Beauty (22 page)

I stood sleepily by the gangway of the
Queen
as the place emptied and night settled. Only a few persons remained when I, with considerable surprise, saw Constanzia peering around a corner near the square. I thought again, as I had several times during the evening, how lovely she was. Her face had a spontaneous liveliness about it. Very dark. Very sexy. Very sly, at the moment, and cautious not to be heard or seen. She came out into the street, carrying a basket from which protruded the dusty cover of the book with the word "Forbidden" stamped upon it. She came nearer, slipped up the unguarded gangway onto the
Queen,
opened a hatch cover, and disappeared below. When the boat left in the morning, evidently she intended to be aboard.

I heard the stumping footfalls of the captain moving along the quay. I followed him onto the riverbank, where Mrs. Gallimar still sat as she had throughout the evening, bidding for nothing at all, dreamily watching the torchlit flow of the water. The captain was not content to leave her so. He carried a bottle of ruby glass in which, so I heard him say, she might find a wine which a master vintner would envy.

Mrs. Gallimar was so touched with his gift that she suggested they share it then and there. They sat in the flamelit night, watching the reflected flares shimmering on the Stugos, avenues of silken light reaching away from them away into unimaginable darkness where the flood moved silently in the night. As they watched the light, ignoring their glasses, I drank their wine. A divine vintage. One of the wines, perhaps, of Baskarone.

"We are at the center of the universe," purred Mrs. Gallimar. "See how the light reaches out from us in all directions."

Silently, I agreed that it was so. In daylight, things seemed to vanish at the horizon, joining there. Here in the firelit dark, all lines plunged toward us across the waters, ending at our feet, a fan of radiance with ourselves at its center. All things centered upon the observer. I was the axle of a wheel of light. It seemed important to remember this moment when the universe wheeled upon my hub, the moment in which I was impaled upon a fan of light.

"Remember this," said a voice. It was the voice of the ambassador from Baskarone. "Remember this. All things end here, with you, Beauty. Remember this."

"Remember," whispered an old woman's voice. Senora Carabosse. I looked around, but she was nowhere near.

It was a fantasy, no doubt, brought about by the darkness and the wine. Still, I would remember.

"We are," the captain said in a strangled voice, "the very center of everything."

"Until now," sighed Mrs. Gallimar with a softly amorous tone, "I had not looked forward at all to this journey."

"Until now," growled the captain in husky honesty, "neither had I."

I left them there, my lips sweet with the wine, my mind full of wonder at the circled paths of light, resolving, as I returned to my cool cabin on the
Stugos Queen,
never to forget this night. The old woman was standing at the railing, just outside my door. "Good night, dear Beauty," I thought she said, but the wine had made me too giddy to hear her aright.

"Good night, Senora Carabosse," I replied. Though the monkeys were screaming in the flooded jungle once more, I knew that, on this night, I would sleep.

19

Captain Karon, by threats and shouts and hiring a few layabouts to help with the unloading, got the last of the publicly acknowledged cargo off the ship shortly after sunrise. Three inmates from the clownery showed up to see the boat offshore, which delayed matters a bit as they insisted upon helping the passengers with their baggage.

The stokers bent their backs before the boilers, the whistle began to bleat, and the passengers trickled toward the rail to watch the departure. The chaperone emerged onto the deck to motion with one languid hand. Colonel Esquivar, a tall person with sharp squinty eyes, an enormous moustache, and very brown skin-riven by long exposure to the elements-had come aboard during the night, and he staggered out of his cabin bleary eyed, bowed to Mrs. Gallimar, sneered at the chaperone, and said something mildly insulting to the captain before staggering back into his cabin and slamming the door behind him. With a final toot, the
Stugos Queen
moved out into the flood, breasting it with a great shuddering clatter of both monstrous wheels, while the clownery inmates hurtled along the shore in a series of giant cartwheels and balletic leaps, ceasing to follow the ship only when it came opposite the swamps at the mouth of the tributary Rio Apenado.

