1993 - The Blue Afternoon (27 page)

Carriscant stood to one side, his hands holding the ropes that were attached to large wooden wedges set against the front wheels of the supporting carriage. Pantaleon jerked down on the propeller and there came a fart of noise from the engine and a puff of bluish smoke from the exhaust. He pulled again and this time it caught. He leapt back and the blade began to spin, blurring into a shimmering disc. Pantaleon walked round the wing, leaned over and pushed a lever to engage the chain drive of the other propeller, which began to turn also, slowly at first and then after a second or two with real speed. The noise of the engine was loud, high and angry, and the Aero-mobile shook and quivered, like a thoroughbred at the start of a race. Pantaleon climbed into the forward saddle and sat there a moment, head bowed, hands on his control levers, as if he was at prayer, and then turned to shout out something at Carriscant—which he could not hear over the engine—but the sweeping gesture with a hand told him he wanted the wedges removed. Carriscant hauled them away and to his astonishment, for he had never really believed the Aero-mobile capable of movement, the machine began to move slowly forward, thrumming and vibrating like a hovering dragonfly, as Pantaleon slowly opened the throttle. Carriscant trotted along beside it as it rolled along the roadway, shouting encouragement to Pantaleon, and then began to run as the machine picked up speed but it soon outstripped him. He stopped, out of breath, and shouted weakly, “Go, Pantaleon, go!” But then Pantaleon cut the engine and the blades abruptly stopped spinning and he saw him reach down to apply the brakes to the front wheels and the Aero-mobile began to slow, although it started to veer to the right. Carriscant watched as the wheels reached the raised edge of the roadway and the machine, moving at walking pace now, slowly tipped over on to its nose. There was a distinct crunching sound as of a bundle of dry twigs being broken.

Carriscant ran up as Pantaleon stepped out of his saddle. He saw that the front elevator was buckled, its doped silk torn and wrinkled. Pantaleon’s face was flushed and startled, and his hands were shivering with excitement. Spontaneously he and Carriscant embraced, thumping each other on the back.

“My God, Salvador, you should have felt it. The power. It was straining to leave the ground. I could feel it. And I was only at half throttle. It was longing to fly, I tell you, longing!”

“Congratulations, Panta. You know, I never really believed…But I was running, and then it began to outstrip me. Magnificent, magnificent!”

They inspected the broken elevator at the front and saw that the damage was not too severe. They heaved the machine back on to the roadway with some effort and then pushed it back towards the nipa barn.

“One thing is clear, we have to make that rear wheel turnable,” Pantaleon said, “to keep it on its true course on the roadway. A simple steering device, a tiller of some kind.” His face was alive and mobile, joyful. “Honestly, Salvador, I’ve never experienced a moment like that. I felt…” He paused, he could not think of the exact word. “I don’t know. On the verge. Like an explorer, I suppose, discovering a continent, an ocean. Something like that. Everything ahead is blank and I am going to take a step into the void, part a curtain, if you know what I mean.”

Carriscant did: he had experienced those sensations himself with the human body. The first time he had opened the stomach cavity. Imagine what it would be like to expose the living brain, the spinal column, the heart. He felt no envy for Pantaleon: they were colleagues, fellow spirits now, both exploring their terrae incognitae.

They trundled the Aero-mobile back into the barn and Pantaleon fussed over the machine checking its components. One strut had sprung from its mountings and there seemed to be a small leak from the fuel tank. Carriscant stepped back and let Pantaleon tend to his creation.

In one corner of the nipa barn, he noticed, a kind of living area had been set up: a low canvas camp bed, a table with a jug and ewer on it and a lantern. He wandered over. On a tin plate was a heel of bread and some fish bones.

“Have you got someone standing guard, Panta?” Carriscant asked, half joking. “Protecting your precious invention?”

“That’s for me,” Pantaleon said. “I work here through the night more and more often. It made more sense if I set a bed up in here.”

Carriscant shook his head in admiration: here was true dedication to a dream. True devotion to a cause. And now he had seen the Aero-mobile in motion he was beginning to think that Pantaleon Quiroga’s name might well go down in the annals of human endeavour after all.

