part one

 

the last trump

 

 

 

 

one[MRN1] 

 

 

‘my, you’re beautiful. Would I like to bed you!’ said the parakeet, black as a felt boot, with two eyelets, of no colour, but shining. Payo made an evil-eye sign against the bird’s tongue. It could rattle off hundreds of names of gods, more than anyone there had ever heard, more than were listed in the pamphlets in the pharmacies, more than were remembered in the alcoves of the slave cults: clicked, chewed, mumbled out in their moist openings.

On one side of the room were tables of white prostitutes dressed as sophomores, eating ice-creams – his jellybabies, Payo called them. On the other, younger black prostitutes shifted slowly together, held in synchrony by long chains of waiting. ‘Fucking business is slow, man,’ said Payo to himself. He put another video on the machine.

Uncle Fernando came in and said, ‘How’s the ghosts?’

Payo said, ‘The ghosts is fine. It’s the living we can’t shift. They don’t like Italians. Maybe they’ll go off men altogether.’

Fernando said, ‘I’m Italian myself.’ After a while he added, ‘Maybe I don’t blame them.’

The bird said, ‘Puttane, puttanate,’ and hopped about, trying to create a market.

I was back in my beloved Bahia, the biggest black city where three continents meet, try to fuck, rip each other off, catch some saliva or lymph to use in spells. Bundles of candles flicker, that are lost souls. Smell like the bottom of a sack, black faces – dumbfounded.

I know Fernando well. He asks Payo, ‘Who’s that greyskin belong to, hanging casual and abandoned on that fine chair?’ He means me. His locutions cover his unwearing thoughts as barnacles might cover granite.

I ask Fernando, ‘What you drinking? Just for interest.’

He enjoys that. He asks, ‘What you doing in the throne room, boy – the stable’s downstairs.’

I say, ‘I’m looking for a singer. A real pure, luminous singer of songs for the other greyskins.’

Payo wordlessly proposes the parakeet, who launches a rope of diamonds over a sapphire cliff, as many octaves of notes as are in the world. I say, ‘The voice is right, but the feathers don’t fit.’

‘In short,’ Fernando proposes, ‘you want a slave.’

‘I want a worker,’ I say, ‘who may also make a lot of money.’

‘I grasp the situation, and the distinction,’ says Fernando. ‘I have a boy in mind that would do well for you.’

I say, ‘I think it should be a woman.’

‘You mean, a prostitute.’

‘Only in the nicest possible way,’ I say.

‘And that’s the best way, isn’t it,’ says Fernando. ‘But I have something in mind that will already start paying your expenses.’

‘No, Fernando,’ I say, ‘Nothing illegal, people or things. One contract, one person, no exaggeration.’

‘It’s out of the ordinary.’

The parakeet coughs like a dog, stomps its feet, like a parrot in a B-movie. ‘Fernando,’ I say, ‘if they even let me into the States, it’s because they’re watching me and want a closer look. If they just jail me or deport me, it’s because they’re quite indifferent.’

Uncle Fernando says, ‘Or because they’re using the wrong list.’

‘They use whatever list they like – but you mean you have a list?’

‘We have a person. With a list,’ he says, ‘And the list’s political, I promise.’

‘What might that mean?’ I ask.

He feigns impatience. ‘For your conscience, if you have one, or would like to have one, the people on the list aren’t criminals but, surprisingly, they will pay, though not as much as criminals.’

‘No, too vague.’

He says, ‘Well, I’ll let you see this singer, but I’m sure that she won’t come.’ And without the list, I’m sure too.

Fernando says, ‘You were political long ago – since then, almost everyone has come and gone. A lot are dead, even. Taking someone in these days can’t be so easy.’

‘Find someone else, Fernando, I’m not the bleached bone you want,’ I say.

‘Mister James,’ he says, brushing invisible insects from his silver suit, tarnished only a little darker than his silver hair, his silver skin, ‘Mister Jay, we get on because you are honest, and you are honest because you have been poor. You do not lie from habit, nor from a false sense of shame.’

‘No, Uncle, I lie because I have to.’

Payo brings us complex drinks. They are on the house. They are the colour of a cardinal’s ruby, and taste like boiled water. ‘It’s free, free,’ says Payo, sidling off to peel and eat a yellow fruit, half turned away from us, his black intelligent fingers sectioning like two coordinated spiders.

The parakeet says, ‘You cheap black bastard,’ but it’s meant for me, the customer. Payo’s friends go to the bar next door when they want to drink. Fernando motions me to leave, look over his choice of singers.

The jellybabies follow our departure with animation, a whole jungle of parakeets.

Once we would have seen real people. Five hours later, I have seen fifty videos.

I think – how brilliantly human and commercially useless these are. I say, ‘What kitsch, Fernando. Their kids, their houses, jocks on the beach, their favourite gods, their fat arms – Uncle, they’re really fat.’

‘They’re overblown, perhaps,’ says Fernando, ‘like cabbage roses in an English garden. But each video costs a thousand bucks. They carry them, and when they’re picked up by the cops—’

‘Then let’s see something in the life – but nothing extravagant.’

Fernando opens up the safe. Inside there are two tumblers full of scotch, and two tomatoes, which he leaves. I say, ‘For throwing?’ as he closes the safe, covering the combination from me with his back.

He says, ‘Sex shows are a special treat, but not the theatre, nor the bedroom.’

I drink the scotch and say, ‘They remind me of a lantern show – slides at the mission hall, the lecturer’s pointer drums, then something muddly in the back row …’

‘You need memory, certainly,’ says Fernando. ‘I find most sensual, and always in the minor, minor keys, pitched very high or very low, a little show that animals are made to give – a snake’s scales against burlap, long long wait to see a coypu’s eye. Same thing with girls: textures, a timid glance. Their sex, yes, leaves me quite unmoved. What interests me, fascinates, and yes, excites is not their sex, it’s their humanity.’

‘And snakes and coypus?’

He says, ‘Yes, yes exactly. With them too: it’s their humanity.’

A pause, and then he asks, ‘Does religion interest you at all these days?’

‘I always cloak my cynicism with cynicism in that respect. Of course, one knows that here the distance between rite and mystery is what in the States produces such incongruous results ... the search for tribal man who often isn’t there. Myself, being in part American-Indian, however small a part, leaves me a certainty of origins, but so far back I feel that what is life for me is death for modern man – if I can call them that. In short, this tribal sense for me is just a personal assurance, that all is carried deep inside And I don’t need new cults – they bore me, and embarrass me—’

‘No, no,’ he says, ‘to do them down, to do them down.’

‘You mean that you’re a revolutionary again?’ I ask.

He looks round, timid, ‘No, no. Revolution is definitely off the cards here.’ He’s so alarmed he knocks a pack of French cards on the floor. ‘And those,’ he says, ‘are just for telling bad fortunes with .’

As we go to see his special girl, I feel good, good in his company. Not really pimp, more like myself, a broker, agent. Payo is your typical pimp, because he’s cheap and formal, not stepping past his role. Fernando, though is different. Different country, different history, and he could have been elected, might have been a politician.

He pauses to set fire to a bundle of candles on the pavement. Ten slave souls. He says, ‘Rather special ones, the family of a friend – of the family.’

‘Rather a catholic gesture, then,’ I say, ‘singling out your family dead.’

Worried, he says, ‘No, no, I assure you, they represent them all, all the slaves who have only slave souls, who for want of light may lack, may gradually come to lack, even their slave souls. A gesture, yes, Jay, I most solemnly assure you, not to everlasting life but to the precarious humanity of slaves – the dead ones and –’ (half a wink, half a last closing of the eye) ‘– the living.’

 

 

* * *

 

we sit in an expensive hut to see Fernando’s performer. I say, ‘You’re sure candles don’t just come in bundles of ten?’ and he’s annoyed: ‘So do I question your principles, whether you have any ...?’

I say, ‘Your stand against religion, Fernando – surely one or two more here wouldn’t cause alarm.’

He is intent: ‘Everyone can bring as many gods as they like, when they arrive. The more the better. The problem isn’t them at all – its the evangelists. With no respect: they want to drive us out.’

‘I know the evangelicals are bastard leeches. But perhaps the government will stop them.’

But Fernando says, ‘They will not stop till they have morally terrorised us all.’ He looks appalled.

‘The jellybabies, Payo’s gelatinas, will be put back in the fridge?’ – I nearly say the safe, but that’s too daring for our friendship.

‘No, not what the poor people do. If they could make us all secure, and even a little wealthy, I’d applaud. But their only powers are powers of terror and of organising. They are a jungle fire shut in a box. And – after Payo, of course – it’s not just you and me they want to see out of business: it’s our life, our culture, richness. If we can’t have wealth, let us at least have richness. Your music, for instance, that would go. No improvisation, no stepping off the line.’

‘Over the line and into the audience? Fernando, all my music’s gone inside now. Big bands are too big, my own stuff bores me, repetitious.’

‘What designs do you have on us, then?’ he asks. We have drunk nothing, almost, but paid hugely. A sign says ‘No prostitutes’ and beneath there is an arrow pointing somewhere.

I say, ‘Someone with a bit of repertoire, able to shuffle along some African tracks as far as greyskins will allow her ... not be too taxing on the guys I find to back her ....’

‘Why here, why always here?’ he asks.

‘Perhaps I’m a loser,’ I say, glancing at my suit, which isn’t.

He buys more drinks, paying with a message, that he writes as if he’s drawing runes, casting a horoscope. The waiter takes it to the manager, who nods at Uncle Fernando.

‘Losing is irrelevant,’ he says to me. ‘You come here because you are addicted to the place – and that is how I know you’ll get my list. And that is why you must keep out that one, that – that funereal god. God of forgiveness and forgetfulness, all in his image, all quite promiscuous and indifferent to everything – except obedience. Those people,’ he leans forward, and our two beautiful suits are like the top and underside of an albino fern, ‘they’re fascists, Jay. Fascists for eternity. We don’t want them in Brazil, here in Bahia. Where will all our gods end up, and all the souls, the souls, that they look after? All swept off the streets, the biggest cop raid ever? Jay, my soul is dear to me. I don’t want these American guys running it through the forest, wrassling it down and branding it, and butchering it. We must,’ he rears back majestically, ‘defy US immigration, first. Second, and even more important, we must defend our independence from the everlasting god, the god who knows no pain, the god who is all things, and so is no thing – and his bullyboys from Wichita.’

‘It’s a big job,’ I say. ‘God I can handle, but you need strong teeth for US Immigration.’

Fernando can work out the singer, but ‘Just let us live and die, not borrowing someone else’s rhetoric. Make ourselves a mystery if we must, as human beings, though – and not false mysteries, suggested only to be explained away. Our heads are full of odd things, that in a thousand years you’d never find. We don’t need them seared out with a torch.’

I tell him, ‘I’m the wrong one for this. Music’s not for real intellectuals, there’s no dialectic, just comments, conversations between friends. A universal language that has nothing to say, a magical mystery tour, that’s all. Either the magic works or not, or you find the answer to the mystery, if it has one, or you don’t.’

‘Nevertheless,’ says Fernando.

Does he think I have something these beautiful, expensive people don’t, offering their costly services, keen electric bodies for red-hot prices? To live and explore whatever you might want to, however noble or degrading, threatened by only one punishment – to sit forever on an economy hot as a stove lid – leaping up, and heating up, only at carnival, out in the streets, dancing to cool down.

And Fernando says, ‘Jay, this is Lomé – the name is part of Philomel. Also she’s called Regininha’ – he is holding out a Polaroid that doubles the girl who’s opposite.

‘But Regininha’s – wow – a stage name,’ she says.

Caught – she says – between two families, her children and her sisters, brothers, she is snared in human trees. Branches and twigs trying to snag her hair and poke her eyes. Her own children jigsaw neatly into younger brothers. Playing, pretending to be the princess in the castle with cloddish retainers, or the fawn in the thicket. Is this her stage name too, her attack, defence, or something else? She quickly puts me off her limits – ‘I’m a bitch – don’t believe anything I say, unless it’s about my career.’

Fernando chooses a peppery chocolate, pops it in, wrinkles his nose and from it there shoot two lasers of snot. Looking away from him, I see the room is a double shell. On the bright, inner part, where we are running up our bill, it is a simulacrum of the Cafe Royal. But outside, in the brown, peppery shadows, I see an altar, like a Wurlitzer, lit with eternal, electric-flickering soul-lights, the colours on the panels changing from one pastel sherbet or milk-shake to another. Its automatism makes it seem inner-looking and absorbed, the sequence of lights and colours run like a mantra.

Fernando says, ‘Jay has had a difficult spiritual journey. He has been,’ he pauses, ‘inside. Inside for many years. He has seen ruin and disaster, and has read. Alas, he has only read. Better if he had done other things, but if you go inside – well, those you cannot do.’

Lomé leans to me, though Fernando is still there and listen­ing, and she says, ‘Fernando is a rich man.’

I say, ‘I thought he was quite poor. Quite rich only. Always in the middle of deals, a bit from both sides.’

‘Safest place to be, and why he’s rich, controlling without risk.’

‘He seems worried about something, his money or his soul.’

She laughs: ‘Afraid everything will be taken away, his protection, his insurances. But because he’s on his own, he’s safe – a benefit to everyone. But you, why don’t you play? Did you get old?’

I tell her, ‘Musicians don’t get old. Their teeth fall out and then they reminisce. Or they have a fang or two riveted in their heads, and so keep on. Pain is like the thousand cuts, but you keep smiling on. One high note a night, show you can still climb the stairs. Quite different from the young warriors – need to be one to keep up with that. Need the right wiring, otherwise it’s just ritual. Stick your fingers in the socket and pretend to be a light bulb. Burns your shorts off.’

‘So you were in prison,’ she says, and, ‘What do I look like?’

I tell her, ‘I don’t know what you look like. Yes, I was inside for sure. Put all us Indians there,’ I laugh, but rub the amulet, my little patch of skin that lets me feel the little red man underneath. ‘Case of mistaken identity; my own. Prison’s a total experience, like the helter-skelter or the grave.’

‘But,’ she says, ‘there are other kinds, other ways, of being inside?’

‘Take yourself down in there, to how it all holds up, is put together, little gates and traps, the little peepshows lighted up, the tiny armouries, all little guys you’ve never seen, working the machinery. The problem is – it’s hard to leave behind, it’s all a way of thinking, being. It’s like the earth, it’s like your skin: inside. You could be quite content, but knowing how they do it – it’s like the bees: if you knew how they do it, you’d stop eating honey.’

A metaphor with a lot of locks. But then, I think, the bees know how they do it, and they go on eating honey. Work ethic needs publicity – grow more flowers, suck more dust, stuff it in your pockets: dance more, fuck more queens. ‘It’s not the pig that’s like us, it’s the bee.’

‘But bees won’t end like us,’ she says.

‘Annual economy pretty tight, not much to do against the frosts, and then the building’s all the same. No high-rise hive that might cave down. And then, the bees don’t end up eaten, like the pig.’

Then, we are on the plane, we sleep, I wake and coming from a dream, ask Lomé – ‘You remember the altar like a Wurlitzer, in the club where you first sang for me?’

‘Yes. That was a Wurlitzer. Worth a lot. You should hear Fernando play it, like a firecracker, wheee. The joint doesn’t just jump, it bursts right out its skin, and then again, again, that joint, man’ – she is like a turbine imagining the waterfall, and she has sung for me, using the words that live in songs and say – just all or nothing that you want them to, and doesn’t yield a fraction of herself  – ‘that joint is a JOINT when Uncle Fernando finishes with it.’

I imagine him slipping back into his jacket, the cloth mottling and black as a lizard’s tongue, with his sweat bursting through, the silver threads still orange with the current, left whining through his shirt.

Lomé goes on – ‘When that man plays, he’s a god, and you forgive him everything. Man, he can light candles with that thing, his great beast.’

And when we enter the customs building we have shed Brazil and Africa. My small hairs rise as we see the first rows of solemn cops, some pursy as hogs, grease-stained to the armpits, others lean and popeyed, like strings of much-chewed tobacco or smoked gopher thighs. All from the wax-museum.

Lomé says, ‘You look like you’re going to throw your jockey,’ and I whisper, ‘Well, at least my lunch.’

I’m ready to confess, yes, I’m importing this woman for more than work, shaping the air with African ditties as she might be, say a silversmith, working on invisible metals that still contrive to carry fruit, bright birds without supports. And not just for my fantasies, but a daring joust with crocodiles laid on before a house of greenish bathers: holding their breaths for hours and hoping – as consciousness escapes into a lifetime’s high, a last hiss and bubble as the light expires – for some exclusive coupling. I confess: but you must accuse, your imaginings, your fears – yes, naked under water with the caymans, yes ...

America is on the march. Not just the kids in masks, the high school bands, the November Santas. The whole country’s mobilised, all battle-drilled and squadded up. Parades, yes, but before what battles? Rallies, with standards, hymns, blessings from lady popes in wigs: many choirs of fallen angels. All wear a uniform – the athletes, businessmen with their badges of rank, cabmen and liftboys – up to the higher grades of land-admiral, opening the door, throwing you out – toting their guns, short, fat, long, black and brown, guns with veins and guns with mumps.

 

 

two

 

 

Canterbury Corrections – showed me that racism has its finer points, its sects. Had we been revolutionaries, no re-grading of orthodoxy could have been more refined – than whites regarding the black universe. Determining a limbo, of all the khakis, yellows, pinkish browns – spilling in clumsy splodges from the master-colouring brushes.

A similar tale of sins and skins was acted out in the quarters of the blacks and browns. Monstrous cosmology, all of us already damned. Above us, the real people, warders like the angels who could fly, locking us in, driving the laundry trucks. And, since they were all colours too, there must have been a higher order, beings so finely tinged they didn’t need to go to jail at all. And these in turn must spend their lives like master critics or restorers, tiding themselves along some other colour chart that said who they would talk to, promote, learn Spanish from, listen to as trumpets and trombones were played, Manhattans poured ... such industry. Such prayer, such preachers, such arrays of cops, even the little kids in masks, when they took them off, there were the primal colours underneath.

