Mysteries of Motion (43 page)

He got up, and tiptoed—God knows why—into the dressing room, where he refilled the carafe and returned with it.

Very gently he tested the water in the pitcher with a forefinger. Museums were humidified. The pot felt ice-cold. Delicately as a curator attending a papyrus, lightly humming under his breath and yet restraining an impulse to pour in instead the rest of the brandy, which was one-hundred-proof Metaxas and sure plant-murder—he watered the tree.

Whistling, he lit the char’s pretty coal-castle with his usual pleasure, then sat suddenly back on his haunches. He’d been messed with that’s what. Interfered with in his private music, shut away for years. He sounded the yearning whistle again. Orioles flew out of a nest in Georgia. His young wife to-that-date had never seen one. She’d had two musical calls with which she’d summoned Wert, birds, the family, the world. This one, which he’d just whistled, the motif from
Das Rheingold,
had belonged to her relationship with a previous man, and she’d worked ineffectually to get rid of it. The second, not a whistle at all, she was very proud of, as the most exotic of her collection of street cries—the cry of the man who’d been selling hundred-year-old eggs the night she first came to Wert’s hotel in Manila.
Balooo-ch. Ba-loooch.

A gray voice, it had been, smearing through the four o’clock morning grayness, selling what Wert still thought of as a gray egg. Though he’d never seen one, he knew of its rumored properties. “An aphrodisiac,” he’d cuddled Jenny closer to say, she as pink as a bonbon against sheets which in those days, his poor ones, were gray as well. At daylight, two hours from then, she would squeal at the sight of the headless shower in his bathroom, but that was still to come. The cry outside was weird and yet consoling, a seller even at this hour, hawking known medicine for our ills. “For old men,” Wert said to her, over her. Not for young men, growing in a woman’s hand like a root, even at four in the morning. Yet the seller had persisted outside their window; maybe he’d seen Jenny come in. Calling the properties of his wares proudly as a proverb, the man kept on, while they’d climbed to orgasm and fell moistly.
Balooo-ch. Ba-a-looch.

Wert called it aloud, inclining his ear. Yes, he still did it better than she had, which had annoyed her. Such anthropology was to have been her specialty; it was to have been the way a diplomat’s wife who refused to be that only could stay with her husband and still be honorable.

She’d had a sibling’s rivalry with him even then—not for what he could do, but over the general spoils of life. In time would this have grown on her like those calloused spurs on the heels of women who wore shoes too short for them? In ten years time, eighteen, which would bring them up to now, with her hair still clipped as boy-short as then, when it had looked like Paris, but on the more massive headline of a middle-aged woman where it might now look like Illinois, and with his own hair maybe falling below the ears in what in London had been a “Chesterfield” but back across the water had become closer to movie-style-at-the-country-club—yes, he could see the two of them. Especially if they’d had no children, as agreed. She by now ever louder in company over what she did, he by now the gentleman-husband-diplomat all in one, ever quieter over his own accomplishment, now that rivalry had faded, along with any further fears of love-embolism. Yet, maybe in her company a man who might have felt better about that accomplishment than he did standing here, after the years without her.

He could see it all quite coolly now. A man who, whatever, might one day soon have need of that hundred-year egg.

The fire was burning handsomely. The rose tree, if that’s what it was, didn’t yet seem to mind. Soon though it would surely need a tropical humidity, and more than the attentions of even a very good char. In all dispassion he must get rid of it. Getting properly rid of the pot itself would be harder.

Of course he was being messed with out of friendship, too. In the black and white of his rented house the Bakhtiarys, father and son, grew toward him, the old one and the young, forming three-dimensional and real from that long bas-relief behind them, the great backwall of polite nuance to which they had been kept.

When both sides knew it was shadow play, each had an obligation—not to move toward the real. That pair was going to. Why couldn’t he guess how? When he already knew what his answer would be. It would be the one he’d been trained to give whenever the East-West balance was upset that way; it was given every other day, internationally. He would be the first to call them uncivilized. And to feel ashamed afterward? Of them
and
himself?

