Light Action in the Caribbean (12 page)

She smiled, tolerant, a sardonic edge to the smile, and said, “They’ll never study what a woman has to say about birds and sand dunes, not in some foreign magazine.”

But, of course, they did.

My two friends with the maps, now on their fifth or sixth cup of coffee, seem close to agreement on a day plan, what each man’s responsibilities will be. The men at the other table persevere without change, one beclouded in dense smoke, the other speaking vehemently into his cellular phone and making abrupt, impatient gestures with his hands.

Yesterday, from Frankfurt, I called Faisal Abu-Said in Riyadh, confirming our appointment; now, pressing milk from the last spoonful of coarse muesli against the roof of my mouth, I feel a familiar doubt: I’m no more certain he’ll arrive this time than I was the others.

My neighbors are shaking hands, briskly reassuring each other, agreeing to meet in the lobby at six. (I look up at the blue light on the roof. It is flashing, about thirty macaws have taken wing. They flock, screeching, to an area behind a bamboo thicket.) At the second table the man on the phone has rung off. He sits frowning, looking distant, opposite his very grave and silent companion.

Sunlight cutting through the glass, the air like wool in the room, would have made me drowsy of an afternoon. This early in the morning I find the closeness, the light, auspicious. I ask the waitress for a large glass of fresh orange juice, and could she serve it outside?

My mother first came to Arabia in the 1950s. She had been a friend of Bowles in New York. She visited him in Tangier, but was soon drawn away to the emirates of what was then Trucial Oman and to Saudi Arabia. She traveled to spectacular, remote places to write—the great salt lagoon at Umm as Samīm, south of Ibri, and up to the ruins at Petra. She was didactically romantic about Baghdad, that it had once flourished as a city of poets and scholars under Harun al-Rashid and was unrivaled as a settlement in the Muslim world in the ninth century, and she would say that she could never visit Baghdad because it would dismantle that illusion of civilization. She wrote a well-received biography of William Palgrave, a Jesuit and the first outsider to cross the Arabian peninsula. She wrote to Camus about his emotions over Algeria and kept up a correspondence with the Englishman Thesiger, the last explorer of Rub’ al-Khali, the Empty Quarter. She disdained, out of jealousy, the popular reports and impressions of Lady Anne Blunt, the first European woman
to travel in the interior of Arabia, sometimes in native male disguise.

Mother wore long pants and traveled as a Christian. She had a scholar’s inclination toward detail and great passion for her subjects, also a physical longing for the desert I admired, though it never developed for me, nor my father. I read most of what she wrote with deference and fascination. When she was killed, in Basra in 1984, one of the first thoughts I had was for the safety of her manuscripts and diaries at her home in Riyadh. But her killers had gotten to them. She had moved overseas when my father died. Eventually she consolidated all of her work in the home in Riyadh. She lived an urgent, forceful life with that city as her base. It wasn’t until I visited her there that I could understand how she managed to gain trust, even affection, as an interloper. Muslim people, everywhere I traveled, appreciated her ingenuous interest—except, of course, the reactionary fanatics who rigged the gas explosion in her kitchenette.

Abu-Said ran to her house that same day, the moment he heard, but he arrived to find it ransacked. Her manuscripts, her books, all her notes—all the paper was gone. When I reflected later on what happened, I grew angry with my mother. I had reminded her pointedly, several times, of the fate of such well-meaning people as Ulrich Seetzen, an intrepid student of Arab culture murdered at Ta’izz. His journals were publicly shredded and burned on the spot.

Two years after she was killed, I got a letter from Abu-Said saying Mother’s papers may not have been destroyed. He had been contacted. It may take a lot of money, he told me, but it was just possible to get them back. I told him he must try. I
had read a little in her journals, pages of curious speculation and glee, of marvelous coincidence, much less guarded than her essays. To me, the loss of her musings was a loss almost as great as her death. I raised some money from her colleagues and an interested university, and over the next six years Abu-Said negotiated. I kept a growing sense of frustration to myself. In 1988 I flew to Quarain for my first meeting with Abu-Said. I waited three days at the hotel before flying back to the States, where I found a letter saying it was an inauspicious time for us to get together, that he was sorry but he could not finally do so.

