"Room enough, sir, adelante. I, too, desire to learn the conclusion to this bourgeois, utopian fable. Then perhaps one day I shall return the favor and relate a history of my people and how they manage their lives."
"Kind of you, Señor Lieutenant, yet surely the history of the oppressed is universal and, from my perspective, to be perfectly honest, uniform. There is so little glory or glamour in the history of sufferers; what occasional allure there might be," Peeperkorn said gravely, "is so lost in the crushing mass of details of exploitation and injustice as to hold no more than fifteen minutes of the reader's attention. The German peasants of 1524 no sooner picked up their scythes than Luther's knights — his patrons — speared them like ripe tomatoes in the field. Indians beg for corn and are sent bullets to eat instead. What does all that prove but the ignominy of the cruel and the powerless of the wretched? Better those tales of human spirit rising, examples of the mighty collective soul witnessed in individual achievements."
"I hold nothing against your fable, Señor," the lieutenant said, "and I shall attend you with interest, for it is not every day an Indian from these mountains learns from the mouths of his enemies how class interests superseded all other human ties."
"Not quite fair of you," Naptha commented gently. "Isn't this more a tale of the attractions of the human mind, of intellectual and aesthetic affinities, the magnetism, of one delicate and tasteful soul to another? Herr Mack, as you remember, did not favor this youth for reasons of class or even personal obligation; he was taken by the youth's ability to glimpse the underpinnings of beauty. The sympathy of like minds is foremost in this tale."
"But no such sympathy would have mattered had Herr Mack not perceived a quality to be exploited to his own advantage! Sapristi!" Settembrini exclaimed. "In this youth Herr Mack had found the perfect minion, with whose soul and class he was in harmony."
"Let us hear out the rest of Herr Peeperkorn's story," Tintin pleaded.
"With your good wishes, I shall continue," Peeperkorn said, giving Tintin a little bow with his head.
"One morning I met Herr Mack himself, who, on the strength of my friend's recommendation, gave me a hearty handshake, a steely look in the eyes and a 'welcome aboard.' So I came on board, but not to the upper, plusher cabins, so to speak, or to the flagship of the fleet. I was sent out into the wide sea on a leaky little boat of which I was the sole master, navigator, and seaman. No sunny office in a major European capital, no long business lunches, no agreeable secretary to screen my calls while I read the newspaper or cut out little paper dollies, feet on desk; in short, I was provided with none of the urbane comforts and ease of the managerial class.
"No matter. This was no mere import-export business I set to work for, no, sir. Import profits and export dreams, more like it. I was its chief export, shipped out to the Americas to look after its various interlocking companies, corporations, ranches, farms, plantations, mines, shops even. I was the inspector general, very general, as you well see.
"Off I went, tramping down from Tijuana to the tip of Tierra del Fuego, up the Andes and through the Amazon basin. Across prairies and pampas I went by rail and car and boat and burro. The Americas were my district, a territory where you made a pile of money in a month of sweat and lost it in a night of gambling and women, where the Southern Cross blinked out in its torrid message in the hot sky — WELCOME TO SOUTH AMERICA, CONTINENT OF CONTRASTS AND ROMANCE — not my kind of territory at first, hard and gritty and tough on the liver for a pure white man, yet once it got in your blood, you couldn't get over it even if you lived five lives more, because that macumba magic gets under the skin, those nights on the sands of the copacabana with the jet black mountains at your back and that purple ocean before your eyes, savage and sexy like a jaguar prowling for porterhouse steaks in a summer rain, or out there on the grassy flatness they call the pampas, under the stars so close down to a man he can touch 'em with his fingertips, so close he'd have to crawl on his belly just to get to his blanket spaced between sky and earth.... Well, sirs, a man gets to love it so much it near spoils 'im for any other life. Now I don't say it's all the same everywhere, 'cause it ain't, but even when you're staying over in some little town like Chapingo or Belem or Dos Cruses, you get to feel that you could stick it out ifen you had to, why, that's the beauty of the whole thing down there, any little place would do you fine, 'cause, like I say, it's living in your blood, and you can't return to them anemic places where they oui-oui and merci bien you to sickness.