Lomé listens, perhaps too much, too carefully. In silence not polite, but professional. Waiting for my solos to stop. And I go inside again, preferring silence with her. ‘Which no doubt you understand as well as speech.’

‘Which no doubt I understand as well.’

Regret my performance in the customs shed – where Lomé said, ‘Remembered your tribal customs – ha ha.’ Misses her children but turns to anecdotes, to other people, and so the city becomes a cushion, contacts that stand in for others, which in millennia will seem as real as the imagined ones. Where being freed comes like a blow, suspension in oneself. Waiting, in a strange country – though this one too is kitted out with jungles, slow rivers, jaguars on strings and bower birds, black people – everything that there can ever be, to accept, hate, work black magic on, all in one day or overwork the game, go into permanent tilt, TILT of hat over your face. Hatland, going inside.

Lomé annoys me, going away, being just unfindable. I however must – put these tapes together. See this spy about the list. Pay him with Fernando’s cash. Give money from the tapes to Lomé, take the tapes to other agents, pay more cash to get the cash to see God’s bunker down in Tennessee, grinding down by Greyhound, through the small towns needed to give perspective to success. Here, where the money is, to down there where God arms up his mercenaries, fits them with wings and long bright swords and sneakers with a little pouch for bucks. Soul-harpoons. Black books like killing-bottles.

It occurs to me what is Lomé’s problem: she is quite indifferent to me.

I ask, ‘Lomé, is all this, me included, real to you?’

‘No, Jay, why should it be?’

I tell her, ‘People are supposed to have relationships, or else they’re sick. Not close or distant, just acknowledgements of presence of the others.’

‘As you wish, Jay.’ Later, ‘If you get off on the formalities I mean, ha ha,’ and her eyes are back in Bahia, leaving behind a nice smile.

After all, the States is not an easy place to face out, and up to. However hard you study the rules, what is right and what is wrong seem very much the same. If you’re no one in particular, chance of falling foul and getting punished, down in that rough-faced room, the bulbs unscrewed, the smell of piss and lysol more or less oppressive – yes, the chances are, they are the same.

‘Africa is in this year,’ I say to Lomé.

‘But I’m not African,’ she says.

‘You’re close enough. Everything’s recycled, so shall you be       – if you put Tex-Mex in your Angola, serve real hot at fifteen cents a portion—’

‘Stereotypes again, Jay,’ she says.

‘It’s all stereotype. People here do ride in a hole in the ground, say “gotta hustle”, push you off the sidewalk if you look like you don’t have a gun. But your music – it’s affirmative, it’s cheap, it doesn’t ream your nose out: mud huts and piccaninnies, buckets of frozen gin brought out, with whole bananas stuffed with hash a-floating on the top. That’s how subversive is black music. Tourism – is no more threat than Dr Dubois’s Skin Lightener.’

She considers this. ‘You’re getting to be a try, Jay. Make your money from the modern world, retire to contemplate your knick-knacks or your 78s.’

 

 

* * *

 

 

My old comrades envy me, know all about the God people and advise, although they’re all stood down, at rest – the finger points to Congressman Hairlicker. Keeping dossiers, it seems, is his way of being psychopathic.

Before his office, a fine land-admiral, picked out in enamel and without a gun, searches my frame. For lunch he has eaten lizard in green sauce. He is wearing asbestos gloves.

The congressman comes from another earthling race, shipped in from some planet clone. What can his angle be? Satanism, perhaps, a gold card indulgence from the Pope to do the opposition down. Perhaps a One God faction-man, a Trotsky among saints. His hair is dark like German silver, his suit gunmetal and he wears a shagreen tie.

I think of my old comrades, pointing with trembling fingers, indictment of this Dean of Men among the fallen men, the fingers all burnt out, the long hours at the plectrum or the roach-clip. What can he say to us, we of another lost generation? Americans have never been explorers, just losers of generations.

‘Well, Jay’ – the voice that sells a thousand policies – ‘the brains behind this group – the “High on God on High”, Higod or Godhi crowd – belong to Jeanne Marie, a Cajun Queen. Bible studies down in Wichita, the first five volumes of a universal history, interrupted by a prostitution rap. Appeared on floats in Carolina then, it seems, another deep conversion down in Moscow, Tennessee.’

I interrupt, ‘They make bicycle seats down there.’

‘Right on, young man,’ the congressman rejoins. ‘Journeyed to find – and found, according to a manifesto – the living God, or fragment of a college dropout, Mexican in aspect, exempt from all social and fiscal dues, through being God having convinced a panel,’ he peers into his word-processor, ‘of college presidents, officers of the National Guard, clergymen or other licensed visionaries, a member of a society, duly recognised, of clairvoyants, mediums and conjurers, or failing these, an officer of the American Federation of Musicians local Local.’

The land-admiral, attracted by the rising voice, comes in, heaping the coals in the congressman’s fireplace – of course, the gloves – the fire roars, but nothing is consumed, how could it be, for smoke in Washington cannot be let loose. And everywhere but here it’s hot. The stones, the coals, glow right through like cardinal’s rubies, and squeak like marble rubbed together – remember that same sound, in Turkey, circle of dervishes in disguise, maybe a huddle of winners in a lottery – squeaking of polished marble in a cold, cold fire.

‘So, Mr Hairslicker, you mean there are fragments of the living God, like pieces of the True Cross, genuine shrouds, Constantine Concoctions, visions made to measure – tax exemptions that would tarnish Eldorado with envy ...’

‘Yes, young man. Bringing religion into disrepute, and the revenue – cloning the divine, fiddling of the genes that breaks state laws.’

The land-admiral takes off the gloves to get a better hold, the embers do not spark ...

‘Then what’s the aim in Bahia?’ I ask.

‘Money, sex and power, I fear,’ the congressman lets out a puff of fog. ‘Poor ignorant folk, ready to give up principles and spend a buck to make two more and hope for additional recommendation when it comes to judgement – I fear, a Latin trait.’

Afterwards, Lomé says, ‘That Hairsicker man – he’s a big man in Bahia. In places you and I would not be asked. Though I also hear that after he has talked big bucks, he comes on over to the other side, keen on certain flavours of ice cream, gelatinas – the jellybabies, even.’

Perhaps there’s more than just the oddness of wanting to be elected. Lomé says, ‘The sex angle explains a lot for years. Then it’s just money. And at the end, it’s sex again.’

Which makes me ask, ‘Lomé, when I can’t find you, where do you go?’

‘I go to see my mother, who’s as you know long dead. She’s at the film museum, was a slave in the ’50s, did all the epics, the first Brazilian TV playlets. Groping towards soft porn, but always saved by very Spanish heroes. She’s complete in the archive.’

‘Yes, film is a good proof of death. There you are on film and here – well, if you’re not here, you’re dead all right.’

‘Jay,’ she says, ‘I must warn you about Herr Sicker. He is a very odd person, who wins elections through television.’

‘They all do that here, Lomé.’

‘I mean he has the power, even, they say, a sexual trickery that makes him irresistible, though not close to.’

I ask her, ‘Why do you think I might have trusted him?’

‘He wears suits like Uncle Fernando.’

I say, ‘But the tie is different.’

‘You understand quite well. He is on your side against the Higod crowd, and he is on Fernando’s side, if he has one: both sides, if he has two. But which side is Fernando on – and so, what side is Highsicker on?’

‘Between me and the congressman there’s nothing, and with Fernando nothing but money and friendship so – nothing to worry about. Straight diplomacy, nothing complex.’

 

 

* * *

 

 

Drawn here by the Cajun Queen, more than by Lopez, the living god – he is impressed by me, and I by Jeanne Marie, life’s athlete, face of frozen and unsalted butter, newly aborted virgin. Lopez is humble, Jeanne Marie a jealous and angry fragment – but she’s alive, and Lopez is, well, asleep. She tells me their community fronts another – theirs is equipped with station wagons running from the supermarket piled with loot. The other, just sprawls, people whose roads run out – just there. I know where I belong, and Lopez seems to think so too: next door.

I say to Lopez, ‘As a god of few words, you don’t seem to fit the evangelicals. They have the word, enough of it, and it’s written down, clear as a thousand suns.’

‘It’s true,’ he says, ‘I may seem an anomaly. But Jeanne Marie sees me as continuity, at least with her other ventures – we have been together since Wichita.’

Nothing came into my head. God must have been too in Wichita, in campers and motels with Jeanne Marie. I wondered if she played Cajun fiddle – sometimes in bars in Michigan someone would whip one out and have a saw in the afternoons, and have a fight. The oily swamps of la Loosiane.

People with imagination think they see God, and people without imagination think they are God. And Jeanne Marie fits with the sects, not evangelicals.

I am sorry for God, so sorry I start calling him Lopez again. Lopez tells me nothing, he is useless, there to be adored or not – he’s quite indifferent. But Jeanne Marie tells me they use music to praise God, and mine was sinful – and I laugh, thinking of my Creaking Foot Blues. ‘I haven’t thought of sin as much as you,’ I say. ‘I thought my trouble was not being commercial enough.’

But she wants power, and not the fancy kind, and Lopez is potentially the biggest kind there is. Yet she is fascinated by my reminiscences, of old pros blown out like clay flutes – showbiz has this stickiness for anyone near – the strippers, preachers, animal tamers – all go ape for details of the tricks on-stage.

I say, ‘I’m a prophet on the rock, I’ve forgotten my prophecy,’ but she doesn’t throw me out. Her face is pale, it is a green, a green so pale it had never brushed fingers with nature, a green so insipid it had read of suns only in books.

Holding my hand, talking of her mission, rescuing people, and yet inviting them – down the marzipan green of her eyes, drawing them back like arrows in the bone-green wishbone of those legs – legs that had launched a thousand football games.

Perhaps, when you had surrendered to Jeanne Marie, had your few minutes of reward and torment, then your eyes go lizard-brown, the scales grow through your throat, make your mouth gape wide, in wonder at your giving over, giving in to sex and power. It reminds me of the Bahian saying, ‘Choose a god smaller and more ductile than yourself’, and there’s another one that says ‘God must be good, but yields his place to one who is as good as he, and need not be.’ Neither seemed apt for Jeanne Marie.

After that infinite interlude with Jeanne Marie (‘up for a visit seeing congressmen’), I look again for Lomé. She was gone. Have I too lost my power, and even my divinity, to Jeanne Marie? I think, ‘I have nothing, but I have lost nothing, so I must have resisted well.’

Only after falling into dream-time, trance-man, do I realise I have nowhere I can look. Abducted, bored, or just fed up, feeling me in Jeanne Marie’s field of force, Lomé’s gone home, or not. I even try to find a private cop, but they just laugh. ‘So what, your bird has flown. Now what, so what?’

Must avoid paranoia, for, after all, being persecuted in the desert happens indiscriminately to anyone who ventures there. It is dismissed by common sense at once, this indiscriminateness: when vultures pick our liver, it is not a random discomfort.

I call my friend Windisch. He had been our leader, but he’d gone into communications, deejay here, a talk show there. Flapping off his chrisms, babbling them out along the wires. becoming a person­ality, not a person. But with an angle.

He says, ‘That Lomé – sounds a home bird, back off to the nest. Or a thousand other things – you know how we are. Take a motel room, hire a car, saddle a greyhound – blast off. New life. Resurr­ection. Carry someone’s burden a hundred yards, drop it, pick up another. Star-trekking through the desert. As for the plots – surely you know our politics is crazy? The senators wear silver shoes made from the bullets used against them. Money, sex, power, race, God, drugs – you know what makes them go. Dreams of screwing film stars, killing hoods, tormenting revolutionaries, fighting unknown wars – spooning the Saharan sand into the starving. Burning a hut down, tipping over a boat – Jay, you understand the criminal mind, and all its complicities. After all you’ve seen, you and your concealed weapons – you can put together what you know and what you see. They burn cold, Jay, they burn cold. And they will burn, for all they have six Virgin Marys on the staff, each, and some popes. But when they burn in hell, Jay, they won’t be like you and me – no, for them it’s frostbite. Blunting the devils’ pitchforks. Cold fire, cold fire, Jay, that squeaks like polystyrene balls. I know them, Jay, I know them.’

And he does.

He goes on, ‘Jeanne Marie, now, she seems a real cool girl, acting it all out on a bigger stage, none of this monkish nonsense, shut in little caves all night, scratching at the itch of mysticism. No – out on the strip, a face-to-facer, Jay. Today, it’s liquor, screwing wholesale – next day, when you or I might think a bit – go out. Hit those bars and whorehouses from the other side. Get the sinners. Ours is not the normal response, Jay.’

It’s true, that in New York we’re not like that.

‘Windisch,’ I say, ‘Fernando and Lomé are, in their different ways, guardians of the fire, archangels.’

‘Jay,’ he says, ‘archangels guard by killing. Maybe Lomé wouldn’t kill – but Fernando ... And Philomel was ruined, but killed and served up Tercus’s son to him. To mythology, almost an innocent, but in real life – a tough cookie.’

I tell him, ‘I don’t think Lomé has disappeared for reasons of ruination.’

‘But, Jay, do you know? Do you really know these people? Everything suggests to me you don’t, you take them as they want you to, or just as you want.’

It’s true. It is a desert. I should be happier on my own, all judgements made. There is nothing, nothing but skeins of blue people, caravans of blue stitching, joining massive sheets of beige of brown of red. Blue people, like shades, blue dots that make up a tattoo, a rune on someone’s chin.

I think of Windisch hunching at his phone, Windisch who single-handedly declared war on the National Guard, throwing us all, his new recruits, unarmed into the breach against them. A great, great man, a natural leader, capable of mobilising, starting the motor of history.

‘How’s the mouth business?’ I ask.

‘Not bad. I have a lot of preachers, is the worst.’

So, his helmet now a bonnet for bees. But a great man.

‘What you do, Jay,’ he says, ‘is fit them all together. No angle left to turn unobserved. Find your Uncle Fernando, you’ll find Lomé. Find Jeanne Marie, and you’ll find God.’ He chuckles.

I go to see the man who has the lists. Behind a tall link fence, corrals of wolves, and what may be dwarf moose. And on the other side, trees, the country, grass. Old auto frames. My contact is small, precise, an atom-spy. ‘Whose are the wolves?’ I ask.

‘My wife’s brother’s. But she’s dead. He’s a trucker, rides with a tough crowd.’ He sniffs. Do I believe him?

After much exchange of shabby credentials, I ask, ‘Those lists – they’re quite important?’

He says, ‘Freedom of information. Anyone can have them.’

‘Then I’m not interested – I want secrets, not truth that’s five years old.’

He says, ‘A message is always a pattern. That is its truth as well. But that’s what costs.’

Can’t make out what he has for sale: all lists are out-of-date. You need to know today what’s happening. Is he keyed in to some computer, red-hot names? But then, they change the system ...

‘What’s the price for a name today?’ I ask.

‘I only deal with specific names and treatments. And I can’t tell you what will happen – only if you’re on a stop.’

‘And if I am?’

He says, ‘Then I suggest you just lie low.’

I argue, ‘It doesn’t seem much. You take the chance – or not. For all I know, you put names on yourself. And you take no risk at all – if one is caught, you walk away ...’

Was Fernando serious – no guarantee, no benefit?

He says, ‘There’s more,’ and stops.

He must have codes, the codes that access different lists, and when they change. I say, ‘Suppose, my friend, I’m on one list?’

‘Then I can tell you. More costs more.’

I say, ‘Suppose you find a name and tell the cops?’

He laughs, ‘Where did you get my name? That is your proof. You trust your friend – I hope: so you trust me. And I trust you, though not so much.’

‘I seek a sign,’ I say.

Through his smokescreen comes a blue head, talking. It is Windisch, on TV. The spy looks, then turns back to me: ‘Your friend’s beset with preachers,’ he says, and indeed, here’s one, a big one, fresh and raw, with lots to say. And Windisch lets him say it, just a little push – the rock sets off, jumps down the mountain, growing, swelling as he goes, down, down to the bottom, bottom line, end of the program. Windisch looking pleased. Next.

‘Let’s just experiment,’ I say.

‘Trust me’ says the spy, and grins. A pack howl swells outside.

I give him Lomé’s name.

 

 

three

 

 

Next day, Stepan calls – ‘Who?’ ‘Stepan of yesterday, the wolf man.’ I had not given him my number. Only Lomé knows it.

He says Lomé is freshly on a list, and gives her passport number as a proof. Only I had that – unless Fernando knew, made sure I made my contact, and was no ambassador, but just a loyal messenger.

Stepan says, ‘More costs more,’ but I’ve paid nothing.

‘My brother’s driving up to see you soon,’ he chuckles and before he rings off, I ask, ‘What kind of truck does he drive?’ But it was his wife’s brother. And she’s dead.

I could just walk away. Just with Lomé’s tape, obsessions with Brazil. Or I could get roots, and rent a cat, even a slave or two, to keep me company, and do the work that I don’t fancy.

I go to the film museum, to see Lomé’s mother. Films of old gelatine, like the early chromes of 1950s, blue and orange like a poisonous fish. People have deepened, or faded, to a terracotta, the mouths inside are white, the teeth invisible, a tiny row of fillings in a void. Slabs of Bahia in the background – French Revolution occurs with De Sotos parked by the harbour. Must be set in Haiti – here’s a tanned Louis, and Marie Antoinette is black. Robespierre, an elegant mulatto wearing in every scene his sky-blue coat – the film degenerates it towards pink – has just come back from surfing. The palace ball jives like a carnival, soundtrack of waves breaking in a porcelain museum.

Everyone has their kitsch, Americans lay down their gas stations and cedar lounges as though Indians had never grown beans or throttled turkeys there. So, in Bahia, Lomé’s mother prepared her family for the guillotine in front of slave sheds and a pile of carobs. The glory of the world, how soon it passes, its drummings and refrains, like gophers trapped behind the walls.