The letter had been delayed.

The next time, 1991, I waited for two days, again at the hotel. The garden where the macaws are now was then dense with hibiscus, jasmine, and frangipani. I was sitting in that nearly overpowering perfume finishing breakfast when Abu-Said approached and sat down. He was cordial and apologetic—and empty-handed. He reiterated what sort of people we were dealing with and promised not to give up. I wondered whether he and Mother had been lovers, if this was an added complication, and was then abashed at the narrowness of my imagination.

The man with the cellular phone has placed another call. He now seems calmer. His companion crushes out perhaps his tenth cigarette as I rise to find a seat in the garden. At that moment a nagging question is put away: the breakfast room is almost empty because it is Ramadan, the month of fasting.

Outside, the screeching and harsh cries of the disturbed
macaws are no longer muffled by the double-glass wall. A difficult decision to have to make, I speculate, opting for the brilliance of these birds’ markings and their impressive size in spite of the scabrous grate of their calls. The soft warble and chatter of other types of smaller but still brightly colored parrots might have been more agreeable around a hotel pool, but someone has decided the overall image would be less striking.

The cold orange juice, thick with pulp, perpetuates an exotic sense of prosperity: fresh, chilled food eaten early in the day at the edge of Rub’ al-Khali. But the hotel is a peculiar oasis. Like everyone else at this Tiergarten, I expect an array of imported fruit each morning, the extravagance with water, with linen, the exaggerated courtesy.

I am taking a second sip from the sweating glass when I see Abu-Said emerge on a walkway from behind a screen of flowering oleander. He is carrying a leather case—much too small—but he is smiling.

After we shake hands lightly, he places the wallet on the table between us and asks if I have slept well. We exchange such perfunctory remarks until this object entirely fills our silences. The wallet contains a letter, he says. He tells me to have written it was dangerous, and very brave. It is addressed to me, to read, not to keep.

Abu-Said waves away the approaching waitress as I undo the leather ties and remove a sheet of heavy, cream-colored paper, folded once and written on one side.

“To the Son of Frances Amelia Desuedeson,” it begins.

The letter was unsigned. I read it again. I was afraid if I looked at Abu-Said, I would sense the years that had passed. I suddenly felt the selfishness of my errand, the inadequacy of my mission.

Abu-Said leaned over and said, “If you are finished, put the letter back in the case. When I go I will leave a room key on the table. In that room, tomorrow morning at ten o’clock, you will find two suitcases with your mother’s papers. At exactly two p.m. you are to take them to the Lufthansa cargo office at the airport. A man there will assist you in making arrangements to get the bags to Frankfurt. After that, you are on your own.”

At that moment it seemed I could not draw in enough of something, of the pungent odor of flower blossoms in the quivering air, the intense chroma of the birds’ hues, the density of the orange juice. I raised my hand to stay Abu-Said, who had started to rise. I wanted an explanation. I put the letter in the case and knotted the leather ties.

“It is not good for me to visit much longer,” Abu-Said cautioned.

“I understand,” I said. “I regret that I can’t make a copy of the letter, but I won’t ask you for that. I regret, too, that we cannot enjoy some of the day together before you go. I have no way to thank you for what you’ve done. You never gave up.”

“Nor did you,” he said. He waited.

“Did you love her very much?” I finally asked.

“I did, with my whole heart.”

“May Allah bless you every day.”

“And may you arrive home safely, if it be Allah’s will.”

We touched hands. He nodded once and walked quickly away. Somewhere, I felt, he had paid a price.

I finished my juice, signed the check, and took the key. I would spend the rest of the morning walking in the city before the heat became intolerable, looking in the shops. Tomorrow, before I went to the room, I would have breakfast at the same table. I would order the same things and watch the macaws stretching their bright wings in the pale dawn air.

What she said to me was “I’ve met someone.” What I heard was “I’m leaving.” She was correct, of course, from her side, but that’s what it came down to for me and soon I, too, was gone. I don’t know whether it was indecision or cowardice that, instead of quitting, led me to take a leave of absence from the firm in which I was a full partner; but I said so long there, closed the house and drove south out of Boise into Nevada, where I thought there would be enough space to work through the first layers of the injury. For long stretches in Nevada there are no towns, and I carried no cell phone or pager. I drove some roads where there was no fence to either side, no power line crossing the horizon.

The dog after me was grief, not bitterness. It had not worked; now that she had taken the first step, I would have to find my own path. I began to think through things I had been
walking away from for years. One hour I felt like an utter fool, the next like a man given a legal reprieve. As I stared through the windshield or into the cottage-cheese ceilings of cheap motels or into cafe-counter mirrors, I saw with some clarity what had happened. My ruminations were not about blame or responsibility. Outside of the loneliness, the violent shivers of anger and general fury at the world, I traveled in peace. I could not bear to read anything and did not want conversation, only to get on with what was coming. If desperation was in me, it was to keep reminding myself on those rueful and sleepless nights of what was possible. And if I returned regularly to any single image, it was to that long arc of time and event from childhood to the present. What was in that I could depend on?

I was at this a few months, eating breakfast at five in some fluorescent-lit cafe with cattle ranchers and no women except those serving; smoking an occasional cigar on the lawn of some off-the-highway motel, gazing at the last direct rays of the sun sparkling high in a rampart of Lombardy poplars and hearing children shouting their glee and irritation from the motel pool. The desire to read returned as abruptly as it had left. One day I picked up a copy of John McPhee’s
Basin and Range
. I read it in the evenings, gaining his sense of deep time to understand the dynamism of a landscape that seems the quintessence of stillness. As I drove, I began to appreciate the geology I was traversing, the clines and faults, and to see its basins and ranges like the crests and troughs of a stalled ocean.

One evening I looked up from my reading by a motel pool and saw in the middle ground of my imagination a monk in
white robes. He was bending over to comfort a child in a cloister.

The Benedictine monastery of San José de Galisteo stands on a low knoll in the Santa Lucia Range of the central California Coast. I had known of it since my boyhood in Santa Barbara, and in recent years had visited there. I found the monks worldly, funny, compassionate, and cerebral. Nominally Catholic, they were open to any genuine search for the divine. One afternoon, walking in the garden with the prior, Brother Jorge, and talking about the rationale behind Buchenwald and Treblinka, he offered one of his typically succinct summaries. “Liturgy without justice is sentimentality. And justice without liturgy is barbarism.”

My visits with the monks had been as comforting as my recent weeks in the Triassic folds of Nevada. Why I’d not gone there first I didn’t know. I was there a week or two before I saw the outline of something else in the long run of beach below the monastery. That margin represented a boundary for me, one I could not have found without swimming across Nevada.

I could easily have paid the small fee the monks suggested to cover my meals and laundry and been done with it; but I needed another sort of exchange, and I wanted to be physically engaged in the world again. I arranged with Brother Thomas to work under his direction in the monastery’s gardens. They raised vegetables and fruits for their own table and sold what remained in a public market in Paso Robles on the weekend.

As on earlier visits, I asked to live under a rule of silence, speaking and being spoken to only on Sundays. Brother Thomas wrote out my chores and left his list each day on a small table in the courtyard garden where I usually ate alone. I attended canonical hours with the monks, starting with matins at four a.m. and continuing through compline at eight-thirty, giving my day that spine. Observing the three mealtimes, attending the seven hours, and receiving the Eucharist at noon was the daily order I needed. Around it I weeded, trimmed, picked, and gathered. I read and slept deeply.