Speedboat (13 page)

We were not exactly hated on the island—or if we were, it was likely that everyone else was hated more. We were not exactly home-owners, not tourists, not celebrities, expatriates, or hippies, not exactly anything. We were not always there at the same time. None of us ever stayed long. We were not there out of boredom. We had all been coming there, from our separate directions, for so many years.

The first year I ever came to the island, there was no phone and no hot water. Since there was no electricity, there were no lights. I was alone; I had rented a house. During the month in which I had the house, the road was being moved. Electricity and telephones, it was said, could not be installed even in town until the road was done. My house, for some reason, was built straight down a hill, in a kind of shaft. One entered through the kitchen, the highest point, and then almost immediately fell down three flights of stairs. The walls on the sides of the stairs were covered with framed, glass-enclosed butterflies. Three mornings a week, a woman came to clean. What she spoke was not exactly Italian, not exactly Spanish, not exactly anything. It was local, a result of all the many invasions and immigrations the island had undergone since before the Crusades. She was squat and, normally, sullen. She wore a wide black skirt, a black blouse, sandals and woolen socks. The only sign of animation she ever gave occurred when she spoke of the men who were working on the road. They were from the interior. Darkly, she mentioned their violent, wrathful dispositions, their criminal natures, the atrocities it was their custom to commit. It was a matter of absolute necessity to them, she would assure me, a matter of absolute, hideous, interior, criminal necessity for these men to commit atrocities. For example, and here her own face would assume an almost maniacal slyness, for example, I might have heard chanting on certain mornings, at sunrise? I might have heard it? On such days, the men in the work crews were strangling a cat. No, she could not believe it either; the children had seen it. Here she called Antonio, her nine-year-old. Yes, he had seen it. From their interior, criminal necessity, these men required, at dawn sometimes, to strangle cats. And so, this was her normal peroration, I should take care. That was all, that was what she would say to me: I should take care.

Private Aufrichtig was the son of immigrants from Rumania. He had graduated from a yeshiva and from college in Queens. He was planning to become a C.P.A. Private Lehmann was the son of a famous novelist and an opera singer. He had gone to Exeter and Harvard. He wrote plays. Both men, one through his brother-in-law’s contacts with a local politician, the other through his father’s friendship with a retired army general, had managed to avoid the draft, with just four months’ active service in the National Guard. Their names had been jumped to the top of the lists at their local armories. There they were. At five o’clock on a morning in February, their third morning as Guardsmen, Privates Aufrichtig and Lehmann had been ordered to clean the barracks floors and stairs. They had already been working forty minutes, on two flights. The mops and brushes, even the soap and water, seemed, like the rest of the Guard equipment, worn and obsolete. Both men were haggard and tired. Both men were cold. On a step near the top landing, Private Aufrichtig turned to his colleague, sighed deeply, and spoke his first words of the morning. “Ach, Lehmann,” he said. Private Lehmann replied, without hesitation, “Ach, Aufrichtig.”

Aufrichtig, Lehmann, all the recruits at the base had been through three weeks of their training; they had marched, and stood guard, and cleaned up, and attacked, and marched more. They were tired and fit. They had also sat through evenings of lectures. On their third Thursday, they were lectured on venereal disease. There was a long talk by a sergeant. There were slides and a movie. The movie was harrowing in its physical detail. When the movie was over, the sergeant returned to the platform. “All right, men,” he said. “Now, Dessalines has had this thing, haven’t you, Dessalines? Dessalines, stand up.” A stocky recruit, looking foolish, stood up. “You’ve had this thing, haven’t you, Dessalines?” said the sergeant. “Yes, sir,” the recruit replied. “Sit down,” said the sergeant. Dessalines sat down. “All right, men,” the sergeant said. “Be alert.”

Be alert, near the army base; on the island, take care. When Lehmann, Dessalines and I were still at the same public school, Miss McKenny used to conclude each year’s American History Week, in every senior class, with a discourse. It ranged in subject from the treachery of Roosevelt in getting us into that war to save his Russian friends to the sinister effects those Russians, and their colleagues, and their co-religionists, must already have upon our thoughts. And so, class, was her yearly final sentence to us, Don’t say you have not been warned. We never said it. Nobody I ever met who grew up in the fifties, Lord knows, would have said it, could properly claim on any subject whatsoever not to have been warned.

