He pressed his wrist against the bulge of his wallet, to assure himself that the crammed wallet, and his ticket for Balboa airport, in Panama, were still there. His flight was announced. He went out to the field. Mail was loaded. Luggage was loaded. A white-crated dog, spurting with excitement, was loaded. Startled by the immensity of the airplane as he stood beside it, the air and his whole inner body were suddenly shaken by another airplane taking off before him. Abruptly, then, the fury of the other rising airplane was gone; and a frail bird flew by, in silent dignity, and in the opposite direction.
Otto noticed that one wing of his airplane looked curiously bent. A man in uniform passed. Otto almost spoke to him about it, then caught himself. Or perhaps the man in uniform knew the thing was bent suicidally? did not intend to do anything about it? It would be quite a job, straightening it. Otto looked at his watch. Obviously there wasn’t time. It looked tremendous.
The great body throbbed on the ground. He sat in the womb of this furious animal. Then worse, it moved across that ground with desperate purpose, angry to leave it. Something lifted it, and it roared away from the sane hardness of earth into nothing. Smoke swirled past the windows: not smoke, but a cloud. There were the clouds below, moving restlessly over one another while the absurd silver animal hung above them motionless. From it, Otto looked out on the white fields below in a nervous exhaustion at being so enclosed, as though, could he get out there and sit down for awhile, everything would be solved. But it went on, hanging without self-consciousness as though it had forgot this preposterous thing it was doing. Heavier than air, it tore into a cloud, angrily shook itself through, conscious again. Frail, wings quivering with effort as unnatural as the bird’s glide is harmony, it shifted, dropped, scaled over shallow green water and came down on Mexico for a rest, recollected its fury, gathered it, and tore away from the ground again with the frantic speed of one possessed, afraid to look back, as though to hesitate, to doubt for an instant, would lose all that illusion was making possible.
Below the sea lay still and hard as a field of lead.
Otto looked behind. Reassuringly, the tail assembly was following, though he could not see its full profile broken by the figure clinging to it, throwing the plane off balance. Beyond lay that giant curve, two colors, nothing more, separated by the surface luster of their meeting: the quiet limit of the world? It went on suspended up there, finally over Guatemala, whose twisting highways looked to him like the course of his own life. Then on the right, alarmingly close, stood a volcano, losing its quiet smoke against the green sky. It stood out of space, in time like a thing seen in memory. Not to be touched or known in any way, it ignored him, beauty which would admit no tampering, to be lost in the horror of intimacy. With every effort of his eyes it grew less real, more distant, as the airplane flew on, like a fragment of time itself scrambling through eternity.
Several thousand sensible feet below, on what had appeared a surface of lead, the Island Trader trundled south-by-west on the surface of the Caribbean sea. This vessel was a bare two hundred feet long, and its dirty hull, which kept it to a speed of seven knots, drew thirteen feet of water. Twin screws labored it forward. It had been built in Copenhagen in 1924 as a private yacht. Some time since it had seen the Atlantic, or even the North Sea: sheltered by the chain of the Antilles, it fared nobly upon a sea whose surface was like glass, as the Caribbean was now. The Island Trader was returning from Florida, where it had carried seven thousand stems of green bananas. The Honduran mess boy stood on deck watching the sun set. Jutting from the porthole beside his head, long toes of one black foot engaged those of another in contest, tugging at one corned toe whose compatriots were busy protecting it. The boy seemed tempted to leave the sunset and attend this contest for the winner. From inside, a voice sang, —Littel girl, please leave my bachelor room . . .
The sun had melted into the shape of a keyhole on the horizon, and the Island Trader moved as though enclosed by the sea and the dull beauty of the sky, with only a glimpse, through that open door, of the outside, real world of fire.
