He wasn't doing it right, this traveling. Too much aloneness; too much solitude. Despite his theories, whatever they were -- "that the better journey must be taken inward, to the self"; that "there is no endless solitude"; that it was "a culture of life and a culture of life cannot be enjoyed alone." He couldn't keep them straight. He made it all up anyways.
Aloneness becomes loneliness. It is that simple.
Max walked through the town with his bag on his shoulders. The sun was hot in the sky and mud was drying on his face. Max glanced at his fingers which were brown with mud. He look at the light which was glinting off the hard dust in the street.
Max had paid a boy on a motorbike to drive him through the valley. They had rode together over green fields that extended far, with god-like intensity. Then the motorbike slipped and they fell in a pool of mud and they laughed. Mud was on everything. The mud dried as they rode and then cracked on their skin so that it itched and they needed to stop to wash their hands in the stream beside the road.
"Anything extra?" the boy asked. "It was a real hard trip," he said. He did not look at Max's face as he spoke.
"How much will the Laundromat cost?" Max said, smiling.
Little bugs were hopping on the table as he sat. He leaned on the plastic. He looked at the town. It was a small town; a woman sat on her stoop in a rocking chair; the colonial houses stood in rows. The colors! he said out loud. Yes, it was always the colors that we wished he could keep. Max could only smile, though no body could see it. They would care, he knew. He knew they would care that he was smiling.
How would he change any of this? Well that at least he did not know.
Most of his days began with him lying awake in a hotel room. It was always dimly lit, real cheap. It was the worst place he knew: a hotel at midday. The walls glow blandly gray; people moving on the street. Then he would leave the room. The first light of the day is one of his greatest pleasures.
Really, Max thought to himself, sitting at the plastic table, looking at the town: things will work out. He hoped they would and he knew that they must. For if the world was not sorted for him ahead of time, the deck stacked in such a way that he might win, while barely trying, he felt that he could not do it for himself.
Thing will work out. He had great faith that they would. In fact he considered this a part of his personal faith in the power of an Almighty God. Yes, it was still vaguely considered, but he felt it deeply. Max believed that the universe was so delicately and precisely constituted that he needed only to throw himself within it for an experience to materialize. Things will work out. This was his Belief -- he believed that if he left his house, life would fall on him like raindrops. And he must only bring the buckets.
Max sat back in his chair. He was smiling dumbly at the town, sipping his grape soda. The question, of course, is that if the rain stops falling, where do you find the water? He hadn't figured that part out yet.
Would he need to? Alone, bored and lonely and covered in mud, Max felt that he was a creature of great luck. I walk through a forest and I stumble over something. When I look down, I find that it is exactly what I needed.
Yes, a creature of great luck, he said to himself. As if I made a deal with Fate to give me exactly what I need, and spare me the worst.
- -
A plump, dark-skinned girl sprawled herself on Max's mattress. She was smoking a joint. Her legs were spread out from her jean skirt, the dark skin of her legs shining with the lightbulb in the corner, like the wet scales of a fish. A topless boy sat in the frame of the door. He was saying, "New Yawk. New Yaawk." He looked at Max. "Tha Big App-lee. New Yaaawk, The Big App-lee."
"The Big Apple," Max corrected. "The Big Apple"
It was four a.m.. Outside the room, big men were yelling in a Caribbean slang. It was dark and the halls smelled like marijuana. Through the plywood walls of the room, Max could hear the Beatles. "Love, love me do," they sang. "You know I love you. You know I ll be true."
"Want some?" the plump girl asked, leaning her head on Max's leg. Max looked at her. He looked at the boy in the door frame. The boy's eyes were fierce, but his face looked sweet. On the door above him, tiny cockroaches climbed through the busted holes.
The Beatles sang: "So please, please, please...love me doooo"
"No, thanks." said Max. He looked back at his book in his lap, From Dawn to Decadence. He flipped through the pages, trying to focus his eyes. Somewhere, he knew, beyond this hall, beyond the beach, over the Atlantic, the sun was rising in the sky.
- -
Sometimes he found the differences charming. They were, he fancied, a part of his personal escape from the wholly parochial. Today was not one of those days. He looked at the street, hot with sweat, hot with stink. He spooned the soup broth. I never want to live like this, he said to himself.
- -
A thin lady wailing on the side of a main street.
The question of why some have more and why some have so very little is important.
But must the existence of such a question (of such a woman), prevent my enjoyment of a simple walk, on this busy street?
That was what he wrote in his journal. It was getting dark. The street was narrow and yellow; boys and girls were climbing the cobble stones; two were kissing in the shadows. Pastry shops lighted each corner. Beside them, policemen stood with machine-guns, chatting with the girls.
