In settling personal feuds, the Guanches practiced a custom that, as recorded by various historians, seems to me particularly disturbing. When two villagers had a falling out, the whole community would accompany them to a special enclosure, in whose center were two raised stones set in the earth at a certain distance from one another. Armed with small sacks of rocks, the enemies faced off from atop these stone-age pitching mounds and took turns hurling their projectiles at each other’s head. The Guanches’ aim was legendary, so deadly that the excitement of the contest came not from the combatants’ striking each other but from seeing who was best able to dodge the rocks. Losing typically meant getting killed; naturally, there were plenty of bets on both sides. Maybe our own contemporary forms of violence — guzzling Diet Coke on night flights to Tokyo alongside the kid you had for kicks — provide a better way of settling things.
2:00 P.M. It took several moments of severe uneasiness before I realized that I’m hungry. I missed lunch because there was nobody here to ask me for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I’ve been married for quite a few years, long enough so that I can no longer remember any whole day when I was a bachelor. On top of that, I’ve now been a father for five years.
Not long ago, Cathy and our little boy traveled to the Midwestern plains for the eightieth birthday celebration of one of her grandmothers. I don’t recall why, but I had to stay home. In less than twenty-four hours I resumed the rhythm that I’d lost after our son was born: I worked all night and woke up in the middle of the afternoon. I ate a dozen doughnuts a day. When they returned home, the fruit in our bowls was swarming with flies and the milk had gone sour. I wonder if that’s how all bachelors live. Do they ever cook themselves a nice chicken almondine or toss a Greek salad? I suppose that every time Odysseus ate a vegetable, during all those years he spent sleeping around, away from his wife and child, it counted as a Greek salad. But what does a bachelor do when faced with the endless horizon of a Saturday alone?
In the kitchen pantry I find a box of Froot Loops the size of a suitcase. A lot of it has already been eaten, making me think that it must be a daily staple for one of my brothers-in-law. Setting the box out on the table, I figure I can finish it off without leaving anybody malnourished: tomorrow morning, between the pool and breakfast, I’ll have time to visit the supermarket and replace it before everybody gets up. By the time they’re all out of bed I’ll have already played soccer, outfitted Buzz Lightyear with his galactic armor, and read the paper from front to back while watching cartoons. With their tousled, matted hair and pasty mouths, the sleepy denizens of the house will be pouring themselves their first cups of coffee while I‘ll be ready to crack open my first beer.
My wife and son must have eaten lunch by now. Studying a chart of famous shipwrecks on the Outer Banks of North Carolina that I bought at a local souvenir shop, I imagine they must have already reached the bird sanctuary at Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge. I’ve honestly never understood the fascination of bird-watching, a pastime so dear to the gringo heart. I remind myself to make a note about the Froot Loops: I’d rather not have to face down any of my brothers-in-law in a stone-throwing duel.
4:30 P.M. Ancient history resembles the old Mother Goose nursery rhymes that are still used to help English-speaking children learn to read. Once upon a time those rhymes probably described political and social realities that everybody understood, but nowadays all such references have been lost. All we can do now is enjoy the cadences of a highly stylized imaginative code, preserved in print. And like Mother Goose rhymes, the chronicles of the conquest of the Canary Islands — by Cerdeño, by Gómez Escudero — make for good reading, but you can only take them in small doses. I’ll opt for The Odyssey on the beach.
It’s pretentious, I admit, taking such a high-caliber classic out to play in the sand. But it was meant to be. I usually travel with just one or two novels and a single book of poetry, but on this trip I couldn’t avoid bringing a huge load of material for my work. Besides the volumes I checked out on the history of the Fortunate Isles, I’ve also got — I’m a professor of literature — volume one of the Complete Works of Martín Luis Guzmán. It’s practically a solid cube — perhaps the most single difficult work in the history of literature to get into a suitcase.
I’ve been reading Guzmán at night and the historians when my son takes his nap. For going to the beach I scoured the anonymous selection of books that belong to this house. On other trips and in other cities I’ve found books that ended up profoundly affecting me, such as Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War or The Loss of El Dorado by V. S. Naipaul. I was looking for some kind of detective thriller when I found the Penguin Pocket Classics edition of Homer and sat down to have a look at it. My son was watching Bambi. He asked me what kind of book could possibly distract me from such a movie — another kind of classic. I told him that it was about mermaids (not sirens) — that seemed to satisfy him. Later on he wanted me to tell him about the mermaids. I told him a fairly faithful version but made a few subtle changes; the mermaids still fed on sailors but I omitted the abundant sadomasochistic details of the original text. That’s a good story, he replied, with a hint of menace in his voice. You can tell me the rest of it tonight. I got busy reading The Odyssey so that I’d have something else to tell him by bedtime.
5:00 P.M. Before settling down to read in the sand with all the quiet calm of my bachelor days, I walked along the beach. Staring out at the sea, I figured that by now my family must be on the ferry from Cape Hatteras to Ocra-coke Island. It was those shallow waters that swallowed the ship of Blackbeard, last of the legendary pirates. In 1718, Edward Teach — his real name — was resting after one of his atrocious raids. Like all his forerunners, Blackbeard knew he would be left to his own devices as long as he laid low in the Carolina estuaries. That very fact enabled the British to set up a blockade. Two navy schooners launched a surprise attack against his ship, and their broadsides sent him to the bottom without much of a fight. My wife and son, and some of their relatives on today’s outing, count among their ancestors the admiral who commanded the mission. It brought an end to piracy, once so lucrative for the English crown, but which political and economic developments had rendered obsolete.
As I walk along, I also think about Guzmán, quite possibly Mexico’s best storyteller. He was also a man who found politics so tempting that he could only write during his periods of exile, when he had no other way to make a living except by writing. No writer is more deserving of Quevedo’s oft-quoted praise of quietude, to which we professors at American universities — without a doubt the people in this world who work least for the most money — so proudly pay lip-service during our frivolous sabbaticals: