pale. But the expectations of tradition were served in other ways: by multitudes of donkey carts, by women dressed and draped in black, by many many beggars, and by other signs of deep and evident poverty. Almost at once a young man approached him with a murmured offer of service; the young man clutched the upturned collar of his jacket round about his throat, and, as the day was not even cool, let alone cold, it might have been assumed that the reason for the young man’s gesture was that he probably did not wish to reveal the absence of a shirt. It was not altogether certain that the young man had no shirt at all, probably he had a shirt and probably this was its day to be washed and probably it was even now hanging from a line stretched across an alley where the sun did not enter in sufficient strength to dry it quickly.
There were many such alleys and many such lines, and, it is to be feared, many such shirts. There were also many such men, not all of them young; and if a count had been made, it might have been found that there were not enough shirts to go around.
Naples.
The traveler continued, with frequent pauses and considerings, to make his way slowly from the port area and slowly up the steep hill. Now and then he frowned slightly and now and then he slightly smiled. Long ago some humble hero or heroine discovered that if the hard wheat of the peninsula, subject to mold and rust and rot if stored in the ear, be ground into flour and mixed with water into a paste and extruded under pressure in the form of long strips, and dried, it would never rot at all and would keep as near forever as the hunger of the people would allow it. And when boiled it formed a food nutritious as bread and far more durable, and, when combined with such elements as oil or tomato or meat or cheese and perhaps the leaves of the bay and the basil, be good food indeed. However, the passage of time failed to bring these added ingredients within the means and reach of all. So, to vary in some measure at least the monotony of the plain pasta, it was made in the widest conceivable variety of shapes: thin strips and thick strips, ribbons broad and narrow, hollow tubes long and hollow tubes bent like elbows, bows and shells and stars and wheels and rosettes and what-have-you. And, if you have nothing, it is anyway some relief to eat your plain pasta in a different design…when you have, of course, pasta to eat.
At least every other doorway in the narrow streets and the narrower alleys kept a shop, and many of the shops sold pasta: for the further sake of variety the pasta was not merely stacked up in packages, it was also—the straight kinds—splayed about as though the stalks held flowers at their upper ends. And when the traveler saw these he faintly smiled. The young man who paced him step for step also looked at these modest displays. But he never smiled at them. In fact, although he continued his soft murmurs, he never smiled at all.
Most of these ways seemed hardly wide enough for outside displays, but such there were; there were second-hand clothes and fewer by far displays of some few new clothes; there were whole cheeses, although none hereabouts were seen to buy them whole, and perhaps not very many very often bought them by the slice or crumbling piece. And there were small fish, alive, alive-o, and larger fish in dim slabs that had not been alive in a long time, dry and hard and strong-smelling and salty, redolent of distant and storm-tossed seas. Tomatoes and peppers lay about in baskets. Oil was poured in careful drops into tiny bottles. There were also olives in many colors. Pictures of saints were sold, and the same shops sold, too, odd little emblematic images in coral and silver and—this was surely strange in such a scene of poverty—even gold: behind the narrow windows of narrow shops, crosses, too, yes, and beads: the universal signia of that religion… But what were these horns? What were these tiny hands, fingers tucked into a fist with the thumb protruding between first and second fingers?
Best not to ask, you would empty the street in a trice. Everybody in Naples knows, no one in Naples would speak of it above a whisper…to a stranger, not at all. Speak not the word, lest it come to pass. Look not overlong at anyone in these streets, particularly not at the children they produce in such numbers of abundance. Who knows if your eye be not evil?
The eye of the traveler passed over the swarming and ragged bambini without stopping, and in the same manner he glanced at the scrannel cats and the charcoal braziers fanned by the toiling housewives: When one’s home is but one room, one may well prefer the street as a kitchen.
When one has that which to cook, and fuel with which to cook it.
At length the passageway widened into a sort of a piazza. At one end was a church, on either side were the blank walls of some palazzo a good deal more antique than the brick ones down below: perhaps from the days of Spanish viceroys, perhaps from the days of King Robert. Who knows. There were anyway no more shops, no stalls, no wide-open-to-the-street one-room “houses”…and, for once, no masses of people…no beggars, even…there was even a sort of alley that seemingly went nowhere and that, surprisingly, held no one. And the traveler, who had so far only from time to time looked out from the corners of his eyes at the young man cleaving close to him as a shadow does, and who had made no reply at all to the soft murmurs with which the young man (ever clutching his jacket round about hi
s naked throat) continually offered his services as “guide”; now for the first time, the traveler stopped, gave a direct look fleeting-swift, jerked his head toward the tiny passageway, and stepped inside.
The shirtless one’s head went up and he looked at the heavens; his head went down and he looked at the filthy worn stones beneath. His shoulders moved in something too slight for a shrug and his unclothed throat uttered something too soft for a sigh.
He followed.
The traveler turned, without looking into the other’s eyes, whispered a few short words into the other’s ears.
The face of the young man, which had been stiff, expressionless, now went limp. Surprise showed most briefly. His brows moved once or twice.
—But yes—he said.—Surely—he said.
And he said, with a half bow and a small movement of his arm—I pray, follow. Very near—he said.
Neither one paused at the church.
And now the streets became, all of them, alleys. The alleys became mere slits. The shops grew infrequent, their store ever more meager. The lines of clothes dripping and drying overhead seemed to bear little relation to what human beings wore. What actually dangled and flapped in the occasional gusts of flat, warm, and stinking air may once have been clothing. Might once more, with infinite diligence and infinite skill, with scissors and needle and thread, be reconstituted into clothing once again. But for the present, one must either deny the rags that name, or else assume that behind the walls, the scabby walls, peeling walls, broken walls, filthy damp and dripping-ichorous walls, there dwelled some race of goblins whose limbs required garb of different drape.
The traveler began to lag somewhat behind.
How often, now, how carefully, almost how fearfully, the youngman guide turned his head to make sure the other was still with him. Had not stepped upon some ancient obscenely greasy flagstone fixed upon a pivot and gone silently screaming down into God knows what. Had not been slip-noosed, perhaps, as some giant hare, hoisted swiftly up above the flapping rags… Rags? Signal flags? What strange fleet might have its brass-bound spy-glasses focused hither? Or perhaps it was fear and caution lest the other’s fear and caution might simply cause him to turn and flee. In which case the youngman guide would flee after him, though from no greater fear than loss of the fee.
The Avram Davidson Treasury Page 46