“How there are friends!” Jenny had exclaimed over tea and cakes the afternoon of the morning he’d met her. “How there are friends in every place.” That morning, he’d been sent out onto the Embassy’s steps to deal with the daily picket line on the Roe case—or rather, with the Americans on it. “Send young Wert to talk to them,” the deputy ambassador of that post had said to Wert’s superior; “He should know how to talk to them; he’s just out from home. What else are these young sprouts they’re sending us good for?”

Only six months along on his first tour, Wert already had been silently instructed on what would and must happen to him. Ideals were never mentioned, or why the young sprouts like him kept coming on, once upon a time only from the “better” universities and families, now from almost anywhere in the States, in tune with the democratic—ideal. Each of Wert’s older colleagues had at some point of intelligence or temperament recognized what his own first struggle had had to be: to remain, throughout all the motley years of foreign seductions, what they knew themselves to be when at home. In their native land? So it was in the songbooks maybe, when they were there. But to us out here, the young Wert coming out to be tested told himself, it was Home—where no “natives” were.

Out on the Embassy porch there was something squalid in the sunshine that wetted him almost as soon as he stood there. He’d worn the lightest-weave American shirt made, a tropical suit, and a narrow tie. He was already having a tailor make him a suit of the local silk, which was permissible, and cheap, but he would not descend, ever, to the barong, however elegantly embroidered—a shirt so cool and transparent that it showed the under-arm tufts and chest hairs of all men to be virtually the same. In every post he would learn that there were certain native garments which accepted the climate beyond where a man like him could follow. Southerner though he was, the heat seemed fetid to him because of the conditions beneath, which he’d by now blundered into like any ordinary observer—squatter-towns not yards from these clean steps, where naked babies crawled like red-eyed larvae; there was a city of squatters inside the cathedral itself. Soon the archbishop would pay them to remove themselves, for which bounty they had come. When they left, others would replace them.

“We have to be at the end of the rope to bring our families here,” a man inside there had said to him. The cathedral, which was at the center of Manila’s earthquake temblors and had more than once been destroyed, had recently experienced a new crack, extending into the sacristy, the chancel and under the statues around which this man’s family and others had grouped a front line of sturdy wooden crates which said
whisky whisky whisky
in black letters, and might have come from the Embassy itself. Behind these they lived, on dun tickings spotted with the yellow salve of living. The priests sometimes came to spray for the lice that got into the pews. The man’s wife had scurried to hide a pot warming on a Sterno can. “It’s a holy place, yes—but—” The man’s shrug was clearer than his English, learned as a boy here in the “American” war. Only the intellectuals here called it the Japanese one. Or those who were hangers-on at the Embassy. “And the marble is cool,” the man said.

It was midday of what was said every month to be the worst month, and Wert’s trousers clung like wet rags to his ankles. “Ayra—deeshun, ayra deeshun!” the man said, shaking a spread hand up, up to the vaults above, with a smile that included all cracks. A priest walking the nave stopped to watch Wert slip the man a coin. Nosworthy, at Wert’s side, watched, too. “What’s it mean?” Wert said when they were out of there. “Ayra deeshun. A sort
of Jehovah wills it
in Spanish?” Nosworthy, who was sometimes called Uncle in the Department because he was Uncle Sam-of-the-striped-top-hat in every dependable fiber, had blatted like a goat. His eyes looked tired, though; newcomers were sent to him to be told what to think, and it weighed on him. “Air conditioning.”

On the picket line in front of the steps that afternoon, Wert saw Fernando Diaz, the tall, handsome graduate student who edited the university newspaper which had started the outcry, and Rony Cristobal, a talented writer soon to be barred from an exchange fellowship for being there. Just the night before, Wert had had drinks with the two of them, and sitting between them, a tiny incendiary girl with pearly, projecting skull-teeth, who had seemed to belong to both of them, but only politically. They relied on her for the anti-American remarks. After each one of these she closed her lips or tried to, then let them recede gumward, turning to each of her companions like a pleased dog.

