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 holes for the air).
She will not be coming to me tonight, but she will
come for a late breakfast tomorrow (does she have to
see Octavian off first, with a peck before his first
class, does she have to get her son off to school,
the dishes washed, everything neat and innocent-looking,
before she can put her foot to the pedal and come
toward me here in the forest?).  I am sleepy now, from
the change of circumstances, and the dark forest air,
and the healthy sucking of the mud.  I think I will
leave this letter open on the table by my bed,
and finish it tomorrow, before or after she comes,
according to my whim.  Good night, dear correspondant;
I will be with you again before you know that I am
gone.

You see?  It is the next morning already.  I feel
sparklingly rested and refreshed, due no doubt to the
mud and the forest air and the bath-houses and the
herbal infusions and body lotions and the purring
cats.  It seems almost sacreligious in such a well-scrubbed
and healthy morning to be waiting for one's married
lover to sneak away from the suburbs and visit one for
a quick and ardent coupling on the crisp sheets of
the healthy firm-matressed bed.  But so I am, and
there seems little point in regretting it.  (Do I
disappoint you?  But I have always disappointed you,
and you have always loved me for it.  It has been my
salvation.)

I had a dream last night, at least one dream (set
like a blurry stone in the smooth and otherwise
unmarked expanse of my long herbal sleep).  I was
in the mud again, and also in the mud with me was
Luisa Melle, the daughter of my lover and my own
attempted assassin (what closer bond?).  I was, in
the dream, very aware of my body sharing the pungent
oozing mud with her body, and the thought frightened
me.  She was staring at me, her face contorted in some
sort of rictus, not so much of hate but of astonishment,
perhaps of disgust or at any rate of disbelief.  There
was no menance in her, in the dream, or at least no
threat of physical harm.  I was frightened, in the
dream, by her mere presence, there with me in the mud.
But it was one of those dreams that makes waking all
the more cheerful for its oppressiveness, and I must
credit it (along with infusions and lotions and cats)
with my buoyant mood this morning.  I will close this
letter now, perhaps have a piece of toast and lower
my pampered body into the hot pool, or the cold pool
(but not the mud, so soon after waking).  I will
write you again when I have leisure again, after
Mrs. Melle has left again, and I have recovered from
her visit.

Entirely healthier and better cared-for than I
deserve, I remain, as always, your large and
optimistic,

Mortimer

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

Dear Niobe,

I think of our bodies (your body, my body, the body of
Mrs. Yolanda Melle my married lover, the body of her
malicious daughter Luisa, the body of her large and
rotund husband Octavian who has been so kind to me,
and the bodies of the people in the spa here, soaking
in the water and the mud and sitting behind the desk
with the cats) as being continents, and as playing host
as continents do to bustling and active cities, alive
with the life of cities and abuzz with the sounds of
cities.  If you were to look closely enough at the back
of your hand, or the places between your eyelashes,
you would see the cities alive and abuzz, their tiny
inhabitants moving this way and that, methodically and
joyfully, taking their places in the daily round of
your body's cities with a mass efficiency composed
of numberless small inefficiencies, as the great
efficiency of the large world is composed, whether we
see it or not (and this is a great comfort) from all
the thousands of large inefficiencies, personal and
civic, that each of us commit here in our larger
cities (and forests, and mud-baths) at all times
and in all seasons.

I have lain (reclined, relaxed, slumped) in the hot
water of the hot bath, and the cold water of the cold
bath, with my married lover, both of us naked, the
myriad inhabitants of our bodies' cities swimming
to and fro between us in a leisurely commerce.  The
people here, on the island and especially here in
the spa in the forest in the dark and ancient interior,
are very easy about nudity, compared to the people
back home.  No one would go naked down the street,
or along the waterfront, or come naked to greet you
at the door, but here in the spa, where there are
healthful waters and pools of mud to make nudity
logical, they don their nude skins with a simple
casualness that I find infinitely becoming.  Mrs.
Melle my married lover and I could recline (repose,
lie) in the fragrant water, our shoulders perhaps
touching in a friendly way, without feeling any
more self-consciousness than the freckled woman with
the startlingly red nipples, or the hairy man with
the intimidating stomach and bushy pubes, who came
in and rinsed and soaked and left and looked no more
or less at us than at the windows and the signs that
listed the rules.  We exchanged the time of day (the
spa is so quiet at this season, had we noticed how
the newspapers in the office are always a day behind)
as thought it were, because of course it was, the
most ordinary thing in the world.

I did not make love to Yolanda Melle in the hot pool,
or the cold pool, or in the mud-bath.  Her breasts and
hips and thighs and the beautiful curves of her arms
and her neck were there beside me, and her hands (when
there was no one else in the room) did move over me
with a maddening gentleness (the cities of her fingers
and the cities of my chest engaging in a lively and
one imagines profitable commercial intercourse through
the water), but we did not even kiss.  In the hot
pool her mouth was soft and red and relaxed; in the
cold pool her lips were thinner and paler, as all of
both of our bodies were thinner and paler there, the
inhabitants hurrying indoors and shutting all the
windows to seal in the heat, playing board-games
perhaps before carefully banked fires and waiting for
spring.

