Tintin in the New World: A Romance

by Frederic Tuten

  "I see Signor Settembroglio's put up daffodils this year, very good that line of buttery yellow along the green hedge path."

  ''I'll tell him you're pleased," Clavdia replied, humoring him, as she lately had grown accustomed to doing.

  One day Tintin handed Clavdia a copy of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, asking her to return it to its owner. "Very instructive, eye-opening that book. Please tell Herr Napberg how much I enjoyed it — enlarges the mind, you know."

  Clavdia simply brought the book to the house library, where she placed it on the shelf among the other returned-to-their-owner books she presumed he also never had read. But Tintin was unpredictable in matters of change. While he would brook no truth in the matter of the vanished gardener and chauffeur, he made no denial of Captain Haddock's death.

  Still bound to his wheelchair, the captain one day seemed to have his faculties returned to him. He no longer referred to Clavdia as "that lubber," and he came to recognize Pimento even in his mummified state, though he did from time to time prod the immobilized man with his cane, calling him "ballast" and "bilgepie" and "pirate cheese." He had come to his senses at last, the captain said, and he was now going to write his memoirs. Tintin reminded him of the great difficulty in ever finishing them — as he himself was evidence — or of even ever getting to the crucial parts and rendering them satisfactorily. Nothing dissuaded Haddock, and he went to his room after meals and devoted himself to writing.

  It was curious, Clavdia noted, that men and women who had moved about so much in their lives one day, out of the blue, felt the need to immobilize themselves in the most cramped positions and scratch out words about the invisible past. She was happy thinking about the happy parts and forgetting the rest, and even at that, she was happiest thinking of nothing at all but the present, the only time, actually, that existed.

  Haddock concurred with the justice of her remarks, adding, however, that while he was writing, he was in a sort of motion, most so when he was most fixed, a state of fixed motion. He seemed to delight in this state so much that he stayed in his room longer and longer intervals, much to Tintin's amazement and envy. Curiosity often brought Tintin to Haddock's door. There he stood and listened. The long silences were sometimes broken by exclamations — "Trim sail!" and "Clear way" — and once Tintin heard a long howl, "Drown me in a squall."

  One day when Haddock seemed to be working away unusually long, Tintin sent up a late lunch, the captain having grown increasingly unmindful of meal hours. But when the meal and servant returned, Tintin grew alarmed. The captain had not responded to the servant's knock and call, not even to berate him for the interruption. Tintin knew Captain Haddock was dead, and indeed, he was dead and still at his post, pen in hand, slumped over the logbooks in which he had written not his life's story but Tintin's.

  The captain had brought the narrative well beyond the place where Tintin had left his off but still short of finishing the adventure in Machu Picchu. He told of how he and Tintin had first met that terrible time when he was drinking and had lost the crew's respect and how unscrupulous officers had plotted to keep him drunk and quartered in his cabin so he would not notice the drug traffic they were conducting with and on his ship. Besotted he was, unaware of how he was being used, and happy to have others do his job, leaving them to run the ship and his life, too, as long as the whiskey was brought to his cabin and flowed to his mess. It was then that Tintin appeared, this strange, indefatigable boy, one night, secretly boarding the ship to search for evidence of illegal cargo. Tintin found the drugs, and discovered Haddock, too, drunk in his cabin and lost to the world. Tintin sobered him up and apprised him of the ship's doings and gave him a chance to win back his loyal crew and rid the ship of its criminal usurpers.

  From that day onward he was at Tintin's side, perhaps not always sober but clearheaded enough and in charge of himself. The rest of the narrative told of Tintin's adventures the world over and told them in a voice sweet, economical, and assured. Tintin could hardly take himself away from reading the logbooks, forcing himself to put them down briefly on the morning the captain was interred in a plot beside Snowy's. It was only several days after the captain was in the ground that Tintin read a passage in the logbooks outlining the sea­ man's desires on the matter of the disposal of his mortal remains.

