The Last Western (41 page)

Nothing of the superstructure of the bank now remained, but the floor was still there, and under the rubble of bricks and timber, the squares of blue and white marble were still quite beautiful, though some of them had been cracked. Under this floor there were two basements cased in steel, where the old government had once kept its money, and these basements also were intact and now served as a residence for many children who were about to die and for many old people who were also about to die. At the moment this bank basement was the only hospital Lirithiville had, and it was here that Willie found Truman, walking from dying child to dying child whimpering and moaning, his crying at last having found a sort of voice.

The children, tiny and black, were already half out of the world, but there was still enough life in some of them that they could turn their enormous eyes to Truman and see him as a giant from a strange land, a marvelous being out of a story they had heard somewhere.

Truman himself must also have thought of it this way, for when Willie found him he was moving oddly on his feet, making a little pantomime for the dying children, thinking perhaps that before they died they would see one funny thing in their lives and close their eyes believing there was joy to be found somewhere, perhaps in their sleep.

The solemnity of the dance froze Willie. It was like a dream or a story from a nursery book—the giant or the bear at play with the children. But when Truman turned in his slow, terrible ballet, Willie saw that his face was sadder and more terrible than anything he could invent for a mask, and it was not at all like the face of a giant from a nursery tale who would turn out to be friendly at the end, but only the face of a man whom the world had killed not once but a hundred times and would keep on killing until it became bored or found some other man made out of the same material.

The children’s eyes were trying to see Truman, but death was already pressing down on their eyelids, and if they smiled, it would be with the last energy of their lives.

Willie watched as long as he could stand it, then he went to Truman and embraced him even as he continued his dance, his hands going up around the huge shoulders.

“It’s all right, it is all right,” he said over and over, until Truman stopped and came back from whatever dream he had tried to make for the children, still moaning and crying and seeing that picture he had seen on the green fields of Angola.

“Come Truman,” said Willie. “Come. There is nothing more we can do here. The doctors are coming tomorrow.”

Truman shook his head, a fierce no. He looked at Willie with anger and dread. Then slowly, painfully, he bowed to the children. Raising his hand to his chest he rendered them a heart salute, long-lasting, unbearable to watch. Then he moved away, toward the door that led to the street.

Following him, Willie reached up to place a hand on his giant shoulder.

“It is all right, Truman. Terrible as it is, tomorrow the doctors come—and it will be better.”

When they reached the street, Truman stopped under a lamppost that threw a dingy yellow light over the rubble.

“Come,” said Willie.

Truman looked back at the door to the basement. Then he made a series of hurried knifelike signs that Willie could not understand.

“More slowly,” he said in sign.

All men
, Truman signified with a gesture that took in the whole human family,
all men
, he repeated, and then brought his hands to his lips,
tell lies
.

Willie considered this terrible message and then said softly, “Come, let’s go back to the hotel.”

So they walked back through the streets, passing a corpse that had once been a young man, and Truman’s moaning was like a dirge but sadder and more solemn than any ever composed by a writer of music.

At the hotel Felder was sitting up. Willie was amazed. Joto was sitting beside him. They were gazing out at the city of Lirithiville.

“Thank God, you are better, Brother Herman,” said Willie.

Both men looked up, first at Willie, then at Truman. Neither spoke.

Willie could not believe Felder felt well enough to sit up, and he tried to ask Joto a question with his eyes.

Then he saw that Joto did not want to answer any questions, and he knew then that something very bad had happened.

“What is it?” he said.

Still whimpering, Truman pulled a chair away from the wall and Willie turned around in time to see him swing it into the television set, smashing its screen and shattering glass around the room.

“Truman!” he cried.

Felder and Joto seemed not even to notice Truman’s act, but after awhile Joto made a sign to Truman and then pointed to the sofa.

Truman, still holding the chair, looked about the room. He seemed to search for other things to break. Slowly Joto got up and went to him and spoke to him and took the chair from his hands.

