Pilgrim (41 page)

Jung had merely shrugged.

Three days after he and Archie Menken had discovered the carved
T,
Emma had led Carl Gustav to the journals and showed him some of the passages she had been reading, pointing out the references to trees, kingfishers and Teresa.

Teresa.

Clearly, this was a figure Jung recognized. But one he mistrusted. She had been a mystic—
an improbable mystic at that, and more than likely the perpetrator of hoaxes
. Levitation, for instance.
Hokum
, he had snorted—a word he had learned from Archie.

Emma insisted it was simply part of who Teresa was. People had seen it happening while she was at prayer.

“A person could pay to have such witnesses,” Jung said that night as they lay in their bed with the covers thrown back. “I’m merely postulating,” he added. “Merely speculating.”

“Would you speculate and postulate on the subject of Haeckel’s findings?”

“Once, yes. But not any more.”

“Because you now believe.”

“Because I now believe.”

“And where is your proof?”

“Proof?”

“Proof. You insist that Teresa prove she was the
victim
of levitation…”

“Stop saying victim!”

“Very well. You insist that Teresa prove that when she prayed, she rose towards God. But couldn’t it just be allegorical? This was Teresa’s whole desire: to rise into God’s presence—His absolute, literal presence. She called God
His Majesty
and to rise to that place where He exists—where He is, was all that mattered—isn’t that the perfect representation of levitation? Isn’t it? I cannot for the life of me understand why you have a problem with this.”

“She was a charlatan.”

“She was a Catholic—that’s what you mean. She was a Catholic and she believed. And you are a lapsed Protestant—because of your God-forsaken father’s God-forsaken ministry—and you believe nothing. Your basic problem, my dear one, is that you hate and distrust anyone—
anyone
—who believes in God. And maybe even anyone who believes in anything.”

“Why are you angry?”

“I’m not angry. I’m just asking. Pay attention to the line you’re following. You don’t want to admit you
know who this woman is because you don’t want to admit Mister Pilgrim has the jump on you.”

“The
jump
on me? What the hell does that mean? The
jump
on me!
Please!”

Emma shifted to one side, placing her back before him.

“You don’t like anyone to challenge you, my dear one,” she said, “my darling. You don’t want Mister Pilgrim to know beyond doubt what you don’t know at all—that he knew and understood a saint—something you may never do. May I put it this way? In Mister Pilgrim’s case, you may be the student and he might be the teacher.”

She settled her shoulders and shifted one hand towards her belly, letting it rest without inquisitory intent on the child enfolded there.

“Imagine yourself without questions,” she said. “Put yourself in her place—Teresa’s. She had no questions. She merely—
only
—waited. This was her wonder: not to predetermine—not to say
it will be thus and so
—not to
know
. She did not demand to know, Carl Gustav.
And you demand to know
. This way, you are a monster.”

Jung bellied over towards her.

Monster?

“I love you,” he said—not knowing he would say it.

“I’ll think about it,” said Emma. And smiled.

Jung fitted his hand to her left and uppermost buttock. He began to scrabble at her nightdress.

“You have never been taken from behind,” he said,
amazed by his own voice—by its sudden, previously undisclosed lasciviousness. Pure, unadulterated lasciviousness. No disguises. No
I’m your husband.
No
let’s pretend.

He undid the ties of his pyjama trousers and slid them away towards his thighs.

I’m going to rape you,
he thought.
I’m going to take you every way a man can take a woman. You will be busy here for hours.

“Carl Gustav?”

“Yes?”

She had spoken. How dare she?

“Take your hand off my buttock.”

Jung deferred. His hand moved. He hardly seemed to be its master. It simply left its place. He hung back, tumescent and confused.

“God
is
,” said Emma, nearing sleep. “You do know that, don’t you.”

Did he? Maybe. Though he hated the idea of saying so, he knew that Someone was there—or Something. If there was no one there, his own yearnings for articulation would be meaningless.

“Yes,” he said. Whispered.

“What is certainty?” Emma asked.

