the gate there was a low murmur of voices in what seemed both French and English. Then the face returned to inquire if he was not an American. He confessed. “I see,” said the woman, and again withdrew.
A different face, noticeably younger, rosy as a ham hock, and congenial of smile appeared in the aperture. “Good day, sir,” this one said in lilting English. “I don’t know what you’re doing here, but I’m dreadfully afraid we can’t let you enter at the moment.” Her accent seemed to be Irish. “I’m the only one here now who speaks English, and I haven’t got any bleeding authority, if you’ll please excuse my coarse speech, so Masked Beauty or rather the mother superior’s sent word that your request can’t be properly considered until Sister Domino comes back. I’m sorry, sir. You’re not from the Church, are you, sir? That would be a different matter, naturally, but you’re not from the Church, now are you?”
Switters hesitated a moment before responding, in imitation of R. Potney Smithe, “Bloody well not my end of the field.” He was encouraged when the new face seemed to suppress a giggle. “I’m Switters, free-lance errand boy and all-around acquired taste, prepared to exchange hard currency for a night’s lodging. And what’s your name, little darling?”
The new face blushed. Its owner turned away, engaged in brief discussion with the unseen voices, then reappeared. “Sorry, sir, you’ll have to wait for herself.”
“Wait how long?”
“Oh, not more than a day or two, sir. She’ll be coming back from Damascus.”
“Why, there’s a wee shade over there, sir.” She rolled her eyes toward a spot along the wall where an overhang of thickly leaved boughs cast a purplish shadow on the sand. “Bloody unaccommodating, ain’t it? I can talk like this because only you and God can understand me, and I don’t believe either you or God gives a pip. I’d like to hear how you got here in that bloody chair, but they’re pulling at my skirts. Good-bye, sir, and God bless.”
“Water!” Switters called, as the grill slid shut.
“Oh, well,” he sighed. He trundled the twenty feet or so to the shaded place, where he spread his blanket and lay down, his heels propped on the chair’s footrest, two inches above the ground. The water in the pitcher was cool. The figs had a faint taste of
When he awoke it was night. Above him, all around him, the sky was a bolt of black velvet awaiting the portrait of Jesus or Elvis. Stars, like grains of opium, dusted it from edge to edge. In one far corner, the moon was rising. It looked like the head of an idol, a golden calf fattened on foxfire.
Why was the air so torrid? It was his experience that the desert cooled quickly after dark. And summer was yet a month away. Not that it mattered, any more than it mattered that his muscles seemed loosened from his bones or that his bones were swimming in gasoline. He felt like the Sleeping Gypsy in Rousseau’s great painting, asleep with his eyes half open in a night alive with mystery and fever.
Fever? It gradually occurred to him that it was he who was hot, not the air. The sweat drops on his brow were like tadpoles. They migrated down his neck as if in search of a pond. Still, he didn’t care. A night such as this was worth anything! His aching only gave pitch to its beauty.
The stars hopped about like chigger bugs. The moon edged toward him. Once, he had the sensation that it was licking him with a great wounded tongue. He smelled orange blossoms. He was nauseated. He heard himself moan.
His brain, lit as it now was by an unearthly radiance, accepted the fact that the fever that sickened him also protected him. It spun a cocoon around him.
Moonlight enveloped him like a clown suit—voluminous, chalky, theatrical—into which he was buttoned with fuzzy red pompons of fever. Inside it, his blood sang torch songs, sang them throughout the night, as he drifted in and out of dream and delirium, unable to distinguish the one from the other. When he vomited, it was a fizzy mixture of bile and
At some point, he realized that the sun was beating him between the eyes like a stick. He covered his face with his hat and grieved for the enchantments of evening. Another time, he was sure he heard female voices, cautious but caring, and sensed that figures were gathered around him like the ghosts of dead Girl Scouts around a spectral weenie roast.
Then, it was night again. He uncovered his face in time to see the moon spin into view like a salt-encrusted pinwheel. Although he couldn’t explain why, the night sky made him want to meow. He tried meowing once or twice, but it hurt his gums, which were swollen, and his throat, which felt like a scabbard two sizes too small for its sword. Oddly enough, it never occurred to him that he might be dying. For his composure he could probably thank fever, which nature had programmed to weave illusions of invincibility, and End of Time, whose yopo had dissolved boundaries between life and its extreme alternative (lesser alternatives being conformity, boredom, sobriety, consumerism, dogmatism, puritanism, legalism, and things of that sorry ilk). He realized, nonetheless, that he was in a kind of trouble for which he had not bargained.
It was on the second afternoon—or, perhaps, the third—that he emerged from deep torpor to find his forehead being sponged by a vivacious, round-cheeked nun. He studied her face only seconds before blurting out, weakly but passionately, “I love you.”
“Oh, yeah?” she replied in American English with a faint French accent. “You’re out of your cotton-picking mind.”
Whether an Amazonian germ colony had been insidiously incubating in his mucous recesses since Boquichicos, or whether he’d taken aboard a more overt yet equally malevolent family of microorganisms while in the company of the Bedouins or Kurds, he would never know. His nurse, the vivacious nun, had no name for his sickness, either in English or French, but she had a cure: sponge baths, sulfa drugs, and pots of herbal tea. Or else it simply ran its course. In any event, after a week of pain, fever, nausea, coma, and phantasmagorical rapture, his lids sprang open one morning like mousetraps in reverse, and he found himself, feeble yet curiously refreshed, upon a low cot in the tiny, blue-walled room that served the convent/oasis as a rudimentary infirmary. Sister Domino sat, as she had almost continually, on a stool at his side.
She wore now a typically Syrian long cotton gown instead of the habit in which he’d first seen her. In truth, he had little or no recollection of their first meeting, and when informed later of his impromptu declaration of love for her, he was understandably embarrassed, although disinclined to deny he’d made such an avowal.
Domino had opened the louvered door and thrown back the curtains on the glassless window, and in the strong sunlight, he saw that she was older than her voice and mannerisms had led him to believe. Older, but no less sparkling of eye. And her pert little nose would have been an apt protrusion from the most popular face at any teen queen dairy bar. As for her mouth (what the hell was he doing evaluating her mouth?), it was one of those perpetually rubicund embossments that resembled a plum squashed half out of its jacket and seemed always on the verge of a pout or a pucker—but only on the verge, for it was a strong mouth, there was a firmness and resolve in it, even when it almost pursed, even when it modestly smiled. She could smile from six o’clock to doomsday, and nobody would ever see her gums. She exuded warmth and tenderness, but on her own terms.
Her complexion was Mediterranean of hue and thus seemed incongruous with her more northerly nose. Around her eyes the skin looked as if it had been trampled by sparrows, a tracing that caused him to put her age at forty. She was forty-six. Or would be in September.
In shadow, Domino’s hair was dark brown; in sunlight, reddish tints shone through in streaks, like claw marks on fine maple furniture. She wore it straight, at medium length, and it had a tendency to swing free and half cover one or the other of her rotund cheeks. The cheeks were not fat, exactly, but each might have concealed a bishop’s golfball—with a couple of Communion wafers thrown in for good measure. Her breasts and buttocks were also quite round, but Switters didn’t notice that. He would have sworn under oath that he didn’t notice. Why would he have noticed? She was a middle-aged nun.