Lomé in a tank for aliens. Lomé in the East River with her feet in a cement block, movie queen shimmying in the yellow water. From the hotel window I can see a kind of factory. Vietnamese with red teeth, they go in quiet and come out happy. It’s a factory for making laughter. There are dozens of them. Sewing machines, double-banked that I can’t see, sorting sequins, making the parts for crying dolls, coiling eels in cans, copying fortunes for fortune cookies, typing them on huge sheets, cutting them up.

Or – this is not the factory, it’s the dormitory, where they come at ten and sleep till four. They’re silent when they come because they’ve come off shift. It’s sleep, not work, makes laughter. Other shifts must come when I’m away and going to bars so far uptown I come back with icicles in my beard a metre long.

And here they come again – the cops. Again, the childish fear, and ingenuousness. Eternal innocent, when every hood without an alibi was a musician too. Condemned for carrying concealed innocence.

Beside the hotel-factory, a studio for avant-garde. Guys that I should have been come waltzing in with cases full of gear, electronic tutti-frutti. Standing in the doorway, talking to the Vietnamese. War is over, even for me. All on the up and up, hit and miss of striving. Lomé brought low by ambitions – nurtured and betrayed by strangers. Yes, I am a stranger, ambition to become a super-stranger. Olé, I am a bandit.

‘Congressman Huhnsecker,’ says the phone. Another intelligence making realism possible.

Leading his band of feisty fundraisers from hell to high water.

‘Hello, Jay, Jay, hello’ – a voice that drains the current from the bulb, erases tape and slides the needle from the groove.

The Vietnamese are playing bones with the avant-garde. Someone is trying to steal a Pontiac. And all the towers of Babylon spark with light and heat, a million secretaries cross their thighs like monster frog princesses, ready for the gourmet hamper and the dinner on the grass.

‘Jay, I think you’re on to something big. The biggest? Well, I’m not so sure, that sure, but – yes, biggish to very big.’

The Pontiac’s hood, reared open like a hippo’s mouth, clanks shut, and four small thieves push the auto down the block.

‘But, congressman,’ I say, ‘I only asked you, you told me. There can be nothing more.’

‘Made a few calls, tied a few ends. Guy here, guy there,’ he says. A biker’s biking down the street. Over-powered, he drops a charge of firecrackers, then wafts on in silence. Chinese warlord on the stage, an insult and he’s done fifteen backflips, not a touch to sullen earth. His armour’s dented, casque as thin as lace. ‘Spraahhht’ goes his bike. He’s found me. Leathered up like a walrus looking for me.

‘Jay, it all ties in’ – the phone – ‘the Brazilians there, and our Brazilians here, religious business and the codes. Yes, yes. But what I didn’t see, you cunning one, was where you fitted in. Using Lomé to hook me – ha ha.’

‘You’re beating me,’ I say.

‘Found out who you are, Jay. Listed as a hitman. Surprised you introduced yourself, but still – man and his mistress, presid­ents have swung for less, I ought to know.’

Stepan’s wolfman’s at the door, the congressman talks on – ‘might help you, depending on how far you’d go, to get your Lomé back. For coming right on over, we could even – but then for something else, we too could manage something else. I’ll let you balance out your options ...’ The phone fizzles into silence, there is no tone, made breathless by a field of force.

Nonetheless, I say down it, perhaps for luck. ‘It’s absurd, I’m a musician, not a hitman.’

Stepan’s brother is at the door like a pack of bad dreams. He is trying hard to intimidate me. When we have both calmed down I ask him what he does, big boy on his own.

‘I don’t ride no more, along the clan.’ He is called Madox, and not Mad nor Ox. I ask, ‘Why does Stepan want to frighten me?’

‘I guess he wanted to be sure you frightened.’

Annoyed, I tell him, ‘I have company coming – better that you leave.’

He is immense. Looks out, ‘Kinda lonely out there – you got gorillas coming in a cab, or maybe jogging over?’ He smells of Canada, of pickled eggs and beer farts.

I say, ‘Who gave you this hitman line about me? Stepan?’

He is not hooked: ‘Stepan’s a creep, a creep from Creepsville.’

Reluctant to leave, he is an information-picker, streets full of them at dusk, coming with basketsful from the cliff-edge where the seagulls bring it in.

I say, ‘Look, Madox, in general I want information, not action. Just want to trace one individual – myself – for sentimental reasons and perhaps the trimmings too.’

‘lf she can call you, then she will. If not – there’s nothing you can do.’

He glides off on his silent bike, figure enforcing order in the street, uniform and agency we all take seriously.

No way out in this city of blocks and intersections. Bahia is all squares, all consecrated, all open secrets. Here, only music is a refuge. You can get inside it, even club, chamber music, and it’s a stage place, a no place. Outside no taxis, no lost dogs. But also – no sun, no black and red bees at the marguerites, no scent of wind from softer places. Urban music boxed up here, all this jazz, this club jazz that I played. All inside, and no outside. All it’s about is clubs and playing, being a pro and playing clubs and living the hours and being fired. And then back to ourselves, unemployed court trumpeters. And here, the space they had in Bahia is slide-ruled out, space that had been space and refuge both, a busy time of hanging on, enchanting, keeping the dark things out. Hoping our memories and our technique could keep them all at bay: no words, no texture, no outside: just a design.

Phone. The operator says ‘It’s your Uncle from Brazil, or maybe it’s your auntie with a low voice. Funny things I hear from Brazil.’

‘Jay,’ he says. ‘News of Lomé?’

‘None. Why do you ask?’

‘She says she hasn’t seen you. And talks about a house in the park.’

‘Then where is she? Did the park have wolves and dwarf moose?’ I hear sniggering on the line, Fernando or the operator, then nothing. A call to check up, to make sure, even, obscurely, reassuring.

A long dream, a sleep of respite from Madox. Long trek through gashed sidewalks falling into clay, and through the clay to seas. And on the seas, like bundles of narcissus, the candle-soul of Bahia. Souls forever from the sea, never returning home, and never liberated. Flickering with a smell of fat and spice. Payo instructing the parakeet with things he didn’t dare to say himself, or was too proud. Payo’s black soul, his own narcissus, his master’s voice. Payo separated from his soul which flies, and settles in a bird uncaged, but one leg tied.

Awakening to darkness, I hear Saigon and sirens.

 

 

* * *

 

 

A lady cop is at the door: ‘… a report of someone missing.’

‘No one missing here,’ I say. ‘Who tipped you off?’

‘Well, it’s my case,’ she puts it all backwards.

‘I have a friend who’s having trouble contacting me – but I can’t say she’s lost, since I don’t know where she is.’

‘Well,’ says the cop, ‘the problem is, we’ve lost her too.’ She goes on, ‘We haven’t ever seen her, but she is in the public domain, and a friend of yours’ – the congressman – ‘mentioned your anxiety.’

‘And so you put her on your list?’ I ask.

‘Well, no. I think she was already there. You see, her presence and her absence are suspicious. And now I’ve got it as my case.’

She comes in. ‘Perhaps I’ll sit myself down.’ She takes off her leather belts, and I say, ‘Like that you look more civilianised.’ Like this you become part of the neighbourhood, humanise the others, the cops, the Vietnamese, the kosher butcher, used furniture mart.

‘Officer Falcucci, what’s behind this case?’

‘I’m afraid I’ve no idea,’ she says, and giggles. ‘And you a musician too! I don’t see all your stuff.’ She points the room, a disappointed dog.

‘I can’t bear to hear the records,’ I confess. ‘The guys sound so lonely, still sitting there from twenty years ago, trying to establish some rapport, of who knows what, a story, some meaning, values, simulacrum of humanity. It sounds banal. You can’t kill someone with a clarinet.’

She says, ‘You might if you stuck it down someone’s throat.’

What would she make of Lopez, or Fernando with his coypu in the sack, or Jeanne Marie – rituals she thinks of or just whispers with that sharp tongue, bright eyes, bright as a parakeet’s?

I tell the cop, ‘You look kinda lumpy in that outfit.’

She considers it, ‘Well, it’s all this junk we get to carry around.’ Cops are good to go around with, community-wise, thank you officer, for saving or arresting me, holding my head while I vomited or had my throat cut.

‘Well,’ she says, ‘I guess you’re all under control.’

‘I’m arctic,’ I tell her.

I look down for her partner, a hulk is jiggling the cruiser, testing the springs. ‘Your buddy rides no more, I see.’

‘No,’ she says, ‘he got too heavy. Couldn’t keep up.’

It’s Madox – sees me watching, gives me a Roman salute.

As she leaves, Falcucci says, ‘Try to act like an innocent person.’

A wise remark.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

People trying to avoid the weight of this city – this season it’s parties. They totter along in their clown suits, some expensively trapped out like horses, with sequins, bits of mirror. Others are daubed up as junkfood – daubed as fake wieners, made up as food, made up with food. Sex ’n’ grease. And see them rumbling home, cauliflowers on split stalks. Fear of being mugged, humiliated in daylight. Zombies at dawn, their greasy holes filled up while they’re away prowling.

Getting cold here, must move on. But I can’t pay the bill. Try the tricks – useless, city of wise guys, wiser checkout clerks.

The world is cooling off up here, but in the street it’s hotting up, the Vietnamese are steaming ahead, the bucks are coming in. Music can ease it down, a snatch of entropy. With little songs – a blues, all human life is there, revolution in samba-time, a change of key and it’s all heartbreak and tristezz’. World goes by in jazztime like a film skidding off its cogs. Life is rendered down to gigs, showbiz stands in for every kind of biz.

I find a note that Lomé didn’t send back to the kids: trouper’s lament.

 

Here it is so black and white – but then the shadows in the streets are midnight blue all day, the steam comes up from ducts below, the sky is blue or grey like squared-off paper cuts. And Mr James is very kind but very sad. He doesn’t play or sing, my voice is closing like a frog with being here, and soon I shall come home. And you tell Fernando that him too I have not forgotten, and will go down again to Tennessee, down to the drowsy god, ha ha, and give them all the slip and then come back and give you all the news. But if you read this, you know all, so perhaps, ha ha, I’ll just go ...

 

The waves start up, the lights begin to flash, and I seek out my crime again. The others looking for their truths, instead. Work keeps them straight. Looking for work will keep them straighter. Music is a string of tricks, like strings of flags the wizard pulls out of his nose. And when you stop, it seems, there’s nothing left but to transgress – Salieri who cuts up Mozart, Schumann strangling his Clara, Mahler dead with Alma at Mayerling, Bird and his hecatomb,Leadbelly – we are all, almost all, professional killers, or their victims, anything to break this terrible jingle-jangling. Words are big, and everyone makes much of words. No one romanticises a note – and yet they’re more expressive, and by far, than words. Each note a dime at least, and some a quarter, the parakeet its throat full of silver bits, and here and there a golden sequin, a florin made of platinum, like the Russian countesses have.

I pay the bill and take the tapes: I have my bus fare left.

Music gives you culture, one that doesn’t fit: gives me, a greyskin, a black culture and black pain. Even gives white copies of that pain, the negative. And on that pain there comes as well: pain that isn’t culture, but poverty pain, guilt and frustration pain. Jazz, that for some was compensation, doesn’t compensate me for anything at all. Any guy puts me down, I don’t take up my horn and wail. No: ‘first I bust your nose, and then I bust your ass.’

But that is quite the wrong response, is not at all courageous, rising above, turning of hurt to beauty, bring together poor blacks, poor whites, rich cats in clubs, bands pounding it all out. No, fisticuffs is quite the wrong response, quite out of sight and off the spectrum, to extremes. Express yourself with dance-hall tunes. Or something more direct – a good lyric, the universal – squawk!

Something pushed me too far over, little disintegrated logics, before the moment – ‘is this my solo, was it?’ – over so soon.

And where did Lomé go? Perhaps she left a candle, one for her mother, even another one for me. Here comes a candle to chop off your head. Because, if she felt in danger – leaving like that put me in it, yes, up to congressmen and Madox and Falcucci, as the tiny tips of volcanoes getting ready.

As I get on the Greyhound, I think, ‘I have history,’ and, as I settle down to watch the motel strips dwindle into primal scrub then swell to more motel strips, ‘But it’s not worth much.’

‘Hey, young feller, you look melancholy.’ It’s another Greyhound philosopher. We sit two by two, a symposium with moving scenery.

He’s a scrawny person, fifties – reformed drunk or busted preacher I should say. Not going up nor going down, just floating; a family, but far away, a last resort.

‘Melancholy,’ he strikes up, ‘implies superiority to your fellow man. Mankind is like the sea – there’s a profusion there of every kind. Your fellow man, good sir, is very various.’

I say, ‘I make distinctions between dislike of groups and of individuals, try to dislike the most what I know best.’

He wags his finger like a bush doctor. ‘No, no, self-hatred is no substitute for real humility,’ he says.

I tell him, that’s a final thing to say, but he won’t yield.

‘Americans – are home here, here on this bus. The city is to be avoided, or else closed up and gridded down. Travelling and fitness – that’s where we come in. Motels, gas stations – we’re in our element, or there’ – he points to a pentecostal cathedral shaped like a half-buried plane-wing – ‘just crashed down or taking off.’

A pause, then, ‘It’s easy to become involved in life. Save for the few, who must make an incredible effort to avoid it. It’s nearly inevitable. All our problems start from that – involvement, don’t you see, exposes us to evil. To the great battle.’ He ponders this for miles. We have continental space before us. No Barbarella is in sight. He looks at me sharply, a little mad.

‘But then,’ I say, ‘the battle’s something else, it’s neither good nor evil, but a game, a test, a rendering and confusion of the sides.’

He looks uneasy. ‘But we know which side is which, and which should win.’

I say, ‘Survival is important too, and loyalty.’

He looks at me closely, ‘I shouldn’t like to think you’re trivialising things, my friend. The law, the right, is what it is. When you have puzzled it out, to that alone you owe your loyalty and maybe, survival.’

‘Yes, that’s the trick that’s often done,’ I say. ‘I’m more a sceptic, more contextual.’

A headshake. ‘You err, if I may say. I know this relativity is popular, but I believe we have a compass, conscience that can guide. It is starting to snow, but the flakes are repelled by the hotwax auto parlours and the body shops: they must be red hot.’

I reply, ‘That is certainly a convenient idea.’

Father Christmases are starting to appear, walloping their uniforms with their arms to start the circulation. It is shortly to be Baltimore, ‘home of the Orioles’. He squints at my ticket, says, ‘I’m going to Knoxville too.’ Coincidence. He has not asked me to pray with him, so he must be tailing me.

He stares at me, eyes popping, tongue a carbuncle in his cheek, like a Santa in a candy ad. We are a million miles from Vietnamese and the artistic laser. He says, ‘You strike me as a Tory, if I may say.’ I lose him in Baltimore, but he awaits me reproachfully in Tennessee. He manages to slip me a last slice of his story. ‘My name’s Kidd,’ he says, as if to say goodbye. Captain Kidd the kidder.

 

 

 

 

four

 

 

The communities, the reservations, of the Indians and the evangelicals stand side by side, or back to back: both handy stockades. Both with merry sounds outpouring, one, hymns on tape, the other, wavering Indians. singing ‘the Bronx is up and the Battery’s down.’

I wonder, ‘Why is Kidd following me, and disappears when I want him to? A lesson to ponder there – do I also want him to follow me? I am the traveller who on a winter’s night fills his case with rye and bourbon, since that is currency down here, and comes knock knocking at the ramparts.’

The peace of Indian villages, the bands live as if this were the waterless uptilted bed of Amazons. Language is vast, no one to talk it to.

As well as Indians here, there are Mexicans, people who have lost, or sold, their tongues, skins like coppers in a charity box. Here there is no hope – why should there be?

Here, I can stay. My birth-fairies give you this guarantee, below a certain point you just can’t fall, some trick of face that stops us going down the gutter, down the sewers, what lies beneath the sewers, and below that, the rivers and the ice-caves, caves of fire, the doorless sulphur cells ... Walter interrupts, but he is really Water, somewhere far back our common ancestors slit each other’s throats, but mercy lets us both ignore – and Water offers sanctuary and says, ‘You want, you can flop out here. You don’t drink, but pay in drink.’ Voice of simple regimes everywhere, a link there seems that ties us to Bahia. I pay him with a pint of rye.

I am living cheap, I am living close to the community of the godly. We are living well. Water has a plan to steal, liberate and ransom Lopez. He says he is sorry for the poor kid, Lopez, and, at other times, that he envies him his easy life of enslavement to Jeanne Marie. At times he’d like to take over the whole God business – ‘we need it more’n they’ – and thinks of ways of putting Lopez to work, to prayer, or just on show.

I see Kidd hanging round our reservation and the little puritan encampment. I warn Water against him, but he prefers not to listen. Water’s friend, Cloud, is much brighter. He too wants to get money out of Jeanne Marie, but directly – by a loan, or threatening her.

The schemes amuse us. A lot of drinking has gone on, is going on. The Indians drink, and the younger braves are paralytic by nightfall. There are frequent fires, that become the centre of new parties. Quite late, the war-dances, everyone looped or crazy, lurching round and through the flames. Sometimes we go in the morning and gather berries, sit by the road, try to sell them, then we eat them.

The Mexicans don’t seem to drink at all, just whisper and look anxious. There are a few like me, we don’t want to hear each other’ stories, of flight or sliding down.

Water’s genius lay in pitching camp beside the richer Godspeople who take all the heat off us. Sometimes the cops check we’re keeping to the usual rhythms, but they are indifferent.

I see Cloud, Water and Kidd, all in long gabardines, all eaten away, but Cloud with a swollen gut. Water has his shoulders left, then dwindles – and Kidd has no belly, ready for embalming. They clack and rustle like three dried bean pods, break away to cackle, twirling in different twists as if part of a witches’ dance. I hear Kidd say, ‘You must ask them for help, then overwhelm them with numbers and pity for you,’ and Water says, ‘To me, it’s indifferent, but if a god he is, then he can’t object. He never comes over our side anyway’, and Cloud hunches up, hides his gut and says, ‘My people grew out of all that business long ago,’ and Water says, ‘Your folks went bust in business, or else they wouldn’t’ve left Memphis.’