“Knowing nothing,” said Jung.

“Good,” Emma sighed. “You’re learning.” She moved farther off. “Do you want me to speculate on an orgasm with my hand? Or is it a certainty without my participation?”

Jung grunted.
Oh, why won’t she suck it for me
, he thought.

He began to reach for sleep. It was there like a fish at the end of his line.
Any moment I will net it and be gone.

What a thoroughly pleasant image. To be standing in his waders down at the far end of the lake on a bright September morning. Sunrise and sunfish. Cool air, cool waters.

Kingfisher
.

What is certainty?
Emma had asked him.
Knowing nothing
, he had answered.

The fish are there—but will one find them?

The sunlight sparkled on the water. Just for a moment, it blinded him.

And God?

He drifted.

God is in the blinding.

True. True. Possibly true.

There was a nibble on his hook.

Doubt less, believe more,
the Grand Inquisitor said.
A few moments ago, Carl Gustav, you considered achieving levitation
.

Never.

Almost sleeping.

Never? Then what is your definition of an orgasm? What else can it be but a rising to another level of existence? You should think about that.

Maybe.

Maybe? Be less doubting, fisherman. The truth is, you have souls to catch
—
forgive the pun. I have a dreadful sense of humour. Perhaps I should have said you have spirits to catch. But this is true. Emma’s little fish. Pilgrim’s lost centre. Blavinskeya’s Moon. Your own lost faith…

True. Maybe true.

Good night, Carl Gustav.

Yes. Good night. You old bastard.

He smiled.

Good night
—just the right words. A good night in spite of the fact that Emma had refused him.

Would he ever force himself on her? Force himself in the merciless sense? He thought not. Not because of what she might think of him—never that—but of what he would think of himself. He did not really care what she thought of him, so long as she did not lose her respect for him as…

An artist?

Where had that word come from?

He had meant
scientist
. As long as she did not lose her respect for him as a scientist.

One day the whole world would acknowledge his greatness. His scientific pioneering, his discoveries and his staking of new territories.

There was comfort in this.

No. He would never force himself on Emma. He need not even ask her. She would come back begging for more. In the meantime, there would be others while he fastened his hold on the ultimate goal—the rightness of his genius.

This way, he found sleep.

In the morning, when Emma woke, Carl Gustav had left. She had heard nothing—sensed nothing of his departure. And yet, when she made her own way to the bathroom, the evidence of his presence having
preceded hers was everywhere. The laundry hamper was overflowing with damp towels. The smells of soap and of the lemon-lime cologne with which her husband freshened his handkerchiefs were fresh as if he had left the room only seconds before her entrance. The mirror still bore traces of steam.

Low down in the right-hand corner of the glass, the letter
T
had been drawn by Jung’s finger. Rather large. Very important.

T. Teresa. Tree
.

Emma wondered how she could bring him to tolerate this difficult woman. This saint. Bring him to her and instruct him in the meaning of her unique genius.

No. Never instruct. He refused instruction unless he had requested it.

Pilgrim’s journals were filled with revelations. Leonardo, the
Mona Lisa
. Dogs called Perro and Agamemnon. Rapes and seductions. Findings and losses. Spanish sheep and sheep in dreams. Mister Bleat and Henry James. Shepherds, saints and golden landscapes. Kingfishers, pelicans, doves and eagles…And at the centre of it all, this tall lonely man who never wrote of loving or of being loved unless it was to tell another’s story, not his own.

Or were they his own, these stories, Emma wondered. Had he imagined them—created them or did he honestly believe he had experienced them? And if so, how? In dreams? Daydreams? Were they fictions or were they facts?

But the care with which he had set them down went far beyond mere dreams and daydreams. Carl Gustav
said that Mister Pilgrim sometimes spoke in his sleep—sometimes enunciating with perfect clarity, even to the point of giving dictation. This in itself was of very great interest, given the nature of dreams.

