The Man in the Tree (20 page)

"More than they pay you in the circus?"
"Yes."
"Then why do you stay?"
"It's a community," he told her. "I'm accepted there; it's almost like
having a family."
"There are other families." She introduced him to artists and writers, to
Dubuffet, Genet, Arenas. Some of them became his friends, and gave him notes
to people in other places. He bought paintings and sculptures, because
he liked them and because he wanted to help the artists; he bought books,
more than he could carry with him. He put them in storage, in Paris, Rome,
Athens, Berlin. He was spending much more than he earned, and he disliked
counterfeiting currency. In Turkey he bought cut diamonds at wholesale,
thirty carats in all. He copied them, distributed the copies into bags,
copied them again. Three months later, when he was in Amsterdam, he took
his diamonds to a dealer.
"And where did you obtain these diamonds, Mr. Gordon?" the manager
asked politely.
"In Ankara."
"And do you have an import license for them?"
"No."
The manager, a young man, rosy-checked, very well dressed, folded his
hands on the table. "In that case, I could not offer you a very good
price, I'm afraid."
"It doesn't matter. I want to sell them."
The manager stirred the pile of stones with his finger. "One hundred
forty thousand guilders."
After that, he came back at least once a year and sold larger and
larger quantities of diamonds. He put his money in numbered accounts in
Switzerland. Later he began to invest in stocks and bonds, real estate,
precious metals. There were many pleasures in the world for a young man
with money; but even as he took them, he thought, 'Is this all?'
For a few years after Avila's death he had continued to make occasional
small wood carvings; then even that had stopped, and he knew now that he
had never had a real vocation. He had left everyone he had loved behind
him. Although he had many friends, he knew he could get along without any
one of them; he was proud of this self-reliance, this invulnerability,
and he despised himself for it.
During the late sixties and early seventies he spent a good deal of time
in museums. One of his favorite places was the Alte Pinakothek in Munich,
where they had Rubens' huge 'Fall of the Damned' -- all those plump pink
bellies and buttocks tumbling through the air like clotted leaves on
the wind. Another was the Musée Unterlinden, in Colmar. He kept going
back there to see Grünewald's 'Isenheim Altarpiece,' the only Crucifixion
that he thought was worth a damn: Christ's body, not afloat in Disneyland
like the one in El Greco, with its silly spigot of blood and its loincloth
slipping coyly down like the tresses of the Botticelli Venus, and not like
van der Weyden's Oriental monarch, lily in one hand, girdle in the other,
robe flapping open across his muscular midriff, about to flap further
-- God the Great Flasher -- but hanging under the weight of its pain,
mouth open in a rictus and the sweat of death on its skin. It was not
so much that he wanted to see it but that he could not stay away.
At a party given by a non-objective painter in London, he met a scruffy
man named Hamilton who was drawing diagrams on the back of an envelope.
"You see, here's the human population in the Middle Ages," he said. "See
how it rises very gradually until you get to about seventeen fifty. Now it
goes up more steeply. The population in nineteen fifty was about two and a
half billion. By the year two thousand, it will be more like six billion."
The woman on the other side leaned over, spilling her Martini on Hamilton's
knee. "Oh, sorry," she said. "But after all, Reggie, what's wrong with six
billion people?"
Hamilton looked at her. "We can't feed that many," he said. "Even if we
could, can we feed twice as many? Fifteen billion in twenty fifty? What
about twenty-four billion? If we don't reduce our population ourselves,
something else will reduce it for us."
"What might that be?"
"War. Famine. Plague."
"How grim." The woman got up, swaying a little, and called to a man
across the room. "Donald, haven't you got any good records?"
"You see," said Hamilton, "they won't listen. I think it's the most
extraordinary thing."
"Well, she's drunk," Gene said.
"Yes, but you're not, and you're not really listening either, are you?"
"Did you say you'd published a book about this?"
"Yes. It sold two thousand copies in England. There were more babies
born than that on the day of publication. The main culprit," he went on,
"is modern medicine. If you wanted to do something useful for humanity,
you could go back in a time machine and kill Pasteur."
"Are you serious?"
