The Transit of Venus (37 page)

The following summer, Grace Thrale bore her last child and third son, who was given the name of Rupert.

In America, a white man had been shot dead in a car, and a black man on a veranda. In Russia, a novelist had emerged from hell to announce that beauty would save the world. Russian tanks rolled through Prague while America made war in Asia. In Greece the plays of Aristophanes were forbidden, in China the writings of Confucius.

On the moon, the crepe soul of modern man impressed the Mare Tranquillitatis.

On the Old World, History lay like a paralysis. In France, the generals died. In Italy a population abandoned the fields forever, to make cars or cardigans in factories; and economists called this a miracle.

Protesters with aerosol cans had sprayed Stonehenge dark red.

In London there was foul weather, and the balance of payments on the blink or brink. There were two new books, and a musical, on Burgess and Maclean: England was a dotard, repeating the single anecdote.

Paul Ivory had a new play,
Act of God,
about an Anglo-Catholic priest.

Josie Vail had thrown an assistant professor's files from a cam-pus window. She had followed her guru to India, and lived two years at a commune in Arizona. Now preparing her doctoral dissertation on marketing techniques, she lived in Massachusetts with a sociology drop-out, younger than she, who referred to her as the Empress Josephine. His name was Burt. Together they would discuss Josie's castrating tendencies, and Burt's need for these.

"I suppose," said Una, "it was her mother's death that turned her so conventional."

Burt and Josie referred to their contemporaries as the kids. As exemption from action, they pleaded their youth, as if this were a disability. Josie explained that Burt was keeping his options open; not realizing that options have a season of their own.

Una said, "They're worn out with proclaiming their moral supremacy."

Una continued to shine. With the pendulum of the era, she had swung by night and by day; had shimmered in beads and sequins, when not in ragged jeans. Her name was on the letterhead of many charities, she had a house on the Vineyard and another at Puerto Vallarta. Cosmetic attention to face and figure, and to her strong, good hands, had become a ritual it might be risky to disband. There was some loneliness now to Una, and an ignored or buried vitality: in her wealthy sparkle and disused allure, she was like an abandoned mine.

Adam Vail's features had grown leaner. He had had an illness, never diagnosed. Most men become indeterminate with age, but Vail was strengthening. His patience and his energies were inexhaustible. In a crowded place, he drew sober attention, as Ted Tice might do. Yet stared at nobody, they stared at him.

Josie was kinder to her father, whom she patronized but could not recall disliking. When she came to New York she had her old room, where she sat cross-legged in front of a colour television.

"Pa doesn't look at it. I don't blame him, at his age there isn't the time. I'm young, I'm interested in everything, right?" Complacent as a matron of fifty.

Caroline Vail observed that knowledge was for some a range of topics; for others, depth of perception. She yawned at her own lie, and at the orange television. Josie was no longer young, and feared to turn thirty; she feared to work on her dissertation, lest she complete it. She feared to call things by their simple human names lest they somehow respond in kind. She did not know what to adopt in exchange for adolescence.

Now, when it no longer mattered, Caro almost loved her.

Caro said she and Adam would be away some months, in a country of South America.

Josie switched the television to another channel. "Do you have to do that?"

"There's no real risk, as yet."

"I guess not." Josie would have acknowledged, if she could, that courage can be required even where no risk is involved.

If she could, she would have touched her stepmother. But it had developed, over years, that they seldom embraced.

A man stood on a white porch and looked at the Andes. He was over fifty, white-haired, thin, with a stooping walk that suggested an orthopaedic defect, but in fact derived from beatings received in a prison. His appearance was slightly unnatural in other ways—

pink, youthful lips and light, light-lashed eyes: an impression, nearly albinic, that his white suit intensified.

So many of the women eventually attracted to the poet Ramon Tregear had experienced initial revulsion to his looks that distaste might by now seem a necessary prelude. Imprisoned in reprisal for certain writings, and released by a change of government, Tregear had lived in the countryside two years. His city-bred person offered the polite excuses of exile. He maintained his perfect dress, that marked him out. In addition, he had done that which set him apart from the generality of men, and this had played its part in his attraction. There were women who loved him for the degradations he had undergone as much as for his having withstood these.

To have risked one's life for a principle, and survived, gave as much strength as a great renunciation.

If the present government fell, as in all likelihood it would, Tregear would in all likelihood die—by decree, or in some necessary accident.

A woman sat on the veranda, at a table by herself. Two men talked nearby. She, not minding the exclusion, looked at the mountains, the valley. A book in her lap. She was not young, but supple, slender, with a weight of heavy hair bound at the back of her head.

Youth, perhaps, had never been her strong point. Tregear was drawn to her as he might have been, in an old photograph of famous persons, to the unidentified "friend" who stares away from the camera or bends to pat the dog. Also, women visitors were few.

He asked if he might sit beside her. She lifted a newspaper from a chair so he could put his straw hat there. Raised to him, her brow and eyes were secure and beautiful. He could not see the title of her book.

The valley, which formed a single vast paisley when seen from the air, at eye level revealed green rises and declivities. Fields, vineyards, and orchards were of every tinge and texture, tree trunks flickered like exposed stitches, watercourses slithered.