Kidd has ingratiated himself with both populations, skittering back and forth like a super-missionary. I think of my Brazil, heart of darkness, Fernando dreaming of burning the rain forests, the missionaries saving the Indios by polluting their minds – and Kidd tirelessly mediating between these extremes. Water and Cloud, separate and disenchanted, watching his tricks – each popping beer cans, snapping of the pulls like the nose-rings of grenades.

Lopez is sitting outside the mission. He looks stunned, but greets me with a sweet smile. His mouth is studded with gold, he looks like an icon. It’s incongruous seeing even a minor deity doing nothing. ‘I’m killing time,’ he says. ‘Jeanne Marie went to get new batteries for the station-wagons.’

I ask him, ‘What about the rain-forests?’

He laughs, ‘Your friends are dancing about, trying to make it rain – but only snow comes down.’ He is amused: ‘It snows: It snows!’

‘Why don’t you go into town?’ I ask.

He looks disturbed: ‘There’s a lot of feeling against me. My time’s not come. It’s all written down in the diary.’

Message kept simple, theology later. Lopez looks friendless, confides, ‘If you really want to show you have faith in me, you could do me a favour in town.’

‘Sure,’ I say. ‘You want the racing paper?’

‘No,’ he says with patient simplicity. ‘Baseball.’

‘Absolutely,’ I say. ‘Give me a couple of bucks.’ He is reluctant to get the money. Jeanne Marie keeps him short. She sweeps towards us, and he presses the bills on me, giving the gesture the expanse of benediction. Jeanne Marie looks sharply at us but can’t remonstrate.

‘What you doing here,’ she asks me, ‘You bought bad weather too.’ It’s a joke, but accusing.

‘I wondered if you’d seen my friends?’ I mean Lomé.

‘Friends you may have, my friend, but all I know we seen a lot of odd guys who know you.’ And Kidd slithers over to us, absorbing our homely apostolic atmosphere as if it was snake oil.

‘Ah, here we all are, then,’ he says, acting away like a hickory splinter off a cigar-store Pickwick.

Jeanne Marie has told me she ‘attracts doctors’ – ‘medical ones, philosophical ones, and guys who’ve run big shows, circuses and space shots, that sort of thing’, and doesn’t want ‘those religious freaks and bible hounds. Just people starting living together, who want to listen to Lopez.’

I asked, ‘Why don’t you recruit directly where you go – plenty of graduates in Brazil?’ – and she said, ‘It’s the technical side we want to take, that and the enthusiasm. We want guys who’ve burned their boats here, but understand efficiency. That’s something you never forget.’

Kidd is fascinated by her, but he’s not the doctor type. Not being deferred to attracts him even more; he knows all about religion, country, western, Manhattan style, and he stares at Jeanne Marie as though she is a butterfly in a skirt. He says, ‘A remarkable woman, remarkable. Such grace – ah, to see her on the stage, those legs – sharp and precise as a pair of compasses.’

Lopez looks unhappy, but Jeanne Marie is enjoying the show as principal and audience. It occurs to me I have no lists, and no way of stopping the Godspeople going to Brazil, or not going, and doing whatever they want. Jeanne Marie is wearing a kind of circus-rider’s costume under her coat, and this must be why she wears a skirt in this cold – to cover another, shorter skirt beneath. ‘You been giving a show, Jeanne Marie?’ I ask.

Kidd’s eyes pop, and she makes some comment about tryouts at Radio City. But it seems mine is the right approach. She has stage makeup left round her hairline.

Cloud and Water, seeing the two worlds mixing and conversing, come on over: ‘Great show, Jeanne Marie,’ says Water, winking. Cloud just winks, then turns and winks again, to no one and to everyone.

Water starts pleading to run the mission as holiday cottages. ‘When you go, and praisegod sooner rather than later, Jeanne Marie.’

No one speaks to Lopez, Kidd looks at him as if he’s a mad horse, invisibly tethered.

‘You clowns couldn’t run an ark and the water was coming in your bellybuttons,’ says Jeanne Marie decisively. She doesn’t know what to have Lopez say – the ace of trumps who only takes one trick.

‘And then you’ll have your animals to leave,’ Water persists, but Cloud intervenes. ‘No – no more dawgs, of dawgs we has us a sufficiency. We are replete.’ It’s true: there are scores of dogs around, not knowing what to do. The police have them as their target to tax or catch, and that is why the Indians keep them hanging round, like thin flies.

I ask Jeanne Marie, ‘What show?’

‘Some guy. Didn’t want to talk about the word, the mission, anything. Just about wooden arms,’ she adds.

Water starts off a long story about wooden legs, but I asks, ‘Did he have red hair and pointy ears?’

‘Yeah,’ she says, ‘another friend of yours, one Windisch, I believe.’

The woods are obvious, but the arms make different sense. A triangular trade, in tropical wood, and people, arms copied, developed in Brazil – who knows what else: money, or drugs, or Coca Cola formulas, and cancer cures. Even the jellybabies fit in somewhere – and Fernando, hoping to mobilise armies of flickering souls, to save his two per cent. But two per cent of everything is enough for anyone.

I go to town to get the drowsy god his baseball magazine. I also need to find Windisch. He lends me money easily, gladly, to buy my bottles of rent.

‘Amazing girl,’ he says, ‘a genuine Cajun Queen. A trouper through and through. She’s quite amazing – and, their plans! The wood and arms – that’s all something else! Who knows if they have schemes, or just will set up local deals, alliances? Religion will take care of any scruples, anything that you and I might worry over. No trouble keeping out of jail – those outfits are quite self-policing, self-contained.’ He is as full of information as a magic lamp. He says,

‘Quite incredible, the act those two put on. Here, it’s all the word, enthusiasm, the old puritan itch. You read the blueprint, spy on your neighbour, simple-minded and scientific. If the science part won’t work, then it’s back to bibletown and shepherds: everything ­you can’t get from science comes through the mail, stamped with a cross for authenticity. Technique and faith, double guaranteed. But that is all for here. But when they’re there, it’s something else. There, it’s a double act, Lopez and she – Lopez is an Indian god, and she’s his Other, his bride, his partner, all the way. The bible here becomes the message of what occurs there. It’s Babylon before the tower: fertility, and no stuff about the elect, and church on Sunday, after.’

I say, ‘I’m disappointed. It’s just one more religious scam. Down there, the gods are thousands – one more won’t make any stir. I thought – something more secular, less sex.’

Windisch laughs, ‘You and no one else, old sport. Don’t you see, the US sends down something new: not the old crew, virginity and worm tablets – but something superspecial: a hi-tech sex act.’

I’m not convinced. ‘Brazil’s just not like that. If it works it’s because everything works up to a point and in a fashion. There is nothing new. Just the old things running down. Living off compound interest.’

‘Then why is Kidd here, number one federal spook of new religious kinks, not just imperial measures, but global, planetary ones,’ says Windisch.

‘That old husk!’ I ask. ‘He rides shotgun on the Greyhounds.’

‘Not what I hear, you old Judas,’ says Windisch, greedily licking the crumbs off his story. ‘I’ll be in touch, but as they say, be very very careful.’

I say, ‘I only wanted some remarkable tapes,’ and Windisch too winks, to the city and the world, and is gone.

In town, it is not hard to find Lomé. There are two bars with entertainment: one features a Salome, and Lomé as herself is a set in the talent afternoon at the other one.

She says, ‘I thought if you wanted to find me you’d come here – to the end of the world.’ On- and off-duty cops watch her show. She asks, ‘Did you sell the tapes?’

‘Of course not. They’re for promoting, not selling. And everyone has followed us down here. The end of the world is like the sea, always begun again.’ But the bar is – barland, where no passport is required or recognised.

She sings, and what is left of Africa is pressed down by cities of ashes, a dump of sadness. Yuppies of Africa, drinking their cuba libres in the airport lounge, watching the planes depart. Sings, and what is left of Brazil is blocked off by classical orders. Lomé is too big a presence, or too big a voice. Her backing has a working day to go before it can pack up. I see Water and Cloud at the door, just looking round. They have the sagging look of people expecting to be thrown out.

Lomé rejoins me, forgetting her mild treachery, leaving me in the cold up North. I say, ‘If Jeanne Marie and Lopez make the world start off again – coupling of Lopez as the passive man-god and she as the Cajun Queen – then all the souls that Uncle Fernando cherishes will disappear. They’ll all be cancelled out – a second Babel, second confusion of tongues and separation of the peoples – all this will come. The past, and with it Bahia, the place in which the dead and all the slaves, of present and of past, start to emerge – all this will cease to be. It will be another curse – like the choice of Bethlehem.’

‘Yes,’ says Lomé. ‘It’s a terrible thing that they have planned. Fernando was right to be so scared.’

To me it’s clear, Fernando bets both sides, above all against himself – but Lomé takes it open-eyed, about the souls, the starting over, cancelling. Whatever Fernando takes seriously, he’s serious to a fault. And we are here: Water and Cloud passed by, then there is Kidd, the congressman, all in a race for something big and leaky coming down, as if there were a balloon of blue and orange silk just cooling off and drifting lower. What do we do? Catch it? Cut it into squares?

Lomé says, ‘Jay, you’ll have to stop them.’

I think – they’ll cancel everything – not just the city and its souls, but all our loyalties and principles. Everything will start again, amnesiac – new instincts and new powers, no Africa but new lost continents, a whole prehistory to be invented.

As I feel the nonsense so I feel the challenge of it, think of all that baggage being lost, delight of a new body, eyes and vocal chords, new organs beating differently. And yet – the cosmic fuck that starts the whole thing off – seems a wrong note, a basic flaw.

But Lomé says, ‘It’s what the people have been waiting for – tiring of scepticism and their conscience, they want to start again.’

I say, ‘If they did, what would Fernando have to offer them for them to stop? He couldn’t stop them, and he’d have to follow them. The thing is – they can’t do it. They can’t cancel. Fernando knows it, so do we, and so – and even more – everyone in Bahia knows it’s just a scam.’

‘But,’ she says, ‘they’ve invented an island – big enough for everyone. You make your first act of submission, and it’s then all yours. You can solve anything—’

‘If only you believe,’ I finish off for her. ‘But that “first submission” is the key to everything we know will happen next. It is the start of slavery, of slavery to time, to everything we know.’

‘That’s why we have no supreme deities in Bahia,’ says Lomé.

I say, thinking that I don’t much care what happens to me, and of myself and Fernando, young suit and old suit scheming, ‘But gods are the least part of them. Look at Cloud and Water – look where their submission has got them.’ I keep quiet about my own, little, red man, stretched out tight in there.

The leader of the band puts on his leather hat, beckons. The entertainment starts up slowly with a twangling, a stripper with a paper bag of groceries hesitates, leaves it in my charge. ‘They’re all dreadful thieves in here,’ she says.

The bandleader says bitterly to Lomé, ‘Can’t you take Daisy Bell slower?’ and she replies, ‘You know I hate country’ and he says it ain’t country, it’s Western. ‘And if we get the customers going too fast, they’ll all get hammered too quick or all go home.’

And if I don’t care, and don’t care even what happens, then all’s left to the law, and that means Mr Kidd and Madox, or whoever Jeanne Marie has chosen for her Mr Kidd. Who will give the tigers checkups, before they go loose into the backwoods. Or will have us go back to the clay tablet, back to Ur and Sumer, fitted with a silicon chip.

I say to Lomé, ‘Surely there’s something more concrete than this cheap drama – the big dealers,’ and she says, ‘Surely there is.’

I go on, ‘And now, I see why the lists may matter. A lot of movement. But what side is Fernando on? Or you? Or me?’

‘Perhaps they’ve not yet settled down,’ she says. ‘Or never will. But even I didn’t stand aside – who just came here to make my fortune.’

‘I do know a DJ,’ I mumble, but she’s not convinced.

She goes to be Salome at the other bar. I take the prince of light his baseball news. Water and Cloud are attempting a census of the dogs. Mr Kidd is taking Polaroids of a heap of bones – it has the makings of a shrine. I see Jeanne Marie exercising with a majorette’s mace. She is wearing a snowy sweater with ‘Bonne année’ on in sequins, like they wear in Rouyn.

 

 

five

 

 

Now it is clear, the lists would tell Fernando much – a whole mass coming, various trades. Fernando, or his clients, would know who, how many, came to Bahia. But then, if this suggested clients from the left (and not precluding clients from the right), it also meant that someone in the States was counting too, for coming in, or going out, or simple prudence. But not knowing what the lists were for, what were the sanctions, if indeed there were – it all implies a power, some power in Brazil or here, or both, that plays a different and a higher game: that really does decide, and changes lists and sanctions, depending where you are.

Whose head, or heads, does Lomé bring when she is Salome? Now Water and Cloud come by, both wearing freshly killed fur coats, but Kidd is still in his full gabardine. The cold seems personal, unnatural. It’s quiet, there are no dogs.

Cloud comes to the place where I sleep, settles himself down to be entertaining. ‘It seems to me,’ he says expansively, ‘that there is a cycle, you might say a fashion. At one time, intelligent and informed people have passionate beliefs, and the ordinary people are uncertain and cynical. And then it’s the other way round. The intelligent ones are sceptical, and it’s the common people who have faith.’

He looks expectant, as if he has been throwing big stones into a pond and expects the waves to amuse him for a while.

I say, ‘Could you leave your coat outside – it smells overripe.’ He politely drops it through the window. It is very cold inside.

I say, ‘I feel that in Brazil, you are either for or against big capital – intelligence hardly comes into it. And is belief in principles the same as faith, as other kinds of faith – even the blind sort?’

Cloud says, ‘I knew we saw things eye to eye. You see, I believe in nothing at all. Absolutely nothing.’

I say, ‘Like Mahler? And does that make you intelligent?’ He sniffs this bone for lies, and says, ‘What’s Brazil to do with this?’

‘Your neighbours are all off there – to Brazil. Going to clean the place up: polish up the violence, exploitation, clean out the Indians’ minds – like Water’s always threatening to do here.’

‘What neighbours? There are no neighbours,’ Cloud says.

And it’s true. All Jeanne Marie’s doctors, the technicians and the media men – either they keep deathly quiet, or else they don’t exist. Waiting to be activated or delivered, like space monsters in pods.

‘Anyway,’ says Cloud, ‘we must be cleaning up, because there’s talk of new settlements. Congressman is coming – moving us all out, he says, to move to virgin lands.’

I say, ‘You should get some dry ice to make the congressman a fire, perhaps those virgin lands will burn cold too.’ It must be Hindseeker, settling the Indians back into the rain forest – and perhaps his own cold fires will do their bit to save the climate and the atmosphere. But this would mean that Jeanne Marie would lead another beggars’ crusade, dark hearts of darkness like imploding marble eggs.

I say aloud, ‘It is insanity,’ but then the plausibility sets in and holds me. Even Cloud, unconscious servant of theosophy, may yet rebel against the thought of Amazonian jinks, starting the long haul of history again, from the roots up to the killing grounds No longer wooden Indian, well, if humbly, befurred, but naked Indio. No longer taken as a curio to enlightenment salons, but pinned as a metaphor, a flailing, clumsy butterfly, on the cork walls of someone’s study.

I say, ‘You should watch that guy, Hidenseeker. I don’t think he likes people very much.’

‘He has to,’ says Cloud. ‘They vote for him.’

‘Well,’ I say, ‘I’m sure you don’t.’

I call Lomé in town. She is distressed, the speed of Daisy Bell is contentious. I tell her, ‘Forget about talent night, you always win, and you already have a spot as Salome, higher than which in the business there is no higher part.’ And she protests, ‘It’s a professional question. Salome is just wafting about.’

I tell her the congressman is coming. She will report this to Bahia. It amuses me that if we – Indians – are shipped to Brazil as followers of the Cajun Queen and the king of the night, I could end up in primal innocence as the critical critic, perhaps forced to treat Cloud and Water at Payo’s bar. Me in my white suit, the braves in dogskin greatcoats. Fertility rites to Au sud de la Louisiane, and Lomé Africanising Daisy Bell. It would out-trump the Manhattan mixed-media workshop.

Huhnsucker and his butler arrive by helicopter, laying a corona of ice-crystals which do not melt in the molasses of a Tennessee afternoon sun.

He spots me, and says, ‘Well, well, a very determined young man,’ and I have only time to say ‘yes and no’ before he is seeking others to be introduced to. He is wearing a white hairpiece parted stiffly so that the nap glistens silver to one side, and a greenish vapour‑white to the other. It reminds me of Uncle Fernando’s suit. The congressman ignores Lopez, and goes with Jeanne Marie to her pavilion. The land-admiral follows them, and draws on a pair of what seem asbestos gauntlets, with a single seam down their backs, dividing on one side silver, on the other, vapour-white. Water says enviously of him, ‘He’s the one that does the screwing.’

I ask, ‘The congressman is often here?’

Cloud says, ‘On high days and holidays,’ and Lopez settles into a lotus position outside the pavilion: he is studying the batting averages.

After a bit, the sun seems to shimmer and dip, as though its charge has dropped. Later, I see Jeanne Marie showing what seems a cheque to Lopez. He seems cheered by this, but both look like children whose treat is soured. The butler looks pleased with himself, but the congressman says to me, ‘Must keep all this under our hats, not spread it around among our Brazilian friends – especially yours that sings. Still very far South here, or North, coming at it from the other side. Prejudice in music is the most loathsome, I’m afraid.’

The congressman is full of threat, but where it comes from is not clear.

Later, I say to Lomé, ‘I’m keeping all this well controlled.’

‘Yes, you are.’

‘I just don’t understand what is happening.’

‘Control is more important,’ she says.

‘How is the singing, the treatment?’ I ask.

‘It’s the end of the world, as you say. Do you want your percentage?’ She is almost offering.

‘Really, you love this gig?’

‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I really love it. It’s not serious, but I love it. No competition, but it’s not a waste of time, or do you think I’m letting myself down?’ She ogles me, to show she doesn’t care. We are talking almost like two human beings. I say, ‘It’s too bad we didn’t meet earlier, when I wasn’t being Flash Gordon.’