I did make love to Yolanda Melle, and she to me, on the
firm and narrow bed in my little room, and again on the
thinly-carpeted floor at the foot of the bed, with
her body bobbing ardently on top of mine and her mouth
on my mouth and my neck.  She left small marks on my
neck and the side of my head, from her lips.  This
was after our breakfast: she arrived in the early
mid-morning, we soaked in the hot pool and then in
the cold pool (which is the recommended order here),
but not in the mud, and then we had breakfast in the
small breakfast-room beside the office, and then back
in the room where I sleep she took my hand again, and
kissed me again, and this time I unbuttoned the buttons
at the front of her dress.

I don't want, dear sister, to give you the impression that
Mrs. Melle and I are united only literally, only by the
bonds of the flesh, by a hungry and insatiable sort of
sex that is not content with the bed but must exercise
itself also on the rugs and the sofa.  While it is true
her mouth and her loins are hungry and demanding in their
kindness, so too is her mind.  We talk as well as fucking,
and our talking goes well beyond the tangled sheets of
the mattress and the odd damp spot on the rug.  In fact
our talking seldom comes that close to the stains of
immediate reality.

I have told her about my book, and my life, and she has
told me, pulled back the covers and let me see, some of
her life.  She has been a teacher, and a mother, and a
welder, and a union organizer.  I think she must have
had many lovers, although before or after her marriage
to bluff Octavian I cannot say.  She tells me her dreams
as much as her reality, and I tell her about the birds
of the night and the mud between my toes.  (I have not
told her about the cities of our bodies; that truth I
gave first to you, the latest of the long string of
humble gifts which I offer in trivial recompense of
your infinite and unwavering patience.  But I may tell
her tomorrow, if she comes to me again.)

I imagine, I told her yesterday as we reclined sweatily
on the sheets, a race of angels or aliens coming to Earth
in their swan-drawn chariots or their fusion-engine
spacecraft, and humbling all of the cities of the Earth
and sending all of the governments of the Earth to
trembling, they demand that one particular person, with
such-and-such a name, living in such-and-such a place,
be brought forth.  And when that person is brought forth
it is a child, a young teenager perhaps, a tow-headed boy
or a doe-eyed girl, and they stand that child before all
the people (the sun glinting off the angelic or alien
metal of the podium, the gigantic stand that they have
built in the center or Europe or the heart of America),
and they say to the world "We have spared you, because
of this child".

She shook her head at this, and pulled my head down so I
as resting again along her side with my cheek on her
shoulder, and she told me about the priests in a town
where she had been a young girl, who had terrified her
and her budding peers with stories of avenging angels
and relentless devils, and how she had lain awake at
night and thought about sin, and about what the angels
could promise that would be as good and wonderful as the
promises of the devils were bad and terrible.  Now, she
says, having lived more of life, she feels both the angels
and the devils to be very far away.  "We have only," she
said, laughing, "the hot pool and the cold pool."  And
she kissed me, her mouth sucking my soul from me and my
mouth sucking her soul out of her, so that they merged
and intertwined in the breath between us.  Whole boroughs
of the cities of my body have been relocated onto the
humid continent of hers; I wonder if the inhabitants can
sense the change.

The hot pool and the cold pool are not just hot and cold
water, as might come from a tap or a bottle in the market
(spring water, distilled water, tonic water, sparkling
water, club soda).  The waters are, the signs assure us
guests and residents, from the healing springs that surge
up in the ground under the spa, heated and cooled by
natural processes, and constantly recirculated and
always fresh for our health and rejuvenation.  They
smell at the same time of softness and metal (as the
mud bath smells of night and deepness and the Earth).
I wonder if lovers, pairs of spa employees, or guests
and residents, or local young people, have fucked in the
hot pool or the cold pool, or squirming in the mud bath,
sometime after hours when the doors are locked (or,
thrilling and dangerous, sometime during hours, when
someone could walk in at any time).

Mrs. Melle tells me that Octavian has mentioned me, and
wondered that I do not answer the telephone.  She smiles
when she says it (she is, as she says it, coming out of
the tiny bathroom off of my room, the juices of our coupling
showered off of her roundnesses and sharpnesses, and I am
standing and stretching and about to shower myself), and
the smile is something wistful and (although I may well
be imagining it) something barely regretful, not as though
she wishes something undone, but that she wishes the world
remade, and knowing that it cannot be is resigned to a
certain sadness.  (Which is, as I know you would point
out, entirely too much to expect to read into one smile,
on the face of a lover no matter how ardent that one has
known for only a cupful of days, who is stepping out of
the shower with a towel around her hair.)  Perhaps, she
says, she will stop by my building, make sure that my things
are being cared for, and report back to him (to her husband,
she means, the default antecedent of her male singular
pronouns) that I have gone into the interior for a while,
to see the other parts of the island.

She kisses me, lightly with her lips closed, when I pass
her on my way into the shower.  Her body smells of soap.
(When we shower, is that rain in the cities of our bodies?
Or is it a flood, washing away buildings and roads and
telephone towers, sweeping everything before it down the
drain and off to be renamed on unknown other bodies some
time in the future?  I prefer to think of the rain.  We
have had enough of floods.)

