Memoir From Antproof Case (3 page)

Can you imagine a bank teller, a beautiful girl of twenty-three, kissing a customer through the bars? This is what the countries of the north have grown great in imagining and lacking—but I had it. We kissed, and we had a moment of truth, as in the chiming of a bell, or maybe a bull fight, that has kept us together through all the subsequent and difficult years.

I don't approve of liaisons, much less marriages, between people of vastly different ages, but I couldn't resist her, and I
pledged myself to her as few young men could, not knowing themselves well, or having been deeply wounded. If she had married a younger man other than a Jesuit or some other kind of priest, who knows what might have become of her?

I was fifty-three and as lean and solid as a weight lifter. I had fifteen sound years left during which I ate mainly endive, tuna, shrimp, and fruit. I didn't smoke, drink, or use drugs, and in spitting in the devil's eye I get strength.

Until she was thirty she didn't even know the difference. In frequency perhaps, but not in hallucinatory intensity. I made up in gratitude what I lacked in vigor, and I could tell her stories. When we finished, I would embrace her as if my life depended upon it, which it did.

When Marlise entered middle age and I became old we looked at one another askance. This red-haired bank teller with huge tremendous bosoms and teeth, who still fit trimly in a bikini, was like a steadily burning coal, while I was like the ash at the end of a cigar. She began to have affairs. I forgave her, I forgive her, for she brought me Funio, and Funio, though of another man, is like a son to me.

About eight years ago, we went looking for Marlise's father, who was a priest and who, rather than leave the priesthood, gave her up. I have always said that he made one wrong decision after another. The first was to take his vows, the second to break them, and the third, not to shatter them completely.

For Christ's sake, what are angels? Here was a man whose heart rose, it is safe to assume, in contemplation of saints and angels, and when an angel was actually delivered to him—even if by his indiscretion—he should have taken that angel in. I took Funio that way, though he was not mine. After one tear, literally, one single tear that I shed because of Marlise's betrayal and my old age, I allowed his raw cry to fill me full of life. But I'm pulling ahead of myself.

We went to the North, which is like a country in Africa—vast, dry, hot, and poor. The air smells of mangoes, carrion, and the sea. We had heard that Marlise's father was resident in a parish somewhere near Natal, and for two days we traveled by bus, boat, and on foot to a forgotten strip of coast where the Atlantic drives upon the shore in great white bales of brine that have been propelled across the vacant ocean from the Bight of Benin. The beach was thirty miles long and backed along its entire length by a mile of pristinely white marching dunes as soft and dry as talcum.

We drank bottled water and ate fruit that we washed in the waves. Church and parish house were twenty miles up the beach and just behind the dunes, where a river made a wide bend before it breached the walls of sand to pour into the sea.

"How do we get there?" we asked at a little town north and west of Natal.

And they said, "You walk."

"On the road?"

"There is no road."

"No road?"

"No."

People from country places sometimes honor me with a reply, perhaps because I look like one of them who has survived into old age. And, if you call the fields in the midst of which I was born country, which they were then but are no longer, I suppose I am. I closed one eye and skeptically cleared my throat.

"No road at all," was the response.

"How do they get their produce to market? How do they get mail and supplies?" I asked.

"By boat."

"Then we'll go on the boat."

"If you want to wait six weeks."

"What about a fishing boat?"

"You can walk twice as fast, and walking costs nothing."

"A jeep?"

"No way to get across the river."

"A raft."

"Two and a half days to build it."

"How
do
we get across the river?" I asked.

"You swim."

"Why not go in a canoe?" By this time the whole village had gathered around us, more toothless mouths than I had seen in years, and the people were enjoying our ignorance immensely.

"If you want, grandfather, you can cross in a canoe, but you will have to swim in the ocean a hundred times to keep cool, so why waste effort by not swimming?"

We sensed that this might be an elaborate joke, that just beyond the dunes was a superhighway with air-conditioned bus service, or a Swiss-made monorail with complimentary chocolates on the seats. But we did like the idea of walking twenty miles on a deserted beach and we entered the river with the whole village watching, our fruit and bottled water in plastic net bags floating beside us.