The stewards began laying the tables in the first-class dining room. The cooks were already ladling out stew for the second-class passengers, the crew, and that part of the cargo needing to be fed at midday. (Was I the only one who noticed food being carried twice each day into the holds? No, the old woman saw it, too. She gave me a significant look and a wink. Who is she? What does she mean?) First-class luncheon would be later, which gave the kitchen boys time to decorate the dessert table with a frilled lizard carved from ice and garlanded with poppies carved from halves of blood-red chinangarees.

I settled easily into the routine of the voyage. Each morning I arrived in the dining room before Roland Mirabeau, who-shaved, dressed, with his hair arranged and moustache trimmed by his servant-arrived shortly after me to drink a glass of cuscumbre juice before sitting down at my table with a steaming cup of coffee or mate or cou, all of which were available, each in several varieties.

Since I was not in the mood or market for a lover and had made this fact clear, Roland accepted me and talked freely in my company. I listened, seldom making any comment that required a reply. The old woman, Senora Carabosse, usually emerged from her room a little later to sit at a neighboring table with her tea, eavesdropping on our talk as she blinked and muttered to herself. Poor old thing. I felt ashamed of my animadversion. She was harmless enough.

[Really!]

After a time, Mrs. Gallimar would come down to breakfast, usually with either the captain or Colonel Esquivar in attendance. There would be a flutter of ribbons and a rustle of sweet, scented flounces, a titter of laughter and a softly modulated voice calling good morning. I would see Roland preparing himself for appropriate reactions, for smiles and courtly bows, for admiring nods and glances, all of which Mrs. Gallimar would expect. One morning he confessed to me that he felt there was something missing in his responses. He felt the lack, as one feels something missing in a flavor which does not fill the mouth but merely lies there upon the tongue as though in anticipation of some more complex savor. So Roland felt a certain lack of sincerity at the core of his acquaintance with Mrs. Gallimar. He did not, in fact, lust after her, although, on an intellectual level, he could appreciate all her lustworthy qualities. She left him chill and untouched, his flesh like tallow, stiff and unwarmed by her welcoming sensuality. So he said, supposing I would understand. This was an unflattering supposition, though I made no remark upon it but merely smiled, cocking my head to solicit further intimations. Behind me, Senora Carabosse chuckled quietly to herself.

Had this been a new sensation, Roland went on, he would have been disturbed by it, but in fact it was his usual feeling with regard to women. Flowers could move him. Sunsets could bring tears to his eyes. The sight of the wind bending the trees at dawn could make him cry out in luxurious sensitivity, but women moved him not at all. There was something about them, some inherent fleshiness, some excess of corporeality which turned him cold. And then there was their smell, whether masked in perfumes or alive upon the air as itself, that fecund stench, that earthy aroma, that mephitic scent, which seemed to come upon them with womanhood.

(I leaned toward him, wondering if he would catch my aroma. Evidently he did not. It was then, I think, that I began to understand the world in which I found myself. I was beginning to find a certain lack of consistency. As though natural laws only partially applied.)

Little girls smelled otherwise, Roland said. He quite liked little girls. He loved their breastless little bodies and their wee buttocks, like two eggs laid side by side. He loved their elven haunches, their dimpled knees, and pink soled feet, but all this adoration was in his eyes only. He did not lust after them. He merely worshipped them, as he worshipped the egg icons in the sanctuary of St. Frog, for what they symbolized, not for what they were. Purity. Oh, Roland adored purity. Purity and beauty. It was why he had become a chaperone, after all, in order that he might adore it. Serve it. Preserve it. And though there was much beauty, there was little enough of purity in Chinanga, so he said.

"I sometimes wonder," he remarked to me over his second cup of cou, "what we would have been like had we not been condemned to live here in Chinanga. What would we have been like had we been allowed to settle in holy Baskarone?"

His remark was overheard by Captain Karon, who snorted and said, "Better ask what Baskarone would have been like if we'd lived there. Can you imagine the Viceroy ruling Baskarone?" Then the captain flushed and looked around himself quickly to see who might have overheard. "Meaning no disrespect," he mumbled, catching Roland's eye. "No disrespect, Chaperone."

"None taken," mused Roland. "In fact, I apprehend your question, Captain. Are we what our environment makes us? Or do we make our environment what we are? If the latter, then one might ask who really lives in Baskarone. Do we not say 'Blessed Baskarone'? Do we not speak of Joyafleur as a heavenly city?"