I have not worked much more on my book; I have been too
full of the mud and the fragrant water and Mrs. Yolanda
Melle.  My editor and his larger brother the publisher
seem to have receded into the distance, like Mrs. Melle's
childhood angels and devils.  I do want to give them a
book, a book that they will like, and publish, and send out
into the world.  But I am less certain now (for, I see you
noting with a roll of the eyes, rather obvious reasons) of
the comfortable and entrancing truths that I want the book
to bring to its readers.  This uncertainty is a benign
uncertainty, and it does not worry me.

Mrs. Melle is gone from the spa now.  She promises to call.
I have not asked her how long she intends for me to stay here.
It would be an odd question; it would imply that the decision
is hers to make, rather than mine.  And why would that be?
But she promises to call.  And I lie here on the bed (I have
straightened up the sheets, and made their corners neat again),
and I write to you, and there are in my head numerous questions
that do not form themselves into words.

The forest is deep and quiet; it is mid-afternoon.  Soon I
will go and see if the spa's restaurant is open, and have
a sandwich.  I will write you again, my most constant and
perfect friend, when there is more to say (but there is
always more to say) and when I have the wit to say it.
Until then I remain, your constant if deeply imperfect
friend,

Neptune

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

Dear Odessa,

It is tempting to so fill my writing with cities and bodies
and mud that the facts are obscured.  Distubing things have
happened.  Again I have been in fear (again not real fear, but
still fear) of my life.  And something also has happened
that has touched you, or my link to you, or our links to
each other.  I will tell the story in the order that it
seemed to occur in time, because that is something like the
truth.  You, dear reader, can always skip ahead, to assure
yourself that you are not exposed, that I have not compromised
our secret, your secret, for I have not.  But being merely
the writer and not the reader I cannot skip ahead, but must
watch the story unfold as it will, a word at a time, in the
order that it chooses to follow.

I was lying in the mud again yesterday evening, feeling again
the mud between my toes and breathing its pungency into my
body (I have imagined cities on the skin; is it reasonable
to imagine cities inside the body, among the hairs of the nose
and in the gloomy cavities of the sinuses, port-cities along
the blood vessels, cities of wind and warmth in the sacs of
the lungs, cities of ships floating on the vast churning acid
sea of the stomach?).  I was alone there (as I am often alone
there; the mud-bath house is smaller and less frequented than
the hot pool room and the cold pool room; I think it was more
popular in another time, when the mystery of the mud was less
plumbed, when mud had not been debunked, where people were
readier to look for healing anywhere that warmth and bodies
and hiddenness might be).  I was thinking of my dream, of the
pinched face of Luisa Melle.

And, naturally and unavoidably, she came in.

Luisa Melle herself, opening the door and coming into the
mud-bath room, not surprised to see me, obviously knowing
I was there, would be there.  Luisa Melle not naked nor
intending to be naked, her thin (spare, whip-like, whippet-like)
body in black slacks and a cotton blouse and a sweater (she
must have been warm in that room, with the mud breathing heat
into the air along with its pungency).

She sat on the edge of the mud-bath, on the tiles, sitting
cross-legged on the ground (lowering herself with no visible
effort, a body well cared-for and able to sit without thought
or precaution directly from a position, standing and looking
down at one, to another position, sitting and looking over
at one, with a fixed and determined expression).

I did not speak; let her speak, I thought.  My own face was
I have no doubt in some indefinite and undecided configuration.
Should I have smiled (in triumph at being alive and unscathed,
or in politeness), or frowned (in anger or haughtiness), or
mollified (had she brought a pistol? a viper?), or simply
neutral, as though it were a great but uninteresting
coincidence that she should be there?

She did not speak either, for some time.  She sat with her
hands gripping her knees and looked at me, considering and
not pleased with the object of her consideration.  Being
nude beneath the mud (my clothing on the bench beside the
rinsing shower, just out of reach of the spray), I was the
vulnerable party here, which gave me a sort of theoretical
strength, or would have if I had been confident that it was
not her aim to kill me, or push my head down into the mud,
or take my clothes and disappear into the twilight.

"Why are you here?" she asked, finally.  It is such a general
question, "why are you here?".  I could have been flippant,
flip, ambiguous.  Where else is there, after all?  Wherever
you go, there you are.  (Ram Das, was that?  Some sage, at
any rate.  Does Luisa know the sages?)  Her voice was flat
and neutral, dry, almost mechanical.

"Your mother," I said, for having been tipped off the side of
a houseboat somewhere out in the harbor must have had to do
with her mother, and her father, "your mother recommended it
to me.  It is a fascinating place, this forest.  And the spa
is relaxing."  (Or similar words to that effect; this letter
is no more or less fictional than most, and you know my memory
is no better than it ought to be.)

"She brought you here?  Just like that?"

"In the car," I said, brilliantly, "yesterday."  And then it
occurred to me that her mother might have pretended ignorance
of my whereabouts, might have been counting on me to make up
a story of my own, not involving her.  She should have briefed
me, I thought, before sending me on my mission.  On my skin
the citizens stirred about in their cities, sending exploratory
capsules out into the mud, looking for new business opportunities.
"That is," I said uselessly, "she showed me the way."

