Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (40 page)

Yet . . .

She would never serve anything but
yogurt for breakfast, beer and biscuits and red-eye gravy stricken from his
diet forever.

She would never discuss
Finnegans
Wake
with him, not even on Bloomsday eve.

And neither she nor her kin would get
his jokes: for the rest of his life, every bon mot, every wisecrack, destined
to fall on disregarding ears.

They wouldn’t get his jokes even if
he told them in Arabic. The Bedouins weren’t stiff and somber by any means.
They smiled when pleased, which was fairly often, and they laughed as well, but
it was a kind of harmlessly mocking laughter, almost invariably directed at an
act or an object—his undershorts with the cartoon pandas, for example—that they
considered ridiculous. Unintentional slapstick might delight them, but a
deliberate witticism was as alien to their sensibility as a fixed-rate
mortgage. Comedy, as such, was not an aspect of Bedouin consciousness, nor of
the consciousness of many other archaically traditioned, non-Western peoples.

Begrudgingly, Switters was starting
to think that Today Is Tomorrow might be on to something. That goddamned
pyramid-headed, grub-eating, drug-drinking, curse-leveling savage from the
Amazon bush could have been right on the money when he concluded that it was
Western man’s comedic sense—his penchant to jibe and quip and pun and satirize
and play humorous games with words and images in order to provoke laughter—that
was his greatest strength, his defining talent, his unique contribution to the
composite soul of the planet.

Conversely, civilized man’s great
weakness, his flaw, his undoing, perhaps, was his technologically and/or
religiously sponsored disconnection to nature and to that disputed dimension of
reality sometimes referred to as the “spirit world,” both of which were areas
to which the Bedouin, the Kandakandero, and their ilk related with ease and
understanding, a kind of innate genius, and harmonious grace. Today Is Tomorrow
had suggested that if civilized man’s humor (and the imagination and
individualism that spawned it) could somehow be wed to primitive man’s organic
wisdom and extradimensional pipeline, the union would result in something truly
wondrous and supremely real, the finally consummated marriage of darkness and
light.

An interesting idea, the shaman’s
proposal, but probably even less likely to be achieved than the happy marriage
of a Berkeley-educated former CIA agent to a tattooed, teat-squeezing daughter
of the khan.

Those were the things Switters was
thinking as the nomad band moved deeper and deeper into the distant, slowly
rising hills, and he, in the opposite direction, moved closer and closer to the
mud walls of the small oasis.

Three of the khan’s daughters—yes,
he was still thinking of them—had blue eyes, betraying their ancestral origins
on Asia’s northern steppes. Theirs was not the Sol Glissant swimming-pool blue
of Suzy’s eyes, however, but a sapphire blue, almost an anthracite blue, as if
hardened into being by millions of pounds of chthonian thrust. Their hair was
so black that it, too, was nearly blue, and in a dozen other ways they were
antithetical to Suzy. Yet, the oldest of them was no more than seventeen, so .
. . so what? Seriously. So what? He had certainly not hooked up with the nomads
because of young girls, and if they played any part in his impulse to leave, it
was due neither to fear nor guilt (emotions quite irrelevant in that milieu) but
rather because he had detected something in the girlish laughter wafting from
the oasis during the downpour that had seemed glutinous, pulpy, and quilted, as
if textured with layers the fleecy Bedouin titters lacked.

However, to what extent those stratified
peals had influenced his sudden urge to explore the place, he couldn’t honestly
say. As mentioned, he was quietly crackling with an emboldened abandon in the
aftermath of the Iraqi caper, there was wahoo in his tank, and that was quite
likely a more accurate explanation for his whim than the curiosity aroused by
distant laughter. In any case, the oasis was decidedly silent now.

