Peter loved none of these weeds. But he loved to look down the mountain Golgotha at a certain ridge-fold where a single green tree rose; that was where he and the guards went to drink at a certain hour because there was a tiny oasis there; in the oasis it was cool and a wide shallow stream trickled through a muddy tunnel between the great cottonwood palms, whose bleached fronds stirred about their trunk-waists like the grass skirts of dancers, and the sky fluttered blue as turquoise between their green fan-fingers, and they spread ever so many happy green hands all around themselves in thankfulness, and cattails made a wall against the heat, and the water glittered in the darkness and the palm-trees rustled and between them it was so dim and cool; it was almost like being in a forest, but not quite, because there were not enough trees and their scales were sharp plates like reptile-scales; but at least the fronds were soft; they did not cut your hands. — Peter felt contented when he thought upon that grove. And he said to himself: My CHRIST is in the grove, not the grave. — And the guards made a covenant with Peter that neither party would molest the other, for each was but rendering service and allegiance as he was called upon to do.
Charlevoix, Québec, Canada (1990)
The hills were like green breasts. In the vast mounds of forest blue and green rose skinny white birches so needy for someone to embrace them. Sky-blue massifs rose ahead and behind. The Baie Saint-Paul was wide and blue, pale blue like a sea. The far shore was but an uncertain congealment of haze.
The priests were Peter's sons. When they saw the immensi.y before them they whispered: We shall make no covenant with you.
Algonquin Provincial Park, Ontario, Canada (1990)
Père Jean de Brebeuf made no covenants. But he followed the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, and being thus directed (according to the limits of his strength) up the great river of prayer called Time, he came at last to the Seventy-Second Rapid— viz.; the Thirteenth Apparition of CHRIST, Who manifested Himself to Saint Paul, and also to the Holy Fathers in Limbo, from which state He freed them. Around this Rapid rose the blockily fractured cliff-faces covered by trees standing one below the other, thii crowns of those spruces and aspens shadowing the bases of those above them; they went down and down, until began the rock that dropped sheer to the brown river below. At first he saw the river flowing far down below him, between trees on which autumn and evening already shone with a pale yellow light; he seemed to stand with JESUS CHRIST, Savior of the World, atop the faded cliffs gray and :ool that rose to crickets, resin, ferns, red maples, forest shade, crowned by sky still luminous as in afternoon; but this position Brebeuf considered highly presumptuous considering his unworthiness, and so his soul leaped into the river, allowing itself to be borne back down the Three Falls of Humility, where he was much bruised and scratched by the river-rocks, a mortification which afforded him some consolation for his many faults. Now he permitted himself to clamber back up the Sauk of Election, to ascend to the Current of Patience which again washed him back to the commencement of the Third Week, to rise from the Sixteenth Rapid to the Third Isle of Prayer, to swim from the Twenty-Third Rapid back up to the Seventy-Second, which he pulled himself up by great might and main, wedging his feet between boulders to brace his climb as the cataract spewed down upon his body and the walls shimmered high and narrow above him like rocky-hued rainbows.
In fact the weather was rather grise—viz.; dull and gray. It chilled him but he would make no covenant with his loathsome body, no matter how much it shivered.
Algonquin Provincial Park, Ontario, Canada (1990)
A sick woman saw in dreams a man dressed in black like Père Brébeuf, whom they called Echon. In the dream it was Echon who touched her with fire, at which her fever became much worse. When Tehorenhaennion was called, everyone in that long-house greeted him most respectfully.
The dogs must not howl, he said. I make my cures only in silence.
A girl took the dogs out, and also a bear-cub in its cage, which had begun grunting.
It is my rule to require the sick one to be carried into the woods, to see the Sky, said Tehorenhaennion after a pause. But today there are clouds. This cure will be difficult.
He bent over her and began to blow upon her and suck at her body where she was most swollen. Very soon he had found five hairball charms which Echon or some other witch had sent into her.
The case was most serious, and he had little hope that she would live. However, he turned to her relatives who were there and showed them the witch-charms before he burned them in the fire, concealing his doubts, for sometimes belief alone would assist a patient to recover. Now he gave her a potion to drink which would open the way to her navel—the seat of her disease—and said to her: Have courage! and she smiled most gratefully and replied: Even now I feel eased . . . and her lodgemates began to be very happy, although for fear of him they did not show it, but then the potion mounted to her ears, which began to swell, and so she died.
You tricked us, a man said to him. Why did you fail?
Tehorenhaennion regarded him calmly. — You did not give me all the presents which I asked you for, he said. Where is my pipe of red stone? Where is my tobacco pouch?
The truth was that Echon had used magic which he did not know. Echon was the most Powerful and malignant witch whom he had ever fought. He would make no covenant with him.