Luisa frowned, her forehead crumpling.  She shook her head,
dismissing an irrelevance, flicking a wasp from her nose.
She breathed.  I spoke again, into the pause.

"You pushed me into the harbor.  It was cold."

She exhaled loudly, through her nose (thin, slightly pink
at the tip, altogether a more severe version of her mother's,
further from the cheeks).  It was nearly a laugh, or a
snicker, but not quite either.

"You lived," she said, charitably, as if anything short of
murder was not worth mentioning.  Then it was quiet again.
The mud surrounded me.

"Would you leave her if I asked you to?" she asked.  My
vague model of the situation broke apart in my mind, and
attempted to reform itself in a new shape.  (In the cities
of my body, limited partnerships formed ad broke apart,
and the bakeries raised the price of bread.)  Would I leave
her?

"I don't understand.  She is not here, I am not with her.
How could I leave her?"  Model Luisa could now say "I mean,
stay out of her pants," or "I mean, leave the country, go
far away and never come back."  Or, exasperated by my false
innocence, draw her thin two-chambered pistol and shoot me
(would the mud absorb the energy of the projectile and save
my life?  Or would she aim for the head?  It is easy to
imagine Luisa Melle on the firing range, sizing up the
paper outlines of men for the most promising targets).

The real Luisa sighed and shook her head.  "Whose ideas was
this?" she asked, but she was not asking me.  She rose and
walked toward the door.  "You're a lump," she said, standing
almost behind me, so I had to twist somewhat in the comforting
mud to look at her.

"Have I offended you?" I asked.  Having begun pretending
innocence, I felt obliged to continue.

She did not even slam the door on her way out.

So again Luisa Melle did not kill me.  When there had been enough
silence, I pulled myself quickly from the mud and sprayed myself
in the shower, and no one else came in.  I dried myself with my
towel, quickly, just enough to slip on my clothes and snap and
zip and button myself up against the mudless air.  And when I left
the mud-house and went back to my room, there was no sign of Luisa,
nor of Octavian or Yolanda, and the sun was setting.  No one
leapt out from behind the bushes, dagger in hand in the darkness,
nor clamped a chloroformed rag across my nose and mouth and
dragged me off for punishment.  Had the thin daugther of my
lover come here to the forest from the town and the suburbs,
simply to ask me three questions, and go away again having had
three far from satisfactory answers?

In my room I stood under hot water for a few long minutes,
washing off the last of the mud and the first of the memory
of Luisa.  I drank cold water and lay on the bed, staring
blankly at the neglected keyboard on the side-table, hearing
nothing and seeing nothing, alone in silence.

The telephone rang, and it was Mrs. Melle.  I wanted to see her,
to hold her shoulders in my hands and tell her that her daughter
had sought me out again, and what she had said, and ask her for
an explantion.  But on the telephone, to the thin thread of her
voice, I could not even mention it, the daugther, the mud, the
expression in her eyes and the questions she had asked.  So we
talked about everything and nothing, about gargantuan trees in
foreign lands, about the stories of Arabia that we had heard in
our far-separated youths, about the weather in the town and
the fog rolling in from the sea.  She had, she told me, been to
see my room in town, to make sure it was secure, to collect my
mail.

There had been (and here is where the story touches you with
a directness for which only I am to blame; here is the place
that you may have skipped ahead to in your reading, to reassure
yourself) a returned letter in with my mail, she said, a letter
that I had sent and that had come back stamped with the Unknown
Addressee stamp.  And I knew, of course and instantly, before
she read the address, your address, to me, what had happened.

The post office had been freakishly efficient; it was against
all experience that that letter, even written so soon after my
coming to the white town and the little room, could have reached
you (your fingers gently teasing open the envelope after the
steam loosened the flap), and been read and smiled at and
appreciated by you, and altered, and reclosed and returned
through your mastery of the mails, and then returned all the
miles from you to here, in such a short time.  But there it
was.

I displayed, I like to think, admirable presence of mind.  I
said to Mrs. Yolanda Melle, my married lover, that there must
have been some mistake at the post office, and that I would
very much like to have the letter in my hand, to look at
the address and the stamp.  I was, or I tried to be, casual
about it, and Mrs. Melle thinking nothing unusual said she
would put the letter into another envelope and have it
conveyed to me, by the preternaturally cheerful and efficient
postal conspiracy of the island, here at the spa.  And
then we talked of eternal inconsequentials, sighed a few
yearning sighs to each other when she said that she did
not know if she would be able to come to me the next day
(today), and we said good-bye.

I was, as you can imagine, restless until your letter (my
letter) arrived, enlettered itself in a wide brown envelope
addressed in Mrs. Melle's hand (her script is broad and
easy, but neat, with large loops and an appealing slant).
I opened it hungrily and put it down under my light,
applying the eye of long practice to the reply that you
had encoded within it, over and around my writing and
between my lines.  (Reading our code is, dear sister,
always the sharpest and most refined of pleasures, and
finding within our code your words is the most ethereal
of delights.)