The Europeans, having tried various spas in their lifetimes—Ischia for its mudbaths and nightlife, Baden-Baden for its hotel and waters—came to the clinic of Doctor Schmidt-Nessel out of a new conviction that the best evidence for the soundness of a cure must lie, after all, in the longevity of the man by whom it is run. Doctor Muehsam, who had died the previous summer, not of his extreme old age, but of a mysterious fall down six flights of stairs in his clinic (mysterious because, since the flights were separated by landings, Doctor Muehsam must have continued his fall around corners; also, because he had left the clinic, not to his wife, who had helped him to run it, but to his directress of gymnastics, a nurse), had disappointed them, by dying. However, he had always looked a frail and burning man. Doctor Schmidt-Nessel, who was bearded, vigorous, and by his own account well over ninety, gave no sign of ever passing on.

Schmidt-Nessel, whose waiting list was long, believed most strongly in the therapeutic, life-sustaining properties of dew—to be, in serious cases, drunk at breakfast, and in all other cases, skipped around in, on the lawn. He believed also in the efficacy of chants. As a result, just before dawn each weekday morning, all patients of whatever age lined up, barefoot, in the Alpine grass, in a sort of conga-line formation, and skipped together, chanting
Nu Na Neu Won
(short for
Nun Nahen Neue Wonnen,
Now Near New Raptures), and
Wir Stammen Von Dem Liebesquell
(We Spring From the Love Source) to the morning sun. A young woman, whose husband had sent her to the clinic because of her asthma, began to laugh at the second chant, on her second morning. She was expelled. Laughter, however, was one of Schmidt-Nessel’s remedies; he required only that it be in prescribed and chanted form. A schoolteacher, who had come because of her nerves, arrived a few minutes late for the Laugh Chant on her first morning. Not having been apprised of there being such a thing as a Laugh Chant, and hearing a unison of derisive laughter when she came through the doorway, she took it that she was being laughed at, and went to pieces entirely.

Every Tuesday night, however, Schmidt-Nessel had a special cure for the Nervous Cases. One of his beliefs was that people in the modern world do not breathe properly; that one of the ways to get them to breathe properly is to make them gasp; and that one way to make them gasp is to hit them. On Tuesday nights, Schmidt-Nessel dealt with the Nervous Cases in the cellar, where he sprayed them, one by one, with a high-powered hose. The schoolteacher, who had not been told about this ritual, either, found herself, first, lined up naked in a concrete room full of naked strangers, then alone with the doctor in a small cubicle, where water slammed her against one wall and another until she began to cry hysterically. Two patients from Albuquerque, worried, sent someone downstairs to ask what the trouble was, and whether Schmidt-Nessel was quite certain that this treatment was right. Doctor Schmidt-Nessel, sitting, immense, in his black bikini, on a cinder block in the steam-filled cubicle, did not deign immediately to answer. Later, when he was dressed, he pointed out to the couple from Albuquerque that if he were a surgeon they would not presume to put to him questions of this sort. They thought it over, and set out for home the following evening. The schoolteacher pulled herself together, presumably breathed deeply, and left by the same train. In the end, in Albuquerque, the schoolteacher married Harry’s and May’s oldest son. That’s Aldo’s friend and partner back in Hartford. Often, when we are not on this island, they are here.

There is a difference, of course, between real sentiment and the trash of shared experience. “I remember you. In first grade, you told Miss Hennebery that Dan Frayne, the class albino, and I had been whispering during Silent Meditation. The next winter, you showed me a wino exhibitionist in our local railroad station. You said he had VD, which was the day we won the war in Europe, and that my Uncle Jean, who had fought in France, would be just like him. I went away to school for some years. In 1954, you ran over my dog. We did not meet again until after college, when we were both in love for a time with the same man at the law office where I worked. Since then, you have told any number of false and vicious stories at my expense. Now we meet again,” is not to say, “Know each other? Gosh, we’ve been close for thirty years.”

