Tintin in the New World: A Romance

by Frederic Tuten

  "She turned from the young man, and much as her heart yearned toward him, she would not profane that heavy parting by an embrace or even a pressure of the hand. They parted, in all outward show, as coldly as people part whose whole mutual intercourse has been encircled within a single hour."

  Tintin watched Clavdia descend to the hotel, her step slow, her head and shoulders cast downward. He would have pursued her, held her back, attempted, in some way, by argument or further expression of his passion, to win her to him again. But another yet stranger impulse gradually invaded him, displacing momentarily the dark, trembling emptiness in his body with an anguish so deep as to make him reel. He felt his life current deserting him through his mouth and fingertips. He sat himself down on a smooth stone, his head bowed to his chest, his arms locked about himself in tight embrace, eyes shut. He thought he would go to the precipice where Peeperkorn had hurtled off and take a plunge himself. "It's the cliff for me, too, then," he heard himself say once again. It was dark and silent; a single star glowed in the sky. Tintin attempted to rise, thinking to fling himself off the precipice, but felt too weak to pursue the effort. He wished his life would be kind enough simply, and with no exertion of his own, to cease.

  "Stop, life!" he whispered to himself.

  Suddenly a voice coming from the earth beneath him answered in mimic: "Stop, life. Listen to this kid, will ya? Stop, life. That's a good one. Stop, life. Look at this, this guy's gonna flood us with his little boy's weepy eyes. Hey, cut it out. You're drenching me with that salty eyewash. Whatsa matter, big boy, your girl just ditch ya? Stop, life. That's about the best I heard these last years. Hey, fool, why don't you get going and blubber on someone else? I'm still trying to dry out from last week's downpour."

  "Everyone, even the earth, has a voice these times," Tintin answered.

  "Shove off, will ya? Go kiss and make up, yeah, and make out while ya at it. Give her a good one for me, and cut out the bull. Stop, life! Look, I've seen it all, kiddo. I've been a regular sex mattress for a couple a million years. Everything's made it here, snakes, jaguars, rabbits, snails 'n' a zillion tons a humans, all plowing away like there's no tomorrow. So where do you come off with all that stuff? You think you're the first chump ever got creamed by love? Beat it, you're making me old before my time. STOP LIFE!"

  "I don't take to your insolence."

  "Well, ain't that tough? Whatta you gonna do, piss on me? Kick me to pieces? For a smart guy like you you're one dumb dummy. Take some friendly advice: Shove the sob story, and find yourself another girl — everyone's dating these days.

  A good-looking guy like you shouldn't have himself no trouble. STOP LIFE."

  "What you say, however coarsely expressed, is sensible, my friend earth. But what to do? I love and am not loved. I suffer."

  "Suffering's unfashionable, kiddo. I know you got a dreamy side, but 'believe me ... you know not what is requisite for your spiritual growth, seeking, as you do, to keep your soul perpetually in the unwholesome region of remorse. It was needful for you to pass through that dark valley, but it is infinitely dangerous to linger there too long; there is poison in the atmosphere, when we sit down and brood in it.... Has there been an unalterable evil in your young life? Then crowd it out with good, or it will lie corrupting there forever, and cause your capacity for better things to partake its noisome corruption!’"

  Moved by this advice and the thousand thoughts it bred, Tintin knelt to the earth and fervently kissed the humid soil. "Now you're getting the point, Tintin. One last word, then, before I leave you, with my blessing. Remember always, 'the soul goes steadily forwards creating a world always before her, and leaving worlds always behind her; she has no dates, nor rites, nor persons, nor specialties, nor men. The soul knows only the soul. All else is idle weeds for her wearing.' Go then, life's wonderful child, take to your vision, and leave all else beside."

  Tintin absorbed these words with a sigh, each word penetrating and healing even the darkest reaches of his misery. He need not be alien to himself, provided he took the requisite measures.

  He reckoned now that his former self had died, that all he had taken as life, encounters, alliances, tables, the palaver of the street, bore the same relationship as the top of the sea to the life beneath it. He had, all these years, skirted the surface of the water merely; now he would swim and dive and among sharks as well as minnows.

