A Fool's Alphabet (25 page)

It was late afternoon when the
camioneta
arrived in the village. It was an old American school bus, and he had visions of high-school children chattering about their math test or their spelling bee as they rode to school. Since it had presumably been bought from one of the southern states, perhaps it had even been used in the derided ‘bussing' programme that ferried children round town to force an equal ethnic mix on socially disparate areas.

The unpadded seats, designed for children, were squeezed close together. The conductor, a vigorous youth of no more than sixteen, was in perpetual motion, throwing the baggage of new passengers on to the roof, collecting money and shouting orders down the bus. Where normally he would have delighted in the strangeness of it, he found the bus journey disturbing. In his apprehension or perception of this place there was something like fear. He began to recognise that it came not from the country but from inside his head.

At one point they were required to leave the bus while a group of soldiers searched them. The male passengers had to lean against the side of the bus while big hands ran along their ribs and inner thighs. If their legs were not well enough
spread, a helping boot was cracked into the ankle. He had no idea why they were being searched. Presumably a military state was continually at war with its citizens. From the bored faces of the soldiers, however, it looked more like a routine show of force.

Quezaltenango turned out to be a sedate, pompous town with an air of municipal permanence conferred by the grey stone buildings of the plaza. The neoclassical banks and official buildings looked politely at each other across the square. He found a room in a white plastered building in the Spanish colonial style. From his window he could see the brown mountains beneath the cloud. It was too late for a garage that night so he went in search of food. In a restaurant that seemed well patronised he ate chicken stew and tortillas, washed down with Cabro beer. He read a book between courses, determined not to brood. He decided he would get the car fixed, finish the journey to Panama City and fly back to New York. Although he had left his job, he still had a room in an apartment in the Village, and he had friends there. It would be all right. He kept his mind firmly away from the subject of Laura. Occasionally as he sat in the restaurant, watching the rotation of the greasy ceiling fan, hearing the excited conversations of his fellow diners, he found his mind wandering, as her brown-eyed smile and searching hands appeared in his memory. He shut them out with a slavish application. He felt that if he pondered them his head would explode. Before he left the restaurant he bought a bottle of a spirit called Quezalteca he had seen other people drinking.

On his way back to the hotel he was accosted by several children asking for money or food. He gave some small change to an old man smelling of drink who lurched at him from a doorway, and hurried on, clutching his own bottle. Back in his room he lay on the bed and poured himself half a toothglass of liquor. He put away the novel he had been reading at dinner and took from his case a history of Central America he had bought in San Diego.

His head was half filled with episodes of the country's
history when he fell asleep. The imaginative role of the Dulles family and the intervention of the CIA to make sure Guatemala would remain a vast factory for the United Fruit Company; the extermination of the Indians by the Spanish conquistadors; the cruelty, murder and tortures of the successive ‘strong men' who had presided over the place . . . These odd facts were like bricks that kept his mind temporarily dammed.

In the small hours of the morning, at about four o'clock, the dam burst and he awoke. Physically the symptoms were so slight as to be unnoticeable. His blood pressure had risen to a point where only a very litigation-conscious American doctor might have worried. His pulse rate had gone up from its usual sixty-five but only to a still reasonable eighty. His heartbeat was lumpish against the sternum, but not dangerous. There was a light sweat on the scalp, which was strange in the suddenly cold night. There was no rash, no broken bones, no bleeding, no symptom that would have given any doctor pause.

What was happening inside him was indescribable. When he later tried to find words for it, he could reach only for analogies, which seemed inappropriate. After he had awoken he continued to keep on waking up. It was as if having hit the normal level of morning consciousness, he exceeded it by the same distance of wakefulness again. Then again. By this time he was pacing round the room in an effort to shut off the sensations that were coming at him. He was seeing five times as much as normal, five times more clearly; he was hearing each whisper of wind, each bare footfall on the wooden boards with an aggressive clarity. More than the high definition, it was the speed with which everything was being sensed that was alarming.

