A piece of flesh in Lorna’s firm fingers.
Pachisi, the backgammon Hindus play with cowry shells — which is like Mexican Patolli.
From Prescelly, Pentelicon, Aswan, the Copan quarries, the great stones (how, one does not know) sometimes without the wheel, moved through the four ages of the world, Maya, Hindu, other.
So that the world comes to be believed in, between us and the truth.
An illusion the Hindus call Māyā.
Felt even more in the partly separated blocks that never quite made it out of the mountain-top quarry and that Stephens and Catherwood scratched their names in.
Catherwood with his hand moved column-idols thirteen feet high all over the world. Stephens arranged the digs, studied the finds. Catherwood went on sketching.
Māyā is the world this side of the truth.
Dudley did not make it up to the Museum of the American Indian that Monday to look at the Catherwood drawings in the vault. The place was closed. On that Monday, Catherwood grew between Dudley and Tessa. In the evening he took her to a Mexican restaurant and they ate baby cactus, and it is quite likely that Tessa did not think of what she had had that afternoon. Dudley knew.
I am Catherwood.
I am Māyā.
Why not use the film to push the diary.
As if still in Glasgow, but now with more weapons, I had nearly willed myself to sleep and knew the comb on the bathroom floor did not belong; for Alba was too careful.
Hands pinioned in the new raincoat now packed in a suitcase checked at the West London Air Terminal, I heard through that static escalator field down which I had plunged, two men angrily arguing, their voices receding.
Between this and what happened next, I knew myself to be adequate.
16
Dag, she called, and a light came on and she got no answer. I was half there.
I contemplated my absence. Nothing happened.
More light thinned my lids, and a rustling preceded a second silence unlike the first. Then above me very near, the baby moaned.
You who have me may see on the far side of my shut, untrembling lids, the tight-bunned contour of Alba’s hair silvery in this light.
She went away.
The baby squawled.
Would Alba change her in the bathroom?
Alba, I called, as if I had just woken.
Alba didn’t speak.
After a while she was nearer.
The baby at first crying as she was at last put down was not sung to but told some nonsense tale that she could not understand at two months but that in some sound of the words stilled the cycles of her energy.
Alba was in the living room, the light behind her.
I told you to take care of Dag, she said. And what have you done?
A woman with a baby, a woman with a closet full of tools, a woman with a husband she had introduced me to ten minutes after she had met him herself and five after she’d met me, in November of ’63 in the hotel room of an American acting as adviser to engineers who were about to introduce a computer into the London traffic mess, and this American Lorenzo kept hugging Dagger and calling him an untrustworthy bastard and when Dagger invited among others me and my “wife” over on Saturday and I accepted, Lorna came up behind me, said we had tickets to Uncle Vanya Saturday, and introduced herself to Dagger and Dagger said her dark hair and blue eyes were sensational and demanded to know when our show let out Saturday. Six of us that Tuesday night (for Lorna had a sitter) went off to Alba’s for spaghetti, and it was clear that she and Dagger clicked. She kept her aphorisms demurely few but sharply apropos.
Here cut in ten seconds of Dagger’s applause record, a particular favorite with Cosmo, who taped it for his own collection.
Add: Dagair, Dagair, I will geeve you da Croix de Guerre, crooned by Alba’s Paris pal, the model, kissing him once on each lip.
Or if maps came with sound, think of Bourguignon d’Anville the eighteenth-century cartographer clearing away the false lakes of Africa and shrinking the Antarctic continent he refused to believe covered half the southern hemisphere.
If you have filmed Alba with sound, but failed to change the aperture when shifting up to slow motion, you who knew her and had seen her would have the efficient voice still more sequential. With it you could call up the turn of one shoulder toward you with the dip of the neck as she introduced between (a) your curious question (Did you recently refinish the table by the window?) and (b) a simple reply (which would have been No) the counter-query to you, Why did you have to keep a diary in the first place?
Anyhow facing you she was so gently still that slow motion would have singled out only her lips: unlike the night Dag and I came back from the final shooting at the air base and I insisted on our filming with Alba’s 8 their flat and the three people we found there, and suddenly I knew how to do it — in slow motion with the sound later slowed also — a fitting end for our film and for me a private recollection of a dream I’d had a week after Lorna and I fought our one and only first and last physical fight, and after trying to dream my lookout dream I was stuck instead with our fisticuffs and wrestling falls and crabbed fingers slow motion as if we were running down, or approaching the state of stills or being analyzed in someone else’s purview plan we’d no say in, and the dream turned words and grunts into some unheard-of madness or underlying real structure that in my dream I was merely impatient with though I’d heard in these disintegrated sounds evidence that Lorna was Jewish — and Alba the night we came back from the base was so restless, up and down, smoking, cocking her wrist, jumping to change a record-band, that she would have constituted a struggling current in the ultimate footage: but Dagger yakking on about Cartwright’s unique plan for a moving terminal had not changed the aperture, and though he said he’d send the film in, there was no hope — as it turned out — at that speed apparently you need much more light. And since I was going away mad, Dag decided to be funny describing Phil Aut, a tense abstemious man, who had told Claire a rule of thumb for 16-millimeter production was a thousand dollars a minute, but the three fellows in Alba’s Swedish chairs either were tired or didn’t find our film venture droll, and neither did I till I was in the minicab Alba called for me and was away from her living room watching white-framed windows flicker down a quiet sturdy street and then saw we were wrong and told the driver to turn, and then was sorry, as if a univac’s fingerprint of micro-rectangles had switched us to a more logical route at the end of which was the chance I had always foreseen that the film would come to nothing, and a gate swung open upon the nuclear family if in fact you got past omens along the way and reached the gate and inside the gate slept wife and hilly seaside village a week hence — son and maybe daughter — who were not coming to the seaside village — and the memory of two helium balloons Dagger gave them the first Christmas we knew him, 1963.
Tell me, Alba, why did we even go there? I asked her now in October in answer to her challenge that you who have me will recognize echoed her light parting plea to me in July to take care of Dag during the Corsican trip. But I added that I had not needed to go to Ajaccio to know that Mary-the-Scot’s brother had helped to influence Paul to disentangle himself.
I got my feet onto the floor. Would the lady like me to go? I asked.