She says, ‘If you think so.’

I see Madox and Falcucci in the bar. He is dressed as a sulky biker, Falcucci, though, is beaming round.

‘We’re on vacation,’ she says happily. That must mean they have no interest in Lomé, up on the stage, and twice as large as life, transformed, sprinkling sugar on the sugar of these songs.

Faicucci continues, ‘This bar is really a place of friends, a special place.’

I say, ‘If you say so.’

She goes on, ‘Our work is mostly about friendship, or the lack of it. Two poles of intensity, both equally intense. I am trained to die for Madox, and he, of course, for me. But much more than sex, or family, or greed – though naturally, all of these intrude – we must be connoisseurs of friendship. Not spoken, acknowledged, and brought out by ceremonies. And not what falls in conventional lines, or couples, or just like and like: but people like you and Lomé, Water and Cloud, Lopez and Jeanne Marie. Lots of intensity there, a lot of loyalty. That’s what our job is all about – to read those links, those strengths, and apply our intuition in situations’ – she stares at the bandleader, now without his leather hat, bald as a mushroom – ‘situations of extremity.’

‘You manage to make it sound a threat, your guiding threat. So does the congressman, so does Kidd. Perhaps you all went to the same academy?’ I say. She ignores me.

‘Extremity is not to be lamented or avoided. That is what we seek, though always as an either-or. Either you rob the hank and live in peace and ease for ever. Or you don’t. Either you have a solid job and prospects as a cop – or else you are eviscerated. Either you make God fuck you – or you end in hell.’

I ask, ‘What are Water and Cloud’s polarities?’

‘For Water, Cloud is order and intellect, to Cloud, Water is the best of a bad job. If it’s not convincing, well, they don’t have much that’s convincing,’ says Falcucci.

I say, ‘Getting yourself in the middle of these gnarled and gritty relationships – you must feel life intensely.’ I watch Madox loading beer.

Falcucci says, ‘Madox is always thinking of Stepan and the wolves. Stepan is always working for you, working on the data.’

I tell her, ‘Leave purposes and contexts out of it – you were talking about loyalty and friendship.’

But she is quite happy with the music as a context, nodding her head and waving her foot quite automatically.

‘Your trouble is,’ says Falcucci, ‘and Madox is with me on this one, is that you are in too deep. And you’re very persistent. I’d say almost obsessive, wouldn’t you, Madox?’

Madox grunts.

Falcucci whispers, ‘You see, your record could keep you out of Brazil forever. Keep you here forever.’

I say, ‘Another threat, that doesn’t convince,’ but I am convinced, of course: Kidd, the congressman, the cops, Stepan.

‘Now don’t get paranoid,’ says Falcucci, calling for popcorn.

I think – you mustn’t let them get away with this friendship stuff, unless it’s a kind of offer of a kind of truce. Madox says: ‘Don’t get me wrong, Jay, we’re not humanists. What we say is just the truth, no more. People stick together’ – and he makes a cradle of his fingers, showing he can’t pull them apart, but then to drink his beer he does.

I know we must be moving on. First in Manhattan, now in Tennessee, this long American winter where all circle round each other, flies round a lampshade – this must stop. Or at least some force must break, and let me go – Lomé be tired perhaps – and behind us on the screen they use for ballgames, Jeanne Marie looms up. She asks for money for her mission, and the drunks and beggars here defer – some even by instinct put their hands where they used to keep their cash.

It’s her interview with Windisch. She holds a little picture of Lopez, like the cards of local saints they sell for alms in Mexico, or they may be football heroes, or a local boss.

Her eyes hold us all, and even Lomé stops. Jeanne Marie’s eyes are like green inward spirals, and they seem to draw, suck even the door open, letting in the cold till a crew of topers binds itself together, forces it back shut. Jeanne Marie describes Brazil – ‘the souls so long abandoned, navel of the world, the loneliness of the poor, the weak, those handicapped by sin, misled by power’ ... ‘investment of personnel and skill that only we who’ve got the God or gods behind us can achieve ... a man that’s born to save, who’s one of them’ – the drinkers look impressed. It’s what they thought, so long as it doesn’t happen here, down here in barland where the rules don’t work, and souls are neither lost nor saved, but left outside, parked like a car, and picked up after, or just forgot.

So, big capital it is. Her eyes switch to the Lopez card, and some guys see the trick at once and grumble about ‘the Mex’, but most take it for what it is, or may be, just one more ad. She finishes – Windisch is entertained, congratulating her, he makes her amateur again, who’s done the trick, whatever it was, of virgin birth, raising the dead, perhaps – but not at all in big-time league, as one must really do these things: professionally.

Lomé begins to sing again – the love of the sun for the earth – the heads turn from the screen. The blue frog, black snake, the trees a thousand metres tall, the yellow alligators – the sun seeks them all out, each one he warms each day, every creeping and swimming beast awaits the moment, its turn every day the Sun will find it: and the whole forest sings like a single bird. Praise to the Sun and her revolution.

It is an impressive victory: but I am tired of this inaction, tired of Cloud and Water who are popping pills and inflating like four-star warlords, challenging the leaders of other bands, insulting Madox, pawing Falcucci – who tries to ‘cool them down’ by pouring beer on their pelts.

I go to see Jeanne Marie, to urge her to pack up and leave, go to Brazil at once.

‘Things are closing in here,’ I say. ‘Too many people bigots, and the giants who made the constitution have gone off in their spaceship. They’re freed slaves here, looking for a new enslavement. Want to turn your mission, manipulate, control your movements.’

And all this may be true, even about the giants. The truth is too that I must move. I have no money. All the rest are settling in and making friends, making careers, or failing. Mankind is just too plastic, welcomes its terminal states as rest cures.

Jeanne Marie complains: she will not meet the John Deere dealer, whose house has three cathedral ceilings, ‘And a suit of armour, real, and he knows all the parts by name.’ So will her snobbery bring low my schemes for sponsorship? I tell her, ‘You’ll just have to hope the high life is waiting for you in Bahia.’ She makes a face. ‘The guys here have more class. For me, this is the holy city.’

I wonder if her vision is not terribly flawed, and if she may not fail to launch this particular sacredness, the community without members, the inextinguishable fire without its fuel. I say, ‘This lack of chrisms, of followers, even of devoted reading of the book, it seems to me that something here is missing.’

‘We stand,’ says Jeanne Marie, ‘against syncretism. That is what the slaves were forced to have – their own mixed in with others. What we want is something pure, and yet their own.’

But syncretism marks a real state – of subjection or of loss maybe – which you in time can turn around, so you don’t care, you turn things upside down, and that becomes your own kind of affirmat­ion, the way you put together the things lost with others, never to be attained yet not quite unattainable. Starting again, with your own special religion – which isn’t yours, in any case, but made up by Jeanne Marie – has its own limits. I ask, ‘Jeanne Marie, what else you got to sell?’

‘Work and education, modern agriculture.’ She is not moved by this. And I think ‘Ha, big capital.’ I say, ‘But Jeanne Marie, I know we’re all attracted to Brazil, the myth, even when we know it’s not like that, it’s one of our psychic resources in which we find some crumbs of truth, also disillusion enough to keep us going – elsewhere. But what do you really have, that lets you meddle with those people, string along this circus, this Kidd, this congressman? And me, and all of us.’

She is not offended, and her green eyes give her the sign to go. ‘The cancelling. An experience so intense, uniting the spiritual and the physical planes, that it wipes out all loyalties, save what you experience and will, at that very moment. It is an intensity of bonding that makes community as it cancels loyalties, that makes a family as it dissolves the dross, the merely biological and calculated.’

‘You mean Cloud and Water will forget they are Indians?’ I ask.

‘More than that,’ she says. ‘We shall recognise ourselves as members of the species, because we can cancel lesser things. And yet, at a higher level, we shall bond, form marriages of the body and the spirit. Cancelling the past.’

She is in full spate. ‘What you cancel liberates your real self – whatever kind it is. You must drop prejudice, the loyalties that exclude, and keep only those that bind in freedom and in love.’

I say, ‘But Jeanne Marie, it sounds the usual mix. You renounce everything in order to get more. The old American dream, the conscience cleaned off like a blackboard, replaced by a whiteboard on which to write the even larger sums your purity brings in.’

She says, ‘You are a pagan, Mr James.’

‘We country boys and girls, like you and Lopez, Jeanne Marie, are no less pagans when we try to forget our pasts.’ I think how much easier for Jeanne Marie it is to love than like. I’d live easier with her liking than her love – but she does have a real talent. I go on, ‘And what about the cancelling of the debts?’

She looks defensive, and smug. ‘We’re working on that one. At the government level.’

‘You mean, international loan-sharking? Very nice,’ I say. So that’s the grease for these particular wheels. And cancelling the awkward, indelible loyalties – to place, to cult, to colour – scrubbing clean of citizens, brains and bodies washed. What a grandiose vision, poorly exploited, though, by Jeanne Marie.

I continue, ‘So, Jeanne Marie, it’s you that wants to cancel your Acadian past, but it’s Lopez who’s been cancelled. And of course, he, being no longer man, must by default be god. But why can’t this orgasmic sponge wipe you out too?’

She says, ‘Perhaps I’m just too strong. perhaps I’m just too deep in sin.’ But she doesn’t look as if that’s her problem.

‘It’s a remarkable weapon,’ says the congressman, who has been listening, ‘Fucking.’ He says it with distaste, as though distaste was his own private property. Perhaps he wants the dealership, accessories and spare parts for loathing too.

This would cancel out the souls of Uncle Fernando’s family’s family friends, and Payo too would find his gelatinas, his jellybabies, even colder fish. Who would pay for kohl and patchouli if for free you could watch the latest move in conjugation?

All this embarrasses the congressman who knows that technocrats who believe in mass conversions have little boys’ delusions. Yet he has no choice, he must go on, believe in personal gods and devils, his own stretch limousine to come – with fairy tales coming true, another may give you that extra spurt of fame, triumph of heroic fixing.

There is no doubt, he’s found a devil ready to buy his soul, sell him a polar conditioner, but promise also of a continental deal, containing dollars and a value change, and other spin-offs – like the blacktop franchise for the Amazonian basin, graders for the Andes, flowmeters for the Gulf Stream.

We are all leaving, down to Bahia, tracked by Stepan two by two, travellers’ tales bounced back to Windisch. Preceded by a founder of the world, and lover. Lomé says: ‘They’ll just disappear in Bahia. Everyone makes and unmakes themselves there a thousand times a day, with or without loving. They’ll be just another anti-climax.’

I borrow the fare from Windisch, and a title as correspondent. Cloud and Water are going down by sea, the American spooks by secret means – or not at all, fixing themselves up with local doubles. My investigation into depths and roots, taken over by intercontinental drift, is suspended.

Lomé brings home her recorded voice, packed in a pizza box.

 

 

 

six

 

 

In the bar, Payo and the parakeet both look at me with the same evil eye. I hear the bird clear its throat as I go into the business room – it’s called – and it says, ‘He has forgotten nothing and learned nothing.’

Fernando is waiting for me. His suit is brown – against the light it shines like a rare wood, in the shade it is like a tobacco leaf, his yellow silk tie coils from his neck like a dreamy snake.

He opens a cupboard. It is empty except for a single tumbler of whisky. He pauses and with extreme reluctance takes it out, gives it to me.

‘I have the lists,’ I say.

‘What lists?’

‘Of desirable and undesirable people,’ I suggest, and he says, ‘With age we all become undesirable, less desirable. Perhaps repugnant.’

To me he looks repugnant, but I go on, ‘I didn’t manage to get Lomé any engagements.’

He looks at the ceiling. ‘Jay, music is a great delusion. It seems to hurt no one, to give pleasure, even to serve the people. And yet, in the last resort, it is only a service to oneself. But then, you and I have ample experience of this. It is a wordless communion.’

I say, ‘Not if there’s singing.’

Fernando says, ‘Even singing is wordless – in another kind of way, of course.’

We fall silent. He starts over: ‘It was important that Lomé should have left at that time. She had unfortunately given a deep offence to the father of her child. He is not, you’ll understand, in all respects her husband. Indeed,’ he looks intently at the glass I have emptied, ‘I feared for her life, her very life. If she had not been able to find room on your mission.’

I say, ‘And then we come back trailing clouds of policemen – one a relative of the man who supplies the lists.’

He livens up, ‘Good, very good.’

‘I think they’re minor figures,’ I say.

‘Well,’ he muses, ‘a policeman’s a policeman after all. It’s useful having them around, and on your side.’

‘And then there’s Mr Kidd, a federal agent, and a congressman appears to be interested.’ Fernando is looking more and more eager. His reactions are the reverse of what I expect, so my upside-down report is proving a success.

‘Kidd, ah yes, Kidd. So they must take me rather seriously. And a congressman – that means big money, and big contacts here, especially if he’s on a mission. All in all, Jay, you’ve done well, and, I may say, fully justified my choice, my faith. As for the music: well, the commercial pressures are as they are, the political difficulties we know about, and then there is the feeling widespread that all the effort should go elsewhere – into things more spiritual perhaps. Music has become more aggressive, populist even. And that cannot help the real cause – the principled opposition we believe in, a truly democratic reform.’ He lowers his voice and flaps his hands towards the bar: ‘The jellybabies have gone to a football match. Can you believe it, the poor things that they are? But cannot even do the things they were cut out, even were designed, for.’

‘But the religious aspect, don’t you want to know about the souls?’ I ask, determined to bring back the first causes of my trek.

He says, ‘Religious aspect, very important. But you won’t want to go back to the States, I’m thinking?’

A girl comes in, her face a tiger mask, dark guard hairs, the lips a purple black. She works for the furriers next door. Starting her off, they’d looked for someone hairy. I say to Fernando, ‘That’s a beautiful mask she’s grown into her work.’ Fernando returns to his old self – ‘Once this was common, people turning to their natural allies. A form of self-defence. She started with an explosion of side-whiskers and moustaches, then the mottling on the brow, the lips and nose becoming harder, darker. She’d make a striking mate for someone, but we don’t know who.’

I tell him, ‘Lopez, the drowsy god, and Jeanne Marie have come here as advance guard – perhaps they couldn’t put their flock, their team together, or want to try the divinity business on their own. My opinion is, the personalities, and the trick of cancelling, are too asymmetrical, too skewed, too power-ridden. I think they are two muddled kids ...’

But Fernando is already saying, ‘Yes, yes, the Americans do things like that. They have this insecurity, so they think they can manipulate other people, but only if they’re very stupid. This makes them stupid, and dishonest, and they get angry if you point it out. Yes, the ingenuous appeals to them. They think we’re thoughtless savages, lying on the beach all day.’

I say, ‘But Fernando, the cancelling of the souls—’

He says, ‘Well, if you believe all that, Jay, and about cancelling loyalties – I suppose that they do, it is their hope and fear, that what they call their freedom leads to a rubbing out of everything, all points of reference, your memory—’

‘No, Fernando,’ I say. ‘Of course I have no faith. But it’s a convenient trick, a therapy for some, a political challenge that’s much more radical than being merely born again. Think of a future where there is no past, a present that’s point zero. And it cancels, but through this ritual screw, it bonds. This ‘screw-fix’ as they call it is a great spectacle, a drama that can lead to anything – soft-porn charisma with a hard-porn kick.’

‘Pooh,’ says Fernando. ‘Can’t every jellybaby do the same? Remember, as we used to say at school, cui prodest, where is the angle, Jay? And here I see many, many angles. And this Jeanne Marie I feel is one of us. But you, Jay, I’d not expected you to be so gullible. What shall we do with you? I think for you the States is out. And there’s the problem of your record – not the one Lomé might have made, ha ha, the one that’s on the files. Ha ha.’

His mind is working like the coypu’s in the sack.

I say, ‘There is a chance too that a broken band of Indians and some illegal Mexicans may make up the God’s apostles. Cloud and Water are the chieftain’s names.’

He is indignant. ‘More people? We’ve far too many already, many of them Indians too. And broken bands – we’re out of musical discourse, I presume?’

I tell him, ‘They have nothing. They don’t even believe in Jeanne Marie’s circus. Perhaps they could look for gold. Be cowboys for MacDonald’s.’

‘Ah no, ah no,’ says Fernando, going to the empty cupboard to find something for the tiger-girl. He gets three drinks from Payo. The liquid is like crystal, but burns like boiled rubies. I feel my lips stretch thin, and grimace at the tiger-girl, who grimaces back. She really is remarkable. I wonder what Lomé’s offence may have been, and if she was Philomel before, or turned into a nightingale after whatever it was. I understand why she left me in New York, afraid of hit squads coming up – and yet, so docile when we both returned. Perhaps there is a season for offence, perhaps the cause was cancelled out, Fernando overriding some difficulty, making her fortune. He says ‘In troubled times, even the image of a relative can be very powerful, to protect, or even to avenge. You have to concentrate, that’s all.’

Lomé doing magic in the archive of the soap operas.

Fernando says, ‘In these troubled times, you’ll find that cancelling is all the rage. If they would cancel out our debt, or perhaps just shift it round, think what a figure we could cut! Disasters in the rain forests, slavery, the tourist picaresque, massacres in the gold mines – all this does us no good, no good at all. Of course, these things are terrible, may even mean the end of all our worlds. And where would all your music go to then, I ask you, Jay? Myself I play, of course, but only in an amateur way, keeping the volume down, never a fiery trampling on the pedals, just a tweak and twiddle every now and then, hearing the vox humana – now and then – a rather tremulous sound. And yet I know that politics is loosening up, things are changing, the image – if we could get Lopez and Jeanne Marie to do their act, do you think, right here?’ He points to the empty bar through the bead curtain. At his gesture, the curtain stirs, the beads strike and sing together like the parakeet’s glissandos. ‘Or on a more cosmic scale, perhaps the big time – the Washington Post owes me some favours, I believe. The thing is to appear mature, not gullible and not superstitious. Their act must be valued rationally, not like these new cults the American presidents get from their blacks. It’s guilt, I suppose, though I can’t think why,’ he sniffs.

