A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories (21 page)

Did I think of all this at the time? Did something that I thought transpire in the look on my face, which worried the poor narrator? I have forgotten to say where we were during his narration, which must have taken ten minutes. It was just before dinner; I lay back in my deckchair, and he sat at right angles to me in his adjacent deckchair. I must have said something; I wonder what, I hope that I didn’t suggest to him that I had any superior opinion or explanation of the events he had confided to me, I hope that I didn’t sound bored.

Then he said, in a louder voice than he had found for the story itself, “Oh, I’m afraid you haven’t liked my blabbing all this to you. My God, let’s talk about something cheerful!”

Silence again, and then, to ease him down from that high point of his immature life, and furthermore, to ease myself, I took him into the bar and seated him beside my brother’s wife, who, I remember, was inclined to be silent in those early days of her marriage. No matter; even without words, she was good with everyone.

I went a little way across the room and sat at someone else’s table. From time to time he glanced across at me, with a look of embarrassment and at the same time of some satisfaction, glad to have the matter off his chest and to have interested me so much.

During the remaining days of our voyage naturally I kept watch for any suggestion or symptom of what his father’s transgression and the ugly outcome had done to him. Never for a moment did he seem tragic or even unhappy; just somewhat broken-spirited. Only in semblance was he a boy; in fact he was a man, one who had lost some illusions.

I can recall one other talk with him, which was the day that the mountain breezes or foothill breezes brought the odor of rosemary out to us; down at sea level, amid the salty breathing and trough and crest of divine Ocean. That this sometimes happens I had read in a travel book or a magazine, but supposed that it was a fabrication or a fantasy. We stood in a place on the deck where there was both sunshine and shade. Facing me, the man from Prison City rested his awkward young figure against the port rail, with the light on his coarse yellow hair. I was gazing to the north or the northeast, imagining that I saw dolphins—either that was an optical illusion, or they swam with unnatural rapidity into the distance, with their generic loping movement, like flight without wings—when suddenly the bittersweet smell assailed my nostrils, startling and gratifying.

I called my companion’s attention to it. He smiled with all his white teeth and drew several breaths, pleased to show participation in my olfactory experience. “Is it just a foreign plant,” he asked, “or is it the same at home? It smells like something, I guess it’s something to eat.”

I told him that a good many Americans season lamb or veal with it, and that I myself, when I can get it, like to snip a sprig into a tomato salad; better to my taste than basil.

“No kidding!” said he, with his astonished smile and the gleam in his brown-and-yellow eyes.

I might have told him that it grows wild in New Mexico as well as in Andalusia and the Carpathians and other glamorous portions of world-geography. The New Mexicans call it romero weed. The famous Brotherhood of Penitents, or their mothers and their wives, concoct a salve or an embrocation of it, analgesic and disinfectant—or they used to, when I was there as a nineteen-year-old—to treat the lesions up and down their backs due to their ritual flagellation during Holy Week. I believe that I decided to say nothing about that. The Sangre de Cristo Range and the San Juan Mountains seemed too far a cry from the scenes of this poor shocked fellow’s past life in Prison City; too far also from his future on the Lido and elsewhere. Also, I always feel some inhibition about the subject matter of sadomasochistic Roman Catholic ritual.

My mind raced back to a thrilling village up in the mountains over the Rio Grande. Above the village a large ravine ascended like a vast flight of stairs, and at the head of it stood a small mountain, a green pyramid suffused with falling snow. Against this background the penitents, naked to the waist, slowly strode along according to their tradition; right foot forward, then a crack of the whip up over the left shoulder, left foot forward, then a crack of the whip over the right shoulder; and soon the blood ran down their backs, down to their loose white underpants. Against the distant snowfall they lit themselves like candles of blood-red wax for the edification of their neighbors in the village, who watched them from a little distance. There was music, played on homemade flutes and sung in sixteenth-century Spanish. I saw one of their whips afterwards: loosely braided fiber with a few bits of tin and glass fastened into the large strands. Calling all this to mind, I took pleasure in the thought of the use of
ros marinus,
the all-purpose plant, for the alleviation of superstitious wounds. Compassion can be a pleasure.

