Divertimenti

--------------------------------

Dear Alicia,

I can't begin to tell you how beautiful it is here. I've,
and of course you've, lived by the sea in other places,
but they weren't like this.  Something about the light,
and the sounds, and the air.  I think it's something about
being on an island also.  Even though it's a big island,
with its own mountain ranges and rivers, and two major
cities, still knowing that when the land curves back
around to the left and the right it eventually meets
itself again, making a circle that it wouldn't take all
that long to go around oneself, changes the way that you
see the place.  Or at least the way that I see it.

The town (I think it's a town, or a village, or even a
small city; the standards are different here) is very,
what, very Mediterranean I suppose.  And it reminds me
of San Francisco in some ways, although it's utterly
different.  I should stop trying to describe it in
comparisons (I can see the face that you would be
making at me if you were here on the terrace with me,
with the sea at your back).  I should stop analyzing
it and just tell you about it, tell you what I'm seeing
and what I'm smelling and hearing, and how the stone
feels.

I got in on Wednesday, just as expected.  Rinaldo
travelled with me as far as the last ferry, and then
hired a car and headed North, as expected.  (See how
I say "hired a car" instead of "rented a car"?  I'm
sinking into a false sort of quasi-British exoticism
already.  Next I'll be telling you that I've retained
a couple of the local lads to keep the palm-frond mats
on the floors fresh.  But they have linoleum here!)
Do you hate me for not writing sooner?  This is the
first letter I've written, though; you should feel
privileged, not neglected.

I spent the first day mostly on tedious details, finding
the place (although that was more an adventure, and not
tedious), signing the rental contract, paying a deposit and
a month's rent in advance, registering at the local police
station (which felt just as foreign as it sounds), putting
my things away.  It was grey and a little chilly, and I
knew that if I tried to do anything more interesting I
would be depressed, and tired, and wish that things were
as welcoming as they are in those dreams.

But Thursday was bright and welcoming, and almost exactly
like one of those dreams!  The town (here am I now, coming
around to finally describing things, and I can imagine you
again, and the encouraging face that you'd make) was
positively drenched in sunlight, almost painfully bright
whitewashed walls stretching up away from the waterfront
up the hillside.  The old part of town, where my building
is, is as steep as anything in San Francisco, and much
older.  Or at least I assume it's much older, it _feels_
much older.  (As you can tell, I haven't read up much
on the local history!  I don't know if I want to, or if
I want to let it gradually wash into me, in some personal
and distorted form.)

I haven't gotten much writing done yet.  I know that
doesn't surprise you!  But I have been wandering the
streets, thinking deep thoughts and having wonderful
ideas that I occasionally manage to hold in my mind long
enough to admire.  (Have I made you laugh?)  The people
here are fascinating (and here you would tell me that
the people everywhere are fascinating), enough like the
people at home that the differences are striking.  If I
see someone here dressed in a way that would mean something
back home, I can be confident that it means something else
here.  That woman is not trying to look promiscuous, that
man is not trying to look eccentric.  And in fact she
does _not_ look promiscuous, and he does _not_ look
eccentric, because here my eyes aren't accurate.

I know.  My eyes are prefectly accurate, and if only I
would write what I really see, instead of what I think
about it, then things would flow naturally, and would be
true.

So.  I am sitting here on my terrace, looking out down the
hill, over a million (or a thousand, or a couple of hundred)
rooftops, down toward the water.  I'm on the third storey of
a four-storey whitewashed house, tall and narrow and standing
in a rank of other four, or five, or three storey tall narrow
whitewashed houses on a narrow street somewhere in the middle
of the old town.  The terrace is narrow, the railing is
black metal, and my chair is an old wood and wicker thing that
creaks when I sit down in it, and is no more nor less
comfortable than you would expect.  The air smells of the
sea, and if I raise my eyes up from all those rooftops
there is the sea itself, stretching out forever and
glinting theatrically in the sun.

(There is so much to tell you that I'm sure I'll quite wear
you out with this letter.  Enjoy it while you can; as the
routine settles in and I've written all of the easy words
you will be forced to live on the scraps of what I had for
lunch, and whether or not it rained, and how slowly my book
is coming!)

The landlady and her husband live on the ground floor, where
the air is close and there is no view.  But either through
excellent taste or great good luck their rooms are exquisitely
arranged and furnished, and would photograph perfectly in any
of your magazines when the light was right.  (The harbor
faces south-west and the light can be stark in the afternoon,
but on clear days it is breathtaking in the morning and at
twilight.)  They seem to be quiet and private people, not to
say unfriendly.  I suppose when you make your living from
having strangers in your house, it's necessary to keep a
certain amount of reserve.  Or it may be that I radiate that
sort of air of uselessness that I expect people with actual
lives and useful occupations must rather disdain.  (I see
that smile on your face again.  I will try not to wander
too far into silliness and self-indulgence.  But you know how
likely I am to succeed in that!)

I would like to report that there is an ancient lift (never
"elevator") in the building, that rattles and squeaks and
shakes alarmingly when it is working at all.  But there is
no such thing; there is only a narrow staircase (and a set
of unreliable fire-escape ladders dangling from the terraces,
to which I hope not to have to entrust my precious life).
Above the landlords, beneath my floor, live an old retired
couple that I have seen I think two times in the three (now
three and a half) days that I've been here.  He is astoundingly
ugly, with a face like an old gnarled tree-stump and a rather
frightening expression; she seems more or less ordinary, at
least by comparison.  (How shallow I am!  I will have to be
much deeper when I begin actually writing the book.)

And then above me there are three young people (ha, young
people; by which I mean only not much older than I am, and
not nearly as dour and serious!).  They are artists, two of
them from here, or at least from the island, and one from
England.  They do pottery, it seems, and have a little showroom
(and shop) crammed into the front of their apartment, where
I have my books and my easel.  (And no I haven't done any
painting yet either, but since painting is entirely optional
for me I expect I will probably get to it before I get
to any serious writing!)

Their names are, if I heard them right and I haven't forgotten,
Miriam and Angie and Tomas (or Thomas or who knows what).  They
are girls and he's a boy (they are women and he's a man).  And
I have not been speculating about their sleeping arrangements!
At least not until just now, when I imagined you reading this
and knew that you would tease me about it.  I don't think they
actually do their pottery in their rooms, or at least I
haven't heard the unmistakable sounds that I imagine must come
from having a potter's wheel in operation over one's head.
I did see Tomas coming up the stairs weighted down with boxes
of wrapped objects, so I assume they do their work elsewhere
and haul it (up all those steps!) to their showroom, or to
local galleries.  (I understand there is quite the Artists'
Quarter up the hill and to the north of here, but I haven't
seen it.  Just down the hill there is a street that is the
bohemian part of the old town; a few small galleries that I
want to explore, and some shops that are maybe a bit too
conscious of the tourist traffic.  I, of course, am not a
tourist!)

So, where was I?  Thursday, was it?  Thursday was brilliant and
clear; the sun woke me early, and I found I had not brought any
sunglasses.  The streets run mostly up and down the hill (the
alleys run across it, level), and going from place to place is
inevitably exercise.  The locals must have the most terrific
calves!  But I found some sunglasses, and wandered the streets
beginning to get my bearings ("get my bearings": how nautical
I am).  The town loves coffee, and every block has its coffee
shop (they don't call them "cafes" for whatever reason).  There
are a few from those international megachains that you hate
(I tell you this for the sake of truth, even though it risks
ruining your opinion of the place!), but most of them are small
and old, or small and young and brave and ambitious, and the
coffee comes in two kinds (whose names I cannot remember sitting
here on my terrace): a light sweet kind, and a heavy dark kind
that reminds you how coffee is made ultimately from beans.  (I
wonder do they salt it; does anyone salt coffee?)

In the evening that first full day I chatted with Miriam
and Angie (or it might not be Angie, it might be Abbey or
something like that) and Tomas for half an hour, and then I
sat on my terrace here and thought more deep thoughts about
the book.  It is still as unformed as it ever was, but I have
the same great hopes for it.  Something between fact and fiction,
something true and real.  And I feel, as much as ever, that I
should _know_ more before I try to write, and that being here,
being somewhere that I didn't grow up, somewhere where every
building isn't one that I've seen a thousand times before,
will help me to know things.  (Although, as I can imagine you
saying, a trip to the library, or a little reading, or a few
more conversations with real live people, would also have
that effect.)

So that was Thursday.  Friday was much the same, walking and
breathing the air and exploring.  I have not covered more than
half of the middle of the old town, and there is no method to
my exploration.  I have found a couple of book stores, another
dozen coffee houses, and two quite good restaurants (recommended
by Tomas, who talks about food as much as anything).  The food
is very cheap here, and you can get a wonderful fresh home-cooked
(well, not home-cooked, but you know what I mean) meal for next
to nothing.  Housing (that is, my rent) is also very good.  On
the other hand things like bottled water, or the food that comes
in jars and plastic wrap, or the liquid soap that I somehow got
in the habit of using, are very expensive!  At least they are in
the one shop I've found that sells them.  I suppose I should
take that as a message.

But now it is getting dark (I have been writing this letter
even more slowly than you would imagine, stopping and listening
to the sounds of the town and the harbor, and maybe even
dozing here in my chair if you can believe it, and it has been
hours), and even though there is more that I could write I
will write you a fond closing and sign my name, and after
another hour I will find some sort of envelope, and see if
the landlady has any stamps (what will be on the stamps,
I wonder?  Fishing boat, or the skyline of the city, or the
flag.  But you know already, if you've looked at the envelope.
So you know before I do!) and then if she has stamps I will
put one on the envelope and put it in the little post box
(never "mailbox") sitting on its post (a post box on a post;
simple pleasures) and someday it will find its way to you.
Or if you are an imaginary friend, or a personification of
my diary, I will just fold this letter away with all the
others, for my great-grandchildren to read sitting around their
fire.  (But if you were an imaginary friend, or if you were
my diary, would I be able to see so vividly your face with
your eyes rolling and that exasperated smile?)

Until I will write you again, faithfully, at any moment,
I remain, your fond and doting,

Antoine

--------------------------------------------------


Dear Beatrice,

And even here there are suburbs!  My exotic dreams are entirely
overthrown!  Well, far from entirely, really.  And not actually
overthrown.  But suburbs!

I should tell the tale in order, shouldn't I?  Did I write you
about my wanderings by the harbor, in the smell of the salt air
and the tough leathery men sitting on piles of rope, working with
their knives and their awls on tangled nets?  Really it was only
one man, and I don't know if that was really an awl he was holding.
(Do you have an awl?  I doubt very much that I have an awl.  But
I do think I would recognize one, given a clear view.)  But it was
a net he was working on, and it was undoubtedly tangled, and the
air smelled of salt and fish, and there were boats in the harbor and
pieces of boats in the corners of the buildings.

(Just as it was only the one man, so yesterday the picture I drew
you of my raising my eyes enraptured from the rooftops to gaze
out over the sea was a bit much.  Actually lying here in my chair
on my terrace I can see the water of the harbor only in one
particular direction down the channel of a street between the
buildings.  But if I stand up and crane my neck only a little,
I really can see it wide and spreading and glinting in the sun!
So I am no more of a liar than you would expect.)

So now I have told you that I arrived, and who my above and below
neighbors are, and I have told you about the coffee shops (and
there really are two kinds of coffee, and it wouldn't surprise me
if the heavy dark kind was salted, although it is also sweet in
a sort of syrupy way), and about the food (did I say that much of
it is fish, but not all of it?), and now about my wandering by
the harbor and the smell of the sea.  I shall put it all in the
book!  Although I may move it to the South Seas, or to the coast
of Nova Scotia, or who knows maybe to Mars or Neptune.  (Would
that be true?  How hard would it be to write a true book about
Mars or Neptune?  No harder than the coast of Nova Scotia, maybe.)

Now to the suburbs!  (And will I put the suburbs in the book?
There must be truth in the suburbs also.)

It is Monday now.  I rested on Sunday (the town was full of church
bells in the morning, but I turned over and went back to sleep like
a proper sinner), and didn't write you or anyone else, but set up
my easel and arranged my book-writing materials and wandered again
thinking deep thoughts.

But on Saturday evening, just after I had stopped writing to you,
and found my stamp (it had a fish on it, a fish that now you've
seen if you looked at the envelope; have you saved the envelope,
or thrown it into the fire or ignominiously into the recycling
bin?), and posted your letter, and was lying again in my chair
and settling down to doze, came a rapping at my door, and I
answered it and was amazed.  (Is that execrable prose?  "Answered
it and was amazed"?  I suppose it depends on what one puts next.)

Rapping on the door was one Octavian Melle, a large friendly
bear of a man smelling of pipe-smoke and wearing wool despite
the season (or likely everyone here wears wool at this season;
all the meanings are different).  Good Rinaldo had called him
up (even I cannot, at least not here and how, write "phoned
him up", much as I might like to) and told him where I was
staying, and hinted that I might want company.

So I went with Octavian Melle (who is a professor, or a professional
scholar, or an attache' of the college at the top of the town, or
is at any rate something studious and affable) down the stairs
to his car (he was of course not impressed with the exoticness
and the thrilling independance of my little room and my terrace
and my easel, and I think dismissed them with less than a glance),
and in his small car we wormed out way out of the narrow canyons
of the old town and out to where the roads were wider and
straighter, and to my bewilderment we were driving through an
unmistakable suburb.

