Butterfly (22 page)

So as I was saying, he was all bowled over by her, leastways in the beginning. It wasn't till after he'd left that he got to feeling something wasn't right about them. Of course, by then he couldn't be sure if he wasn't imagining things; but the more he mulled it over in his head, the more it struck him that there'd been something theatrical about the way the two of them behaved, as if they had rehearsed everything like a stage play. And that got him wondering. “What is the script?” he asks in his diary. The more he puzzled, the more mysterious it got to be.

Well, whatever the script might be, there sure wasn't a doubt about who'd written it. This was what Dada got to realizing by-and-by. It took a couple of days for it all to get itself in focus, and then came the “flash”: that she was the one running the show. Pinkerton wasn't anything more than a pawn she could push around with her little finger, even against his own judgment and will; and that's the change in him. When did it happen, Dada asked himself, when did he come under her spell? Thinking back, he decided it must've happened in the fall, at the time of Pinkerton's change of heart. Well, Grandma Charlotte and Butterfly had hit the nail on the head, it had been another woman all right, but what a woman! Because it wasn't just a matter of falling for her, you understand, it was more like falling completely under her power, “ensorcelled"—I love some of these words Dada uses—like one of Ulysses's men who got turned into
pigs. That was what had struck him in the eye first off, though he hadn't been able to put a finger on it. Realizing this made Dada feel cold to the core, because he knew how it could be with that woman, himself having felt the magic of her breath down his own neck, you might say. But what really made him shake in his boots wasn't that, it was thinking about what she might be after in Nagasaki. He went all hot and cold at the idea it might be Butterfly. But what in blue blazes would she want from Butterfly? He hadn't an inkling; fact is, it made so little sense that he told himself he was imagining things. But a little voice kept nagging at him and he couldn't keep it down. And then, what could it be if it wasn't Butterfly?

So there he was getting all wound up and not knowing where to turn. Desperate as he was feeling, he even thought of Grandma Charlotte, but what could she do
to
help, even supposing she'd see things his way? She sure as sure wasn't a match, not for that lady! He might go see Butterfly and warn her, but what against? And supposing he was wrong and they weren't meaning to go near her at all—then he'd just be stirring things up something awful, all for nothing. Worse than nothing, because she was better off not knowing they'd come—that was sure.

In the end it was the lady he went to see—or maybe he just took himself down to the hotel without anything in particular in mind and it just happened that Pinkerton wasn't there. Anyhow it suited Dada fine, because his being there would've made things more awkward. She was just as charming as ever, but this time Dada being on his guard, all that charm and good looks only made him feel more sharply the danger in her. She noticed, of course, and gave him his opening. I can still recall most of their pourparler as Dada set it down in his diary.

“You seem to have something on your mind today,” the lady says in that crisp accent of hers that's got a hint of England in it. “Is there anything I can do to unburden it?”

Dada hadn't been expecting her to come out like this, but now
that she was calling the hand, he was game to lay it out. “Yes, as a matter of fact,” he replies. He's unsure about what to say, but again the feeling of danger pulls him up; looking her straight in the eye, he asks, “Why are you here?”

“Why,” she answers, “the charm of visiting an exotic and fascinating country, which you'll admit this is. And if that's not reason enough, isn't it only natural for me to want to see the place where my future husband spent a year of his life?” And she looks at him with half a smile, as if to say, “Your move,” because all this time he's giving her a look that says let's-not-kid-one-another.

But now Dada's steam is up and he isn't about to be stopped. “You know about the circumstances of his life here, I presume,” he says meaningfully. He considered this pretty bold, but she didn't bat an eyelash.

“Are you referring to his charming Japanese companion?” she asks cool as if she were talking about her little boy playing with the neighbor's three-year-old. Dada just kind of nodded his head and tried to figure out what to say next. She let him sweat a little before going on herself, “Yes, Henry's told me all about her. A lovely. . . butterfly, isn't it? I'd like to meet her. I hope I shall, while I'm here. After all, she is among the best elements of the scenery, isn't she, at least for Henry?”

