Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (58 page)

“All right, I get it. You’re offering
to trot out the Snake. Forgive me. My rooster brain jumped the conclusion
fence. But, Domino, think about it: I used to be in the CIA. I ate secret
documents for breakfast. I’ve handled more secret documents than Maria Une has
handled chickpeas. What gives you the idea that I might drool on the Persian at
the prospect of seeing another one?”

She sighed. “I, also, must be guilty
of the wishful thinking.” She sighed again. “It’s just that you appeared to
have at least a small bit of interest in the matter.”

“What matter is that?”

“The matter of the lost prophecy of
Our Lady of Fatima. It isn’t lost, you see. We have it.”

As October picked up speed, dragging
its grape skins behind it, daytime temperatures had become marginally less
sizzling, the nights increasingly chilly. Switters, who hated the sight of
gooseflesh (had found it pathological even prior to being subjected to the old
crone’s naked parrot in Lima), pulled a wool rug up to his chin as he propped
himself against the tower-room wall and lit the last of the five cigars that
had come in the most recent Damascus delivery. “Mmm,” he hummed. “Mmm. Yes. A
cigar is a banana for the monkey of the soul.”

Domino was the only lover he’d ever
had who didn’t giggle almost automatically at his pronouncements. He wasn’t
sure if that was a character flaw on her part or further evidence of her good
sense and substance. More naked than any parrot could ever hope to be, even if
plucked and singed, even if boiled and eaten, she stood in a far corner,
washing her hands in a ceramic jar kept there for the purpose. He blew a series
of smoke rings in her direction, jabbing an index finger through the center of
each one as it floated away. “The Zen art of goosing butterflies,” he said.

It was too dark in the room to
ascertain if she smiled, but she definitely didn’t giggle. “Think about my
proposition,” she said.

He
had
thought about it. He
was
still
thinking about it. He could smoke a cigar, make oblique
remarks, admire her silhouette, and think about her proposition all at the same
time. It was easy. Who did she think he was? Gerald Ford? John Foster Dulles?
Pbthbt!

In truth, Switters was not
overwhelmingly interested in the third and final prophecy of the Fatima
apparition. He was curious about most of life’s tics, quirks, mysteries, unreasonable
passions, aberrations, fetishes, enduring enigmas, and odd-duck jive, and his
encounter with the Fatima legend a year earlier in Sacramento certainly had
piqued that curiosity, but it would have been difficult if not impossible to
separate clearly his interest in things Fatiman from his interest in things
Suzian. Had his little stepsister not been so keen on the subject, he
doubtlessly would have rolled the Fatima story about in his brain tumbler a few
times and then let it pass. On the other hand, in a universe he knew to be
founded on paradox and characterized by the interpenetration of sundry
realities, he didn’t believe in coincidence. Although it was an era of
resurgent Marianism, a recent survey had found that 90 percent of Roman Catholics
remained unfamiliar with this Fatima business, and the fact that it had
resurfaced so dramatically in his own life—in a setting occupied by Matisse’s
live blue nude and provided, at least in the beginning, by Audubon Poe’s
provider, Sol Glissant, well, these compounding synchronisms left him scant
choice but to take it seriously.

Speaking of blue nudes, Switters
couldn’t help being struck at that moment by the similarity between the
remembered figure in the painting, with its sapphire domes and midnight naves
(a rambling plastic Gaudi cathedral pumped so full of huckleberry cream that
its stained-glass windows were bulging out), and Domino’s bluish silhouette as
it loomed now in that tower lit only by starlight. In shadowy profile, bereft
of flaw and detail, the ex-nun’s body could have belonged to the queen bee of
one of those North African harems that had set Matisse’s thyroid and brushes to
throbbing—although it could just as easily, he supposed, have stepped down from
a 1940s jungle movie poster: an untamed, thunder-titted She who ruled tribes of
awestruck warriors and consorted with panthers.