A shout of the mate’s voice and the contest ended, abruptly the feet were withdrawn, to reappear a moment later in the door frame where Fuller paused to press them into shoes. —He callin me, Fuller said. —Mahn, I hope he not goin to be vexed again. This was because Fuller sat next to the mate, at the end of the table, at meals. Though immense bowls of mashed potatoes, platters of meat and fish, chops, croquettes, and many vegetables were served, the mate’s diet never varied from pigs’ feet, cooked roots, and banana chips. This choice was all that reached Fuller, unless he interrupted the silent prandial industry beside him to ask for something else. When the mate was vexed, Fuller dared not hazard this interruption. He did his best with what was left in the three serving bowls, when the plate beside him had been loaded with pigs’ feet, cooked roots, and banana chips. Such fare was difficult, for Fuller had no teeth. He had sold them in Tampa, Florida, to a rising young buck with social aspirations, left behind, like Crassus below, admonished, —Say, did the taste of gold make thy mouth good?
In response to the darkening sky, the sea changed its surface from glass to marble, the Breche rose marble of Italy reflecting the broken color of the sun, and losing that, to the gray-white Piastraccia, reflecting light from nowhere, veined with shadows.
The sun sank over the sharp edge of the marble sea. The shout sounded again from above. Nevertheless, Fuller paused there at the rail for a moment, that momentary sense of something lost, that sudden moment of emptiness which pervades everywhere the instant the sun has disappeared.
There was trouble in Tibieza. No one there wanted it. It came from the capital, up on the central plateau, where brisk weather encouraged that troubled intelligence necessary for revolution. It was all very well for them to run about the hills firing old Springfield ’06 rifles, ponderous brass French Hotchkiss machine-guns whose clips jammed after the first few explosions, heavy American water-cooled Brownings and delicate Italian Bredas: that stock of arms which has been floating about Hispanic America for decades, whereabouts totally unknown until necessity produces it with revolutionary magic in any one of the sister republics. All very well for the educated people up on the plateau to blow each other to bits, but for Tibieza . . . except that Tibieza de Dios, in fact its only reason for existence, was a port, and one of few. Therefore it must be taken. First, it was necessary to settle who held it. This was arranged one early morning, when three men suspected of belonging to the revolutionary party, and known to have participated in shady deals (an easily made and always justifiable charge) were shot over their morning coffee, in reprisal for removal of the local priest who had been found garishly made up with lipstick, and castrated, sitting on one of the petrified sponge-like rocks at the end of the seawall in an attitude of repose, with a hole in one side of his head where an ear had been, and out the other.
After that, even the veranda card game moved indoors.
The cathedral, in a state of such genial collapse that it looks never to have been built stone by stone, its arches chipped and smooth so that no one stone stands away from another, its saints armless and headless waiting, smoothed and quietened by the rain, in open niches, its towers hanging heavy with the silent bells, stands to one side of the central plaza, behind a pitted concrete wall. These pits, obviously due to poor contracting years ago, were now circled with chalk, and scribbled beside them, “Calibre .45 para los niños,” though actually no children were known to have been blown up in some time. Across that plaza stood the Hotel Bella Vista, girt with a rickety balcony, and leaning, as though rickets were familiar throughout its frame, like a hipshot elder, toward the sea. There were a few large trees in the plaza, which was surfaced with concrete. Just around the corner, toward the beach, was the office of Doctor Espinach, whose sign told that he had been educated in the United States of America.
It was upon this strip of beach that Otto’s mighty airplane careered to an ungainly stop. The passenger who
had caused this aerodynamic embarrassment, by riding outside instead of in, was so cold that he remained fixed to the tail assembly as the others got out to see why their giant had hesitated, what engine of human frailty had interfered with the miracle so preternatural that they took it for granted. The other passengers were a fairly dismal group, except for a handsome lady with an armload of orchids, and a small man whose clothes bulged suspiciously, both of whom seemed delighted to be put down right where they were. The fresh-air passenger had boarded in New Orleans, so he said, in Spanish, for that was all he spoke, with lips which were the only thing about him that he could move. —We would have seen you when we stopped in Mexico, said the co-pilot, who allowed miracles only a reasonable breadth. —Dios . . . dios . . . said the passenger. The plane might have waited until this problem was disposed of, but its arrival had caused some consternation, and delight, in the town. At that moment seven carloads of men were racing toward it, believing it had brought arms from the capital. Two of the cars were loaded with revolutionaries, four with loyalists, the last undecided, but armed. All stopped behind the dunes. Before he knew what was happening, the co-pilot was knocked awry with a bullet in his calf. He and the pilot consulted in decisive profanity, and a minute later the airplane roared down the beach and veered away into the sky, slightly cockeyed, its topside passenger so occupied holding on that he did not raise even a paralyzed arm in farewell.