Thank you for all your kind thoughts, and your encouragement
with my book.  I know that, reading all the letters that
have passed between that one and this one, you are smiling
now at the contrast between the simple pleasure that you
expressed in that letter, at my enviable situation and the
beauty of the town and the perfection of the sea, and the
more complex thoughts that you need now express: your
forgiveness of my indiscretions, your tolerance of my
muddy lust for Yolanda Melle and her red-lipped mouth,
your satisfaction that her touching your letter to me
has not endangered your secrets or mine, and that all is
secure and as it should be.

I will return to the town and the little room, or I will
arrange for my mail from there to be forwarded here without
intervention by Mrs. Melle or any other human apart from
the gloved and disinterested riders of bicycles and wearers
of dove-gray coats.  Whatever miracle caused your first
reply to reach this shore so quickly, I cannot believe that
the next will have the same good fortune, so there is no
pressing hurry; but I will be prompt and I will be
responsible.  I do not expect Mrs. Melle today; I will
sit and type at my book, and I will call on the telephone
my landlady (or should it be the post office?) and see
to the redirection of the mail.  And you need have no
worries, or none to overshadow your worries about my
own safety and happiness, with Luisa Melle somewhere plotting
my ruin, and my editor somewhere else slowly coming to
realize his long-suffering future, and my book remaining
unwritten under my hands.

Eager (hungrily eager, like one crawling through the
desert sand under a broiling sun toward the sound of a
stream and a flute-player) for my next helping of your
words, but knowing that I must be patient, I remain,
your humble and apologetic,

Otto

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

Dear Penelope,

It is impossible.  I have no excuse.  And yet I must believe
that it will come out right in the end.  It was the drink,
and the hour, and the tears of Mrs. Melle, and something wayward
inside me (something that, I believe, you have always known
was there, and have always loved despite itself).  I have told
her a piece of our secret, my sister, a piece that I said I
would never tell, and although it was not the inward and vital
piece, or any part of that, still I tremble.  I know that you
will forgive me; I do not know if I can forgive myself.

She came to me after all yesterday, late in the evening, after
I had eaten a light dinner of greens and souffle' and was sitting
in the rickety chair at the small desk in my room, with my
keyboard before me and my book spinning and weaving in my
head.

She rapped at my door and called softly through it.  I opened
it in flushed surprise (in innocent delight, in a certain
singing in my veins) and she nodded and smiled and came in,
wearing a trim suit and with a bottle of claret in her hands.
After I had closed the door and she had set the bottle on
the table, we came together in a long melting kiss, and then
came apart, and breathed, and stood face to face.

The claret was good, clear and dark with a hint of musk far
in the back.  Her company in the room, sitting beside me as
she had sat beside me that first night, after her husband
Octavian went up to bed, her legs in their brown stockings
crossed at the knee and her elbow on the back of the sofa,
her shoes off, was also good.  We talked of the day, and
the wind, and our childhoods, and things lost.  I told her
that long story about the park and the swan-boats and the
honking of the geese across the autumn sky, and as I talked
she touched my face and my mouth with her fingers, and
slowly undid the buttons of my shirt.

Later, naked and sated under the sheets of the narrow bed,
we drank more of the claret, and when she tried to get from
me more stories of childhood I turned her questions back on
her, and for the first time she talked long and deeply (her
head on my shoulder, my hands caressing her hip and her
throat and her breasts) about her mother and her younger
sister, and the sweet and bitter tragedies of their lives,
and how her life had lasted out beyond them all, and how
even with Octavian (my friend) and Luisa and her son and
her house and the suburbs, and even with me (and here she
kissed me and her lips wre wet and salty with her tears)
she was still, always, alone.

So we cried together in the bed, naked and drunk with the
sweat drying on our skin, and she licked my neck and sobbed,
and laughed, and talked about her sister, and I talked about
my sister, about you, and about loneliness and time and
silence.  And (here is the crux, the nub, the kernel for
which you must forgive me if you can) I found that I had told
her (or told myself, telling my story to myself in the sweet
warm embrace of her arms, forgetting her ears) about the
letter from you, and the happiness of decoding it under
the brilliance of the desk lamp, and the peaceful friendly
loving words that you had written me concealed in it, and
the image of your hands opening it and sealing it again,
and making it return to me disguised.

Here she seemed, my married lover Yolanda Melle, a bit more
sober, and she laughed an uncertain laugh.  Feeling her
move, if only psychically, away from me, and drunkenly
horrified with myself for having let out part of our
secret, I sobbed and curled myself into her, and she
took me into her arms and the bow of her body and held
me while I cried, and she cried, and our tears mingled
with claret and sweat and the oils of our bodies, and
we slept.

That is my confession, then, dear sister.  Yolanda Melle,
a married and unfaithful woman, a woman of vigor and hearty
lusts, a woman with a husband and a daughter and a son and
a lover, who lives in a distant city, and whom you have
never met, knows that I have a beloved sister, and that
that beloved sister writes to me, of necessity, by the
subtle coded alterations of my own letters, made with
razor and lemon and secret inks by moonlight, and returned
under cover of first-class mail, returned to sender, no
such addressee.  And I am sorry; you know as no one else
could how sorry I am.

