Against the Day (165 page)

Only
to find out that, good God, after a winter of so much hardship and
misdirection, Bevis Moistleigh had been holed up in Cetinje with Jacintha
Drulov all this time, that the lovestruck young imbecile had actually made his
way, in that season of acute Europeanwar hysteria, across an inhospitable
terrain disjointed according to ancient tribal hatreds he would never clearly
understand, driven by something he thought was love. “Spot of Bosnophobia as
well, I shouldn’t wonder,” as Bevis explained airily.

Plum
and pomegranate trees were coming into flower, incandescently white and red.
The last patches of snow had nearly departed the indigo shadows of northfacing
stone walls, and sows and piglets ran oinking cheerfully in the muddy streets.
Newly parental swallows were assaulting humans they considered intrusive. At a
café off Katunska Ulica near the marketplace, Cyprian, sitting across a table
from the cooing couple (whose chief distinction from pigeons, he reflected,
must be that pigeons were more direct about shitting

on one), at great personal effort keeping his expression free
of annoyance, was visited by a Cosmic Revelation, dropping from the sky like
pigeon shit, namely that Love, which people like Bevis and Jacintha no doubt
imagined as a single Force at large in the world, was in fact more like the
333,000 or however many different forms of Brahma worshipped by the
Hindu—the summation, at any given moment, of all the varied subgods of
love that mortal millions of lovers, in limitless dance, happened to be
devoting themselves to. Yes and ever so much luck to them all.

He
felt a strange sober joy at the ability, which he seemed to have picked up only
recently, to observe himself being annoyed. How odd.

   
“I
say do look at Cyprian, he seems rather stunned.”

   
“Yes
are you quite all right, Cyprian?”

   
“Eh?
of course. Why shouldn’t I be.”

   
“Have
we offended you, Cyprian?” Jacintha carelessly radiant.

   
“Look
at her,” crooned Bevis, “she’s her own Ultraviolet Catastrophe.”

   
“I am
offended only by certain sorts of wallpaper,” Cyprian smiled tightly.

   
“We
always assumed you’d be about looking for us,” Bevis said.

   
Cyprian
stared back, he trusted not too rudely. “Because . . .”

“Well because you’re not one of these
bloody Theign people. Are you. If you were one of his, you’d be safely back on
some neutral station by now, Geneva, New York or whatever.”

“Oh,
Moistleigh. I was in the neighborhood, that’s all. Lovely to see you both.”
There had been a time, and not too long ago, when this sort of thing would have
promised a good week of queasiness and resentment. Instead he felt, against the
face his soul would have if souls had faces, a brisk vernal equipoise, as if he
were aloft, maintaining an angle of attack into the advance edges of a storm
none would have seen to the end of. It surprised him, and did not surprise him.

fter picking up a modest sum at the tables, Reef drifted
around Nice for a while, sitting in cafés drinking noname wine, or in hotel
bars drinking pineapple Marquises with
troissix
chasers. But he couldn’t
see himself pursuing the life of a flâneur forever. What he really needed to do
was to go out and blow something up. Clear his mind. No sooner had this thought
occurred to him than who should appear but his old Simplon Tunnel
compañero
Flaco,
even more anarchistic and dynamitecrazy than before, which was going some.

   
“Flaco!
What are you doin down this neck of the woods?”

   
“Was
back in Mexico for a while, almost got done for a oilrefinery job, had

to spend some money, get out fast. But you know who I ran
into in Tampico?

your brother Frank! or Pancho, is what they call him there.
And he said to

tell you he ‘got one of them.’ Said you would know what that
means.”

     
“Well,
old Frank. Well damn. He didn’t mention which one?”

   
“No,
that was it. He had three wagonloads of godevil squibs he wanted to

sell, you know, these little oilwell torpedos, hold about a
quart of nitro each?

Beautiful. We were in the market for some of them, he gave us
a fair price.

Buen hombre,
your brother.”

   
“I’ll
say. See him again, tell him he better be watching his ass down there.”
  
“Oh I’ll see him again. Hey!
everybody in Mexico will be seein everybody

again, know why? ’Cause everythin there is all ready to
explode! Match is lit.

I’m goin back soon’s I can.”

      
“Real
thing, this time?”

      
“
¡Seguro, ése!
lot
of
fun, too. Fun for all. You want to come along?”

   
“Don’t
know. Think I should?”

   
“You
should come. What the hell’s there to do over here?”

Well, first thing come to mind’d be
the old sorry unfinished saga, so miserably aborted in Venice, of Scarsdale
Vibe, whom Reef ought to be shadowing

right now in fact, looking for that big moment to present
itself. But since Ruperta’s exit, Reef had been working without much
information, and Vibe might not even be this side the ocean anymore. And since
the chilly parting with Kit, his heart hadn’t been that much in it either, tell
the truth
. . . .

“I’m staying in the old town here,”
Flaco said, “down near Limpia, ship’s sailing day after tomorrow, you know that
bar, L’Espagnol Clignant, you can leave a message with Gennaro.”

“It would surely be nice,
mi hijo,
”
said Reef. “Like some old
days I can almost remember.”

