Inside, the music streamed on as reliably as propaganda. In the evening, when the shadows of the blinds curved around his arm like vertebrae, the songs seemed friendlier, perhaps as a result of simple contrast to the loneliness which existed between him and this woman who slumped in the seat with one leg up, eyes closed. Later, to his intense surprise, she leaned her silent head against his arm. He watched the veins on her tanned hands. Then it was night, and morning.
Years later he'd drive the freeway past the place where she used to live and the sadness of it screamed at him; he wanted to chop down her exit sign. Years later he'd look out his window into the rain (the maple tree was taller than before), and he'd watch the cars go planing by in their troughs of wet grayness, and he knew that no matter how long he looked out the window she'd never again come past the ivy tree to turn in at the streetlamp, slowly crossing his line of sight in her new red car (it must not be new anymore; she probably had another) as he leaped up and ran down the stairs so that he could open the door like thought as her finger approached the bell. He remembered the first day he'd met her when they went walking in wide horse-meadows and he climbed the fence first and then turned to her and she leaped into his arms, so shy and skinny and lovely but not shy after that.
She was still sleeping. Her head had been on his shoulder all night, but now she made a face in her sleep and turned to press her forehead to the window.
Continuing south to loud waltz music in the front and mariachi music in the back, they crossed a yellow-brown plain cut with deep sandy washes where cattle lurked like lost souls and the cement vaults of cemeteries were painted blue and orange. Gradually it became greener. That was probably his fault. Everything else was. There were still chollas and ocotillos, but there were also dark green mushroom-shaped trees.
Past rusty-pale railroad cars, they saw a half-naked brown boy on a bicycle, whitish houses plated with curvy orange tiles. Between the blinds of his window the list of monotonously strange entities went on, retreating down forsaken roads. The time was coming when he'd want to tell her so much because he wasn't with her anymore, but at the moment they continued together, so he had nothing to say. It was not a question of boredom; it was just that they were caught up on all each other's secrets so that the next moment would also die easily, leading to death the moment beyond it like that girl who was taking her little daughter for a walk along the railroad tracks. There was a watde fence, with great trees inside; then laundry drying under an aqueduct, a family bathing in a curvy river, prickly pears, long, whiplike fingers of cactus . . . The gray-blue sea kept breaking white and clean against a coast of scrub and thorn and cactus, the cacti like mutilated hands planted at the wrist. They were so far away now. They'd gone almost to the end. Two vultures passed overhead. Long shady combers broke shallowly on the beach, the water getting lighter as the sun got higher.
Across the aisle, a man in a T-shirt slept on his wife's shoulder, his breasts and belly jiggling like his massive brown arms, and the water giggled and slapped in the jug at his feet.
There came another stop, where people fanned themselves at flowerclothed tables and tried to sell the passengers Tropicana, corn and bread. And she was still with him, so he didn't need anything; he had bought a bottle of mescal which he shared with the other men and so they all told him that she was the most beautiful woman on the train. At the time he took it as a matter of course; later, after they'd passed the end, he tried to remember what the other women had looked like but he couldn't. In the train of his memory there were men and there was mescal and the men taught him how to sing sentimental songs like "I am the king but there is no queen" and that must have been true because there were never any women but her. The train had not gone away yet. He gazed down those wide dirt streets defined by low white houses with curvy orange-tiled roofs, fenced and treed, and he was so lonely. The fact that she was with him made no difference even though she loved him, even though they still had time; they'd not yet come to the end of the end. He held her hand tight.
Once the air conditioner was fixed, the train went into the blue mountain-walled highlands welling with cumuli whose white fringes caught the light almost like jewelwork.
The rain came down hard enough to hurt, and then the air was fresh and good with clouds still over the mountains and the smell of licorice.
In the place between cars he pulled her shirt up and held it out the window to soak it in cool fresh rain while she laughed. He loved her so much. Her inverted nipples were raspberries.
