It was not that she had a bad eye or an objectionable scar. It was just that a hangnail of ugliness for an instant obstructed the view and went against all the careful, delicate ordering known as beauty. It was like the darkest of dark, fleshly memories rasping against the heart. But if one wished to view her in a more quotidian manner, she need be no more than a shy maiden returning from a tryst.
They climbed the stairs and paused at the door to catch their breath. It was half open. Honda pushed his way inside. The room seemed empty. He called up the narrow stairway to the second floor. Each time he called he was seized by a violent fit of coughing.
There was a creaking at the top of the stairs. “Yes?” A boy in an undershirt looked down.
In surprise, Honda noted the blue flower hanging over his forehead. It seemed to be a hydrangea. As he looked down, the flower fell and rolled to Honda’s feet. The boy was startled. He had forgotten the flower. It was brownish and worm-eaten and badly wilted.
Keiko, still in her sombrero, surveyed the scene over Honda’s shoulder.
Though the stairway was dusky, it was apparent that the boy had a fair, handsome face. An almost disquietingly fair face, it seemed, despite the fact that the light was behind it to send down its own light. The need to return the flower his excuse, Honda carefully but briskly made his way up the steep stairs, his hand against the wall. The boy came halfway down to take it.
Their eyes met. Honda knew that the cogs of the same machine were moving both of them, in the same delicate motions at precisely the same speed. Honda’s duplicate down to the finest detail, even down to an utter want of purpose, was there as if bared to a cloudless void. Identical to his own in hardness and transparency despite the difference in their years, the delicate mechanism within this boy corresponded precisely to a mechanism within Honda, in terror lest someone destroy it, the terror hidden in its deepest recesses. In that instant Honda saw a workerless factory polished to a perfection of utter bleakness, Honda’s mature self-awareness in juvenile form. Producing interminably without consumers, endlessly throwing away, horribly clean and perfectly regulated for heat and humidity, rustling forever like a flow of satin. Yet there was a possibility that the boy, though he was Honda himself, misunderstood the machine. His youth would be the reason. Honda’s factory was human from an utter want of humanity. If the boy refused to think of his own as human—that was all right. Honda rested in the confidence that though he had seen all of the boy, the boy could not have seen all of him. In the lyrical moods of his youth, he had been wont to think the machine the culmination of ugliness; but that was only because a youthful miscalculation had confused fleshly ugliness with the ugliness of the machine within him.
The ugliest of machines, very youthful, very exaggerated, romantic, self-advertising. But that was all right. Honda could so name it today with the coolest of smiles. Exactly as he could name a headache or a pain in the diaphragm. It was nice that the ugliest of machines should have so beautiful a face.
The boy was of course unaware of what had happened in that instant.
Halfway down the stairs, he took the flower. He crushed the source of his embarrassment in his hand.
“Damn her.” He spoke to himself. “I’d forgotten all about it.”
Most boys would have flushed. It interested Honda that no transformation at all came over the white composure.
The boy changed the subject. “Is there something I can do for you?”
“Not really. We’re tourists, and we wondered if we might have a look around for our edification.”
“Please. Come on in.”
The boy bowed quickly from the hips and laid out slippers for them.
It was cloudy, but the naked outdoors seemed to be sweeping them suddenly from a dark attic to an open moor. Some fifty yards to the south were Komagoé Beach and the dirty sea. Honda and Keiko knew well enough that old age and affluence dispel reticence. Soon they were seated as if at their own veranda on the chairs pushed toward them. Yet the words that followed the boy back to his desk were very ceremonious.
“Go ahead with your work, please, quite as if we weren’t here. Would you mind, I wonder, if we were to take a look through the telescope?”
“Please. I don’t need it at the moment.” The boy threw the flower into the wastebasket. After a noisy washing of hands the fair profile was bowed over the notebook on the desk as if nothing had happened; but Honda could see curiosity swelling the cheek like a plum.
He invited Keiko to have a look through the telescope and then had a look himself. There were no ships, only a heaping of waves, like a culture of black-green bacteria squirming purposefully under a microscope.
The two were a pair of children soon tired of their toy. They had no particular interest in the sea. All they had really wanted was to intrude for a moment upon a stranger’s life and work. They looked around them, at the several instruments echoing the stir of the harbor, distantly and sadly but faithfully, at “Shimizu Docks” and the name of each dock in large black letters, at the wide blackboard listing the ships in port, at the books ranged on the shelf, Shipping Ledger, Registry of Japanese Shipping, International Codes, Lloyd’s Register of Shipowners 1968–69, at the telephone numbers on the wall, those of the agent and the pilot and the customs and quarantine stations and the provisioners and the rest.
All these details had about them, undeniably, the smell of the sea, the light of the harbor some two or three miles distant. From whatever distance, a harbor announces its languorous turbulence in its own sad metallic tones. It was a gigantic, lunatic zither, sprawled out by the sea and sending an undulant image over the sea, sounding and for a time echoing destruction on all the seven giant strings of its docks. Entering the boy’s heart, Honda dreamed of the sea.
Sluggishly pulling in, sluggishly tying up, sluggishly unloading—what an endless compromise it was, this trance-like mating of the sea and the land. They were joined in mutual deceit, the ship wagging a seductive tail and pulling coyly away again with a threatening bleat on its whistle, moving away and then coming in again. What a naked, unstable mechanism!
From the east window he could see the confusion of the harbor frozen under a smoky mist, but an unshining harbor was not a harbor, for a harbor is a row of white teeth bared tensely at a shining sea. The teeth of piers eaten at by the sea. It had to shine like a dentist’s office and smell of metal and water and antiseptic, with cruel derricks pushing down overhead and antiseptics sinking the ships into a motionless sleep, and perhaps, from time to time, a trace of blood.
The harbor and this little signal room. The image of the harbor taken and firmly impounded as toll, until he could almost fancy that it was a ship grounded high on the rocks. There were more than a few likenesses to a dental office: the simplicity and the efficient disposition of the instruments, the freshness of the whites and the primary colors, the readiness for a crisis that could come at any time, the warped window frames gnawed at by the sea winds. And the watch, solitary in the field of white plastic, carrying on an intercourse almost sexual with the sea, through the day and through the night, intimidated by harbor and ship, until gazing became pure madness. The whiteness, the abandonment of the self, the uncertainty and loneliness were themselves a ship. He felt that one could not stay at it long without getting drunk.
The boy pretended to be lost in his work. But Honda knew that in point of fact he had no work when there were no ships in sight.
“When is the next ship due?”
“About nine in the evening. This has been a slack day.”
He answered with an air of bland efficiency; and his ennui and curiosity came through like strawberries through plastic walls.