She knows no more than this.  She does not know how I
decode your messages, or in what marks and alterations they
re encoded.  She does not know what it is that constrains
us to these ends, the dangers and circumstances that surround
your life and your work, the proud and sorry secret history
of our family.  She asked only once, out of honest concern,
for further details, but I wailed (still in the circle of
her arms, my lips on her collarbone, our legs entwined)
that these things were not mine to tell, that in my madness
I had already sinned too much in the telling, that I was
a miserable wretch and that she should forget all of my
words, dismiss them as the ramblings of a too-fond drunkard,
and forgive me my excesses (and was I wailing then to her,
or to you, or to the stern judgement of my own sober
conscience, approaching inexorably with the distant but
certain approach of the dawn?).

You will understand, I know, how her loneliness touched
me and drew out this piece of our secret.  You will
understand and I know you can forgive, because your
forgiveness is boundless.  Can you laugh at me, your
dear and incompetent brother, flung out here on this
foreign shore, sobbing in a woman's arms, filled with
familiar and finally traitorous self-disgust?  I need
your laughter.  I thirst for it.

I pull myself away now, from my confession.  It is done,
as the idiot deed itself is done, and soon I will launch
it into the world to find you, in an envelope from the
spa office, with a stamp from the spa office, sealed in
with air smelling of water and mud and cats.  I await
your next replies, the ones that will come to me in
the interstices of my previous letters, and then finally
(or I hope and trust not finally, but tellingly and
fatally) the one that will come back with this letter,
telling the captive (for I shall be a captive until
that letter comes) whether he is condemned or pardoned.
I look for (pray for, hope for, long for) pardon, just
as I deserve condemnation.

But I said I was done with confession; so I will be
brave (I see you here laughing at my determination,
as you would have laughed when I was sixteen, or eleven,
or eight, your head outlined against the trees).  When
we were done sobbing, Mrs. Yolanda Melle and I, we
slept briefly, then laughingly she woke us up, saying
that if we slept drunk our bodies would punish us, and
she kissed me, and I kissed her, and we showered and
dried and sobered and dressed.  She lounged on the couch,
her arms behind her head, looking at me and sucking on her
lower lip.  In the cities of my body the scientists
studied her, a distant planet, in their telescopes, and
wrote solemn theses on her course and her orbit and
her shape.

She left me then; the duties of her house and family
(duties where I have no duties, save the duty to you
that I have so inexpertly kept, or failed to keep) pulling
her back to her car, and the road out of the forest,
and the suburbs.  She kissed me going out the door,
a light and tender kiss, a kiss with a furrowed brow.
The night and the trees closed down around the spa.
I changed the sheets on the bed, and sitting at the
little desk I struggled, mostly in vain, to lose myself
and the shame of myself in my book.  And then I sat
on the bed, with my paper and my pen and an atlas in
my lap to write upon, and I wrote out this confession
to you.  I feel as slow and as wordless as any convict
writing his confession, as any poor jailbird putting
into words his regrets and the incredible finality
of the moment of sin.  It should be so easy to take
back that claret, to pull Mrs. Melle's mouth down
to cover my mouth in a soul-searing kiss that would
bottle up my indiscretion, that would kill unborn
the words of my treason.  But senseless time constrains
me as ever, as it constrains Mrs. Melle, and her
husband and children, as it constrains the cats
under the office counter, and as it constrains even
you, and I cannot undo even the simplest thing.

It seems, and it is fitting, that tonight I can do
nothing but confess.  So I will close this letter here,
and try in the next one to be lighter and to be
convivial, for your sake if not for mine, and in
unquenchable hope of your forgivness.  Until then,
I remain, your ever faithful, your now faithless,

Peter

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

Dear Querida,

I write you again from my terrace, overlooking the
rooftops of my city, and leading off into the distance
the ribbon of the sea.  I am again in my wood and
wicker chair, I woke again in that humble bed, and
I lauched to freedom from the terrace one more buzzing
wasp.  I lounge here thinking about writing my book and
thinking about your letters making their way to me, waiting
for the next mail, and waiting for the telephone to ring.
The waiting, here where the air smells of salt and
tar and harbor, is delicious to me.

I have your next two letters now, decoded and graven
in my memory, your kind and laughing words, your chidings
for my sillinesses and my self-indulgence, your sweet
encouragement on my book, your anticipation of my
adventure on the fishing boat (how long ago that seems
now, that was just the other week, the other day, just
an hour ago).  Somewhere in the mysterious world
between you and me a new air-route must have been
opened, or an ancient mountain pass cleared of
centuries of snow and piled rock, or giant suborbital
cannons moved into place for the use of the postal
service, so quickly do your replies follow on my
letters now.  The masterly efficient bicyclists of
my city may have spread, gloved and jacketed, in a
wave of courierly conquest, over all the land and
sea between us, the better to speed our words.

The spa was a good spa, with good water and mud and
cats, and even for that matter good redemptive sinful
sobbing sex with Mrs. Yolanda Melle in the prim and
matressed bed; but it is good to be back here, near
the edge of the island.  (And, I sigh as I think, in
a place that is not the place where I betrayed your
secret.  But I have resolved not to dwell on this
and pester your ear (your eye) with my regrets, but
wait patiently for your returning letters to catch
up with the time, and your forgiveness to reach
me and make further confession unnecessary.)

