Tintin in the New World: A Romance

by Frederic Tuten

  Tears flooded Tintin's eyes. Taking them for tears of sorrow for what awaited them all, Clavdia tried to console him. "We have no regrets, have we? We've lived together more fully than most."

  "And we have upset Pimento's plans," Tintin added lightly, determined not to let her know the new unhappiness visiting him lest it also visit her.

  Snowy, too, had seen Tintin cry, a sight so unfamiliar that he dropped the bone from his jaw and let out a friendly bark.

  Better stop playing with these bones and get to business. He barked again, the bark Tintin recognized as Snowy's important call of discovery. Tintin made his way to the bone pile, where Snowy was now standing proudly, his tail rigid. Tintin could make out a narrow opening in the wall that the bone pile had concealed. Snowy took Tintin by his chaps to urge and lead him into the opening. Tintin slipped through to find a cool tunnellike chamber, its walls glowing faintly but with sufficient brightness to illuminate the room.

  "Clavdia," Tintin called out, "I've found a passage where Snowy has come from."

  What did he think I was doing here if not come to rescue him, and how else did he imagine I had materialized?

  The tunnel went back farther than any limit Tintin could see. He returned to Clavdia's side and carried her into the tunnel. Snowy was far into the distance, beyond Tintin's vision, but he followed the sound of the terrier's barking for as long as his strength allowed. Pausing finally, he propped Clavdia against the glowing wall, which, as his hand passed over it, felt wet.

  The walls were filmed with water, but not with enough flow to cup in a palm. Snowy returned to show Tintin the way, licking the wall with long slides of his tongue. Clavdia weakly followed suit.

  Within some hours, they had regained enough strength to follow Snowy deeper and deeper into the tunnel. Within some hours more, they felt the slightest of breezes caress their faces and they smelled the faint aroma of living things. When they became tired, they slept, Snowy curled between them. When they woke, they continued stumbling toward the endlessness of the tunnel and its eerie glow.

  Tintin and Clavdia began to believe that the tunnel would lead them nowhere but to their deaths, that they would not have the strength to reach wherever it led and ended. But Snowy's cavorting, his sudden rushings ahead and racing back told Tintin that their goal was not too distant. Indeed, as the air suddenly freshened and snapped about them, they presently came to what seemed a thick bush or tree branch bathed in blazing light and blocking their path. Pushing aside the foliage, Tintin spied a green, sheep-dotted pasture before him. Sheepdogs darted about their woolly charges, while the immense sky busied itself with flocks of crows and burly white clouds. An observatory sat on a knoll, and below it gleamed a pond brimming with ducks. In the near distance, a huge house, its triple red chimneys piercing the slated mansard roof, its French windows gleaming and reflecting the golden light of the day and the blue tints of the vast ocean heaving before them.

  They were home. Marlinspike.

  In the following weeks Tintin and Clavdia stayed close within the manor, wanting to attend to matters of the estate after their long absence and to recuperate from their exhausting adventure. They breakfasted long and took long walks, returning to lunch and to ride again in the afternoon; they took tea and napped until dinnertime, when they dressed (Tintin in smoking jacket) and dined in the company of Captain Haddock and Snowy. The furrows in the captain's face had deepened; he had grown more portly. Snowy's gait had slowed perceptibly, his whiskers gone soft. Distracted he had become. In the middle of charging a pheasant he'd stop and rush into a bush and fall asleep. "He's going stale," the captain noted.

  Tintin thought Snowy lacked companionship and brought him a female snapped from the jaws of the local pound. "Josie," read the name on her tag, and she answered to that name, giving Tintin and Clavdia an appreciative snort and jump whenever they called it. But Snowy was having no part of her and ran from her to obscure niches of the house, where he concealed himself She was, Tintin finally observed, a secret nipper, waiting to gain the confidence of man or fellow dog only to sink her teeth into ankle or hind leg. Seeing the impossibility of the relationship's developing further, Tintin sent Josie to live in the workers' quarters.

