Hunger's Brides (188 page)

For the last time, I am a fisherman. It is all I do.

I'm sorry.

Sorry for me or for you? But good you understand—why don't you get a bathing costume now and a straw hat and go to Cancún? Find a young black man if that's why you stick on this coast and have your experience. Or brown or yellow or blue.
Eso no me interesa
. Just go someplace else and leave an old man to what peace he has left.
Vete de aca, señorita
.

Remember, after … my little soldier's clayfoot limp and sway … rejected postulant, repellent pirate as she stumps back down the strand, through twisted streamers of kelp and stinking seawrack. See the salt grapes bunch under clouds of beetles that swarm up into her halt shadow—the serene dance of insects in a sheen of green and lavender … feel the fade of serenity as they settle back to roost. Tiny buzzards.

Under one kelp clump a doll—pig pink, socketed head. Naked, eyeless, crew-necked in grease. Its bent doll arm a signpost, a pudgy wave way down to a rocky point scarfed in spume.

See? it says, the blind seer, Miltonic eyedoll, See all this between, all this is yours, Daughter, you have it to yourself. Sea-tilled half-acres of dead smelt, skeleton crabs. A gaza of jetsam, driftwood, junk. Improvised squalor of yard sales, racked daily up and down the continental shelf.

Green starburst and fray of a driftnet's tattered end, braided over a buoy like a smoked glass lantern. Soft underfoot a million tiny balls of tar, of black salt taffy. Taste. Walk on past a sargasso stretch of medical waste
bobbing like a little logboom. Sodden landings of dressings … crafty wink of hypodermics, threads of silk to keep you in stitches for a month.

Sit. Stop. On this oil drum … sandsunk rustpit. Sit and rest. Sun. Muddle. Slump.

Tired light, tired sun, I radiate its exhaustion, recycle its spent immensity, reflect it back across vast intergalactic gulfs. I answer, I correspond….

Sit awhile, lulled by this gulf's exhausted middling plunge. Feel the champagne crush—swift push and slide, then slow hiss of ferment. See the seethe of disintegration, hear the rheumatic indraw of breath before a dive…. And again. Endlessly. I sit and stew here in the foetid heave and pant of this Gulf, this cavernous stench everywhere clinging and close like a meat mask….

There now, see? You can still do this. A little doggerel at least. A line or two. See you are not finished, it's just a little slump, dear, cheer up.

Faraway down by the point I make for the cool shadow of the lighthouse. Into the sundial shade I step lightly into a
hot blue noon
of jellyfish streamers sinking a thousand quick hooks into one ankle. Time to rest again—right here in the sand. Doubled up in this grimy blouse, stink of black jeans bleached in salt … sickening cling at chest and and hip and knee.
Get a bathing suit a straw hat a beach blanket go to Cancún with all the other gringos
.

Sit for minutes, hours. Asphixiate eyes turned on a fixity. Open sea of writhing tin, brass sundog overhead…. I close my eyes to plumb the swells' deep boom—unchecked, unslowed battery of rams against the rock's shrouded jut. Beaten beaten again, unshaken obelisk unmoved. Point the way out. Or on, or up.

The little soldier has soldiered down to here, little toy all wound down. With this scream of silence in her ears. I tell and tell myself, little soldier you can finish this, your vast study in pointlessness. Make it here, since you can't follow anymore. Nobody knows where he sailed from here.

Last dwarf beating up her tambourine at the edge of the world, at its end.

So I crank and crank the handle, little drummer winding down her battery ever faster to exhaustion, avalanche of stone and drums. Wind her up, she really goes and hums. But something's wrong, this is not
music
—just the scream of gears, of an angry empty engine, bankrupt vacuum pump. The little coffee grinder is all used up.

Sound but no music but the silence is worse. Oh, much. It's why I try and try. But there's a spring now in the little soldier that can't be rewound, something in the clockworks cracked and sprung.

Give up.

Give up.

The little drummer says nothing in answer. After all the brave talk. Of a music of gaps … that has become this gulf.

Hop skip and trudge back up the beach, back into town, towards the sound I just can't learn to bear. That drives me from here. Hear it again from across the street.

I enter the busdepot lobby and feel it once more, as never before as never again … echoes of this new Arcady, the last Centaur fled. Cash register chimechime / barked karate KA!s, shell-shocked teens tensed over videoscreens. Electronic ball courts / bright mazes unravelling at insane velocities / simulate bomb-runs over Icaria—soft puppy sway / buck and twitch of thin hips. See the dark faces lit with thin rapture, then despair … suddenfaded in an ebb. Now
here
is a music box—Again! Feed the machine another token of cancelled will. Feed the whole. Feed the hole again.

And again!—renewed the fuedal duellings with alien polymorphs! renewed the camaraderies of a multi-racial Ninja society. Clatter of burst urns, gattle of gun / concertina of heretical wails, sobbed shouts-unmelodious … score the endless conquest of this last howling wilderness.

In us.

