The Coup (28 page)

heart, to contemplate the future of his girls. The boys, he worries about. He fears they may fall, civilian casualties in the war of muchness that is certain to overtake the planet. The family lives, apparitions from a rumored continent, beyond Carabacel, where the streets become steep and the tile-topped garden walls bear a profusion of bougainvillea and a forgotten rusting pair of scissors, in the Rue de Ste.-Clement. Behind their walls they are assiduous, economical, conjugal, temperate, optimistic, dynamic, middling, and modern. The woman, it is rumored, paints. The children, the neighbors attest, take violin, anzad, clarinet, kakaki, piano, and sanza lessons. The small black man can be seen sitting at round white tables along the Quai, or a few blocks inland from the distracting, sail-speckled Mediterranean, at open-air cafes beside the river of traffic along the Esplanade de General de Gaulle. He has always a drink at his elbow, a Fanta, Campari-and-soda, or citron presse with a dash of anisette; he seems to be an eternally thirsty man. His other elbow pins down a sheaf of papers. He is writing something, dreaming behind his sunglasses, among the clouds of Vespa exhaust, trying to remember, to relive. Little news of Kush comes here. France has become what China once was-an island of perfect civilization, self-satisfying, decaying, deaf. What does it care for the smoothly continuing coups in sandy lands where once its second sons in cerulean pillbox hats chased blue-skinned Tuareg deeper and THE COUP deeper into the dunes? At an OPEC conference in Geneva, among the oil ministers taken hostage and harangued by an Austrian divinity-school dropout and his emaciated girl friend, was named one Michael Azena [misprint] of Couche. He survived the episode, though the revolutionaries smashed his wristwatch. Otherwise, Kush comes as a dusky whiff reminiscent of peanut fodder, or a green band of sunset sky toward Biot, or the taste of orange in a sip of Cointreau, or the shade of the Cinzano ombrelle overhead, faintly suggestive, when the sea breeze flaps its fringed edges, of the shade of a tent, the most erotic shelter in the world. Kush is around us in these hints, these airy coded bulletins, but the crush of present reality-the oblique temperate sun, the sensational proximity of the sea-renders these clues no more than fragile scraps of wreckage that float to the surface, fewer and fewer as the waves continue to break, to hiss, to slide, to percolate through the pebbles. All yesterdays are thus submerged, continental chunks sunk from sight that once were under our feet. How did he come here? the pink passersby perhaps ask, insulted by the negre's air of preoccupation, amid the beauties of their city, his face downcast to the cahiers in which he pens long tendrils like the tendrilous chains of contingency that have delivered us, each, to where we sit now on the skin of the world, water-lilies concealing our masses of root. Those ivho have gone before them also plotted, but Allah is the master of every plot: He knows the deserts of every soul. The man is happy, hidden. The sea breeze blows, the waiters ignore him. He is writing his memoirs. No, I should put it more precisely: Colonel Ellellou is rumored to be working on his memoirs.

The End

A Note About the Author

John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, an caret spent a year in England on the Knox Fellowship, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, to which he has contributed short stories, poems, and book reviews. He has published twenty books, including four collections of poetry and eight novels. In 1973 he travelled in Africa as a Fulbright Lecturer.