"I was on the move. Just got my foot in Belo Horizonte and looked over the diamond cutting when I had to move out again to oversee our coffee and rubber plantations, flying, you know, in a little single-propeller — no bigger than a sleepy mosquito, and getting closer and closer to up north and the creamy Andes. Nets at night over your bunk and plenty of quinine through the day. Well, sirs, soon enough I was feeling at home in the working world. And I was getting sharp and careful; having to talk to managers and engineers 'bout production levels and the like keeps you wide-awake and on the lookout! My body toughened with all that travel and hard driving in the great outdoors; yes, sir, I tightened up that pudgy and softy frame, and soon even my little butterball cheeks sank away, my face now the color of smoked hickory and the texture of a cowpoke from Archer City, Texas, and so lean and muscular that each chew sent sexy ripples up and down the jaw and around these blue eyes, for my eyes were blue then.
"Amazing how from one month to another I had shed the old self and all of Europe with it, and by God, I became a man. Good-bye, then, Kurfürstendamm and Unter den Linden and farewell, Champs-Élysées and Boulevard St. Germain, and I really hope never to see you again, Via della Croce, Piazza Navona, and Via Veneto, so long once and for all, you mincing, corrupt, and jaded streets of Europe what's caught sleeping sickness and will never recover, 'cause here I am steaming it along the upper Parana en route to Corumba and then by shanks' mare and horse hoof to Cahloo territory, where the cattle multiplied on our little twenty-five-thousand-acre spread like amoebas on a sea of jelly and broth, and now I'm entraining to Puna de Atacama, to take a little peek at how we're doing in the way of our mineral digs. Our hefty extractions of wolfram and vanadium, mica and talc, tin and antimony are yielding about one hundred eighty-eight thousand four hundred thirty-four metric ton a year, but after spending a week up in those Andean veins, I see that we can produce as much as eight thousand metric tons a year more by just switching from handcart to mule cart from the mine to the train. The trick there was to get feed for those mules, and I found just the way.
"Well, the long and short is I was happy. I'd found that a man is no more than the work he loves and that when you got that kinda work, just get down on your knees and thank the Lord for each living moment. Don't mean to boast, but pretty soon I got high respect from the folks back at home office and even a copy of a letter from Herr Mack boasting of my productivity on all fronts of our operations. By and by, after a few years, Mack and Raiss let me share in the profits in my district, a tiny share, but enough to give me some surplus income, which I invested in a little island smack in the Amazon, where I planted rubber trees and tobacco, coffee and cocoa, and drew a high yield of balata gum and oil from the juicy kernels of the babassu palm, which I rafted down to Para.
"Money enough and land to cultivate, soon enough you find it cultivates you and roots you like just another tree! Well, who wanted to move? Not I. Companionship? Enough native plumage landed in my branches to keep me content from time to time. Some even nested with me temporarily, but that's another matter. Attachments, cohabitation, marriage, monogamy, children, to my mind, in those days, equaled death of the soul, and the body, too. I had not yet met Madame, you see, and still knew nothing of the joys of union — soul twins, profound that experience, very.
"Then one day out there on my little island I took sick. It was the certain end of me 'cause they got little nameless germs out there floating in that jungle stream that once they've bitten you, it's time to think
over your life and make peace with your maker. So I was lying there in my wide rosewood bed, my flesh dripping over my aching bones, my hair falling out in colossal clumps (it's grown back since), my eyes melting in their hot sockets. It was good-bye, little island, and farewell, great large world, but I had known some years or so of happiness, and I couldn't altogether discount those times in Paris when I enjoyed myself, not knowing a life more grand and vital, more personal existed. When you dawdle over sherbets and kir at boulevard cafés, you think the world's winnowed down to your select table and your habitual corner... n'est-ce pas?
