Life During Wartime

Izaguirre’s bedside manner, because at a remove, everything about the doctor grated on him.

‘Oh, don’t forget your book.’ Izaguirre retrieved the Pastorin book from the reception desk and handed it to him. ‘It’s very, very good,’ he said.

The first story in The Fictive Boarding House told of two families who had feuded over the possession of a magic flower. Mingolla lost interest in it halfway through, finding it too mannered and concluding that all the members of the families were complete assholes. The title story, however, enthralled him. It detailed a strange contract made between an author and the residents of a boarding house in a Latin American slum. The author offered to educate the residents’ children, to guarantee them lives of comfort, if in return the residents would spend their remaining days living out a story written by the author, one he would add to year by year, incorporating those events over which he had no control. Being in desperate straits, the residents accepted the offer, and though at times they balked and tried to break the contract, gradually their individual wishes and hopes were overwhelmed, subsumed into the themes employed by the story. Their lives had taken on almost mythic significance as a result, their deaths proving to be passionate epiphanies. Only the author, whose health had been ruined by the expenditure of energy necessary to script their lives, who had conceived of the project as a whimsy yet had realized it as a work of transcendent charity, only he had endured an ordinary life and ignominious extinction.

Sleepy, Mingolla closed the book, turned off his bedside lamp, and settled back. Moonlight streamed in the window, bathing the walls in a bluish white glow, bringing up stark shadows beneath his writing desk and chair. Tacked to the walls were a number of sketches he had done during the months of drug therapy. They were unlike anything he had done before, all depicting immense baroque chambers of stone, with bridges arching from blank walls, ornate staircases leading nowhere, vaulted ceilings opening onto strange perspectives of still more outrageous architecture, and thronging the horizontal planes, hordes of ant-sized men, smudgy dots almost lost among the pencil shadings and lines. It made him uncomfortable to look at them now, not because of their alienness, but because he recognized the psychology underlying them to be his own, and he wasn’t certain whether that psychology had been laid bare by the drugs or was the product of a transformation.

His eyelids drooped, and he thought of Debora, both with anger and with longing. Despite Izaguirre’s revelations, his obsession had survived intact, and whenever he tried to apply the logic of recrimination, the fact of her betrayal was swept away by fantasy or by his insistence in believing that she must have had some real feeling for him. And so it was not at all surprising that he dreamed of her that night, a dream unusual for its lucidity. She was floating in a white void, clad in a gown of such whiteness that he could not see its drape or fold: she might have been a disembodied head and arms superimposed on a white backdrop. She was revolving slowly, tipping toward him, then away, allowing him to view her at every angle and each angle providing him with insights into her character, seeming to illustrate her resilience, her toughness, her capacity for devotion. There was no music in the dream, but her movements were so graceful, he had the notion they were being governed by an inaudible music that pervaded the void, perhaps a distillate of music that manifested as a white current. She drifted closer, and soon was near enough that—if the dream had been real—he could have touched her. She drifted closer yet, her limbs aligning with the position of his arms and legs, and in her pupils he saw tiny facsimiles of himself floating in whiteness. A keening noise switched on inside his head, and his desire for her also switched on; he wanted to shake off the bonds of the dream and pull her against him. Her lips were parted, eyes heavy-lidded, as if she, too, were experiencing desire. And then she drifted impossibly close, merging with him. He went rigid, terrified by a feeling of being possessed. She was inside him, shrinking, becoming as small as a thought, a dusky thought in a white dress wandering the corridors of…

He sat bolt upright in bed, sweating, breathing hard, and for a split second, confused by the moonstruck walls, he believed he had awakened in the white place of his dreams. Even after he recognized his surroundings, he couldn’t escape the thought that she was in the room with him. The geometries of moonlight and shadow appeared to be describing the presence of an invisible form. He was alert to every creak, every quiver of shadow, every sigh of wind. ‘Debora?’ he whispered, and when he received no answer he lay back on the bed, tense and trembling.

