"How famous of you to notice exactly that! Yes. Let us once and for all admit that fame has its immense attractions. Only the superficial or those fearful of being thought snobs would deny that. The advantage of being famous is that you need not introduce or explain yourself to each stranger at a dinner party, for instance. When you are renowned, your mere presence is sufficient explanation for who and where you are ... if you understand what I mean. But these are not thoughts that should, or indeed are intended to, occupy your mind, your being too young to be concerned with the foibles and insecurities of adults — especially of women past their magnetic moment — and famous enough never to feel the pains of anonymity. Ah!" Madame Chauchat continued, in a tone that signaled some profound disquiet, "there are rooms in one's life where one has spent stretches of misery so profound as to alter forever whatever pleasures daily life affords even the most fortunate, such as myself."
"It's strange, Madame Clavdia, how I have no idea of what you mean or what you are saying, yet I also know very well everything you are saying, know it from some distant and forgotten time in my life, but where could I have been and what was I doing then to give me so sharply this feeling of misery that you describe? Being small, holding the hand of some great grown-up while ambling along in their train on a Sunday afternoon when young and old strolled along in their Sunday clothes, then stopping off at some crowded café to take an ice or a pastry, and the waiting and waiting for the grown-up to decide to leave and take you home once again, where you are again alone, stiffly dressed for Sunday and sitting or standing in some grown-up's way — how they dislike you when they love you."
"I think you've got it. It's the boredom that I hated most."
"Yes, there is also that, but I'm speaking of the injustice of being a small one, of being tied to their dull lives — the lives of big ones, I mean. How many Sunday afternoons, with my Sunday clothes buttoned to my chin, did I long to be an Indian on the plains, to ride about on my great spotted pony and smoke a pipe at the campfire and stick my tomahawk into the head of some enemy brave?"
"Did you wear a long coat and shiny leather shoes?"
"A long blue coat and black shiny shoes. And since I always had a sore throat, I was made to wear a long red scarf, the scarlet color of my throat, Mother would say."
"Had I known you then, Tintin, I would have run off with you to the Americas or to the moon. Ah, if children only had the means, what different histories they would form of themselves!"
"How I would have protected you, Madame Clavdia, from wild animals and wild persons, in our skin-carpeted cave high in the mountain clouds, our nest hung with bear furs and antelope skins and illumined by a secret light of the sky. Yes, had we known each other then, we would have destroyed the vacancy of Sundays and the misery of being small."
"And what of the miseries of the present? Are there no aids for them?" Clavdia asked, her voice dropping. "Cannot grown-ups help their own kind to suffer less the dull shadow of the day?"
"Every person who knows you, madame, would help you to throw pails of brilliant light on this and every other mean shadow."
"Many have offered me the same, and yet when the moment of required aid arrives, the self-proclaimed assister rehearses other roles on other stages."
"I've been in the wings and sometimes in the orchestra and sometimes in a cozy box, and from these watches I have noted much villainy, but I have witnessed much kindness, too," Tintin said.
"Of course, all through this world are kind and bright persons, or there must be — so we all say. Yet when we are starting out anew in search for some intelligence and love, where are those sparkling, helpful persons? Men circle me when I'm least in need of them. But this subject grows gloomy! Let me blame this thin mountain air for lapsing into gloominess."
"Gloomy you shall not be. As long as there is life in me," Tintin exclaimed, his emphasis nearly tumbling him out of his chair.
"Well, my cavalier, you must remain on your mount should you wish to serve me," Clavdia chided mockingly. "Will you come, then, this evening, after dinner, to my room, where we may pursue further the service you volunteer?"
— Chapter IX —
[That night. Clavdia's room. The moon bulging in the window.]
Tintin sits at the bed's edge, his arms folded, his thighs pressed tightly together. From a corner of her Hermès suit case Clavdia Chauchat draws out a bois des îles casket, removing from it several glittering vials of crème de Java, oil of brazilwood, Amazon dew, essence of lilac, dragon's-tooth powder. These she mixes in a Chinese-blue porcelain bowl until they thicken into a smooth white cream.
"Tintin, undress!"
"Madame Chauchat!"
"Yes?"
"Clavdia!"
"Yes?"
"My clothes?"
"Yes, my darling boy, all."
