The Boy in His Winter (20 page)

He treated me with respect, serving up additional proofs of a democratic spirit by dismissing the crew and making me a Spanish omelette in the galley of his new yacht—he named her
Canción de Luna
—and pouring me, with his own immaculately manicured hands, a pleasantly chilled Jurançon. We sat on the sundeck, smoking fat Havana cigars, having bitten off their ends in easy fellowship. I told him a story of my life, and then he told me his.

He recalled with tender yearning a young girl met by chance in a tapas bar in Barcelona’s El Raval Bario. Like the prince in another of Twain’s books, Juan Carlos had given his bodyguards the slip; and disguised as a stevedore—or else a movie usher, I can’t quite remember which—he ate chopitos, prawns, and fried quail eggs on bread, washed down with beer, with his pumiced elbows on the sticky tabletop.
While returning from the
cuarto de baño,
he collided with a waitress carrying plates of empanadillas. They became lovers soon after Juan Carlos had stooped to pick up the sardines in onion sauce, the broken pastry shells and plates.

“I was with her only the one night,” he said wistfully. “In the morning, I was once again
el rey.
I never saw her after that, but perhaps she realized her good fortune when, later on, she received the key and title to an Aston Martin. It was used—by my father—but very gently.”

Moved by an insurgency of desire, he went inside to be alone. I sat on while my cigar burned toward extinction and—as if to spite all handmade sources of light and comfort—the stars emerged, repeating for me their familiar patterns on the sky. I, too, yielded to the past: a night in 2005 when I had sprinkled ash in memory of a man drowned on the other side of the ocean. Unsettled, I dropped my spent cigar into an Atlantic warmed by Africa and the Sahara, heard it briefly hiss, went inside, and—undone by weariness, wine, and the ocean’s drubbing on the hull—was soon asleep. I fell down into the unlit ocean, where vague shapes combine in dreams, and wondered why, unlike the king, I could not summon even a fleeting memory of tenderness with a woman. Not even for—no, I won’t say her name. She’s alive yet, in Palm Beach, and litigious when it comes to former lovers, which are many.

There was—about our trip north along the coastlines of Morocco, western Portugal, and Spain—something nearly magical. The
Canción
behaved as though she had passed directly from the brain of the naval engineer who drew her hull to the ocean, without need of any other construction than that which happens in the mind. She was the radiant
idea
of a yacht. Her engines were a dream of thrust and
ascendancy, lifting her bow into the topaz sky while her stern drew an ever-widening vee behind us.

“She moves like a logical argument from one shining term to the next, toward an ineluctable end,” said Juan Carlos, who was, during the space of that journey, changed, like someone in a spell.

He spent the time, which seemed unmeasurable, on deck, playing shuffleboard or shooting skeets, or inside the cabin, feeding Spanish coins into a slot machine or playing the piano. Astonished, I listened as he moved effortlessly from “Chopsticks” to Debussy’s “Poissons d’or”—this man who had been tone-deaf since birth. Finished, he stood for my ovation, which I gladly gave, while a señorita dressed pertly in a sailor’s blouse showered him with roses.

Wanting to be alone, I went outside and, sitting in a deck chair, watched the western ocean turning gold. It was then—I swear!—I saw Jim cradled by a golden wave, wreathed in a Stephen Foster song. His course, unaltered by the prevailing current, tended toward the place of his birth: Africa. He may have hoped to find his wife and children there. On the raft, in the shade of the lean-to, during intimate and earnest conversations with Henry Wilson, Jim might have heard of Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa movement. I didn’t blame Jim for turning away from his countrymen; after all, he’d been enslaved and lynched by them. Seeing him now recalled me sharply to our common past: a shapelier time, a happier one for me, though not for him.

Thank you for this dream! I shouted in my mind, so as not to disturb Juan Carlos, who had gone below to the royal suite in order to savor his.

How marvelous it is sometimes to feel the minor agony of a broken heart! (I supposed this to be true, for I had
yet to undergo love’s trials, however much I knew of its lunacy.)