  One day Snowy disappeared in a driving rain. Tintin was agitated all the while, fearing that his friend had been injured in an accident or, worse, that Pimento or his henchmen had kidnapped Snowy in lieu of his master and would return the terrier to Marlinspike in a glass coffin, alive but mutilated. With no success Tintin's agents scoured the countryside and the cities, too, but just when all hope seemed lost, Snowy reappeared with a companion in tow, a dog of Andalusian origin, her name, Concetta, as pronounced by her platinum tag. Now two dogs dined at evening table, their silver food bowls set sometimes beside Tintin's chair, sometimes by the captain's or Clavdia's. Peace again dwelled at Marlinspike.

  One day while Tintin and Clavdia were out riding, they noticed a new shepherd tending their flock. Familiar he was, not so much in his face, which was grizzled and the color of lightly grilled salmon, but in his straight posture and huge frame. They rode closer, finding to their alarm that the shepherd under his hood was their long-sworn enemy Pimento. Tintin drew his pistol, forgetting that he wore none. The old outlaw pulled aside his cloak. Tintin, thinking that his enemy was about to draw, hurled himself before Clavdia. But no shot rang out, no fierce oath and curse issued from the outlaw's lips. Instead a small, supplicating voice came from beneath the shepherd's cowl.

  "I've not come to harm you but to ask your forgiveness for the ill I've done you in the past."

  He was actually kneeling, this ancient foe.

  Clavdia and Tintin looked about them to see where the outlaw's men were hiding, sure that the old man's plaint was merely a ruse. But there was no one in the area but the red sheep and Josie, the dog working the flock.

  They took the shepherd, Pimento, back to the house, where, over scotch and dark soda, they heard his tale. It was while waiting to capture them at the border — by what miracle they had escaped him he did not know — there in the highlands of Peru, those many years ago, that a jaguar had seized him and made him prisoner. But instead of devouring him, the jaguar made him promise to give up his lust for revenge against them and to lay down his weapons and turn toward a tamer life. This he promised, never intending to keep his word.

  And no sooner was he released from the cat's paws than he went again to his old life of lies and lechery, of subterfuge and pilfering, of aesthetic sabotage. Then, one day, while he was crossing Chapultepec Park in Mexico City, on his way to Chicago, there in the middle of the path in the broadest of broad days, a day wide and bright and full of sky, the jaguar reappeared.

  "I'll not kill you, liar. But punishment there is," the jaguar declared. And with those words the jaguar leaped into a tree and vanished, the last objects living or inanimate the forsworn one would ever see again, for he, the jaunty old Pimento, had gone forever blind.

  Years of wandering ensued. Begging alms, doing an occasional odd job, raging to no avail against the darkness and his enemies, and generally exhausting himself in misspent anger. Repentance was at hand, however, the renunciation of all his vile acts and vices followed, and sweetness took the place of bitterness, light filled him. He was a changed man.

  "How is it that you are tending sheep when you are blind?" Clavdia asked suspiciously.

  That was the beauty part. The more he changed, the better his vision, his sight being slowly restored to him with every good deed and thought, and now he was waiting here at Marlinspike, to beg their forgiveness in hope that the final veil would be lifted from his eyes.

  "Forgiveness and more," cried Tintin, conducting the reformed person to the manor doors. Pimento would be made the first shepherd, and when he was no longer able to perform his pastoral services, he would have a place in the kitchen by the stoves, where he would always be warm in the winter or summer. No sooner was Pimento installed in the quarters closest to the manor
house than Clavdia, feeling the strangest aches and pains, gave birth to a son, a blond child with a blond cowlick and the suggestion of a white beard, whom they named Little Tintin. Later in the day, Concetta presented Snowy and their human friends with a son, a pure terrier, whom Tintin named Little Snowy. Captain Haddock announced he would be Little Tintin's godfather and watch over him, and Pimento voted himself the same for Little Snowy. Then, to celebrate the event, the captain downed several glasses of cheer, tucked himself away in the northwest wing of the manor in the large, open room where the ospreys had set up their tall nests. Pimento immediately went about teaching Little Snowy how to retrieve purses and wallets flung to the farthest reaches of the main hall. Clavdia flew to Paris to buy a new wardrobe now that her body had resumed its fabulous shape. Once there she met friends and stayed two weeks longer than expected. Little Tintin rang her up at the hotel because of problems he was having translating some passages from Ovid; he was certain that those passages would be on his university exams, and he asked her, in passing, whether it was usual for women his age to carry pistols and little red books in their handbags, because he had met one, called May, who did and who was perfectly earnest and very pretty.