The least exotic suburb imaginable, or not quite since the
styles are still certainly foreign, the people dressed in ways
that sent the wrong signals to my analytical mind, the street
signs enigmatic and a certain overlay of difference over the
basic pattern.  But the basic pattern was there!  Prosperity
and modernity, people living just far enough from the city
to take part in its wealth but not its life.  Shops, or I
should say "stores" now, with all too familiar logos (what
an odd mutation of a word; "logos", not "logos"), and with
overpriced running shoes on display in the windows.  Neatly
trimmed lawns.  (Although Mr. or Professor Melle did tell me
that Sport Utility Vehicles are illegal here, being neither
cars nor trucks and therefore unlicensable.)

It was really quite a shock, in a completely non-shocking way.

Octavian Melle lives in this suburb (and of course it is in
fact a very nice suburb, clean and moral and a fine place to
raise children and I don't know if you would love it or hate
it), in a fine and tidy house with his wife Yolanda (a healthy
looking woman of a certain age (and here you will tell me that
I don't know what "of a certain age" means, but I will remain
coy)), and his teenage son, and apparently he has a daughter
just out of college who was not there.  And we all had dinner
together.  (Had we been back in the old town I would have
said that we dined, or supped; but in the surburb I think
that we had dinner.  Even though it was local and agreeably
exotic food, and very good.)

I told Octavian Melle and his family what I had already told
you, only in even greater and more boring detail, about the
ferry rides, and having known Rinaldo from school, and all
about my explorations of the town, and my book.  I was of
course quite self-deprecating, as that is the most reliable
way of covering up my actual faults.  No doubt the poor
innocents thought I was merely being modest when I allowed
that if I actually wrote more than a page in the three months
I will be here, it would be a miracle.  But you and I know
the truth.

(But when I write to you, I am so productive!  Perhaps I shall
write an epistolary novel, consisting of my letters to you with
all the names and private details obscured.  It would be a
masterpiece!  But an impossible one, and at any rate not one
that any prying third-party eyes should ever see.)

I told them of my explorations of the harbor and the docks,
and they were I thought amused in a condescending sort of
way (although they are the souls of kindness, or at least
what my foreign eyes see as the souls of kindness).  Octavian
(Mr. or Professor Melle, my host) said that he knows some of
the fishermen (although he didn't say "fishermen"; what did
he say?  Some word or phrase meaning "someone who owns a
fishing boat"; I will have to get better with these words
if I am going to cram them into my book!), and that he would
be glad to arrange with one or two of them that I might come
along on a run (did he say "run"?  I don't remember).

So in the next few days I will be going out on fishing boats,
and getting cold and soaked and set upon by thrasing bleeding
fish, and learn no doubt a raft (a host, a school) of new
true things.  But I don't know if that kind of truth can
settle into me quickly enough to make its way out into my
book before it must be finished.  (And here you will look at
me impatiently, and say that if I go out on a fishing boat,
and meet the fishermen, then that will be part of me, and
it can flow out into the book at once, and I will have to
grant that you are right, or at least that you ought to be
right.)

And that is where I am now, sitting again in my chair on
my terrace, with my unused book-writing materials beside
me, and the easel set up (quite uselessly, I now realize)
inside where there is no view.  And thinking of the sea
and the fish (how cold the water must be), and of you
opening an envelope and finding this letter in it, and
holding the paper in your hands as you read it.  And
then out in the suburbs Mr. or Professor Octavian Melle
is in his house, perhaps asleep with his wife Yolanda,
secure and prosperous, a man who knows fishermen, and who
invites spoiled artistic strangers for dinner.

(Did I seem artistic to them?  Or peculiar?  They will see,
it occurs to me, the same overlay of strangness over me
that I see over everything here.  Did my clothing suggest
to them that I am a criminal, a socialist, a rabble rouser?
Did my conversational style hint to them that I want to
buy their house, or marry their daughter?  When Mrs.
Melle kissed me formally good-night, and I perhaps
flinched because due to a mismatch of polite head
motions her lips touched my cheek unexpectedly close
to my mouth, did that flinch signal that I am a
misogynist, or a prude?  So hard to know!)

All right, now!  I am seized by a sudden burst of
energy and detemination.  After I fold this letter and
put it aside, for later sending off to you (my dearest
imaginary friend), I shall pick up these neglected
book-writing materials, the letters from the publisher,
my original ambitious and self-absorbed proposal,
the instructions from the editor, the wooly and
useless notes that I scrawled on the bus and the
airplane and in numerous taxis and art museums,
the tiny computer with the reproachful keyboard and
the shiny perky display, and I will start to write!
It will be, no doubt, useless trash that I will
entirely discard before the book is done (hear the
quiet beauty of that accidental phrase: "the book
is done"), but at least I will be writing.

Are you not proud?

Until next time, dear diary, I remain, your
devoted,

Bertram

------------------------------------------------

Dear Cara,

I can feel, or I could feel until a moment ago when I finally
moved my hand and picked up the pen and began to write, the
struggles within myself, the active give and take and forth
and back of the various parties, like groups of half-allied
and half-hostile protestors, carrying signs and chanting slogans
in a swirling mob before some embassy or government building
somewhere, forming blobs and patterns and elaborate shoving
and surging masses on the seven o'clock news (where has this
sentence taken me?), the various parties within my mind that
would pull me in one direction or another, and I was lying
here quite happily just feeling their surging and tugging
until it occurred to me that lying inert and introspecting
was itself just the recommended platform of one of the parties,
and somehow (for it could easily have gone entirely the other
way) this caused me to shake off the lethargy (the Party of
Lethargy suddenly thrown from power by its own success) and
sit up enough (o, extreme exertion!) to write to you.

I did begin my book yesterday!  Or at least I wrote down words
on the meticulous and scratchproof little computer, and the words
had at least something vaguely to do with the book that my
soon to be long-suffering editor is expecting, a sort of meditative
travelogue, half fact and half fiction, aimed (although not in
so many words) at those who would like to travel in theory, but
cannot in fact be bothered to stir from their chairs.  How much
nicer, I say to myself, it is not to stir from one's chair on
the terrace of a tiny room in a pretty building on a steep street
over the harbor; to be lethargic here rather than back there, and
to be paid (or to have some hope of being paid) for the words
that might (that _will!_) arise as a result.

You ask (I imagine your hand holding a pen, your box of stationary,
the light coming in through the window or from your desk lamp)
whether I am "on the network", and whether I "can do email".
Anathema!  There is no network here!  Only me and the terrace
and the sea.

Leaving aside, that is, the computer I saw over my landlady's
shoulder (where it seemed she was shopping for dresses or
shoes), and the computer upstairs with the artists where they
check their mail and their website and their online orders
from Spain for pottery, and no doubt the electronic television
downstairs in the retired couple's apartment, where they
watch Hungarian pornography and hungrily pleasure each other
deep into the night.

But other than that, we are pure and unpenetrated by the
tendrils of global society!  Which is to say, when the
landlady offered me the privilege of an umbilicus of my
very own, for a fee almost half that of my entire monthly
rental, I joyously declined, having brought with me no
computer but this little writing device, and it with no
"network connection", but only an archaic little trick with
a little square memory card.  And for you, even more quiet
and simple and primitive, I have my pen and my pad, and I
sit and scratch the words one by one, rather than typing
them out in bursts (for I have become quite the typist
since typing became bread to me!).  Does my handwriting
convey myself (my self) to you there, coming out of the
envelope with the fish stamps?  Are you sitting by a
window, as I imagine you?

The armies that I was so enjoying as they struggled within
me were the armies of lethargy (that we have already met),
and the armies of up-and-doing, including the party of
book-writing, and the party of doing something about dinner,
and the party of going down and wandering the twilight streets
in search of rapture and adventure (a surprisingly close
ally, really, of the party of lethargy).  And a dozen or
a hundred other parties, with less obvious names and
natures, but each one ready and eager to lift me up
(or keep me down) and control me for whatever span of
time their victory could be attained and preserved in the
swirling mass.

And, thought of in that way, I myself have no control at all,
except to the extent that I can help or hinder the successes
and failures of the various protestors with their signs, or
perhaps now and then open the gates of imagination and allow
in whole new factions, hitherto unsuspected.  Or, in thinking
of the matter that way, am I fooling myself, pretending to be
some greater overseer and influencer when in fact I (if "I"
is a word that applies at all) am simply one of factions
myself.  Or am I a derivative, a summation, a sort of
generalized effect of all of them, like the distant
rhubarbing you might hear if you were standing on the
mountaintop, and the crowd was swirling and jostling far
below you in the valley, and the wind was right.

And can I fit this kind of aimless philosophizing into my
book?  Can I make a living from lying here in my chair and
metaphoricizing myself to you?  I could, if there were any
justice in the world.  If only this were the paradise that
we deserve.

Now that I have begun my book (and you should admire me here,
for not pausing after the absurd beginnings of this letter
to apologize, and self-indulgently ask your forgiveness for
the length and pointlessness of it all), now that I have begun
my book, I am constantly seeing things that I want to write
about that can't possibly be fit into it.

In the street this afternoon, as I passed one of the narrow
houses (this one a pale blue with lemon shutters; not all of
them are whitewashed and blinding in the sun), the narrow door
opened, and a man (neither young nor old, fat nor thin) came
out with some speed, smiling, calling something that I did not
catch to someone behind him, and sped off down the street and
around the corner.

"This is," I said to myself, "someone who has just had good
news, who has come into a fortune or won the lottery, and who
is leaving his old life at great speed and going off to a
newer and brighter one, and not giving a thought to what he
might be leaving in his wake."

And I would like to write a story about that, about those
left behind in the wake of this great and uncaring good
fortune.  But can that go into my book, the book that I
have promised my unfortunate editor, and that I have come
here, to this place of beauty and two kinds of coffee, to
write?  It seems unlikely.  Can I sneak it into the storyline,
the tale of a place, by having an old man tell it while sitting
by the sea (descriptions of the harbor interspersed at
regular intervals), or as a tale told in the marketplace
(the very scenic and languidly depicted marketplace, full
of stalls and shouting and naps in the mid-day heat)?  It
would be, I think, rather too obvious.

But you, my most precious, are uncomplaining; I could tell the
story here in this letter.  But if I do any writing, any _real_
writing beyond this nattering that I do in the evenings, lying
in my chair and thinking of your fingers opening my envelopes,
if I do any more exalted (and possibly publishable) kind of
writing, will that leave so much less for the book itself?
Drain me of the creative juices such as they are that I need
to keep myself in shoes and chocolate?  Best not to take the
chance.

But here, I will tell you what I was thinking, without writing
it as writing it.  I was thinking that the protagonist, in
winning the lottery and taking himself off that very day to
a distant hotel set in the branches of an enormous Boabab
tree at the edge of a jungle, left behind him, among other
less-fortunates, his boss ("boss" sounds wrong; what is the
quasi-English exotic word for "boss"?), who has by the
protagonist's leaving thrust upon him the bitterness and the
discontent that he has been keeping beneath his cleanly
shirted surface for so long many years, and faced with the
indisputable fact that when given the chance our young,
our capable, our entirely sensible protagonist has run
away at top speed from the office (the yard, the laboratory,
the works, the big-top) at the first good chance, and what
does that mean about the sensibleness, the desirability,
the legitimacy of the enterprise in which the boss, lotteryless,
is thoroughly left behind?

That is one of the characters that would be left behind.
The others are lost, forgotten between picking up my pen
and now, if they were ever there.  But they can go.  The
book has no place for them anyway.

And what have I actually written in the book, you wonder?
(I can see you wondering, or at least pretending to wonder,
what those words might be that I have resisted the party
of legacy long enough to write down.)  Nothing to be
awfully proud of (although I am awfully proud of them,
even as I know that I will be destroying them soon
enough, if all goes well).  A calm and relaxed passage of
description, a sort of narration of place, a sort of
capturing of the town as spread out down the hill below
my terrace.  But not exactly this town; I have not yet
committed to just where the book is set, whether here,
or somewhere else that I have been, or (if I dare!)
somewhere I have not been, but am willing to research
(or imagine?).  It is partly the necessity to commit,
I think, that has kept me so long from writing.  Once
I pick a setting for the book, what happens to all of
the books I might have written about somewhere else?
(Oh, and now I must apologize, at least a little, for
my self-indulgence.  I know I am absurd, and it is only
knowing that you approve of my absurdity that allows me
to live with myself.)

Octavian Melle has arranged for me to go out on a fishing boat,
as promised!  Or as vaguely hinted at over dinner the other
night; one of the overlays of strangeness here is that I am
never certain when someone has suggested something offhandedly
or out of politeness, and when they have given their bond.
I nearly collided with my landlady's husband on the step,
and groping for something sociable to say suggested that he
should come up sometime (in the unmentioned future) and
see how I have set myself up (although he has not seen
a hundred idlers set up in that room before), and that very
evening he appeared on my landing and we spent an awkward
and entirely unproductive ten minutes saying nothing about
nothing, and attempting to find a mutually agreeable way
for him to leave again.