It sat there, almost loomed there,
like a mud ship becalmed in a rusty bay. Its contours, its lines, were simple
but sensuous, organic but intrusive, utilitarian to a fundamental degree yet
somehow oddly fanciful, like a collaboration between Antoni Gaudí and a termite
colony. The walls, which enclosed an area of about seven or eight acres, were
rounded on top, and the single tower that rose above the flat roofs of the two
principal buildings inside was also round and bulbous, creating the effect that
the whole compound, architecturally at least, had been formed in a gelatin
mold. All that was lacking was a dollop of gritty whipped cream. The air around
it was so awiggle with heat that one could almost hear a soft shimmering, but
not the smallest sound escaped the compound itself. It seemed, in fact,
deserted.

The gate—and there was only one—was
arched, wooden, and solid. High on the gate was an area of latticed grillwork,
but even when standing on his wheelchair, Switters was unable to quite peer
through it. From the outside, the compound was as blank as it was hushed. Hanging
from a wooden post beside the gate was an iron bell about the size of a
football, and beside the bellrope a sign hand-lettered in Arabic and French. It
read: TRADESMEN, RING THREE TIMES/ THOSE IN NEED, RING TWICE/THE GODLESS SHOULD
NOT RING AT ALL.

Switters considered those options for
quite a long while before giving the bell exactly one resounding gong.

After several minutes, having
received no response, he next gave the bellrope
four
strong yanks. He
waited. The sun was barbecuing the back of his neck, and his canteen was
running on empty. What if he was not admitted? Left out in the heat and
desolation? Those responsible for the laughter couldn’t have vanished in so
short a time. Were they deliberately ignoring him? Hiding from him? Trained, perhaps,
to respond only to three rings or two, might his unauthorized signals have
bewildered them or blown some pre-electrical circuit inside? Switters was
always nettled when expected to choose between two modes of behavior, two
political, social, or theological systems, two objects or two (allegedly)
mutually exclusive delights; between hot and cold, tart and sweet, funny and
serious, sacred and profane, Apollonian and Dionysian, apples and oranges,
paper and plastic, smoking and nonsmoking, right and wrong. Why only a pair of
choices? And why not choose both? Who was the legislator of these dichotomies?
Yahweh, who insisted the angels choose between him and his partner, Lucifer?
And are tradesmen, as implied here, never in need? Did the bell instructions infer
that any visitor who believed in God would, per se, either be needy or have
something to sell?

His skull-pot, fairly boiling inside
his crumpled Panama hat, was not cooled by this cogitating. He was on the verge
of swinging from the bellrope like a spastic Tarzan when he heard a scraping
noise, like dog shit being scuffed from a jogging shoe, and looked up to see
that the grill had slid open and was framing a human face.

As near as he could tell, the face
was female. It was also European, homely, and either middle-aged or elderly, as
it was lightly wrinkled and sprigs of graying hair intruded upon its margins.
The owner of the face was either standing on a box, or Switters had stumbled
upon a nest of Amazons about which University of California basketball
recruiters ought to be apprised, for she was staring down at him from a height
of more than seven feet.

“Bonjour, monsieur. Qu’est-ce que
vous cherchez?”

“What am I looking for? The
International House of Pancakes. I must have taken the wrong exit.”

“Pardon?”

“Ran out of gas out past the old
Johnson place, and I’m gonna be late for my Tupperware party. Can I use your
phone to call Ross Perot?”

“Mais, monsieur . . .”

“I’m looking for this very
establishment,” he said, switching to his best French, which had grown as moldy
as Roquefort from lack of use. “What else would I be looking for in this. . .
.” He paused to search for the French equivalent of
neck of the woods
,
though even in English the expression was irrelevant here, there being no woods
within hundreds of miles, indeed, not a single tree in any direction except
those embosomed by the compound walls. “I was in the neighborhood and thought
I’d drop by. May I please come in?”

The hospitality so prodigious in that
arid corner of the world was not immediately forthcoming. After a time, the
woman said, “I must consult with . . .” At first she said something that seemed
to translate as “Masked Beauty,” but she quickly corrected herself and uttered,
“the abbess.” Then she withdrew, leaving him wondering if this desert outpost
to which he had been drawn was not some kind of convent.

His suspicion would prove to be well
founded, although the kind of convent it was, exactly, was not something he
ever could have guessed.

