The Man Within My Head

Video Night in Kathmandu

The Lady and the Monk Falling Off the Map

Cuba and the Night

Tropical Classical

The Global Soul

Abandon

Sun After Dark

The Open Road

I
was standing by the window in the Plaza Hotel, looking out. Below—ten stories below—I could make out round-faced women in ponchos standing on the sidewalk of the city named for peace and renting out cellphones to passersby. At their sides, sisters (or could it be daughters?) were sitting next to mountainous piles of books, mostly advising pedestrians on how to win a million dollars. Along the flower-bordered strip of green that cuts through Bolivia’s largest metropolis, a soldier was leading his little girl by the hand, pointing out Mickey and Minnie in Santa’s sleigh.

The skies were tumultuous this midsummer afternoon. In parts of the city it seemed to be raining, and shacks cowered under shades of grey and black; in others, great shafts of light broke through the swollen clouds as if to announce some heavenly arrival. Young couples brushed shoulders as they sauntered down a narrow boulevard at whose end seemed to loom a snowcap, rising to nineteen thousand feet. Everything seemed small, distinctly fragile in this elemental landscape.

I drew the curtains and fumbled my way across to my bed. I
fell asleep erratically, constantly in this thin-aired climate, and when I emerged, I stepped out of dreams of a many-chambered intensity I seldom knew at sea level. I couldn’t tell if a minute had passed—or an hour—when I got up now, but as I scrambled out of my bed, I made my way to the desk in one corner and began to write, unstoppably. I had nothing I needed to write—I’d come here seeking a break from my desk—but now the words came out of me as if someone (something) had a message urgently to convey.

A boy is standing by a window at his school—this is what I began to transcribe—as the last parental car disappears down the driveway. He goes back to his bed and tries to prepare himself for the next twelve weeks of what can seem like hand-to-hand combat. It’s no good feeling sorry for yourself; that will give the others an opening. He has to use the only thing he has—his mind—to conquer the environment around him.

Twelve weeks isn’t so long, he thinks; it’s only eighty-four days. And twenty-one days ago doesn’t seem so long at all. He just has to go through that four times. Besides, three days is nothing, and if he can endure that twenty-eight times …

But things will not be so easy this term. In the holidays a friend of his mother’s—from her school, a hundred years ago—had come to visit and the mothers (knowing nothing) had suggested he play with the woman’s son. But the boy turned out to be a classmate of his, so now both of them were scarred by an association. It was hard enough to protect just yourself.

Around him, as he tries to magick the numbers down, come the sounds of everyday. Boys are sniffling under their covers, and he can hear others tiptoeing across to another bed
to whisper something to an ally. A master paces outside, his steps recalling to them the tennis shoe he’s ready to use on any malefactor. The previous Sunday a man from Salisbury had come to chapel and said that all of them had a Father in Heaven who was waiting to admit them to Eternity. But every father he knows has just vanished down the driveway, and Eternity is precisely what he’s trying to make go away.

W
hat was going on here? I put down my pen and stared at what I’d done, as if it were something I’d found rather than composed. I’d been at a school akin to this thirty years before—the emotions weren’t entirely foreign to me—but why was the main character in the sketch called “Greene,” as if he had something to do with the long-dead English novelist? Graham Greene had written, near the end of his life, about how he lay in bed at school and tried to face down the “twelve endless weeks till the holidays”; he sometimes wrote to his American mistress that he was counting down the days till they met, as if he was in school again.

But school had mostly nurtured in him a longing to be alone and a sympathy for the oppressed. Why couldn’t I have used the name “Brown”—or “Black” or “White” or “Grey”?

A knock came on the door, and I opened up to see a middle-aged chamberman staring back at me, extending a tank of oxygen. He’d appeared at my door three hours before, impassive under his mop of dark hair, with a tray of candies in the shape of watermelon slices. Was it the ten thousand feet altitude that made me not myself like this? The five or six cups of coca tea
I’d drunk this morning, from the thermos set out in the lobby to help newcomers adjust to the heady atmosphere?

Why had I suddenly remembered, this morning, how my father once, eyes alight and regularly magnetic, had broken into torrents of infectious laughter when the Mother Abbess in
The Sound of Music
had burst into “Climb Every Mountain”? Forty years on, in a very different land, I’d heard myself do the same at exactly the same point in the story.

I looked down again and saw the name in my handwriting: “Greene.” The novelist had never even come to Bolivia, so far as I knew. Was it only through another that I could begin to get at myself?

I
drew back the curtains and, as the light came in, recalled that the same thing, weirdly, had happened three years before, pretty much to the day: I’d taken my mother to Easter Island, at the end of the last millennium, so we could get away from frenzied talk about Y2K in the presence of stone enigmas casting long shadows across great patches of grass. Though far from Catholic ourselves, we’d decided to go to Sunday Mass in a little church in the main town: how often would we get to see a service on Easter Island? Pretty altar girls walked down the aisles, dipping blue collection bags in front of us, as if foraging for goldfish. A priest at the front threw his arms out so we could see the rongorongo symbols on his white robe. Jesus above the altar hung outstretched as if he were just another stone totem, commanding respect with his silences.

We headed back to our simple motel, set beside the black
volcanic rocks against which the surf pounded and subsided, with nothing to be felt but Pitcairn Island, thirteen hundred miles away. My mother retired to take a nap; I, for no reason I could tell, went out to the green lawns behind our sliding doors, bringing a chair from my nearly empty room, and began to write. About a young man in Italy who becomes a priest, dreaming of bringing comfort to the afflicted and light to the darker places in the world. He’s sent to the Pacific, famously fertile ground for missionaries, and there, very soon, on Easter Island, he gets converted himself, till soon he is sitting on a terrace with his cocktail, while the children he has made with a pretty island girl play around his feet. His only hope is that Rome will never find out.