“All right, put me down.” I gave him my name and number. “And I think I will try to call through Tokyo. What are those times?” I wrote them down on the back of my diary, thanked him, and pushed off. Translated to Spanish time and found I could call in forty-five minutes.
Getting through to Tokyo was no problem, but the patch via Uchūden put purple blotches all over the cube. I tracked down Dan at the labs.
He peered out of the cube. “Marianne?”
“Yes, darling, we have to make it quick. Do you know about the fuel squeeze at the Cape?”
“Of course. Didn’t you get my letter?”
“I’ve gotten several; nothing about that.” Damn them. “They must be censoring letter transmissions.”
“They are. You calling through Tsiolkovski?”
“Uchūden. I’ve got a reservation for the shuttle on May fourteenth. If things don’t get better—”
“Can’t you come home before then?” I shook my head. “Earliest date. Have to push off. So good to hear you and see you.”
As his image faded: “I love you.” I bit my lip for not saying it myself. It was only a hundred pesetas a second.
35. Diary of a Lover (excerpts)
13 January. Jeff spent only a little more than an hour at Interpol. He said they had traced Benny—as they routinely do when somebody has his identity changed without taking the elementary precaution of bribing everyone in sight. He had gone to a farm in South Carolina, with the identity of Sheldon Geary.
As to James’s bunch, he had only been told “not to worry.” He said this probably meant that they were well infiltrated.
I’m glad Benny got away but wish that nobody knew where he was. Jeff didn’t know whether the FBI was going to pick him up for questioning. He had broken federal law in being accessory to the forgery of his documents, but the agency rarely bothered to arrest people for that. It was more useful simply to keep an eye on them. …
Geneva isn’t as pretty as Lausanne, but it’s more impressive. All very neatly laid out and meticulously maintained. The weather field keeps it warm enough to walk around with just a light jacket, and the avenues are lined with green growing things. We went down by the lake and sat on the grass there, enjoying our picnic while a blizzard howled a few meters away. Swiss chocolate is remarkable. …
I’m trying to taper off the Klonexine. Less tension so less medicine. Violet taught me a trick. Open the capsule and divide the powder into two piles; refill each half-capsule and plug the end with a bit of bread. So I’m still taking them with each meal, but at half dosage.
Jeff has become very tender and solicitous since I dropped all my problems on him. I think he has a stronger mothering instinct than I do. Yet he has the most violent legitimate occupation in the world, and to stay alive must have a killing instinct equally strong. He’s full of paradox, keeps surprising me.
(14 January-18 January: Berlin, Munich, Bonn, Rome)
19 January. Pompeii is the most interesting place we’ve visited, in terms of history. I guess because of the ordinariness of it—old monuments are interesting, but they are monuments, culturally self-conscious, built for the ages. Pompeii was just an ordinary city, and what’s preserved here are ordinary houses, shops, pubs, brothels. Walking down the streets is a mundane trip through time.
The Italian government had Pompeii thoroughly restored by the turn of the century, and they had the good sense to cover the city with a plastic dome, to protect it against the weather and the pollution that drifts down from the industry around Naples. So it looks just like a city of 2000 years ago, only slightly worn.
In the museum outside the city, they have plaster casts of people, animals, and vegetation, preserved when they were entombed by the swift fall of ash from Vesuvius. The eeriest is of a dog, fighting to free himself from his chain. The human figures are pathetic, sometimes gruesome, preserved with their expressions at the moment of death.
(Violet was fascinated by that, of course. She mentioned yesterday that she’d started school with a major in thanotics, studying to be a “death counselor.” Sort of like a hypochondriac getting a job as a druggist.)
Back in our stuffy room in Naples, Jeff and I lay together in the dark for a long time, talking about death. He is matter-of-fact about it, and I think honestly not afraid. Just suddenly not-being. He was brought up in American Taoism, though he rejected it in his teens, and admits that the passive fatalism of that religion probably still affects him, or infects him. We were tired and made slow love with our hands.
(20 January-26 January: Athens, Salonika, Dubrovnik, Belgrade)
27 January. They wanted us to go through Maghrib before the Alexandrian Dominion because Maghrib is so much more modern and familiar. At least women can show their faces. They don’t execute criminals in the public square.
It is still the most alien place we’ve been. We spent late morning to early afternoon in Tangier, which used to be a major port. Now its main industry is wringing money from European tourists, being picturesque.
The foreignness is enthusiastic and unrelenting but it’s not fake. At least not in the Casbah, the native quarter. At midday, with eight or nine people in our group, we felt isolated, alien, in danger. Sinister-looking people stared at us, scowling, measuring. Beggars showed us their sores and stumps. In the open-air market, meat was hanging in the warm sun, crawling with flies. A small mob formed when one of our people resisted paying a man after taking his picture. He paid.
The tourist part of town is all white beaches, colorful fluttering flags, music and dancing, high prices. For lunch I bought couscous, which had been so delightful in Paris, but here was an indigestible lump of yellow starch. Cheapest thing on the menu, though.
The train to Marrakesh was a fascinating antique. Polished wood and brass and agonizingly slow. We saw lots of desert and some camels, and herds of goats invariably tended by small boys who looked like they would rather be doing something else.
We came in at sundown (the agent probably planned that) and Marrakesh was heartstopping beautiful. It’s an oasis, lush green after hours of desert, with the Atlas mountains behind it dramatic with snow, and all the buildings are red clay, more red in the setting sun. When we got off the train we could hear muezzins chanting from towers all over the city, calling faithful Muslims to prayer. There were evidently no faithful Muslims at the railway station.
The hotel was rundown but fairly Western, sit-down toilets. When Jeff and I tried to register together we were coldly asked to show proof of marriage. So I spent a quiet night with Violet, reading. We were advised that there was no inexpensive nightlife in the parts of Marrakesh where you could safely go at night.
The four of us set out early in the morning and, dutiful tourists, admired the Koutoubya mosque and the thousand-year-old walls that once protected the city from nomad invaders. Then we went to the Djemaa El Fna, which is the largest and most colorful market in Maghrib.
In front of the actual market was a large packed-earth square full of exotic entertainment—snake-charmers, acrobats, mimes, musicians. The musical instruments were mostly strings, types unfamiliar to me, and they weren’t playing in anything like a diatonic scale. Or maybe some were and some weren’t, which would account for the weird discords they seemed to hit on every note. But it wasn’t unpleasant.
Violet and I got tired of having every man we passed stare us in the crotch—Maghrib women don’t wear pants—so we went into the first clothing stall and bought loose kaftans. We bargained for five minutes, passing numbers back and forth on a tablet, since the man didn’t speak either English or French. We worked him down from 5000 dirhams to 2500, though we had to walk out of the shop twice to get the last 500 (a technique Violet had learned from a guidebook). Then we put the kaftans on over our western clothes and undressed underneath, the sight of which nearly gave the poor bugeyed man a stroke.