Port Mungo Page 5
It was a strange, violent night in New York. As though a spirit were abroad, or a posse of demons. There were jangling discordant energies wherever they went. Shouting cops, restive crowds, snarled traffic. Saturday night, a full moon, madness in the city: in one bar an enraged man picked a fight with a stranger and when they tried to throw him out he tore the washroom door off its hinges and hurled it across the counter, bottles, glasses and mirrors shattering, and they all had to run for the exit.
An hour later, in another bar, Vera’s friend Herb turned on Jack, irritated by his silence.
—What are you doing here, man? he shouted, over the hubbub of talk and jukebox, and in a tone of sufficient hostility that the rest of the table fell silent and looked on with interest. They all knew Herb’s history with Vera. Jack shrugged. He was burning, he told me, with rage and embarrassment, but all he did was lift his glass, lift his cigarette, as if to say, Nothing, drinking and smoking like you.
—Yeah, but what are you doing? I mean, taking up space, that it? You give me nothing, man, you’re like a plant.
—Shut up, Herb, shouted Vera.
—A houseplant.
Herb turned grinning to the table.
—Better a plant than a Herb, shouted Vera, but it was too late for Jack. It hadn’t occurred to him that anything was expected of him here. These people were older than him, they were Americans, they knew Vera from before, their talk gave him no openings. He was not an artist, not yet, he was not an American, he had nothing to contribute. He bought drinks, he assumed that his position was understood. Now this. The rage all at once boiled over and he lunged at Herb, swinging wildly with both fists. His mood was brutal to begin with. For several weeks his existence had had meaning only in relation to Vera. He was baffled by her friends, he hated bloody Herb—he was sure there was something between them still, and it preyed on him—he felt there was no solid ground under his feet, nothing familiar to cling to. He needed me, but me of course he had left far behind. Now this. Herb scuttled away and stood panting and growling and shouting at him to settle down, man, be cool, man, and Jack slumped back onto his chair, wiping his face where he’d spilt beer in his brief assault. Then he pushed his chair back and in the sudden silence the legs scraped loudly across the boards of the tavern floor. Without a word he walked out into the night.
For several hours he walked the streets, thinking of nothing but how good the cold air felt on his skin, and seething still with jealous rage. He didn’t know that Vera had rushed out after him, but that he’d walked away so fast she didn’t see where he’d gone, nor in the loud, mad city did he hear her shouting for him. He tramped the city streets, his thoughts in utter turmoil, alone in this alien place, and Vera a part of a world which offered no place for him, which rejected him. He tramped the streets and allowed the anger and misery to boil up and rage unchecked.
Midnight, and he found himself down at the Battery, sitting on a bench, smoking a cigarette, gazing out at the harbour where just a few weeks before he’d stood on the deck of a liner and felt the limitless promise of the city. The night was cold and clear. The crisis was on him, and he must make a decision, to go back or go on. To go back was unthinkable. But how to go on? He had to get out of New York. But he had to get out of New York with Vera—and that simple thought shed all the light he needed. It was a decision not to abandon her.
I believe he made other decisions that night, or rather that certain ideas crystallized in his mind. He told me he waited for sunrise, for the first light of dawn to touch the Statue of Liberty and burn off the mist on the water. He said there had been other times in his life when the early-morning hours seemed to open new avenues in his mind, something to do with the edginess, the febrility that comes of not having slept, something to do with the sense of an empty world out there, a sleeping world, the space for one’s thoughts not contested but free, rather, for expansive movement, for the sweeping perspective. Gazing out at the harbour Jack at last found some clarity. He said he understood that years of obscurity lay ahead of him while he became a painter. He would suffer humiliation and neglect, but this he could endure: he would grow the hide of a rhino and become impervious to the opinions of others. Better by far, he thought, to spend those years elsewhere. He would come back to New York but only when he had something to offer New York: he would return a mature painter with a body of work. The city was no place for an aspirant, for a beginner. New York was full of aspirants and beginners, and they all seemed to be Vera’s drinking buddies. He would stagnate if he stayed, he would grow sodden and lazy, and delude himself into believing he was an artist when he was nothing of the sort. He needed rigour, he needed routine, he needed somewhere he could live cheap and work without distraction. Above all he needed Vera beside him.
And then, as yet another stray beam of enlightenment came shafting in with the sunrise, all at once he felt with a sense of rising wonder—and he was still young enough that such sudden dramatic shifts of mood were possible—that the paranoia was lifting, that the knot of sexual suspicion he had been worrying at, obsessively, was dissolving—it was all in his imagination, of course it was, and he had to communicate this to Vera without delay, sweep away all the bad feeling, sit down and talk to her, consider their options, make a plan—
When he got back to the hotel she was waiting for him in a state of great distress. They clung to each other and she told him how she had scoured the Village for hours, and so had Herb, but it didn’t matter now, none of that mattered, and they fell onto the bed, she wrapped her legs around him, and responded with joy to the love newly started from some secret spring inside him during the hours he’d been alone by the harbour. Afterwards they didn’t sleep, they sat up talking, and this he called the Rising. Later he made a painting inspired by that long dark night of the soul, as he thought of it: The Rising, probably the rawest of what I regard as his phallic paintings.