I ask, ‘What kind of power might Lomé have acquired?’

Fernando considers. ‘Well, probably she can confer a case of impotence on those too near and threatening. Nothing as considerable as cannibalism, I’m sure.’ He laughs. I think of her other song and dance routine, Salome’s, and wonder if a head somewhere was involved.

‘And now, Jay,’ says Fernando ominously, ‘what can we devise for your future? The first thing is to love power – in others – rather more. Your resentment at being bossed around is just too plain – though I surmise that in the end you must give in.’

In fact, I feel closest to Water and Cloud, the creator and container of chaos, but I say, ‘I know them all. They all trust me for what I am, and up to a point.’

‘Well,’ says Fernando, ‘at least we shan’t need you for any rough stuff.’

He becomes more cheery. ‘The police,’ he says, ‘can always be set to work. Excellent gatherers of gossip. So too this bishop character, Kidd. He might even opt for the priesthood – some of those liberation people have quite remarkable contacts, and Kidd is, I suppose, a Protestant, which will help. Lopez and Jeanne Marie I see as regular features on TV, working for national unity, and cancelling out as much as they wish of anything else. With a considerable charge of opposition – they, I should think, are not so much Protestants as heretics, which could be a hindrance.’ He sniffs again, this time scenting burning flesh. ‘Must be careful,’ he says, ‘but at least I don’t see them as any way involved in the left: but crime, perhaps?’

‘I don’t think they’ve any classifiable political ideas,’ I say. ‘They do what’s necessary, by instinct, to fill the station wagon. As for crime, Jeanne Marie’s too smart, and Lopez has an interest in baseball.’

Fernando is electrified, his disbelieving smirk is cancelled. ‘Baseball. Sport. Perfect. A god who’s also a fan. The first one, ever. Perfect. That’s really bringing God to man. A god who roots for the team – and with no rancour towards the rest, I’ll bet. That at least should teach you something, Jay.’

It’s true, my quest brought no spiritual enlightenment. Only returning home to the wizard do the signs encountered, the runes and birdcalls, make sense. But does this divination give the strength to sustain this knowledge? ‘Knowledge is always knowledge about other people’ – I remember the saying from somewhere. But if this knowledge is just gossip and intrigue?

The tiger-girl leaves, leaves a last smile. Payo comes for the glasses. The parakeet on his shoulder looks like a second, faceless, blackhead. The bird says, ‘Drink up: this is your last.’ Payo is carrying three blue drinks, the colour that barmen like to create, a colour found only on the walls of nightclubs or coat linings. It tastes like the water from boiled skies. This time Payo drinks his with us. ‘That girl has the most beautiful face. It’s so beautiful, it’s almost not like a girl,’ he says. I have never seen him so moved. His presence makes us concentrate on the drinks, their flat, empty aftertaste like painted skies, like scenery glimpsed through waterfalls, the scent of petals rotted into moss.

‘Would you pay, Jay, I’m not carrying money these days. Life is getting dangerous,’ says Fernando.

I say, ‘I’ve never paid here before. It must be dangerous round you too,’ and Payo and the parakeet flap their hands. ‘On the house, on the house’ they insist.

I’m irritated with Fernando: ‘I think you’ll find, Fernando, that without me to interrupt the theology and keep in sweet with Jeanne Marie, they’ll think you the most profane kind of shark. I’m not even sure I feel like rescuing your fortunes. If you want mysteries, and mysteries left half explained, there’s no good banging drums and advertising miracles. The staging is most delicate. How do you think a big show like the papacy’s put on, and runs and runs? Even the littlest cult requires a delicacy, and a suggestiveness, a teasing out of half significances, knowing what old crones and adolescents want. Just think, Fernando, every seashell, every sunset, every poem transcribed and piped out onto birthday cakes – it all requires an artistry you can’t aspire to, a sense of this and that, knowledge of aesthetics and theology that you don’t have.’

He looks pained. ‘I have the Wurlitzer.’

I go on, ‘The Wurlitzer is a prepared machine, it speaks in sonnet form, it gives communion. It is already programmed, my dear friend, to provide what sceptics want – a breath of cosmic chants and rhythms, legions of saints all blowing reeds. You don’t realise, that mystery is invented only by those with a profound desire for meaning. Only the search for truth throws up the unknown things that people puzzle over, come to prize as central shafts of being. I’m afraid, Fernando, you’ll appear to people who are seeking enlightenment, a mystic frisson, orgasm that lasts if not forever a little longer than the norm – as a mere commercial puzzler. Mystery comes from seeking truth, the sacred from the familiar, knowledge stems from error. You’re proposing tricks that rest on your own power, your knowing that this sideshow is a fraud, its aim to make you money, and defraud the honest seeker.

‘And so they’ll call you fraud, and you will fail.’

Fernando laughs, ‘You don’t suggest I should believe in all this nonsense, and in Lopez?’

I say, ‘I’m quite indifferent. I’m not a priest, and I don’t care about your state of faith; nor mine. I’m a theologian, which is a different thing. I test the plausibility and the seriousness of what you’re trying to sell, organise the mystery, interpret the puzzling designs that those two make. I undertake to show I take the audience seriously, their perceptions of what the purpose is. I don’t despise them, and I don’t exploit. But certainly don’t believe. There, if I help, I should fall down, and fail the honesty test.’

‘Well,’ said Fernando. ‘I never realised that lay religion nowadays could be so complex – without the priests, the state, of course, it’s bound to be, I saw it simply as another scam, to get the big bucks flowing in, arms contracts – always for the left, you understand – and now you present it in a different way. A way for getting yourself the post of middleman, the job we all prefer. But since you have this access – even to my friend, if I should call him that, Stepan ... we can at least all meet together, one by one, with you and I, and see how things may twist and turn ...’

As I leave, I see Payo pouring the dregs from the glasses into a jug: as he stirs them into the liquid, it seems to groan. Must be the spoon against the earthenware, but when he stops, the liquid still emits a few grunts, like warriors tiring in a war canoe. The parakeet says, ‘The stuff, that’s the stuff’ and plays dead, then, seeing Water and Cloud entering the bar it says, ‘Hail to the chiefs.’

Lomé has work. She says, ‘Fernando goes about saying “Dear me, Jay will never find work here, a terrible thing”, so you should find a crevice somewhere.’

‘What does that mean?’ I ask.

‘You know. He wants to get rid of you, but thinks you are a threat. And he is into everything, now the left is doing well, he is going well: housing projects, contracts for everything. Fernando sees the poor as so many tiny model wallets opening almost silently – an orifice that he can put his beak in.’

I say, ‘I thought you were his favourite, Lomé.’

‘No, Jay, more than his favourite – now I’m his woman. Things are sorted out. And now you’re with us too, for good.’

I say, ‘I hope you are my friend at court?’

And she says, ‘You’ve done very well, aware of it or not. Fernando would have hated me to have success in the States. Better that the tapes work here. It keeps me close to him. He might buy a club for me. And you did exactly what he asked, and more.’

I say, ‘Life bubbles up. And Jeanne Marie could perform on the same bill as you.’

‘He’s uncertain what to do with them. He has a spiritual side that comes out when he’s poor, or fears his death. But he is proud: at least, he wants to be on equal terms with gods.’

She goes on, ‘Fernando now sees Payo as a loser. And yet he owes Payo money, lots of money, from a host of deals that turned out bad. They’re souring in each others’ pockets. And then Fernando hates that bird. He taught it all the things it taunts him with. But Payo is a much-respected man – the top of his own community. And Cloud and Water are already doing well. In old clothes, selling.’

I say, ‘They were top men once. And now will just be rich. We all seem to find over and over our own level, life is a lesson in elementary hydraulics.’

‘Water and Cloud must do much more than that,’ says Lomé decisively. ‘They are our guarantee with the people, with the poor, if Jeanne Marie and Lopez make it big. Water and Cloud are born disciples, and they should remember that.’ I raise both hands in agreement, mock surrender. Power is contentless, sought only for itself, and Lomé is its victim, on the rampage to take more slaves.

Madox and Falcucci seek me out. They know at once the things one needs to know, and Falcucci says, ‘Parts are like New York, but the people are saner and the cops more understanding.’

‘What are you kids doing?’ I ask, and Falcucci looks guilty and tells me about Mr Kidd, who has extended their holidays for them and is himself searching for a bishopric that may be vacant, though the right denomination is a problem, but perhaps his cousin – and then again, liberation movements being as they are ...

Falcucci is dressing with more style, and losing some of her New York bumpiness, but she and Madox carry the look of Ellis Island and too many tons of chipsters with them. Yet, although their extravagances are suburban – barbecues blighted by the neighbours’ gunshots – they too have put down roots.

It is Jeanne Marie, top of the pile in Tennessee, as an exotic tropical fruit or third world bug, who here is out of place.

‘You’re an American dream,’ I tell her. ‘There, you can make belief in God and belief in Lopez seem the same – and it was Lopez whose show would run and run. But here, even the little kids can tell the difference.’

She says, ‘I don’t believe too much in Lopez now.’

‘Trouble at the bank?’ I ask.

‘You knew about that too?’ She is surprised. ‘We had a terrible experience in the interior.’

‘What do you expect?’ I ask. ‘It’s war there, and you must have known. You had duly sought it out. That was your attraction – whatever you may have said, looking for trouble was your aim – not of your own making, even – and were rushing in, with Lopez on your back.’ Though, I reflect, Lopez in his way had made Jeanne Marie bearable.

We are sitting in Jeanne Marie’s belvedere – a tube of coloured panes that looks out over squares and roof furniture, the tops of trees – a magnificent view, she says, but not of anything, quantity. And yet – here there’s no furniture, no possessions. And the rest or the building belongs to other people, families whose concerns require no belvedere. But can she live here, bird without water, dumb ox without straw: and just a view, a beetle consuming her own context, deathwatching?

She is subdued. She says, ‘First, I have no rancour to you for suggesting we went first into the interior. It was a brave proposal, even if it cost us dear.’

I say, ‘But you had helpers?’

‘The congressman was useless. With him around, we couldn’t start a fire. He had his butler serve him vodka martinis while we were struggling with the sound equipment.’

‘Why did he come at all?’ I ask.

‘He wanted to use us as a model for his plans: counter-insurgent intensive agriculture, resettlement of indigenous tribes, ozone control – all the trendy issues. We were to be the cement, the detonator.’

‘And instead the detonator blew up the cement,’ I say.

‘We went through the forest where there were creatures I had never seen before: birds with four legs, alligators with wings, and worlds of small blue insects, who seemed to manufacture, trade and administer: all on great funguses that grew on trees. And birds that seemed to call in all the tongues, just bits of words. And figures – as if they’d learnt them off shredded tape. And then the pits of mud – where it seemed the last men were fighting not to drown, as if they were going straight to hell, but instead, fighting each other, and really mining gold. Or so they said. Carrying their bundles like ants disturbed by boiling water – and a sound of gunfire that frightened us, but didn’t make them stir.

‘And finally we came to a plain. And Mr Kidd said we should stop there, for he could go no further, and that clearly the Lord had called us there and so ordained it. And then we set up the sound stage and the video, and the rain came pouring down, and Lopez had a diarrhoea persistent as the rain, and lamented on and on about his magazines all being wet. And Madox laughed hugely, and Falcucci cried, and all the time the congressman was sipping on his vodkas, and we had to keep him and his butler away from the equipment because they seemed to make it go all wrong.

‘And this plain had just been cleared – and all the trees and creepers taken down and all the hills levelled and the rivers filled And there was nothing, no insects, and no birds, and no animals – and Mr Kidd said that it was perfect, that we’d get a perfect take, and there was nothing but the hiss of rain.

‘And then the people rose up, they just rose up from the mud, of all colours and sizes – Indios, and German hunters and miners from Bolivia and their families. And either they were naked or they looked like they were because the rain came hissing down, and there was no thunder or no lightning, and no clouds that you could see. Just mud. And people, more and more people came rising up out of the mud.

‘And Mr Kidd said it was a perfect test, and that it was make or break time. And I began to talk and explain, about the union of the earth and the seed, and the union of the two of us, and how the god impregnated the earth and the sun came and made the life grow, and so on ... And all the time the rain came hissing down and Lopez was squatting there behind the stage straining his guts out into the mud.’

‘It must have taken a lot of courage,’ I say.

‘It should have taken faith. But anyway, I went on with the message, and the congressman was sitting there – he’d even brought a film director’s chair – sip sip sipping on his cocktails and holding out his glass for more, and steaming off the rain and seeming dry. And I went on and on, and then it seemed there was a change, and I thought, ‘So after all, it does work, it does mean something, it’s understood even if they cannot understand the words, they understand the music, the urgency of our bodies and the sounds, there is a universal language and it is called love, and people everywhere can understand,’ she pauses, and I wonder if she had proposed to screw there in the rain, or just allude to it symbolically and she goes on, ‘And suddenly there was a change indeed. There was a dry, dry sound, like twigs and branches long fallen and dried out rubbing together. And it spread and spread, and I expected the rain to stop, perhaps even the sun to come out, and I heard Kidd say, ‘It would take a miracle,’ and I felt my doubts were cancelled out – and then I understood. The people there were laughing. And the rain went hissing down.’

‘And then?’ I ask.

‘And then they all went down, went back down into the mud, as though they had never been, and there was left only the levelled earth, and nothing, all was brown and grey, and at the horizon, just grey and grey.’

The plastic in the belvedere gives the roofs a constant change of colour – from cherry pink to honey yellow, eyeliner blue – not classy colour, but at least not brown or grey.

‘And there was worse to come,’ she says. ‘When we were going back, the rain went on. And all the sights we’d seen when toiling up had gone. It seemed the paths had closed. And Madox swore, and Mr Kidd just shook his head – only the vodka kept on running, and we had to stop more frequently because the congressman was tired.

‘But the problem was with Lopez. He constantly complained – he hadn’t got to do his part, his stomach hurt, he couldn’t find his magazines. And so and so. And in the end, we all agreed with Madox, and we left him.’

I am amused, but say, ‘Expeditions often leave the sick behind, coming back when things seem rosier,’ but she goes on:

‘With us it wasn’t kindness or necessity. We tied him to a tree and left him. We were just fed up. He could see the road, there was no danger – but just to shut him up, you understand. That infinite and pointless complaining – not the mission failing bothered him, but only the little pinpricks, the infinitely small discomforts that the rest of us were suffering for.’

Lopez tied to a tree and hollering, Falcucci and Madox stooped under their amplifiers: the congressman on his servant’s arm waving a martini glass, and Mr Kidd reading his black book and longing for established religion and bingo in the church hall. It was a biblical rout, left only Jeanne Marie, unviolated and unvirgin, dream of the big time and the cancelling out of Tennessee, no longer in Acadian straits, the swamps enlivened with a touch of kitsch and criminality, those old fiddles sawing at the mind’s strings until that day – the little Jeanne Marie who’d felt that modesty forbad that she be God, but at least she could do her duty, find someone to appreciate her and through Him produce the mighty fuck that saves the world.

‘So where is Lopez now?’ I ask.

‘Lopez is around,’ she says.

I say, ‘Well at least you see now there are people who maybe need something, someone. But not you, as I have always said.’

‘I did something. I acted, I mean, I did something. And it was something that would not have worked in Tennessee – and it doesn’t matter to me what the guys in the radio station think, what the old folks in Nebraska believe. Seeing those people come up from the mud – it was unforgettable,’ she stares at me with eyes as green as grapes.

‘And they went back down into it,’ I say. ‘Though at least they had a good laugh. And that too is important.’

I would like a good laugh too. Even though I stage-managed everything, I drew no advantage from the business.

She says, ‘Mr Kidd made a video of the whole thing. We saw it on the big screen. Some guy played a Wurlitzer. It was a rare show. The people laughed so hard I thought they’d burst.’

I wondered if Windisch could find a use for it, and thought – a copy of that will pay off my debt to him. Thus proving miracles occur, if only in a minor key.

‘So, it’s all finished then,’ I say, and she at once is hostile. ‘Not at all. Only the liberation aspect, it would seem. All the rest will come, and Hensick will make his bucks. Even be made ambassador – he likes to see the people bow, and footmen do the things they do.’

At least the world is safe now for Fernando’s souls. The Wurlitzer will roar again for many an avenging god. But Jeanne Marie reminds me – ‘I came not bringing vengeance, but forgetfulness. It has not occurred to me that to forget could be such a violent thing, such a breaking, an affront. It’s my vanity, I suppose. I wanted to forget so much, the cancelling seemed a fine invention.’

Instead, it turned out truly lethal – ha ha, as Lomé would have said.

I tell her, ‘The side effects of forgetting your loyalties are quite significant – like losing all you have. Myself, I have an open mind. You know, there are computers programmed that after ten years they wipe out all their memory, and off you start with your slate completely clean. And nothing counts against you. But for the dead to be forgotten – even though to me it seems a sentence on the living, one for life in fact, to have them flickering at one’s feet – this is quite terrible for them. And so, because we are tomorrow’s dead, for all our efforts too. I know the mode’s conservative. But if you cancel all the dross, and all times past – you just start off again, or so it seems. Remembering the instant of the cancelling, you then begin again, accumulating. So, you are condemned, to cancel and to accumulate, accumulate and cancel. And this, as well you know, is nothing but the oldest rule of life itself. Instead of slow forgetfulness you interpose – a Jeanne Marie. The problem – if it is a problem – remains the same. To me, it’s not the solving of a maybe puzzle that’s the point – but rather getting the music right. As you did not, it seems, up there.’

She’s unconvinced. ‘Cancelling is much more radical than you think,’ she says.

‘But is it that much more useful? If Lopez is the principle, it’s not being without memory, but being simply mindless,’ I say.

‘Lopez remembers baseball averages. But yes, he is the principle of forgetfulness, irritating though this sometimes is,’ she says.

I tell her, ‘Cajun queens never forget,’ and she smiles, despite herself a little comforted.

