The Eighth Day (22 page)

One afternoon he returned to his hut to find Ashley cleaning the flue of his fireplace.

“Ah! Good afternoon, Tolland.”

“Good afternoon, Dr. MacKenzie. These briquets clog up a flue in no time.”

“Yes . . . ? yes . . . ? eh, Tolland, what are those tin sheets you've put up beside the latrines?”

“Well, sir, I've been thinking about solar heat. I've been trying to direct some rays on those spurs of ice—might fill a washing trough for the women in the village. The water would freeze overnight, but we could take an axe to it when the sun's up.”

“Yes . . . ? hmm . . . ? I think I remember an article about collecting solar heat in some old engineering journals I have. I'll look it up. Come around after dinner tonight. Bring a cup with you and we'll make some tea.”

That was the first of many cups of tea in Dr. MacKenzie's hut. These visits were an administrative error on his part and he knew it. The engineers respected their managing director as much as they hated one another. His hospitality to Ashley was without precedent. They were jealous.

One night during his sixth month on the hill, Ashley learned that a child had died in the Chilean village. On the previous evening there had been a small celebration of some miner's name day. The women and children had sat crowded together in one corner of the hut while the men drank
chicha.
The ban on alcohol brought some measure of interest into the miners' lives. During the singing and dancing and horseplay a gourd of hot
chicha
had been spilled over Martín Ramírez's week-old son. Dr. van Domelen had worked over the baby for several hours in vain. Ashley knew the parents and went to their two-family hut. He knocked at the door and entered. There were five or six women in the room, their shawls over their heads, and some children. All the men in the village were away at work, except Martín Ramírez, who sat in a corner, more angry than sorrowful. Babies die every day. Women's fuss. The baby lay on the floor wrapped in his mother's coat.

“Buenos!”

There was a murmur of greeting from the women and children. Ashley stood with his back to the door waiting for his eyes to become accustomed to the half-light. Soundlessly the visitors left the room to him, leaving the parents, and one old woman. He pressed a greeting from the father.

“
Buenos
, Martín!”

“
Buenos
, Don Jaime!”

“Come and sit here, Ana.” Ana was a mere girl. She had long since lost the use of one eye. Timidly she sat down on the bed beside him. “What's the little boy's name?”

“
Señor
. . . ? the priest has not been here. He has no name.”

The priest came once a fortnight or once a month from the larger mines to the north.

“Yes, but he has a name. You know his name.”

“. . . ? e . . . ? e . . . ?” Ana's eye moved hesitantly toward her husband. “I think . . . ? Martín.” She began to tremble. “
Señor
, he is not a Christian.”

Ashley remembered that Latin Americans barely hear what is said to them unless one touches them with one's hand. He put his fingers lightly on her wrist and spoke with surprise and reproach. “But, Ana, my daughter! You don't believe such foolish things!”

She glanced up at him quickly.

“Your Martinito has not sinned!”

“No! No,
señor.
”

“You—Ana! You are not going to tell me that God-the-Eternal punishes babies who have not sinned!”

She did not answer.

“Didn't you hear that the Holy Pope in Rome went up to his golden chair and said to the whole world that that was a very wrong thought? He said that God was sorrowful that anyone would believe a thing like that.” Ashley went on at some length about this. Ana's eye was fixed upon his face. Ashley was smiling. “Martinito is not here, Ana.”

“Where is he,
señor?
”

“In happiness.” Ashley held out his hands as though he were holding a baby. “In the greatest happiness.”

Ana murmured something.

“What are you saying,
mi hija?
”

“He could not speak. His eyes were open, but he could not speak.”

“Ana, I have four children. I know all about babies. You know that they can speak to us—to us fathers and mothers. You know that.”

“Yes,
señor
. . . ? He said, ‘Why?'”

Ashley put his hand firmly on her wrist. “You are right. He said, ‘Why?' And he said something else, too.”

“What,
señor
?”

“‘Remember me!'”

Ana became very agitated. She said quickly, “Oh,
señor
, I shall never forget Martinito, never, never.”