  "Henceforth I shall commence each day with START LIFE," Tintin said humbly, the tears in his eyes shed no longer in remorse and grief but in gratitude for the lessening of his pain and for the quickening sense of hope and renewal. He would follow life wherever it led him, even to the sources of its pain and joy; he would live, not as do most men, married to guilt and fear, ill from want of love, dreading time and failure, but with a calm in the certainty of life's plentitude.

  Love, he thought, had made him human, had given him reference to the deepest longings of his species; the sorrow of love had triggered his desire for death — the beautiful, good, consoling motherfather, the great, dark purple river — and had transformed him (before it had a chance to break him) into something higher than human, had elevated him among the recluses and the seers, but he had yet to undergo another transformation, one more accelerated and radical than that which he had recently experienced. Mysterious how, by the moment, new sensations, ideas, powers, coursed their way through him; how, even now, Clavdia seemed an intense incident in his intense, compressed history — although he knew that his grief would return time and again.

  When Tintin returned to the hotel (the earliest light of morning had spread over the mountains), he found Captain Haddock, blazer rumpled, his face sagging with fatigue, waiting for him on the veranda.

  "Worried about you, my boy."

  "No need, Captain. Get some rest."

  Something's up, Snowy thought, raising himself from Haddock's side, knew it when that sad lady came back alone, her face white as a desert bone. Better stay close by.

  "Too late now for that. We're all leaving for Cuzco on the morning bus, Tintin."

  "Without me, my dear friend."

  Snowy's ears froze; his little body quivered.

  "Thundering castanets! You're going too far."

  "Beyond," said Tintin with a slight wave of his hand.

  — Chapter XX —

  "I sense I shall never shall see home again, Captain. But you return to Marlinspike, my friend; perhaps I may join you there again one day."

  "And Snowy?"

  "Goes with you."

  "I will miss you, laddie. Perhaps it's all for the best, who knows? You've changed, you're almost my height now, your voice is deep, a man's, you think strange thoughts, and I confess I can't plumb them. No fear, I will tend Marlinspike for you, and wait for you, and keep Snowy's larder filled with bones and biscuits."

  "Don't drink too much, Captain. Keep your hatches dry."

  "And you, my boy? She's left, you know, in a big black car the size of a yawl. Forget her, there's only sorrow and squalls on that course. My beloved boy, mark the narrows on your charts; I beg you, no dreaming on the night watch."

  "Yes, of course. And now it's time to leave, Captain." Tintin watched Haddock descend the trail to the waiting bus. Snowy turned inquisitively and barked for Tintin to join them.

  What's he up to, hanging back like that? Come along, Tintin, the bus is here, we must be off

  At last he understood that Tintin was staying behind, and a sudden rush of fear and misery seized him, his bark turning into a whine. Tintin saw Haddock sweep Snowy under his arm, saw the captain's braided blazer sleeve flash in the sun and the little dog's struggling body disappear behind the closing door of the green bus.

  In this tumultuous world who knows when one life ends and another begins, when chance and destiny will upturn the solid planking under one's most sturdy shoes? Who knows, Tintin thought, when even the most temperate-zone life will change season and bear hot, flowering trees where cold oaks and pines once stood?

>   Preceded by two porters in white uniforms, Naptha and Settembrini shuffled arm in arm down the grassy trail. Tintin understood in that comradely splicing of arms that their burning harangues and bitter outpourings, their posturing had at the core only a yearning for love, and at last, after so many deprived, barren years, they had discovered it in each other. Beyond life, beyond the grave and crematorium they were now risen above the Andes and the Alps, elevated above the words they no longer needed to squander. With their polemics and diatribes spent, they would no longer argue who was God's or the devil's agent, rather who, at night, as they sprawled leg over leg, would be the embraced and who the embracer; love would once again render them into merging contraries. One day, imagined Tintin, in some café or library, or in a common study, or in the amplitude of a shared wide bed, the sundering words would begin again, and the ancient schism would rupture them anew; or spent and aging, they would die together, in mutual compact, painlessly, by pill or gas, or the letting of veins, by means ensuring that one would not outlive the other, by means that would bind them, as they were now bound, arm in arm, through eternity. All that was still to come, but for the moment the generous days were just unfolding.