The train was rolling faster now to crosscut the breeze, past rusty rails and toilet paper, heading southeast toward the cool mountains; swaying up the canted greenish-brown plain that dim gray train crept, almost empty, through the high mountain tunnels. Ahead, the next car's row of ceiling lights could be seen slowly swaying, and a silhouetted passenger dwindled beneath them. They emerged from the tunnel. It had been raining again, and the sky was still gray, with pale orange streaks of evening. The greenshagged wilds were muted in that light, like distant mountains. Granite and then foliage ghosted by, close enough to touch. The train accomplished a perilous trestle and then a man with a medal was smiling, leaning out the window where the open air came in between cars. They descended the steep green ridge-churned villi'd slopes, rode down to the town past blue mountains, and it was dark. Through the blinds he saw the swing of a flashlight far away along the axis of a fence, flaring warmly between trees in the mountain village where they'd stopped. She said to him that it was still only the middle of the end. In the west the sky remained pale like a piece of manila paper. The train began to move again, passing a wall that was boulder-scaled like an immense crocodile, and a few houses flashed dully like skulls behind the trees and then they were out of the village. There was nothing left but dark mountains.
In Guadalajara they changed to a sleeping car. He thought that he would never forget the station's plain of tiles whose particular brown matched that of a smoked cheese; all the families sitting in the long darkstained pews subdivided into prisons by metal handrails; because he said to himself: the next time I am here she won't be with me. — Then they got on the sleeping car.
The warm orange light of the lefthand lamp, the only one on, was reflected on the khaki-painted walls with the globular texture of sweat, its original rectangular shape degraded almost into an oval as he lay sweating against this silent one who lay reading the guidebook with her knees up, her shadow-head growing hideously when she raised her real head to see the map better, and the train increased velocity so that lights like stars flowed by in stripes between the blinds which they'd closed when they were making love. Her bush sweated between her thighs, a wide brown-black wave at the edge of her flat white belly whose navel held a single drop of sweat, and the rectangular lamp outlined the ridge of her nose in gold, and a sickle-shaped goldness adorned her cheek just below her gilded eyelashes. They lay side by side in the narrow and threadbare bed in this narrow room as sturdy as a submarine, built in the U.S.A., with the original English-language instruction plaques still on the fixtures: CEILING, EMERGENCY. In this he took a curious pride. These trains had long since been abandoned by his countrymen in favor of newer and inferior things. For how many years now had the trains continued across Mexico? No doubt they broke down sometimes, but they got well and struggled on through the fleeing decades.
Someone was knocking. He got up and dressed to show the ticket to the conductor. When he was finished she'd turned her head in the other position so that her feet were beside him. She'd turned the righthand light on so that now the khaki paint was much whiter and brighter and there were two reflections in it, one on each side of her magnificent shoulders. She lay on her belly, reading. The hairs between her buttocks made pleasant shadows. They continued eastward, past darkness.
In the morning, the bed back up inside the wall, the two wide red armchairs basked, warming their faded felt in the murky light that also pleased prickly pears, plantations and white horses along the high river.
Then they went into a tunnel; and the armchairs and the world were gone. Far away, a cloud-brain brooded atop a broad blue pyramid. That was the end of the end.
He said: I'll never forget.
But she only smiled bitterly and said: If you remember everything, what color was the thirteenth house we saw after Mexicali?
White, he said defiantly. It was white like your underpants . . . Then their lives together were over, and they got off the train.
