A Brief Theory of Travel and the Desert Read online

  When I have finished explaining all this, she politely excuses herself as she slowly and painfully gets up from her rocking chair. Now, for the first time, I can see her entire body from close up. I am usually the one to end our conversations, which are identical night after night: the filthy state of our campsite, how pretty Hazel and Nola are, their boundless, misplaced love for me, the reasons for our peregrinations to get away from any electric currents . . . Perhaps that is why she says nothing about herself. Then she’s gone, and with her, once more, her crystal-clear memory. Is it possible that I am the first person on this campground to see her like this? She is average height and, as I guessed, her frame is pretty sturdy. So, her fragility must stem from some other part of her being, from some hidden recess of her inner self . . . from her proximity to death, perhaps, I wonder for no particular reason. I don’t know the cause of her apparent thinness. She is temperamental, and she has a magnetic personality, I can feel it, and (despite the overbearing heat and my fatigue) I can’t get away from her or her compelling force of will. Day after day, the same gestures and conversations are repeated. What is it about her that is so mesmerizing? And why is she here, among all these wretched souls in the middle of the desert? (Where the smell is foul and hope has run out.) Without fear of being mistaken, I say to myself that at least she is not sick—unlike the rest of this community. How do I know? It’s obvious from her wrists. The first symptom of illness always shows in the wrists: fragile, brittle, an unhealthy whitish color . . . Like fish caught in a net, twitching and exhausted. But she is not like that. In fact, the more I think about it, the younger she seems to get. Living purely in the present. A woman who is in control of her place in the world, unbent by fate in so many ways. Unlike myself, who is doomed to pour water into a bottomless pitcher. As she climbs the steps to her camper, I study her feet, her hips, her long graying hair that tumbles rebelliously to her waist, like an old girlfriend with whom you are reunited after a long separation (as you clutch a carton of spoiled milk with an unrecognizable photo of her printed on it). She hasn’t turned on the light, so I can’t see what she does once she is inside.

  Around the campground you can still see the entrances to the old nuclear bomb shelters. As we had some time to kill over the past few days, I visited them with the same solemn interest normally reserved for the ancient sites of Mesopotamia or Cyprus. I’m told they were converted into underground studios by artists—constructivist sculptors whose parents cashed in on their real estate to swap New York for some place in the Mid-West. That’s the way it is round here. And she’s the only one who calls me Olivieri.

  I make the most of her brief absence to think about what she said and stretch my legs. They are stiff from sitting in that uncomfortable position. I move toward the trailer, picking my way between the peels, the condoms, and the occasional sanitary pad. I can’t hear anything. I kick the trailer tires with my leather boots, raising a miniature dust devil that swirls around my ankles. She doesn’t pour water into a bottomless pitcher. She thinks she is the water. Will you ever understand? For a moment, I’m tempted to turn on the ignition and get out of here right now in the middle of the night, while the girls and my neighbor are fast asleep. That would be truly heroic, but only superficially. While I am considering this possibility, the lights suddenly go up on the carousel that I have seen my father riding every night since we arrived here. The light bulbs decorating the revolving platform of the carousel come on one by one, projecting at the base of each animal a grid of uniform shadows over which the image of my father and his damn oxygen tank constantly flicker. His pony, the only one that isn’t made of papier-mâché, is hanging by its neck from a pink synthetic rope, and it is urinating its pain. The puddle from the stream is about to overf low and fuse one of the tungsten light filaments. Then everything blacks out again. This time, my father has been saved from the void. (I am profoundly relieved: given my present age, I am actually older than he is so it is my duty to protect him.) I smile to myself. As I head back toward my neighbor’s trailer, feeling much better for having kept my father from danger, I mutter something to get the cat’s attention. It approaches me from its hiding place behind the rickshaw and rubs its frail spine against my ankle.

  “Are we friends now?” I whisper.