Tintin slowly disrobes, leaving on, however, his blue boxer shorts.
"Now, my sweetheart, on your back. With the aid of this salve, I intend to elevate your spirits."
The Andean moon illuminates the room with its polished glow.
"This is more than I'd ever dreamed. More than life itself!" Tintin exclaims.
"Tintin," Clavdia whispers, kneeling beside the bed, "you are so strange, so hairless."
"I am a bit chilled, too."
"Indeed, you are," Clavdia answers, caressing the young man's chest.
Tintin sighs; his heart pounds; his face flushes; his skin tingles. Clavdia slowly draws down Tintin's boxer shorts, leaving them heaped about his ankles.
"Our night of love, finally."
"Our loving night, my beautiful Clavdia, my soul."
"You, a soul?"
"Soul-filled. Born by your touch."
"I feel, too, I've inspired yet another, more palpable growth."
"Your spirit has sparked the flesh."
"Meno male."
Long silence. Then chirps of crickets and the crackling of stones decomposing in the cold mountain night. Many sighs float to the ceiling, some breathed to the mattress. Faint odor of sea spray, roses, and honey. A blue glow emanates from bed center, where two animals collide and cohere.
"Ecstasy."
"Sublime."
"A new life. Should I die in the next moment, I would have no regrets, having lived so passionately in this interval."
"But, Tintin, I am only your first —"
"You shall be my only."
"Do not exaggerate. You are young, innocent, impressionable, generous. What do you know yet of sorrow, loss, of the dreadfulness of time? Do you know the icy wrenching, the salty burning of having to divide yourself from the one you love, and divide again until you are shorn and broken and lost? Do you know what it is to see the one you love fly from you, high and direct into the pure, free sky while you are left to remain and straggle earthbound, stranded on a desolate shore, left to age and to wither? We are alone, and always."
"But, Clavdia, you are too young, too loved to suffer these feelings."
"Adventure and novelty are all you understand, my sweet Tintin."
"I protest. You have a wakened in me a capacity for love, too."
"Perhaps, but I cannot — will not — allow it to be reserved for me. No matter, we have this night, and perhaps some few more days, here or elsewhere."
"I shall follow you."
"No, I sense your destiny is beyond you."
"I shall leave with you."
"To go where?"
"Anywhere!" Tintin exclaimed, his being flooded with a surge of images. "To Brazil, perhaps. To the moist green nights of Rio or Bahia, where I've never been. To hot sheets, and hotels, to sexlove and sexkiss and sexsigh and sexbreath to sex longings and sex spendings, and more."
"Oh! Tintin, your words compensate for your inexperience. But leave words now, and let's swim longer in the flowing wet of love."
"Clavdia, yes, but let's pause a while to look at the moon."
"Yes, and we'll stay beside each other till the sun replaces her."
>
— Chapter X —
Thus they fell asleep, side by side, smaller hand in larger, falling asleep at the same instant and beginning the same dream, their clasped hands the conducting link of the dream's mutual flow.
They were cantering across open plains, the red sun sliding slowly behind the snow-tipped peaks. At last glimpse of light, they came to a clump of cottonwoods beside a dark, swift creek, dismounted, and tethered their Arabian steeds. Tintin started a fire; Clavdia shot an antelope. While Tintin baked a lemon soufflé, Clavdia rolled fat cigarettes and laid out the bedrolls, saddles for pillows. At meal's end and with plates and utensils washed and stowed away, they smoked and played poker by the firelight, Clavdia winning most hands. The moon was up, full, pinned to the tree tips. Stars perforated the black sheet of heaven.
They had ridden hard for three days and had harder days yet before them. The plains would melt into hilly badlands and badlands level into burning desert. Dangers lay ahead. The outlaw Pimento and his pistoleros stood between them and the border, waiting to murder them, slowly. There were things with knives Pimento had sworn he would do to Tintin, while his men did other things to Clavdia before his sickened eyes. But for now they were safe, this night at least, under the cool draw of sky and the rushing whisper of creek. They played their cards and spoke and smoked.
Later, after checking and cleaning their weapons — Clavdia adjusting the hairwire trigger of Tintin's Colt six-shooter, he lining up the sights of her Winchester 77 — Clavdia took out her guitar and sang a lonely song she had learned on the Argentine pampas or the Texas Panhandle.