The proprietor of the Bella Vista was a man with a heavy bunch of keys which rattled against his thick thigh as he strode up and down the first-floor veranda, avoiding the place over the dining-room door where the boards had gone through one night during a visit from United States Marines. He wondered what the airplane’s mission had been, what all the shooting was about, and it was oafishness rather than courage that permitted him to expose himself as he was doing. All he saw, however, was a draggled figure in gray flannel crossing the empty plaza toward his door. Everything was silent but for a distant hum of song, punctuated by thuds, from the direction of the Baptist Church where a prayer meeting was in full sway. They were using their new bass drum to rousing effect, its clamor enhanced by the resonance of the roof, which was pleached of flattened oil tins.
Past the sign of Doctor Espinach, a tempting swinging target with three holes in it already, he came on looking slightly dazed, to be given a room with one window facing toward the sea, hung with forlorn curtains in the middle of a sagging string. Two doors led to nowhere, and the louvers in the outside door were broken. The wire to the electric bulb swung free on the wall. The sink gurgled like the plumbing on a ship. There were large pictures of blond girls on the wall, one holding daffodils for Carr’s English Biscuits, the other, suffering a running jaundice brought on by a leak in the ceiling, presented a tray of Canada Dry. With a cigarette, he lay back to consider that modest portion of the ceiling which was painted, just over the bed, and his own, a swelling weight on his chest where the wallet lay empty of anything but uncounted bills. He had escaped twice, this second time from the certain difficulties he would have had upon reaching his destination and being asked to produce identity papers and a visa. He had escaped, where, he did not know, he did not think, he had not thought since Christmas Eve, and when thought or memory intruded he forced it off with calculation drawn to one purpose: to keep moving, with money no object but to spend his way through it, to keep moving and live it through, without looking back. He reached out on the floor and drew the chamber pot nearer, to use as an ashtray.
In the afternoon, it seemed that the loyalists were in full control. Police, at any rate, rode into the plaza, though no one was certain whether they were on the payroll of the loyalists or the revolutionaries. They were armed with pistols and carried sabers. This was because there was to be a demonstration, fomented in the local school and forbidden by the mayor, whose measure for peace and quiet was understood as a challenge to liberty.
The demonstration began on time. Boys marched into the plaza carrying placards which read, “Mothers! Your children have the right to be free!” and “Calibre .45 para los niños.” Someone threw a rock at a mounted policeman. Someone else threw another. The horses were having difficulty keeping their feet on the slippery concrete.
After a ghastly lunch served by a black girl sheathed in one spotted white garment, Otto wanted coffee. He waited. The dining room was festooned with fly-blown streamers of colored crepe paper, each leaf of which had lost most of its own color and borrowed some of its neighbor’s. In the middle of the room, a fruit bowl stood on a table, a luxurious economy, for the bananas were so near rotten that no one ever took one, or at best, never took another. —No coffee. She burned the milk, the girl said. Otto lit a cigarette, and went out. He had got as far as a café across the plaza before the demonstration began. From there, he watched it progress. It made no sense. He started back toward the Bella Vista. The demonstration was noisy, but he looked on it with a tired eye, refusing to be taken in by such foolishness. Until a policeman rode toward him, swinging a saber; and the policeman’s neck was covered with blood.