In addition to this overload he felt unsure of his physical reality. He touched the things in the room in rapid succession, in the same way he had done in Mexico, but much faster. If he could convince himself, he thought, that the grain of the wooden table or the weave of the curtains was truly tangible, then he could somehow hold on.

He was also uncertain where he was. Bits of the Guatemalan history he had been reading came up through the channels of his memory. As they arrived in his already overcrowded brain he couldn't distinguish between history that had happened to other people long ago and the current experience of his own mind. At some moments, he felt as if he were an Indian peasant or a Spanish soldier. Sepulveda. MUST Turn Right.

He knelt on the floor and held his head in his hands, but he couldn't stop what was happening inside it. He went over to the wall mirror to try to reassure himself of his physical reality – that old familiar face, the hair with its last touch of red, the dark eyebrows, the eyes his mother had loved. But his skin looked translucent, like the wax overlay of a medical model that demonstrates the working of the nerves and arteries. He looked at himself and pleaded for the familiar picture to return. Nothing was there.

Unable to deal with the sensation, he stumbled on some instinctive stopgap. He took the bottle of Quezalteca and drank straight off what remained. With it he swallowed four of the yellow pills given to him by the doctor in California. There was a momentary respite as the liquor slowed his system. It was the first time since he had woken up that he was able to think. It hadn't occurred to him until this moment that there might be something mentally wrong with him; so powerfully physical were the symptoms that he assumed they had their origin in some violent bodily disease.

The relief was short-lived. As the effect of alcohol began to ebb, he felt that all the certainties and previously dependable facts of existence were in question. He didn't know where he was, who he was, or what he was. With an effort of will he held on to the wooden leg of the bed and pressed his face against the counterpane.

Let them exist, he prayed, let me live.

As the panic mounted in him he thought that when the last thread that connected him to reality was worn away, he would go into an endless free fall. If he failed to hold on to
himself, then he was going to go into meltdown, like a China syndrome of the personality.

The brand-named Diazepam, manufactured in the tranquil country of Switzerland, was enough to knock out a person in a normal state of mind. It didn't make him sleepy, but it reduced the panic to controllable proportions.

It was dawn when he released the leg of the bed he had clasped to himself for the last half-hour and lifted his head from the covers. He was shaking like a leaf in an autumn storm as he walked slowly to the window.

It was arctically cold in the mountain air. He put on two spare shirts and a sweater, which were all he had. He pulled open the shutters and stepped on to the balcony.

He looked out across the lake to the brown hills, and then down at the sleeping town where he could hear a stray dog barking. He leant his damp, exhausted head against the white plastered wall. Good morning, Guatemala.

IN THE PROTESTANT
cemetery, overshadowed by a large pyramid, is a modest white tombstone beneath which is buried a stablekeeper's son from Finsbury, north London. It is dated Feb. 24th 1821 and has a carved lyre towards the top. The ground is covered with grass on which grows a riotous creeper. The trees between this modest white grave and the giant pyramid are semi-tropical. It is intensely hot. The cemetery, by its nature, is filled with foreigners, people from the northern lands of the Reformation who have ended their days exiled by choice or accident in this southern imperial city. This particular grave contains, in the words of the inscription, ‘all that was mortal of a young English poet', John Keats, who a year and a half before his death, with no relevant training and little formal education, wrote, at the age of twenty-three and in the space of three weeks, four of the greatest lyric poems in English.

It is hard to sense from looking at the hot Roman grass what sudden comet must have flared that spring in north London, where he was living with his friend Charles Brown. Nothing, certainly, could have been done without hard apprenticeship; nothing without the reading and investigation of what others had written; but, with all the willed preparation, the carefully settled domestic life and the encouragement of friends, there was something freakish in that cold burst of genius.

When Keats returned from the garden one morning in April he thrust some scraps of paper behind a row of books
on a shelf to save them from the maid's over-zealous tidying. When his friend Brown asked him what they were, he said they were nothing. When Keats was out of the room, Brown fished them out and found that they in fact contained the ‘Ode to a Nightingale', which Keats had written that morning beneath a plum tree in the garden. The previous day the poem had not existed.