Mrs. Melle visits me here, once or twice a day.  She
is very kind, very considerate.  She brings me things,
little gifts and thoughfulnesses, and she strokes my
forehead and looks at me from her dark and smoky eyes.
Sometimes she is almost maternal, and sometimes she
is carnal and hungry and her fingers dig into my
back.  Sometimes when she looks at me I think there
are tears in her eyes.

She is interested in you, although she does not press
me for information.  I have told her that you are a very
private person, and that I cannot tell her much.  I have
been both casual and discrete, not stirring up her curiosity
nor hinting that there is anything out of the ordinary to be
curious about.  I have told her stories, about your youth
and my youth, and our parents and our birds and a house
on the dunes.  I mix the facts (or my memory of the facts)
with random fancies and words heard in passing on the
street, to make something for her that is true and that
is also faithful to you and to our secrets.

I think she knows that not everything that I am saying
is true (or factual, or accurate) in the strictest and
most mundane sense.  She helps me, sometimes, with my
stories, giving me bits of her own story to weave into
my words.  Although without the claret she has not opened
up her own warm and sobbing history fully to me again,
she has given me specks and scraps and hints, colors
and shapes that may be as imagined as my own, but that
curl together into nicely colored shapes that we show
each other as the afternoon sun rolls down the sky.

This is a quiet time, an interregnum, after the spa
and before your letter releasing me from guilt; after
the mud and before absolution.  I am quite content to
wait.  In the restaurants they are serving a different
kind of fish now, the currents having turned I suppose,
and there is a new smell mixed into the smells of the
air.  And in the mornings there are the wasps for
company.

I have not seen Luisa Melle again, and not mentioned
her to Yolanda (her mother, my lover).  I did finally
tell the one about the visit of the other (tell Yolanda
about the visit by Luisa, as I lay swathed and naked
and vulnerable in the mud); have I written you already
about that?  She frowned and sighed, looking away
distractedly into some thoughtful world of her own
or into some task she faced elsewhere, but then she
shook her head and smiled at me, and said I should
think no more about it.  And, mostly, I have not.

When Yolanda is not here, as she is usually not here
(back in the suburbs, among the trees and the shrubs
and the small cars in their driveways, back in the
house where I first saw her, in the same room and
at the same dining table, behind the same doors),
I sit and look down at the city with my keyboard
in my lap, and write softly in my book.  Or I go
down to the street and walk outward, following the
crowds or walking against them, sitting in the coffee
shops and drinking the light sweet coffee (watching
the old men and the young women drinking the dark
salty coffee, holding the mugs with fingers whose
nails are chipped or polished or pink).  In the
coffee shops here, at this season, there are hot
and cold fish sandwiches on heavy brown bread and
hot yellow mustard, to be eaten along with the
coffee morning and afternoon.

How much, I wonder to myself, is it normal, when sitting
in a foreign city where one has gone to write a book, to
think about one's married lover, who is currently back
with her family in the suburbs?  This is not something
that we are taught in school, not discussed in the
picture books.  I can imagine the Lothario, the spy,
the philosopher, thinking of her only casually, only
with reference to metaphors about freedom, or plans
for safe-houses, or in comparison to other lovers
scattered about the city and the continents.  Or I
can imagine the obsessed protagonist, able to think
of nothing else but her, torn with powerful tearings
of guilt and desire, writhing in agony or discomfort
at each unavoidable thought, and writing in terror
at the unavoidability of the thoughts.  Or I can imagine
someone, with a hat like mine, sitting on his terrace
immersed in a bath of thought whose water is suffused
with his married lover (her mouth, her eyes, breasts,
hips, moans, sobs) and also with the light over the
sea and the buzzing of the wasps and the whiteness
of the houses and the brownness of the bread.  Are
all of these degrees sanctioned and proper, I wonder?
Is it unhealthy to be suffused in her?  Would it be
dishonest or cold not to be?  Where are the scales
kept, where are the standard weights and measures?

I dreamed last night that Yolanda and her daughter
stood beside the little table in my room here, wearing
flowing red robes, discussing in fond calm tones
(their voices like flutes or distant horns) the shape
of the world, discussing me and you and our letters
(although I know that in waking life the mother
would never discuss my private matters with that
daughter), perhaps drinking wine, and perhaps holding
knives in their hands.  It was good to dream about
Luisa calm and concerned, drinking wine in slow
sips without any furious tension about her, even
holding the knife in a soothing formal hold, her
fingers relaxed, not about to plunge it into any
live beating hearts.

(I know you will tell me here not to dwell on my
dreams, that dreams are the mind, are the brain, are
the soul, trying to rid itself of things, of images
that are unhelpful or leftover tatters of thought,
and that holding onto them, contrary to that invariable
tendency of dreams to melt with the morning light,
is like preserving the cobwebs to the detriment of
the fabric.  And as always you will be right.  But
this dream may not have been a sleeping dream, an
excretion of the neurons, but one of those pieces of
art that come between sleep and waking, with the
buzzing of the wasps and the rising of the sun,
and that may be kept, for awhile, as fragments of
the ubiquitous truth.)

