Now-what did M. Bйdier of the Forgeron recommend tonight? The red snapper, served cold with mayonnaise. Rosamund ordered some other fish. Neither dish was well cooked. The snapper at room temperature was clammy. The mayonnaise was like zinc ointment.
"How is it?" Rosamund asked.
"Underdone."
Tasting it, she agreed that it wasn't cooked through. It was raw at the center.
"Tell the _patron__ about it. You can speak to him in French."
"His English is better. People don't like to be trapped in dummy conversations. Why should he chat me up in French? I can take a Berlitz course, he'll think."
I could not finish the snapper. Dinner was endless.
Rosamund said, "It's an off night-they can't cook such bad food in a beautiful location like this."
You couldn't serve inedible dinners by this warm, still tropical water, with a moon to back up the setting. A restaurant ten minutes by foot from your apartment would have been a bride's dream-no shopping, peeling, cooking, serving, washing, or garbage disposal.
Toward midnight there was a lull in the air traffic. I had very soon learned how many privately owned planes came into the local airfield-a revelation of the wealth and the piloting skills of a considerable population of Americans, Mexicans, Venezuelans, Hondurans, and even Italian and French sportsmen-people who liked their reality to follow their thoughts. One thought of a place and in a matter of hours one could be in that place. In the sixteenth century, Spanish sea journeys lasted sometimes for months. Today you could play golf in Venezuela and dine the same evening in the Yucatan. Back to Pasadena in the morning, in time to catch the Orange Bowl.
When you begin to entertain such thoughts about people rich enough to buzz around and lay out their itineraries and figure gas mileage-very soon you may recognize that the air-hours fatigue you will feel is _your__ fatigue.
The fact was that Bйdier of the Forgeron had infected me.
When I complained of tiredness and low energy, Rosamund told me that it was the accumulation of fatigue aggravated by worry and grief. She, too, was still grieving for poor Ravelstein, destroyed by his reckless sex habits. Rosamund did not dismiss your com plaints-she gave them her full attention without irritability. She said that holidays often began with such burdensome and heavy feelings. She stroked my face affectionately and told me I must catch up on my sleep.
I did just that but felt no better. The toxin carried by the fish was heat resistant, I was to learn, and more boiling or baking could not neutralize it. As it was explained to me later in Boston, the cigua toxin was quickly excreted by the body but not before it had radically damaged the nervous system. Very much like Ravelstein's Guillain-Barrй syndrome. Among the first symptoms is a sudden distaste for food. I even disliked the look of it. I came to loathe all food odors. For dinner I could eat only cornflakes with a bit of milk. I kept telling Rosamund that this was all to the good. I was losing unwanted weight. Like everyone in the U. S., I said, I was grossly overfed.
The French family in the apartment below had come from Rouen to be easy and hang loose, unbuckled in the tropics. They swam in the smooth sea; so did Rosamund and I. We dried ourselves on the beach, chatting pleasantly. But the odors rising from their kitchen were becoming unbearable. I said to Rosamund, "What kind of shit are they cooking?"
"Is it as bad as that?" said Rosamund.
Then I lectured her on the decline of French cooking. "You used to be able to get good food in any _bistrot__. Maybe tourism has brought down the standards. Or isn't it possible that the disappearance of the peasantry is ruining French cookery?"
"One of the pleasures of living with you, Chick, is that you have so many thoughts on every subject. But you seem to have lost your appetite entirely. I have one theory myself: you've been so strained-overstrained, wrung out-that this peaceful place is too peaceful for you. You're just wound up too tight." She was evidently worried by the force and violence of my reactions.
"I have to get away from this awful food stink."
"Let's go out then."
"Yes, let's go. _You__ need a meal, Rosamund-you should have a good dinner. I have no appetite, but I'd like you to eat." My nights on this island had been restless-my heart misbehaving. I had increased the doses of quinine prescribed by Dr. Schley, the cardiologist. I swallowed tablets with glasses of quinine water. My head was clear enough but I complained of numbness in the soles of the feet. "Kind of an unpleasant thrill goes through my feet," I said.
"Perhaps it's the way you sit. Try to work standing. Maybe you're overdoing the quinine," said Rosamund.
"Dr. Schley said I could take any amount for the arrhythmia-the fibrillations-Good God! Everybody sounds like a doctor these days."
We walked on the beach to avoid the stink of the chicken and lobster stalls on the main street. At Le Forgeron the patron, lounging outside, pretended to be looking out to sea and didn't return my greeting. "Five thousand miles from France and he's been emancipated from _politesse__," I said.
"We've stopped eating there…."
"_Machts nicht__. He's a pig who was taught manners, but they didn't take. Terrible people everywhere. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's asshole."
I didn't know how sick I was. All I knew was that I was fitfully irritable or somehow out of whack-a bit deranged. I was aware that I was repeating myself and that Rosamund was distressed. She was wondering what to do. Probably she blamed herself for bringing me here. One of my obsessions is perhaps worth describing. I often said to Rosamund that one of the problems of aging was the speeding up of time. The days flashed by "like subway stations passed by the express train." I often mentioned "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" to illustrate this for Rosamund. Child-days are very long but in old age they fly past "faster than the weaver's shuttle" as Job says.
And Ivan Ilyich also mentions the slow rise of a stone thrown into the air. "When it returns to earth it accelerates at thirty-two feet per second per second." You are controlled by gravitational magnetism and the whole universe is involved in this speeding up of your end. If only we could bring back the full days we knew as kids. But we became too familiar with the data of experience, I suggest. Our way of organizing the data which rush by in gestalt style-that is, in increasingly abstract forms-speeds up experiences into a dangerously topsy-turvy fast-forward comedy. Our need for rapid disposal eliminates the details that bewitch, hold, or delay the children. Art is one rescue from this chaotic acceleration. Meter in poetry, tempo in music, form and color in painting. But we do feel that we are speeding earthward, crashing into our graves. "If these were just words," I said to Rosamund. "But I feel it every day. Powerless thinking itself eats up what is left of life…."
Poor Rosamund, she had to listen to such stuff night after night, at dinner-and this Caribbean holiday was to have been a romantic holiday, something of an additional honeymoon.
"Did you discuss this with Ravelstein?" she said.
"Well… yes, I did."
"What did he say to you?"
"He said that Ivan Ilyich had made a _marriage de convenance__, and that if he and his wife had loved each other things would have looked different."
"The poor things did hate each other," said Rosamund. "Reading that story is like crossing a mountain of broken glass. It's an ordeal." She was very intelligent, Rosamund. We could not only talk to each other but could also count on being understood.
We now turned to the volumes our friend Durkin had asked us to look up, working together on the pages he had asked us to copy out for him. It was a short chore, really, and Rosamund did most of the work. There were no copying machines for volumes of this size. I read the extracts aloud, and Rosamund took them down on her word processor. I had started out with little interest in the material, but I was very quickly absorbed in it. Not the legal side of it, the copyright suit filed by Durkin's client. The author of the journal on which the book was based was an American physician who had spent years in the New Guinea rain forest under a research grant from the National Institute of Something-or-other, and spoke the pidgin or island lingo. That he wrote well made his report all the more effective-super-memorable at times. He described a cliffside covered with great flowers as a "crimson orchid waterfall." There were many near-purple passages, but you felt he was responding to the purple of nature. He had a firm scientific aim and the entire article was important-humanly binding. He started out by describing the shortage of protein in the diet of the tribes he had studied. He said that in the primitive wars, the natives couldn't afford to waste the bodies of their enemies.