I wonder if I didn’t tell my poor friend all this, sleeptalking as others sleepwalk; memory of its own accord and in its own right, sounding off. Certain it is that when I snapped out of my reverie and attended to my interlocutor once more, he gave me a puzzled look.

We went up on the sundeck, and for another quarter of an hour, while still thinking gratefully and with humor of what I was inhaling, recalling not only the differences of opinion about the best uses of rosemary in cooking and salad-making but my various other favorite confusions in folklore about it, bee-food and sting-component and fairyland awakener and energizer—and indeed, letting my fantasy wander as behooved it, far away in space and far back in time, the story of the sweet perspiration of Egyptian heat imbuing the Virgin Mary’s cloak and subsequently staining the little pallid flowers of primeval rosemary blue, blue—I carried on further pleasantly desultory conversation with my Californian.

“We’ll be sighting land before long,” I said. “There is a promontory, called I forget what, that we may see just a shadow of, on the horizon. It’s in the lower left corner of the map of Spain.”

“Is Spain an island?” the youth on his way from Prison City or from Sacramento to the Lido wanted to know.

“No, no,” I answered in an unemphatic voice, in order not to wound him in his self-esteem. He had a quality that would inspire kindness in almost anyone, I thought.

“Oh, I remember now,” he said, with something of a child’s enthusiasm when it has learned its lesson. “It’s Portugal that’s the island.”

Deep-seated in our poor humanity is covetousness. It is a vacuum and we want it filled. We call upon imagination, no matter how, to counteract our childishness with experience true or false, to beguile our tedium, and to give consolation, when this or that obvious reality has disappointed or frustrated us. Credulity is another immense characteristic; it also helps us with our hearts’ desires and the void in our minds. It is contributory to the strength of love and the effectiveness of literature, and enters into other spheres of the spiritual life, some of them unsavory. And I conclude that the sense of smell especially ministers to all this.

Therefore, from time to time, in the years that have elapsed, I have asked myself whether the odor that day, the great whiff of Spain, was imaginary. I have answered myself, No. Why should it be? Either it is true or it is my madness; that is to say, a truth about me.

It would not have occurred to me to invent a breeze-ful of the aroma of a very common herb, and to add interest to it by simply situating it where it was not, had not been, never will be. How can I prove what I say? How can you disprove it? I do not, I could not, ask you to accept the corroboration of my Californian, even if he were at hand and remembered standing there on the
Conte di Savoia
beside me and taking deep breaths. For if I, taking my deep breaths, had declared that I detected, for example, the icy, deadly sweetness of the North Pole—or, for example, the heroic body odor of Alexander the Great in battle (immortalized for us by Plutarch)—that most unheroic boy would have agreed with me. Why? Because I had listened respectfully to his tale.

Read this as fiction if you prefer to. A part of fiction is error, and another part is forgetfulness; and when a great many years have passed, the same is apt to be true of truth. Allow all you like for that; still there will be something that life has implanted in one man’s mind, if not in many men’s minds, and that life, later on, has called forth in the way of inspiration. It is the details that persuade us of great things. It is the uninventable that we choose to believe and to love in the end. Down from the steep mountainside fields, impossible to cultivate, humming with the wings of bees and sharp with their stings, down came (and down still comes) the musky and honied odor of the herb. Out of the mouth of a commonplace and traumatized boy may issue uninventable words also: his saying at the end of his sorrowful tale, “My God, let’s talk about something cheerful!” which touched my heart; and his saying, as his make-believe geography lesson, “Portugal’s the island.” Yes, let it be the island.