Jim vanished into the east, where sky and water had turned dark after the departed sun. The moment when day’s effulgence suffers its eclipse is terrible! I was harrowed by a thought, perhaps because of it: What would become of Jim, or any other creature cursed with immortality, if the world were destroyed? Where all is naught, what space can an immortal occupy—what ground is left to stand on? A chilling thought made all the more so by another: Suppose Huck Finn is immortal, too, as experts in literary history have declared him? Does it matter I’ve left the role and changed my name to Albert Barthelemy?

You want to know where this is leading.

I may not have escaped Huckleberry Finn. You’ve heard of people unusually amenable to suggestion, who are regressed by hypnosis to other, earlier lives, as if the self were an archaeological record of personalities that disappeared without a trace until—by patience and exertion—they are, one by one, unearthed. Huck may be waiting underneath Albert Barthelemy for the final call to bring him, smartly, forward. Huck’s personality may be the stronger and, in the end, may have power to overthrow my own. Perhaps Huck can better endure eternity, or the grave. Should I send for a hypnotist to release him, the way devout Catholics do a priest to daub their brows with the olive oil of Extreme Unction? Ought I go into eternity as Albert Barthelemy—or will I stand a better chance as Huck, who was less fastidious and scrupulous than I have become at the close of my days? And what if there is a still deeper antecedent self beneath us both, whose name might be Mark Twain? Had I tried to outrun the past, and failed?

I woke, feeling anxious and afraid. The king seemed not to know me. At breakfast, he was curt and, when I called him Juan, rebuked me for an insolent disregard of etiquette. After his toast had been reduced to crumbs and his coffee to its lees, he stood—on his dignity—and left without another word, allowing me to consider what was due a king. The steward reassured me, saying that his majesty often became sullen when he remembered the race of Spanish bulls, now sadly extinct. At Rotterdam, the
Canción
docked with an undignified bump against the pier. I rented a bicycle and pedaled the twenty-one kilometers to Papendrecht.

I
MET
J
AMESON
—
BY ACCIDENT
—at the Golden House in Papendrecht, where Willem and I had gone to eat dim sum. She was by herself at a table placed beneath a painting of the Yangtze River, elegantly conducting with chopsticks an orchestra of dumplings on her plate. Willem asked if we could join her. She smiled agreeably, and when two additional places had been set, we sat. Bashful for a reason I could not explain, I fiddled with a spoon while Willem introduced us to each other:

“Jameson Tarn . . . Albert Barthelemy.”

“How do you do,” she said, her eyes sounding mine, which slid away to a calendar by the kitchen door. I read the date, as if to steady myself in time: August 15, 2034.

Willem nudged my ankle with his shoe. I turned my face to hers and stammered, “Glad to meet you.” And I was! As absurd as it must seem, I was pleased to meet this lovely black woman with a frankly penetrating gaze that searched for something in my eyes throughout the meal.

All right! It’s far-fetched, but I believed from the first
instant I saw her that she was Jim. No, that’s too disturbing an idea! Let’s say instead that I believed Jim had entered her. That’s not exactly right, either. I believed Jim had been
infused
in her, the way tea leaves are in boiling water, to become what is neither one nor the other, but something tonic and strengthening. In other words, Jameson—by an unimaginable transubstantiation—had acquired a vital aspect of Jim, who meant to look after me in death as he had in life. He may have fallen in with the
egun,
spirits of the dead for the Yorùbáns, who believe the border between the spiritual and physical life is porous. Fortunately for my readers (to speak optimistically), in 2077 I can talk of numinous states without fear of ridicule. In previous ages dominated by a vulgar materialism, I could not have told this story. (I’d have had to tell some other to explain my life.) But I want my readers to understand that when I fell in love with Jameson and she with me, there was nothing unnatural in our feelings.

“You have an unusual first name,” I said later, when we were walking along the Merwede.

“My father named me after his favorite whiskey,” Jameson said, and laughed.

“Willem said you were stranded.”

“I am, although Holland is a lovely country to be stranded in. I chartered a cruiser at Rotterdam and planned to travel the Merwede to the river Waal, then on to the Rhine. But at Papendrecht, the captain took sick. His appendix burst, poor man. He’s in the hospital. I’m thinking seriously of giving up and going home.”