Dada said he couldn't tell whether his heart was rising into his throat or sinking into his stomach. “So it's true,” he thought, “she did come for Butterfly!” It was all he could do to keep himself looking calm. “I wouldn't do that,” he told her. “You would just be stirring up feelings that are perhaps settling down at last. She doesn't know you're here, and it'll be best not to let her know. She's been hurt enough as it is.” Dada tried to make it sound like he was giving an objective opinion, but his voice came out all strangled and that gave him away. He found her looking at him with a queer little smile..

“What is your interest in her, Mr. Sharpless?” she asks suggestively.

Dada colored, I believe. He couldn't help it, he told me, it was that insinuating smile. “What are you trying to say?” he burst out after a moment of struggling to control his indignation. “I am a married man with grown children!”

“Oh, I'm not casting aspersion on your morals,” the lady protested in a bantering tone Dada didn't much care for. “But she must mean something special to you for you to get so excited.”

“It's nothing personal,” Dada declared, and went back to talking about Butterfly's situation in such terms as he hoped might touch his countrywoman—he tried to think of her as that so as to defuse the hostility he felt mounting. He ended up appealing once again with a passion he never intended: “All I'm asking you, as an American and a Christian, is to do the decent thing, which is just to leave her alone.’

His hand is all laid out on the table now. After a little pause, the lady says, just as casual as you please: “I don't think I shall.” Her smile had tightened, Dada notes, and the voice had something deadly and hard that made her playful tone sound sinister. “I was born in Europe, where we have a more complex notion of decency, and as for God, I have always numbered myself among the forsaken.”

At least she was now in the open
too.
Dada wrote that his insides felt all—I'm quoting—"jumbled up in panic like a sentry's who's been uneasily watching foreign troops amassing and now sees them suddenly cross the frontier: he hasn't an inkling of the deep politics behind the move, but knows it won't be for the sake of a neighborly confabulation.” In that instant, without thinking, Dada, like his sentry, “threw himself unheed-ingly in the path of the invader,” knowing full well that one dead body isn't going to stop them, but by golly, they'll have to take the trouble of stepping over it to get to the one he loved. Before he knew it, he was crying out: “You can't see her! I won't let you!”

That took even her by surprise. The mask dropped, and, in Dada's words, “the darkness in her heart came flooding into her face.” It didn't last but a second or two, but that was long enough. He saw it, and never forgot. “Milly,” he said to me once, and I could feel the shudder going through him still, “it was a face from Hell. I didn't think so much hatred could go into a face. Hatred, bitterness, despair. Behind those flawless features, behind that supreme beauty. I could never look at her again. Ordinary mortals don't have the strength it takes to look upon such fatal mixtures.”

While it was all happening, though, Dada hadn't got the time to think about that. In his agitation, he'd gotten up out of his seat in a spontaneous gesture of shielding Butterfly, as if he could by putting himself bodily between the lady and her prey. She'd risen too to meet him, and now they stood eye to eye in open enmity. “How do you propose to stop me?” she asks. He heard a challenge in the hint of laughter in her voice; there was no more pretense.

“I don't know,” Dada conceded. He says, “I was hoping that by talking to you . . . ,” but left off in the middle of his sentence as he realized he'd just confessed the hopelessness of his position more than he'd told of any hope he might've had, and to his own ears the words sounded foolishly ineffectual, like an “echo of his ineptitude.” His body, which had been drawn tight as a bow, lost its tension; its combative posture went limp. He turned and aimlessly paced a few steps as if unable to stand his ground any longer. Crestfallen now, he was ready to bargain, or reason, or plead—anything, even beg on his knees, if that would help. Only it wouldn't. And he knew it; he had seen her face.

“I can't,” he finally announces in an outright recognition of defeat. There wasn't a thing more to be said. All he's got left to do now was to clear the field, and he did that, in silence, without another look at his adversary. At the door, however, he turned back to her and added, “But I can pray for you.”

71

(The Nagasaki ms.)

A week went by while Kate played the tourist. Our purpose in coming seemed forgotten, and accustomed as I had become to serving Kate without question or comment, I dared not broach what she eschewed. My apprehension, however, grew from day to day as we explored in apparent leisure places I had known and things I had relished; these were invariably redolent of Butterfly and ushered her even more to the forefront of my thoughts.