When we emerged, our clothes were fresh and clinging, our hearts beating. After a few minutes of walking by the edge of thundering surf as high as a house we were alone in a place where we would not see a single soul or the work of man for the rest of the day.

Nothing stopped us and no one could hear, so we sang. I have a strong voice even now, but it is Marlise who sings precisely, sweetly, and well. And we did swim a hundred times. Ever since I was a boy I have loved the idea of swimming in my clothes, so that I could cross a river or a lake and keep moving after I had emerged from the water. I like the way a wet shirt feels on a hot and windy day, and khakis crisp with sun and salt, as stiff as a starched army uniform.

When my plane went down in the Mediterranean in 1943 I swam at least ten miles to shore, and here, with no mirrors in which to see myself, and a heart buoyed by bright sun and the surf, I felt almost as free, almost as triumphant.

The difference was that now I was old, and the death I had escaped had become, once again, not always so unpleasant to contemplate, except that I had Marlise, who at forty-two was at the peak of her glory. I will never forget her as she walked in the wind, barefoot, disheveled, and perfect. I will never forget the streaks of salt that curved down her back and whitened upon her shoulders. Nor her dancelike movements as she strode through those magnificent hours. When the wind changed, and blew her hair in front of her face, she tied it in a thick rope that was as red as her lips, and I thought to myself that I had done the right thing, that had I stayed in the office and risen high in the esteem of others I would not have had a hundredth of what I had here—the clean sea air forced into my lungs as if I were drowning in it, and midday as bright and hot as a lamp.

After we came to the river, beyond which the beach continued to stretch as if to infinity, we turned inland and walked a mile or two through irrigated fields that were so still we could hear the ocean singing in our ears long after we had left the sound behind.

We found the priest in the wooden rectory of a wooden church. He was drinking coffee and reading the Bible. I grasped my stomach, pivoted, and sought the outside.

He rose immediately, assuming that I had come to him, as undoubtedly some did, to seek last rites, but Marlise took him aside and whispered, gesturing with her hands. Then she gave him one of the strong mints that she carries for the purpose of ... well, I think you know by now. I have heard only the beginning of her practiced monologue, because I always absent myself after the words, "Forgive me, but my husband is a crazy person."

It's mortifying, especially in light of the fact that I am right and they are wrong. And I'm hardly the one who's crazy. Catherine the Great, who looked no more like Ingrid Bergman than I do, but was in fact a dead ringer for Edward Everett Horton, used to make her own coffee when she arose—as I arise—very early in the morning. Her customary recipe called for one pound of ground coffee to four cups of water. She was known to be a jitterbug, and now you know why.

I knew immediately that the priest was not Marlise's father. He was a midget and she is statuesque. He was many shades darker than she, though she had been in the sun and he had not. He had deeply socketed pop-eyes and caterpillar eyebrows, whereas her eyes are wide and almost oriental, and her brows ride above them as high and delicately arched as single willow branches.

Either his lack of physical resemblance to her or her diplomacy in getting him to pour his coffee down the drain had temporarily driven from her the question we had come to ask. But when I returned and the three of us stood in the cool shade of the rectory front room, it returned, probably because of her strong sense of mission but possibly because we had come such a long way.

"Father," she cried, sinking to her knees, in tears.

"Yes my child," he answered, in requisite but puzzled compassion.

"Are you my father?" she asked.

"Yes, of course."

"Literally?"

"Why do you ask?"

"We heard a rumor."

"Where?" he asked indignantly.

"In Rio."

"Rio! I've never been to Rio. From whom did you hear this rumor?"

"From my mother."

"I don't know your mother, I never broke my vows, not even once, and if I had it is unlikely that the child of such a union would have been like you, unless the mother was..."

"How about a giraffe?" I asked, cruelly, but the smell of coffee does make me cruel. Marlise hit me in the stomach, with many times the impact of an assassin's .12-calibre bullet (but sans penetration), and I went down. She's sensitive about her height.

