Stolen Pleasures (28 page)

“The youngest and, of course, the most beautiful. She has hair as black as the wings of the devil, way down to her knees.”

“Does he live, as they say, in Mexico?”

“As they say.”

“Born there?”

“It is his refuge.”

“Ah, refuge, yes.” He nodded as if he knew from what pursuit, from what tempest.

“You have heard the latest theory?”

“Which one is that?” asked Klipspringer.

“The Czechs advanced it first, after which the French translated it, then the Germans from the French, and the Mexicans from the Germans. The theory is that he killed a man. In an elevator in New York City, forty years ago. The man found in the elevator had on him the papers of a young Czech writer. But the dead man did not comply with the Czech's description. Not the age, nothing. What, then, happened to the young Czech writer? He becomes J. Kruper and flees to Mexico.”

“Did he do it?” Klipspringer asked.

“He doesn't say.”

“No, of course not,” he agreed, in hasty apology.

“I myself don't believe that he did,” said the young man. “In the first place he is not a Czech.”

Klipspringer waited in silence for further revelations. Speculation was appropriate in a conversation with someone who had never met Kruper, but with a friend of the man it was like asking for betrayal.

“If you care to meet him and are someday going down to Mexico, as far as Cuernavaca, say, I will be happy to give you a letter of introduction,” said the young man, still gazing out over the bobbing heads.

 

WHILE THE YOUNG man and his woman companion sipped cognac at the bar, after a supper as Klipspringer's guests, the writer excused himself and went up to his room to telephone his wife in Carmel. In his coat pocket was a letter to Kruper that the young man had composed at the supper table; it possessed for Klipspringer as great an urgency as a summons from Kruper. Ila, his third wife, was called to the phone by her daughter from a previous marriage. She agreed that he ought not to postpone the trip even for a day, for who knew where the man might be the day after that? She urged him to accept as true the young man's claim, for it was entirely possible that he, Klipspringer, was the one to persuade Kruper to reveal himself, he was the one to write Kruper's biography, and the young man had sensed this possibility. She could see the book jacket now: Kruper photographed at last and with Klipspringer,
his reverent biographer, beside him, both men under an arcade at Kruper's villa.

After he had reserved a seat on the plane to Mexico City and replaced the phone in its cradle, he continued to lie on the bed, his shoes off, his shirt unbuttoned, the cool air from the louvered windows wafting to him the laughter and music from the night and the pool. The numbness, the faint buzz in his right ear seemed to be due not to his hour long conversation with his wife so much as to his surprising decision to believe the young braggadocio.

From out in the pool, which he knew to be beautiful in its illumined state, green-blue and filled like a harem pool with women of various shades of brown from the desert sun, the voice of one woman came to him above the others, this one both sweet and brassy. If he strolled out from his room to the pool, all of them, each in her strategic time, would turn to gaze at him, having heard that he was at the inn and recognizing him. And if it was what he wanted, this recognition, then he ought to go and claim it, it was his. But once his clothes were off he did not reach for his swim trunks on the back of a chair. Instead, he bent to his suitcase, found his leather kit containing a miscellany of personal things that he had listed somewhere in his novel, among them Band-Aids, two extra pens, flashlight batteries, aspirins, cufflinks, eyedrops, sleeping pills, and earplugs. In the years before he overcame his fear of barbiturates, a fear he had examined in his novel, he had used earplugs on noisy nights away from home. He had not used them for years, but now he stood before the mirror of the dresser to watch himself swallow a pill with habit's ease and also slip a pink plug into each ear.