(And yet if I had found myself standing beside him at the
edge of the harbor in the same evening, looking up at the
flights of the birds to and from the sea, and the wind blowing,
could we not have had a natural and productive conversation
about the same nothing?  I like to think we could have.)

But Mr. or Professor Melle.  He phoned me up (or should it
be "rang me up"? never "called me"!) and said that if I was
still interested, and fishing boats, and so on, and I said
yes I was, and he called back ("phoned back" sounds entirely
wrong) and said that it was all arranged.  So day after tomorrow
I shall be cold and wet and have fish-blood in my hair, and I
will have more pictures to render into odd linear words and
write down in my book, or in what might someday if the Gods all
smile become my book.  But first, tomorrow night, he will come
in his tiny car again, and take me to the suburbs, and I
will dine again amidst suburban prosperity.  He seems quite
taken with me (I can't imagine why); or perhaps this is just
how he behaves, even when not quite taken.  No way of telling.

Until I return with further tales of wonder,
I remain, your faithful,

Charlie

------------------------------------------------

Dear Diana,

Picture me at my ease, sitting on some damp burlap sacks
in one corner of the side deck of a black and grey boat,
somewhere out from shore in the midst of the fishing grounds.
Fishing is as expected a wet and a salty business, but there
is very little fish blood involved.  There are nets, and
winches, and waves, and spray, and the sun on the water,
and the thrashing of the cold shiny fish.  The boat that
Mr. or Professor Melle found for me is a working boat, not
used to tourists, but the people are kind and friendly
enough, not effusive, taciturn even, but not (or I hope
not) annoyed or inconvenienced by my essentially useless
self as I sit in my corner and watch.

I am not really writing to you while on the boat; the paper
would be soaked!  But picture me out there anyway, because
I want to imagine you imagining me out on the water, held
up by sea and planks, surrounded by fish.

Now, by contrast, sitting again on my chair on my terrace,
I feel lethargic and limp.  I have written perhaps a dozen
pages of the book, and I think some of them may be real,
be something that I will not have to throw away in that
promised future when I begin seriously writing.  But the
thought gives me less joy than I would expect.  Everything
is too easy.

Too easy?  What did I mean by that, I wonder.  The writing
is certainly not easy, it comes slowly and with much
straining.  (Would that book-writing was as easy and
safe as letter-writing!)  I have not put any of the
boat or the nets or the fish into the book yet; I don't
feel that they have sunk far enough into me that the
words would mean anything.  I don't want my book to give
the reader just the same thing he would get (she would
get) from watching a movie, a television program, a
newsreel.

And here you must imagine hours passing!  My telephone
rang while I was writing that last sentence, and I have
been again to dinner at the Melle's and back.  It is
very late, and I am tired, but we dissolutes laugh at
lateness, and at tiredness, until we sink dissolutely
into our cushions and into the lap of Morpheus.  Ha,
we laugh: ha ha!

I have had a bit to drink.  How could I have dissmissed
Yolanda Melle in a half sentence as (what did I call her?)
a "healthy woman of a certain age"?  She is the kindest
creature on earth (excepting you, dear correspondant).
Her troll of a husband, Mr. or Professor Melle, took
up the banner against me at dinner, guffawing must rudely
when I rhapsodized (and I do rhapsodize; is there any
harm in rhapsodizing?) about the sea and the nets and
the fish and the quiet competence of the fishers.  He
was most amused, in a condescending way, and painted me
as the spoiled whelp of a decadent civilization (which
I know that I am, but he needn't have been so jolly
about it).  He washed his hands of me and went up to
bed early (I tell myself licking my wounds that the
churl was so rude only to give himself an excuse to
drag his indolent corpus upstairs before his guest
had left).

But his wife (did she roll her eyes apologetically when
the troll waxed must abusive?  I think she did) was the
sole of politeness, even kindness, and she sat with me
in their prosperous sitting room after dinner, and we
talked about things and places and people, and even fish
and boats and the sun on the sea, and our lives and our
hopes and the state of the world, and she praised me
with her attention quite late into the night.

She has had a fascinating life, so much deeper and more
complex than mine that she might be from, well of
course she _is_ from, another continent.  She was born
into poverty, into a slum somewhere far north of this
island, and she remembers her childhood with a mixture
of fondness and bitterness that I can only dimly imagine.
Her mother was always in desparate straights, and
she never knew her father.  She was orphaned, I think,
very young, and somehow made her way into school and
polite society, and now the prosperous suburbs.  She
has passed through a host of places and events, bright
and dark, in between.

You're not to think from this that she talks about
herself!  I have inferred it, reconstructed it, from
things that she said most casually tonight, when she
was drawing out of me my own (poor, quite, entirely
uneventful) life story, things that she said to keep
me talking, that she said by way of comparison or praise.
She somehow made the vivid (if disturbing) canvas of
her life a background in which my own (new, young,
unformed, unremarkable) one shone as if it were
something new, something interesting.

And at the last, when we realized how late it was and
I made my apologies and farewells (leaving her with a
friendly goodnight to convey to her no doubt snoring
husband as well, and her children wherever they were),
there was again between us that veil of strangeness
that makes me misinterpret all that occurs, and reminds
me that despite global networks and well-lawned suburbs
I am very far from home.  The kiss that we exchanged at
the door, her lips startlingly soft on mine, must have
been only a friendly politeness here, although it would
have been (wouldn't it?) something more than that,
something thrillingly fond, at home.  Or I may be
imagining it entirely.

So, yes, I am quite infatuated.  It is the wine that
we drank, I am sure, and a loneliness that I did not
until tonight realize that I was feeling; in that
loneliness any spark of praiseworthy attention is
wine itself.  In the morning I will feel quite
foolish for my thrilling night in the suburbs and
my doting on the memory of an ordinary polite
kiss.  And I will have an awful headache.

Hoping I still have the wit about me to find a
stamp and envelope, I remain,
Your somewhat addled but always fond,

Dennis

----------------------------------------------------

Dear Emillia,

This letter follows closely on the heels of my last one,
that I apparently managed to seal and mail last night
before I fell into an intoxicated heap on my sheets,
to reassure you that, although I did tell the very kind
Mrs. Melle all about myself and my life and my hopes and
dreams and foolishnesses, I did not tell her any of
_your_ secrets, but mentioned you only in passing if
at all, as though (impossible as it is) your place in
my life was something quite routine and ordinary.

Your secrets, our secrets, are as safe with me as they
have always been.  Silly and self-indulgent as I am,
you know you may always trust me in that.

Now it is morning again, and my headache is not as bad
as I deserve (not nearly as bad as that, or I would be
in the hospital, or dead!).  I am determined, once I
seal this letter and send it off after it's irresponsible
older brother, I will sit in a dark upright chair at the
desk by the window, with the patient keyboard, and I
will write more of my book, pages and pages of the
pristine (and sober) truth of my being and of the
world, and show (show myself) that I can be something
like an adult, and that that is something worth being.

Grateful always for your endless patience, I am,
Your most respectable,

Earnest

----------------------------------------------------

Dear Francesca,

I have made great progess with my book, and avoided wine
and even fishing boats; you would be proud of me!  My
artists from upstairs have come downstairs at my invitation
and we have sat about on chairs and carpets and discussed
the world in the most serious and intelligent terms, and
(brace yourself for this) I have read from from the
unfinished (nascent, embryonic) pages of the book, and
they have not been entirely insincere in their praises!
Some of the words are, perhaps, something that someone
other than myself (and you, always you) might be willing
to read, and be able to take some joy in.

It is a great comfort.

I have had a nice note from Octavian Melle, on a blunt
tan stationery, thanking me for my visit the other
night, and offhandedly apologizing for his early
retirement (and, I think implicitly, for his attitude
during dinner).  And I have had another note from
his wife Mrs. Melle, on her own pastel stationery,
politely thanking me for the same (I picture with
amusement the mixup about who should be writing the
note to the young guest that etiquette requires, and
if they have discovered over breakfast that they have
both written to me, and laughed about it).

I have had a long, a very long, walk up the hill to the
top of the town (which spreads out inland like a fan
out from the top of the hill, gradually flattening
and thinning out into suburbs, not stopping suddenly
as if cut by a knife, or a major highway, or a swamp,
like some towns and cities do), and then along the
top of the hill, and down again to the southern edge
of the harbor, and along the harbor by sunset and
starting up the hill again just as the lights of the
town were coming on.

The town's bright eyes opening against the darkening
sky in the chilly air filled me with a sort of helpless
wonder.  Why do we bother to write books, when something
infintely better is to be had any evening (any morning,
any noon) by simply stepping out the door, looking up
at the town, or up from the fields at the moon, or
going in through the doors to the smoky bar and
drinking sherry and watching the mouths of the people
talking and drinking and smoking their cigarettes?
Why would anyone ever prefer words to that?

(I make an exception for the writers of letters, as
I must, including myself for this one.  I write to you,
dear diary, because I wish to speak to you; I offer
you a wordy substitute for myself, not a wordy
substitue for life.)

A silly thing to say, I hear you thinking, just after
saying what great progress I have made with my book!
But it is part of the progress.  I write knowing that
the writing is ultimately futile, and that the reader
would be better off putting down the book and going
out his door (or staying in his chair and talking to
the person sitting beside him, and looking into her
eyes).  And it may be that having that knowledge when
I write the words, the words will inspire the reader
to put the words aside, and look at life.

And it may be that this is the millionth time that
a writer has had that thought, and that all million
good books in the world were written with just that
purpose.  I would at least be in good company.

Mr. or Professor Melle (I should really stop writing
that, except that I like the sound of it; he is in
fact a quite distinguished Professor of Anthropology,
until recently the Head of his Department, at the
local college, and quite respectable) has offered
me another fishing excursion, although I don't know
if I'll take him up on it.  He says also that there
is an interesting system of caves and tunnels under
the hill, part of which is open for tourists, and
part of which is not (although he hints that through
his college he could get us permission to go into
those parts, or at least those parts that one does
not have to be a season spelunker to reach).  So
I can report to you from both the open glistening
sea, and the depths of the earth!

I wonder how ancient tunnels and caves can have
survived under this modern town, which must have
its basements and sub-basements and sewers and
underground conduits for electrons and heated
water, compressed air and steam and dry goods.
I imagine workers some decades ago digging the
foundation for another house, and breaking through
into a moldering cavern, its air choking with
the dust of centuries and the stench of minerals,
and somewhere deep in the gloomy distance the
endless drip of water.

And almost certainly, real caves are nothing like that!
I don't know if I have ever been in a real cave (not
counting, ha ha, that basement that I lived in the
second year of University, where the stench and the
dripping water were just like that).  I recall very
vaguely something from my childhood, some place on a
hillside with lights and walkways and cold air and
columns and things dripping from the ceiling, walking
with some adults and being very tired.  I remember
remebering it later (years later?), and trying to
remember its name, or where it was.  Ah, my
constant friend, time is so deep!  What will
become of us?

The reason we write books, it occurs to me (the
profundity of that original thought above having
rather worn off) is not to substitute for life,
but to share life.  I don't want my book only to
goad the housebound reader into going outside; I
want my book also to welcome home the adventurous
reader, who can come in from his caves and his
space rockets and his tuna canneries and his arctic
expeditions, and read about my islands and my
imaginary travels and smile, and mix what I have
written into what he has seen.  I suppose if we
could all do everything together than the mere
writing would be only an inferior form of that
sharing; but since I am here and you are there (the
writer is here and the readers are there), and there
is not nearly enough time or space for each of us to
live in each other's pockets and be all of each
others' boon companions, then books are better than
nothing, and I should be content.

(But of course I am content.  I am always content!
That is my problem.)

After the great progess with my book, and the heartening
and hearty discussions with my artistic friends from
upstairs (I hear them moving around now, perhaps
shifting their pots and displays from place to place,
the better to catch the eye of the tourists, who are
becoming more numerous as the season comes upon us),
I have established myself lying in my wicker chair
on my terrace, looking out at the town, and resting
the rest of the virtuous after my long walk up
and around and down.  I stopped a few streets below
the building here (have I already told you this?
reading back I see that I have not, but that I have
told you a fat lot of nonsense of various kinds, and
it is a very good thing that you are so patient),
and I had dinner in a small brown place on a side
street, where the mussels were fresh and perfectly
spiced (like the wind from the sea passing over a
field in the spring sun) and the water was cold,
and for dessert there was ice with lemon juice and
honey.

And now it is full dark, and the town is oddly quiet
(the day having ended, and the human sounds of the night
not begun), and although it seems unlikely I tell myself
that I hear the sea down in the harbor rolling against
the piers.  And I think (although it is early, for
me in my dissolute self) I will seal this letter and
go to bed, thinking all the time of you and your eyes
reading my words, and I shall go to sleep fully
sober, and tomorrow I will again think deep thoughts
and write them down for my book.