So, when you find yourself sitting in a bomb shelter beside someone who refuses to share either of two blankets with a small child who is shivering; or you find yourself standing in a living room beside someone who, seeing a sad, powerful, distinguished man, recently widowed, in animated conversation with a shy, young, not quite homely woman whose husband has left her, when you find yourself standing beside someone who then swoops toward the gentleman, embraces him as though he were a lover swum out to save her from a cruel drowning, and saying “Darling, I’ve been so longing to talk to you,” protracts her embrace until she has removed him from the not quite homely woman, as effectively as a sheepdog might single out a sheep or a tackle might crowd a runner out of bounds at the sidelines—when, time and again, such a person happens to be, in fact, the same one, it is best not to think, nostalgically, “Hell, we’ve been through a lot together,” unless you are prepared to add, “You have caused, over the years, varieties of unhappiness for which I have not, perhaps, been sufficiently grateful.”

When we were still in graduate school in England, Aldo used to read his Aristotle, for a time, before he went to sleep. When he turned the bedside lamp off, he used to drop this Aristotle on the floor. A few months later, we became friends with the downstairs tenants, also students. They spoke of the eccentricities of the previous tenant of our place. He gave enormous drunken parties. He threw watermelon rinds into the garden. Once, he had himself climbed naked into the garden, and sung a song there, until the neighbors complained; two of his guests had climbed down and lifted him back through the window. It had seemed to them that this tenant never slept. “Could you just tell us, though,” Kate said, one evening after dinner, “what is that final nightly thud?”

The eight-year-old Greek boy had been sitting on the toilet since dawn. He left the door open, so that he could watch the events in the awakening house. Each morning at five, there was a tremendous braying, squawking, mewing, barking in the street. The mules were climbing the hill and annoying the cats and the chickens. The mongrel dogs all over the hillside became hysterical. The roosters, which had crowed intermittently all through the night, gained confidence that day had, in fact, arrived, and began to crow incessantly. The noise of the mosquitoes had, at least, subsided, by the time the boy assumed his watch from the toilet seat. At eight-thirty, his grandmother called him to the kitchen. What she did in the kitchen was never clear. In theory, she was the maid. She could not cook. The point of cleaning seemed in some way to escape her. The principle that you take a clean thing to wipe a dirty thing, that the formerly clean thing becomes thereby a thing to be washed in its turn—this principle was, every morning, seriously confused. In any case, when his grandmother called him, the boy went to the kitchen. I went to the lavatory and flushed. I flushed again. All over the house, people sat up, startled, in their beds. Between sixteen and twenty-two Americans had been staying there all month. Five were sleeping in the dining room, four on each of the two terraces, no less than three in any bedroom, and a few others scattered elsewhere about the house. There were only two bathrooms; water was expensive. It had been agreed that no one would ever overfastidiously flush. Few people in the house woke up much before noon. Most stayed up on the terraces until four every morning, drinking and looking at the sky. I brushed my teeth. I went to the kitchen, put on water for coffee, and got a cup of yoghurt from the refrigerator. The grandmother and the boy stood there and smiled. I wiped off the breakfast table with a sponge. I sat reading a thriller in the sun.

By nine o’clock, Lyda awoke. Lyda likes houses; she is good with them. She went directly to the kitchen, where, every morning, in a monologue, accompanied by many gestures, she gave the maid what were meant to be the household’s instructions for the day. The grandmother did not understand a word, or care to. Her daughter, whom Lyda considered less intelligent, was by this time standing in the kitchen, too. It was hard to understand on what basis Lyda made any evaluation of mother and daughter in terms of intelligence; neither had ever given a sign of comprehending even the other. But the daughter responded to any request or instruction with an expression that suggested that, while she did not understand a single word, she had never heard such degrading, stupid, insane words in her life. She conveyed this impression by causing her head to loll forward, her mouth, with the corners down, to hang open, while she exhaled in indignation and contempt. Then, she would utter her single, all-purpose syllable, “Buh.” After the daughter had done several tones of “buh,” ranging from incredulity to outrage, the mother would begin winking, with little conspiratorial smiles, while she pronounced a range of monosyllables of her own. This may have been meant to imply that the mother was, in fact, obliging. Mother, daughter, and eight-year-old were, however, consistent in never obliging Lyda, or anyone, in anything. The household lived that month on drink, the local yoghurt, sometimes eggs, and an impromptu parody of wartime rations: Spam omelet, breaded cucumbers, sprat casserole.