"Well, there's no discussion and no appeal. I had to leave, against my wishes, a life I had not as yet completely tasted and fully plumbed. Some do not mind, some welcome and beg for the end of all vital emanations from their body, so miserable, so hard, so deprived their lives. But for me the fun was just starting, the big loneliness of life ready to be filled with new moments of adventure and challenge; the man or woman narrowed to the small scope of routine he or she has not chosen, whose each new day is but the echo and mirror of the last, has little cause, so thought I, to wish to keep breathing. To have lived one dull day is to have lived them all. But I, in the amplitude of youth and power and money, could live ten times over and never feel the sate of repetition or the gloom of staleness.
"All of you speak of humanity's call for fairness, to make the tall average out with the short, the rich with the poor, the bright with the dull. Yes, at the bottom of the barren well of the long argument there is only that, the grading down of the highest to create the inconspicuous average, and I, too, think it will one day happen, the great races and the great noble cultures will bastardize and mix with the shiftless and noisy peoples, those for whom quietude is torment and who must each instant fill silence with noise or rave in the pain of their own emptiness, this uniform, ugly world will arrive in due course, but I there, dying in the lush days of my youth, there among the implements of my thriving farm, the little blue diesel tractor brought piece by piece overland and by steamer, each arrived section a triumph of culture no less great than a Beethoven string quartet, a Cezanne painting, yes, and each acre harvested and each animal birthed in that tropical riot a victory of civilization, and each worker and his family who came to labor and dwell on my busy and happy island, a triumph even greater. Oh! That was the promise of a second tilled Eden wrested from our knowledge of good and evil and thus greater in value than the innocent garden given our original rude and dullard parents, to all this and more — my darling silver fox and my noble Labrador, my pets, my friends — I was saying farewell and was blinking my last longing glance when he arrived, summoned as final resort by the wife of my overseer, a woman whose overbite and soft round shoulders drove me mad, I might add, though without any meaning to this story and to the events succeeding it.
"He arrived, that frail slip of a yellow reed, and he touched me with his long yellow fingers as if touching a dying white monster.
"'The smell,' he said, 'white people smell so terrible, especially when they die. White cheese lying out too long.’
"And so there I was, a runny Camembert stinking up the bed and house. He had the houseboy spray my fetid room with a perfume made from the essence of crushed camellias, and only then did he return to administer his frisky medicines concocted from boiling the herbs, roots, barks, leaves, and mossy webs he had gathered that very day. I drank the bitter syrup he spooned me and plunged into a long sleep. It was the sleep of life and dreams, and the fevered sleeper knew that this Chinaman's syrup was negotiating for my life with the assassinating bugs and had, by the close of the third day, won my reprieve. Within a week I was alive enough to sit up in bed and eat a proper meal and was strong enough even to receive this Chinaman of mine to my invalid's bedside for breakfast and conversation.
"He was not much for conversation. He had come by, he said, only to take one last look at my condition and be off about his business. And what was his business? He shrugged, twirled about the room, flailing his skinny bare arm, and, from the perfect French he had been speaking, launched into shrill yaps of pidgin English. It struck me like a slap, and I broke out into the first great laugh I had since weeks before my illness, that laugh that steals up and takes your unconscious by surprise, releasing you for a while from whatever misery disease has brought.
"'Well, sir, that should finish the matter,' he said, speaking again in French as he turned to leave.
"'Take whatever you want but stay,' I pleaded.
"He paused. There was in fact something he wanted. He was quitting these parts and had delayed his journey because of me, but now he was to resume his long river trip to Belem and would have liked a book for company.
"'A book? Take my entire library,' I pleaded earnestly, grateful for the chance to repay him. Yes, he was familiar with my library, having slept there from the day of his arrival, but he would never consider depleting it beyond a volume or two, though he would take, on a conditional and provisional basis — to be returned to me by the next traveler to these parts — a copy of Montaigne's Essais.
"'Why, my dear man, Montaigne you shall have, and whoever else of that ilk of pensive men you desire. Name him, and if he is on my shelf — or obtainable through direct order from my bookdealer — he is yours.'
"'Montaigne will do for this trip, to have him by my side for a while, to remind me how men thought before they fell into degraded times.'