They talked about the future, and he told her that he had to get out of New York, that he could no longer live the life they were living. He was moving on, and she could come with him if she wanted or she could stay where she was and drown her talent in whisky. She did not argue. She was languid with sex.
—Where do you want to go?
He told her he wanted to go south.
—How far south?
As far as he had to, until he found a place where he could work. He told her that more than anything in the world he wanted her to come with him. He begged her to come with him.
Later they sat in a coffee shop down the block. It was almost noon. She was wearing dark glasses. Beyond the plate-glass window the rain was gently falling. She was more awake now, and worrying at this ultimatum of his, delivered earlier when she was still soft and tender from the sex. She cranked up her engines of dissent. Rusty and spluttering at first, she soon had her theme and Jack allowed her to run it out. The general drift was, he was asking her to turn her back on her friends, all that was familiar to her. First London, now here—what was wrong with New York?
Nothing was wrong with New York, he told her, it was how they lived in New York that was wrong: they stayed in bed all morning, he said, then they wandered the city for three or four hours, then it was time for cocktails.
She took off her sunglasses and rubbed her eyes. She spoke about being dragged far from civilization. She said he was leading her deep into a jungle she would never find her way out of. But Jack knew, so he said later, that as she grumbled and rambled she was at the same time coolly examining his proposal, and that even as she argued, the idea of going south began to rouse her, for she was always susceptible to the prospect of flight, she was far more the drifter than he was.
—Where is it you want to go, Jack?
She was properly awake now, she had drunk enough coffee, the hook was in. He shrugged. He was cool, offhand.
—Mexico.
—Mexico!
—Cuba. Honduras.
She had her sunglasses on again, he couldn’t see her eyes. But sh
e ran her tongue round the inside of her mouth as she reached for the cigarettes and murmured the names. Mexico—Cuba—Honduras—poetry!
—Go by water, he said.
—By boat, yes.
—Look for a town on the coast.
—A river town.
Is this how the conversation went? A river town may or may not have been suggested, and Vera may or may not have been so easily persuaded. But she knew that without Jack she was sunk. She had no plans, no money, nothing. And she was still very much in love with him. And so, in this fashion, or in a fashion similar to this, the decision was made. They would pack up and go south. She grew excited later, this Jack did remember clearly, she decided that here was one of the moments of grand pathos in an artist’s life—a moment of heroic self-sacrifice—a moment when a woman lifted her eyes and glimpsed her destiny, understanding, yes, what must be done, no matter the cost, for Art to be served. She called it “The Leaving of Manhattan.” She described, over drinks, to the usual crowd, the epic canvas she intended to paint, a vast thing of color and movement, allegorical figures in the sea and in the sky, with Manhattan a kind of radiant heart in the center of the composition, and pulling away from it a great white ship with four slanting funnels and Jack and herself at the rail with their eyes on a future where Art and Art Alone would rule, and their friends on the dock weeping and dancing—
How they laughed. Let her mock herself, thought Jack, let her set herself up as a ridiculous figure, the woman who left Manhattan so she could paint in peace.
But just let me get her to that quiet river town and she will be painting pictures of real importance. More to the point, so will I. No, she wouldn’t let him go without her, he knew this, she wouldn’t miss this adventure, and besides, there was real spirit in Vera Savage, an old deep spark of the unquenchable stuff. And Manhattan—Manhattan could wait. Manhattan wouldn’t go away.
For much of the next year they drifted. They didn’t leave New York in a great white ship with four red funnels, they took the train to Miami. I believe there was a sexual crisis of some kind—Vera told me about it years later—the first infidelity, if you don’t count Gordon, which she didn’t. They weathered the storm through my good offices: the money arrived the next day, and it came as a shaft of grace, for it allowed them to move on and, more important, to buy clothes more appropriate to the climate.
I next glimpse them in Havana—this was before the revolution—living in an apartment at the top of a crumbling pale-blue building with a balcony from which they could see the Caribbean tossing over the seawall if they craned out far enough. There was a covered courtyard, a place of cool shade dappled with sunlight before you hit the glare of the street, a riot of bougainvillea crawling over the peeling walls, the whole a study in texture and tone that Jack was soon attempting to paint, this with the active encouragement of the neighbours, who had at once taken to the young pintor grande, him and his pirata both.
