In Times of Fading Light

So Charlotte thought. And wasn’t sure whether she merely thought so in the dream. Whether she always thought so in the dream, or only this time. Or whether she thought, every time, that it was only this time she thought so.

The door was open. Charlotte went through the doorway. Now Adrian was there again, smiling. Touched her gently, turned her around—and Charlotte felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up: Coatlicue, goddess of life and death. With her necklace of hearts torn from living bodies.

And one of them, she knew, that one, was Werner’s.

2001

He is rocking gently, pushing himself off from the terrace parapet now and then. The South German sounds heard sporadically around the large table have died away. So have the shouting and laughter that sometimes come up from the village, the drone of car engines, the ghostly radio voices wafting this way from somewhere or other now and then, and the busy banging and clattering from the guesthouse kitchen. Even the palm fronds have stopped rustling. For a moment, when the afternoon heat is at its greatest, the world seems to stand still.

Only the regular creaking of the hemp ropes is still audible. And the distant, undemanding roar of the sea.

A state of stasis. Embryonic passivity.

Later, when he has woken from his light sleep, when he has brought himself to overcome the force of gravity that presses him gently but irresistibly down in the hammock, after he has gone to get a cup of coffee and in passing, briefly looking up from his cup, has greeted the two tourist backpackers who have just arrived and, as he did on his own arrival, are standing on the terrace marveling at the view—later he will sit on the bench behind the Frida Kahlo part of the guesthouse, as he does every day, looking out over the corrugated iron roofs of the huts where the Mexican employees of Eva & Tom live, and read the newspaper.

It is always the same newspaper. Always the one with the airplane flying into a skyscraper. He reads slowly. He reads the articles again and again, until to some extent he understands them.

He doesn’t understand everything.

He understands that the U.S. president has said a monumental war against evil is being waged, and that the United States is the brightest beacon of liberty.

He understands that part of the Latin American population still goes hungry, and some of them pick through garbage to feed themselves.

He understands that the introduction of the euro as a currency is in full swing, and stock exchanges all over the world are suffering catastrophic losses.

What he doesn’t understand is why the stock exchanges are suffering catastrophic losses. How is the value of, say, shares in the post office affected by the collapse of two buildings in America? Are people sending fewer letters now?

What he also doesn’t understand, and will not understand even this afternoon when he reads the article about poverty in Latin America for the third or fourth time—at least, what he will have understood will sound so outrageous that he will doubt whether he really does under stand it—is that a special race of stunted human beings has developed on the garbage dumps of the big Latin American cities, people who apparently are better suited to surviving the conditions of a garbage dump.

After reading the newspaper he will go down to the beach again, will sit in the wooden deck chair with the blue sun umbrella beside it which he hired for a considerable sum on his first day (it has been lying around in the sand oblivious of all else since then), and he will watch the sun setting.

The sunset will be the same as usual. All Pacific sunsets, he has found out, are the same: large and red and indifferent to the world—whether that indifference is reassuring or disturbing he doesn’t yet know.

Dear Marion. Recently I’ve often been thinking of you. And often for tiny and, I have to admit, sometimes inexplicable reasons. I think of you when I see the sun going down, that’s fair enough. But why do I think of you at the sight of a blue sun umbrella when you don’t like the color blue? Why do I think of you when a flock of birds takes off from a power line overhead? Why do I think of you when I put my hand on the lukewarm sand?

When the sun has sunk irrevocably into the sea, he will be the only customer to sit down at one of the white plastic tables of the Al Mar and eat fish. He will drink a glass of white wine. He will look at the mother-of-pearl afterglow in the sky, which is almost exactly the same color as the inside of Granny Charlotte’s big, shining seashell.

He will be surprised to see the crescent moon hanging askew. He will look (usually without success) for constellations of stars tilted sideways.

When it is fully dark he will climb the steps to Eva & Tom at his leisure, to where the usual company, whose conversation is dominated by South German sounds, are sitting at the table on the terrace. They are all acquaintances of Eva the Indian, and they assemble here every year at this season: a gray-haired, chain-smoking man in a loose flowered shirt; a rather younger man with a bald head, who shares a room with the chain-smoker; a woman with a missing tooth in a dress printed with a homemade batik pattern; another man whom Alexander thinks of as Straw Hat, because he wears a decrepit straw hat at all times of the day, to suit his shabby, formerly white linen clothes; and a motorcyclist with several rings in one ear.

The biker (who will turn out later to be a staff council representative from a large German city hospital) has told Alexander that all of them except the bald man met here in the seventies, that Eva and Tom stayed on and gradually turned what had been a down-at-heel hotel for all comers into this guesthouse, and before he discovered from the biker that Tom died long ago, Alexander thought Tom was the man in the straw hat—maybe because he talks louder than anyone else, always about repairs and rebuilding of some kind, and regularly complains of the unreliability and indolence of the Mexicans.

“The only good Mexican is a dead Mexican,” he will say when Alexander comes up the steps to the terrace this evening, and the man in the loose flowered shirt will chuckle the way you chuckle at a joke that you could have told yourself, because you know it already, and his paunch will bob up and down under the loose flowered shirt.

It’s worst of all—worst of all?—at night, when I lie under my mosquito net and hear the voices of the aging hippies through the flimsy walls of my room as they sit outside telling each other their stories. I think of you then, in particular. Why just then? Because I feel excluded? Because I have a sense of not belonging? But always, all my life, I’ve had a sense of not belonging. Although all my life I’d have liked to belong somewhere, I have never found out what I’d have liked to belong to. Is that sick? Do I lack some kind of gene? Or is it to do with my story? The history of my family? If I’m to be honest, when I’m lying under my mosquito net nothing makes me want to go out to that table. And yet, when I hear them laughing, I feel an almost painful longing.

He will shake out his bedclothes, as advised by Eva. As he does so he will think of the scorpion that he saw on the terrace a few days ago. The scorpions here are not deadly, but almost the size of saucers—and astonishingly beautiful. He was so moved by its fragile structure that he was unable to tread on the creature. Eva did it, in her flip-flops. Since then, he thinks, she has despised him.

The voices will be audible for a long time this evening. The man in the loose flowered shirt will chuckle to his paunch. The straw hat will talk about the unreliability and indolence of the Mexicans. And sometime or other the woman with a missing tooth will take out a guitar and sing Joan Baez songs, and the others will join in, with genuine but destructive fervor.

Then at some point, late at night, there will be nothing to be heard but an occasional coughing fit from the man in the flowered shirt, and the chirping of a cricket, sounding like an alarm, and Alexander will lie under his mosquito net and write letters to Marion in his head:

Sometimes I think I ought not to write to you at all. That I ought simply to disappear from your life. That having made my own bed I must lie on it alone. Now that sickness has caught up with me, how can I want to get into bed with you? How can I think of longing for you now? And yet I do long for you, and the odd thing is that it’s not bad. I mean, yes, it is bad, but comforting at the same time. It’s comforting that you exist. It’s