Since he did not care to go to the trouble of transferring to the bus, he proposed to the driver of the taxi carrying him from the airport in Mexico City that he continue to be carried on to Cuernavaca, and so he was—out through the city and up into the mountains above deep, immense valleys from which wisps of smoke rose high into the silent afternoon. They arrived in a rosy sunset. He took rooms in a small and exclusive hotel and ate his supper in the garden where peacocks and cranes stalked over the lawn and flew up with a clapping of wings to roost on the lower limbs of the trees whose large, fire-colored blossoms fell to the ground with the sound of a small, soft fruit. The moon rose, a warm erratic wind rose, and excited by the enchanting conditions which he interpreted as propitious he strolled out through the lobby to the taxis. The woman in the café, where he asked to be driven, was to act as his liaison with Kruper. Twelve years ago, even five years ago with three novels to his name, he could not, he mused, have approached so confident of his welcome as now. Surely a man of wide and eclectic ranging through the literature of the world, classic and current, Kruper would recognize the name of Klipspringer and think twice, think six times, before turning him away.

“¿Aquí?”
he asked as the taxi swung up before the open door of a dim, hole-in-the-wall café with three tables, lopsided cloths, and four customers, three of whom were sprawled around one table.

“Aquí,”
said the driver. On the other side of the street rose a massive stone wall, along the top of which men sat with their backs to the street, or, since they were so high, to the night sky.
“A la izquierda,”
said the driver,
“es el Palacio de Cortés.”
So it was obvious the café to the right was his destination. He had expected it to
be brighter, cleaner, but might it not, just as well, be dingy and with a narrow staircase in the kitchen leading up to a room where the great man paced the floor? Or was he the heavy, elderly man alone at a table, with his gray hair shaven close and his jowls hanging over the collar of his soiled shirt and his small, pale eyes fixed in austere curiosity on Klipspringer's head poking out the taxi window?

Shaken by the conviction that the man was Kruper, Klipspringer sat down at the empty table, unable to speak, likening his abashment to that of a young novice ushered into the presence of Conrad. A number of flies flew up from the cloth, and beyond their darting bodies he saw emerge from the kitchen a girl who met the description of Kruper's youngest daughter given him by the young man in Phoenix. One thick braid hung over a shoulder and lay on her large bosom that swelled against the embroidered blouse.

He ordered a beer. Then, before she turned away, he detained her with an appealing face. If she did not recognize it, she would at least suspect that he was somebody of intelligence, somebody who intended no flippancy, no flirtation either with her or with life. “You are
amiga con Felipe
?” he asked, limited by his scanty knowledge of her language. “I am also a friend of his.”

The name of the young man caused such an agitation of her plump face that he could not make out whether she was smiling or weeping.

“He told me,” he said,
“su padre es
J. Kruper.”

“Who is her father?” the man with the jowls demanded, his voice on guard, deep and rumbling, and, as if he had commanded it to be silent, the far-off music from the band pavilion in the plaza ceased at once on a flourish of trumpets.

“Forgive me,” Klipspringer began. “I am looking for her father. You are her father?”

With the dignity, the expressionless calm of a man who has sired twenty children, and an unknown number beyond that, he nodded. Unable, any longer, to contain the emotion aroused by the name of Felipe, the girl ran into the kitchen.

“Then you are J. Kruper?” Klipspringer asked.

With his forearms on the table, the man meditatively turned his bottle of beer between his palms, taking the time that a dog takes to turn around a few times and lie down. “No, but I am his brother,” he said and smiled a narrow smile of yellow teeth and gaps.

Klipspringer introduced himself, observing, as they both rose halfway from their chairs and gripped hands, that his name meant nothing to the man.

“He is here?” asked Klipspringer.

The brother shook his head as one does humorously for a child who has asked for too much.

“Where then?”

The brother shrugged. “The last letter is from Ixtilxochitchuatepec, but that means nothing. By now he may be back in Veracruz.”

“Veracruz is his home?”

“Let us say,” said the brother, “that the earth is his home,” and smiled again his narrow smile. “I am sure you know,” he said, gesturing Klipspringer to sit closer, an invitation Klipspringer accepted at once, “that many countries claim him as their own, each one claims his place of birth. But if the earth is his home, what is the difference where he first opened his mouth to bawl?”

“Yourself, you're from.... Let me guess,” said Klipspringer as if for camaraderie's sake alone.