Ayeee, ayeee, my lonely blood runs in rivers
Ayeee, ayeee, get along, little dogies, 'fore
my heart falls to betrayers ...
Then Tintin drew out his little accordion and sang a sea shanty he had learned at nights on the stormy Atlantic:
From stem to stern I'm your first mate
So hey-ho, blow the man down ...
The songs and the singing and the tender flames of campfire biting into the night aroused them. Tintin unbuckled Clavdia's chaps and removed the spurs from her black, tooled boots. Clavdia undressed Tintin in turn. They grazed on each other. A jaguar watched from a short distance, marveling at the sight.
They broke camp at dawn, speeding out of the Badlands and into the high desert at the sun's hottest blaze, its flames grilling boulder and outcrop, braising earth and its stalkers large and small — lizards refrigerated under shale canopy, foxes slouched down in the miserly shade of cactus.
On the third day out, Tintin wasn't sure whether it was the sun's effects on him or if he had really seen perched at a precipice's edge Pimento or, rather, his white beard peeking from behind a tree stump. Was the outlaw waiting for them to fall under the sun's blows before attacking?
Thirst-crazed, too weak to put up a good fight, they'd be captured without a scratch, but alive and well enough to suffer Pimento's cruel devices.
The day lengthened, shadows of mesquite and brush elongating into fantastic silhouette forms, a gondola cut through the sand, leaving a wake of blooming rosebushes, an Inca lord in full headdress played a huge guitar under a cantina umbrella, Snowy barked at a giant bemused bear; image after image rushed in a burning trail. Clavdia and Tintin staggered under the heat, their horses faltering in exhaustion. Water there was none, and shade neither. Tintin and Clavdia exchanged knowing looks — if they failed to cross the desert that night, they would be dead by the following day. They rode hand in hand so to protect each other from falling asleep and slipping off their mounts. But Tintin and Clavdia pretended it was love, not protectiveness, that linked them thus, and they began, with pitiful, strained voices, to sing:
Cross the prairie and the plain
From the pampas to the north of Spain
Hand in hand we'll ride together
Cross the moor, desert, and the heather.
Tintin's palomino gave out first and with a great shudder died under him. They took turns riding and walking Clavdia's spotted pony until he, too, stumbled and fell, his mouth foamy, eyes glazed. Tintin shot him cleanly in the brain. Now both walked, arm in arm, stumbling, supporting each other, crawling on all fours, inching their way until they came to a ridge. Clavdia cried out; Tintin sighed in grief. Another desert lay before them, one fiat and white, treeless, bushless, plantless, leafless, dry to the far horizon.
They had no strength to crawl their way over the vast stretch, even at night, and even if they had begun, they would be caught in the open expanse at daybreak and die there horribly in the day's full crushing heat. Death at least would cheat Pimento of his cruel pleasures.
They looked about them in the growing darkness. There at the end of the ridge appeared a fissure or crevice in the wall. When they reached it, they saw a narrow opening leading into a small cave. It went back several meters and ended where lay a pile of bones, some human, some of small animals.
"If we had water, I'd make us bone soup," Clavdia said, attempting to smile despite the pain of her parched lips.
"I hope we won't be left to that."
"You hate my soups, then. At last the truth." They laughed.
"Make a broth of me," Tintin said lightly. "Sup on me till help arrives."
"Or you me. Should it come to that, darling," Clavdia answered softly, ''I'm still the tastier here."
"Let's wait the limit for that solution," Tint in said, "though I'd rather it be I."
"Not I, Tintin. When we have to do it, let's do it at once and together."
"As with everything, Clavdia."
It was night, and the desert cold visited the cave. They stretched out, spent, sadness draping over them like wet clay. Tintin thought he'd wait for Clavdia to fall deeply into sleep and then, while she was still dreaming, shoot her in the brain and spare her the suffering ahead. And after, of course, a bullet for himself. Even in her sleep Clavdia was thinking his thoughts. Suddenly each spoke, saying the same words simultaneously: "No, not that way. I want to see you before going." They slept more easily with that reassurance.