Entirely too pleased with the world, I remain,
your faithful,

Ferdinand

-------------------------------------------------------

Dear Grace,

Now, here is a thing.  I have blamed much on the veil of
strangeness, the foreign and unaccustomed customs, the
differences in convention and in the meanings that we give
to inherently meaningless acts, the differences that lead
me to see entirely the wrong meanings in what the people
here wear, how close to or far from one they stand, the
eye contact that they do or do not make, even the styles
of their hair (back home _that_ hair could only mean _this_,
but here it means something else completely; back home only
_that_ kind of person would wear _that_ like _that_, but
here anyone at all can and it means nothing).  But this,
it seems unaccountable.

Last night, rather late, just as I was thinking of bed
(a night or two after my last note to you, in case you are
numbering your days by my notes), I opened my door at a
rap, and found Yolanda Melle on my threshold.  She had been
passing by the street, she said, on the way home from town,
and remembered that it was my street, and come up to say
hello.  Which seemed entirely friendly if unexpected, so
late at night.

I of course invited her in, and she said polite complimentary
things about my hovel, my easel (on which, thankfully, there
was no canvas, I having taken down my most recent splotchy
watercolor that afternoon and filed it with the others in
case of a need for kindling some cold winter's night), my
chair and my terrace.  I was sleepy (I tried my best not
to yawn, and she laughed almost as I imagine you would laugh),
but she seemed entirely at ease, not unaware of but unbothered
by the fact that she was keeping me up.  We sat close together
(closer together than would have been comfortable at home,
but again there is the veil of strangeness and I liked her),
and talked about my walk around the town and about her
children and mussels for dinner and the shape of the moon.

And, put at ease my her ease I suppose for normally it would
have been unthinkably rude, I fell asleep there on the settee,
a few inches from her, with my head backward on the plain
unremarkable cushion.  I skipped in and out of sleep a
few times, in fact, apologizing to her the first time (she
only smiled), and (I vaguely recall) making some sound about
saying good-night, some polite hint that she might want to
leave now, but she only sat and nodded, warm and relaxed
beside me, and I drifted off finally, one final skip off
the surface of wakefulness and then breaking through the
skin and sinking down into the colorless darkness.

To wake up an unknown time later, and here is where I can
no longer rest easy on the veil of strangeness, to find
myself curled almost foetally, my mind in a thick and
utterly comfortable haze, my cheek against Mrs. Melle's
collarbone, my body cocooned by hers, my arm flung
casually across her torso.  Her fragrance was at the
same time like powder and like flowers and like the air
off the sea.  That she had just kissed me, lightly, on
the mouth may have been the memory of a dream; but the
fact that her face was close by mine, her eyes looking
downward into mine and the fingers of her right hand
stroking my cheek, was a plain fact.  I should have
been startled into wakefulness instantly by the
impropriety of it all, but in fact I came around
slowly and by degrees (my hand moving sleepily over
the fabric of her dress, pressing innocently upward
toward her breast).

Seeing me awake she only smiled again, and slowly sat
upright, her limbs uncoiling from around me, and I
shook my head and straightened.  Blinking, I'm sure, most
comically, looking in vain for a clear line marking the edge
of dreaming.  She said nothing, or nothing about having
held my sleeping self and touched my face and perhaps
kissing me (her lips very red), but only nodded as though
things were just as they should be, and making a little
final conversation and standing up.

At the door she pressed my hand (my arm casually, by
coincidence, without any possible meaning, brushing
against the side of her dress), and she went out into
the night and was gone.  I looked at the clock, but
the numbers meant nothing.  I might have slept in her
encircling warmth for five minutes, or an hour, or a
week.  I shook my head and went off to bed.

Now I write you, so that you can tell me that it was
a perfectly normal thing, that it happened as it happened
and I should not endlessly analyze it, but just remember
it and savor it and let it become part of myself cleanly,
without dissection or categorization or judgement.  That
is what you will tell me, I trust?  Or so you can tell
me that it does matter, that it was an important thing
that I should do something about.  Although what I might
do is utterly mysterious to me.

Now it is morning again in the city, the sun rollicking
up the sky just south of east, over the hills and the
sea.  I am lying in my chair indolent, writing to you and
thinking to myself of the scent of Yolanda Melle and the
shame of being an ignorant foreigner that falls asleep
when entertaining guests.  I have put out the morning's
wasp, and had a roll, and soon I will go down and have
eggs and coffee (the light sweet kind) and a biscuit in
the shop next door.

Have I told you about my wasps?  The third day that I was
here, I followed a persistent buzzing and found a wasp
battering itself against a pane of one of the windows
that looks onto the terrace.  It would not be shooed
toward the open terrace door, foolish stubborn thing,
so I cought it in a cup and carried it out myself, and
it spiralled out over the town and vanished.

There was another buzzing around the place the next
morning, and there has been every morning since (unless
it is always the same one, but how likely is that?).
I have even found the landlady and suggested to her that
there might be a nest of them in her walls somewhere,
but she was noncommittal, ambiguously negative about
the idea that the wasps have anything to do with her
or her building.

I call them wasps, but they may be something else.  They
are assuredly wasp-waisted, thin and fragile-looking
things with wings and legs and miscellaneous structures
with spiky fur and an impotently malicious look.  They
may be bees, or wasps, or hornets, or something else
completely.  (Are bees and wasps and hornets really
different things?  I remember when I was little we had
long pointless debates about what was really a bee and
what was a wasp and what was a "yellow jacket".  Or
maybe not pointless, in that the debates trained us for
the later debates, about what is liberal and what is
conservative and what is liberty and what is truth.
Bumble bees are round and fuzzy; my freedom ends at
the tip of your nose.)

My wasps have the yellow and black stripes, but are
not round nor fuzzy not in any way endearing, except
in the familiar futility of their flight.  They buzz
sporadically, and the buzzing is punctuated by sharp
almost metallic clicks as they fling themselves repeatedly
against the unyielding walls, and ceiling, and window
panes, and light fixtures.  Are they attracted to the
light, like moths?  We don't say "like wasps around
a flame", but that may be only because we have one
metaphorical use for wasps, as dangerous things (and
if there's one in the room you want to know where it
is), but for the metaphor of the flame we need something
soft and vulnerable to be a victim, and the moths with
their powdery greyness and flapping wings are that
for us.

I catch my daily wasp (do they come out during the
night, or at the crack of dawn, squeezing out through
some crack between the wall and the floor, taking a
wrong turn in the tunnels of the nest, or just scouting
unluckily down a corridor that leads inward rather
than outward?) in a cracked plastic cup that came
with the room.  I plunge it down over him (are these
wasps male?  worker wasps?  it's ants that they
teach us about in school, with the queens and their
egg chambers and the workers, not wasps), and then
I slide a stiff piece of paper underneath, trapping
him inside and safely away from my soft and vulnerable
skin.  I take cup and paper and wasp outside to the
terrace and throw my arms apart, the cup in one hand
and the card in the other, and the wasp tumbles out
into the air between.

There is no particular virtue in my releasing my wasps.
I do it entitely for myself: materially because it
seems unwise to crush wasps (a near miss might be
dangerous; like a tiny wounded rhinoceros charging
to plunge its painful dying stinger into the cells
of my hand), and spiritually because it is a small
and finite task, an easy success to start the morning.
The wasps, I think, are not aware of my kindness, are
not really aware of anything.  They are tiny machines
that have wandered consciousless into the wrong place,
a place that is wrong by my lights (since they have
no lights themselves), like a paper-clip fallen from
a pocket into some important machinery, and delicately
fished out for the sake of the machinery, not the
paper clip.

And here you would ask me if I am not also just a
tiny machine, and if I do not regardless expect some
sort of consideration that I am not giving the wasp.
But, whatever my motives, I do free them alive; if my
philosophical speculations on mechanism had gone
differently, I might have found some other reason
to toss them out over the terrace alive.  The sun
warms them just as it warms me, after all.

So waspless and filled with confusion, I sit here
and write you.  I wonder if I will get a formal
thank-you card from Mrs. Melle this time?  Or wait,
since I was the host it would be my job to send
one to her, I suppose.  But the idea is impossible.
I hadn't meant to mention her again, but I know you
will forgive me.  The wasp and Yolanda, neither here
but both surrounding me!  You are my life-line, as
you have always been.

Until next time, when no doubt my life will have
become even more baffling, I remain your grateful
and attentive,

Gaston

--------------------------------------------------


Dear Heidi,

The tunnels and caves under the town are, as it turns out,
far realer and more substantial than I had guessed.  Not
having heard of the place being noted for its subterranea,
I had expected some paltry and self-conscious little feature,
like the nation's third-largest dairy farm, or a the place
where a famous statesman once spent a week's vacation, with
a building by the side of the road and an undermaintained
gift shop, with a local teenager behind the counter talking
endlessly to friends on the telephone.  But what is under
the town is in an entirely different universe from that.

Octavian Melle came with me only to the mouth of the
underground, swimming in bear-like apology that between
his invitation to me and the time coming around, he had
been called into an urgent meeting of the senior professors
of the University on some matter of (as he said) mundane
and uninteresting importance.  So at that opening, he
turned me over to one of the apprentice geologists, a
tall pale graduate student named Augustus Bernard, and
wheeled ponderously and hurried back across the cramped
car-park (wedged in among the gullies and crevasses of
a sort of rough and rocky park in turn wedged among the
streets and buildings of the town).

Mr. Bernard is a graduate student in geology, and spends some
of his time leading tourists and amateur cave enthusiasts
into the tunnel complex, and some of his time down futher
into the stony bowels of the earth where specialized
equipement is needed, and people squirm on their stomachs
through muddy passages with lights on their foreheads.

Walking through the building (no gift shop, but a rack of
books and University pamphlets, another rack of maps of
various grades of technical accuracy and mountable gloss,
a cash-box and another student sitting at a desk and
reading), and through an archway, and down a flight of
steps in what could have been an unusually cool basement,
my guide proved taciturn, and I missed Mr. or Professor
Melle's affable grumble.

Down in that basement we passed into a series of narrowish
tunnels, fitted with modern wooden walkways and electric
lights, handrails and informational signs about the mostly
unknown ancients who had first carved out these tunnels by
expanding the natural caves with crude metal tools (in search
of what rare mineral or sacred quest no one knows), and
with signs reminding the visitor to Stay On The BoardWalk
and to Please Not Touch The Walls.

(Impossible not to imagine those unknown people down here
with their torches and their brittle picks, scraping at
the rock generation after generation.  Was there a town
here then?)

We walked slowly, my guide looking over at me frequently at
first, with a sort of resigned expectation, but (perhaps
because I was content with his silence and the signs, and
did not ask him annoying questions) gradually seemed to
relax, and walked with a slow gait that seemed at home in
the stony dimness.  The lights could have made the place
seem like an eccentrically-decorated sitting room, but no
doubt to preserve the atmosphere for the paying customers
(I had avoided the ticket booth and the gathering area for
scheduled tours through the generosity of my friend), they
(the lights) were space far apart, and were not bright.
So one quite felt oneself in some ancient and eerie place,
and not in the usual world.

And then beyond the tunnels the boardwalk brought us to
a narrower and wilder place, where the walls and floor
had not been tamed even by those ancient instruments.
We descended a ladder into a grotto full of the sound
of water, and Mr. Bernard gestured at a dark mouth to
one side.  There, he said, with the right equipment one
could go for nearly a mile in under the skin of the
town, far below the sewers and buried cables, down to
an underground stream that slipped between the layers
of earth and out into the sea.  "Nothing like Carlsbad
or Aggtelek", he said (I got him to spell that for me;
an enormous system of caverns somewhere under Hungary,
kilometers of tendrils pushing under a rocky and spectacular
forest no doubt full of werewolfs and witches and the
full moon and scuddering clouds), but a good system,
still, rare for being so near the sea, and with some
very unusual features.

We passed eventually, I saw from the signs, a bit beyond
where the tour groups went, to a place where the boardwalk
ended and emptied us on a rock path between glistening
stony walls, shaped in smooth folds like heavy draperies
or moist skin.  "We won't go much farther than this,"
he said, and I made no objection.  The pathway narrowed,
and he gestured with half-sentences to branches and
forks that went off into the darkness, where again one
could find various wonders and numerous dangers if
properly equipped.  Just beyond the last light, the
walls came together to much to proceed (without being
slim and skillful, and perhaps oiled), and my guide
took from where they leaned against a rock a pair of
folding chairs, and opened them for us to sit in.

I think I am remembering more now about the cave that I
visited as a child.  It had the same wooden boardwalk and
railings above the same kind of stony roughness, the same
widely-spaced lights, and the same deep coolness in the
air.  I remember being tired, and somewhat afraid, and
not understanding why we were going down into the ground,
and what we would find there.  My parents had no doubt
told me that it would be interesting; but parents' ideas
along those lines were as far as I could tell at the
time entirely random, and not related in any way to
the actual interest that things might arouse in me.

It was cold there at the end of the path, sitting in a
companionable silence with my pale guide.  I had brought
a jacket, at Octavian Melle's advice, and put it on when
we were still back in the tunnels.  There was a soft
wind, or just a gentle motion of the air, from further
into the earth, beyond where the walls narrowed too much
to pass, and it smelled of dampness and earth and rock.

(The walls, Bernard, narrowed to much to pass there,
but by taking a branch a few dozen yards back along
the path and squirming through a couple of tight places,
one could get to a wider place beyond, and shine one's
light and halloo back to anyone sitting here.  But
there was no one deeper in that part of the system
today, so we were unhalloo'd and uncontacted.)