  The instructions — for that is what Tintin took them to be — were couched in the form of a wish. Would that the narrator meet the fate of his seagoing ancestors and be placed with his instruments of his profession, his sextant, compass, and spyglass, in a craft of navigable size — larger than a dinghy and smaller than a schooner — and set aflame out at sea so that he and craft would burn to ash and marry with billow and brine. He would then not be so much in the sea but of it. Atoms of him flung on shores, his misty spume racked across the sunbeams of morning, atoms of him in the lungs of whales and in the tissue of fishes. He'd swim with and tack against the tides, plunge to the blackest bottom of the sea only to climb up again on backs of dolphins gliding to the brilliant day.

  Tintin had the captain's body disinterred and followed the dead man's wishes. From his study window Tintin saw the yawl bob out to the horizon and flare into fire like a red match on a plate of sudsy water. Then the flame sputtered out, and with it the last of the earthbound Haddock.

  Tintin left the captain's grave and headstone intact, though nothing lay beneath it except the memory of Haddock's brief stay there.

  Clavdia was all Tintin had left of the old life, and he hers. His grandchildren visited infrequently, his son and daughter-in-law never. Little Snowy's offspring roamed about the estate half wild, a threat to the sheep. Little Snowy had grown too old to have control over them, and their poodle mother offered no direction, having abandoned husband and children to follow a life with a black Labrador whose roots were in the city. Parentless, ill-mannered, and savage, they were pampered by Tintin, who saw in their eyes the glimpse of their grandparents, of Snowy.

  Memories of former days and attention to the few demands of the household kept Tintin little occupied. To see Tintin puttering about the house in ever-widening circles of distraction saddened Clavdia, she herself filled with projects and activities each day and week. As a former explorer, world traveler, racing car champion, rose garden expert, she was in demand to give lectures and organize charity parties. She was famous and sought after. In old age one must be wanted and rich, she would say. The former, because to be shunted by the roadside is to feel the isolation of the deep grave before the grave's call, and the latter because independence and options grow from the soil of cash, and where there is cash there is currency.

  Tintin had long given up writing his memoirs and had little by way of activities to challenge him. Clavdia tried to get him on the lecture circuit, but he was a resolute failure on the platform. Where in life he was natural and graceful, his style and carriage plain, on the stage mannerisms invaded his gestures, shrugs of shoulders, waves of the hand or, when he thought the occasion demanded, both hands; he waxed rhetorical, lowering his voice and making the most artificial pauses to signal that something momentous was to follow. These and other embellishments ruined his image. The public who had read of him and his adventures and who had come prepared to see a stout, artless man found standing in his place a ham. So the stage was out, and he returned to his puttering and reading the mail, which he had come more and more to expect and depend on, waiting at the window in pajama and robe for the postman to arrive before dressing for breakfast. One day the post brought a rich travel brochure in the wake of letters soliciting money and his signature. Travel, the once-dangerous, adventure-ridden, and consuming occupation of his and Clavdia's earlier life, now presented itself in a new allure. No tent nor knapsack, no sleeping bag nor pine-bough bed, no campfire biscuit and boiled water, no treeside evacuations, no hard life on dunes or tundra frost or moldering, wet jungle floor, and no worry of human ambush, animal charge, or insect bite, no worry whatsoever was due him and his on this magnificent,
meta-luxury tour of Europe, commencing with Italy. Tintin once knew a famous opera singer from Milano whose stolen jewels he had helped recover, but he himself in all his travels had never been to Italy.

  Clavdia had spent time there in her youth, in her wandering years, and had learned to speak Italian as did the Florentines. "Bocca toscana," she had, pronouncing c's as though h's, very elegant her Italian, she had been told, and for that reason she spoke it all the better. "Just to see that face and hear that voice are enough to make me die happy," more than one of her Italian suitors had said to her; it was all too much for them, her beauty and her Italian, spoken as they spoke it but issuing uncannily from the lips of a forestiera to give it a perverse charm. They loved her, would die for her or because of her. Her voice, her face, her hair in a splay of fiery flames — her hair was red then — a wild explosion, it drove them mad, the Italian men. She could choose from among them, as she had always chosen, with the willful abandon and recklessness of a woman universally adored.