“I have my captain’s license,” I said, and, noticing her doubtful glance, added, “I’ve spent more years on the river than you’d think to look at me.”

There are no coincidences, Tom Sawyer whispered in my mind to bedevil me.

“You have time?” she asked.

“As much as you need.”

Time, for me then, seemed all but inexhaustible.

We walked in silence along the river—she looking thoughtfully at the water, I shyly at her face in profile, which stirred in me memories of other elegant lines, like a heron’s in flight or the prow of a riverboat in the charged instant before getting under way. I suppose I was thinking of a quality as elusive as beauty; I mean
expectancy.
Isn’t it marvelous how, with the speed of light, we can be recalled from the present to a commensurate moment in the past? And just so did Jameson and I arrive at a band shell on the riverbank—empty and silent now, but able to unearth an evening buried long ago when Tom Sawyer, Jim, and I stood by another river and heard a brass band playing military marches that had incited men to fall at Austerlitz and, on our own shores, at Dearborn and Detroit, on ground made noble, or ignoble, by death.

“People have been kind,” said Jameson, her eyes resting on mine, which this time didn’t flinch from hers. “Even here: Willem and now you. It’s enough to make me believe in providence.”

“Or accident,” I said, feeling obliged, again, to resist the tyrannical persuasion of fate. (As if it matters to the body mangled in a car wreck whether the fault lies with fate, accident, or a moment’s inattention!)

Earlier, I mentioned that something had changed me: an accident I had no earthly reason to expect. Do you have the passage? Yes? Let me see it.
I was changed, too, by something that I will insist, always, was accidental: an instant of
senselessness and absurdity when I fulfilled the river’s purpose and my own.
I was talking about Jameson and the impetuous moment on the Merwede when I offered myself as captain and she just as impulsively accepted.

I
N
S
ANTA
M
ONICA
,
WHERE
J
AMESON
wrote and illustrated children’s stories, she’d had the happy thought of turning a pilgrimage to the German town of Münchhausen into a picture book. An eighteenth-century baron by that name is famous for his fantastic tales and became himself the subject of improbable narratives like
Marvelous Travels on Water and Land: Campaigns and Comical Adventures of the Baron of Münchhausen
. She’d planned to follow the Merwede’s more or less easterly progress to the Waal, then on to the southerly tending Rhine. Below Koblenz, she’d travel the Lahn, a tributary of the Rhine, northeasterly to the Wetschaft valley and the town of Münchhausen. It was not until she hired a boat and captain in Rotterdam that she understood her intended journey’s impracticability. (With its feints and twists, the river system seemed a folly to me, who was used to the frank ways of the Mississippi.) The captain soon persuaded Jameson to forgo a trip to Münchhausen in favor of the Middle Rhine and its castles.

“It was a disappointment!” she said to me. “Still, there’s no reason why I can’t honor the baron with a marvelous travel story of my own.”

She’d turned the smaller stateroom into a studio, where I discovered pencil sketches she had done between Rotterdam and Papendrecht. She had a gift for capturing, in barest summary, small moments that promised larger things. Her line was confident; her shading conveyed an absence made
mysterious by an almost-glimpsed presence. She’d brought a number of her published books. One in particular, about a boy and a giraffe named Rupert, moved me by its unchildish refusal of sentimentality. It began:
From autumn until spring, I left the attic just once—to go to Africa with Rupert, my friend. There was a war. Smoke darkened the sky. At night, it covered the moon. We were afraid. The attic belonged to a man who made shoes.

I don’t propose to recite the itinerary of our river journey, my last, as it turned out (unless another awaits me beyond time’s final reach). In any case, I don’t remember the places where we stopped. My thoughts were centered on Jameson, who was herself the beauties of the way. I can’t recall the rails on which we slid, according to love’s commissioning, from affection into attraction. Like the rivers themselves, the passages down which we moved were unmarked. We struggled at once to cleave and to fend off—the countervailing motions of the bewildered heart.