   
Flaco
peered at him closely. “You working a job here, is that it?”

No reason he shouldn’t confide, given
what he recalled of Flaco’s inflexible hatred of all the figures of consequence
yet to be assassinated, both sides of the Atlantic.

They sat outside a café in back of
the Square Garibaldi. “I try to avoid places like this,” Flaco muttered. “Just
the kind of bourgeois target anarchists love to bomb.”

   
“We
could find someplace else.”

“Hell, let’s trust in professional
courtesy,” Flaco said, “and the laws of probability.”

“One thing to try and keep to an
honorable deal with your dead,” it seemed to Reef, “another to just go spreading
death any way you can. Don’t tell me I’m infected with bourgeois values. I’ve
got to where I like these cafés, all this toandfro of the city
life—rather be out here enjoying it than worried all the time about some
bomb going off—” which is of course exactly when it happened, so
unexpected and so loud that for many days afterward those who survived would
not be certain it had really occurred, any more than believe someone had
actually desired to send such longevolved and dearlybought civility into this
great blossoming of disintegration—a dense, prolonged shower of glass
fragments, green and clear and amber and black, from windows, mirrors and
drinking glasses, carafes and bottles of absinthe, wine, fruit syrups, whiskey
of many ages and origins, human blood everywhere, blood arterial, venous and
capillary, fragments of bone and cartilage and soft tissue, wood splinters of
all sizes from the furniture, shrapnel of tin, zinc and brass, from torn ragged
sheets down to the tiny nails in picture frames, nitrous fumes, fluid
unfurlings of smoke too black to see through—a huge, glittering passage
skyward and back again, outward and across the street and down the block,
passing through the rays of a completely indiffer

ent noontide sun, like a long
heliograph message sent too fast for any but angels of destruction to read.

Leaving
these so abruptly wounded bourgeoisie, crying like children, children again,
with no obligation but to look helpless and pitiable enough to move those who
had the means to defend them, protectors with modern weapons and unbreakable
discipline, and what was taking them so long? As they cried, they found they
were able to look into one another’s eyes, as if set free from most of their
needs to pretend adulthood, needs in force up until what was still only a few
seconds ago.

“Flaco,
damn
that wa’n’ one of you crazy sumbitches was it?” Reef looking with
interest at the blood that seemed to be all over him. He managed to crawl out
from under what was left of the table and grab Flaco by the shirt. “Still got
your head on, all that?”

“Worse
than bein back in that tunnel,” Flaco with a big stupid grin about to start
crowing like a rooster with surprise at still being alive.

“Let’s
have a look, see if. . .” But it was not very damn hopeful. There weren’t many
dead, but enough. Flaco and Reef lifted away wreckage, beat out a couple of
small fires, found people wounded whose bleeding could be stopped with
tourniquets, one or two who’d passed into shock and had to be covered with
burned and bloodsmeared tablecloths for warmth, and figuring, about the time
the police and a few wild dogs began to show up, that they’d done what they
could, they left. An early
gregaou
had swept upon the coast, and when
the smoke had cleared some from his head, Reef thought he could smell snow in
the air.

“Some
of these
bandoleros,
”
Flaco
still grinning, “they don’t care who the hell they do this to.”

Reef
almost said, “Why?” but was suddenly dizzy and had to sit down. Everything
hurt.

   
“You
look like shit,
pendejo,
”
Flaco
advised him.

   
“That
arm of yours ain’t about to win no prizes either.”

   
“I
don’t think I broke it?” Flaco having a look—
“
¡Caray!
”

“Let’s go see the knife fella,” Reef
suggested. This was Professeur Pivoine, who was a sort of neighborhood
couturier of flesh wounds from the frequent street encounters in the Quartier
Riquier. He could take out bullets too but admitted he was less of an artist at
that.

They
found the instruments sharp and sterile and the Professeur in the mood for
medical knifeplay. Afterward Reef passed into one of those twilit states where
it seemed his brother Kit was there, hovering a foot or two in the

air and glowing in a peculiar way.

   
“I’m
sorry,” Reef tried to say, his voice paralyzed as if in a nightmare when the
light goes away and we hear a footfall and want to say “Who’s there?” but
can’t.

   
“It’s
all right,” Kit said, “you didn’t do anything wrong. Nothing I wouldn’t’ve
done.”

   
What
the fuck are you talking about? he struggled to say, I did everything wrong. I
ran away from my baby son and the woman I loved. Reef knew he was crying. All
he could have cried for, and he was crying over this. It was like one of those
orgasms early in life, a timeless event whose power can’t be measured. He shook
with it. He felt tears and snot all on his face. Kit just floated around up
there by the ceiling, going “Easy, easy” and other reassuring phrases, and then
after a while he began to fade.

Though the
outlook
for Anarchists
in a shooting revolution is never too promising, Flaco was determined to go
back to Mexico. Just before he sailed, he and Reef came limping into L’Espagnol
Clignant for a bon voyage drink. They had stickingplaster and surgical
stitching and black patches of dried blood all over them that caused Gennaro
the bartender at least a half hour’s merriment.