Willie sat down beside Felder, whose face in the lights of the city looked more than ever like a death mask.

Willie saw that Felder was drinking a bottle of the blue liquid. His great camera rested on his chest, flashing in its holster.

“What is it, Brother Herman?”

Felder said nothing, only stared at the deathbound city.

“My speech tonight? The conditions here? What?”

Felder tilted the bottle to his lips.

“Herman.”

Felder leaned forward a little. He seemed about to collapse.

“Perhaps we had all better rest,” said Willie.

But Felder made not a move.

“Tell me what it is, Herman?” said Willie.

“The ape is dead,” said Felder.

“Speak plainly.”

Felder lifted the bottle once again and this time drained it. Then he threw it through the window. The glass went flying and crashing around them again.

“For God’s sake, Herman!”

Felder struggled up from his chair. For a moment Willie feared he would jump through the window.

Joto came up behind him and pinned Felder’s shoulders.

“Goddamnit,” said Felder, “Goddamnit.” He wrestled himself free and, moving to the side of the window, grabbed the drape and hung there like a weary clown.

“What’s it all about?” Willie demanded, his voice tightening and thinning so that it was not his voice at all. “Tell me.”

Joto gazed at Herman Felder, who was hanging on the gold drape, the camera dangling from his neck.

“Tell him,” Felder gasped. “Plainly.”

Joto’s eyes shifted away.

“Whatever it is, Joto,” said Willie, “let us speak as brothers in truth and charity. It cannot be bad—because we live in love.”

“It very bad,” said Joto. “In Angola we were betrayed.”

And then Joto told Willie what Truman had seen in Luanda, how the revolutionary leaders had been murdered, how the government had lied about the peace talks. Joto spoke until he could not say any more.

Willie sat down in the chair that Herman Felder had been sitting in. He felt very heavy, as if his body had become a foreign object that someone had thrust unexpectedly upon his shoulders.

The lights of Lirithiville shone feebly before him.

Down on the corner he could see the small form of a child’s sleeping body, and even from this distance he knew that the child was sleeping death.

So it had all been a joke and a lie. So he had come to bring peace, and so men were murdered instead of the peace coming.

There was a shattered wedge of glass still sticking up in the window, and Willie could see his face in it.

And then he saw the face of the old professor leering through his own, the immemorial headmaster of the world, who had once more made his lesson clear.

He stood up suddenly. As he swung away from them, he did not hear Felder shout, did not hear Truman moan, did not feel Joto’s arms trying to restrain him as he went through the door.

He found a stairway and went down to the street where the stench of the dead brought him to. He went on for a while down a very dark street and was sick among ghastly white flowers. He realized he had come to a park.

He staggered toward a pond where a fountain gurgled and splashed in a maddening babble.

He sat by the pond, looking but not yet seeing.

There were lights strung about the fountain, and suddenly he saw his slanty eyes reflected in the water.

Then through his came other eyes, bulging from a skull.

He was sick again.

An old man approached him, teetering and swaying.

Coming out of his fugue, Willie went toward him, but the old man fell before he reached him.

Cradling his head, he tried to comfort the man and pulled away a sort of scarf that the man had wound around his face, perhaps to keep the stench of death away, and when the scarf fell away, Willie saw that it was Father Angelicus, the old priest he had met earlier in the day. He was bleeding from the mouth.

Father Angelicus said something that Willie could not understand, and then his head lolled back and he was dead.

Automatically, as if in a trance, Willie blessed him and said words of absolution. He knelt for a while in silence.

He coughed. A fit of coughing seized him.

He put his coat over the body of the dead missioner and walked past a row of corpses, stacked more or less like wood, near a trench grave that had been dug at the edge of the park.

He felt the world recede from him for an instant. Then it came back in a frieze of blue lights that were startling and insane in the night.

CAFÉ NAPOLEON, the lights said.

