Lying on the planks he looked up at me, the dying cock in Yaviza flashed through my mind. The men kept their eyes averted, no-one looked at us, a fallen emperor is more dangerous than an emperor on horseback. I went back and sat down. Groaning, he maneuvered himself into a sitting position. Maria brought him another glass and filled mine. I wiped my fist on my trousers. Bent over, holding a hand against the side of his chest, he sat there spitting gobs of blood onto the floor. The girl knelt down in front of him, he slapped her hand away when she tried to stroke his face. I pulled my chair over, put my face down close to his.
‘I waited for you the whole time,’ I said. ‘I looked for you everywhere, I thought I saw you everywhere. Is that him, does he look like that? No, he doesn’t walk that way. He has to be a lot taller. Brown eyes, not blue ones. When you’re missing something as major as a father, you’re always cutting and pasting, wherever you are. You believe in miracles. Who says I’m not going to run into him here, today? You dream up things that might give him a reason to show up. The story always makes perfect sense, except he never shows up, that’s the only thing wrong with the stories, that he refuses to show up.
‘Even earlier than that, the years when you wonder: does he think about me like I think about him? Am I in his thoughts? If I listen closely, can I hear him whisper? Are we able to get in touch with each other in some magical way, through dreams, telepathy? But I only dreamed of you as a phantom, as the silent ghost from A Christmas Carol. Never a face, never that. These, I knew when I woke up, these were the ghosts of impotence and frustration. That’s the half that’s missing. That’s what you left behind. Nothing but sorrow and misery. And this, this here, is nothing but the same thing to the umpteenth degree. You spread that nihilistic trash of yours like some contagious disease. The only thing you believe in are the things that are broken. In things that are ravaged. The only thing you can count on is the blackest of the black. Mishmash of moral colorblindness and poignant simplism. Mediohombre, that’s what I called you. How fitting that turned out to be!’
‘Let’s drink to that!’ he shouted. ‘Mediohombre!’
‘Half a man. .’
‘Mediohombre!’
His hand had disappeared under the girl’s skirt. She pushed it away, but it kept crawling up between her legs. He was strong, he was capable of bearing things. That was the one thing I admired about him, the kind of admiration that’s tied up with fear; that he endured his life, spared no-one and nothing, and never looked back. And from the maelstrom of the night I fished up yet another clear thought — that finally, once I had returned out of this wilderness, I would no longer have any desires in which he played a role. Not a single expectation would survive this night. Where all feeling has been crushed there opens up a luxurious amount of space for the horrific, delicious mercy of indifference, that guise worn by the gods.
I awakened with a start because of something moving beside me. We were lying in the corner of a hut, through the thin mattress I could feel the hard dirt floor. She rolled onto her other side. On her brown back was the tattoo of a shackled hand, clenched in a combative fist. The heat pressed me against the mattress. I struggled my way out of that nest of fleas and venereal disease and dressed quickly. I left thirty dollars behind on the spot where I had lain. Shoelaces untied and shirt unbuttoned, I left the hut in search of water. By the barrack I saw Ché Ibarra, standing in the shade of the wall. The scraping of metal claws grated in my ears. The mountain looked down on us and bled. Forgive my father, for he knows not what he does.
‘Una hora más,’ I told Ibarra.
In the barrack I drank three mugs of cool water from a barrel. This was what the river’s song was about. I climbed the path to his house. He was sitting in a chair, in a dingy pair of boxer shorts too baggy for his legs. It was impossible to tell where the piss stain stopped. The skin around his eyes was black and swollen, I had hit him squarely. He was holding one hand to his side.
‘I think I broke a couple of them,’ he said.
His white calves were covered in sores. The jungle was in the process of devouring him. There was not much left of the big man from the stories. The Creole girl was making coffee over a fire outside. She squatted there, waiting for the lid of the dented kettle to start rattling. I picked up my backpack and put it on the table.
‘I was supposed to give this to you,’ I said.
From the bag I produced the plastic box I had carried with me throughout that long hike. I put it down in front of him and zipped up my pack.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘It’s for you.’
His red eyes shot back and forth between my face and the outsized sandwich box. His hands shaking, he took the rubber band off the box, removed the lid and looked in it.
‘What’s that?’
‘What do you think?’
‘Ashes?’
‘Ashes.’
‘Not her ashes. .?’
‘Her ashes.’
He pulled his hand back as though the box contained a deadly adder.
‘Jesus Christ. .’
‘It was her dying wish.’
‘Just like Marthe,’ he whispered. ‘Just like her. .’
‘She never understood why you went away,’ I said.
He doubled up even further.
‘She never stopped loving you.’
And with those words I put on my backpack, said Bye now, and pulled closed behind me not one door, but many.
That was more or less the way I told it to Linny Wallace. Some things I left out, others I toned down, but it was along those lines that the story spun itself out. In the restaurant they were setting the tables for breakfast. A man walked down the corridor, pulling a vacuum cleaner. We both felt like a gas station that is open twenty-four hours a day; even our clothing, our hair was tired. We climbed the stairs, at the door to her room there was a moment’s hesitation, then she took my hand and said, ‘Come.’
We undressed, on far sides of the bed. We averted our eyes from each other’s nakedness. I lay curled up slightly, my back to her. The light smell of soap when her body moved against mine. She put her arms around me. Then the shaking started. It came in bigger and bigger waves. I lay there shaking like a Parkinson’s patient, my teeth chattering, dug up out of an avalanche, defrosted. It seemed like it would never stop.
‘Shh, shh, oh, take it easy now,’ whispered the woman who was holding me.
Gradually the trembling decreased, her soft, soothing hands caressed my upper arms and chest, she stroked the tremors out of me. And that was how we fell asleep, the gray morning light leaking through the curtains.
The cemetery around St. George’s had been full for years, but Warren received a spot in the Feldman family grave, a stone sepulcher sealed with iron doors. The outside walls and tower of the Anglican church were built from the round pieces of flint which the sea brought ashore; it was a large church, the largest building in Alburgh, like a mother hen spreading the down of eternity over the last of the believers. I was the first to arrive. I had on my charcoal-gray suit with a black tie. I was welcomed by the priest, Lindsay Temple, who didn’t seem quite sure she recognized me. My mind was almost sagging out of my body with fatigue. We ran through the program, between the prayer and the reading I would go to the piano and play the Marcia Funebre Sulla Morte d’un Eroe. She wrote down every word.