Then came the first inkling I had of Funio, because, out of nowhere, Marlise announced, "I'm a
pregnant
giraffe."

Constance had been too busy to have a child, and Marlise had had such a miserable upbringing herself that she could not bear the thought of bringing a baby into the world, until, evidently, just before the wire—for she was of an age when these things cease to be matters of concern except in retrospection. I had reconciled myself to dying without an heir.

Now, in my doubled-up position on the cool stone floor, I was overcome with the other prospect. I think I knew for half a second the ineffable presence a father feels when his child is born. I have heard that you cannot sense the Divinity any more clearly than at that moment.

The priest was justifiably confused, but did what came naturally. He congratulated me and began to offer a prayer, until Marlise screamed, "No, no, no! It's not his."

For a second time within seconds I had the breath kicked out of me. The little priest dealt with illegitimate children every day, but I never had, not in the painful way that you must when you learn that your young and beautiful wife is carrying the child of another man.

Marlise was inconsolable, too. The priest knelt down and tried to comfort us. "You must come from somewhere very far away from here," he said in amazement. "We don't see strangers often. I tell you, would you like some fried bananas?"

That is how I was introduced to the idea of Funio, although not to Funio himself, not knowing whether the baby would be a boy, a girl, or a giraffe. After a while I was too stunned to do or feel anything, and I sat in the darkness, eating fried bananas, which I detest, wondering why I wasn't angry.

Had I been younger I might have razed the village, for ever since the age of ten I had been on intimate terms with rage. Once, I smashed a donkey cart in Brooklyn Heights, leaving the donkey and the rest of the world unharmed, after I peered into the kitchen of a brownstone on Joralemon Street. There I saw two young schoolchildren—a boy and a girl of about six and eight—sitting at a breakfast table, in school uniforms, two-strap briefcases beside them, the girl in blond pigtails. I could hardly believe my eyes. They were reading the newspapers and drinking from two huge cups of coffee. Nothing in the world angers me more than the abuse of children, and to see innocence so casually and systematically destroyed was more than I could bear. I would have attacked the parents but for the fact that the children would not have understood, and the windows were protected by heavy iron bars that, though I was sore for a week thereafter, I could not bend.

Never will I forget the expression of those poor children, their huge, toilet-bowl-shaped, globular vessels of coffee held an inch above the saucers, their jaws hanging down. They looked a bit like the priest who fed me fried bananas. And the donkey cart was the first cartlike object I had ever destroyed, though I have made restitution for my delay at least a hundred times over in smashing expresso wagons and coffee urns.

Now that I am eighty and Marlise is fifty I understand her affairs. Had I been fifty, with an eighty-year-old wife, I too might have been tempted to go outside the marriage. At the time she became pregnant with Funio, I was still able, though I suppose that she, in her greatest glory, wanted not a smoldering stick but a blazing torch.

When I had an inkling of what she was doing, I tried to retaliate. I met a nightclub dancer, a woman even younger than Marlise, whose job was to arouse men (somehow) by gyrating in a costume of silver bands, a plumed headdress, and purple-tinted mirrors. She did not look particularly human, and even her breasts were heavily covered with powder and rouge. I began to see her, and then I began to see my doctor. Nothing is as chilling as sex in reprisal, except perhaps that this sad and abandoned woman had offered herself to me because she pitied my age.

You cannot abrogate the passage of time, so I returned to the quiet benches in the parks where old people are supposed to sit, and I returned to walking up the mountain, and there, in the dim asexual beauty of reddening dawns and skies that finned to blue, I discovered my real and appropriate strengths.

Funio is going to rise above his difficult origins. I have been a father to him, and my greatest sorrow is that I will die when he is young. But though he will cry I don't think it will break his stride, or, at least, I hope it does not. I can think of nothing I would rather do than live another forty or fifty years and watch him move through the world. He wallops you with his brilliance. I don't like the idea of child prodigies, and we are trying to ignore that part of him, for a brilliant child can be ruined if he is made to do tricks like a circus animal.