  When Clavdia returned, hatbox filled with gloves and exhibition catalogs, she found Tintin at his desk, still writing his memoirs. They kissed, Tintin enchanted by the aroma of her new perfume, by the saucy cut of her hair, by her smooth, waxed legs. She admired the intellectual look his bifocals gave him, the red rims of his eyes fatigued from reading and writing, the slight scholarly slope of his shoulders as he bent to kiss her again. Little Snowy came into the room while they were making love. So grown he had become that Tintin wasn't sure whether it was Snowy father or son that had come into the room, having forgotten for a moment that the father had died quietly in his arms one spring morning, his grave beside Concetta's. Wheeled there by the new chauffeur, Captain Haddock often spent time by their graves, thinking his thoughts cold sober, for he had long given up the bottle. Sitting in his wheelchair, rug over his inert legs, the captain mused on the nature of his love for Snowy, deeming it more than his love for all but Tintin. He regretted he had never told Snowy that.

  The new chauffeur, Herr Napberg, was impatient with these grave visits, claiming that his services did not include the transporting of passengers in their wheelchairs.

  "Take the gardener's job then," Tintin suggested. "You won't have to stir except among pots and plants."

  The chauffeur would not hear of it. "The people of my race do not till land. We traverse giant space with engines and motors, not furrow baby hectares with plow and hoe." How familiar he was, this Herr Napberg, with his certainties and insistent voice. A voice from the far past, when conversation ran riot and tempers burst, the hungry days, when ideas were more wanted fare than food on the table.

  Now Tintin went to appeal to the most recently hired gardener, tracking him down to a remote section of the estate where tomatoes of several varieties were planted in season, Tintin enjoying especially the sweet plum tomatoes, which he harvested and ate all through the month of August. There he found the man busy tying plants to stakes and oblivious of the sounds of his approach. The gardener was singing or speaking to himself — or to his leafy wards — in the purest Tuscan tones: "'Vedi Parìs, Tristano; e più di mille ombre mostrommi e nominommi a dito, ch'amor di nostra vita dipartille.’"

  Tintin ventured a discreet cough and called out the gardener's name: "Signor Settembroglio." His interruption jarred the melodious intoner and even seemed to disquiet the flowering plants whose erect, firm leaves now appeared to droop beside their stakes.

  "Guarda! You have stricken me and my charges with your sudden manifestation. See how they tremble, my children. Gentleness, sir, the soft tread and softer voice, or how else are we to grow into the forms destined us?"

  Tintin politely apologized for his indiscretion and went to the matter at hand, impressed, nonetheless, by the gardener's admonitions. But the gardener, as did the chauffeur before him, refused the task. No, he was no walker of old sea dogs or of any manner of dogs, the gardens and their growths being his province, as he had long ago decided that it was wiser and more rewarding to tend to the needs of flora than to those of humans.

  "Very wise, indeed, sir," Tintin said respectfully. "I see you are a bit of a thinker. Much like Herr Napberg, the chauffeur who came here the week you arrived, I think."

  ''I'm acquainted with no such person," the gardener said with a dismissive gesture. "My thoughts do not notice persons any longer."

  The matter concluded there, though the gardener did explain, and at great length, the estate's need for an orchard of pears and figs and for a patch of basil for his own use. Tintin limped away, walking slowly on his good leg and weighing heavily down on his stout oak cane — Clavdia's gift. He would wheel the captain himself and rely on no one in these matters of sentiment — a reflection on life in general that he would note in his memoirs immediately. He searched about the house for Clavdia to tell her of his encounters with the gardener and chauffeur, of how they reminded him of the two intellectual antagonists they knew those many years ago on that strange Inca mountain in Peru. But Clavdia was nowhere on the premises, and none of the servants had seen her since breakfast.