‘Goddamn you!’ he said.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Roatan was no tropical paradise. Though the barrier reef was lovely and had once nourished more than a dozen resorts, the interior consisted of low scrub-thatched hills, and much of the coast was given over to mangrove. A dirt road ran partway around the island, connecting the shantytowns of Coxxen Hole, French Harbor, and West End, and a second road crossed from Coxxen Hole to Sandy Bay on the north coast, where the hotel was located: a curving stretch of beach that one moment could seem beautiful and the next abysmally ugly. That, Mingolla realized, was the charm of the place, that you could be walking along on a beach of filthy yellow-brown sand, stepping carefully to avoid pig and cattle droppings, and then, as if a different filter had slid in front of the sun, you suddenly noticed the hummingbirds flitting above the sea grape, the hammocks of coco palms, the reef water glowing in bands of jade and turquoise and aquamarine, according to the varying depth and bottom. Sprinkled among the palms were several dozen shanties set on pilings, their tin roofs scabbed with rust; jetties with gap- boarded outhouses erected on their seaward ends extended out over the shallows, looking at a distance to have the artful crudity of charcoal sketches by Picasso.

It was along this beach that Mingolla learned control of his power through daily lessons with Tully. The lessons were—as Izaguirre had suggested—merely the practice of those things of which he had become aware that first night in the shed, serving to augment his strength and the capacity to know the shape of his emotions; yet he believed he was learning another sort of lesson as well, a lesson in personal competence, in the shouldering of power, the acceptance of its virtues and the practical denial of its liabilities. Though Tully still unnerved him, he saw that his trainer’s arrogance and forceful approach to life were qualities essential to the wielding of power; and though he continued to dream of Debora, to think of her in terms of longing, he came to view these dreams and thoughts in a grim light, to perceive her as a target.

One morning he and Tully sat floating in a dory just inside the reef. The tide was low, and iron-black coral heads lifted from the water like the parapets of a drowned castle, its crannies populated by whelks and urchins. Beyond the reef, the sea was banded in sun-spattered streaks of slate and lavender, and there were so many small waves, the water appeared to be moving in all directions at once. ‘I hate the goddamn sea,’ said Tully, and spat over the side. He leaned back in the stern, jammed a grease-stained baseball cap lower onto his ears; his skin was agleam with bluish highlights under the sun.

‘Thought you used to be a fisherman,’ said Mingolla.

‘Best on de island, mon. But dat don’t mean I got to like de sea. Ain’t not’in’ but a motherfuckin’ graveyard! Once dat come home to me, I never set foot ’pon her again. Look dere!’ He pointed to another dory passing close to the shore, maybe fifty yards off. ‘Call de mon over, Davy.’

Mingolla tried to engage the man’s mind, but failed. ‘Can’t reach him.’

‘Keep tryin’ till you catch a hold.’ Tully propped his feet beside an oarlock, and the dory rocked. ‘Nosir! Once I seen de way of t’ings, I left de sea for good’n all.’

‘How come?’

The man in the dory shouted, waving at the shanties tucked among the palms. ‘Got silkfish, satinfish! Got reef snapper and blues!’

‘How come?’ Tully snorted. ‘’Cause I were sixteen days stranded on dat graveyard sea. Dat were on de Liberty Bell, nice little craft. Tested hull, V-8. Had us some nice fish, too. ’Leven sacks kingfish, coupla sacks grouper.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Sixteen days! And each one a longer day dan I have ever knowed. Drinkin’ fish blood, watchin’ men die crazy.’

The dory had come within twenty yards, and Mingolla made contact with its pilot, projecting amiability and curiosity into his mind. ‘Got him,’ he said as the man stopped rowing, shielded his eyes against the sun, and peered toward them.

‘Not bad,’ said Tully. ‘Don’t reckon I can do much better.’