"Oh, absolutely. Until the end of the nineteenth century there was really
no effective medicine for anything. Doctors weren't healers especially,
they were diagnosticians -- their job was to identify the malady and tell
the patient what to expect. Apart from that, and a lot of nostrums that
didn't work, they just did palliative things -- sent people on ocean
voyages, and so on. Well, in the twentieth century we've wiped out one
disease after another, and the result is that there is no effective
check on population. But people are breeding pretty much the way they
always have, and you see the ghastly result. You're, what, about twenty?"
"Twenty-four."
"Well, with reasonable luck, you'll live long enough to see the big smash.
I put it about ten years into the new century. We can't go on as we are
much longer than that."
"You'd rather see people die of things like cholera, and typhoid?"
"It's not a question of wanting people to die. We're all going to die. The
question is how many. People are going to die of plague and famine and war.
The longer we put it off, the worse it will be."
"What's the answer, then? Birth control, education?"
"Yes. The only answer, except the three I mentioned."
"Will it work?"
After a moment Hamilton put his envelope away in his pocket. "No. Probably
not. But one's got to try."
One spring in Rome, when Claudina was there, she took him to see an
extraordinary exhibit. It was not in a gallery but in a cellar hired
for the occasion, under an abandoned brewery. From the lobby where they
bought their tickets they went down a steep flight of stairs into an
unpleasant earth-smelling gloom. An attendant held a curtain open. "Per
favore." Beyond the curtain they found themselves in a long, high chamber
with a wooden hand-rail running down the middle. The only light came
from dim hooded lamps aimed diagonally upward from the floor. Above
each of these lights, as their eyes began to adjust, they could see a
monstrous incomprehensible shape projecting from the wall. As they moved
slowly down the room, each figure in turn became clearer. There were
five: a king and a queen in tenth-century costume, a goat-horned demon,
a nude and obese woman with a hood concealing her face, a hawk-headed
image of the god Horus. The figures were carved of some grainless wood,
stained red-brown; each one sat on a carved throne fixed to the wall,
not upright but projecting horizontally, so that the vast malignant faces
stared downward; and the figures were so massive, so arrogant in their
perverse gravity that Gene and Claudina felt a kind of vertigo, as if they
themselves, not the carved figures, were standing impossibly on a wall.
Afterward they met the artist, a haggard young man named Gianfranco
Peganuzzi. His smile was wolfish; his English was very good.
"Where did you get the idea for those figures?" Gene asked.
"It was something in 'The Adventures of Augie March,' by Saul Bellow. His
people were in a gallery in Paris, looking at some paintings from the
Pinakothek, and Bellow wrote, 'These grand masterpieces were sitting on
the walls.' At first I thought that was funny. Then I said to myself,
'Why not?' And then it grew."
He said that it had taken him five years to carve the figures; he had
hollowed them out to reduce the weight, but, even so, each one weighed
seven hundred pounds, and it had been necessary to attach them by means
of bolts inserted through holes drilled in the masonry.
"Did you feel a dislocation, a nausea?" he asked.
"Yes," said C!audina, "very much. I understood then why there was a
hand-rail. And after the exhibition, what will you do with them?"
He shrugged. "Maybe some museum will buy them, or some collector. Or
maybe, if I get rich, I will build a gallery for them, underground -- in
a castle which I will buy, you understand -- and leave them there. There
will be no lights in the gallery. If you want to see them, you have to
go there with flashlights." He grinned.
* * *
In 1972 Gene Anderson left the circus for good and took up residence in
Athens, where there was an international community that he liked. Among
his friends there was an Irish painter named Hugh Mulloy. Mulloy drank
a good deal and quarreled with his wife, and sometimes when she locked
him out he would go to one of his friends' apartments, climb down the
fire escape, and get in through a window. They would find him the next
morning asleep on the couch, or perhaps on the floor. People used to say,
"Poor old Hugh." Everyone liked him, even when he was so drunk that he
couldn't talk. He was an emaciated little man with ginger-colored hair
and bright blue eyes. His favorite saying was, "Let's have another for
the fun that's in it."