A
PPENDIX
T
WO
E
SSAYS AND
AN
E
XPERIMENTAL
S
TORY

Beginning in the mid-thirties my family (including myself) resided in Union Township, Hunterdon County, New Jersey. In 1957 it was decided to expropriate us and to turn our entire valley into a reservoir. The waters of Spruce Run and of Mulhocoway Creek were to be held back in winter and spring, then gradually released in summer, so as to equalize the flow of the Raritan River of which they are tributaries. Now I will tell you what this meant to me at the time, and what lessons I seemed to learn from it, some of which I have had to unlearn.

In point of fact, it was to have been expected. In the late twenties certain real estate speculators, foreseeing the future usefulness of the two streams and a dozen adjacent properties along them, lobbied to have that tract inundated
pro bono publico.
But, as it turned out, another sale in the northern part of the state was selected and submerged instead, which made available the good-sized farm acquired by my brother and sister-in-law some years later, all bottom land. After the war the lower Raritan developed into one of the most flourishing industrial areas in the nation, with vastly increased population and water-requirements which, before long, were going to amount to a continuous emergency. Inevitably the Spruce Run and Mulhocoway project was reconsidered and set in motion once more.

A number of families in the valley banded together to oppose the forced purchase and abolishment of these dear homes and fertile fields, in which opposition my aged mother who had recently come to live with me, and my sister-in-law who was in delicate health, were inclined to join. My brother and I understood that it was hopeless. Furthermore, we were aware of the perilous general lowering of the water table in our part of the world, and, in principle, we believed in the return of a good deal of unnecessary farmland to a condition of wilderness once more: lake, swamp, woodland, and wild acreage. My brother’s and sister-in-law’s house was to be under forty or fifty feet of water, the state officials told us; mine and my mother’s under only ten.

That same summer and early autumn New Jersey suffered a bad drought; irony of the heavens! For the first time in twenty years the brook that encircled my lawn shrank into mere mud. The pastures got in so moribund a condition that the soil loosened under the shrunken grasses, eroded in the breeze. Leaves in the hedgerow withered and hung down around their stems. In some places even burdock and thistle and poison ivy died. So many of the greens having faded out of the landscape, there appeared an odd new color or non-color; and sometimes in the middle of the day, when the sunlight was perpendicular, it seemed to darken, as a dead body may be seen to do: inner flesh casting its shadow through the skin. On and off we felt a kind of passivity, in accord with the general distress of nature, alternating with the characteristic human rebound of excitement and sentiment, dramatization of sadness, unrealistic love of life.

“Pleurs de joie!
Tears of joy!” Is that not what Pascal had written on a piece of paper folded up or wadded up in a little sack on a string around his neck, referring to his great mystic experience: thunderstruck, lightning-struck sense of doom and simultaneously of salvation, dated November 23, 1654? Nothing of that kind has ever been experienced by me; no real occultism. Presumably I am incapable of it, self- incapacitated. Something similar to it, however, suffuses my life upon occasion; distils itself in me, one or two tears at a time.

One morning in the course of that parched summer I awoke at about half past five or a little earlier; ready to work, I thought, or almost ready. I was trying to write an essay on William Butler Yeats, based on my notes for a lecture that I had given two or three times, entitled “Story Underlying Poetry.” It was a matching-up of the chronology of his life, particularly his strange love-life, with the order in which his love poems were written, obscured by him in the arrangement of his successive volumes but on record here and there, in biographies and critical studies. It interested me exceedingly, but it was work promised and dutiful, therefore my instinct was to put it off.

First, I said to myself, first, let me jot down something about the look on the face of a young or youngish man who had appeared to me in a dream, just on the verge of waking; one whom I knew but had not seen, scarcely thought of, for several years. He had been a friendly acquaintance of my close friend John Connolly, and now and then, when I went to New York, he came around to visit us after dinner. He liked me; liked my being a writer.

For my part, he mystified me which, as I am a virtually professional student of humankind, is often a factor in my sociability, at least for a while. He had an athlete’s physique, grown soft. He had a worker’s hands, but dressed with some elegance. He was pleasant company, although as a rule he only questioned us and commented mildly on what we told him; volunteering little or no subject matter of his own.