“We do not know why we suffer. We do not know why millions and millions of people suffer. But we know one thing. You have suffered. Only those who have suffered ever come to have a heart that is wise.”

“What,
señor?
”

He repeated the words in a low voice. Ana looked about the room, lost. She had understood Don Jaime up to that point. But this idea was too difficult to grasp. Ashley went on. “You will have other children—boys and girls. You will become an old woman. And someday your children and your grandchildren will be all around you on your name day. They will say, ‘
Mamita
Ana, you treasure!'
‘Mamita
Ana,
tu de oro!'
and you will remember Martinito. The only people in the world who are really loved—really loved, Ana—are those with hearts that are wise. You will not forget Martinito?”

“No,
señor.
”

“You will never forget Martinito?”

“Never, never,
señor.
”

He rose to go. With a glance and the slightest gesture of a hand toward the baby she asked something of him. She asked a rite. He came from the world of great people who were rich, who ate at tables, who could read and write—who had been favored by GOD and who carried magic within them. Ashley was not certain that he could make the sign of the cross correctly. He had hated everything about the Coaltown church during his seventeen years' attendance there, but above everything he had hated the prayers. Out of the children's hearing he had once muttered to Beata, “Prayers should be in Chinese.” He now recited the Gettysburg Address twice, first in a low voice, then ringingly. Ana slid to the floor on her knees. He recited, “Under the spreading chestnut tree, The village smithy stands.” He started off on a fragment from Shakespeare that Lily spoke so beautifully: “The quality of mercy is not strained,” but he got lost. He talked to Roger and then to Sophia. “I must count on you to take care of your mother. We cannot understand now what has happened to us. Let us live as though we believed there were some meaning in it. Sophia, let us live as though we believed. Forget me. Put me out of your minds, and live. Live. Amen! Amen!”

He returned to his room. He was overcome with a great weakness. He could barely drag his feet. Closing the door behind him he fell full length upon the floor. His head struck the corner of the fireplace. When he awoke four hours later he could scarcely pass his comb through his hair. The blood had dried into a mat.

Ashley drank tea in Dr. MacKenzie's hut several evenings a month. He hoped that the managing director would discuss the problems of mining, but his host made it quite clear that he put copper out of his thoughts at sunset. By tacit consent they refrained from talking about their colleagues; neither wished to talk about himself. The walls were lined with books; there remained little to discuss except the subjects proposed by their titles—the religions of the ancient world and of the East. Ashley was ready and even eager to hear about them, but he soon learned that he was to receive neither profit nor pleasure there. Dr. MacKenzie looked upon all human activities—except mining—with irony and detachment. Ashley never employed irony and did not understand it; nor was he prepared to view with detachment those beliefs with which so many millions of men had consoled or tormented themselves. It made him uncomfortable to hear accounts of human sacrifice delivered with a remote and superior smile—maidens immolated in Carthage, babies roasted before Baal, widows burned on pyres. Ashley wanted to understand such practices; he did not even shrink from trying to imagine under what circumstances he would have participated in them. These were not smiling matters. Another thing made Ashley uneasy during these conversations. At each session, Dr. MacKenzie—with the regularity of one pursuing a system—asked him a question which both men knew to be impermissible. By time-honored convention, uprooted men in far places may occasionally volunteer a piece of information about their past lives; they may not ask for any. Dr. MacKenzie broke this law: “May I ask, Mr. Tolland—have you ever been married?” “Were both your parents born in Canada?” Ashley lied roundly and returned the conversation to the ancient religions.

He heard how every Egyptian for well over ten thousand years believed with passionate conviction that on his death, with merit earned, he might become the god Osiris. Yes, that his soul—“MacKenzie-Osiris” or “Tolland-Osiris”—descended the Nile in his death boat to the hall of judgment. There, if it had escaped the snapping crocodile and the snapping jackal, it was weighed on a balance. Ashley listened spellbound to the awful Negative Confession (“I have not diverted water from where it should flow,” “I have not . . . ?”) He heard of how countless Indians believed, and were now believing, that they were reborn into the world millions of times and that, with merit earned, they would ultimately become a Bodhisattva, a Buddha. Ashley did not find these thoughts and images very strange. He seemed to be momentarily on the threshold of believing them. What he found strange was Dr. MacKenzie's way of presenting them. Question after question rose in his mind, but he did not put them to his host. He listened. He borrowed some books and read in them desultorily; he found them unrewarding. But then, he had never been a reader. Beata was the reader. One evening he ventured a question.

