Butterfly (23 page)

74

(From the interview with Mrs. Milly Davenport)

Well, he'd lost the battle, and defeat was in sight on all fronts, but he wasn't beaten, not yet. He still had some fight left in him, and he felt better soon's he got out of that hotel. His parting shot had came out all on its own, you might say, and it had braced him. It'd had an effect on the lady, too. Because he'd seen the way she stood in the middle of that room, stock still, with her lips atremble—not a whole lot but enough for him to see. Dada had gallantly waited—or maybe it was more cunning than gallant—anyhow he'd stood a moment longer so she could have her say. But she never said anything, just stood there like her feet had grown roots. When he shut the door, he knew he'd scored a hit without ever intending to. Well, he
would
pray for her, he said to himself—or maybe against her, he didn't know. Maybe in God's eyes there isn't any for or against.

The next step was to see Pinkerton, but just how he'd do that wasn't real clear, because if he was sizing up the situation right, it wasn't going to be easy. What Dada finally did was to write a note asking Pinkerton to come by the consulate. Then he bribed a bellhop to hand it over personally and privately, which the boy did because Pinkerton showed up the next day. Now, Dada'd been trying to figure out how he'd go about saying what he had to
say, but he needn't have bothered because this time Pinkerton didn't hem and haw but started in right away like a child who's done something bad, with excuses and apologies and all. “I suppose you want to know this and that, well, it's like so and so . . .” Well, Dada wasn't much interested anymore, he had other things on his mind.

“Fine,” he said when Pinkerton had run out of steam. “What I want to know is what you want with Butterfly now, after coming all this way. You do intend to see her, don't you?”

The question clearly didn't make Pinkerton any too comfortable. He started talking confusedly about wishing to explain his behavior to Butterfly so as to make everything clear between them. This phoney talk got Dada's dander up.

“Explain!” he exclaims. “What's there left to explain? Isn't it clear enough? She doesn't need explanations now. Just leave her be!”

Pinkerton turned a little pale, but went on mumbling about putting things in the clear.

“Listen,” Dada tells him, and I think I can remember most of the words he used. “Listen,” he says, “it's too late for that. It's done, the explaining. You wouldn't do it, so I did it for you. In your name. Yes, I wrote her letters in your name, the letters it was your obligation, your moral duty, to write, the letters that you should have written out of common decency. But since you didn't, I did—I forged them, that's right! I forged letters in your name, so that the wound you inflicted might heal. Now it's all done, and there's nothing more you can do for her, not any more. Except to leave her alone.”

Pinkerton didn't speak. Dada said he looked as limp as a puppet with its strings cut. Eventually he spluttered, “I see, I see.”

“Then promise me you'll leave her alone,” Dada demanded.

Pinkerton withered and turned even paler. “I can't,” he finally says in a strangled voice.

That took Dada a little aback. He felt like cussing but held himself in. So they just sat there both looking away and each one alone in his thoughts.

“She won't let you, eh?” Dada says after a spell.

Pinkerton turned red at that and he glared at Dada, though not for long. Straightaway his eyes were down again, but he nodded.

“Tell me,” Dada asks, “what is it exactly that she wants from Butterfly?”

Pinkerton's eyes seemed to be going right through the floor; his lips quivered some but he didn't speak. In the end he made a little gesture of helplessness.

“You mean you don't know?” Dada asks in amazement. “You've come all that way and you don't know? Just what kind of relations do you have with her?”

Dada's questions hadn't been making Pinkerton none too comfortable, but this one really cut him to the raw and you could just about hear him stiffening and bristling. “Ask me anything,” he said in his best starched manner. “But not that.”

She really has got him under her thumb, Dada registered with a degree of surprise, even though he'd had that exact same thought before—oftentimes it comes as a surprise to see our own thoughts turn out so true. It was clear as day there wasn't a powerful lot of help to be gotten out of Pinkerton, but that wasn't going to keep Dada from speaking his mind.

“Okay, I won't ask,” he tells Pinkerton. “It's none of my business. I'm concerned only about Butterfly. Look, it's simple: she loved you, and you abandoned her, even though she had every claim on your devotion. She loves you still, but she's accepted your jilting her; in her own way she's come to terms with it—though no thanks to you—and for better or for worse
she's getting on with her life. Now, what more can you do for her, except stay away?” And he followed it up with an afterthought: “Unless of course you want to go back to her.” But even while he was saying it, Dada was already thinking bitterly how superfluous it was.