H
er face was two inches from his. He ran a finger down her cheek and across her lips. He felt an extraordinary liberation wash through him, an immense gratitude, and he was duly humbled by it. That he could hold her like this in his arms, that her body was pressed against his, that he was free to touch and caress her wherever he wished, seemed to him almost incredible, fantastical. It was a gift surpassing all acts of generosity, and he kept touching her fleetingly—her face, her breasts, her arms, her buttocks as if to reassure himself that this was still the case.

They had made love on his firm leather examination couch, more orthodoxly this time, but with the same cautious tenderness. Neither of them was naked, as if in mutual acknowledgement that his consulting rooms were not a suitable place for total disrobement, that there was still something snatched and furtive about this moment. She had undressed to a cotton chemise and petticoat; he had removed everything but his shirt and drawers. Then she had lain back on the couch and lifted the hem of the petticoat to her waist. He had climbed between her spread legs and, kneeling there, had fumblingly undone his drawers as she reached to pull them down until they bunched at his knees.

Later, as they lay together, he had lifted her chemise to expose her breasts and had kissed them tenderly, reverentially. And now he stared into her face, studying its features and contours as if he had to memorise them for an exam.

“I can’t believe it,” he said. “I can’t believe that I have you here, that I can hold and touch you…”

She smiled and hunched into his arms, her hand on his ribs, her shoulder fitting snug in his armpit. He moved his leg and felt his foot go over the edge of the examination couch. His elation faded instantly as the brute facts of their circumstances forced themselves in on him once more—the facts of where they were and how short a time they would be together. She seemed to sense his mood change, and touched his face, stretching her neck to kiss his chin.

“What are we going to do?” she said.

“I don’t know,” he said. He managed a wry smile. “If we were in Paris or London it would be no problem. But in Manila…” He raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Why didn’t we meet in Europe?”

“Vienna,” she said, wistfully. “That would be wonderful. Have you been to Vienna?”

“No,” he said, saddened. Vienna with this woman: an ache of unlived lives settled itself in his gut. Platoons of alternative existences lined up to mock him.

“I was there in the spring of ‘ninety-seven. On the seventh of March I went to a concert and Brahms was there. He was very sick. Almost brown. A thin brown sick old man. But I saw him. They played his fourth symphony. Do you know it?”

“No,” he said. “No, I’m afraid not.” He felt a bitterness in him. “Brahms,” he repeated softly, as if the word were a talisman. “Brahms. To be in Vienna with you, To go to a Brahms concert…” He thought of a cold European city. A fire in a comfortable room. Maybe snow falling outside. A big white soft bed with Delphine waiting, naked, for him. He groaned. This was agony, it was intolerable, an appalling torture. This was what it did to you, he supposed, this level of infatuation: sublime delights and fiendish torments. He thought of the Brahms concert again: before he died he would hear the fourth symphony. He would pay one of the second-rate touring orchestras that came to Manila to perform it for him, however ineptly. Some other less pleasant visions came to him.

“Was he with you?” If Sieverance had been there he could never possibly hear—

“No. I didn’t really know him at that time. We were engaged the following year.”

He wanted to ask how someone like her could have married someone so…so insipid, so nothing, so unworthy of her. To find out how people became trapped in unions that were so manifestly wrong. Jepson Sieverance with his ephemeral personality, his feeble boy’s moustache. His indecisiveness. Pleasant enough manners, he supposed, but where was the man, the true character that had won this fabulous treasure, this goddess? He stopped himself, this was madness. He thought sourly of his own marriage, its tired disharmony. As well put the questions to yourself, fool. It happened all too easily.

“He’s changed, you know. Jepson.”

“Yes?”

“This war did it. He’s not the same man. Something’s gone from him. A confidence, a generosity. He was never a true soldier, you see. It was like a family trade he had to go into. But now he seems more dedicated to it…Soldiery, I mean. He thinks he has a talent for it, he told me. He said he thought his father would be proud of him.” She gave a small snort, half disgust, half amusement. “Why is that so important to men? That their father should be proud of them? Why don’t they go their own way, be themselves?”