I see Lomé and ask, ‘Who was it you were busy making impotent back in New York? Not me, by any chance?’ But all she says is:

‘If you listen to that old shaman, Don Fernando, you’ll discover he’s the father of the city. He offers his paternity to all the children of Brazil, of any age and colour. So long as they don’t ask him for money.’

She has become a singer. She now moves in that world, collects the jewels it offers, despising the others. Sings like a caged bird – the narrower the bars, the sweeter the song.

 

 

seven

 

 

Falcucci tells me Madox has become a writer. ‘I think he has a relative, Madox Ford, who does the same thing. And I’m so worried, Jay. He just sits over his typewriter and looks real gone, as if it was a hookah. A silly smile, and not a word comes out. I tell him he should take some classes, go back to where he’s known – and we have slid, oh, how we’ve slid, first from hotels to rooms and then to room. The people in the street are still afraid of him, but if they knew he only wants to write, entrap their essences on foolscap ...      I mean, Jay, when did anyone become a writer writing things like that?’

I tell her, ‘Perhaps he just wants a break,’ but I don’t really care. That is, I’m angrily indifferent. If I have brought together all these freaks, it’s as a comment on my life, on my whole tribe as Western man ... Instead, you put them down, they start up running and turning somersaults, just like clockwork beetles landing from Mars.

I should have been closer to Lomé. I should not be so close to Jeanne Marie. And Lopez tells me of his encounter with Don Fernando. ‘A really important man. Did you ever meet one of those kind, James?’ The name of a slide trombonist comes to my head, but I don’t let it out. ‘Of course,’ says Lopez. ‘Them kind of things I find beneath me, but just all the same, it’s good to see the men of power, the men of action.’

I say, ‘I see that you must find it so. Guts better?’ he looks at me as if I’m speaking German.

‘Hey, man, you trying to put me down?’ he asks. ‘Because you’ve got nothing I want, you’ve got nothing I don’t have.’

‘I did get you your magazines back in Tennessee.’

‘And I don’t forget that, don’t forget a thing,’ he says, his eyelids tottering. He goes on, ‘That Don Fernando has a palace, but it’s like he ain’t unwrapped it yet. It’s like a warehouse. One room full of plastic cups. A banqueting hall packed with folding chairs. And not just rooms, man, each one is like a little mansion.’

‘Yes, he’s a rich and powerful man for a country that’s rotting back into the jungle.’

Lopez says, ‘It’s a country that can be saved. It has too much sin around, that’s all.’ He turns away and adds, ‘Too much musical trash for one.’

I say, ‘Hey, man, you trying to put me down? You had your moment, up on the stage. No one was even watching you. Fernando may still have hopes for you, but the people back there in the mud – I think they don’t. Although you may not care. And they, indeed, like me – they may not care too much.’

He looks drowsier than usual. He says, ‘I am on my journey. You know who I am?’

I say, ‘I guess that you are one of the pulque gods, one of those that has to do with the drunken rabbits. Or – since you can hardly be a jaguar and eat up men, you might be a brother of she of the painted skirt: someone who has to do with stars. And yet in Cloud and Water you have followers who have to do with rain, and the South  …’

‘The rain, yes. Sometimes it overdoes it, though it is an honour always.’

I tell him, ‘But you have no powers outside of Mexico, and even there, you wait for men to act and die, and drink and plant seed. And when it rains or when it’s night, or when a sun is spent – you do not seem to have acted, to have done things. I mean, to be a god is always important, but in this case, it is the frantic course of men, the race to worship, certainly, but also to ape the deities, to be as harsh to men as earthquakes are to earth, the fire is to obsidian – it is the course of men that the gods follow, without intelligence, without pity ...’

Lopez says triumphantly, ‘Yes. Without understanding, without caring. Absolute indifference to everything except being worshipped.’

He seems transfixed by this idea: not sleep but solipsism attacks him. I tell him, ‘In Brazil this attitude is a loser. The worshipper expects a reward. And the rituals start late and don’t last long.’

He looks gloomy. ‘Cloud and Water are going into politics, or maybe something to do with uniforms – but beautiful uniforms, made of feathers.’

I think Bahia is a black hole, a spot in the universe where all the beliefs cluster together, try to impregnate each other. And instead are lost, sucked tropically down. Like the mud people, digging for fortunes but being smothered in mud, in acid mud. Arrogant like Lopez, like Fernando, forever uselessly hopeful like Madox. Scheming like Mr Kidd, who is to be anointed bishop somewhere on the periphery.

Kidd’s hair is sticking out. He tells me, ‘The ancient Greek actors did this to let the audience see them better,’ but he is still a husk, an old man to be met on buses: his pants enclose most of his shirt, which has its collar sawn off and reversed around his wristlike neck. He is the goose, past laying golden eggs. I do not tell him that but say, ‘So the checking time is over? You are looking after souls, the time of lists is past?’

He is enthusiastic. ‘Look at them, my sheep, my black sheep!’ They mill around him noisily. A black archbishop prepares something on a brazier. Kidd explains, ‘We had to get a stand-in, an actor. The archbishop couldn’t make it, but this one is much better. It’s an all-denominational ceremony.’ He is delighted to be becoming a bishop. ‘And the lists?’ I ask.

‘What lists?’

The audience is mainly porters, and some women have already formed a claque for a rival appointee. Bishop Kidd is joined on the platform by a small, talkative lady candidate. The acting archbishop cuts something up and starts roasting it for two. Kidd looks dis­appointed. Indeed, tears come to his eyes. The ritual feast seems to be monkey, or it might be cat.

‘I hope the congressman at least spares me his presence, for that man has done so much to hurt our cause,’ says Kidd.

‘What cause is that?’ I ask.

‘Why, to save Brazil and all Brazilians, and to make sure they do not renege on their responsibilities,’ says Kidd.

Debts are good business. The congressman arrives in an embassy car. Some of the armed men around seem to be with him. His name, I see from his badge, is Heinz Egger. He is important, for he has brought a double too – not just to foil assassins but, I feel, to survive himself.

He says to me, ‘Aha, so our Mr Kidd has passed over to the other side. Let’s hope for him as well the trumpets will all sound, but not, I observe, yours, Jay.’ He is in high humour. ‘Placing’ friends and enemies in higher places, the more incongruous the better, is his game. He goes on, ‘Bishop Kidd will serve us well. He is a rising star, while Lopez must do in other ways – a wet blanket if there ever was one, but so convinced of being God we cannot let him go, run to his own devices.’

I say, ‘Well, though everything begins again, this time with you all muscling in here, I’m off your hooks at least.’

The congressman has moved to inspect the brazier, but the archbishop’s gorillas flap him back, and I think I see them wave a sign at him, or it may be a plastic doll that garbage men collect and stick as mascots on their carts, or it may be something wet and moving, like a spleen. At all events, the man steps back – I had not seen he was so tall before. We tower above the black sheep, who are indifferent to our presence.

‘Hooks, Jay? Your hooks are of your making. How can you get off a thing that you have shaped? Certainly, the embassy always has an interest in nationals with a record, and have some contact with the services – especially those who work in no man’s land, like Mr Stepan, who I think you know, and have perhaps tempted, tempted with what alas we know he takes like ratbane. A poison, as you know, that makes you swell and thirst, and drink and burst.

‘Money, I fear, generates desire. Desire is what it’s all about, you know, desire that breeds and feeds on more and more, like interest mounting in the bank.’

      The lady bishop is jigging about, trying to press Mr Kidd into some kind of lurching embrace. His collar has drifted round his neck, civilianising him again. He holds a lily in one hand and a toasted drumstick in the other. The black archbishop conducts the band with vigour. They do a creditable number, and the sounds they make bring us down to earth.

So, Cloud and Water are theatrical outfitters. Kidd is heavy on the forgiveness business and much taken with the stage. The porters run off to snatch work from each other, but he stays on the boards, blessing with his white lily, from which a long red tongue, coated with yellow gobs of pollen, lolls.

It seems that only I have not gone back to entertainment – even Madox writes and has a live-in agent. I resist Jeanne Marie’s exuberance that led us dancing down the globe. I am still criminal and fixer, and it suits me.

The congressman says, ‘You and I are wise old dogs. We know we can’t all sing for our supper – someone must go out and shoot it, or there’s nothing.’ The ritual is abandoned, and on the square remain: some bones, some bottles. Violet leaflets for skiing holidays. Not much.

He says, ‘Jay, you’re close to Fernando, and I could use someone who will keep an eye on him. Not that we don’t see eye to eye, of course.’ He winks, and I wonder which eye he uses for Fernando. The veins in the white are just green dots, eggs of a condor, boiled and abandoned. He continues, ‘And Jeanne Marie is quite a girl. Still quite a girl.’ He winks again. His gorillas have stripped down to their bullet-proof vests. They gather round a friendly brown dog. I think how its brown skin makes it look like a bather, like a girl whose tanned skin gives her the confidence to wear it like a fur. And he’s right about Jeanne Marie, although, I say, ‘There is the problem of her mind and style of life.’

He says, ‘I never let that bother me. It’s energy one must seek. What is dynamic, what has force. Forget the legions of the dull, the powerless, their aspirations – repeated and unappeasable down the ages. Religion will serve them just as well—’ He breaks off, and I wonder ‘as well as what?’ Power? Sex? A modest life and death? I say to the congressman, ‘Why not try Lomé? She’s much closer to Fernando than I am.’

He turns white. ‘That woman! Her very presence is oppressive! For one thing, she is obsessed with her art. When I could not promise money for a movie, more than surprised, she was offended. And her insults: I made some innocent remark about hiring the Bahia carnival for a parade on Broadway, and some attempt at wit about our southern neighbours being condemned to repeat as error everything that we up here got right ... And she was most insulting – gestures impossible not to understand, even though she remained fully clothed. I had my man put her out, of course, but for a moment ... so different from my childhood on the farm, the blacks there quite at ease with me and intimate – the games of hangings in the barn,’ His eyes light up, ‘the rat hunts in the dawn – you’ve never seen, I’ll bet, those extraordinary dawns in Maine, where first a line of fog is drawn above the line of frost, the line of frost divides and shows another line beneath – of brine. The three white lines hang there, like three dancers, then there creeps in a thinnest line, below, of green, of corn-green, then the fog moves up, and there’s a band of brown, a mailbox – red – a fence-post grey, a gradual complexity, and up and up the mist rises until you see the sky, as if the curtain has risen on a magnificent, a transcendent, an enfolding, void.’

I refuse a ride in his car. In any case, it’s full of guards Where does it come from? How can this jaunt be justified?

In Payo’s bar there’s tension. Prostitution is depressed. Even Jeanne Marie has stopped promoting altruistic screwing. The jellybabies thought someone was making her work for nothing. The parakeet says, ‘Something heavy going down,’ and Payo turns from his task to give a gloomy smirk: he is opening a box labelled Japanese scotch, but all I see inside is twisted roots.

Lomé hurries by and says, ‘Watch yourself’, and ‘Why not start practising?’

Fernando is grinning. He shows me a photo, of myself with the congressman. We are immensely tall. I have on my Raybans, and look like a spy advertising my spymaster. Fernando keeps saying, ‘I was there, you didn’t see me. Just one of the little folk ...’

I say, ‘If you spy on me, Fernando, you’re spying on yourself. Everyone knows we’re as close as nostrils.’ But for some reason he’s delighted. ‘Next turn a senator,’ he crows, ‘Just like the Romans!’

The parakeet takes it up, ‘Friends, Romans, conquerors.’

There is no doubt Fernando feels he has triumphed. He pulls an ascetic face, and says, ‘Enough of abnegation, enough of wiping things out. I have discovered inwardness. I shall concentrate on my mind, its purity, its general condition.’

I say, ‘I thought that’s what you always did, Fernando,’ but he doesn’t heed me.

Later, Jeanne Marie tells me she has given up cancellation. It seems logically untenable. ‘If you cancel,’ she says, ‘you’re still what you are. Just you’ve no idea how you got to be that way. Nothing is ever new, and we’re always tied to ourselves, whether we know it or not.’

I tell her, ‘That sounds a very grown-up thing to say,’ but she is inconsolable. Now every day will bring a further loss of innocence, another virginity squandered.

I hear from Windisch, who wants to know exactly what is crashing down here. If I see a civilisation in decline,’ he says, ‘I might identify what civilisation is when its not declining. If I saw a society collapse, I’d know then what holds them up.’ He promises to come down and see for himself, but I tell him he expects too much from a short visit. He says, ‘First impressions are my specials, Jay. And it seems this flattening out, this not caring and uncaring life they say you have here – is spreading universally. It’s the next thing, a world civilisation that is decadent before it’s even started,’ and I warn him again. ‘Distrust those first impressions, Windisch,’ but he says ‘Jay, I’ve no time for more.’ Impressions or our conversation?

He once told me, ‘A very little civilisation does for me – it should be like steel, the hotter and more fluid it appears, the stronger the end product is.’ I had meant to ask what this end product was, but never found the time.

I think of playing once more, working with Lomé, but as I start to break back in, I remember that I haven’t changed. Technique was perfect for the simple things, but technique so simple doesn’t get you far. Sad that it cuts me off from Lomé, who with her Fernando now is almost a first lady, trading on antecedents and her New York tapes.

The parakeet too stays true to its limits and croaks, ‘Up and down and round and round, They all end up in a hole in the ground,’ but it is really speaking for itself, and I fancy it will end up in the garbage, not in any hole.

And so, one is drawn to the incongruous relationships that incongruity, what we may have, allows. In my case, a sympathy for Jeanne Marie, devoid now of faith in her dissolving past and future. And Lopez now a sulky, as well as a drowsy god. I ask her, ‘Did you know he was on codeine?’ and she says, ‘He told me it was pulque, for his soul.’

The spiritual has wrecked itself on the barrenness of the adult personality, though Jeanne Marie had hoped to cancel hers, and Lopez knocks his on the head.

‘A tropical country.’ It takes hold of us. Even the congressman’s blood is warming up, or maybe Lomé’s spell is wearing off. He starts to hold court, plays poker for small stakes and always wins, forces Fernando to unpack some rooms – carnival heads and crackers with a dynamite charge – and offer rounds of jellybabies to the hangers-on.

Windisch arrives, his ears raised like antennas. ‘You’re all gathering here,’ he says. ‘Yes, yes, yes, yes. Something’s happening, all being sucked in here.’ He sees us as all mustered round one of the vents that leads down – to what? ‘No, not to hell,’ he laughs, ‘But down somewhere. Implosion of the modern world – and it was you, Jay, for whom I’ve always had a great respect ...’ He begins to mumble, and I catch, ‘Not always reciprocating to the full, and then again a talent not quite realised, even led astray, the unfortunate blend of anarchy and moralism that’s so easily subverted, leading to an oscillation between extremes of tolerance and a will to power that in the very nature of our condition cannot be appeased ...’

I say, ‘Windisch, if you’re talking about me when you’re talking to me, you have the duty to be clear,’ and the parakeet laughs a tall and teetering laugh, a crystal bead frozen on a copper frond. Fashioned and in secret placed amidst the other fronds. For what?

Windisch says, ‘The way I see it, Jay, you started a huge jangling here and there: you were the fly that burst into a web that’s large as life itself. And twice as expensive.’

‘Which means?’ I say.

‘I plotted it all out with Mr Stepan. On his computer, there’s a design that starts from here, this very bar, devised by Fernando, and financed by Payo and his friends.’ He gestures at the jellybabies and, from habit, some wave back. ‘His plan is to increase the autonomy of the interior. This he does in two complementary and also contradictory ways – by loosening its ties with the centre, and by strengthening them with the outside, which we know is Uncle Sam, or under some such name. And so he needs the power to know, if not to control, who’s coming in, and going out, and so – what are the groups who’re interested, and what governments think.’

I ask, ‘But autonomy for who, for what? For exploitation, or to resist it?’

Windisch smiles, ‘As you well know, the powers of Don Fernando don’t involve themselves primarily with this. First one joins battle, then one sees. These autonomies of the periphery, when no centre holds, has ever held, these shifting sands, these people on the edge, these cosmic margins, virgin deserts – what power can hold here, that’s disinterested? Especially one that’s run from here. He waves his hand again and Payo very slowly brings out a bowl of brown liquid for us: its surface moves in foamy regular waves that don’t subside, and we don’t touch it.

‘Then,’ Windisch says, ‘there’s the counterplot. To increase the influence of the big interests of the North, the gods, we might say, of the wind and cold. The congressman has an idea that he might run the interior himself, draining out of it the dangers to us all – the forest fires, the draining of the river basin: might, in a word, congeal the whole running down. But with a deeper purpose, one I should not have credited, save that our friend up there, Mr Stepan as you know, was able to tease it out of his computer as it were a skein of Chopin.’

‘That is?’ I ask.

‘A survival area. To begin again. Our roots. The congressman, his intimates know him as Hinzurucker, the there-and-back-again man, has a plan to make the Amazon jungle a park, where the Indios are maybe preserved, but all around them rage jungle survival courses – anti-surgency of lads from Kansas. Moral purity is the thing. And that is why Fernando wanted to keep the religious out, because it could get local support, the congressman because it cancelled roots and made the cult of fucking seem a universal release and pacifier ...’

‘Which the Kansas guys could have fallen for if they stopped reading comic books.’

‘Exactly.’

‘So plot and counterplot end up as variations – a circling round and mutual sniffing out. Fernando would settle to be prince of nowhere, the congressman to be the emperor of icecream.’

‘Exactly so,’ says Windisch.

‘And so from being central and a threat, Jeanne Marie is just a tactical weapon. Falcucci and Madox have nothing left to watch, and Mr Kidd becomes a bishop, like in living chess,’ I conclude.

‘Exactly. And Cloud and Water arrive, in a way sucked in by Lopez, to show the congressman what originals become. The survival grounds. That is his plan. A kind of reservation of the plants, and people too. Except the people then become just more Cloud and Water, people whose element is mud.’

‘I see great chances of big bucks, not to say aggrandisement. But where do Lomé and I come in?’ I ask.

