Not Spanish Harlem but that wire basket just outside the fence, with a cerveza Schaefer and a mango pit and a copy of El Diario crushed in it, MATAN as always in the headline.
Not Old Law Farm but that old marten-house on a pole, and its battling noisy occupants coming and going and building nests.
Not the Seventh Saint Bar & Grill but Bacchus in basrelief, or Silenus or whoever that was supported by goat-footed satyrs nearly as drunk as their god.
Not the weird pursuing pressure of his madness, inherited and inescapable, only that plaque fixed to the gate where he had entered: Mouse Drinkwater Stone.
Not the false Sylvies that had afflicted him when he was drunk and defenseless but the little girls, skipping rope and playing jacks and whispering together as they eyed him suspiciously, who were always the same yet always different, perhaps only in different outfits.
Not his season on the street but the seasons of this pavilion.
Not her but this park.
Press on, press on.
Never Never Never
The cold compassion of bartenders, he came to see, was like that of priests universal rather than personal, with charity for all and malice toward almost none. Firmly situated (smiling and making ritual and comforting gestures with glass and cloth) between sacrament and communicant, they commanded rather than earned love, trust, dependence. Best always to placate them. A big hello, and the tips subtle but sufficient.
“A gin, please, Victor, I mean Siegfried.”
Oh God that solvent! A season’s worth of summer afternoons dissolved in it as his father once, in a rare burst of enthusiasm for the sciences, had in school dissolved something blue-green (copper?) in a beaker of clear acid till it did not exist at all, didn’t stain its solvent with even the faintest veridical residue; what had become of it? What had become of that July?
The Seventh Saint was a cool cavern, cool and dark as any burrow. Through the windows the white heat showed the more blank and violent to his eyes when they were accustomed to the dark; he looked out at a parade of blinking, harrowed faces, bodies as nearly unclothed as decency and contrivance allowed them to be. Negroes turned gray and oily and white people red; only the Spanish bloomed, and even they sometimes looked a little blown and wilted. The heat was an affront, like winter’s cold; all seasons were errors here, two days only excepted in spring and a week in autumn full of huge possibilities, great glamor and sweetness.
“Hot enough for you?” said Siegfried. This was he who had replaced Auberon’s first friend Victor behind the Seventh Saint bar. Auberon had never enjoyed any rapport with this thick, stupid one, named Siegfried. He sensed an unpastoral cruelty in him, an enjoyment almost in others’ weaknesses, a Schadenfreude shadowing his ministry.
“Yes,” Auberon said. “Yes, it is.” Somewhere, far off, guns were fired. The way to avoid being disturbed by these, Auberon had decided, was to regard them as fireworks. You never anyway saw the slain in the streets, or as rarely as you saw the dead bodies of rabbits or birds in the woods. Somehow they were disposed of. “Cool in here, though,” he said with a smile.
Sirens wailed, going elsewhere. “Trouble someplace,” Siegfried said. “This parade.”
“Parade?”
“Russell Eigenblick. Big show on. You didn’t know?”
Auberon made gestures.
“Jeez, where you been? Did you know about the arrests?”
“No.”
“Some guys with guns and bombs and literature. Found them in the basement of some church. They were a church group. Planning some assassination or something.”
“They were going to assassinate Eigenblick?”
“Who the hell knows? Maybe they were his guys. I forget exactly. But he’s in hiding, only there’s this big march on today.”
“For him or against him?”
“Who the hell knows?” Siegfried moved off. If Auberon wanted details, let him get a paper. The bartender had just been making conversation; he had better things to do than be grilled. Auberon drank, abashed. Outside, people were hurrying by, in groups of two and three, looking behind them. Some were shouting, others laughing.
Auberon turned from the window. Surreptitiously, he counted his money, contemplating the evening and the night ahead. Soon he would have to move downward in the drinker’s scale, from this pleasant—more than pleasant, necessary, imperative—retreat to less pleasant places, brightly-lit, naked, with sticky plastic bars surmounted by the waxy faces of aged patrons, their eyes fixed on the absurdly cheap prices posted on the mirror before them. Dram shops, as old books had it. And then? He could drink alone, of course, and wholesale so to speak: but not in Old Law Farm, not in the Folding Bedroom. “Another of these,” he said mildly, “when you get a chance.”
He had that morning decided, not for the first time, that his search was over. He wouldn’t sally forth today to follow illusory clues. She couldn’t be found who wanted not to be found. His heart had cried out, But what if she does? What if she is only lost, and searching for you even as you search for her, what if only yesterday you came within a block of one another, what if at this moment she sits somewhere nearby, on a park bench, a stoop, Somehow unable to find her way back to you, what if she is even now thinking He’ll never believe this crazy story (whatever it would be) if only I find him, if only; and the tears of loneliness on her brown cheeks… But that was all old. It was the Crazy Story Idea, and he knew it well; it had once been a bright hope, but it had over time condensed to this burning point, not a hope but a reproach, not even (no! No more!) a spur; and that was why it could be snuffed.
He’d snuffed it, brutally, and come to the Seventh Saint. A day off.
There was only one further decision then to make, and he would (with the help of this gin, and more of the same) make that today. She hadn’t ever existed at all! She was a figment. It would be hard, at first, to convince himself of how sensible a solution this was to his difficulty; but it would grow easier.
“Never existed,” he muttered. “Never never never.”
“Wazzat?” said Siegfried, who usually couldn’t hear the plainest request for replenishment.
“Storm,” Auberon said, for just then there was a sound which if it wasn’t cannon was thunder.
“Cool things off,” said Siegfried. What the hell could he care, Auberon thought, aestivating in this cave.
Out of the roll of thunder came the more rhythmic beats of a big bass drum far downtown. More people were in the streets, driven forward by or perhaps heralding the oncoming of something big which they looked now and again over their shoulders at. Police cruisers shot into the intersections of street and avenue, blue lights revolving. Among those coming up the street—they were walking heedlessly in the middle of the roadway, that looked exhilarating to Auberon—were several wearing the blousy shirts of many colors worn by Eigenblick’s adherents; these, and others in dark glasses and narrow suits, with what could have been hearing aids stuck into their ears but probably were not, discussed things with the sweating policemen, making gestures. A portable conga band, contrapuntal to the far-off beating bass drum, proceeded northward, surrounded by laughing brown and black people and by photographers. Their rhythms hurried the negotiators. The suited men seemed to command the police, who were helmeted and armed but apparently will-less. The thunder, more distinct, rolled again.
It seemed to Auberon that he had discovered, since coming to the City, or at least since he had spent a lot of time staring at crowds, that humanity, City humanity anyway, fell into only a few distinct types—not physical or social or racial, exactly, though the qualities that could be called physical or social or racial helped qualify people. He couldn’t say just how many of these types there were, or describe any of them at all precisely, or even keep any of them in his mind when he didn’t have an actual example before him; but he found himself continually saying to himself, “Ah, there’s one of that sort of person.” It certainly hadn’t helped in his search for Sylvie that, however distinct she was, however utterly individual, the vague type she belonged to could throw up cognates of her everywhere to torment him. A lot of them didn’t even look like her. They were her sisters, though; and they harrowed hini, far more than the jovens and lindas that superficially resembled her, like those that, on the lean muscled arms of their boyfriends or honorary husbands, now followed the conga band up the street, dancing. A larger group, of some status, was coming into view behind them.