“Partly your own fault,” Frigate had said. “I can understand and sympathize with that. I, too, was, am, self-defeating.”
“My family motto was ‘Honour, not Honours.’ “
Opposite the Leighton portrait was a photograph of his wife, Isabel, made in 1869, when she was thirty-eight. She looked buxom, regal, and handsome. Like a kindly but domineering mother, he thought. A few pages back was a portrait of her done by the French artist Louis Desanges in 1861, when she had married Burton. She looked young, loving and optimistic. Beneath her was the Desanges painting of Burton done at the same time. She was thirty; he, forty. His moustache dropped almost to his shoulder-bones, and he certainly looked dark and fierce.
And how thick his lips were. Which had suggested to certain biographers, and others, an overly sensual nature. How thin and prim and pursed were Isabel’s lips. A flaw in an otherwise perfectly beautiful face. Thin lips. Thick lips. Love, tenderness and cheerfulness versus fierceness, ambitiousness and pessimism.
Isabel, blonde; he, dark.
He turned the pages to a photograph of him at sixty-nine in 1890 and another of himself and Isabel in the same year, same place, Trieste. It had been taken by Doctor Baker, his personal physician, under a tree in the backyard. Burton sat on a chair, not visible in the photograph, one hand on the knob of his iron cane, the other draped over his right wrist. The fingers looked skeletal: Death’s own hand. He wore a tall gray plug hat, a stiff white collar, and a gray morning coat. The eyes in the gaunt face looked like those of a dying prisoner. Which, in a sense, he was. Little of the fierceness evident in the earlier pictures was there.
By his side, looking down at him, one white hand held up, a finger extended as if she were chiding him, was Lady Isabel. Fat, fat, fat. While he shriveled, she expanded. Yet, according to Frigate, though she knew that he was dying, she bore in herself the seeds of death, a cancer. She had not said a word to him about it; she had not wanted to upset him.
In her black dress and hood, she looked like a nun, a nurse nun. Kindly but firm. No nonsense.
He contrasted the youthful face in the mirror with that in the photograph. Those old old eyes. Sunken, despairing, lost. Those of a prisoner who had no hope of bail or pardon. Moons in eclipse.
He remembered how at Trieste in September, the last month of his life, he had purchased caged birds in the market, taken them home, and set them free. And how, one day, he had stopped before a monkey in a cage. “What crime did you commit in some other world, Jocko, that you are now caged and tormented and going through your purgatory?” And, shaking his head, walking away, he had muttered, “I wonder what he did? I wonder what he did?”
This world, the Riverworld, was a purgatory, if what the Ethicals said was true. Purgatory was the hardest of the three afterworlds, heaven, purgatory and hell. In heaven you were free and ecstatic and knew that the future would always be good. In hell, though you suffered, you knew for once and all what your future would be. You did not have to strive for freedom; you knew that you would never attain it. But in purgatory you knew that you were going either to hell or to heaven, and it was up to you where you went. With the joys and freedom of heaven as a carrot, you strove like hell in purgatory. You knew the theory of how to get a ticket to heaven. But the practice … ah, the practice … that eluded you. You snatched it away from yourself.
Earth had bristled with carrots of many kinds: physical, mental, spiritual, economic, political. Of these, one of the greatest, if not the greatest, was sex.
Frigate had once written a story in which God had made all animals, hence humans, unisex. Every species lacked males; only females existed. Women impregnated themselves by eating fruit from sperm trees. Cross-fertilization was a very intricate procedure in the story, the women shedding genes with their excretion and the trees picking these up through their roots. Thus, males were unnecessary and not included in the parallel world Frigate had imagined.
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