It was the first time I had heard those words. They set up a reverberation within me, a humming, as though some great tuning fork had been thrust down my spine. A holy city. A blessed country. And the ambassadors from that region, ah, what were they, then? I inferred what they were and flushed as I felt myself longing for angels. Had the ambassador from Baskarone been an angel?

The captain made a face as though to spit, then thought better of it. "Well, sir, since we're speaking frankly, how by all the serpents would I know? Not having been there. We look up toward Baskarone from these sweaty lowlands and see it all stretched out there like some great, feathery wing, full of color and design, but who's been there? None of us, that's sure. The border posts, they don't let tourists from Chinanga go up to take a look, now do they?"

I caught Senora Carabosse's eye. She was listening unabashedly, her mouth slightly open, as though ready to bite at some intimation she desperately desired.

Roland murmured, "There have been visitors from there."

"Ambassadors. Oh, yes. Once in a while. Closemouthed as turtles, too. I met one once, at Mrs. Gallimar's."

"Did you indeed? An ambassador from Baskarone?"

"A great tall, tan fellow with a sunny smile and a ready laugh, not a feather in his wings out of place, and no more information in him than there is good intentions in a woodtick."

Was it the same ambassador from Baskarone? Had he had wings? I could not remember.

"Then what was he doing here?" asked Roland.

"Flew down to find out how many cases of wine we wanted lowered from Joyafleur. Come to find out what we had to trade. Come to find out whether any contraband was getting through, had I been bothered by pirates. Asked if Chinanga was stable, if it was safe if someone wanted to leave something here for a while. Complained a little about a few hunters climbing the wall and falling off. It messes up the trails through there, so they say, and since the wall is known to be impassable, creates a foolishness. That kind of thing. Full of questions, he was. If you ask me, he was here spying, finding out about us, about Chinanga."

"Did you ask him about Baskarone, directly?"

"Well, you know how people will, at a dinner party. 'How're things in Baskarone, Your Excellency?' 'Had any interestin' happenins in Baskarone?' 'How's the weather been in Baskarone?' That kind of question."

"To which he replied?"

"Not at all," said the captain. "Far's I could tell, nothing ever happens at all in Baskarone. He said about six words."

"I wish I'd been there," Roland mused. "I would have asked him directly, 'Tell me about Baskarone.' "

"No you wouldn't," said the captain. "You think you would, but you wouldn't."

"I suppose that's true," sighed Roland, with a sidelong glance at me. He sipped the cooling cou as he stared across the undulant waters, letting the silence settle between them.

I thought of the captain's words often in the succeeding days. Did we suit our environments or did we change them to suit ourselves? And in that case, what were we who had lived in the twentieth? And in that case, who were they who lived in Baskarone?

Late that night the
Stugos Queen
tied up at what had once been and would be again, when the floods had passed, the riverbank. There, under the motionless branches of great jungle trees, Captain Karon conducted some hours of quiet business. All the passengers except myself had long been asleep before the captain and the mate opened the hatches to the forward hold and lifted out a number of cages. During the earlier hours of the evening small boats rowed by persons claiming to be from Tartarus and Tophet and Eblis and Gehenna had drawn near to the
Queen,
and now they surrounded the ship. Natives came aboard a few at a time to pick up consignments or to offer Captain Karon bids for his unconsigned merchandise. Cages were lowered into the waiting boats. To unsuccessful bidders, the captain offered his hand and the suggestion that they might have better luck next time. As the first fingers of dawn stroked the sky, the last native boat departed, skimming the water like a swallow, away and into the drowned forest and up one of the tributary rivers, Rio Lamentarse, Rio Abrasador. The cage tied to its hull shaking from the agitation of those enclosed.

"Is that the lot?" the captain asked the mate.

"That's it. Thirty-seven big cages and thirteen small ones. Only ones left are in the after hold, a dozen of 'em, consigned farther upriver. Erebus, if I remember right. Oh, and there's one little box for Abaddon, up the Rio Desmemoriarse. What do the natives do with them, anyhow?"