Windisch’s ears are sharp as elbows, and he says, ‘You are the innocents. You are the ingenuous power of music, which says it all, but doesn’t need to say a word. You are the primal fixers, beyond suspicion, yet the universal grease that lines up people and their causes – the battle hymn, the national anthem and the wake. Bury them deep and then dance dance dance on their grave. Total plastic of emotions. Void filled with intellect and sensibility – nothing. Sound, but no fury. But I, I know that’s wrong. Because I have seen you, Jay, have seen the fury in you.’

I say, ‘Stepan was having you on. He wants to keep the program running so he can get more cash – grass for the moose, meaty thighs for the wolves.’

‘What you don’t appreciate,’ says Windisch, ‘is the dimension of this clash, the powers that Fernando and the congressman not just represent but are: the last powers in the world. And you have brought them together here, in the port that leads directly to the kingdom of the mud, the place that sees the slaves, the sons of free men, meet with the originals, the Indios, the fathers.’

‘Why are the slaves the sons of free men?’ I ask.

‘The Indios are the men who made us, the slaves are the people that we made. And now there’s only you, Jay, who can resolve all this – for, so you tell me, Lomé has passed to Fernando, and Jeanne Marie has lost her faith, the silly thing. Car fare to Tennessee – that’s what the congressman will pay, no more. And Lopez, as gods go, is melancholy. He has gathered here to pick the bones, heap up the skulls, peck here at a heart and there a liver. A classic case of supreme deity indifference.’

‘With some things I agree,’ I say. ‘But what is happening here, old friend? You have described the end of the world. What do I do? Play the reveille, last trump blues?’

Windisch stares at me: ‘Exactly. Yes. The end of the world it is, we sink back into mud. The last souls flicker out, old age cancels memory and Jeanne Marie’s libido sets, and goes back into Lopez’s cold and smoky realm. And what do you do? Perhaps a crime. That you commit, or stop – how should I know? You can’t ask a computer that.’

‘It’s a farrago, Windisch,’ I tell him.

‘I know. So what?’ he says.

‘Of all of them, I think that I prefer Jeanne Marie, because she is quite hopeless, helpless, useless. Trouble and disaster flake off around her,’ and I think of Lopez telling me, ‘Jay, you have a foul existence.’

Windisch is earnest, and he says, ‘No, no, you can’t be turned aside by mere compassion. Especially if it’s for yourself. Somehow you have drawn them. Somehow – all are transforming, becoming what they must be – but darker, always darker. It’s the reign of nothing upon earth.’

I say, ‘In that case, I’d rather approve.’

Windisch is implacable. ‘No, no, Jay, this is not anarchy, this is the end. Willed and wilful. No one is coming, there is nothing left to save.’

‘And what will you do with this analysis? Make another one tomorrow?’

‘Even today,’ says Windisch.

And if and when he leaves again, I’m sorry. He is the pilot who has put us on the rock, gave us a little swimming lesson.

‘It pains me about Lomé,’ I tell him. ‘But the congressman has it in mind to square the circle, going off with Jeanne Marie. The competition now is such that move calls counter-move, without regard for any real utility.’

But Windisch says, ‘What would he do with Jeanne Marie? Those two, Fernando and the congressman are wrestling free style, they don’t care what happens. A continental cattle-ranch for Hideanseeker making the hamburgers for the world: a people zoo for Don Fernando, where he can sell admissions to who’s left outside – it all becomes the same, you see. We are in the age of world business, world activities. And it will burn us out, and nothing to be done, just nothing to be done.’ He dances a few steps. ‘Just stick the records on and interview the scientists as down you all go, down.’

And I say, ‘You’d feel lost with anything else, Windisch,’ but he’s gone.

I don’t like talking about myself, I say to Lomé later, as she waits for her act to start. She says, ‘I can relate to that, Jay,’ but from what side she doesn’t say. She sings remarkably, she’s like a package that by going through the mail and being insured and lost and redirected accumulates a lustre and a mystery – a gleam like you would find on steamer trunks or hatboxes, like Xica da Silva, slave and empress of the world, her artificial lake and invite to King Louis. Lomé’s plateau of professionalism will not let her fall, but now she has consumed so many styles, gobbled so many other singers, she has become mosaic. That never falls at once, or all together, just a few points of colour falling every year, petals pushed out by other petals starting.

‘Remarkable, quite remarkable,’ I tell her.

‘That’s dinner for a lifetime,’ she agrees. ‘And no more tours, and all that jazz. And apologies to you, my dear.’

And yet there’s something not quite right. The club, the drinks – perhaps they’re subsidised, or even bought by someone else, as only tourists like to pay these days ... and that from sense of shame, perhaps, however it’s obscured.

I sniff at one of the glasses. It is plastic, but looks like crystal. The liquid inside is green and smells of dawn, but tastes like monkey’s nose – a drink inquisitive, promiscuous. As though excrement has been prepared in it. For what?

So, Payo does the catering. The evening rushes to a climax. In the bar I see the jellybabies, and a host of tawny-headed tourists. The stage is opened up to show a table, at its broad side, facing the public, there are enthroned two kings. I see that they are Don Fernando and the congressman. Fernando wears a tall magician’s hat in blue, and a suit so stiff it seems asbestos, and at the level of his hat another hat, but this time black, and on a perch. I hear him say, ‘That damn bird’, and the parakeet replies ‘Vice on the arm of crime, squawk, squawk’, and hops towards the congressman – but it is tethered. The first time I’ve seen it chained.

The congressman has on a kind of turban in cerise: and in it he has stuck a tuft of black feathers. Similar hats are handed round. Don Fernando provides the crowns, and we’re all kings. It is a different scene from Jeanne Marie’s, a marriage of God and woman from which might rise – divine Jeanne Marie.

Fernando makes a banal speech of welcome, announcing too that the time has come to order our last drinks, a custom this, ‘imported from the USA, on the insistence of my partner here, the congressman, who will say a word about the philosophy of limit and creatively austere behaviour for us all.’

The congressman is brief. We must preserve and guard the resources we have left, including the bar’s electricity and drinks which we can enjoy tomorrow and the next day too. He himself proposes an example, drinks his last drink, briefly extinguishes the lights, announces a scheme involving partnership.

‘It’s the division of the world,’ I say to Lomé, and she corrects me – ‘The division of my world, Jay.’

I ask, ‘And are you happy now, with this?’ and she says, ‘Indifferent – but I didn’t work industriously like you to bring about what you now deplore. Besides, the division, as you put it, is a divide that immediately unites. And all in all, between the congressman and Don Fernando, and the giants you thought to bring in here – I don’t see too much difference. It was immodest of you to step in, to intervene.’

It’s true. And yet a great crime, a genocide, is going on.

 

 

 

 

eight

 

 

I suggest to Jeanne Marie that she leave her bare belvedere and share the backroom of Payo’s bar, where I now live. She is more interested in justifying her past than improving her existence.

‘I at least invented a religion, or a technique. And greater claims than that one can’t make,’ she says.

I reply, ‘That’s true, if claims is all,’ and think, ‘a silly religion too,’ but say instead, ‘Where is Lopez, now that divine days are done?’

‘He’s doing divination at the stadium. Sells packets of predictions, sleeps under the stadium shell.’ I imagine his niche under the goals, the altars of this monumental trough, so immense it would wrench the heart of any Aztec. I tell her, ‘He has found the right trade, and the right home. But it isn’t right for you.’

‘Fernando has promised me something, some work, but he’s not unpacked, and then the congressman, but he’s well, so English, so damn cold.’

I agree, ‘Yes, he is an extreme, a polar case. But then, you’ve given up on all your sect?’ If so, I thought, there’s no more lists and I’m stuck down here for good, or at least till some old phantom from the past, another Windisch, takes me back.

Jeanne Marie says, ‘The community, alas, is dead – the bank foreclosed. In any case, the elders said that I got all the fun. There may well arise a new messiah and his church, and with some chick divine, out West somewhere. Perhaps Nebraska. All of them that’s left is sure enough all anglos.’

‘To me,’ I say, ‘it’s Lopez isn’t right. A great guy, but arrogant, in a slothful way. You, though, shouldn’t surrender all your plans – your talents are adaptable, and if not for a cult, of which there is abundance here, then just for scheming, entertainment, politics – your fields are vast, and fertile, even.’

‘You mean a lay, a secular prophet,’ she asks, brightening.

Well, I had rather seen her on the stage with Lomé, since strippers with green eyes attract a following, of gamblers and the little creatures of the night. And I as manager, of course. But she is off again, down that hobbyist’s list of what passes in the States for social movement, living in yet another different way, seeing the same things more sharply ...

I pretend to be irritated: ‘Can’t you stop thinking like a charlatan,’ I say, ‘Think like a Cajun Queen, think of what you can declare, quite honestly, or what might be helpful, even entertaining, to people that you get along with.’

She is silent. I feel I have revealed a truth to her, that I have changed her life, removed her alienation, that has pinned her down – skin of an animal or a gourd.

She stares at me all mine, as never before impressed.

She says, ‘I always wondered if you were a violent man: then all the stories about you, Jay – they’re all true.’

This idea catches her, like the other one – that of the cult, whatever – did. Useless to persevere. I say, ‘To be consistent with itself, anarchy requires a moral order. Moral order, to be acceptable, requires an anarchy. Either we cut our throats – each others’ throats – or else we have them cut for us’ – but she is unconcerned with word-spins. Now, it’s the prophet armed – she senses the arm, packed away and oiled, waiting for the moment when stiff-legged and six-shooting, another awful figure, plastered with Angolan clay, strides out into the sun. She’s hopeless – but this means she’ll come to Payo’s bar. And now I need them all, the whole crowd, my resources now.

Madox has contracted prickly heat, the writing broke him down. But he will come, Falcucci too. I remember her saying ‘we’re not humanists’, and now they are the hook and bait of a detective agency. Falcucci seduces and is caught, or burgles, and is not. Madox follows along to sell protection, or a photograph, or a set of locks. Cloud and Water cobble together costumes from the things they find. The less they find, the more fantasy and daring emerges from the result. They are even fashionable, and when they cease to be, they will go back to being ragpickers, pluckers of birds, salvagers of rinds.

We are all gone back to the ways of creation, but since no one appears to work, or think of our needs, this Eden is a godless one, before the curse of general work turned us all sour. Only from the interior comes news of how we’ll all go down, protesting mouths that fill with mud, as if there was a constant earthquake, a long shaking down into the galleries of earth – whose centre doesn’t glow but is reduced now to a blob of ice, that will go liquid in that sun we’re all going mad about – our tongues full and pink and spiny, going to Payo’s bar for salty drinks that taste of vulture snot.

And now the duumvirate is florid, it has captured everyone, it’s second only to the sun, and we all run about, with gossip of Don Fernando, and when does Congress start, and will our man be President – perhaps he’ll be one who’s killed instead ... and so we run about, our full pink tongues thirsty for Payo’s drinks, and Fernando leans on his partner’s arm, and whispers in his ear, stretching to reach it like a salamander, and I see, the first and only time, that Don Fernando has a tongue, and that it’s pink and glistening too, and very swift and sharp. And I know the end of the world is here, waiting for Don Fernando to launch the word, tempting, teasing on the agile tip ...

The parakeet is sick. Its tongue is white and shredded like a chewed stick. It says, ‘Pay up, pay up, roll, roll Jordan roll’, but it really could be anything, and it hops and grimaces like a tout, and waves the little string of national flags that hangs down from its perch all white with starch and lime, the flags too all bleached out.

The duumvirate is in rehearsal. Perhaps for the big feast Don Fernando will unpack for, perhaps for the cooling fireworks the congressman has promised us. They sit together on the stand – it is indeed a Roman triumph. The poor bands march past. There is a band of whistles, instruments and bandsmen all of different sizes, and they make a windy mooing like the mouths of caves, the little pipers are thin and shrill as linnets and I think of Lopez at the celebration of his friend, of Xipe – flutes sounded, broken, then the heart cut out.

There is a band of bugles – all the bugles sound the same note, and seem identical. Then there is a band of drums, and they go whoompf, whoompf, like lungs. And then there is a band of mickey mice, playing the kind of plastic instruments you find in crackers. Don Fernando seems delighted, even the congressman cracks a smile. I make a call to Stepan, thinking it will be the last.

He says, ‘In for one last throw, then, Jay? It’s hard to tell about the Hensegger man. It’s generally believed that he has flown the coop, taking a lot of money and a secret file on almost everyone – for use in topping up, when funds get low. Yet there are also those who say he’s liquidated all his wealth to start an ecological park, nurturing the survivors, building a new race from the roots, resistant to acid and to fire...’

He is like a river, Stepan, ‘Yes, yes, I’ve heard all that,’ I say. ‘But is he on a list?’

And Stepan laughs. ‘I know you’re on a list, my friend, and know what for. But what will you do there?’

‘I shall just watch,’ I say.

He laughs and says, ‘You’ll boil over again, I know you, Jay. And next time they’ll throw away the key. Or, seeing as you’re there, they’ll rub you out.’

‘Stepan,’ I say, ‘just the one thing. It seems to me that everyone – just everyone – is on those lists of yours.’ There is a silence. Then a crossed line says, ‘What makes a spectacle in Tennessee is not necessarily the same thing in Bahia.’ ‘That’s very true.’ Then Stepan is back, and says, ‘Yes, that’s about it, Jay.’

The duo on the rostrum watch the colonists slouch, hop and samba past. They are already half in drag, the congressman has made himself a queen of hearts, and Don Fernando is a Marie Antoinette. And I’m the knave. Fernando gets down, out of the sun, and says, ‘I’m always thinking of a job for you, dear Jay. Perhaps a little protection for me, would that suit you, do you think?’

I say, ‘I don’t like being hit, and hitting even less. Besides, there’s Madox. And you don’t need gorillas, but a pistolero,’ and he smiles. ‘It’s disliking violence that makes good bodyguards. It’s where we all once started. And Madox has a history of changing sides and you,’ he laughs, ‘have only one – your own.’

He adds, ‘Above all, no thieving,’ like a precept, and   I say, ‘Does it look as if I thieve?’ but the congressman has taken over, and it seems to me that, yes, he could be president, or chieftain, with virgin brides in every room and milky horses to manure the White House lawn. He says, ‘Look at him, look at him, Jay, have you ever seen anything finer in Raybans?’

They crowd around me, and more people come, laughing. ‘You should do my PR, Jay,’ Fernando says. ‘But no sex. Take the journalists to Payo’s, but no forbidden fruit – that doesn’t come from Payo’s battles. No jellybabies, mind, unless you want to rot.’

A thought now comes to mind, that this procession is a rehearsal now for something else, creation of a regime that’s to last till the current fails.

I say to Jeanne Marie – ‘You see these pasteboard queens – could they be made holograms and sit while we file past for ever? And could we, in our turn, be made holograms, and be about our better business too, which in due course would be extinction and the clump of candles on the pavement?’

‘No, Jay. There would be no point.’

The gods are where they are, and Jeanne Marie is where, and what, she is. The police are also here, but have adjusted their trades. Jeanne Marie says, ‘I’m nothing to do with you, Jay, but I’m not easily reduced.’

Everyone but the two of us is laughing, especially the little blacks dancing along the street. Power too likes a good laugh, I think, so do we all. It must be a comfort to tell stories and laugh. ‘Yes, you and I have no sense of humour,’ says Jeanne Marie. ‘My stories didn’t make them laugh, nor did they comfort them.’ And I agree.

Boy scouts have penetrated even here: I see an instruction, ‘Prevent a crime today’, and someone has pencilled on it ‘or commit one’.

Cloud and Water jazz by, they wear designer briefs, and both now have the wrinkled guts that come with too much Bud and Old Crow. I am stony sober, but I feel I have been drinking hard all day.

I say, ‘I shall just watch, I think,’ and I hear Lomé say something to Jeanne Marie, that sounds like ‘parcel him up’, or it may be ‘parcel him out’, and if it’s me, then who gets what and what can be divided?

The slaves knew all about division, and very long division too, and I see Fernando light a cheroot and with the stump attempt to light a candle, and he blows and blows, as though the charring end can light another charring end, and Congressman Egg protects his face but does not seem to sweat. I see Falcucci’s fat ham-coloured legs wriggling disappear through someone’s window, while Madox round the corner waits to catch her and sign a contract, and as he stands there tall in his leathers he takes out a cheroot, lights it and throws down the match.

      The parade starts up another time, and Fernando opens a new box of plastic instruments, pink saxophones, blue trumpets, long as a long finger, and they all start off, the bands, and four primal musics thump and twang, like different organs of the body doing different things.

Behind him I hear the parakeet over and over saying confidentially, ‘My God, I do feel ill, I think I’m going to die, ha ha,’ but Payo is busy serving drinks that seem to belch and regurgitate themselves, and doesn’t heed.

And Don Fernando laughs, as he never used to do, and I remember how he was, with talk of souls, the left and freedom, and now that these are dead again, he starts to laugh. The congressman joins in and somewhere in the mud there too, perhaps, they all begin to laugh. I say to Jeanne Marie, ‘Laughter is not always a sign of merriment,’ but she doesn’t hear, or recognise, or care. And everyone is laughing now, some spitefully, and some to make the others laugh, and some because they’re being paid, and some because they haven’t anything else they want to do. Our grins say that we are one, that inwardness has burst on up and out, and registered at least a grin – for if you’re in the mud you shouldn’t laugh too hard in case it all comes in and fills you up.

And Don Fernando puts his arms around me. ‘So, at last,’ he says, ‘you have arrived.’

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I’m here.’

‘Too bad,’ he says, ‘for you. You had your chance, you fired your shot.’

I push against his arm. ‘Perhaps I haven’t fired,’ I say, trying to break away.

‘Your little shot,’ he says, and laughs.

He draws me closer, and I see his face is bright and innocent, he’s laughing and the others too, are laughing round, and he must see I’m trying to get away from him, to break his hold. But he just laughs, and with the congressman’s, the laughs are two. And as he laughs, he forces out the words: ‘It doesn’t matter if you fired or not, because, my dear friend Jay, you only ever have one shot. You only have one shot.’