I thought all the conventional things that one thinks
sitting artistically in a dim cave down inside the earth.
I thought of being inside the body of some great being,
of myself as a quick warm parasite inside a vast and cool
creature whose life is too great and too profound and
too slow for me to understand, or even perceive as life.
I thought of that breath of air from deeper in the system
as the breathing of that creature in sleep, or in a long
infinitely considered wakefulness governed by some vast
economy of motion that might take one action in a dozen
centuries, but by that action remake the world.

It is entirely too luxurious to sit in breathtakingly
odd surroundings and think about the universe.  And, to
be even more self-congratulatorily profound, it is no
different from sitting on my terrace (here where am I
now, writing to you), because that is also breathtakingly
odd, as any mound of humans going about their affairs
is breathtakingly odd, and even the place of familiar and
maddening ordinaryness that I left to come here is
breathtakingly odd (and I know you were always trying
to tell me, and I was always trying to hear).  But
I indulged myself, and exploited the patience of my
guide (who also seemed content and luxurious in his
folding chair, his hands in his lap as though perhaps
in a kind of meditation, saying now and then something
about the caves, or the University, or Professor Melle,
and then sinking back into silence and the dripping of
the water).

Eventually Mr. Bernard drew himself up and folded his
chair, and I did mine, and we turned and went out again,
back the way we had come; although the place is something
of a honeycomb (or rat's nest) of passages to the properly
equipped, only the one way leads from the quiet sitting
place to the surface for those in ordinary shoes.

And had I enjoyed the cavern?  He asked politely, and I
said that indeed I had, and he said that the Professor
had said I was writing a book, and might find some
inspiration down within the rock.  I smiled (or I hope
that I smiled) and said that it was certainly an
inspiring place.  I wonder if I shall find myself writing
caves and tunnels into my book, or just some sense of
quietness and time and long slow patience, and the
coolness of the earth.  I like that thought.

I have been reading books, between writing you letters
and dozing on the terrace and exploring the inner parts
of Terra.  And in many of these books, even the good ones
without helicopters or bikinis on the covers, I find that
surprisingly often there is something that explodes, or
something that is stolen, or someone who is murdered in a
sort of formal and unsypmpathetic way ("oh, yes," the
prop department says, "there will be a body over there,
we just haven't gotten around to the killing yet").
And I wonder if my book will have any of those things,
and if it does not I wonder if my editor will be less
than happy with it.  But people buying travelogues, even
ambiguous self-fictional ones, will not be expecting
car chases or international espionage, will they?
Reassure me, please, that they will not!

This morning there were two wasps, one buzzing as always
against the window, and the other hopping exhaustedly on
the table, beside my little keyboard.  I caught them one
at a time and tossed them into the air from the balcony
as usual.  I rather wish I had just put the exhausted one
down on the railing; I'm not at all sure that it could fly.
But then it would have been more likely to come back in;
and being such weightless little machines even a three-storey
fall down to the little courtyard (scrub grass and an
unambitious tree and a concrete bench) will not have
broken one too badly, I don't think.

Thinking always of you, amid the wasps and the hidden
entrails of the Earth, I remain, your affectionate,

Harald

-------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Inga,

There is nothing duller than not doing something.  A few
years ago I heard something somewhere about how eating too
much food, even good healthy food like apples and milk and
celery and caramel, causes foul things to build up within
the walls of the blood vessels (within the linings of one's
own inner tunnels, chipped out bit by bit over nine months
of centuries by the ancient miners of the womb), and eventually
one falls over unromantically dead.  I resolved on hearing
this to eat less food, so as to live forever (and now I
have completely given up pausing to apologize to you when
I become to silly; you will have to take the apologies as
read!).

And so I would eat my three rhombic meals per day, with apples
and milk and celery and caramel, with the inevitable birds
singing their arias outside my window (you know my birds),
but then while pottering around the house and out and about
among the shops and the sidewalks and the street corner vendors
of hot dogs and cold soda and salted pretzels and sugared
dough and glossy magazines of naked men and women with
chocolate bars attached I would eat nothing else.  This
was in stark contrast to my usual habit, which was to eat
more or less all the time, in small doses, of the hot dogs
and cold soda and so on, and at first I thought it would
be difficult but actually (at first) it was marvelous.

It was, I suppose, an exercise in that Zen-like Letting Go
of material things; reaching out for an apple but then not
taking it, thinking about a pretzel and then not buying it,
looking at the cold soda but then waiting until dinner.  (I
did allow myself water when out walking on the hot streets
and the sultry valleys; water aparently does not contain
the deadly gunk that fouls one's tunnels and makes one die.)
It was an enormous exercise of power, to cut through the
Gordian knot of desire and craving and struggle by just
not doing, not buying, not eating, not drinking or sipping
or sucking or biting, until the next official meal, by a
pure and unsulliable act of will.

And that lasted, I would estimate with my estimating hat on,
perhaps a month.  Or less.  Because that thrilling act of
will involved in not doing wore away very quickly.  Once one
discovers that one can reach out into the world with one's
will and not eat a piece of caramel, that fact has a certain
beautiful simplicity, and informs the rest of one's life,
but in itself it gets boring.  Not eating an apple is much
like not eating a stalk of celery, which is much like not
drinking a glass of milk.

On the other hand, well.  The thrill of once again eating
a lump of caramel (sticky on the teeth and soft and smooth
on the tongue, and especially if covered in chocolate warm
and dark and blissful on the palete), or the cold substantial
whiteness of a glass of milk, or the tart musky crunch of a
fresh stalk of green and pale celery, are all completely
different from one another, and all new and gleaming and
delicious each successive time, and although the thrill does
dull eventually, with exposure, with entire boxes of caramels
finished off while watching old black and white movies, still
the dulling is, compared to the dulling of the initial thrill
of not eating, as slow as molasses, or honey, or a drop of
caramel sitting in the sun on a hot day.

Because, after all, it is as much an effort of my will to
overcome that fear of gunked tunnels and death and drink the
milk as it is an effort of my will to overcome the tonguely
craving and not eat the apple.  And so much sweeter!

I did after all write a polite host-note to Yolanda Melle,
although I'm afraid it may have gotten to her after more
than the statutorily (is that a word?) permitted delay.
I came home from somewhere (out buying apples and milk and
caramels, most likely, on the bustling waterfront streets
at the bustling waterfront apple and milk and caramel stalls),
and I saw her very kind and polite note sitting there on my
little table, intimately lying across her husband's very
kind and polite note, and I felt quite the inadequate foreigner
and in a rare burst of energy wrote to her, thanking her
in (I flatter myself) gentlemanly terms for visiting me and
brightening up my poor hovel, and apologizing for my sleepiness
and the accompanying rudeness, and not alluding in any way
to her kiss on my mouth (which I'm now sure was just a
dream) or her fingers on my face (which I'm still convinced
really occurred, but which must have been just the honest
and natural emotion of a motherly woman to a sleeping
idiot, and which would be thought entirely ordinary by
any mother native to this side of the ocean), but only
saying ordinary friendly things and generally being
civilized.  (Am I not infinitely approvable?)

The mail delivery on the island here is like something out of
an earlier century, which is to say that it is marvelously good,
and like Homles on Baker Street one can put a note into a
post box in the morning and hope for an answer by afternoon
tea (although afternoon tea isn't a common tradition here,
except in one Anglophile hotel lobby, tucked curiously in
a corner by some fish-shops that I discovered entirely by
accident the other day, sadly well past tea-time).  Not that
I hoped for, and not that I have received, any answer from
Mrs. Melle, but I am at least confident that she recieved my
note shortly after it left my hand.  (Really the swarms of
letter carriers around the town, in dove-grey coats and white
gloves, many riding bicycles, are one of the more notable
things about the city; I don't know why it's not prominently
featured in the guide-books.)

I am still putting out my morning wasps, although there have
been mornings without a wasp, and I have found two or three
dead ones scattered about.  (Poor broken machines, run out of
fuel before I could rescue them or their random batterings
could find an open window; how inefficient, how profligate,
Nature is with her creatures!  An overabundance of material
She has to work with, after all.)

And last night I dreamt there was a wasp crawling on my
back.  I was in my bed (in the dream as in life), but in
the dream my back was bare, and I was lying prone and quite
asleep, and on my bare back one of the tiny machines was
walking daintily to and fro, stepping over and around the
small hairs, and dipping in and out of the spinal groove
as it walked.  My point of view was somewhere outside and
above myself, looking down at my back and the wasp.  It
walked for a very long time, with the malleable time of
dreams, much longer than it would have taken to cross my
back side to side and top to bottom twice, even at the
slow and painstaking pace of a wasp-machine.  But in the
dream the journey was endlessly long, and the wasp was
tireless.  I may have been, at some point in the dream,
the wasp myself; yes writing it down now I'm sure that I
was, a small jacketted maching travelling forever across
a long smooth expanse of back-skin, the spiky hairs on my
legs and my antennae rubbing together gently as I walked.

That is the kind of dream that you wake from with an odd
taste in your mouth (although I don't remember an odd taste
this morning).

I have been writing steadily in my book, or steadily by
my own lights at any rate, and it may be starting to take
a feasible, a plausible, shape.  Almost I regret the passing
of my panic and the fear that the book would never be
started, let alone finished.  Some energy, I think, has
gone out of me with that panic, and I feel a lethargy
(and here I see you laughing, and reminding me that it
is exactly lethargy with which I react to worry and
panic, and in my steady writing now I am aeons less
lethargic than I was before Page One was written.  And
you are quite right, as always.)

I have also been visited my friends the artists who live
above me, and admiring their pots and their other art.
For they are not merely potters (not that there is anything
wrong with potters; a well-turned pot or a handful of
goblet can be the most perfect of material things), but
also artists of the modern sort, involving concepts and
wrapped things and the relationship of Man to his Environment
as expressed by an old shoe, and other profundities along
those lines.  They have one line that they are persuing now
that involves making objects that have no names, that will
(as Miriam explained it to me) keep the viewer in that
pristine and pre-conceptual state that comes between the
first seeing of a thing (when the life of perception
begins) and the first naming of it (when that life dies).

I would try to describe some of these things to you, but
as their purpose is to defy description it would be perhaps
disrespectful.  Think to yourself of that live moment
between seeing and naming, and imagine it stretches out
indefinitely in the experiencing of an object small enough
to fit on a table, and you will have imagined their art
at its most refined and successful (you will have, perhaps,
experienced it more purely than I have, since in fact to
see is to name, and especially when one knows one is not
supposed to name a thing names for it come crowding in
even more densely).  I think, in fact, that we perceive
the name first and the thing itself only afterward; but
the suggestion was met with a sort of polite derision when
I brought it shyly out in the apartment upstairs.

Miriam is the quietest and perhaps the most interesting of
my three artists (whose sleeping arrangements, you will recall,
I am not speculating on).  She is slight and blonde, with
a quiet whispery voice that commands attention by how hard
it is to hear (which is to say, you have to shut up and
listen if you want to hear what she is saying).  Her hair
is a very pale blonde, almost white, whispery and slight
itself, always being mussed by some invisible wind.  She
is the girl from the island (Tomas is also from the island,
if I have this right, and Abbey, whose name I can never
recall, is from England, somewhere in the suburbs of London,
attending the University in a sporadic and desultory manner
and taking care of the little collective's finances and
gallery contacts.  Tomas is Chief Potter, and Miriam is I
think the most conceptual of them, able to converse at
considerable and interesting length on topics that afterward
I am utterly unable to reconstruct, having to do with the
relationship of art and society, or rather with the
impossibility of there being any such relationship, or
with society being a form of art, or something along
those general lines, or perhaps about something else
completely.  But she is the one that I am fondest of,
because she is the least comprehensible, and comprehension
is to over-rated.  (Also because I suspect that she is the
one sleeping alone, although I am not speculating on that
subject.)

Tomorrow night I am invited again to the Melle's den of
prosperity in the suburbs, for another pleasant dinner,
at which I may finally meet the Melle daughter (who has
launched off on her own).  You may expect a full report
on the adventure presently, and in the meantime I remain,
your humblest and most worshipful servant,

Ivan

-------------------------------------------------------

Dear Jane,

Well, I will try to tell this slowly and in the proper
order, although as you will see there is a great temptation
to rush ahead and give you the climactic and amazing part
of the tale first.  But I will be restrained and present
it to you in order, so you can have the enjoyment of
unwrapping the package before you have the gift itself.
(If you do take the final contents of the wrapping as
a gift; I hope and trust that you will, but it has been
so long since I saw your eyes.)

I spent yesterday entirely unremarkably, writing unremarkable
but acceptable words in my book (words that I think, or I
thought at the time, that something good and substantial
and true might be built on), and lying in my chair on my
terrace looking out at the city (over which hung a certain
haze with an odd tangy smell), and putting a fresh sheet of
paper on my easel but not touching brush to it, and eating
and drinking.

At seven my friend Melle, my very generous and respected friend
Melle, came by in his tiny car and took me off again to his
home.  We were dining early, because his daughter had to be
somewhere at some time.  The suburbs were placid and calm and
self-content, unaware (or pretending to be unaware) of anything
at all out of the ordinary happening behind their groomed walls;
leaving all that stuff to the city and the closed curtains.