Mission-Sainte-Marie, Midland, Ontario,
Canada (1648)
Corn hung yellow and bright. The pigs wanted it. They were grunting pigs with huge pink ears and dirty faces and there were flies on them. The flies wanted pigsweat and blood. Not far away, udders hung. The brown calves wanted them. And the mooing black cows with swollen brown udders, they wanted to be milked or sucked. They had great glistening eyes; they lowed loudly in the hay.
The furnace eye was uneasy. The flames curled back.
Priests stared from the open casements, knowing the furnace eye, wondering when their covenant would be burned. They watched the aqueduct drain down to the South Compound. The water continued through the narrow canal, just a canoe's width; it exited the lock all gray, narrow, a little waterfall through the square arch; and then it left the tables, candles and beds to become again the river it had been, deep and black, streaming with white reflections of palisade-poles like bones. Across the river the Iroquois crouched in hiding. They wanted everything they saw. They wanted to make everything scream and burn.
The flies came and came; they got everything. Then some corn dropped down to the pigs at last, and the pigs got it. Milk jetted from udders into pink mouths, the mouths of calves. Now practically all that's left of those days is Québec's Chapelle des Ursulines with its rose window and rose-windowed arch; but if one looks into space as one reads or rather recites from one's Bible (the eldest daughter looking up at one, the other children eyeing each other silently), it's possible to see how the furnace eye blinked and widened. But the priests never succumbed, never made any covenant, even when they canoed fleeing from their burning Mission. Yes, the fire came, and the Iroquois also gained their own desire, singing: Hé é é é é . . .
DOING HER HAIR
Madagascar (1993)
* * *
Madagascar (1993)
While the roaring gray rain cooled down Madagascar for a minute, she greased her hands, then combed her hair back again, combing the grease in until it shone, leaning forward naked on the bed to watch her progress in the cracked plastic mirror (one of the few items of baggage she'd brought from home). She made a greasy twist down the back of her head, the center one. Then she began to form the others. Leaving the comb in her hair for safekeeping, she inserted the rollers, holding each in with a forefinger until it was securely pinned. So steadily she assembled a long spine of those cylinders along the center ridge of her head like a sort of mo-hawk as the rain slackened and thunder sounded close but not loud, and she commenced combing and twisting around her temples. She was making art as surely as the barefoot craftsman who hammers wood with a wooden mallet
, squatting on fresh sawdust. Her fresh head slid forward and back as she peeked in the mirror. She sang. A loud clap of thunder made her laugh. Her gold ring shone dully in the dim light of the hotel room as she pinned the last comb in the back, the whites of her eyes large with concentration in her chocolate face. Now she could embellish herself with the new earrings he'd bought her, she nodding, talking fast, rows of twisted locks curving back around the side of her head. Now she was ready to dance with him at the Discotheque Kali where white shirts and blouses glowed blue in the fluorescent lights just as the tonic water did;, and a man stood behind a pillar, his face the color of blood, his necktie like the blue tongue of a black snake, and he was watching, grinning with hard eyes. Perhaps the man liked her hair. (She was always doing her hair. Sitting on a bed in the Hotel Roger with a towel around her middle, she put her hair up with the same sweet concentration as when she squatted to piss on the sidewalk.) In the Hotel Anjary she did her hair, but did she do it for him who loved her or for the man whose face was the color of blood? She loved to dance but she feared the discos because the robbers owned them; why was it that she must do her hair for robbers? Maybe if she did not make herself more beautiful the blood-faced watcher would not watch her. But he never said anything about the blood-faced watcher to her because she feared the robbers already and he did not want to make her more afraid. In the corner, behind another row of black pillars, beer bottles shone full and empty; behind them, a line of white shirts spanned the wall like skulls. The faces above the shirts were entirely gone in shadow. These were the gangsters who ran the Kali, and the darkness they hid in was the same essence which they manufactured outside, extruding it past their bouncer at the door, past the beggar-boys in carnival masks who waited just outside, past the men who sold brochettes in the street (cautiously wise, she visited only the brochette stand owned by the patron), past the taxis waiting to take her one block for two thousand francs because it was cheaper to pay two thousand* than to go beyond the taxis, where it became dark and lifeless and men stood playing cards on the hood of a parked car, and after them it became truly dark, even darker than in bed when the blackly humid night pressed its hands down on his lungs, because this other darkness was moist with the breathings of robbers.
It was moist; it was raining again. She needed to do her hair.
Dawn found the two of them a green and rolling rainscape, green gestures of vegetation in fog, the dark fingers, beseeching hands and benediction-laden palms of it, looming through the mist in a rattle of insects, trees drinking moisture like green cotton balls, ferns bowing politely, then building green walls inset with stars of darkness. She did her hair. Because she had a toothache, she could eat only soft things, so she gobbled ice cream and cream-filled pastries as the raindrops rushed innumerable as ants in the hole of a dead snake.