They slept on a huge bed beneath a headboard of carved dark hardwood and kept the shutters open so as to gather up any breeze that found its way down their narrow street, Calle de Placencia. Jack remembered the vast shining moon that bathed their bed in silver, and always, he said, somewhere nearby, a loud, rapid conversation punctuated by shouts and laughter, or weeping, or screams, or a radio playing dance music, or a streetcar clanking by below, and for a while they were happy. They would lie propped up on pillows, smoking cigars, listening to the night, then fall asleep and dream about painting. They rose early and by eight they were at work.
For several months they lived in the apartment near the seawall. He said he worked hard and came on rapidly. Vera too was working, and Jack watched her closely. At first she painted without interruption, at all hours, for days and nights on end. She painted what she saw on the streets of Havana with a free, loose hand on remnants of cotton duck they picked up cheap in the fabric houses of Havana Viejo, using large brushes and powdered pigment in primary colours they mixed themselves in buckets. Decayed colonial buildings baking in the sunlight, their roofs eaten away by grass. Towering palms with massive finned automobiles gliding by. Plazas and fountains and statues, grand boulevards, gaily dressed habañeros gathered on street corners to pass a bottle and dance. Shouting women hanging out of windows to haul up groceries in a basket. Wretched campesinos asleep on benches. Parrots, skulls, fields of sugarcane swaying in the moonlight, sun gods, rusting tankers and baroque movie theatres featuring American film stars, all found their way onto Vera’s big canvases.
So he learned from her even if she did not teach him, and just as well, because she could not articulate what it was she did. It’s a mystery, Jack, she said, art’s a mystery, okay?—and laid one finger on her breast and another on her eye. This gnomic gesture was followed by a solemn silence, then a gust of chesty laughter. They got out a few weeks before Batista fled the country, and missed the spectacle of Fidel Castro entering the city after a triumphal journey the length of the island, and his rousing oration to a crowd of half a million in front of the Presidential Palace. Apparently it turned cynics into romantics and romantics into fanatics, and I almost wish I had been there myself. Was that why they moved on? Because of the deteriorating political situation, the escalating violence, the hardening antagonism of the people of Cuba towards the brutal oppression they had so long endured—was that it?
But no, it was all much more banal than that. Jack told me it was because Vera couldn’t handle it any more. After the productive month or so there came a period of inactivity, when she lay on the couch in her studio all day, smoking cigars and gazing at the ceiling. Then she started going out. Soon she came to prefer the street to the studio, the nights to the days, it was all just as sadly predictable as that. They were subject to much stress at the time, partly to do with money, partly to do with the irritability that came of sustained daily drinking, and partly to do with the mischief that came of Vera’s idleness.
—Mischief? I said, catching a whiff of something in his tone.
He nodded. He laboured at his canvas every day, and in the empty apartment her absence would work its mischief at the back of his mind. He would push the thought down, he would employ the full resources of his will to remain concentrated on the work at hand. At noon he stuck his brushes into a jar of turpentine and wiped his hands on a rag, put on his cotton jacket and straw hat and descended the echoing stone staircase to the arcade below to buy cigarettes, knowing that he was really going down to see if Vera was about, assure himself that she was not in some room with a man. If he didn’t find her it would not be a happy afternoon in the studio, and he would rage in his mind until he heard her footfall on the staircase. Then they would fight.
—How, fight?
But he would not be drawn, he would not tell me if their fights were merely verbal, the same shouting and screaming they heard every night coming from other apartments in the building, or if it went further, if there was actual physical violence.
Then came the night they heard gunfire close by. Jack had for some weeks been finding it more and more difficult to control his suspicions of Vera, and his work was suffering as a result. She refused to talk about what she did in the hours she spent away from the apartment. She told him it was no way to live, this trying to account for each other’s movements at all hours of the day or night. Her line was: Why can’t you trust me? He tried to banish the jealous thoughts, but no sooner did his head clear than the small voice started up again. He thought he might be going mad.
But he was not mad! These thoughts came for a reason! He was picking up signs without being aware of what they were, he must have been, there was some subtle way she was telling him what she was doing, only he couldn’t identify it, but the message was coming through all the same, and he thought it was probably as simple a thing as how she touched him, or perhaps how she didn’t touch him, a telling but almost imperceptible falling off in her physical behaviour towards him that could only be the effect of a divided sexual attention.
He grew to hate Havana. He grew to see its loose easy life as the enemy of his bond with Vera, and of his work.
Then came the gunfire in the night. It woke them up. They knew what it was, no question of fireworks or backfiring automobiles. Jack went out onto the balcony, Vera following him, hissing at him to be careful. He stood with his hands on the balustrade, peering all around, but there was nobody about, nothing to be seen. The moon was low over the sea at the end of the street. He came back in, and they sat in his studio smoking, waiting for more gunfire, for whatever was going to happen next. Nothing. The usual sounds of Havana late at night. The sea, the trees, the insects. Vehicles on distant streets. No voices though.