A quarter hour passed before the
slot in the gate reopened. The face in the grill reported (in French) that the
abbess wished to know more specifically the nature of his business. “I don’t
have any business,” Switters replied. It was dawning on him that he might have
made a dumb mistake in coming here. “I’m a simple wayfarer seeking temporary
refuge from a stern climate.”

“I see.” The woman removed her face
from the grill and relayed his words to party or parties unseen. Behind the
gate there was a low murmur of voices in what seemed both French and English.
Then the face returned to inquire if he was not an American. He confessed. “I
see,” said the woman, and again withdrew.

A different face, noticeably younger,
rosy as a ham hock, and congenial of smile appeared in the aperture. “Good day,
sir,” this one said in lilting English. “I don’t know what you’re doing here,
but I’m dreadfully afraid we can’t let you enter at the moment.” Her accent
seemed to be Irish. “I’m the only one here now who speaks English, and I
haven’t got any bleeding authority, if you’ll please excuse my coarse speech,
so Masked Beauty or rather the mother superior’s sent word that your request
can’t be properly considered until Sister Domino comes back. I’m sorry, sir.
You’re not from the Church, are you, sir? That would be a different matter,
naturally, but you’re not from the Church, now are you?”

Switters hesitated a moment before
responding, in imitation of R. Potney Smithe, “Bloody well not my end of the
field.” He was encouraged when the new face seemed to suppress a giggle. “I’m
Switters, free-lance errand boy and all-around acquired taste, prepared to
exchange hard currency for a night’s lodging. And what’s your name, little
darling?”

The new face blushed. Its owner
turned away, engaged in brief discussion with the unseen voices, then
reappeared. “Sorry, sir, you’ll have to wait for herself.”

“Wait how long?”

“Oh, not more than a day or two, sir.
She’ll be coming back from Damascus.”

A day or two!
“Wait where?”

“Why, there’s a wee shade over there,
sir.” She rolled her eyes toward a spot along the wall where an overhang of
thickly leaved boughs cast a purplish shadow on the sand. “Bloody
unaccommodating, ain’t it? I can talk like this because only you and God can
understand me, and I don’t believe either you or God gives a pip. I’d like to
hear how you got here in that bloody chair, but they’re pulling at my skirts.
Good-bye, sir, and God bless.”

“Water!” Switters called, as the
grill slid shut.
“L’eau, s’il vous plaît.”

“Un moment,”
a voice called
back, and in about ten minutes the gate creaked open a few inches. In the crack
there stood not the Irishwoman but the Frenchwoman to whom he’d spoken first.
She shoved a pitcher of water and a plate of dried figs at him and quickly shut
the gate.

“Oh, well,” he sighed. He trundled
the twenty feet or so to the shaded place, where he spread his blanket and lay
down, his heels propped on the chair’s footrest, two inches above the ground.
The water in the pitcher was cool. The figs had a faint taste of
slida.
He fell asleep and dreamed of woolly things.

When he awoke it was night. Above
him, all around him, the sky was a bolt of black velvet awaiting the portrait
of Jesus or Elvis. Stars, like grains of opium, dusted it from edge to edge. In
one far corner, the moon was rising. It looked like the head of an idol, a
golden calf fattened on foxfire.

Why was the air so torrid? It was his
experience that the desert cooled quickly after dark. And summer was yet a
month away. Not that it mattered, any more than it mattered that his muscles
seemed loosened from his bones or that his bones were swimming in gasoline. He
felt like the Sleeping Gypsy in Rousseau’s great painting, asleep with his eyes
half open in a night alive with mystery and fever.

Fever? It gradually occurred to him
that it was he who was hot, not the air. The sweat drops on his brow were like
tadpoles. They migrated down his neck as if in search of a pond. Still, he
didn’t care. A night such as this was worth anything! His aching only gave
pitch to its beauty.

The stars hopped about like chigger
bugs. The moon edged toward him. Once, he had the sensation that it was licking
him with a great wounded tongue. He smelled orange blossoms. He was nauseated.
He heard himself moan.