Carl Gustav had a theory that what was experienced in dreams was tantamount to reality—that the terror of nightmares could equal the terror of true events. That a man who dreamt of being buried alive might just as well have truly been buried alive because the effect on him was the same. Survival of either the nightmare or the reality left the same psychic scars. This way, many patients had to be sedated with chloral hydrate or comforted with ether until they were convinced their doctors, nurses and orderlies were not intent on returning them to the grave.

And yet, Mister Pilgrim himself had a longing for the grave he could not achieve. How sad he was—this great tall man. Emma had seen him from a distance, walking in the snow with Lady Quartermaine. His hair was now turning white, Carl Gustav had told her, and his loneliness increasing. Long hours were spent in the Music Room listening to recordings of Mozart, Beethoven, Verdi and Puccini—or seated at the piano stumbling through the music of Schumann and Schubert. And always he would rise and stomp out if someone came to disturb his privacy. Much repressed anger—many sudden storms in this great, tall man.

Emma returned to the bedroom and put on her wrapper. She would spend the morning in Carl Gustav’s study, unlock the magic drawer (for so it seemed to her, now) and finish the story set in the sun of
la tierra dorada
. Even as she descended the stairs, with one hand on the bannister and the other on her child, she imagined that she could hear the distant barking of a dog and the dusty wings of a flight of pelicans.

6

Horsemen rode out along
la Mujer
every three days to leave supplies for the shepherds and cowherds who were in charge of Don Pedro’s sheep and cattle. Bread, wine, onions, cheese and olives were the staples of the diet thus achieved, to which the herders then added dried beans of various kinds and game—when birds and rabbits had been killed—or on very rare occasions, a wild boar. The cowherds ate in groups—the shepherds, for the most part, alone.

Campfires were built. Men slept on the ground using rough blankets and pillows made up of saddles, boots or a rolled garment. Each shepherd had his dog—or two. The cowherds had dogs, a few horses and burros amongst the cattle because the burros’ presence warded off marauding wolves. On occasion—perhaps every five to six weeks—the men and dogs were replaced by others, affording a holiday of two to three days.

These were good conditions. Other less wealthy or more stinting landowners might leave their people in the hills for as long as four to five months.

Three days after their first encounter, Teresa de Cepeda rode Picaro out with the horsemen to visit
Manolo and to see Las Aguas. She had fallen in love with the landscape, and for all his nearly speechless awkwardness, she missed Manolo’s
charming innocence
. That was her phrase for it, written in her notebook, which otherwise was filled with prayers, pressed flowers and injunctions against her personal sins—amongst them, levitation. Anything sensational was clearly a sin—unless it had been commanded by His Majesty. To be the centre of a sensational event was to curry favour in other people’s eyes. She had begun to pray in barns and earth closets.

The horsemen, once they heard of Teresa’s destination, gave her Manolo’s personal supplies and sent her off with them. She was popular with these men, who treated her as a
daughter of the house
—one of their own.

Don Pedro’s residence was known as
El Cortijo Imponente
—
the Grand Farmhouse
. It was home to five children besides Teresa, and had already sent five others out into the world by means of marriages, seminaries and the army. Two, many years before, had died as infants.

In all, Doña Aña de Cepeda y Caridad had given birth to twelve children. She was now, as was Don Pedro her husband, in the late forties of her life and, unlike him, was prone to extended periods of melancholy during which she would sit with her rosary in hand, not praying but merely staring off across the
meseta
at the horizon. She believed, in her deepest states of depression, that the world at large had retreated beyond this place and that, in the end, she would be abandoned by all those she loved and had
given birth to and left to die without ever having knelt in the great cathedrals of Madrid or walked in the flowery cloisters of the Alhambra. These were her dreams, and like a child, she often fancied that she would run away to fulfil them.

Teresa, who loved her aunt well enough, was nonetheless happy to escape her company for a day. It was difficult to watch so many hours being wasted on daydreams—hours that might at least have been spent in contemplative prayer. Doña Aña was too much like Teresa’s own mother in this—too much brooding, not enough doing.