  I’d have no qualms about filling its balls with buckshot . . . Meanwhile, my neighbor has come back and sat down in the rocking chair. I walk over to her and sit down on the same concrete block as before. Another phosphorescent light streaks across the sky, and for one long moment the horizon fleetingly resembles a photographer’s darkroom.

  “I think I know what you meant when you said I was pouring water into a bottomless pitcher.”

  Something stirs beneath her feet.

  “Is that so? I’m glad, very glad,” she replies animatedly.

  “Yes, yes, I really do,” I say. And I launch a discreet attack, an innocent little ambush. I can’t repress a burning wave of latent euphoria rising in me because of the discovery I have just made. “Pouring water into a bottomless pitcher.” It’s all to do with the time we live in. It’s plain to see that in her case time doesn’t fly. It just repeats itself over and over again.

  “Do you always spend all night in your rocking chair?” I ask. “Don’t you ever sleep, for Pete’s sake?”

  This is our last night here, after all, and here I am pouring that water . . . Endlessly pouring water . . . Day and night. Just like she said. Every night, in the small hours of the morning, my father rides my nightmare carousel and hovers on the edge of the void, but tonight I have kept him safe.

  She doesn’t answer. But I don’t think I’ve offended her. A few seconds pass before either of us speaks. It is not an awkward silence, and I wonder, who is she, who is this woman who knows me so well, and how can she possibly know me? It is only the bottomless silence of the desert. Everybody should experience it.

  Until now I have never attributed my neighbor’s absences to any external cause. Perhaps she has gone in to unscrew an orthopedic leg or cough up a blob of blood as big as a calf ’s heart, big enough to choke her if she doesn’t spit it out. Or perhaps she has a gun hidden away in a drawer and, finally, this is the day she is going to kill me. God only knows why I am obsessed with her enigmatic state of health. I think I see a shadow moving inside her camper. The shady figure of a hunched-up man with a shriveled face, like the overcooked white of a fried egg. “How about that!” I think to myself. “Now that’s a surprise.” But it doesn’t matter anymore. Suddenly I realize what she has gone inside to do. The reason lies in the dark interior of her trailer. It is so long since I heard music, isolated as we are from any electrical appliances or aerials, that it takes me a moment to identify the sound that startled me. It has been playing softly for several minutes, a lulling sound in the half-light that shrouds the silhouettes on the horizon. My neighbor is stroking her fat, crippled cat in time to the music, listening to the melody with such careful concentration that she seems to sense the ineffable moment when the music settles on each grain of sand, each mesquite bush, like a single bee pollinating a vast fragrant field of violets. The music is like a fine, fertilizing rain under whose touch this tough, dry campground full of electronic outcasts shimmies and trembles. I sense the presence of the male figure; he looks at me and scurries out of sight. I don’t know who he is, but the smell of shit starts to drift toward me. I can’t remember the last audio system I had or what make it was, whether it was a CD or a cassette player . . . Whether I bought it in Singapore or Pennsylvania, whether I was with Serena, Sherry, or Svetlana or some other girl at the time, before my life with Hazel and Nola, far from all sources of radiation . . . I don’t even know what type of music it is. What I mean is that I can’t identify it, but it makes everything seem very real. It is sad and happy at the same time, both consoling and unfathomable. A few scorpions approach us, forming a strange and dangerous audience. Their shadows etch an indecipherable code in the
sand, a mosaic of menace.

  I have to get back. I can’t stay any longer. My neighbor has obviously forgotten that I am here. In a gesture intended to mark a break with my surroundings, I light another cigarette as I watch the dawn warming the horizon again.

  “Have a good day,” I murmur in farewell, and then I stand up and go back to my own campsite.