Dawn's light filtered through the cave. Tintin felt the morning through his sleep. He felt, too, a cool wetness flicking about his face and hands. Presently, he imagined, he would dream of an oasis creek or a waterfall, of wonderful cascading water showering him and his drinking it. But no such dream arrived. He opened his eyes to find Snowy busy licking his hand.
Was it a dream? Snowy himself, frisky and juicy. Come from where? Tintin kissed Snowy's snout and eyes and buried his face on Snowy's neck.
"Good Snowy, my sweet lad. What a joy to see you!" Tintin roused Clavdia to tell her of Snowy's mysterious arrival. Clavdia woke slowly, insensibly. Tintin saw in Clavdia's face and eyes the dehydration of her being, her cells shrinking, hardening, and dying.
She half smiled when she saw Snowy. "Is he real," she asked, "and is the captain here, too?"
"Alone, and real flesh and blood."
Snowy regarded the two with his head cocked. They seemed so drowsy, late to wake. Get up, sleepyheads. Let's get going, lazybones. He let out some snorts and a short bark but to little effect. Tintin merely raised himself on his elbows while Clavdia shut her eyes again. They were in a funk and best left alone for a while. He had plenty to keep him busy while they dallied. Bones. All kinds and sizes. A treasure of them. He went to the pile and rolled about the bone bed.
It wasn't Snowy back there rummaging among the bones but a dog that resembled him, a fake Snowy sent by Pimento to give them false hope and empty joy. To test him, Tintin ordered his return.
"Here, Snowy, come now!"
But the dog remained on his bed, gnawing on a fibula. Tintin called again, louder, and with the same results. Thundering figs! It was Snowy and not some terrier trained to deceive him, for Snowy was recalcitrant to any command, any pleading when it came to bones. How would Pimento have known that and trained the animal accordingly?
Good Snowy it was. Come from nowhere. But come for what? To die
with them miserably in this foul cave. There flashed across Tintin's mind a dreadful thought, one so shameful that he winced and dug his nails into his palms to expel it.
Kill him. Eat him. Drink his blood. The thought would not go away. Tintin looked over to Clavdia. Burning she was, drying out. How long would she last without liquid? And how long Snowy himself? But to kill him! Tintin went back and forth on the matter. The image of a dead and devoured Snowy sickened him; the image of Clavdia suffering thirst and dying painfully also sickened him. Snowy's flesh might gain them some hours of life, and then who could tell what might turn up? A saving flood of rain, a caravan transporting red melons.
"Snowy," Tintin called out softly, "come."
Tintin's voice, with its gentle urgency, beckoned. This is not an idle call, Snowy thought, keeping the fibula clenched tightly in his jaw as he padded off to join Tintin. Tintin unholstered his pistol, keeping it in his hand as he stroked Snowy with the other. Clavdia woke and gazed up at the affectionate scene, feeling that for all its tenderness something terrible lay beneath it.
"Tintin," she cried, her voice more an accusation than a call. He turned, and their eyes met.
"No," she said, at the instant Tintin had come to the same word.
"Of course not. It was a lunatic moment, and it's passed. Off you go, Snowy, my boy."
Snowy scooted back to his treasure, pleased that Tintin had let him return to it without making more of a fuss. He never wants me around these wonderful bones, shows me up for being too much dog, for his likes.
What savagery and what a savage he was to think of hurting Snowy, of killing him, not to save his beloved dog from a gruesome death from hunger and thirst but so that he, Tintin, and Clavdia might live one day more. He had seen himself in the act, Snowy's limbs severed, his body gutted on the cave floor, while he with a mustache of blood and bloodied mouth and lips cracked the terrier's thighbone for its marrow.
An unfamiliar feeling of sorrow came over Tintin, a sorrow that actually burrowed beneath the layer of distress over their dreadful plight to a place in himself unknown. This new feeling gnawed at him the way Snowy was now gnawing at his bone, but there was no pleasure in these bitings and chewings into himself. And with these pangs now flowered a burning in his throat. How could anything burn more than this burning flower? Not even the sun waiting outside the cave. This feeling was what adults called remorse, guilt's punishment. This was why judges tried to determine whether a criminal felt remorse for the crime he had committed and why it was correct to soften the sentence for a criminal who felt it, for remorse was in itself a complete and harrowing punishment.
Tintin in the New World: A Romance Page 5