She bound her hair around black threads of yarn until she was more impressive than the barefoot girls who walked with entire forests of leafy twigs on their heads; she strung her hair with the rain-strings that stretched down the sides of rocks into moss-lips and corn-hairs and tree-capillaries, drumming and splattering down; her hands became fernclaws bristling with rain. Seeing her, a brown man cinched his awning tighter against the rain. She took a shower and wrapped her wet hair into tight black licorice twists which she made sure of in her cracked mirror. She made it shine more brightly than the whites of her black eyes. She put her lover's hand on it; his fingers followed and loved her hair's soft raw studded coarseness. Now she was almost finished. Running into the rain for her hair's sake, he picked a red kana flower, a blue fasis berry, a red round coffee bean, a yellow blossom with a black center; and she took these things smiling and hunched over her mirror like a woman washing clothes in the river. Now once again she was ready to go dancing with him at the Discotheque Kali.
The taxi crawled across the pitted beige surface of the night which rattled teeth and windows; they went down dark meat- and diesel-smelling streets, and the light from bottles in a bar could not outdo her hair, and they passed the épicerie whose doors were open wide like a whore's legs, and dirty white walls and dirty white dresses glowed in the headlights. The strings of sausages silhouetted like amber beads compared not at all with the boldly twisted segments of her hair which ran suddenly like the rain down the dirty walls of his life behind which occasional lights burned weakly like failures. Men walked into the darkness of her hair like skinny spiders. She would not dance with them; she danced only with him. Her hair kissed him so that his eyes could, not be doomed anymore by the row of shirts like skulls where the big watchers sat. The blood-faced watcher stood behind the pillar. The fluorescent blue swirl of a white miniskirt as a girl danced among girls lured the blood-faced watcher for a time; his mouth was like the lighted aperture in the wall where they sold cigarettes. But then all the watchers at once saw the lover with his very dark girl who nodded her heavy head to the music, drinking beer. They had seen him and her already that night at the robber-infested restaurant whose greasy concrete floor and grease-streaked concrete walls enriched the flies on the tables while beneath bright bare bulbs the gangsters grinned and punched each other's wrists and fat whores laughed and went in and out of the bathroom; the whores sat at the corner table, smiling bright-toothed, their hair braided into darkness; but the hair of the one he danced with was as flowery ricefields under hot purple clouds. A man leaned against the wall by the bathroom, a cap low over his eyes, nodding, smiling to music. A fat whore in denim shouted ah yah yah, slapping her thighs. The belt around her was as big as a railroad track. The music got louder, and she clapped her hands, which were as big as hams, with a deafening booming sound, and then the gangsters came over and asked to be bought drinks. He was wise with her wisdom; he bought them drinks. A whore asked him to buy her dinner and he did, so as a favor she whispered to his braided-haired darling that the robbers planned to stab them that night. That was how it had been in the restaurant. In the Indra the darkness was better for the watchers. The blood-faced watcher came and asked the lover to give him money. As for her with the lovely hair, the others waited for that with their knives. Once they cut it off the rain would stop forever. In the village where everyone was sitting in trees, one last time a tiny waterfall would fill a brown pool that fed bright green ricefields, and then the waterfall would stop.
* In 1993, two thousand Malagasy francs was a little more than U.S. $1.
SPARE PARTS
Mexico (1992)
Highway 88, California, U.S.A. (1993)
Mogadishu, Somaila (1993)
Roma, Italia (1993)
Mogadishu, Somaila (1993)
* * *
Mexico (1992)
The train passed slowly away from flat white-sand-floored towns whose trees spread lushly pubic shadows, and then it whistled and began to accelerate, leaving a squat palm askew, slicing the pale blue sky a thousand times with the glittery slats of its blinds. The horizon was slate-blue like a thunderhead painted with dust. From those sandy towns men in tank tops and shorts stared out, sunglasses covering half their faces, and they absorbed the passing train darkly from behind baseball caps. At Caborca the men who stared wore cowboy hats. They leaned in the narrow strip of shade adjoining the wall (the wall was yellow on top, brown on the bottom). Just past the station, men in cowboy hats lay wearily in the space between offices. The train kept pace with another track, grown stale with wiry grass that writhed and whipped in that hot wind that came from the dry hills. The train passed a wall made of old tires. Then it went away.
There was laundry under a tree in a sunken place. On the far side of the road, which had accompanied the train across dry riverbeds, began a pale-green-grassed desert befogged by trees. Blue and red bush-pocked conehills lay ahead. Once those were reached, the road would end at last, like a wailing lover who'd run alongside as long as she could, until she collapsed breathless in the desperate sands. But for now the road went on, in panting little zigzags which never grazed the train's progress.
> The train crossed a slanted plain which ended in gross knobs and knuckles. These were the hands of other dying roads, which went down into the earth; they went nowhere, but their hands refused to be buried; they clutched at distances they could never catch. The train left them all behind.
The Atlas Page 15