Pinkerton's face went all to pieces and something between a wail and a whimper came out of his throat like it was being torn from his soul. “I can't!” Dada wasn't clear which he meant, staying away from Butterfly or going back to her; maybe both. “I can't,” he repeated in a pathetic whisper with his eyes clamped tight as if wanting to shut out something too awful to stand looking. “I can't.”

“All right,” Dada says, speaking with what he defined as “that exacerbated indulgence with which one approaches idiots and drunks.” “All right, I won't ask. Do what you have to; I won't even ask you to keep away. Just don't do anything vile to her. You can promise me that much, can't you?”

Pinkerton just sat real quiet and stared at the inkstand on Dada's desk. Looking at him, Dada got a feeling of pity and disgust and something close to hate; then suddenly something cut loose inside and he got just as mad as the blazing dickens. “I wanted to get right up and thrash him,” he told me. “I wanted to grab him and throw him out the window. And by gosh, Milly, I think I just might have—honest to God! You know what most probably kept me back from doing it? It was a thought that came into my head all out of the blue, that it was going to feel like picking up a sack of potatoes. And somehow that quirky reflection let out all my fury. I just sat there and thought to myself: I guess I'll have to pray for him too.”

75

(The Nagasaki ms.)

The interview, if it failed the vice-consul's intent, was not without its effect on me. The word “vile” in particular struck me with force—"Don't be vile,” he at one point admonished. It had never occurred to me that I could be vile; but had I not been? And was I not? Had I not become vile in my condition, my conscience, my very flesh? I thought of the stigma I bore, of the degrading things done at my mistress's pleasure, and worse, of I know not what ignominious acts she even now had but to command. Yes, I was vile—worse than vile! At that moment I saw myself as the man sitting across the desk might have seen me if his eyes had been more penetrating, and a sickness came upon me, a loathing unto death.

My head felt heavy, too heavy to hold up; I had a sudden whimsical wish to lay it on a prie-dieu. But I could not have, even if one had been available. For I realized that I could no longer pray. There was no God for me anymore. Perhaps there never had been and I had not noticed. My head wanted to fall, to collapse; I would have laid it upon the vice-consul's desk, in humility, in fatigue, and it would have comforted me. But I could not, not even there. Only on Kate's feet could my forehead now rest; in the whole of the universe, there was not another place for it. So I thought, and despair poured over me thicker than honey.

From that moment thoughts of death came to me frequently. I no longer wanted to live. Will, hope, pleasure, desire, all had submerged in the sweet filth that engulfed me and dragged down my living spirit. Yet I could not die, for even my hand was no longer my own to command.

76

Inches above hung the flower of her femininity, its petals deeply flushed and peering as if eager yet shy to open. His eyes clung to them as he breathed deeply in preparation; he would have liked to touch them with his lips. Never had he looked at them for so long. Their loveliness made him ache.

Time slowed, almost halted. It was as if in the imminence of their obscene communion they had reached a timeless juncture of heaven and hell, where the divine merged with the abominable, the monstrous with the sublime. He had never felt the one so present or the other so near: in her hovering downpour, in his unquenchable fire. Never before had he felt so nakedly exposed to forces beyond his ken, never before so self-abandoned and so voluptuously possessed.

All at once, a small tremor broke out in the suspended patch of paradise, and a golden sluice descended, steamy and urgent, burning his throat and tongue and his very bowels with the stark, pungent taste of shame.

77

(From the interview with Mrs. Milly Davenport)

After that, there was just one thing left for Dada to do, and that was to go see Butterfly. He wanted to go that same afternoon but had to wait till the next day because he hadn't gotten her new address. She had moved a couple of months back to a more modest house and, there having been no invitation to visit, he hadn't seen her since. But even before that, she'd about faded out
of his life—though in no way or manner out of his thoughts. She was, as Dada put it, “being absorbed back into the Japanese world from which Pinkerton had plucked her—like an enchanted figure from a painted screen come out to keep company with a favored guest and now receding back into it.” Yet, Dada remembered wistfully, she had been ready to follow that guest into his alien world, to affront a new and foreign civilization, even to the extent of leaving forever the country whose subtle hues alone could match her own exquisite lines. Well, how's that for talking like a book!
(Laughs.)
There are parts of that diary I've read so many times that I can rattle off whole sentences pretty near word for word. Providing my memory holds out, praise the Lord—can't ever know at my age.