  For himself now, Tintin thought, there was ahead only the memory of love and the path which it flowered.

  — Chapter XXI —

  [That night.]

  It was already dusk when Lieutenant dos Amantes came to fetch him from the hotel.

  "We have some matters to discuss, Señor Tintin."

  "Yes, I've been waiting."

  "You know already?"

  "Much of it. As I once recently learned you formed a part of my unfolding history, this morning I realized that you had something further to reveal to me."

  "Bueno. So far it is as it should be."

  "Are you frightened, my lieutenant?" Tintin asked gently. "I have been for some time, ever since meeting the fat one who died, your precursor. I have had many doubts and apprehensions. I feel myself unworthy of this."

  "You derive from a long line of those who have waited in solitude. Your worthiness is in your blood."

  "I'm grateful to you, Señor Tintin. At times a man needs reassurance. It is so difficult to live."

  "Yes."

  The two departed as if on signal. Walking side by side, in minutes they reached the ridge connecting the ruined city to Huayna Picchu, crossed, and slowly ascended the mountain ledge to the pinnacle. Three thousand feet below them the Urubamba River glimmered in the last light of the sun, and beyond, the green jungle gathered the humid darkness from the sky.

  Lieutenant dos Amantes unfastened his cartridge box, drew out from it a jaguar-skin pouch, and spilled three dry mushrooms into his palm.

  "Señor Tintin, these are for you to eat, slowly. They are the most potent of all the highland fungi known to the Inca high priests before the conquest. The secret of their existence was transmitted to only a few in each succeeding generation. We have been waiting for him, the special one, to savor them. It is for you — I think — we have waited. Now I have done my part. What you learn here tonight shall decide the rest."

  "Yes, my good lieutenant, this is the way I, too, have come to understand it," said Tintin, nibbling on a mushroom stem.

  "I shall leave after the mushroom starts cooking in you. No matter what you see or hear, do not be frightened or try to return to the hotel; the descent would be perilous. You will not know the hours passing, and you will not be cold or uncomfortable, and in any case, that is of little matter. I shall return to escort you in the morning."

  "Don't worry, Lieutenant. It's you should take care, for there is a snake by your left elbow. A snake of two minds. He thinks he would like to sting you, for your presence offends him; he thinks, too, that you're not worth the effort."

  "Is he a large serpent, Tintin?"

  "No, very small and thin, and with two heads. A lemon-green wand in coil, his mouths the color of pomegranate, his fangs speckled blue and white, his eyes like flecks of black diamonds."

  "Will I die, my friend?"

  "Not tonight, he has decided. Do leave now. I would speak to this creature."

  "Good night, my hope," the lieutenant said passionately, exhilarated by the fulfillment of this new stage of the prophetic design: the reappearance of this unusual serpent and Tintin's powers to fathom the creature's thoughts.

  The moon illumined Lieutenant dos Amantes's stumbling but cautious way down along the narrow ledge, led him beaconlike ultimately back to his room, where alone in bed, he praised the miracle of man's solidarity with the earth, and he prayed for life's greater wisdom to visit him until finally his prayers spun him to deepest sleep.

  Tintin considered his conversation with the snake dull. The serpent, Tintin discovered, knew little more of the world than the scope of the mountaintop on which he dwelled.

  "I marvel, serpent, that for one so beautiful and rare there is so little to you at heart."

  "Do you take form for substance?"

  "Yes. Since recently. But I'm losing the notion as quickly as I acquired it. You are good argument for my revision. Be off, friend. I expect more telling visitors presently."

  "Certainly, Tintin," said the snake, suddenly sprouting wings and golden plumes. Tintin followed his gliding flight into the absorbing darkness.