He left the question unanswered for a while: he was not content to be talking about Sieverance. “I never think about my father,” he said, honestly, bringing that mild placid stranger to mind for the first time in ages.

“Good,” she said, but he could see she was still thinking about her husband.

“I don’t hate him,” she said, with quiet vehemence. “It’s more a kind of apathy…an apathy of feeling. I feel nothing for him. I don’t quite despise him, if you know what I mean. Almost-contempt. I can’t summon up the energy to hate him.”

She paused, her head slightly cocked, as if this were the first time she had articulated such feelings and she was surprised to hear the words spoken out loud. Carriscant remained silent.

She went on: “But…what fills me with anger is that I didn’t see this lying ahead of me. That I made myself blind. Anger at myself, I mean. And then despair.”

“Despair?”

She looked at him, her eyes clear with a pure hard conviction. “I can’t spend the rest of my life with him. With a man like that. I can’t just waste it away.”

He touched her face again, pushed a lock of hair off her forehead.

“Why did you come to me that day?” he asked.

“Because I knew you wanted me to, with all that book nonsense. I knew you wanted me to.”

“But did you want to?”

She smiled at him, teasingly. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Lots of men would want you, you must know that.”

“I was…I was intrigued by you. Even that day at the archery, and then on the Luneta. So angry. So cross with me.” She grinned, showing her teeth. “And then you saved me. I was lost. Simple as that. Head over heels.”

Was she mocking him? This was what thrilled him too, this provocativeness. So new, so American. So different from the European women he knew. A kind of audacity in her, a huge self-confidence. So why had she married that lap dog?

“Why did you marry him?” he asked suddenly. “I’m sorry, it’s none of my—”

“No,” she said, smiling ruefully. “Good question. I don’t know. At the time, he seemed…well, not the best, but everything someone in my position could reasonably hope for. When he asked me to marry him I couldn’t think of any really convincing reasons for saying
no
.” She hunched into him. “It’s been a terrible…It was a big mistake.”

“At least he brought us together.”

She stretched her neck and kissed him. “I’ve had this dream,” she said. “A story I heard about an Englishwoman, a true story, who was travelling out to India to rejoin her husband. She went ashore at the Suez Canal, at Port Said, with a party of friends and they went to the souk. While she was there she became separated from her group and when they went to look for her they couldn’t find her. She had gone, vanished. Never to be seen again.”

“So what’s your dream about?”

“I have this theory that it was all a plan, and she made her escape. That she’s alive and well and living the life she always wanted. Somewhere else. All her friends and family think she’s been killed or abducted, but I have this notion of her, living under a false name, in Australia, or Brazil, or Turkey, or Moscow.”

“You could escape like that,” he said. “Just disappear…And then I could come and join you. We could go and live in—”

“Don’t say that sort of thing, Salvador. It’s not fair. Please.”

“No, you could. Then I could—”

She put her finger on his lips to silence him. “Ssssh,” she said.

He stayed quiet.

“Did I really nearly hit you with that arrow?” she said.

He held up his hand, forefinger and thumb two inches apart, and she laughed, deep in her throat, causing her breasts to shiver beneath her chemise. He pressed himself against her thigh, very aroused.

“Delphine, we have time, we—”

“No. I must go.” She reached down and her fingers trickled across his hardness. “I’m sorry. We have to be careful.”

“You’re right, you’re right.” He sat up, all his anger returning. “We have to find some way. We have to.”

“Let’s go to Paris,” she said mock-gaily.

“Vienna.”

“Salzburg.”

“Samarkand.”

“Timbuctu.”

“Anywhere but here,” he said, vehemently.

That silenced them and they dressed quickly, a little morose. Such fantasising was dangerously double–edged, he realised: it elated and depressed in equal measure.

At the door of the consulting room they kissed.

“I can smell you on me,” he said. “It’ll drive me mad. What shall we do? When shall I see you?”

“I’ll contact you, somehow,” she said, suddenly troubled. “Perhaps at the house again…I’ll see.”

“I love you, Delphine. I love you.”

“Don’t say it, please. It upsets me.”

“Why?”

“Because…Because it makes me think.” She took his face between her hands and stared at him. “It makes me think too much and that’s bad.”