It was affecting for Dada to see Butterfly again. He thought she'd lost something of her youthful radiance, but otherwise she was fine and if anything even more beautiful than before. Sorrow or adversity had given her face a reflective quality, a maturity, which in Dada's eyes only heightened her charm. He'd have liked to be treated more intimately, though; she was charming as always, but seemed even more distant than the last time he saw her. I don't mean cold; she just seemed to have moved away some more from what Dada calls “the magical crossroads of East and West,” and he got the feeling she'd gotten even more deeply immersed in a world he couldn't enter. She had even lost some of her ease in talking English.

Dada was inclined to tell her about Pinkerton and his lady right away, but she didn't give him half a chance. He had to wait till he'd been served tea and whatever else polite people do over there. The longer the words sat burning on his tongue, though, the harder it got to speak. Finally he took advantage of a moment's pause to announce he had something to tell her. She put on a serious expression and said “yes” like someone waiting to be given instructions.

“Henry is here, in Nagasaki,” he told her, and hurriedly added so as she wouldn't misunderstand, “with someone, an American lady he's going to marry.”

Dada could just barely detect a reaction in her eyes. She uttered a guarded little “oh” and he didn't give her time for more—not that more was likely to come, for her face was quite stoical.

“I think they want to see you,” Dada went on in a cautious manner. “Or rather, she wants to see you, or wants him to see you.”

He'd been expecting more of a reaction before, when he first broke the news to her, but now he was surprised to see her start the way she did. Her body gave a little jerk as if she were in the grip of some terrible emotion. But she got a hold of herself and kept her formal sitting position on the
tatami
—that's what they call those straw mats they have in place of hard floors, but you'd know that better than me. Anyhow, Dada's even more surprised a moment later when he notices her crying: tears are streaming down her cheeks, though there's not a sound. He would've liked to say something comforting, but he couldn't for the life of him think of a single appropriate phrase. So they just sat there in a silence.

“Now, I don't think you ought to see them,” Dada ventures after a long while. “I know how you feel about Henry, but still I think it'd be better if you didn't see even him. And certainly not her. You don't have to, you know.”

Butterfly looked puzzled. “Don't have to?” she asks in a tiny voice.

“Certainly not,” Dada assures her. “If they come, have Sachiko tell them you're indisposed. But more likely they'll send word, and in that case you send word back either with an excuse—say that you're going away, or ... anything would do—or simply that you don't wish to see them.”

Butterfly, who wasn't looking any too convinced, hung her head like she was deep in thought. “I think that will not stop them,” she said by-and-by in a sad little voice.

“Oh, I don't expect they'd break in by force,” Dada tells her half-jokingly. “They're up to no good, but I doubt they would do anything improper. You just have to be very firm in refusing to see them.”

Butterfly didn't seem to understand. “Can't they send someone to take her?” she asks with obvious distress. “Police?”

Now it was Dada's turn to be puzzled. “Police?” he asks in wonder. “Take her? Take who? Where?”

Now both of them were confounded and looked across at one another in mutual incomprehension. With just a hint of exasperation, she stared unsmilingly into his face for a few seconds before bursting out, “Itako—who else do they want?”

That got Dada more confused than ever, because he'd forgotten that Etsuko's name had been changed to Itako. It took him a moment to remember, and a moment more to figure out what Butterfly was talking about. Then he understood: she thought they wanted her child. It seems that in Japan a child is considered to be the father's sole property. The problem simply hadn't ever occurred to Dada. Could it be they really wanted to take the child, he asked himself? He couldn't imagine what they'd want with her. It seemed too unlikely, and besides, Pinkerton hadn't mentioned it and probably hadn't ever considered it either. Certainly Dada wouldn't put it past the lady—he'd believe her capable of anything; but no, it wasn't the child she was after, he felt quite sure. So a moment later Dada was able to reassure Butterfly with conviction in his voice that it wasn't Itako they wanted at all. She took some convincing, but in the end she believed him. But then she couldn't understand what they wanted to see her for, or why they'd come to Japan. Dada didn't know any more than she did, but he did tell about his
fears, especially concerning the lady, and he warned her once again not to see her.