Highway 88, California, U.S.A. (1993)
Sunset on the snowy rock-wrinkles haired with pines and spruces trapped him; sunset was as dreary as the evergreens crowded to shade last year's dirty snow. Last year he'd gone this road with her in the morning. They'd left the motel room in Tahoe on a snowy icy dawn whose light spread before them like the rest of their lives; and a man whose wife had left him gave them a ride to the junction. The man could hardly keep his eyes open. He had been driving all night. He was going to drive over the mountains to San Francisco. The lovers were worried about him. They warned him that he might have an accident if he didn't sleep before he went his winding icy road, but they were happy and he was sad so that he could not hear them. When he let them out, they were very glad to be free of him. His sadness had choked them like old snow. (Now the sadness of the one who remembered made him squeeze his fingernails into his palms. Did she ever remember now?) They stood in new snow, kissing. She said that the cold made her legs prickle, so he kissed her legs and then she laughed and said that she was warm. Half an hour later, two ladies who were going on a ski race picked them up and let them ride in the back of the carpeted van among bright clean skis. They let them out at breakfast time where the road made a T, east into California, west into Nevada. The lovers were going to Nevada. They waited for three hours, getting discouraged, and then a boxer came and took them down into the place where the desert day opened up before them like an endless noon.
It was the same time of year as then, but the rivers had not been so swollen that year. He would never see them with her again. This year they were pale and rushing, brown and white-flecked, drowning bushes.
The sun struck peaks with clanging strokes as it sank, dyeing them a lurid orange which made his heart pound with fear and despair.
The mountains of sadness were left behind. He said to someone, he didn't know who: Please don't ever let me see them again.
Then he went down into the green-gray evening desert.
Mogadishu, Somalia (1993)
Pharaoh asked Moses news of the former generations, said the teacher, and Moses said: Their names are with my Lord, in a Book. My Lord never errs or forgets.
That book was the atlas. The atlas contained the rain upon her breasts in Mexico. It had cloud maps, kept track of all the water in the world. The atlas contained the browneyed dog in the van, brown-eyed, brownhaired, red, blacklipped, standing with its forelegs on her knees, trying to lick her; and she was laughing and he was laughing and the man who'd picked them up was shaking his head with a smile as they came into the high desert flats just past June Lake with the purple-brown mountains smeared with snow and purple ridges behind where he had kissed her and kissed her, sleet pelting on his camouflage raincoat which he did not wear anymore because it reminded him of her. — The teacher took a stick, dipped it in a pot of thick black ink, and wrote that verse on the long narrow piece of wood which was knobbed at the top like a weird tombstone or a cross-section of a bowling pin. The teacher had the whole Qur'an in his head. For each lesson the little boys would write one day, wash it off the next. Outside the school's walls, brown kids with their long dirty shirt-tails hanging out played games of throwing rocks and running in the shade of roofless buildings past which soldiers' trucks rolled. (Very ancient buildings, a man said. Two hundred years.) Birds flew over the missing roofs. A kid cleaned a dusty piece of canvas with his hands, and a long gray iron-breasted truck with soldiers in it came speeding around the road. Where the road turned away from the sea there was a wall with two bites taken out of it, and then the road dwindled into trees and soldiers slowly trudging across a street-horizon in the direction of the Green Line, the dangerous place. A brown man in white walked steadily down the white sand road, whirling a stick. On a ledge in a white wall, people sat, and water ran slowly from a silver bowl which a boy poured over his hands.
He did not want her back because he could not have her and also the rest of his life which contained matters which had caused her anguish, but of course he wanted her back; he wanted to wake up beside her; he was so lonely for her. In the atlas it said DRAINAGE BASINS and UNPRODUCTIVE AREAS and LOST LOVES and FOREVER LOST LOVES. The principal meteorological factors which impose severe natural limitations on human activity are temperature and aridity. — The boy poured water from the silver bowl.
The boy poured water from the bowl. Beside him lay a long narrow piece of wood which was knobbed at the top like a tombstone. A verse was written upon it in black ink. He looked up at the boy with the wooden slate, and wanted to ask which verse it was, but the boy did not understand. He wanted to ask where the gazetteer was, so that he could locate the rains which had fallen upon her in Mexico, but the boy did not understand. The boy spoke to him, and he did not understand.