Most often we were accompanied on our excursions by Goro, the same Japanese interpreter who had been instrumental in bringing me together with Butterfly. I had never cared for the man, and now he was more distasteful to me than ever; but he had been sent to meet us at the wharf, and Kate, taken with his natural servility or else recognizing his utility, had immediately requisitioned his services. His presence became even more intolerable as Kate took to treating me in a high-handed manner she usually forbore in front of acquaintances; Goro, of course, pretended not to notice.

But if the days were trying, they were well recompensed when, the day's tourist duty done, we retired to the privacy of our chambers. The long ocean voyage had brought us closer together, for Marika, who suffered on the sea, had been left at home, so that all her duties devolved on me. The bizarre and arduous training I had received now stood me in good stead, for not least among Marika's functions was to gratify her mistress's sensual longings. Kate had restrained herself on board ship, however, and it was only in Nagasaki that I came to know her appetites. Although every measure was taken to limit the pleasure I took in procuring hers—among others, the imposition of a
contraption that not only effectively made me a eunuch but rendered painful the least stir of manhood—this equivocal intimacy with a flesh so extravagantly longed for and so rigorously denied, gratified me to a degree that words cannot describe.

72

Slowly, as inch by inch his hands pushed past the finely turned ankles, soft folds of silk and lace bunched and parted like a languorous, high-frothing wave over a slender reef, and in their wake emerged a lengthening expanse as dazzling as sunlit snow. His lips hovered in frozen homage, overawed, as if afraid to desecrate the tender surface of her breathing divinity, while his mesmerized vision fed upon the unveiled substance which, so persistently sequestered from his starving senses, had as steadily nourished his wayward dreams.

His dazed eyes followed the receding hemline, over the graceful calves and long thighs, and up the twin monticules at whose summit they came to rest, exultant and devout, like zealous pilgrims scarce able to conceive of attaining the sacred spot to which endless longing had given a quasi-mythical cast. The sleek double cheeks glowed softly, like blushing snow; a light fragrance swept over them, as cool and intoxicating as heaven's breath. To Pinkerton, whose manhood had passed under his mistress's heel, they had seemed no more accessible than a goddess's living countenance to the temple slave who dusts the sculptured image at her shrine. For like the latter, he had ministered to them in a slavish capacity, with ablutions and scents and fresh garments and pans to transport detritus from the crater they embosomed. But never were his eyes permitted to tarry in the sacred precincts; and his enslaved heart in all its ardor
did not dare think of violating their mysteries. Nor, but for her explicit commands, would he even now.

As his face dipped to the enchanted valley, his eyes clouded with tears and he felt his love-racked soul ascend as to an inner heaven and explode in a spray of infinite stars.

73

(The Nagasaki ms.)

Sparse moments of eccentric intimacy thus emblazoned my unrelenting travail, like jewels on black velvet that capture all one's attention. Exorbitantly sensual and yet withheld from the senses, the singular gratification tormented rather than appeased; and constricted by that demonic contrivance to martyr desire, I sizzled like a toasting keg of explosives girt with steel bands and hourly doused to prevent its blowing up. It was a wonder that I was able to go through the motions of daily life with an appearance of sanity.

This aberrant state no doubt prevented me from being more attentive to the problem of Butterfly. In any event, it was not for lack of reminders: for one, the officious vice-consul whom I had once charged with certain practical matters concerning Butterfly and who had taken it upon himself not only to preach propriety but to compensate for my want of it. Having met Kate and scented, I know not how, the nature of our relationship, he invited me to his office for a tete-a-tete. Although I knew he was sensitive to Butterfly's plight, I was astounded to learn how far his sympathy extended: he had been writing letters to her in my name, so as to mitigate my unexplained desertion. He would not have confessed this but for his concern to safeguard her peace. In his attempt to dissuade me from invading it, he was insistent,
even intrusive. Not knowing how powerless I was to comply, he quite succeeded in stirring up a turmoil of guilt and regret. My wretchedness was compounded by the realization, only now dawning, that Kate wanted and no doubt intended to hurt Butterfly. Did she imagine that in doing so she would reduce me further? Only later was I to understand.