In the autumn of 1973 Gene was living in an old high-ceilinged apartment
in the Patésia district; he had been there only a month or two. One
night he had a bad dream, the kind in which the dreamer sees everything
very clearly and knows what is happening, but is unable to move. In the
dream, he was in an old house, perhaps a castle, with tall ceilings and
casement windows. It was dark outside. Gene was lying in bed looking at
one of the windows, and he knew that in a moment someone was going to
try to get in and kill him. But he could not move; it was that kind of
dream. He lay watching the window, and he saw a man's shape appear in the
frame. Then he woke up with a jolt, covered with sweat, cold and shaking.
The window in his room was partly open, but there was nobody there. He
closed the window and turned on all the lights, and sat up until after
dawn. For some reason the dream had made him think of the gigantic carved
figures of Gianfranco Peganuzzi, and he wondered if they were brooding
somewhere in the darkness underground.
About a week later, someone asked him if he had seen Hugh. His friends
compared notes; it turned out that no one had seen him since the day
before Gene's nightmare; and no one ever saw him again.
Gene believed he knew what had happened. Hugh had been to his new
apartment only once, and didn't know where all the rooms were. He must
have come down the fire escape on the wrong side, and tried to get into
Gene's bedroom window instead of the window in the living room; and Gene,
half-aware in his sleep, had destroyed him -- made him nonexistent,
thrown him out of the world forever.
He went to see Hugh's wife and gave her some money, and got away as soon
as he could; he was unable to bear her gratitude. He flew to London
and talked to a marine architect, who designed for him a sixty-foot
cutter-rigged sloop with a cabin and galley tall enough for him to stand
upright. He took instruction in sailing and seamanship; a year later,
when Sea Sprite was ready, he hired a deckhand-cook named Richards and
sailed across the Atlantic. From that day onward, he never spent a night
ashore in a room that had a window that could be reached from the outside.
Chapter Seventeen
On the Gulf coast outside St. Petersburg there is a chain of islands
connected by causeways to each other and to the mainland; the islands
form a strip twenty-five miles long and in places no more than a few
hundred yards wide: St. Petersburg Beach, Treasure Island, Madeira Beach,
Redington Beach, Indian Rocks. The southern end is heavily commercialized,
with many luxury hotels and condominiums; then, as you go northward,
the tourist cabins on the ocean side become progressively smaller and
shabbier, the beach sadder and more desolate.
Margaret Morrow, freshly arrived from Albany, found a tourist cabin,
one of six with identical peeling green paint and pink trim, at the
upper end of Indian Rocks Beach; the place was called Site O'Sea. The
owner and manager was an old woman with frizzy lemon-colored hair who
wore muu-muus and carpet slippers, and called Margaret "Dearie." The
cabin was a single room with a tiny kitchenette, a sofa bed, and an
air conditioner that hummed and dripped all day long. The windows, of
narrow glass panes that overlapped each other like the siding on a house,
were gummy with salt spray, and the sand drifted in under the doorsill.
It was hard to get used to the strong sunlight, the bright pastel colors
like a child's painting, the cleanness of everything. Sand was everywhere,
drifted against the sides of houses, scattering in the wind across the
highway; it got into your hair, your ears, and, if you were not careful,
into your food, but there was no dirt, no grime. On the beach, at certain
hours, the gulls and terns gathered in convention -- just standing around,
blinking wearily, the gulls and terns in separate groups but side by side,
like businessmen waiting for a tour bus. Cormorants sat on the pilings of
the groins, spreading their huge wings to dry. The sun on the water was
piercingly white, painful to look at even through dark glasses. In the
evening skimmers glided over the shallow water, scooping up something
with their open beaks; the sun spread vast robes of pink and gold over
half the sky, and the wind rattled the dry fronds of the palm trees.
On her second day she bought a newspaper and rode the bus into
St. Petersburg. After Albany, the wide streets seemed almost empty. She
filled out applications in three employment agencies. On the third day she
answered advertisements in the paper and was interviewed, but not hired,
by an insurance company, a stock broker, and a home finance agency. The
next day was Saturday. She spent the weekend writing postcards, swimming,
and walking on the beach. In a grocery bag she collected several pounds
of shells and pebbles.