  For a while she chose the Conte di Monte Beni, a young man from an ancient family, his eyes sloe, his hair raven, his passion for her absolute. One day he brought her to his family's ancestral home, a hilltop ruin with an enclosed ruined garden, lizards and rippling thin snakes its tenants. After an afternoon of lovemaking in the bed where he had been born and had spent many languid days of his adolescence, he brought her into the garden and plucked a fig from its tree. With a penknife he made a deep slit that he slowly spread apart with his thumbs. "You open like this ripe fig," the young count said to her, "and your fig is always ripe and always crimson, my red-haired, my redness."

  Italian men, expansive, monomaniac, and burning, they were beautiful and gone like the flight and quick red plunge from tree to hedge of a flaming red bird. She had flown beside them in hectic moments of flight but left them when they landed. Her motto: Leave before left. And at all costs, leave. She left the count, too, ardent though he was, in her thrall, as he claimed. She learned that he later withdrew from the world, living alone in his house of decaying rooms and garden, and was cared for by an old family servant who had raised him. What did he do in his house all alone? Clavdia had wondered. The count did not read — not that he disdained books, but his education had never promoted that skill — and he did not race cars or boats, nor did he cook or garden or play at any sports or games. She visited him unexpectedly, as a youth would do, without written announcement or notice, but as he had no telephone, she felt no obligation to be embarrassed should he receive her badly. And should he be rude or surly, she would climb back into her car and speed away over the Tuscan hills to any one of the places where she was surely welcome, where she was longed for.

  When he came to the door, finally, his hair slicked back, his lips curled downward, his eyes vacant with the vacancy of the hopeless, Clavdia realized that love was his game, his only sport, indeed his only occupation. She understood, too, that he was enamored with winning this game and that she had been his spoiler. His expression at the door said all that. She need not divine it, it was fully there, his misery at her having left him and his sadness at realizing that while she had come, she had not come to be his lover. He was polite and doleful, and she wanted, she remembered, to laugh. Not from cruelty, this desire to laugh, because she was not cruel to those who loved her, even when she no longer loved them, but from the exaggeration of the man, exaggerated in love and exaggerated in suffering.

  There was no tour of the garden this time and no demonstration of analogies of figs or of any other fruit. They sat in his decrepit salon under a Rubens scene of fauns and maidens romping in a glade, in the foreground the figure of an old satyr with flowing white beard dangling a bouquet of grapes over the body of a supine young woman whose smile combined weariness and delight. The family Tiepolos and Titians hung in the obscurity of the heavily cloaked windows and lent nothing of color to the musty gloom of the surroundings.

  Yes, he lived here, with Umberto, who fed him pastasciutta and Dover sole (poached and topped with a caper sauce) brought in from England every other week, and apart from that he saw no one and wished to see even fewer no ones, the count replied to Clavdia's question of how he was spending his days.

  He sat facing her in the gloom of the afternoon still in his robe and slippers, speaking little, biting his lip, smoking, distracted, until at last Clavdia announced that she was leaving, since her visit seemed to have found him out of sorts and inconvenienced. She rose to leave, her cigarette still dead in her mouth — he had lit his own without noticing to light hers — and turned to the door where the faint window light caught and seemed to hold her.

  But it was his voice, not the light that held her there; she had heard him without realizing that he had spoken, since what he had spoken had penetrated to levels far beneath her consciousness.

  "Yes, I'm dying for you. For want of you. Umberto saw you arriving and refused to open the door, so much he hates you for what he thinks you have made of me. Yes, he knows I'm dying for you. For lack of you. You who exist no longer except in my dreams and in my every thought."

  When his words filtered themselves up to her consciousness and when she understood not only their meaning but their meaning to the speaker, she unfroze and left him, her heels clicking and clacking on the ancient marble floor, leaving him rapt in his misery. She started for Perugia, then turned about and made for Porto Santo Stefano, then detoured again to race to Rome, her MG buzzing through traffic like an angry red bee. Some of the male drivers tried to pursue and catch up to her, honking their horns, gesticulating and calling out, "Bambola, stella, come ride with me." One sped up close to her, shouting, "Slow down, beauty, so I can get a good look at you."