The minimalist spectacle of Domino’s
maximalist contours was enough to justify his decision to tarry at the oasis
awhile longer. But there were other reasons (or excuses), as well. Chief among
them was the trouble then brewing between Syria and Turkey. Having protested
for a long time that Syria was arming and financing PUK separatists who were
seeking to carve an autonomous Kurdish state out of sections of Turkey and
Iraq, an angry Turkish government had finally dispatched troops to the Syrian
border. Syria responded in kind. Now, according to the Net, armies were massed
along both sides of the Turkish-Syrian frontier, and the border was closed
tighter than a young girl’s diary. Since Turkey was the only country from which
he could legally fly home, Switters was rather trapped. Normally, the situation
would have turned his crank—there were few things he loved more than that sort
of challenge—but in a wheelchair or on stilts? . . . He could be reckless, but
he wasn’t stupid.

Any hope that Poe might pick him up
somewhere along the Mediterranean coast was dispelled when Bobby informed him
(in their personal Langley-proof e-mail code) that
The Banality of Evil
was plying the Adriatic and was likely to remain in those waters as long as the
Balkan horror show shrieked on unabated.

What the hell? Switters had no great
reason to rush his departure, did he? Suppose he actually could locate Today Is
Tomorrow again and convince him to cancel the taboo: what then? He lacked
prospect for gainful employment anywhere on the planet, and out here under the
vast desert sky, where primitive equalities prevailed, the notion of completing
his doctoral thesis had come to seem downright silly. That the human species
was apparently evolving beyond the civilized limitations of analogic
perceptions, heading toward a
Finnegans Wake
state in which its thinking
and acting would manifest in terms of perpetually interfacing digital
clusters—well, that phenomenon continued to fascinate him, but he could ponder
it without interruption beneath the pomegranate trees at the oasis; he didn’t
require academic sanction or societal reward: “Having played for many years by
our rules, Mr. Switters, you may henceforth call yourself
Doctor
, though
please bear in mind the title is solely meant to massage your ego and does not
qualify you to take Wednesday afternoons off or practice gynecology.”

Moreover, although he couldn’t begin
to explain why or how exactly, he still believed he was gaining some special
insights into existence by observing it from two inches above the ground. If
nothing else, a man on stilts was a man apart. So what if he was noticed only
by a gaggle of aging ex-nuns?

Thanks to President Hafez al-Assad’s
cordial relations with Fidel Castro, fine Havana cigars were available in
Damascus—but only at the luxury hotels. Transdesert truckers did not shop at
luxury hotels. Switters had been brought cheroots manufactured in the Canary
Islands. Like all machine-rolled cigars, they were in a hurry to burn
themselves up, a kind of vegetative death wish, a plant-world version of
self-destructive rock stars. Still, like those fey rockers, they had talent
while they lasted. Switters spewed a stream of richly flavored suspended carbon
particles toward the Milky Way, obscuring about three thousand of those five
thousand stars to which human vision was said to be limited. And he said, “So,
how soon can I peruse the Fatima Lady’s climactic fortune cookie?”

Domino was drying her hands. “How
soon? Were you not listening to me? I said, Christmas Eve. If you stay, I will
give you the Virgin’s message on Christmas Eve. It will be apropos, you know, a
kind of—”

“Yeah, I see. A gift for the man who
has everything.” Exaggerating his pucker, he blew a smoke ring so large a
Chihuahua could have jumped through it. “Very well. I’ll Adam this Eden for
eight more weeks. And you’ll guarantee you’ll show me the goods?”

“I promise on the Holy Bible.” Then
she added for his benefit, “And on
Finnegans Wake
.”

They sealed the bargain with a
purposeful kiss, at the conclusion of which he gloated, “I outwitted you on
that one, Sister, my love. I would have agreed to stay and celebrate Christmas
with you even if you hadn’t promised to show me the prophecy.”

“No, you big imbecile,
I
outwitted
you
. I would have shown you the prophecy even if you had not
consented to make me a happy holiday. I would have shown it to you tomorrow or
the next day. Now, you have to wait until Christmas.”

He pretended to be miffed. “How
typical of you mackerel-snapping snafflers. I should have known better than to
deal with a tricky theophanist. I’ve become yet another sad victim of simony.”
She ignored his ostentatious flaunting of vocabulary, and he became sincere.
“But why, Domino? Why would you want to share your big holy secret with a
virtuoso sinner like me?”