"Ah, there was a theme worthy of several evenings of after-dinner conversations, aided in their flow by fine brandy and rich, moist cigars — and I had these to offer should he wish to stay — but no, he was an adamant Asian, very correct and ironic at once, and finally very irritating with his sense of modest self-assurance, his polite smile so perfect in its standoffishness, in its contempt for all that was not, and you could be certain, nothing quite was or ever would be, perfect. So, then, that's how it fell out, he leaving and my getting ready to be strong and healthy again and to build my wonderful world.
"Does that satisfy you gentlemen? To know how fortunes are made from dreams and how chance interceded to aid even the most undeserving. Mark your words, for who knows on what ears they adhere and to what use they are made in this world's drafty and public stadium.
"And so now I'm off to my room," Peeperkorn announced. "I feel the need to repose and refresh myself, as do our friends here, judging by their somnambulant, nay, slumbering, attitudes — note, my lad, how Naptha curls himself like a folded guitar and how our companion from the Italian peninsula pillows his head on crooked arm, a picture of the beggar boy napping in a rotting corner of forever dying Naples — yes, I, too, hear Morpheus's song drawing me to the warm sheets of sleep. Young man, I perceive that drowse and fatigue leave no impress upon your smooth features. Resilient youth, elastic heart, bring yourself to my rooms at the hour after dawn, when we may then continue, on newer grounds, to engage our personalities and bridge the distance of our souls."
"It would be an honor to converse with you, if I understand your intentions, sir, but I fear disturbing you from your morning sleep since dawn breaks within the hour."
"Who spoke of rest, my boy? That was the inclination of the moment, a breeze that has come and gone. Presently, then."
— Chapter XV —
[An hour after dawn.]
Peeperkorn ushered Tintin into a large, brightly lit room where, with exaggerated flourish, he directed the young man to seat himself in a wicker chair set before a solid French easel. In the interval since their last meeting, Peeperkorn had exchanged his mountain costume for simple coveralls and a coarse linen shirt, open at the throat. While Tintin sat expectantly, the old man slipped on a thick brown tweed jacket leathered at the elbows, and after some moments of searching in his trunk he produced a wide-brimmed straw hat, which he patted affectionately before crowning his head.
"My good-luck hat."
"Are you going for a walk, monsieur?"
"Walk? Why would you think that?"
"
Your costume, sir, suggests an out-of-doors atmosphere."
"These are my work clothes," Peeperkorn bellowed, "though naturally I wear them en plein air during clement days."
"Are you going to work now?"
"Why, of course. I work every day, and shall until these eyes and hands fail me. Work invigorates, fuels body and spirit."
"I should be leaving then," Tintin said disappointedly. "Leaving? Nonsense! Remain you must. This is our moment. There is so little I know about you, my dear youth. Of your exploits and adventures, naturally, as does the whole world, but to learn of you and your thoughts, your inmost history, this was my intention in organizing our little tête-à-tête this morning. Oh! Yes. And now, by way of preamble, an introductory note, let's turn to a related matter, my life's passion, my work, about which I ask your opinion and your advice, because I've come to an impasse, one which I believe your judgments and feelings may help me span, being, as you are, wholly honest, wholly au courant with the matter at hand, since, as I've learned from your salty companion the greathearted Captain Haddock, you've a taste for painting, if your acquisition of one of the most precious artifacts of contemporary art, that Matisse of yours, I mean, reflects such taste."
"Well, sir, I do like pictures."
"Ah, yes, pictures. But I was thinking more in the line of paintings. I have arranged here, along this wall, as you see, my portable museum of miniatures, uniform-size paintings, scaled-down copies of the original canvases I've executed over the years. I hasten to add that what I shall show you is merely an anthology, a fraction of my total oeuvre; it represents each of my various periods, from the earliest to the very present."
''I'm honored, Monsieur Peeperkorn, yet as to the advice you seek, I'm certainly not qualified to render neither you nor any artist such service."
Tintin in the New World: A Romance Page 15