  Suddenly Tintin was seated in a theater, third row, center aisle. The lights dimmed. A fat, grinning man in a crisp tuxedo bowed to the audience (Tintin was the only spectator) and, after pausing for a moment as if in acknowledgment of general applause, spoke: "Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, and for this night only — never to be performed again in the whole of the Americas — we are honored to present for your amusement and edification, and employing the greatest talents — man and beast — ever assembled on one stage, the Grand Spectacle of the New World. Without further delay, and with the request that you hold your applause until the show is completed, I ask that the curtain be raised and our evening begin."

  A shaky spotlight followed the impresario as he edged into the wings. "The Mexican Hat Dance" struck up on a phonograph, and presently two dancers emerged doing a heel-and-toe step. No sooner had they reached stage center (and the elegant mustachioed caballero tossed his sombrero to the floor) than the music stopped and the spotlight went dead. When the beam reappeared, some seconds later, it struck its vermilion glow on the impresario, dressed this time in the costume of a gaucho of the pampas, a bola suspended from his kerchiefed neck, a gleaming dirk stuck in the fold of a green silk sash about his large belly. Bowing and waving his hands as if to plead with the audience to halt its applause, he began introducing the next act, but a squad in cuirasses and helmets, rapiers drawn before their eyes, interrupted him. They marched briskly across the stage, followed by a short man straddling a stuffed brown horse pulled by wires attached to its dusty forelegs.

  "Pizarro and his valiant band en route to Peru," announced the master of ceremonies, sidestepping the onslaught of horse and rider.

  Dressed in cardboard armor, his false black beard strung perceptibly about his ears, Pizarro held in one hand the standard of Spain, which fell limply to the pole, and in the other, a long silver-painted wooden sword. The conquistador kept his head high and his eyes fixed nobly ahead, as if viewing the prospect of his future victories and glory in the theater wings to which he was being slowly dragged.

  Lights down. Sounds of shuffling and of props being moved, thuds and noisy curses. Lights up.

  The Inca, in full headdress and ceremonial robes lies prone, bound to a stone bed. Pizarro stands by as his men torture the man. One removes the Inca's headdress and ties a thin braided cord about his forehead; he inserts a stick under the cord and twists the tourniquet slowly. Others, with papier-mâché fires, roast the Inca's already charred feet. Gold tears stream from the Inca's ears and mouth.

  Throughout the night many acts and tableaux vivants of similar historical nature followed. Tortures, murders, conversions of Indians at the stake, kidnap pings, tra
nsportations and enslavements, whippings, mutilations, the murders and extinction of tribes by the Spanish invaders — bodies strewn into rivers and pits or left to beasts and birds.

  The tableaux vivants vanished, and a huge screen dropped before the stage. Images rushed by at kaleidoscopic pace. Tintin saw vast settlements spring before his eyes where forests, ripped from their roots, had once swayed. Tractors cut swaths into the living green forest. Hills of trees young and old, brush and bush and all living creatures caught in the teeth of the invading machine burned, the flames alighting the surrounding forest and transforming it into a furious crackling furnace, fat smoke billowing into a black tent high in the sky. Highways unfurled like carpets of concrete over the tracks of raw burned earth, and new steel-and-concrete settlements rose beside great rivers and deep into the jungle where once only jaguars lived. The great rivers and lakes turned brackish and spewed dead grinning fish. Trees and undergrowth were uprooted and swept away in the rains that flooded the stripped land, and when the earth baked in the scorching sun, the rich soil turned to bitter sand where nothing grew. Many went hungry and died, some died eating the earth, little mustaches of powdery film ringing lips and chin.

  When Lieutenant dos Amantes rejoined Tintin as the sun's first rays blazed over the mountaintops, the officer found the young man asleep, his hand over his mouth, just as he had left it, to stifle a yawn.

  "Tintin, wake," the lieutenant implored.

  "Why, yes! Most instructive, most, simply elucidating," the young man answered energetically to the officer's anxious call.

  "Is that all? Instructive? Elucidating?"

  "Of course, there are other things, too," Tintin added gravely, "added attractions, I mean. Let's say our farewells and be off, Lieutenant, I must have an early morning start."

  "¿Nada mas?" the lieutenant asked, his voice sunken low. "From all you have been privileged to see and learn, you leave me and my hopes with so little?"