But the body he is most interested in, these days, is his own. He is his own hobby. And his body is its own lover. What a love is this, between upper limb and external heart. Christ no, it’s not like the Wellport days, back when: poor old Tod and his one-man no-shows, his lone fiascos. Hamilton just can’t get over it, his body. You would think he’d never had one before. As he moves through the house, mirrors monitor him. Him, it, this, this: this is the body he primes and mortifies and shrewdly inspects in all the rippling funhouse mirrors of Portugal.
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There are poems to Rosa, which he takes from the trash. They are brought in the wicker wastepaper basket by bowing Lourdes. Never more than two or three lines long.
The soul of a princess in her gypsy rags,
Doomed to fret in her humble stall . . .
And:
Rosa, whose innocence asks to be saved!
Where the knight who will deliver her?
Yeah. Where the knight. These lines of his he moodily and sometimes tearfully erases with his pen—a good image, perhaps, of his chronic diffidence.
His body now exudes this pink gook which he subsequently bottles and gives to the Agent together with a bunch of other toiletries.
When he goes out there to wait for her in the evening, I sometimes think: It isn’t Rosa. It’s the camp he loves. The fierce and sentimental music and the ignorant colors, the prettiness and the disease under the fake-gold light, the tuberculosis and syphilis, the fires showing through the branches like illuminated brains, the glamorous nomas of eye and mouth, the childishness and all the valueless trash. He wants to do something to the camp. What? Here in Portugal he pretends not to be a doctor, probably wisely, and steers well clear of anyone who is sick or injured, Lourdes with her dramatic fevers or Tolo knock-kneed with gout, even Rosa’s scrapes and sprains. He leaves it to the local man: the local man, whose tremulous reliance on a few patented drugs Hamilton observes with a speechless sneer. But he wants to do something to the camp. He wants to doctor it.
Mind and body are preparing for war. The body, during the waking hours, with its regimes, its saturnalias of self. The mind at night. Something is savaging his sleep. Surprised into consciousness, alone in the black hemisphere, he cries until he laughs; then he uses the chamber pot that Rosa readied, and goes back to sleep quickly, despite the pain. Somewhere in the severe dance of this roiling sleep I can sense the beginnings of a profound rearrangement, as if everything bad might soon be good, as if everything wrong might soon be right. Admittedly this new recurring dream of his, in bald summary, doesn’t sound particularly encouraging, but I think it’s ambivalent and could go either way. He dreams he is shitting human bones. . . . Now and then, when the night sky is starless, I look up and form the hilarious suspicion that the world will soon start making sense.
One hot afternoon I came down from my bedroom, after a brief but taxing siesta, to see the Agent pull up in his outlandish Packard. Over a cognac he gloomily informs us of the Japanese surrender. Lourdes and Ana, I notice, have tears in their eyes and keep crossing themselves. The Agent tells me apologetically about the superstitious fears of these simple people. The end of the world. A bomba atómica … I was astonished. So! They did it. They had to go ahead and do it. Just when world abolition looked like a certainty. They couldn’t resist: limited nuclear war. . . . Rather rudely, perhaps, Hamilton decided to take Bustos for a romp and leave them all to it. On our return the Agent had gone and the women were calm, unlike Bustos, that foolish puppy, who spins at my feet and fixes me with his heartbroken eyes.
There is a growing coldness in the household. Emotion is retreating from it. This is how things should be. Rosa, who still works for us, has safely escaped into childhood. The gaze that Hamilton turns toward her no longer moves softly across her face, her pink rags. This is fit. We will now be able to take our leave of Rosa with a quick nod, a little inclination from the vertical. I won’t even miss Bustos, which the Agent dragged off months ago.