Under the lights Willie could make out figures seated at tables.

There was laughter in the air, the clink of glasses.

The men were wearing shiny black uniforms that caught the blue light and gleamed with a strange luminance.

These were the men of the victorious revolutionary army, and they had been drunk for many days in celebration of their conquest and their heroism and their forging of a new nation.

There was a small band playing somewhere, and the music floated out into the night, where the dead lay in the victorious air.

Willie took a step forward, and another sign, this one in green neon, caught his eye: VIN REGENT—ET LE MONDE C’EST BEAU.

Someone, a thin man wearing one of the blue-black uniforms, stood suddenly before him.

“… for the celebration?”

“What?”

“Would His Excellency pay us the honor of joining our little celebration?”

The man was a colonel Willie had seen at the television station.

“I have been with the dead,” said Willie. “The dead,” he gestured to the park beyond.

“Let the dead bury the dead,” said the colonel. “You see, I remember my Scripture. Please, join us.”

Willie turned and ran.

He ran through the park, past the cord of bodies, past Father Angelicus, past the pond, toward the hotel.

It started to rain.

The tears
of God fell upon the bodies of the dead children and fell upon the blue tiles of the Café Napoleon and Willie knelt by the shattered window in the Hotel Saint Mark and he prayed and listened and he could not hear the rain and could not hear the breathing of Herman Felder who had fallen where he had clung to the drape and could not hear or see Joto who sat sleeping in a chair by Felder’s side and could not hear Truman who whimpered continuously on his sofa because the men were filing through the green grass again, and the rain came down, washing away the blood from some of the corpses so that there were little red rivers and lakes in the streets of the capital of the model nation.

Willie knelt by the window and he did not see anything and did not think anything except what he had read when he had come back to the room, the words someone had left for him to read, there in the Guidebook still open on the floor by his side, and he did not know who had opened the Guidebook to that page but the words were in his brain and he knew the words were for him now like no words had ever been for him before.

The words were the words of Recommendation 40, written long ago by the mysterious Carlos Lull, and if Willie had read them before, and he had, it was different now because of what had happened and the words were like fire in his head and there was no doubt what they meant even if he knew he had to pray and to listen very hard about them.

The words Carlos Lull had written in 1574 were:
When the treachery of the world seems unbearable and the lies of men prove more powerful than the force of love, then to the most treacherous men submit thyself, and in the presence of the most mendacious, stand as Christ before Herod, saying nothing and inviting death that the foul enemy might be drowned in the blood of thine innocence. Thus for a time the Lie will be crushed, and even fools shall see their defeat.

There could be no question what the words meant, he thought, but still he listened and the harder he listened and the more he gave himself to the silence, the more his spirit seemed to empty itself until it became like an empty hall, and the words repeating themselves reverberated like a shout on a flat plain surrounded by high mountains.

No, there could be no question, but the more he listened, the more the echoing words confused him, and he had never had such difficulty in listening. The rain fell but he did not hear the rain falling, only the words echoing back to him, and the words of Recommendation 40 began to mix with each other and the individual words were like separate angry voices magnified as if by loudspeakers and when this shouting became very loud, Willie, out of the habit and knowledge of years of prayer-listening, knew that he had to concentrate on certain basic principles, beginning with Recommendation 19.

Recommendation 19 stipulated that when death became the application of any particular recommendation, then the believer had to question himself of every virtue (the recommendation contained an outline “inventory” of fifty-five questions) and review the listening monitions as well.

He opened the Guidebook to the listening observations that had been written by members of the Society who lived at different times and places over a period of 800 years. His eyes fell on Observation 11.

It is of the essence of the listening prayer that the listener put himself away from the pleas and suggestions of the normal self, especially when a life-giving action seems the recommended course, for the normal self will suggest many false deeds for the sake of pride or guilt removal or vengeance or for the satisfaction of desires that go back to the time before love spoke.