Melle's daughter (the daughter of Octavian and Yolanda Melle,
Miss Luisa Melle) is an intense woman of I suppose around
twenty or twenty-two, with dark and slightly protruding eyes,
thin and eloquent fingers, and shiny black hair.  She lives
somewhere on the other side of the city (the other side, that
is, from my own hovel and the surrounding streets, toward
which I have come to feel a certain pride of ownership), and
has a job of some kind in an office of some kind, and a set
of decided political opinions.

There was a palpable tension in the air (not that ordinarily I
would have thought of palpating a tension, but in this case the
metaphor was entirely apt; you would agree if you had been there)
between Miss Luisa Melle and her parents, and especially between
Miss Luisa Melle and her mother.  Nothing the mother said escaped
contradiction or criticism by the daughter, and a certain number
of the mother's remarks might have been interpreted as casting
a less than favorable light on the life and activities of the
daughter.  The father stayed mostly out of the direct line of
fire, but he did not thereby escape injury; secondary lines of
tension ran (not quite as visibly-glowing strands of angry red
suspended in the prosperous air of the dining room, but nearly)
between him and each of the women, each of whom expected and
did not find, and took great offense at not finding, support
from him in the campaign against the other.

Or at least that is how I interpreted the polite and actually
sometimes quite humorous and entertaining conversation that
occurred over the lamb and apples and milk.  I thought at
the time that it might be the veil of strangeness again,
and that this is how in this city it feels to have dinner
with a normal loving family with a normal loving wife and
husband and grown daughter just finished college and living
away from home (and a teenage son down at the end of the
table quite successfully monosyllabic and unobtrusive).
But subsequent events -- well.

I had decided, on the drive between my fortress tower and
the country manse, to be a little bit infatuated with Mrs.
Melle.  To think of her the way that a shy boy might think
of his pretty older girl cousin who had touched his hand
casually on parting from a family party last month, and
maybe smiled at him a little more than usual.  But Mrs.
Melle was not a co-operative subject; the firey cords
between her and her husband and daughter reached into her
muscles, and she had a stiffness and an air of being
armored that was only discouraging to my intended
infatuation.  I looked in vain for a glance that might be
misinterpreted as flirtatious, or a casual brushing by
me on her way to the kitchen, because that evening she did
nothing casual, and all her attention was on her daughter
and opponent, and her husband and failed ally, and she had
nothing but the most socially inevitable glances to spare
for me.

The daughter's feet were in high black leather boots, more
grandmother than vixen, and they clacked nervily on the
floor when she walked.  Her mother's shoes were lower
pumps, also black and also clacking, and the sound of them
walking was one with the tension (was something I certainly
would not even have noticed without the tension, as I know
you would point out, but as it was it played into and was
a part of the anxious and strenuous whole).

With the tension and the clacking and being cheated of my
intended innocent infatuation, it was the least pleasant
of my evenings at the Melles'.  They had out on the coffee
table after the meal the box of candies that I brought them
the other day (did I mention my box of candies?  caramels,
of course, covered in dark chocolate, and a few creams, and
decorative sticks of licorice), and we picked at them and
talked, the men looking mostly vainly for subjects that
the women would find nothing in to disagree about.

When it was over, rather early as expected, my infatuation was
fed momentarily and unlooked for, as Mrs. Melle pressed my hand
warmly at the door, and rolled her eyes secretly at me in the
direction of her daughter, who was disagreeing about something
emphatically with the teenage son within the house.  Or so I
took the motion of her hand and her gleaming black eyes, knowing
that there was probably nothing in it, but warmed in my game
nonetheless.

The rest of the story will not be long in telling; the wrapping
is mostly off and we are close to the center.  Or to substitute
metaphors, we have lapped off the chocolate, and nearly are at the
smoothness of the caramel.

Sitting in my room again, then, yawning and preparing for bed,
someone rapped again at my door.  And again it was Yolanda Melle,
in the sensible wool dress buttoning down the front, and the
sensible black pumps on her feet, and a flat black hat that
she held in one hand.  When I opened the door she flowed, or
swayed, or at any rate was immediately in the room, with the
door closed behind her.  I took a step backward and smiled some
impromptu pleasantry meant to refer humorously to the lateness of
the hour and the pleasant surprise and the enjoyableness of
her previous visit.

She did not, as far as I can recall, say a word, but she
smiled a smile that delighted the remnants of my game of
infatuation, and then destroyed that game utterly and
forever by slipping one arm around my back, pulling her
soft and gently rounded body against mine, and kissing me
warm and meltingly on the mouth, for quite a long and
breathless time.

Now this, dear sister, was as you can imagine one of the most
surprising things that had ever happened in my young and
technically virginal life.  Accordingly I noticed things
about the event, and I remember them.  She kept her eyes
open as we kissed (or, as I should say, as she kissed me),
until the point where her mouth softened and opened and
our tongues (how odd to say "our tongues") gently greeted
each other.  Here my eyes closed (although the rest of my
senses were open to the greatest degree), and I think hers
did as well.  Her breasts pushed very sweetly against the
lower part of my chest.  One of her hands was on my back;
the other, still holding her hat, came up to hold and
caress the back of my head.  I felt the breath from her
nose warm on my face.  Her mouth tasted slightly, not
unpleasingly, of sherry or brandy.

This was the first large surprise.  She stepped back and
away from me, and tossed her hat onto my table (tossed,
note, not a careful laying down), and walked into the
room.  I stood inevitably like an idiot, only turning to
face her as she passed me (the line of her back, the long
curve of her legs).  And then in the second large surprise
she turned back to face me, looking me full in the eyes
with a frightening smile, and very slowly, one at a time,
from top to bottom, she undid the buttons of her dress.

Soon I should draw a modest curtain across the scene.
I should not burden you with the shape of her breasts, or
the blackness of her pubic hair, or the fine mottled lines
on her hips and belly where her skin remembers being big
with babies, or how she came to me naked and kissed me again
in just the same way.  (But I have, now, burdened you with
that, and I shudder with hope that the burden is not irritating
to you.)

For the rest: she had a condom in her purse, and I was
grateful that the bed-springs did not creak.  She was
energetic and enthusiastic, and so I must admit was I,
although the encounter (the activity, the consumation,
the event) drained me of the last of my waking energy
in the end, and she drew the sheets up over us and
cradled my head on her shoulder, and I slept, with my
arm draped woozily over the bare and voluptuous flesh
of her side.

Sometime early in the night I dimly recall our waking,
and caressing each other lazily, and talking, as we talked
that night in her house, of life and the world and everything
and nothing.  But not about marriage or jealousy or betrayal,
or about sordid affairs between young tourists and the
wives of local professors.  Nor about her daughter or
son, or anything else particular to the world and ourselves.
Then she kissed me again, and as though she were a succubus
I fell back into sleep with her mouth on mine.  Or that
is now I remember it.

When she rose and left, sometime in the deep of the night,
she did not kiss me again, but only tousled my hair and
put on her clothes and went out.  I know nothing of the
etiquette of these things; should I have risen and
helped her with her things?  Offered her a drink?
Warned her to keep an eye out for wasps?  I feel now
(the next morning, late, having just risen long after
the sun and feeling as hung-over as though Yolanda Melle
had been at least a bottle of wine, or more likely some
overly-sweet liqueur) as though there must be rules for
these things, these things that happen millions of times
a day.  But at the time it was entirely unique.

(I can imagine you here again, telling my that I am
analyzing perfection as I always analyze perfection, and
I should simply accept the gift for what it is, the
darling unwrapping of every day.  But is that what you
would say, and toss your hair and smile?  Or have I
crossed some line, sinking into carnal knowledge of
Yolana Melle, and would you push me out of the nest
of yourself for it?  If it would make you happier with
the world, I invite you to assume that this is all a
fantasy, a crazy typist's lonely maundering on his
terrace alone in a foreign city, with only that one
nice evening with the wife of a friend, and your
distant love, to keep him company, making up false
but amusing stories for you.  And never for an instant
wanting to risk the loss of your good opinion.)

So there we are.  I assume I need not write a polite
thank-you note for this particular occasion.  I assume
that the veil of strangeness cannot account for this;
if there are cities where it is the ordinary course of
public business to visit one's husband's young friend
and slowly take off one's dress while looking him in
the eyes, then those are cities that I have not heard of,
and that I would be reluctant (although interested) to
purchase a ticket to.  I am now a mere cuckolder, I
suppose.  And what will this do to my book, once it
has sunken its moist surprising jaws far enough into
my soul to come out through the keyboard?

Baffled and uncertain, but bouyed up by the inevitable
suffusion of proud male hormoes, I remain, eager as
ever to make the world pleasing to you, your quite
astounded,

John

-------------------------------------------------------

Dear Kayla,

It was raining this morning.  Huge overstuffed grey clouds
clumped ponderously over the city, enormous sponges dripping
down cold water in loud heavy bucketsful.  But now the sun
is coming out, and the rainwater is thin and delicate and
gleaming on everything.  The sponges have left us jewels.

It occurs to me that she (Mrs. Yolanda Melle, the assumed
antecendant of all my third-person female pronouns) is the
one in control.  She can come to my door and rap again at
any moment; she knows when her family is expecting her to
be somewhere, when she is free, when she is observed.  I,
who am never observed and have no family here to watch me
(and no promises to keep, except some implicit promise to
the wider society and the stability of family relations,
which I have already broken enthusiastically on the little
bed), know none of these things about her, and I can take
no action on my own.  I can hardly call her house and ask
to speak to her, or visit on no pretext.  I could call
ostensibly to speak to Octavian and hope that she answers
instead, but how sordid!

I have tried to work on my book, but it is hopeless.  All
my words about the primacy of life over writing, and hopes
that my book might draw its readers away from books and into
life, haunt me now, as the all too accurate prating of an
ignorant, uttering terrible truths that he is too simple
to appreciate.

Writing, even the writing of semi-fictional travelogues
intended for a mere long-suffering editor and remunerative
publisher, comes from deprivation and emptiness.  I was
satisfyingly deprived and empty, but now I am distressingly
baffled and over-full.  My emotions pull me now here now
there, toward daydreaming and erotic reverie and self-loathing
and guilt, toward joy and misery, toward despite of my own
silliness; but in any case away from the settled and
thoughful (feelingful) concentration that is required
(that I require) for putting down significant words.
(Not that my writing to you is insignificant; it is all
that keeps me alive!  But it is not for anyone else's
eyes and fingers.)

I suppose I am suffering, waiting for her, wondering if
she (when she) will return, or call, or write.  No, I don't
suppose: I know.  I am in an agony of anticipation.  She
will never want to see me again, she was drunk, she was
enraged by her daughter and through some unfathomable
emotional alchemy that translated into a lust for me (for
any near young life) that now shames her and that will
never be repeated.  Or she will report me to the police
and I will be jailed forever for rape in a foreign prison,
and never see daylight again.  (But she would not do that.)
Or I have imagined the whole thing, or somehow misinterpreted
it, or I am mad.  Or she will come back, but coming back
she will hate me.  Or not hate me, and again unbutton
her dress.

Which is perhaps the most frightening thing.

I will --

And here you must imagine two or three hours passing!  When
I wrote those last two words (and I will not scratch them
out, because they were written for you, although I've
forgotten what they were going to mean, what other words
were to follow them to give them sense and purpose) I was
interrupted by a rap on the door (how I must have started
from my chair).  I put your note, this note, into my
pocket, and at the door there was Mrs. Melle (there was
she) once again.

She was charming, smiling, polite.  I think there was
irony, a hint of shared secret (was there room for
anything between us _but_ that shared secret?) in her
smile, but she did not come in and take off her dress
(or her shirt and practical skirt).  She did not come in
at all, but asked me if I would like to see more of the
harbor, and without waiting for a reply (or perhaps I
said yes, or nodded, or groaned some sort of assent) she
took my hand and led me outside, into the gleaming wet
world under the sun, and down to the docks.

We go into a neat little open boat, with a gasoline motor
on the back that started with a key (I remember motors
starting with feisty and dangerous ripcords and loud
cursing, sometime in my youth, our youth, but this one
was quiet and biddable), and with a practiced hand on
the tiller (looking at her fingers my throat constricted)
she guided us out among the moored and anchored ships and
out into the open.

She and Octavian, she said (and I heard nothing painful
or guilty in the conjunction) had an old houseboat out
in the harbor, and she thought I might enjoy the setting.
(I wondered that her husband had not mentioned it to me.)
We had exchanged few words on the way from my room to the
little motorboat (my terrace and my chair and my easel,
the patient keyboard holding my book, all left behind
on the shore), and few touches; just that initial innocent
grasp of my hand by hers, leading me out and down and
seaward.  I was as bewildered as ever (I know you will
have no trouble here imagining me bewildered, even if
imagining me bewildered in a boat with a married lover
is something new).