What was worse were the streets without the guns.
Men walk with black jackets and they pick through the trash. They look at me as I pass. I think they look like wolves. "Give me money. Any money," a man says and he touches me on the shoulder. I say nothing. I shake my head "no" and I walk. There is no light on the street. It is all blackness except for the occasional red of the florescent lights of a closed-down shop, small as a particle of dust, glowing red like a fat drop congealed in the distant upper sky. "You and me," the man says. His hair is long and his face is sooty. His eyes are wild. "In all of us there is only one spirit." "Yes," I say. I walk quickly. Streets like these are an image of Judgment Day. The weak face the strong and God says, "Well, boy, what have you done?"
What was worse were the streets without the guns. Beneath an order of guns is that more odious one: the order of human survival.
- -
Unless you are old or already in love, nights like these are spent feverishly. From the beginning they are unsettled, breathless, like running in a machine designed for the manufacture of illusions, like a whirling top. Nights like these are spent moving from place to place wondering whether around the very next corner is the Answer, the permanent fix to your endless hunger.
They were the same in Bogota as they were in Lewisboro, which is evidence that human anxiety is universal. For Max, who had no guts and anyways liked sleep too much, such nights still held their mysterious charm.
"How old are you?"
"Fifty-nine," said Max, making the numbers with his hands.
"No. Really, how old are you?"
"Age is illusion," he whispered in her ear.
"Is that so?
"Yes, illusion. And you? How old are you?"
"Thirty one."
"Thirty one? Really? Thirty-one? Don't worry, that is illusory."
She put his hand on her waist, and they both moved together. She was teaching him Salsa.
"Slowly, slowly," she said. Max smiled big and she smiled too. Wilfred, Max's friend, was dancing with a heavy woman in the back. His head rested on her shoulder; her eyes were closed. A man was kissing a girl in the corner, behind them and the girl was touching the back of his head. The whole room was moving. It was all real slow.
"Slowly," she whispered in Max's ear. She laughed and Max laughed too.
"White skin," he said, like a revelation. "Pizza, war -- that's all I've got. American."
"Now hold my hand," she said, taking his fingers, touching his ring. Max spun her. The lights hung from the wooden rafters on the ceiling, glowing soupy and big.
Max never caught her name. It was something long, and Latin-sounding. Wilfred and the heavy woman and Max and she sat down. They don't have girls like that back home, Max thought to himself. Nope, not in America. They all drank shots.
"In my opinion," Max said promptly, pointing at a man across the room. "In my opinion, that man, not really. Not really so impressive."
"Oh?" she smiled. "Is that your opinion?"
"Sure, sure," Max continued, not looking at anything now. "Sure he's more handsome that I am, and he can speak fluent Spanish, and he can dance better, but..."
He trailed off, unable to finish the comparison. In fact, it wasn't there for him to find. To put the question another way: what does it mean that he, this boy who hoped for pandemonium, with all these notions, far from innocent, is sitting here tonight? Perhaps (as he would later argue) he had been searching eight months for the answer. His mind now was eggy, reeling: all lightness.
The whole thing, he thought, was teetering on an invisible line drawn somewhere in the space between the musty shine of the wooden rafters and the infinite softness of this sly girl's breasts (and all the girls he's ever thought about) and to Max's own beating heart, thumping gaily to the rhythm that was filling this room. It was fast now, lots of trumpet. Perhaps everything rested on that line.
There's no time, Max thought, grinning, triumphant.
"Professor!" he shouted. The music in the room was loud. "Come heerree!"
"You." she said. "You come here."
She was moving her hips. Max got up slowly. It was dark and hot and it was hard not to realize at that moment, as he walked slovenly to the floor, that they were different -- she a Colombian woman and Max a Jewish boy from New York. There was no charm that he could summon, Max knew, to fill in that gap. That gap will persist; presumably it must.
They danced all night, whispering and smiling. Max, beside these beautiful women, looked as if he were only joking. In a lot of ways he was.
- -
Somewhere, he mused, drifting on the tops of the Andean mountains, is my style -- that slippery bitch. Is it buried in the snow? Maybe it's beneath a stone?
Max looked at the window, as the bus moved from the terminal. If only for the blows that I'm going to take, he smiled. I need a style, if only to survive. He looked back at his journal and then up at the mountains. I hope it's there, there for me to find.
Well, in any case, he thought, my stuff is getting better. That's all I want: to unite my thoughts with the realities of the world with the words I can write down in my journal. That is what he aimed for. He wished to express himself fully, and then die.
No comments:
Post a Comment