The wave of growth broke at the foot of the Andes in a crest of green.

It was October, and therefore spring.

Caroline Vail sat on the veranda and said again, No, it was not like Australia. She was thinking, All these places glimpsed in transit.

She could not remember who had once said to her, "Not travel, but dislocation." It might have been Adam, or Ted Tice.

Bauhinia, jacaranda were banked nearby. On a low terraced garden of flowers and shrubs, a gardener had been at work all morning. The master of the house, in a linen suit, sat at some distance on the veranda, talking to Adam Vail. Vails stick was propped, a black stroke, on a white chair. Sheets of paper lay on a cane table between the two men, and from time to time one or the other of them would pick up a page and read carefully, before resuming the discussion. They were speaking in Spanish, and the man in linen was the freckled petitioner Caro had seen with Adam years before on a winter morning in Whitehall.

Three women lived in the house—the owners wife and her sister, and an adolescent daughter. They did not sit on the porch with the men, though not questioning Caro's right: she was interested in justice, and therefore like a man. The three women were black-haired, high-coloured, statuesque; three rose-cheeked Latin women with pale throats and shoulders they protected from the sun, bodies for shuttered afternoons and cool evenings, bodies soft as the soft beds where they lay. They were physically distinct from the servants, who were Andean Indians.

In her own setting, Mrs. Vail would be considered dark. Such were the illusions of context. There might be places—Ethiopia, Bali

—where Latin women similarly blanched.

As visitors were few, Tregear sat beside her and said, "I never supposed my life would turn on these matters" — meaning the discussion at the other table. "Nor, I suppose, did you."

"Well," she said, "I am not surprised." She dropped the newspaper to the ground. "Yet I can't think that all the rest—what went before and still goes on—has been unimportant."

"On the contrary. The rest is the reality that has a right to happen. Any proper struggle against injustice is an access, merely, for a more normal confusion. For myself, there's nothing I'd like better than to go back to squabbling about usual things."

It seemed hard, all the same, that such a man might have to die so that Dora, or Clive Leadbetter, could waste the world's time.

Caro asked if he could not leave the country before the government fell. He gave no answer, but after a time said, "Vicente has compromised himself for me."

The woman looked over at the freckled landowner at the cane table, to observe his virtue. "He's on the right side."

"Better than that, he has no side. Even a right side imposes wrongful silences, required untruths. As the timid say, there is strength, or safety, in numbers; but solidarity is an extension of power, that is, the beginning of the lie. The only proper solidarity is with the truth, if one can discover it." Tregear still smiled. It was the smile of a primitive, having little to do with what was said. "In any group there are masters and followers. Even the right side rather dislikes a man who stands alone."

Long ago, Valda had said, "It's the uncommon man who gets everyone's goat."

"Vicente is also brave because I'm not a famous man. For most people it's easier to support an eminent person in deserved disgrace than an obscure one who has been wronged."

Caro sat beside this obscure man who had risked himself and lived to tell, offhandedly, the tale. She said, "There are those, too, who befriend the weak because they feel themselves unworthy of the strong. Because they cannot bring themselves to honour abilities greater than their own." But who are the weak, she was wondering; who are the strong? This man had actually displayed the heroism most people confine to their fantasies. He had left nothing, in his nature, to be resisted or exposed. Because of him, one could look on the green vega as a place where one man at least had earned a right to be.

She said, "There are many, too, who don't mind being wronged."

"One of our poets said, 'Disorder also holds its charm.' " His enunciation gave immortality, as slow motion makes any human action beautiful by an appearance of control. "
'El desorden,
' " he said, "
'tambien tiene su encanto.'
" He took his straw hat from the chair, and smiled. "Will you see the garden?"

The sun was already high. Man and woman walked into the garden. Caro turned to look back at Adam, who lifted his hand and watched her light-blue descent into the flowers with the repulsive, stooping hero. Through the cotton dress you could see the shape of her legs moving, like limbs of a swimmer.

An old, chained dog lay in a patch of shade, lolling tongue, swaying tail: a lapped old boat, weathered and tethered in a calm port.

There was a wall where different jasmines had been trained up, one or two of them already in bloom. Tregear reached for a frond of flowers, while the gardener paused to watch. Petals shook from blue sky. "Gardeners and librarians hate to see their charges put to use." Ramon Tregear showed the Spanish jasmine, Cape jasmine, jasmine from the Azores. There was a huge plant in a terracotta tub.

"That's Florentine.
IIgelsomino del Granduca.
One of the Medici, the Grand Duke Cosimo, imported it into Italy from Goa, where he sent expeditions for tropical plants. They all came from India, or Persia, if you go back far enough."

On such a morning you might love the white-flowering earth as if you, or it, were soon to die. Left to herself, Caroline Vail might have run through fields or gardens.

A boy came through cypresses holding a tennis racquet to his face. Squinted at them through the mesh. A smaller child toddled behind, calling out, "Andres." Below the trees, the garden ended at a small
barranca.
Man and woman turned their backs on the landscape and followed the children up the path, up the steps. The boy held up his mask, like a fencer. The dog lay on its side, a grey rock now, yellowed with age or lichen. On the woman's hair and shoulder, white petals clung like flakes from a defective ceiling.