The sun was bright in the harbor, the air cool and moist,
a considerable breeze.  She was hatless, I was hatless, and
our hair whipped about in our faces.  I sat facing forward
on a hard seat between the gunwales, with her behind me on
an identical seat steering the boat.  Buoys dotted the
water here and there, and other boats like ours ("dingies",
perhaps?) and larger fishing boats, and now and then a
gleaming white pleasure boat or tourist ship.  We moved
smoothly past them all, and out where the vessels began
to thin out we pulled up (she pulled us up) beside a
trim squarish yellow houseboat, sitting complacent on
the surface of the harbor, with flowerpots on the deck
and a cheerful hen painted (in rather garish colors) on
the side of the cabin.

I thought I would spring competently from the dingy to
to the deck of the boat and help her gallantly board,
but while I was still planning the exact placement of my
feet (you know I am not entirely comfortable around the
water) she had turned off the motor, secured it, and
somehow sprung past me and was helping me onto the
deck (the skin of her palm warm and dry around my
fingers).

It is a neat little boat, minimally but adequately
furnished and provisioned, clean and organized, all
things in their places.  She showed me politely and
leisurely around the fore and aft decks, talking about
the previous owners, the places the boat had been,
the pleasures and trials of houseboats, the rhythm of
the water.  Standing at the very stern she swayed back
against me for a moment and I put out my arm.  She
stood like that, her body pressing back against me,
long enough to send a quiver running up my back and
raising the hair on the back of my neck.  Then she
grinned at me over her shoulder (and it is a matter
of accuracy that I don't think I have described her
as "grinning" before), and stepped away from me back
to a proper distance, only letting her arm for a moment
rub against my chest and stomach and thigh.  I hope
I did not groan.

As we had been walking about on the deck (admire me that
even in the extremity that my life has become I still
maintain the quasi-British exoticism, and say "walking
about" rather than "walking around"), I had been getting
glimpses of the interior of the cabin through various
windows; some but not all with curtains half or fully
drawn.  It seemed an equally neat and tidy place seen
from without, and when she (when Mrs. Yolanda Melle,
the wife of my friend Octavian Melle) finally opened
the door and bowed me in, it proved to be exactly
that: a sitting room with cooking niche, a bedroom,
a small but efficient bathroom, all visible from
each other but with enough clever corners and hanging
curtains to give the eye places to rest and the mind
a feeling of busy space.

It was quiet within the cabin.  She came in after me
(we both ducked our heads slightly through the low
doorway) and closed the door behind her.  She said
nothing, and I was suddenly aware of her breathing.
I said something inconsequential and complimentary
about the neatness of the place, and I turned,
expecting that she might continue the tour, but
still she did not speak.  And she put her hands on
my shoulders, and her face near mine.

It did not happen as quickly as that first time, in my
hovel, but it did happen.  Again we were enthusiastic,
and again (this time I did not have the excuse
of the late hour, but I had not slept well the night
before) she drew the covers (the covers of the neat
little ship's bed with its firm compact matress) up
over us and again I fell asleep with my head on her
breast.

She rose and kissed me some time later, and told me
to rest and enjoy myself, and she would return before
long.  And I heard the boat's motor start and drifted
back to sleep, only a few minutes ago waking with
something of a start, realizing myself effectively
stranded on a little houseboat, belonging to the
friend I had cuckolded, somewhere indefinable out
in the waters of the harbor.  For comfort I gathered
my clothes together (flung and peeled off in that
enthusiasm), and I remembered this note in my pocket
and brought it out, and smoothed it out on the
bedside table here (bolted to the floor, to the
deck, very nautically), and found a pen in a drawer,
and now I am writing to you again.  It is good to
be writing to you, my fixed standard in the gale.
I only hope I will eventually reach land again to
post this; or maybe I can tie it to the leg of a
passing albatross, and trust to fate to deliver it
into your care.

What can it mean, this having made love (twice, now)
with the wife of a friend, a friend that I have known
for only a week or two but who has been most generous
and kind to me, and now to be lying in a bed on a boat
(his boat, also, and her boat) out in a harbor that I
first saw only a week or two ago, with no way to shore,
and nothing of my own with me but my clothing, my wallet,
my latest letter to my dear embattled sister, and only
the tatters of my wits?  Is this why people go to
foreign places, so that things like this will happen
to them?  Or is this why they stay safely at home?

Lying here on the bed (and you must not imagine me
writing this note all at once, but rather taking
long pauses between paragraphs, sentences, even words,
to listen to the sounds from outside, listen for
a familiar motor approaching, and even now and then
to doze in a sinful but enjoyable repletion), I
find in my head the Ballad of Natty Grove.  You
know the words:

  Heigh ho heigh ho holiday, the best day of the year
  Little Natty Grove to church did go,
   some holy words to hear

And of course he runs afoul of a beautiful lady, and
ends up in her bed, and is surprised by the return of
her husband who questions him cruelly and rhetorically.

  And how do you like my house and lands
  And how to you like my sheep
  And how do you like my fair young bride
  That lies in my arms asleep

And then her husband kills him.  (Or it may be "sheets"
rather than "sheep"; this houseboat probably does not
contain a definitive version of the lyrics.)

So I lie here, listening for that one generous member
of Lord Arlen's Merry Men to blow his horn; his fair
young bride is not here to tell me that it's only a
shepherd and I should lie down beside her again.  (Mrs.
Yolanda Melle is no longer a fair young bride, but the
situations are otherwise analogous.)  I wonder if
Octavian favors the sword, or the more modern pistol?
But probably he will not kill me at all; we are more
civilized now.  And there was no church involved.

I will optimistically close this letter here, and if
my lovely captor (and she is lovely, in ways that it
would hardly be proper to describe) ever returns to
free me from my floating cell, I will post this note,
and follow it quickly with another one, to give you
the tale of my release and whatever follows after it.
Until then I remain, your Sinbad,

Karl

--------------------------------------------------

Dear Lorelei,

Here again is quite a thing.  I have flailed about in
freezing and oil-slicked water, soaked my clothes, been
in fear (perhaps not real fear, but fear nonetheless)
of my life, and even as I write this to you, I write
with fingers whose bones are still chilled deep within
their cores, despite all the blankets and hot coffee
with chocolate and electric heaters (and lovemaking)
in the world.

After I sealed my last letter (which, if the world's postal
carriers are as cheerful and quick as this town's, you
will have received in your graceful hand along with, or
just before, this one), there came across the water and to
my ears the sound of a small motor.  Unlike the other sounds
of small and large motors, this one came reliably closer
to the boat, and I stirred myself enough to get up and
look out at it (the bed, where I stretched in passive
lethargy holding the sealed envelope, planning to some
day put it somewhere in some unimagined future, not
having a view of the shoreward window).  Already in
my mind putting out my hand to gallantly help Mrs.
Yolanda Melle (my married lover) onto the houseboat,
I luckily looked out the window before I went out the
door, and so avoided meeting her daughter, the redoutable
Luisa, on the deck of the boat, under the open sky, in only
my crumpled underwear.

I had time to peel on the rest of my clothes, but time
neither to find a good hiding place nor to hide myself
in it, before Miss Luisa pulled up in the dingy, leapt
out of it (looking for an instant like a thinner and
paler version of her mother, with a staight and set
mouth), and yanked (tugged, pulled) open the door and
came into the cabin.  Where I was.  Her face tightened
even more when she saw me, but she did not seem to be
surprised.

"Hello," she said, probably not as sourly as I remember
it, or more sourly.  I smiled (unconvincingly I imagine),
and nodded, and said something complimentary about the place
(not, I hope, the same thing I said to her mother, also vague
and complimentary, the first time we spoke in that space).
She looked around, sniffed, shook her head.  "Come
out onto the deck," she said.  I followed her.

Outside the dark was coming down (where, I wondered,
was Yolanda, Mrs. Melle, her mother?), and a wind
had come up.

"My mother brought you out here," she said.

"Yes," I answered, more or less, "she wanted to show
me the harbor and the boat.  It's very sweet." (I
remember that I said "sweet", and when I did she
closed her eyes, although it could have been that
she was blinking.)  I said something feeble and
inadequate about Yolanda (Mrs. Melle, Luisa's
mother) having gone back to shore briefly, for
mumbles of reasons.

"I loved coming out here when I was little," she
said, and moved away.  I followed politely after
her, and when she sat on the edge of the deck I
sat down also, not close to her.

And then she rose, with a suddenness that immobilized
me, and came to face me, and hooked one foot under my
ankles, and pushed hard on my shoulders, and I fell
backward into the water.

This was not a pleasant experience.  The water was, as
I have said, frigid.  Plunged in suddenly, upside down,
I was naturally mindless with terror, flailing with
every limb, and not screaming only because my body is
despite everything wise and my mouth was clamped shut.
It righted itself in the water and my arms flapped so
as to keep me there (my mind all the time huddled in
one corner, moaning and ineffectual).

I came back into my wits just in time to hear, around
the other side of the boat, Luisa starting the dingy's
motor and taking it back toward shore.  Then I did
scream; meant as a righteous demand that she come
back and fish me out, it came out as a shrill and
impotent yowl, ignored by all.  A slight swell of
icy water from the dingy's wake passed by me.

Although I can barely swim, I did not die there in the
harbor.  I clung shivering and spluttering to the side
of the houseboat, groping in the twilight for handholds
or a ladder, not remembering where one might be on this
side of the boat.  I dragged myself around (stopping
twice when the shuddering overcame me), found a ladder
at last, and hauled myself up.  I rolled sopping into
the cabin, stripped off my clothes (shivering now
uncontrollably), and wrapped myself in all of the
towels from the neat little bathroom.  Then I piled
all the sheets and covers and cushions in the the
cabin onto the bed, and crept in under all of them.
The shivering took a long time to subside.

Mrs. Melle came not long after, brought out by a
purring water-taxi with a bright yellow light on the
prow.  I heard it pull up, heard her say a word to
the driver (the pilot? the captain?), and heard or
felt her step onto the deck.  I managed only a groan
(an exceptionally pathetic one, I hoped) when she
opened the cabin door and came in.  I had the
satisfaction of hearing her surprised, taken off
guard, nonplussed, at the sodden carpet and the
pile of wet towels and my own huddled form within
the bed.

"Did you fall into the water?"

"Your daughter," I said, "your daughter pushed me
in."

I am charitable, and I recall that the sound she made
then was a gasp of astonishment and horror, with nothing
about it of laughter.  There is a limit to how amusingly
pathetic I am willing to be, and that limit is somewhere
on the warm side of an attempted drowning and the danger
of pneumonia and death.  But then she was all care and
efficiency, boiling water on the boat's small electric
pad, turning on the electric heater (which I would have
noticed in time), tossing soaked towels into a hamper
and hanging my clothes over the heat to dry.  I
turned onto my back and watched her moving about the
little cabin.

"Your daughter?" I said, "Luisa?  Pushed me into the
water?  The very cold water.  Right off the deck."

I should be able to write something subtle and nuanced to
describe her face here, Mrs. Yolanda Melle's face, when
she sat down on the bed beside where my huddling and chilled
(if by now somewhat relaxed) self lay under the piled
sheets and blankets.  She was rubbing her upper teeth
against her lower lip, or rather her lower lip against
her upper teeth (which drew my attention to her mouth,
which distracted me even in my sorry state), and her
forehead and eyes had a kindly and considering look,
slightly disturbed, slightly unhappy.  She touched my
face with the back of her hand.

"My daughter can be difficult," she said.  And she bent
over and kissed me gently on my forehead, and then on
my lips, and then straightened again.  "You shouldn't
take it personally.  She will not do it again."  Her
voice for the last few words was quite definite, stern
and maternal.  "She will not do it again."

I wanted to ask if she might do anything else, if Luisa
might put poison in my food, or set fire to my building,
or shoot me with a sniper rifle from the top of a bell
tower.  But I only shivered and turned onto my side again,
toward Yolanda, and she ran her fingers through my wet
hair.

After awhile, when the room was warmed crisp from the
electric heater and she had brought me some tea and I
had stopped shivering (although the cold of the water was
still, is still, somewhere deep in my bones, and my
chest aches if I breathe too deeply), I got out of bed
and dressed.  (Her eyes were on me quite boldly as I
slid naked out of the bed, feeling like a mussel or
scallop forced pale and clammy out of the moisture of
its shell.)  She took a telephone from a shelf and
called another water-taxi.

(And yes, as you have noticed, and I see you smile as your
concern for my poor shivering form and my possible pneumonia
fades, the boat has a radiotelephone (it did not occur to me
to search the place; I was after all such a willing prisoner
and then such a self-absorbed victim), and the harbor has a
water-taxi service that takes people here and there among
the boats (not everyone, I guess, has their own dingy, and
it must be an adventure to do one's grocery shopping over
the waves, as long as you are not pushed in).  So I was not
quite the prisoner that I had imagined.  But would I have
called a taxi, and let the world know that I was on the Melle's
houseboat?  What if the taximan had been a student of the
Professor's?  Had Yolanda told Octavian about showing me the
boat? Had she told her daughter?  The questions occurred to me,
but I could not ask them.  Will I ever be able to ask them?
Will I ever be able to see Octavian again?  Will his daughter
assassinate me here in this foreign town with its harbor and
whitewashed buildings?)

One minor (or not minor) blessing: in getting into my
half-dry clothes while she was speaking to the taxi
dispatcher on the telephone, I found lying neglected
but unharmed in a corner my previously sealed letter
(the one which, knowing your love of order, you have
read just before this one), and I slipped it gently
into my driest pocket.  Finding it was a gift from the
small gods, and it made me happy.