  Don’t ask me why, but as I make my way back to our camper, the music—with a melody that reminds me of the “methamphetamine blues”—makes me think it’s the song of the last human left on Earth: taking stock of his extraordinary circumstances, he walks a few yards, pauses to look at the soles of his shoes, and then maybe swats away some sort of fly or plucks a hair from the mole next to his right nipple. That is the extent of the surviving technology. After a long while, he looks at his body. Then he continues to walk, and all around him there are bright flashes, fragments of broken mirrors and tiny particles of sand and ash. He knows that, minute by minute, he is crumbling into dust, and he knows that it is magnificent. Later, he sits down. The last man on Earth, and he’s sitting down. The heat has vanished from the surface of the Earth. There is no echo, or perhaps that is all there is. Before singing for the last time, he thinks of his father on that winter afternoon; he thinks of his father’s powerful wrists, raising him high toward the warm afternoon sunlight, and much higher still: toward that guilty, unmistakable, urine-colored light.

  FROM LENA TO THE READER OF HER

  STORY

  (THE ROOM OF LOST FOOTSTEPS)

  Because God appears to us not in our thoughts, but in our dreams.

  There he sits, waiting to make love with us.

  MILORAD PAVIC

  I, who in dreams cast no shadow and know no fear; I, who as I walk along an endless tree-lined avenue am a vanishing point destined to disappear in the distance (all the while, dry autumn leaves slowly tumble to the ground); and you: a figure standing by the side of that avenue, leaning against an old wagon under a gray sky, gray as the sky over Paris or Vienna in an old movie; you light a cigarette and then petulantly toss the spent match to the ground.

  Cut? Fade to black? And I ask myself, “Do dreams come to an end when somebody decides that they will, right there and then, at their whim?”

  That’s how it has happened in our case, at least, in this idealized love affair between fiction and reality. And so I imagine that you are dreaming what I have already seen in my solitary nights, that we are fantastically united as if we were falling asleep together between the roots of an old almond tree. It goes without saying that you also would cast no shadow—either in my dreams or, of course, the stories that you gate-crash. But we know that you are a reader of stories and that you readers will never be able to conceal the fact that you are crazy.

  Since you vanished from this story that I have always inhabited, my nights have been filled with dreams that not even Inguerina could decipher, no matter how hard she tried; visions through which I walk barefoot, carefully extinguishing all the lights, one by one. Incidentally, in the dream about the avenue at the cemetery that I just mentioned (does it remind you of anyone or anything? Orson Welles, say?) our hats fall to the ground—no, that’s a lie: like seed fluff they nonchalantly float on and on, ad infinitum, without ever touching the ground—as our mouths press together. Now that I can dream (and that is all thanks to you), each night I dream of a succession of rural landscapes with cemeteries overgrown with wild flowers and rampant undergrowth, places where amazing fantasies always play out happily for me, a far cry from the depressing cemeteries that readers know out there in the real world, where death may be lurking beneath the touch of every pair of lips.

  The meetings every Thursday on the first floor of number 9, Svetozara Radica still take place as usual. They begin a little later now, though, because we all cherish the hope that you will come back one day (all of us, that is, except for that die-hard skeptic Pavle Bornemisza, who has finally given you up for dead or dissolved). He is as obsessed as ever with his romantic conquests: last month he started courting a friend of Yautsin’s, but only until the girl turned into a mermaid after failing to go into mourning for the death of her father. His account of the metamorphosis was heartrending. Nothing of the sort happened, of course, but I caught a distinct whiff of the brine from her fins when we invited him round last week and he told us the story while we were waiting for you, with that powerful gift for storytelling of his that is only comparable to your own (although in your case, it is more a need to lose yourself in the story, a kind of ancestral trancelike state to combat time). The days grow longer and longer now, in contrast to my happiness; sometimes it is still light when we sit down to dinner. Which gives that lying Inguerina an even better chance of a writer one day deciding to tell her story, if that’s really what is destined to happen. Whoever would be foolhardy enough to make Inguerina the main character in a story! If you should happen to see my writer again, tell him to hurry up and invent a house for my friend. In the meantime, I suppose I could become a writer and give Inguerina her very own story in which to shelter from life and the fierce wind that blows off the Sava River. After all, we all deserve to have a story because we are all crazy and deserve to die plastered out of our minds.

