We have our own cabin, scene of many a knee bend and chest flex, on A Deck. There are also communal exercises, on B Deck, which John leads in association with a swarthy purser called Togliatti. We do jumping jacks, and chuck a bit of hooped rope about. To begin with, in the evenings and mornings, during stroll time (the suit, the stick), all the people tended to gather at the sharp end of the ship, looking at where they came from, as people do. Only John is invariably to be found on the stern, looking at where we’re headed. The ship’s route is clearly delineated on the surface of the water and is violently consumed by our advance. Thus we leave no mark on the ocean, as if we are successfully covering our tracks.
And we seem to have got away with it, likewise. John’s feeling tone is buoyant: he seems wonderfully relieved. But if you had me on the table or on the trolley in intensiv
care—the submarine blip of the oscilloscope (like a lost code), the richly sighing respirator—then I’d be going, going, tumbling end over end. I didn’t get away with it. I came too close, I spent too long with suffering and its foul chemical breath; its face is fierce, distant, ancient. The hospital, tepidly humming—I can remember it all. To remember a day would take a day. To remember a year would take a year.
Something ails the ship’s engines. How they cough and choke and retch. The smoke that feeds our funnels is much too thick and black. Our Greek captain puts in a courtesy visit during dinner and apologizes in his ridiculous English. Often, for days on end, we can only wallow helplessly or make grand clockwise circles. Ugly sea gulls backpedal in our path, seeming to break their fall through the sky. John fumes, like the ship, but the people don’t seem to mind. And I quite like it, the sense of suspension, far from land and the means of doing harm. At night, while John’s impatient body sleeps, I listen to the waves loosely slapping at the side of the stilled ship.
The slapping sea sounds nice but it’s insincere, flattering to deceive, flattering to deceive.
What with John’s new fitness program, and the salutary Atlantic air and everything, I myself expected some kind of halfhearted renewal. It didn’t really happen. Still, I couldn’t help responding, at least in spirit, to the orgy of general joy as we docked at Lisbon; and even John stiffly lent himself to various aromatic embraces. But then the ship idled there for hours, in its own sea mist of impatience and anxiety. Limply I gazed at the mortal oiliness of the water, in which no creature could prosper, and the dockside crowds of welcome floating and swimming above like tropical fish. After that, will and vividness again absented themselves. In fact
tuned out altogether for at least a week, while John checked into the hotel and ran around town shuffling papers and permits and palm grease and all the other shit you deal in when you’re firming up a fresh identity. We came out the other side of it with a temporary chauffeur, a good profit, and a really first-rate new name: that of Hamilton de Souza. I am assuming that this identity business is a foible of John’s, of Tod’s, of Hamilton’s, and not universal. But look outside, at the street-skinned hills, the wildernesses of the parks behind their railings, and all the people. This crowd must churn with pseudonyms, with noms de guerre. Those that the war will soon reel in. We’ve been through three names already. We seem to be able to handle it. Some people, though—you can see it in their faces—some people have no names at all.
Hamilton and I are well established now, of course, in our agreeable villa, with our three maids, plus Tolo the gardener, and the dog, Bustos. It lies in a shallow valley a couple of clicks north of Redondo. Listen: there go the goats, the faint arrhythmia of the bells on their collars, led by the white-clad peasant. The goats are white too, a little herd of souls. The herdsman’s infrequent cries are full of the Portuguese melancholy, the Portuguese humanity. Twice a month the fat lawyer whom I think of as the Agent comes to visit in his sweaty suit. We drink white port up on the roof here and converse in formal and limited English. The birds are excited by our garden and by the flowers that shine around us in their troughs and pots.