That suddenly, it was real. And as suddenly terrified, Otto looked frantically for sanctuary. The cathedral, with its protecting wall, stood waiting. He looked wildly round him but saw nothing as he started to run toward it. From behind the bandstand, a policeman rode, he and his mount looking in every direction, the man’s and the horse’s eyes matching in bloodshot apprehension, dodging the rocks that found them from above.
Just then a white bird came down in an arc from a branch, down falling like a stone before it ascended, and the policeman, dodging the threat, threw his weight over, his horse scrambled for a moment on the concrete and went down, and the falling flank caught Otto as he ran without seeing toward the church, spun him round and pinned him on the concrete, unconscious.
The vulture on the outside roof fussed for a moment, one wing extended, impatiently like a dignitary fully dressed for an appointment looking at his watch. Then the wing came back somewhat askew, as though he’d buttoned the coat up wrong, and not noticing it in his impatience stood rocking from one foot to the other.
In the street outside a little boy held up a male dog, exposed, for a female to investigate. His mother said to another and larger black woman, —Tomorrow morning, soon soon . . . Other little black boys passed, wearing men’s hats. The card game was back out on the veranda.
Near the only occupied cot, in the schoolroom which had been used as a hospital, was posted a stuffed fox whose snarl exposed a pink fly-blown tongue. The doctor stood beside the cot looking down at the face. Nothing moved there but a fly. It rummaged a cheek for a moment, studied the caves of the nostrils, hurried across the bandage to the cleft of the chin, from that eminence sighted the convoluted marvel across the way, and leaped silently to the ear. The eyes flickered, and closed tightly as though to recall the long night and the wonder of nonentity it had permitted: recreation not for the body, nor the soul, but opportunity for circumstances to refurbish themselves, a hope untempered by ages of experience where morning brings no change, but only renewal of conflict on the terms it left off. The lips moved, drawing up twice on, —I know it . . . I know it . . . and then tightening to know sleep only, and there animate circumstance with the good intentions which had already brought it low in present disaster; and then descending, a little lower, only to belabor those good intentions, vicarious opiates laboring in half-consciousness to fall away before the pursuit of dreams, dreams ravin in tooth and claw, while the beard grows against the pillow in darkness.
The fly returned to course the warm terrain of the eyelid, moving with the careless persistence of diabolical things, and both eyes came open.
—What happened?
—I was going to ask you the same thing. They just brought you in here in pieces, and . . .
—I feel sick.
—Well you are sick, so it’s a good thing you know it.
—I can hardly hear you.
—You’re lucky you can hear me at al
l. Ever have ear trouble?
—Yes. No.
—Well, you do now. You might even have a deaf ear before you’re through. Just like Julius Caesar, that would be nice, wouldn’t it. Who are you? You’re very young to show up with something like this. I might even say tragic if I knew who you were.
—Wait, I . . . I can’t move my arm.
—That’s partly because it’s broken. Do you remember trying to walk yesterday? Please excuse my shouting at you.
—But what is it? what is it?
—Like a drunkard. Staggering around like a drunkard. Of course I might not say that if I knew who you were. We didn’t find any papers on you at all. Just money. Money. Lots of it.
—Where is it?
—Lie back now, it’s safe. All that money! But you can’t run around spending it now. Don’t be impatient. Why, look at me, I have a right to be impatient. I was sent down here to help these nig . . . natives with their drainage problems, and now look at me. They keep promising to transfer me to Barbados, but they never do. A special health project in Barbados . . . He had walked over near the window, and looked out. —I’ve sent for some more medicine for you. Of course I know all the time that I’ll have to go get it myself eventually, this tattooed idiot who’s supposed to work for me . . . Then he shouted out the window, —Jesse . . . ! Jesse! . . . There, you see? He’s nowhere to be seen. Worthless, useless, tattooed idiot . . . of course I wouldn’t call him that if I thought he could hear me. This is the third time now that I’ve put in for a transfer to that special health project among underdeveloped . . . oops! Wait, don’t throw up on the floor. Here . . . here we are. Ummmp! That’s better. Feel better?
The Recognitions Page 98