“Why do you bother with us?” Wert had said. “We’re out of here, officially. Soon we’ll be phased out altogether.” Fernando, who was as well read as anybody like him at home but wrote lavender verses which seemed to have little to do with either his mind or his sex (they all wrote, whether they were radicals, poets or medical students like the girl), said: “You people have been in the Philippines fifty years; you’re in our blood and we hate you for it.” Rony, a hard drinker, said moodily: “I speak English better than Tagalog. Better than Spanish. Tell me—do I write in it? No, don’t tell me. I’ll write in it—and I’ll get nowhere. I won’t deserve to, maybe…So I’ll write in Tagalog, which is supposed to be
my
language. And I’ll get nowhere.”

At least we’re not responsible for your Spanish, Wert had thought, but hadn’t said; how could he? Yes, get out with the young ones; we have to know how they think, Nosworthy had said to him. The girl leaned forward, about to snap at him. Above her pearly muzzle the nose was a tiny sepal of flesh, pulled. “You people are in the world’s blood.” And miraculously, her lips had closed.

So, out on the sunny steps he had come, that afternoon. Or had been sent. His being there meant nothing—a ritual. Just the daily courtesy to the picket line. The ambassador before the current one had been a cultivated man who believed in talk, real talk. Nosy’s version of the uses of talk was that it served but needn’t mean anything. Wert on the steps still believed with that other ambassador. “Understand their courtesies; use these. They’ll weep at the sight. Just so you don’t,” Nosworthy had said. “And it lets them let off steam.” Still, out there hatless and exposed on the steps, Wert felt himself to be an emissary—and likely never to get over that feeling. “Always remember,” the briefer in Washington had said, checking Wert’s orders: “Wherever you are, you’re us.”

And wherever we are, are we the world? He hadn’t believed it, even then. It was after five, and the streets of the central town were filling everywhere with ant-crowds arrived from all the crevices, not all of them young but predominantly so; by seven o’clock the streets would be milling, all traffic jammed. They crisscrossed the streets and stalled the cars—a hegira trotting neat and purposeful, knowledge-bound. It was the hour when the universities let out, or their evening sessions began.

Hundreds of universities, most of them private, Nosy had said. “And those size-two girls with flowers in their hair, don’t let them fool you—nurses, doctors, dentists, biologists and all the rest. And the men—two professional degrees, three—even if you’re going into daddy’s bank…more especially of course, if you’re not…Look down there.”

They’d been in a hotel that night, the highest night spot in town, with the bay below. As many times as Wert looked at Manila Bay, whether it smiled with breakfast sweetness at the false front of tourists lodged along its shore, or sullened with black, peppery rains which vanished forward like motes into steam, he always saw it squawking with the triangulated flames of war, or jigging white and black with newsprint, or in the mysterious abyss of silence that came after gunshot or before. He never knew which war he was looking at, Admiral Dewey’s little take-over, or that later spectacular whose winners were now leaving. “Look,” Nosworthy said. “Dewey Boulevard’s hard enough to cross at best. The whole Orient’s jammed with students. But don’t you worry. Over here they’re good little boys now; they’ve learned their lesson. It’s all for—” Rubbing his right thumb on forefinger and middle one, he made the immortal money-sign. “It’s no moral rearmament.”

So he, Wert, had come out on the steps, but not as to battle. Only to give the picket line the message they’d been given yesterday and would expect tomorrow. That the ambassador had taken cognizance. And would convey
their
message. To the proper authorities. The plaza was really very crowded; it was hard to say which students were on the line and which only on their scholastic way, in a city which appeared built on the square but where one turning could confuse even an old resident. In colder cities the poor couldn’t rubble up a hovel right next to a Riviera-style hotel, as they had near Manila’s main one.

Or, like last week, appear one morning in the rear slop yard of an Embassy which hadn’t bothered to plant anything there—fourteen people matted together in sleep, or in the copulations which produced the round-headed babies lying everywhere among them—all with the diseases or hidden starvations that linked them bone to bone. That first morning, seen from the Embassy’s back windows, as the sun glinted on an exposed cheek or bodice or the white sole of a child’s foot, a chicken-chatter of wakefulness ran through the pile of them. “A heap of
people,
I’ve never seen one,” a staff girl said, and fainted; then the mound down there gurgled and opened, maggoty face after face, saw the Embassy people staring from the office above and folded again, inching over each other but still moving—a mass of night soil for which there was no pipe. They had stayed on for days; a democratic ambassador could take no cognizance.