The Weather Channel announced that a storm was coming and was expected to hit early in the morning. I got into my car and drove along Route 1 to the mall under the bridge, the unceasing caravan of cars from New York seeming like an invasion by an enemy army. Cars upon cars, one after the next, all moving at the same speed and staying the same distance apart, their headlights on, traveling in a single direction as though guided by a common goal, going by just like that for hours and hours. In the end, after passing Junction, I exited south off Route 1, crossed a bridge, and turned toward the main square. I took a few loops before finding the Home Depot. The hardware store was enormous, with tools, machinery, and equipment of all kinds and sizes covering the space as if it were an endless workshop or wrecking yard with newly arrived pieces. There were no customers or employees; the place was empty. I walked along the numbered aisles between large red objects and mechanical drills. I had the sensation of being in a museum, a kind of replica of the sheds you find behind old houses where people keep tools and disused objects, but everything here was shiny and brand-new.
The cash registers were locked and covered. At the end of the aisle, a lone girl was working at the only counter open. I bought a snow shovel, a pair of canvas gloves, and some pliers (to open and close the windows). A snowstorm was about to arrive, maybe the last one of the winter.
4
The next day, D’Amato’s receptionist told me that the department chair wanted to see me and was inviting me for a drink in his house. He lived in a residence on Prospect Avenue, and I went to see him that evening. Don was a particularly North American mix between a scholar and a man of action. In the Korean War, at age eighteen, posted near the border on the edge of the 38th parallel, he’d been caught by a mine on his way out of the field latrine and now had a wooden leg. He opened the door for me and turned about as though his left leg were the mast of a ship. He was tall and broad, and his white hair, which came down to his shoulders, resembled the rigging of a sailboat.
His book on Melville had been a point of reference in the academic world during the sixties, but then his star had begun to wane. On the top floor of his house he had a room dedicated to Melville where he collected objects that had once belonged to the writer—for example, a portable desk, an extremely rare piece from the 19th century—and also a vast library specializing in the author of Benito Cereno. People told the most extravagant stories about Don, and I always got along well with him. He was a forthright type, and they said he no longer prepared for classes; in his course (his mythic seminar on Moby-Dick), he would simply ask the students to write their questions on cards and then read them out in class and improvise the answers. He was on his own that night—and every weeknight—because his wife and children spent long stretches of time in New York and couldn’t stand life out in the town. D’Amato only lived with them on the weekends, and that had furthered his reputation as a womanizer.
His study was covered with objects from the whaling world that he’d collected as part of his Melville Museum. He showed me a replica of Queequeg’s harpoon and the original cedar desk on which Melville—“always on his feet”—had written his tedious reports while working as a clerk in the New York customs office. He also brought out the 1789 edition of Shakespeare’s works that Melville had been working through while he wrote the novel. It was evident that Captain Ahab arose from his encounter with the works of the Bard, and it was there that he’d encountered the high, tragic tone that the novel takes on after its more traditional beginning. It begins as a book about whaling and ends as a work on the magnitude of Macbeth.
His library was the most complete private collection on Melville that existed in the United States. He’d been made offers to sell it but always refused with a smile. “If I sell these books I’ll just get bored,” he would say. He was very friendly with me that night considering that I was an obscure South American writer and he a third-generation scholar, a peer of Lionel Trilling and Harry Levin.
We sat in the leather armchairs of his study with glasses of brandy and went back and forth about the relationship between Hudson and Melville; there was a long chapter in Idle Days in Patagonia about the whiteness of the whale in Melville. “Both writers could be identified by the great grasslands and the vast sea,” said D’Amato, “while we in contrast are writers of stories that unfold in closed rooms and tiny spaces. The hardest thing to do in a novel is make the characters leave their homes, and Melville has them travel around the world in a whaling ship.” He laughed with a powerful voice while pouring me a brandy, as if we were in a pirate’s tale.
Then we moved to the dining room, ate a pizza that arrived by motorcycle, and opened the bottle of Argentine wine that I’d brought. D’Amato asked me about my future projects. If I intended to remain in the United States, the department would be delighted to renew my contract for another year. My colleagues, the students, and especially Professor Brown were very pleased with my