It was late, and dark.  The taxi cut through the now
mostly still water, sliding over a soft mirror out of
the dark of the harbor in to the lights of the city.
From the taxi landing we went back to my humble room,
walking quickly through the evening streets, conducting
ourselves like ordinary friends.  (Was she aware of the
pressure of eyes on us, the people in the street who might
be friends of hers, or of her husband's?  Would someone
remember her walking up the hill with an odd bedraggled young
man?  Would someone see her go up to my room and not come
down?  Were there strategies and considerations that I ought
to be following, that were my responsibility to keep up?
I felt a whole structure of new rules forming invisible
in the air around us, and I felt infinitely tired before
the demands that it might make of me.)

At the door she smiled and hugged me, but with no kiss
(will it always be that I remember each time I touch her
in such detail, as a separate and self-sufficient event?).
She went out to get us food from one of the dim little
restaurants I had found in my early explorations of the
city (back in another geologic era, before I fell asleep
on Mrs. Melle's shoulder and before she unbuttoned the buttons
of her wool dress with her fingers)

At the narrow table in my room I ate curried lamb (smoky and
warming), and she had a colorful salad with curdled white
cheese, and we drank red watered wine and talked only a
little.  Octavian, she said, had left for two days for a
conference, and if I liked (her eyes black like marble and
deeper than the harbor) she could spend the night with me.
(Her son otherwise occupied, how I don't know; I could not
have asked.)  I said I would very much like to spend the
night with her, and she kissed me lightly over our plates.
When we were done we left the dishes on the table and stood
by the terrace windows, looking out over the sparkling
lights of the city.

She asked me if I liked the little houseboat, and I said
something about pleasant prisons and the danger of
pneumonia.  I wanted to be angry at her, to rail at
her about her daughter's abominable behavior, or to
be righteous and indignant, or even generous and
mature and forgiving toward her daughter for her sake,
understanding what young people can be.  But I was
none of those; I was only standing looking out at
the city beside a fragrant woman, something like
content in dry clothes, with the chill only curled
up somewhere deep inside the structures of my body.

She reached out and again stroked my cheek with the
back of her hand.  At my expression (whatever it was),
she laughed fondly, and kissed me lightly on the cheek,
and then with a more serious face kissed me on the mouth,
lingeringly, and I put my arms around her (warming
myself at the curves and surfaces of her body through
her clothing).  We sank onto my threadbare couch and
kissed for hours (for days, for weeks, for years),
like teenagers in the back of a car, my blood slowly
heating despite my tiredness, and gradually our
clothes came off and we made love again, on the flabby
cushions of the couch, and afterward we staggered
(or she walked and I staggered, exhausted from the
chill and the heat), and under the covers she wrapped
herself naked around me and kissed my neck and my
shoulders, and I wondered if I might spend the rest of
my life there, exhausted in a bed in a room overlooking
the city, between Mrs. Melle's smooth and muscular
thighs.  It was not an unattractive thought.

(At some moments, as I write this, I am overcome by
conventionality, and fear that you will be appalled by
my writing this to you, at the intimacy of the kisses
and fevered couplings that I write with my innocent
pen.  But I know you have never been appalled by me,
and we have always shared all our secrets.  But and
again but I have never had this particular secret before.
Tell me that you do not hate me, and are as sweet and
tolerant as ever; the alternative is unthinkable.)

I woke up early this morning, with the dawn light
filtering through the windows.  She was beside me in
the bed, lying face-down, naked, with the sheet just
at the small of her back.  And on her back, lifting
and lowering its tiny feet, was my morning wasp.
I lay there in the chilly morning air and watched
it.  It stretched its wings and waved its spiky-haired
appendages aimlessly at the walls.  Her back moved
up and down slowly with her breathing.  The wasp,
within the warm layer of air around the softness of
her skin, must have been quite cozy.  Do wasps sleep,
I wonder?  If I were that wasp, I would have been
blissfully happy to stand on her back, in the warm
scented air, and sleep, if wasps sleep, until it was
time to take to the air and do whatever wasps do.

After awhile the wasp suddenly buzzed off into
the corner of the room, and I moved up against
her and pulled the covers back up over us, and
slid again into a light scudding sleep, with my
face up against her shoulder.  Later in the morning,
with the sun already high in the sky, she woke
me up and we made love again, slow and languorous,
and then she had to go, to attend to something
from the rest ofher life, out in the suburbs,
with children, and a husband's laundry to wash
(or do they send out the washing, or even have
someone come in and do it?  I don't know even
that.)

When she was gone I got up and put on some
clothes.  On the floor by the terrace window
a wasp buzzed feebly, trying to raise itself
in exhausted wings.  I picked it up with a
bit of paper and put it outside, on the top edge
of the terrace railing.  It took a few steps and
lay still, quivering.  As I've been writing you
this note (at great and I hope not tiring length)
it's disappeared.  Perhaps it gathered its
strength lying in the sun, or perhaps the wind
just carried it off.  Or perhaps there was
never a wasp at all.

Feeling as though I were a whisp of something,
poised at the peak of a pin-sharp mountain ready
either to plunge down the other side or to be lifted
by the wind (limp, helpless, exhilharated), I
remain, as always, your storm-tossed,

Leopold

--------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Mona,

I exult in the feeling of the mud between my toes.  The
mud, which is thick and hot and pungent, cradles me and
enwraps me everywhere (except, by mundane necessily, my
eyes and mouth and nose), but the first place I think of
it is between my toes.  I rub my toes together deep in the
mud, and I am at once my miniature self slopping barefoot
through some deep rain puddle under a thrillingly wet sky
(did we, you and I, ever slog our feet together into the
mud?), and at the same time my grown self, feeling in the
squelching thinkness between my lower digits an animalistic
connection to birth, and excretion, and the suffocation
of reason in under the unplumable mysteries of the cosmos.
Which pair of feelings may, really, be the same thing.

I am not, as I write this, soaking in hot mud (running my
hands, under the mud, down my naked sides, tasting what
the world would be like if we had mud rather than air); but
I am remembering for you as vividly as I can my long and
supposedly health-giving (and certainly sensuous and smelly)
soak in the mud of the local mud-bath, in a large shack or
medium-sized cabin a short walk from the room where I now lie
on a padded wooden lounge, drinking lemonade and listening
to the wind in the trees.

This is no longer my little room and my terrace and my view
down over the city to the harbor.  It might be a universe
away, a century away, but it is in fact only half an hour's
drive, up out of the city and past or around the suburbs,
and into the forest that lies at the heart of this stormy
and seaswept island of white buildings and maniacal daughters.
I came here with Mrs. Melle, or to be honest she brought
me here, coming to my room early this morning.

She had only a few hours, she explained, before her husband
returned, and she wanted to take me up to see the inland
forest.  Kissing me (firmly, on the mouth, with her hand
at the back of my head) she told me to bring clothes, and
whatever else I would want for a week's stay.  It was not
so much an offer, or an idea, or even a demand, as it was
simply a done thing, the next step after the steps that had
gone before.

We talked on the drive, talked more directly than we had
about our situation, the present instant, the immediate
future.  (She driving, I with my hand on the top of her
thigh, feeling her muscles move when she stepped on and
off of the accelerator.)  I gathered from what she said
(and although I can remember how the fabric of her skirt
moved under my hand, I cannot remember the individual
words that she said) that she had planned to put me up
in the houseboat for a time, to offer me its comforts and
the comforts of her visits as long as it pleased me, but
her daughter's discovery of me had put an end to that.
So now she was offering me a tidy room at a tidy and
healthful spa nestled somewhere in the forest (which
closed dark and primal around us as she drove, the
roads as soon as we left the highway becoming narrow
and uncertain, seeming likely at any moment to peter
out into brambles or swamp).

At the spa, whose name is so embarassingly pedestrian
that I cannot bring myself to write it here, but which
is otherwise quite calm, servicable, even artistic in a
craftmanly way, I checked into a room (we, she, checked
me into a room, paid for with her Visa card), and I carried
the dufflesack that held my clothes (and my little keyboard,
and my paper and pens) out in the back, across the richly
scented courtyard (something of perfume, something of
the earth, something of decay), and into this little
detached structure of two rooms, and a path to the
bathhouse and the mud room.  Mrs. Melle came with me,
and once we had looked around and I had put down my
bag, she pushed me back onto the bed and kissed me
ardently.  And not long after she left me lying spent
again, and went back to her car and back to the suburbs.

The mud is delicious between the toes, and on the back of
the neck, and in the armpits and between the thighs.  It
is freshest and warmest, they say in the office here, in
the mid-morning and the early evening.  Getting out of
the mud-bath, one rinses oneself off with a dangling
shower-hose that sprays hot water, and the mud and water
run off one's body and down into a grating in the floor.
In the bathhouse across the foot of the courtyard there
is a cold bath, and a hot bath, and two sauna rooms, and
a row of showers.  The place seems nearly empty, but I
have seen three different men and two women so far, each
unselfconsciously nude under the spraying water.

I don't know why Mrs. Melle (Mrs. Yolanda Melle, my married
lover, my captor, my sponsor) wanted to move me from my
room, either to the houseboat or to this odd muddy paradise,
at all.  Does it increase her feeling of ownership, her
pride of possession?  Did I say something that made her
think I was unhappy in my room, with its terrace and its
wasps?  (Here at the spa I have seen a handful of flies,
and in the darkness there are dozens of moths visiting
the flowers that sit in pots in the courtyard.)  Or was
my room in the city too known to her husband, too exposed
to efficiently host our affair?  Now that Octavian Melle
has returned from his conference, will she leave me alone
here in the doubtless demon-haunted woods?  Will Octavian
come to visit me, and find me gone?  Will the landlady mention,
with casual malice, that I left with his wife?

After I put down my pen and seal this letter (the office
here has everything one might want: pens and paper, envelopes
and stamps with pictures of notable statesmen, slim books
on the history of the spa and the geology of the area, the
plants and animals of the forest, racked bottles of wine,
and chocolates, and skin-preserving creams and body ointments,
preparations of bee-honey and lanolin), after this letter,
I will take out my keyboard and work on my book.  I have
already begun to write Mrs. Melle into it, not as a married
lover but as a single woman, perhaps a widow, living in
a house overlooking the sea, keeping a shop near the harbor,
kind to all and kind to the protagonist of my book, who
ought to be me but is, I think, someone more confident,
less limp, than I.  My hopeful child, perhaps.

I don't know if my editor will like the book, if my
publisher will accept it.  The proposal that they accepted,
now that I look at it again from out here in the wide
world of houseboats and spas, of harbors and mud-baths,
is vague and indefinite.  The writing sample is very
like my writing, but as for content I have proposed to
them only something about foreign parts, something not
entirely true and not entirely false, something playful
and appealing to those who like to think of travel more
than they like to travel, who would like to read about
odd things, not necessarily true odd things, happening
in strange places, not necessarily accurate strange
places, while sitting in comfort in their own houses
and stroking their own cats.  (There are two cats here
in the office at the spa, sitting and lapping at their
paws underneath the shelf of creams and headache pills
and herbal infusions; one is grey and one is ginger.
I wonder what they think of the mud-baths, and the people
lowering their needy bodies into the still pools of
water kept under roofs, one hot and one cold.  How
strange we must seem to them, with their tails and
tongues.)

Today Yolanda was wearing a new scent, or a scent that
I had not noticed on her before; lilac I think it was.
She has many scents, this woman, scents of light and
darkness, of wind and of moisture.  I suppose all women
have their scents; we are mammals, and mammals live in
a cloud of scent.  I have my own scents, for all that I
am too used to them to notice them.  Perhaps I will buy
a bottle of lilac scent (lilac bath soap, lilac body
lotion, lilac tea) at the office (where the cats purr to
themselves under the counter), and lie in the bathtub
here in my small tidy spa room, and scent myself with
lilac from head to toe, rubbing it into my hair and
into all the expanses of my skin.

Or more likely I will only think of it, and write about
thinking of it here in my letter to you, so that you
can laugh at my absurdity while you hold my letter in
your fingers.  I will use this stamp on this envelope,
I think, the one with the stern bearded statesman with
the unpronouncible name, pictured standing against the
base of a mountain, with a squat stone fortress just
visible in the background.  Does he not look formidable
and respectable?  Perhaps I will ask in the office for
his story, and put him in my book.  Perhaps he is in
one of the brochures on the rack in the office, with the
local attractions and the geological facts.  Do you
remember, dear sister, when we visited the guysers, and
in the gift shop there were books with volcanos on the
covers, and books with spouting geysers, and one book
with for some reason a tiger on the cover, and you held
that book and shouted, and would not let it go?  I
remember that.  I wanted one of the volcano books,
I think, but not enough to wrap myself around it
and insist.

I wonder if Yolanda will come to me this evening, or
tomorrow.  The room has its own telephone; does she
know the number?

Synchronicity: just as I was writing those words (or
no more than a few minutes later, and before I had
written any other words) my telephone rang, and it
was Yolanda (her voice from the heavy plastic tool
with its inanimate sprinkle of h