  She signaled she was slowing down, smiling at him, but with rage in her heart. After pulling off the road, she waited for him, opening the top buttons of her blouse as his car turned and rolled beside hers so that they were face-to-face. "Well," she said, "do you want to go? I'm incredibly hot. Non ho ancora scopato oggi."

  He could not hide his shock at her boldness and imagined a motive other than love for him. "Ah," he said, "do you want money?"

  "Not money," she answered, reaching out to him through the window and pulling him by his tie. "You, I want, with your god's face and body, right now, here in the car."

  "You must be crazy, lady. I don't know what you're thinking," he said, revving up his motor and accelerating the car. "I'm thinking that you are a bigmouth coward and a mama's clown, is what I'm thinking."

  He disappeared, and as if he had sent off a warning signal to the others on the road, no other car or person bothered her for the remainder of the journey.

  She arrived in Rome after ten to a quiet city and ate some cold pasta with garlic in her apartment. Below her window a mellow light from a restaurant shone on the statue of Giordano Bruno, martyr and Renaissance man of reason. It was reason she wanted, but she was feeling the crazy pull of a madman in love, one who would die for her, was dying for her, his life drying and decoloring like an old, dusty lizard handbag in a hot, sun-filled window of a used-clothes shop on the Tiber.

  She climbed into bed with the image of him, of his loneliness and suffering, of his Dover soles wet on the plate before him, wet from his tears and the green caper sauce. She had left him because she feared the sadness his words had made her feel as she had stood there in the doorway trapped in the gloom of his words. That she should suffer this, she who wanted lightness and charm, not misery and darkness, the twin brutes of unrequited love. In what way, she wondered, was she responsible for his misery? Had she misled him or encouraged affection beyond the usual required of impermanent lovers? No. From every perspective she was faultless, her blame only that her being engendered in others wayward emotions she could not regulate. Still, blameless though she was, she felt the count's love for her mattered; no one ever had felt quite as acutely for her as he did, his grief a noble flower in a garden of stones and snakes. With these thoughts she tried to sleep. She slept.

>   In the morning she knew what to do. Her body knowing it before her mind. She would return to the count and soothe him; if she could not love him, she could help him mend and draw him back to life. She drove the same roads of the previous night and rode them even faster in her rush to appear to him and to make him the present of herself. Car speeds through traffic over hills and bridges, swooshing past inns and motor camps, the hot August sun burning the land and road and tires, igniting, by the power of its incendiary rays, little brush fires along the roadsides, flames leaping and licking her tires as she sings, deep-throated and husky, the "Stabat Mater," singing until she and the song and the ride end at the count's oaken door.

  After several loud and declarative knocks, Umberto appears, opening the door the width of a child's hand. The count is indisposed. "Is the count ill?" Clavdia asks apprehensively. No, not ill, indisposed.

  Then she will wait for his disposal, Clavdia says.

  Yes, the signorina may wait, wait wherever she wishes but not inside. She shall wait elsewhere, she says in cool fury, but she will return in an hour or so, and when she does, she is sure the count will be available, or Umberto and the count may start to look about for replacements for their heads. She withdraws and drives to the town to look in the shop windows and have lunch and maybe buy a pair of soft gloves. Hot hot hot and dusty, and it's August, nearly everything is closed for ferragosto, restaurants, shops, even the bakery. Then she remembers the open-air terrace of the little hotel where sometimes she and the count had spent .afternoons in the cheapest room in the house — he being too frugal for a more expensive bed and she unable to pay for one because it was against the count's principles to have a woman pay for anything while in his company — and she goes there, leaving her car to cool under the shade of a medlar tree. Crowded tables in the patio, and there, at one of them, under the shade of umbrella, is the count, lifting a forkful of caprese to his mouth.