  Tintin went to his study to resume writing his memoirs. Scarcely had he touched pen to page when he heard a loud boom and thud. From the window he could see that out there in the ancient park an ancient oak had jumped its roots and lay on its side, branches flailing. Already some of his staff had rushed out to see the beached giant; Clavdia was there, too, and Pimento beside her, and Little Snowy was inspecting roots and trunk and letting out short howls. Tintin wanted to go down to join them, but he felt exhausted. He would learn about the tree later. How could he leave when he had so much more to write! He was still in the early years, before Machu Picchu, before Clavdia had given grace to his life. He had so much more life to cover that he thought his task would never end. Little Tintin could resume where his father had left off, but the boy's interests were elsewhere, in the direction of electrifying the world with his plans for raising dams and power stations the planet over, to bring light to jungle and cave, desert and tundra. An engineer he had become, this lad, with not too much concern for the reflective life, just as he himself had been at his son's age.

  Tintin realized that he had been writing without his bifocals on — no wonder his tiredness — and he searched about the room to find them. Nothing. He went downstairs and rummaged through the kitchen, then on to the library, and from there to the hothouse, where he had been grafting roses that morning. Moans, sighs, and voices came from the tomato bed, where Clavdia was lying, blouse open, tartan skirt folded above her thighs, her wig askew. Beside her groaned Pimento, shirtless, and beside him his broken and splintered shepherd's crook.

  "Rapture. Quite. Amazing. As always. Suffice to say no more. My dear."

  Still without his bifocals, Tintin returned to his study and sat himself down in a large leather chair. His head reeled; his heart sank to its lowest basement. He was thinking miserable thoughts when Clavdia came to find him. She stood behind him, clasping his eyes with her hands. She loved him, would always. But a part of their lives together had terminated, and now there would be slight changes. She would be spending some of her nights with Pimento, some with him, and some alone. And unless Pimento was away in town, he would be dining with Tintin and her most evenings. She tenderly kissed Tintin's forehead and started to leave the room.

  Tintin's voice arrested her. "Could he have plotted a better revenge, Clavdia?"

  Now he was alone again. Little Snowy came to him often and stayed near his bed on nights when Tintin slept solo, but Tintin did not find in the son the father's loyal affection. Little Snowy, born to a generation of comfort and adventuresomeless, had not swum rivers nor slid down cliffs nor faced all manner of death by his master's side. All bones were the same to him, those on his plate as juicy as those won from a deep di
tch or wrested in a fight. He was a house dog, kind, present, but with a limit to his understanding of the intensities and shades of Tintin's moods and needs.

  So when he stayed beside his lonely master, Tintin did not feel less lonely by much, except insofar as Little Snowy reminded him of the other Snowy, life's veteran.

  Captain Haddock was of little help as well. He had become forgetful in sobriety, or as he once lucidly remarked, he had become sober just when drinking cheated him of memory. On those rare nights at dinner with Tintin Clavdia Pimento he would lurch forward after a long silence and, pointing to the former brigand, ask, "Who's this lubber?" He asked the same when pointing to Clavdia. At times the captain did not remember where or at what moment of his life he was living. Tintin noticed that the captain stashed food and especially bread away in his greatcoat while dinner was in progress and later learned that the old seaman thought he was still the hungry young swab hoarding sugar cubes and hardtack to consume on late watch.

  Once, in the middle of dessert, he attacked Pimento with a carving knife he had tucked away in his belt. "Avast! Pirates larboard. Repel boarders," he shouted, lunging at the surprised man's throat, just as some lemon sherbet was coolly passing down it.

  The blade missed but had come close enough to the mark to alarm its target, although the deed itself was sufficient to create a stir. In the days to come Pimento demanded that the captain be sent away; he himself had found a snug place, a retired seamen's home called Sailor's Cove located in the Swiss mountains. Clavdia reluctantly joined in the petition. It was for the captain's own safety, she said, for soon he would do injury to himself as well as others, and he needed more tending than the household staff and Tintin himself was capable. No matter how much they pressed, Tintin remained firm. And finally it was decided that Pimento and Clavdia would take their meals without the captain and leave Tintin to join them or not as he pleased.