  It must have been last Thursday evening when Inguerina brought along to our gathering two brothers whose story is bound to interest you. Once you’ve read my letter, you can pass it on to anybody you choose, and feel free to add or omit whatever you like. You see, life is as skittish and playful as a puppy that has fallen into a tub. These two brothers are equal protagonists in the story of the brothers in love, which begins one fleeting spring morning. I’ll spare you the full stop, new paragraph. The wind had died down, giving way to a soft breeze, the protean clouds bore witness to the imperfect order of the universe, and the spokes on Inguerina’s bicycle glinted in the sunlight as she went on her morning ride. It was then that she saw them: they were crying on each other’s shoulders, facing each other on the terrace of one of the cafés next to the National Theater. It must have been a sad sight indeed that met Inguerina’s eyes that morning, because she burst into tears, put on her brakes and immediately cut short her bicycle ride. The sky clouded over and her bicycle wheels, suddenly bereft of sunshine and joy, stood motionless. The waiter wept, and a Persian cat mewed at the feet of a drowsy customer, while the parakeet locked in a cage at the entrance of the café flew round and round, constantly crashing against its bars. As if that weren’t bad enough, beside the door of the Turkish café there was a huge sack of pepper, from which a detestable smell wafted all over the neighborhood. The waiter, an old man known to everybody, asked Inguerina if she would be kind enough to escort the brothers off the premises, because otherwise their sadness would overwhelm the sun and it would never shine again in Belgrade and all the terrace cafés would have to shut down. So Inguerina turned round and perched on the handlebars, and the two brothers started to pedal in time to their sobs and set off in the direction of my house under a glowering gray sky. One of the brothers was tall with strong arms, thinning blond hair; and his pants couldn’t conceal that he was very well endowed, although his voice was too high-pitched for my liking. The other one was much shorter, with a face like a hearty sailor’s and, in contrast to his bald brother, he had hair that smelled like honey at breakfast time.

  Naturally, they were the first to arrive at the meeting that Thursday, and it is only now that I remember how long ago it was: Ovidian wheels within wheels. It occurred shortly after you appeared at my house that blessed night that begot two creations (the one of my blood and the other of my dreams). I recall that I was still in the shower, my eyes closed and listening through the steam to the wonderful music of Jurassic Park (a strange choice as my signature tune in the world, everybody thinks, and they’re right). That very afternoon I had come to the conclusion that there was no bird more literary, no bird more worthy of the storyteller’s art (remember that famous poem by Apollin
aire?) than the legendary Roc that lays giant eggs in the middle of the desert. Worthier by far than the turtledove, of which Mistress Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor said (if my memory serves me correctly) that it would take less time to find twenty lascivious turtledoves than one chaste man. I can’t agree with that. Today I saw two men kissing in broad daylight and I was struck by the perfection of the scene: the beginning and end of an ideal world. (Or, perhaps, the opposite: a clever and menacing pre-arranged signal of destruction.)

  Reluctantly, the brothers sat down in my living room as far from each other as possible. Was there tension? You can’t begin to imagine how much! Inguerina and I went into the kitchen to fix something to eat and my regular guests gradually began to arrive: incredulous Pavle, Yautsin the future publisher, a stuck-up girl without much imagination from the School of Fine Arts and that nymph with an incredible gift for fantasy, although I can’t recall if they arrived in that order. They asked after you again and my spirits sank; we waited for you for quite some time until I finally said what I always say: when I woke up, you were no longer there and I had grown very small.

  The damp air coming off the Sava that night, together with the hostile presence of the two brothers, had combined to create for the first time at my Thursday gathering a gloomy, ominous atmosphere, a kind of mourning for your diluted reader’s soul. We were looking at each other in silence and nibbling unenthusiastically on our food when Inguerina came right out and asked the brothers her stock-in-trade question: