The Way Out

work. At that point I had no clear idea of my future, but I didn’t want to return to Buenos Aires; I thanked him for the offer and answered evasively. D’Amato wanted to convince me to go visit the old seafaring areas of Massachusetts. I had to go to Nantucket, it was near Concord, and all of American literature had been written in that region. I answered that Sarmiento, our greatest writer in the nineteenth century—our Melville, I added, to give him the idea—was a close friend of Mary Mann, née Peabody, who was the sister of Hawthorne’s wife. Sarmiento had visited Emerson and met Hawthorne, and he might even have met Melville on his visits to Horace and Mary Mann’s house. Might there be a letter from Sarmiento to Melville? He looked at me, I wouldn’t say in surprise, but indifferently. I know that when I talk about the South American writers I admire, North American scholars listen to me with polite distraction as if I were always telling them about some kind of patriotic version of Salgari or about books in the style of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Yes, of course, the southern seas, he reconciled, the Pequod had gone around Cape Horn. The conversation went on a bit longer and began to languish, and then he invited me to visit the basement.

Basements are underground structures that have a great tradition in North American culture: young teenagers have their sexual initiations in the depths of houses; in horror movies, you have to expect the worst when someone goes down to the basement; murderers hide in the basements of houses out in the country and then eliminate the family members one by one. But I couldn’t imagine what would be waiting for me in the bowels of D’Amato’s house.

The staircase that led below was at a side entrance, next to the kitchen. Behind a metal partition, Don had isolated the heating boilers, the washer and dryer, the breaker box, the concrete pillar with the alarm panel, and some old crates and containers. He had emptied the rest of the floor space in the long basement and turned it into a great aquarium with glass walls and a sliding lid. You could walk over the top of the enormous fish tank on a few planks of wood that spanned the glass structure.

Below, a white shark swam in the enormous aquarium. It moved through the clear water like a shadow, its fin skirting along through the air. “It’s a dogfish,” he told me, “a pup, they don’t live very long in captivity.” It was beautiful and sinister and moved with cold elegance. “And how do you feed it?” “With visiting professors!” said Don, pretending to push me but only resting his hand on my shoulder. He turned on the lights, and this seemed to enrage the shadow, for it plunged down until it became invisible and for a while there was nothing to hear but the lapping of water, but then the shark returned to the surface like a savage apparition, its fin cleaving the water in silence, a smooth gray line in the transparency of the air. He fed it live mollusks and strips of meat, but never gave it newborn cats or dogs to eat, no matter what his slanderous neighbors said.

We watched the sinister undulations of the proud fish for a while and then went back above ground and parted ways cheerfully, aided by the haze of alcohol.

As I walked back, the night was calm, the trees barely moving in the March breeze, the moon gleaming in the sky. Not far from here the white shark was gliding silently through the water under the surface of a Victorian house.

Chapter Three

1

I would run into Ida in meetings or in the hallways, and she always seemed rushed. “We need to talk,” she’d say—alone? I’d wonder—until finally, one Friday, as I was getting onto the train to New York, I saw her step into the car, beautiful and dazzling, and sit down beside me. There were several things she wanted to talk about, so, if I had nothing better to do, we could take this opportunity to catch up with each other. Her eyes were bloodshot as if she hadn’t slept or had a fever. Of course, she knew all about what we’d been doing in the seminar. The students were happy with my classes. Had I talked with John III? He was the most brilliant and the most problematic. He was still on about that ridiculous idea to write his thesis on only one book. “You just don’t write a thesis about a single book anymore,” she asserted categorically, as though referring to a shift that was obvious to any of the other passengers on the train. But what was I going to be doing in New York? “Nothing special,” I told her, “just walking around a bit.” She escaped to the city every chance she got, tried not to spend all of her time buried away on campus. She needed to breathe, in New York she was a different person, she’d grown up in Manhattan and knew the city well, her father was a doctor, an old-school doctor, the kind who visited his patients. He used to take her with him when she was a girl, and she would wait in the car while he made his rounds. Her father always came out with a scent on his skin like dry ice, and she could sense the cold air from the alcohol on his pale white hands when he touched her face, and he would joke around with her before starting the car to drive across the city for his next consultation. She seemed to have told that story many times and managed to make the image of a child waiting in the car for her father seem personal enough that you