The broken face of that old building was covered with the sun. It was difficult to believe that it had ever been new, actually been built stone by stone under the surface of the plaster. The saints, some armless and headless, waited in still niches smoothed and quietened by the rain. The towers hung heavy with silent bells. But in places the plaster had come away, showing the walls built brick by brick, separated by lines of mortar laid by men's hands. Just inside the door waited a Virgin; the priest went in not glancing at her, passed her with proprietary certainty. When he was gone the children forgot him and remembered themselves. The birds, forgetting nothing and remembering nothing, dashed the benches with spots of white.
Otto walked more rapidly, for fear of one of them catching his linen, and was suddenly brought up face to face with a girl beside the waterless fountain. The darkness which she wore about her gave her an air of richness, her skin a color never burned by one sun; and in an evanescent instant he loved her. Recovering, he was as suddenly embarrassed, and got round her through the plaza.
Around the weight of the cathedral, the town looked transitory, brightly colored and haphazard, as though without that weight it might disintegrate, to wander off and be lost in the green hills.
The white boat slipped away from the pier, away from the black and brown and tan upturned faces, the hands extended for a last tossed coin and those few raised in farewell. The water was shallow and clear green. Slowly the heat of land fell away, and two people stood, a distance apart, at the boat-deck rail, watching the buildings lose their form and become smears of color, the palms lose their majesty and fade into the heavy green of the countryside. The harbor was still, nothing could be seen to move, and its sounds and cries were lost: there was only the throbbing of the boat, moving with certainty out upon water which became deeper and deeper blue. Otto, walking up to the bow, was taking the sun of this lost country with him.
He took a case out of his pocket, opened it, and caught his quivering lower lip with his teeth as a jarring of the boat hit his hand against the rail and sent the gold-rimmed dark glasses down into the white water. He stood clutching the emptied case tightly, looking over the bow to where it tore that water open, as though there must be some way of recovery.
— Too bad, said a cheerful voice beside him, a fiercely sun-pinkened American. — Looked like a nice pair of glasses. Otto closed the case and put it into his pocket. — Why don't you throw the case in too? asked his witness.
— I can use it for something, Otto said, surly, defensive.
— Carry pills in? said the traveler, and laughed again. — Hot as hell, isn't it. It'll cool down when we get out a ways.
— Possibly, said Otto, and walked aft.
The mirror in his cabin was smaller than he would have liked, framed in wood covered with thick green paint. He looked at his luggage. It was all there, with Wanted-on-Voyage tags tied to the handles. Then he thought to look at his fingernails. Not as a man does, the fingers turned in upon the palms, but like a lady, at the back of the extended hand so that she may admire the slim beauty of her fingers. Otto admired the taut dark figure of his hand, forgot to look at the nails and had to look back again (fingers turned in upon the palm). He was immediately troubled about covering that fine hand with a bandage. Still, injury might have been to the wrist: in which case the white gauze would go splendidly across the base of his hand, set off the dark length of the fingers like a lady's evening glove. He made certain that he had two extra packages of Emu which he would offer (preferably to ladies), casually indifferent to their choking fumes. He considered unpacking, but there was no hurry. The sling he had fashioned was in the top of the small suitcase. There would be time that evening to try it again, to decide where the bandage would go, where the wound was.
The sun moved down toward the sea, its redness heightened in hurry to be gone, moving as though pursued. The land was far behind, a soft haze behind the slowly curving wake of the boat, a white wake already floating with garbage where white birds dove and lifted themselves away. Otto saw none of this. He had started to post the Italian print on his wall (Lady of the Junipers), thought of Jesse's words, shrank, put it out of mind. He thought of his wallet, and pressed the bulge under his coat with his wrist. His hair, like his nails, was grown just the right length. The mustache, sparse and golden, the same. He tightened the knot in his tie and pulled down the skirt of his jacket. With the smoke from a fresh cigarette he blew a perfect circle against the hard surface of the mirror, where it clung growing larger and thinner around this image of his importunate face.
Up the coast of the New World the ship bearing ten million bananas ground out its course, every minute the waste heaving brokenly around it more brilliant as the moon rose off the starboard bow and moved into the sky with effortless guile, unashamed of the stigmata blemishing the face she showed from the frozen fogs of the Grand Banks to the jungles of Brazil, where along the Rio Branco they knew her for a girl who loved her brother the sun; and the sun, suspicious, trapped her in her evil passion by drawing a blackened hand across her face, leaving the marks which betrayed her, and betray her still.
V
America is the country of young men. — Emerson
— Nothing, said Maude Munk.
— Nothing? Arny Munk repeated.
— Nothing, she confirmed, dropping ice cubes into a glass. — The same things. They ask the same questions they've been asking for three years. Was I conscious after the accident, and if I wasn't how could I have reported it all to the police, and did I have pains in my back then, and if I did why don't the hospital records show it. Then my doctor and their doctor argue, and my lawyer and their lawyer argue, and the cab driver who was driving the cab I was in lives in Detroit now. I wish you'd put your shoes away somewhere when you take them off.
— Well I could tell them your personality's changed. And you never used to drink before that accident. It used to upset you because I drank.
— It still does, Arny. Terribly. And you don't have pains, like I do. Today I even asked the judge, Would you have two operations and wear a spinal brace if you were malingering?
— Maude look, you're spilling your drink, he said, righting the glass which tipped toward him in her forgotten hand. The radio offered cocktail music, When Buddha Smiles.
— What is it? Are you tired? Arny?. Oh, I just wish you got tired doing something you liked.
— You don't make a living doing things you like.
— But selling. and year after year. and. things like last week.
— Maude.
— Does your father know about that? Or does he just pretend he doesn't know, and he's glad you've sold another order, playing cards in a hotel room where they send naked women in for your out-of- town buyers. And all the time your father's such a fine dignified old man. Why if my Daddy ever.
— Maude.
— Anyhow, my Daddy was a man.
— What do you mean by that? Just because I have a rupture.
— I don't mean your old rupture. It's just that. She looked at him a moment longer, got up and freshened her drink, and turned the dial on the radio. Finally she asked, — What are you reading? Arny? You're not even reading, are you.
— Maude.
— As though you were all alone. Sometimes I come into the room and you're sitting here with a book open, but you're not reading. You're just sitting looking at the page, but you're not reading? Are you lonely?