Stand fast little soldier, I tell myself, just another moment, here in the field tent where the maps are spread. Pick a destination. Scan the vast mural of Yucatán, pyramid cities painted across one whole wall, childlike as nursery clouds. Anywhere but here. Stand—eyes dilated fixed—stand it another minute if you can, under the television bolted to the sound-conducting ceiling tiles—miracle of acoustical technology piped direct to your room—and choose: Uxmal, Edzná, Palenque, Cobá, Tulum …

Deep Vadervoice
boom
of station identification:
This is CNN
. Call letters of the Death Star. I flinch but hold my ground as the Network tolls out its bellicose countdown. To the glorious four-year anniversary. Do not adjust your set. As we, united, free, mark this Olympian interval since the last jihad, hour of Baghdad. Remember '91?—remember the Gulf. Lest we forget, just four shopping days left to Armagedon, three two one: January 16th 1995, let's all sing auld lang syne. Hand out the duncecaps with the elastic chin straps, the
sambenito
lifevests. Slip them
on just in time to catch the burst of Disney fireworks over the battlements. Holy Reruns of the Alliance Strikes Back. Against another Holy Land, coating another oily gulf in its extreme unction. While we, lion-eyed, lounged on couches like Persians.

Quick
choose
, what can it possibly matter now?—Uxmal, Palenque, Cobá, Tulum.

But I could have taken even this—that all the screens in this room look the same—wall to wall floor to ceiling. Boys with rayguns, even the salon of talking heads with cathode-ray tans. The same faces avid with despair. Same cheap last effects. Same bomb sites superimposed on an eye ever searching a lost centre … grainy steadycam of high-altitude death impending. I could have stayed and finished, but for this one sound, that again and again drives me from the Black Room.

It is these voices.

This cheap electronic opera of video moans, lobe death of attenuated souls … this choir rising up through the floor of my room in a long, expiring groan. Sobbed chorus of unending disenchantment. These breathless, despairing, unpausing moans.

Palenque, Cobá, Tulum.

This is why I can't finish here. This opera, that breaks my heart. Somehow, still, this miracle…. But how can it? How does it go on and on? What does it want that still it pipes and drums? Why won't it just stop?

This heart.

Palenque, Tulum.

Pick anywhere, Heart.

Tulum.

S
        

H
E FLIES IN FROM
L
ONDON
. The taxi driver consults him on matters of prosperity and international finance, seems to think he must be an economist. The man in turn wonders if it is his bad Spanish.

At the conference welcome desk he appears only mildly angry to have been omitted from the list of registrants, pays or repays the fees, insists on eventual reimbursement. He asks for a tag please to be typed, gives the name Professor Douglas (John) Gordon. He has been to many conferences, attempts to blend in. He has been to too many conferences, knows he does not. Within an hour he begins to wonder why he has left London, flown ten hours to Mexico without a reservation, at a cost of two thousand dollars. The dollars are American, but things back home are pointing towards a handsome settlement. Or prison. As he strolls around the convent, it is not long before a purpose comes. He has come to find a woman named S and fuck her. It is all he can think of, it is the least he can do.

In the first two days he meets dozens of women of the right age. Registrants and presenters, employees and professors of the University of the Cloister of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. He begins to see the joke, or one. Sabina, Silvia, Serena, Stefana … But it is not long before he finds her. There are few female lecturers on the history of Medicine, only so many doctors S taking a turn in the infirmary.

He sleeps in her house, on the couch one night, then in a guest room, her bed. He stays through Holy Week. He likes the quiet streets. She takes him to a district called the Countess, with restaurants of some refinement, elegant diners on terraces, before them valets, bootblacks, strolling guitarists. On several occasions he has seen one stylish client or other take food and drink, gingerly, careful of a bulky cotton dressing just above the lip. It is perhaps a district of the accident prone, he offers. Perhaps, but those are not accidents.
El bique
. Nose jobs. Will she have one? Her eyes shine. She is beautiful, her nose is ethnic, powerful. The man understands. A fine line, it might leave her merely pretty. She corrects him, No, Professor Gordon. After one of those, just whose nose is one to follow?

Her black eyes are bright and steady, slow to leave his.

They go to the Museum of Anthropology. Carvings, a calendar, sculptures unlike anything he was prepared to see. It is enough to make one doubt photography. Then the pyramids, then several such day trips. Once to a town in the mountains. He has admitted he likes mountains. At a restaurant in the market in the mountain town they watch a pair of young lovers having perhaps a first argument. He has seen them earlier, getting out of a new Jeep, spotless, red. The Spanish is too fast, the music too loud, but it appears her heart is being broken, the way they break in pop songs. He takes in the boy's angry arrogance, her pure absorption in the pain of the moment, of her commitment … to love, no doubt. But it is mostly the song he thinks of, there is something about it. S too is watching them, perhaps following the argument. After a moment, she tells him the song is quite popular among the students. An African man, he thinks, singing a duet with a woman, maybe American. Something about a quantity of seconds, then something incomprehensible, beautifully sung. Back in the city in the evening, the man and S buy a juice from one of dozens of vendors with a hand press and a shopping cart full of oranges. On a whim he asks to see the Auto Museum as he pays for her drink.