“Dr. MacKenzie, you say so often that the Greeks were a great people. Why did they have so many gods?”

“Well, first there's the easy answer—the one they teach us at school. Whenever a new migration poured into the country or whenever they conquered another city-state or entered into a close alliance, they made a place for the foreigners' gods among their own. Or they combined one with one of their own. Sheer hospitality. On the whole they tried to keep the principal gods down to twelve, although it wasn't always the same twelve. But I think we have to look deeper than that. Wonderful people, the Greeks.”

Occasionally, as now, Dr. MacKenzie dropped his ironical tone. It was a sign of earnestness that he resorted to long pauses. Ashley waited.

“The twelve gods represent twelve different types of human beings. They looked at themselves. They looked at you and me. They looked at their wives and mothers and aunts. They made gods out of the various types of human personality. They put themselves on the altar. Look at their goddesses—mother and guardian of the hearth; lover; virgin; witch out of hell; guardian of civilization and friend of man—”

“What? What's that last, sir?”

“Athene. Pallas Athene. Minerva to the Romans. She doesn't give a damn about Hera's cooking and diapers, or about Aphrodite's perfumes and cosmetics. She gave Greece the olive; some say she gave it the horse. She wanted her city to be a lighthouse on a hill for all peoples and, by God, she did it. She's a friend to good men. Mothers are no help; wives are no help; mistresses are no help. They want to possess the man. They want him to serve their interests. Athene wants a man to surpass himself.”

Ashley held his breath in amazement. “What color eyes did she have, sir?”

“Color eyes? . . . ? Hmm . . . ? Let me think: “Then the grey-eyed Athene appeared to the far-voyaging Odysseus as an old woman, and he knew her not. “Buck up,” she said. “What are you doing sniveling by the salt sea? Get some heart into you, boy, and do what I tell you. You shall yet return to your dear wife and your homeland!”' Grey eyes.—She often gets discouraged, I think.”

“Why?”

“She never wins the golden apple. It's Aphrodite who wins the golden apple and starts making trouble. But Aphrodite often gets discouraged too, poor girl.” Here Dr. MacKenzie was shaken by his silent laughter and had to down a whole cup of tea. Tea is inebriating at high altitude.

“Why should Aphrodite get discouraged?”

“Why, because she thinks that love is the whole of life—the beginning and the ending, and the answer to everything. She can make her gentlemen friends think so, also—for a short time. But after a while her gentlemen friends go off to build cities or fight wars or to dig for copper. She gets furious. She tears her pillow into strips. Poor Aphrodite! She can find some consolation in her mirror. Do you know why I think Venus came from the sea?”

“No.”

“Because a calm sea is a mirror.—She came ashore in a shell. Do you see the connection? Pearls. Venus is obsessed with jewels. That's why she married Hephaestus. He could bring her diamonds out of the mountains.”

More laughter. Ashley was beginning to have a headache. What good is conversation if it isn't serious?

“What type are
you?
” asked Dr. MacKenzie abruptly.

“What, sir?”

“Which of the gods do you take after?” Ashley had no opinion. “Oh, you're one of them, Tolland. You can't get away from that.”

“Which are you, Doctor?”

“Oh, that's easy. I'm Hephaestus, the blacksmith. All we miners are diggers and blacksmiths. Always getting inside mountains, preferably volcanoes.—Now which are you? You're not one of us miners. You only play at it. Are you Apollo? Eh? Healing, poetry, prophecy?”

“No!”

“Are you Ares, the warrior? I guess not. Are you Hermes!—businessman, banker, lawyer, liar, cheat, newspaperman, god of eloquence, guide and companion to the dying? No, you're not merry enough.”