After a long pause, she answered,
“Because the nature of Mother Mary’s last words at Fatima has troubled us.
We’ve never been quite sure if we interpret them correctly. Your—how do you
call it?—
input
might be helpful. You look at religious issues in a most
unique—What are you doing?”

Switters was pretending to write on
an imaginary notepad with an invisible pencil. “I may have been fired by the CIA,
but I still moonlight for the Grammar Police.
Unique
is a unique word,
and Madison Avenue illiterates to the contrary, it is not a pumped-up synonym
for
unusual
. There’s no such thing as ‘most unique’ or ’very unique’ or
‘rather unique’; something is either unique or it isn’t, and damn few things
are. Here!” He mimed tearing a page from the pad and thrust it at her. “Since
English is not your first language, I’m letting you off with a warning ticket.
Next time, you can expect a fine. And a black mark on your record.”

Domino pretended to take the
imaginary citation. Then, miming every bit as well as he, she “tore” it into
shreds. As she tossed the nonexistent confetti into his face, he had to fight
to conceal his admiration.

True to her word, she would not show
him the fabled third prophecy until Christmas. Why? Not because of peer
pressure. The Pachomian sisterhood was far from unanimous in its enthusiasm to
grant to its unruly male guest the privilege of handling, reading, and
discussing the transcription around which their order had coalesced
(ultimately, their custodianship of the Fatima revelations had knit them
together more tightly than their advocacy of women’s rights or even their
devotion to St. Pachomius), yet there was none among them who would oppose the
will of Domino and the abbess. After all, if it wasn’t for Masked Beauty, there
would be no transcript, no oasis, no Pachomian Order. Privately, some feared
that their much adored Sister Domino had fallen prey to Fannie’s demon, but
they’d respect her wishes, Asmodeus or no Asmodeus.

Nor did Domino hold off out of
mistrust. As inexperienced as she was in the area of romance, she knew in her
bones that, for better or for worse, Switters cared too much to deceive her. He
would never read the prophecy and then skip out.

In fact, twice during November she
offered to go ahead and show him the prophecy; she was becoming a bit anxious
to get his reaction. Switters, however, insisted on waiting. He reminded her
that they had made a pact. They must honor that pact, he told her, they must
honor it even if it was frustrating, unnecessary, or outright senseless to
honor it, because not to honor it would create more quaggy willy-nilliness in
the world. They had to honor it because in honoring it, there was a certain
purity.

That was what had convinced her to
wait. That was what had touched her. That was what had made her want to want
what he wanted. It was the way that he said “purity.”

She would not show him the prophecy
until Christmas, but she felt free to provide some background, and he felt free
to receive it. She told it to him the way that Masked Beauty had told it to
her.

Sometime during 1960, Pope John XXIII
summoned the bishop of Leiria to the Vatican. The Portuguese bishop, whose
diocese included Fatima, was barely off the flight from Lisbon when the supreme
prelate drew him aside and whispered his intentions to open the envelope in
which Lucia Santos (then Sister Mary dos Dores) had sealed Our Lady of Fatima’s
final prophecy. Assuming that Lucia had written down the prophecy in
Portuguese, Pope John was going to need the bishop’s assistance.

That afternoon, following an austere
private lunch, the two men retired to the papal study, prayed to God and to
Mary, and slit open the envelope (which had been held for three years in the
study wall safe) with a jewel-encrusted blade. The contents, surprisingly
brief, were, indeed, handwritten in Lucia’s native tongue. At that point, the
bishop confessed what the pope already had deduced from their unsteady lunchtime
conversation: his Italian was more than a little rusty. The pope had no
Portuguese at all.

It was imperative that the
translation be exact, every particular fully rendered, no subtlety or shade of
meaning glossed over or ignored. The bishop had a suggestion. He was fluent in
French, could read it as precisely as he read Portuguese. Suppose he translated
the prophecy into French? His Holiness grumbled that that was a start, then
left the study briefly to make a telephone call.