“Amsterdam,” said the brother. “Our father was a shipwright. It was a big family, he was the third from the oldest and I was the third from the youngest, so if you want to know what kind of child he was, if he whined or if he laughed, if he did good deeds or sulked in a cupboard, I can't tell you. At the age of ten he shipped as a cabin boy and by the time I went to seek my own fortune he was already away for many years. But I met him again on a freighter to the East Indies. To make a long story short, the ship went down in the Atlantic. The captain and the rest of the crew all went down except my brother and myself.”

Klipspringer sat in confounded silence. The story the man had told derived from one of the early novels of Kruper. Was the man Kruper or Kruper's brother or simply a reader of Kruper's novels?

“You are yourself a writer?” the brother asked.

Klipspringer nodded, reaching for a cigarette in his breast pocket.

“And what is it you write about?” asked the brother, offering a cigarette to Klipspringer and lighting it and his own with a finesse that was strange for the large blunt hands whose cuts were filled with black grime. Or was it ink?

At the risk of sounding melodramatic, hoping that the man would accept his words as honest and significant, he answered, “Of my life.”

“Of your life,” the brother mused, seriously enough, impressed enough, settling back and stretching his short, heavy legs in their baggy trousers. He gazed at Klipspringer's clean-shaven plump
cheeks and, for a longer time, at his coat, at its fine cloth of subtle stripes. “Not every man has the courage to turn over his own stones,” said the brother. “And because you have that courage I will give you the name of the woman who translates my brother's works. Since she does not care to be tracked down by searchers after Kruper, her name never appears on his books. She lives not far from here but you must phone to set an hour as she is a doctor and has many patients. It's possible that my brother is with her now for a few days and—who knows?—he may be acquainted with your life and rush out to embrace you.”

On the paper that Klipspringer slipped across the table, and with Klipspringer's pen, the brother wrote the woman's name in a laborious script.

 

AT FOUR THE following afternoon, the hour of his appointment, Klipspringer, in high, anticipatory spirits, pulled the rope to the side of a small, carven door and set a large bell to clanging above his head. The street on which the taxi had left him was narrow, full of stones and ruts. A manservant, an Indian, admitted him, and Klipspringer entered a tiled hallway whose opposite end opened into a small courtyard struck with sunlight. On the straight-back chairs in the hallway several Indian women waited, wrapped in brown and black rebozos, barefoot, one with a child in her lap.

He waited for the
doctora
on a bench in the courtyard and was certain that the woman whose simple and benevolent household this was would not fail to respond to his plea. He began a conversation with the manservant, and since the servant was attending to the luxuriant plants that edged the courtyard, watering
them with a hose and picking off beetles, Klipspringer described for him the garden of the hotel. He knew the place, the servant said. The
doctora
's husband, the servant went amiably on, had collected many plants on long trips up into the mountains and into the jungles, accompanied by the
doctora
who took care of sick Indians. Klipspringer, at this unfolding, was struck by the conjecture that the
doctora
's husband was Kruper, whose avocation explained the man's firsthand knowledge of the Indians and the country's varied terrain. A great, unbounded desire to find Kruper was now in possession of Klipspringer. If his search had begun from curiosity alone, it had become a matter of immeasurably more than that, and at this point he was convinced that Kruper was in one of the rooms that faced the courtyard, perhaps even inspecting him from behind a curtain, and that this was the arcade, shading the windows, under which their picture was to be taken together.

Quick of step and apologetic for her delay, the
doctora
sat down beside him on the bench. She was once a comely woman; her large, dark eyes were evidence enough. He was confused by her, attracted by her remaining beauty and rebuffed by her own unconcern with it. She was untidy, her hair in a straggling knot and a spot or two of some tincture on her blouse.

“Your husband is a botanist?” he asked.

“He is dead,” she said.

“Was he Kruper?” he cried.

“No, he was not Kruper, he was an English botanist,” she assured him, and Klipspringer was both relieved and surprised at his error.