Hampstead in those days was a long way from what was known as London. It was surrounded by fields and streams. A rainy stagecoach ride back from town produced a startling fever in the poet. Even at the height of that summer in 1819 he had already begun to cough with the tuberculosis that would shortly kill him.

The Roman room in which he died is much visited by tourists, particularly Americans. The visitors' book in the small apartment above the Spanish Steps contains many names written in the neat cursive handwriting of the American high school, expressing a sense of wonder or elation at what the room contains. ‘A great experience', according to a woman from New Brunswick. ‘You can feel him here', according to another from Santa Barbara. ‘Well worth traveling to see', says a man from Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Rome with its citadels and seven hills is joined to the motels and luncheonettes of the Midwest by a dead twenty-five-year-old from Georgian London.

It is very quiet. On the wall is a picture of Keats sketched on his deathbed by his friend Joseph Severn who nursed him. The handwriting at the bottom says: ‘28 Janry 3 o'clock mng. Drawn to keep me awake, a deadly sweat was on him all this night'. It is all too easy to feel the presence of the man, the sight and smell of the night-sweat throughout the hot small hours with Severn nodding at the bedside. Although the room has been repainted, the original fireplace remains. It was here that Severn used to warm up meals he had been to fetch from the Osteria della Lepre in the nearby via dei Condotti: the restaurant is now part of the giant premises of an opulent jeweller called Bulgari.

Keats had come to Rome for the sake of a warm climate and managed to prolong his life by a few months. He had had little reason to travel before. Despite being ebulliently energetic – to the extent that his schoolmasters thought he would make a name for himself as a soldier – he found worlds open to him not through travel but through the cut pages of books. He did, it's true, spend a long time in the Isle of Wight, but that was so he could more quietly imagine the mythical landscape of
Endymion
. The exile and the poem over, he could begin his work in earnest; and even to Regency London, the Isle of Wight was not a daunting voyage.

Outside the death room, the Roman traffic roars. The shop next door, which sells shirts and socks, is called Byron. It is a loud, hot city and the small Cockney youth, weakened and dying, must have felt a long way from London. He wrote his own epitaph, ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water', to express the fear that his memory would evaporate beneath the Italian sky. Rome and Finsbury are twinned in the shade of a pyramid. Day after day it is burning hot in the Protestant cemetery and the trees are not those that grew along the muddy lanes that led from Edmonton.

When he left England to die in 1819 Keats hadn't the strength to write. He did revise a poem, however, as he lay in his bunk on the boat bound for the south. It was a sonnet beginning ‘Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art'. The poem, the last he completed, doesn't dwell on the sadness of exile, although it does take a detached view of the world, seeing it from above, from a star's point of view.

What Keats was concerned with at that point was not a place but a person. He would like to be as steadfast as the bright star, he said, but not alone, not a ‘sleepless Eremite'. No; while sharing that fixity with the star, he wanted to be with another – to lie with his head pillowed for ever on his ‘fair love's ripening breast'. The star may watch above as the waters of the earth wash the shores of the continents: the
poet must be with his love – ‘and so live ever – or else swoon to death'.

In the faces of Italian people Pietro saw the features of his mother. She had seemed exotic and unique to him as a child with her black hair and slightly accented English. He didn't like seeing all these people who were recognisably of the same kind; they seemed to threaten her uniqueness. Many had similar colouring, reminiscent gestures, or the same agile movement and sudden laughter. Yet he found also in this country, from Milan with its fashion-conscious women to the rough surliness of the south, that he was on a quest. If one woman should turn her face and prove to be Francesca, or her double, he might forgive her the trickery and the anguish it would cause him because it would show that in some way she was alive, or that she had lived. The beauty of Italian women was held by experts – Italian men in other words – to be a recent phenomenon. After the war the men had eyes only for the young American women who arrived by the boatload to study or sightsee in Perugia, Rome and Florence. Then suddenly, in the late 1950s, a spectacular change came over Italian women: their legs grew longer, their brows lost the last trace of autochthonous heaviness; they bloomed and flourished and became the most beautiful women in the world. So the story went.