Catherwood, said Dudley. How odd! I took up Catherwood to interest Tessa. Can you feature that?
I’d known this as far back as New York in ’64—the first flush of Dudley’s interest. I told him so, and he looked at me. I looked down at his belly flapped over his bathing suit. He spoke at length, and I leave you who have me to imagine my occasional responses and the washing of pale green chlorine waves clearer in their refractions than hard crystal.
Whatever was between us, said Dudley (meaning himself and Tessa), it came to take solid forms.
Stones. Violence. Mexico.
The Maya, their sacrifices, their underground rivers in Yucatan, the noses and the lips, the legends. I made her come with me to the British Museum to see what she’d seen on her own before — the wooden lintel from a temple in Guatemala with the halach uinic, the religious chief, seated holding the round shield and the manikin scepter, one of whose legs ends in a serpent’s head; and I’d read about Tikal, the ancient city the lintel came from, and I said someday let’s go see its pyramid temples which are the highest man-made things in Maya country ranging from 143 feet to 229 measuring from the ground to the roof comb, and in fact she’d seen a painting of Tikal, an enclave of powerful structures shadowed by time and perspective into a forbidding scene held off from the viewer who feels he might lose out if he tried to enter — at which point Tessa says Dudley, do me a favor and stop trying to be a poet; she cared about the method of sacrifice and I was unable from my rudimentary reading to say for sure if the heart-excising ritual was common to Tikal or not and she wandered away to look at Egyptian antiquities. I took her to Switzerland, I know you remember, when she had a bad chest but principally to surprise her with the Maya lintels at Basel which are the finest. You can guess how I made the same bloody mistake over and over. I took her to Holland to see the Leyden Plate which is just a hunk of jade 8½ inches by 3 from Guatemala in a shape like a little chisel implement they call a celt—the Leyden Plate was unearthed in 1864 and of the highest importance though not for the ferocious sleepy profiles of animals or gods — the enormous-nosed, dollop-lipped, retreating-chinned profiles Tessa loved — and the captive under the warrior’s sandal. I read Bishop Landa. I read Stephens’ Incidents of Travel. I gave it to Tessa. I tried to intercept her — you know her — but then again I know her. And if it was ever physical it had little to do with whether I took regular exercise or studied breast-beating in the Kama Sutra. For a time I virtually gave up European history except to lecture on it. I took up Catherwood (said Dudley) because I wanted a German Jewish refugee who was obsessed with her mother’s disappearance in a death camp.
Catherwood was between us, the friend of Keats and Shelley, Prescott and Wilkinson, and no one except possibly Wilkie Collins in The Woman in White described him, and there the character Hart-wright goes off to Central America and is a draftsman and the rest of it may not be Catherwood at all — the star-crossed lovers (for he was married) — but the honesty and legality in Hartwright does seem right for the man I find in Stephens’ Incidents and in the drawings; he was a great draftsman and the first to use daguerreotype to record Maya remains, but there is no picture but the self-portrait vaguely self-effacingly at the center of his picture of the Tulum ruins where he’s either paying out or pulling in surveyor’s tape, possibly the same reel they used for the ruins in Jerusalem.
Tessa would of course interrupt me (said Dudley) in the presence of her father and others when I would speak of my Catherwood inquest. She would say Dudley is counting the fifteen-foot-long rungs of the famous eighty-foot ladder that runs down the well of Bolonchén but the real current is the underground river that feeds the well; Dudley is working out what Catherwood’s camera lucida was and just how he used it between his eye and the paper to bring Egyptian temples and obelisk carvings and Alexander’s grand cock jutting along from wall to wall at Karnak down to the right proportions and perspective — while my Catherwood is finding in a ruined city his friend paid fifty dollars for, a Maya idol he instinctively knows is a blood relative of Egypt.
You know her. Why do I tell you all this? In ’64 Catherwood instead of being a means to a juncture became a subtle passion. To me. Tessa begged off the Brooklyn Museum and the Natural History Museum. She reminded me that because of her in the Natural History in London I’d said I’d never set foot there again with or without her. On a mad detour en route to Yucatan she could fly around southern California looking out her window for the 167-foot man, but she wouldn’t come uptown in Manhattan to see the vaults of the Museum of the American Indian, though on the other hand she always made me feel I’d done well when I took her to a restau rant as I did that night, there was a Mexican place in the Village, but you must recall it — and even as early as ’64 I knew it was hopeless and at this time Catherwood got larger in my thinking, a mystery man, exile engineer, impromptu physician to the Indians — how much of Collins’ Hartwright is Catherwood?