Roma, Italia (1993)
No, no, it wasn't that she'd died; no, she hadn't gone down into the rotten arches of darkness that crumbled like cheese. And it wasn't that he couldn't be hers again, contingent upon certain modifications which he could (but would not) readily make in his character. He knew where she was; if he was determined enough he could find her. But he refused to rewrite the inscription on his secret obelisk. She'd told him that in that case he'd chosen to give her up. And it was true. — But, as Husserl says, how fares it with animal realities? He still wanted her. That being so, his deductions then proceeded thus: (i) When your wife dies and you die, you'll meet in Heaven, (ii) When your wife dies, and you marry again, and then you die, you'll meet both your wives in Heaven. The wife and the other wife will both be with you, loving you and each other forever, (iii) Since Heaven and forever are both beyond time, whoever is meant to be in Heaven must already be in Heaven now. (iv) Therefore, everyone you love, living or dead, is already in Heaven waiting for you.
So he descended beneath the Sunday noon of empty streets stretched tight like drumheads (a woman sounded them with her gold-flowered black high heels); so he went into the catacombs. She hadn't died. She wasn't in Mexico. That night he ascended the Spanish Stairs' white smoothness etched black in the texture of a full moon. He bought a pocket atlas in Italian; opening it, he addressed her and said: Since you are also in Heaven there must be two of you. Therefore one of you can be with me. That's reasonable, isn't it? I'm not asking for you. I'm only asking for a spare you.
He confided this into the atlas, which he then closed and tied with black ribbons. Then he left it in a church. He hoped that maybe it would call to her like a signal beacon.
Mogadishu, Somalia (1993)
At the Petroleum Market, where they'd steal the eyeglasses right off your face if they could, a lady robed in blue flowers sat on a dais at one of many covered stands whose tables were separated by thick wire mesh. Tins and jugs and bottles of molasses-colored oil stood on the tables beneath the roofs of corrugated metal. Some of the tables were fronted with rusty steel. White dust and buses blew past. A child, grinning with effort, rolled a rusty oil drum in the sand. A lady in yellow and black glided through the dust. These stands ran a long way down Population Street. They sold gasoline and diesel, direct from Mombasa and the United Arab Emirates; they sold Comet and Caltex and Pelo 400 and Ocklube. Oil cost fifty thousand shillings for ten liters.* The air reeked of oil. The lady in the blue garbashar was laughing, swatting flies on a post.
A big red truck with many brown feet and knees high on top drove down Population Street past a rusted Soviet tank. It was bound for Bardera. The passengers had paid thirty thousand shillings each. Suddenly the truck ran out of gas. It stopped, and the driver ra
n to the lady in blue and bought a bucketful of gasoline from her.
Another man stopped for fruit. There were both mangoes and oil on Population Street. Next door to the lady in blue, bananas had been strung like washing along a wire in a mango stand roofed by corrugated metal.
There was a man who came walking down the street holding onto his eyeglasses, and he peered into every stand of rusty metal with mangoes and limes and glasses on top, but then he'd walk on, shaking his head. Finally he came to the place that said SPER PARTS.
On the whitewashed facade of the spare parts store was painted a camel, a glass of milk, a yellow fan belt, a blue carburetor, a red and yellow battery, and a blue and black tire, all bursting with speed like cartoon rockets. The spare parts came by ship from Japan to the dusty white beach where the sea swirled green and stinking against a sharp lava-like rock (it smelled as cheap postage stamps do when they're licked) and people with brown skinny legs sat barefoot on blue steps outside a blue door with one panel blown out; the spare parts sailed between the American battleships on the blue horizon; they passed the rusted red and yellow Soviet ship; and they arrived at last, at the seaport where a handcuffed boy rushed by in the back of a jeep and crowds waited and hoped for the job of carrying sacks of rice. The spare parts kept company with a white wall veiled in white dust; then they passed through the curtain of camelbone beads in the cement doorway (a cassette playing loud and scratchy), the doorway over which was written SPER PARTS.
The Atlas Page 16