It makes me happy, like my dream or my story made me
happy, to think of you opening this letter (this envelope,
I think, will have a stamp that shows a building rising
up like a cliff from the sea, it's windows reflecting
the orange sun), and reading it, smiling though it at
me with your warm regard, and then taking your hair-fine
pens and your razor blades, your pale ink and your nearly
invisible dust, and encoding around my dull and plodding
words your own subtle and dancing ones, to be returned
to me with the post office stamp (as though you did not
exist at all, were as ephemeral and eternal as the breath
of wind in the fog between the tree branches), for me
to open and savor.  I will close this letter now, and
return to my book (which takes form day by day, emerging
from nothingness like a diver from the water, the droplets
of awkwardness clinging to its skin, but offering some
hope of eventual dryness), and return to my listening
idly for the telephone to ring or for knuckles to rap
on the door.  And I will wait for your next letter, your
next letters, until the one arrives that carries my
absolution.

Until then I remain, as always, your sullied but soluble,

Quentin

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

Dear Rebecca,

Another note from the interregnum.  I meant to write you
in my last letter that my letters would be fewer and
farther between (more bootprints in the snow between
the lamp post of one letter and the lamp post of the
next, golden circles in the blue twilight of a winter
road; although I do not think it snows in the winter
here like it does at home, and like it does where you
are), but I don't believe that thought made it all the
way from my intention to my pen.

It strikes me as funny, it confuses me in fact, that
these letters, these that I write here between my error
and your removal of that error by your forgiveness,
are letters that you will read after the end of that
quiet period.  You will be replying to this note (you
are now replying to this note, with the precise and
loving strokes of your camel-hair brush and your tiny
blades) well after you replied to the one in which I
confessed by weakness and my betrayal, and you will
know exactly what you said to me there, how you
chose to free me from my guilt and redeem me back
into the world again.  Whereas I write in ignorance,
although confident as ever of your unfailing good
will, and your generosity toward those who need you.

My confidence is warmed (not that it needed warming,
not that it had cooled or grown cold) by the letters
I have received from your hand (from your hand via
the hand of the post office and the Return to Sender
stamp), and the kindness of the words that you have
encoded into them.  Your reaction (and I can see your
mouth curving as you laugh, the lift of your shoulders,
the tilt of your head) was all I could have hoped, all
I could have wanted.  Your encouragement in my little
affair (my little seduction, my tumult and tumble) has
transformed it for me, transformed the intertwining
of my sweating limbs with Yolanda's, from something
entertaining but possibly sordid, to something good
and glowing, something admirable, and entertaining
as a side effect of that admirability.  It is just
as you say; the animal and spiritual parts of our
nature are closely entangled, the blood with the
breath, the fevers of earth with the air of the
heights.  Mrs. Yolanda Melle unbuttoning the topmost
button of her dress, standing in the rented room of
a wide-eyed young friend, is as pure as the purest
art, as pure as the grass, and I should be grateful
for it.  And I am.

I heard above me last night, in the apartment of the
artists Miriam and Thomas and Angie (or Abbie, or
Aggy), a certain amount of thudding, and voices raised
to what must have been, given the admirable thickness
of the walls the floors and ceilings of this redoubtable
old building, considerable volumes.  They were, I
think, the voices of Thomas (or Tomas) and Abbey (or
Angie), and they were not happy voices.  They were
debating, on practicl grounds, the nature of truth,
and of stories, and of lies, and in particular (I
had the impression, although it was late and I may
have been asleep) debating whether or not a particular
set of words uttered (or possibly written) by Thomas
on the subject of his relationship to one or more
particular women had been in the nature of truth,
or in the nature of lies, or in the nature of benign
or malicious or despicable stories.  The discussion
went on at some length.  I heard a door bang and feet
descend the stairs, but as the voices continued I
assume the feet were Miriam's, or perhaps those of
some unknown third (or fourth) party.

The nature of truth, it seems to me, is not what the
voices hotly debating above my head would take it to
be.  Or, at least, it is not what I (lying there asleep,
poised between willing them to shut up so I could continue
to sleep, and wanting to hear every detail of the rich
texture of love and hurt and anguish and life that filled
them) would take them to take it to mean.  Truth is
not something other than stories, and the literal facts
may serve lies as well as, or almost inevitably better
than, they serve the truth.  The most utterly true
story about the world would be, I think, entirely made
up, completely fictional.  If scientists knew what
they were about, the most thoroughgoing scientific
theories would be shot through with fiction, and those
statements that most require precision would be the
most utterly mythical.  Storytellers would sit on the
editorial boards of our most prestigious journals, and
would be the final graders of all scholarly theses.
Perhaps, now that I come to think of it, that is how
things already are.

Yolanda told me a story, lying next to me in the
narrow bed and brushing the hair from my forehead,
about a young woman she had known, or who her mother
had known, who had worked as a daily housemaid, going
from house to house and street to street, cleaning
the dishes and the toilets and the tubs and putting
out the trash.  This woman had fallen in love with
the daughter in one house, a girl about her own age but
pampered and wild, and quit her job as a maid and moved
in with the daughter, and been happy for a long time.
But eventually she found (as probably she had always known)
that the daughter was as loose and wild with her heart
as with everything else, and after seeing her with too
many other lovers the former housemaid had moved out
again, and started a new life on her own.  She later
married a local man, and had beautiful twin children;
but she was sometimes seen at the other house, where
the daughter (and her mother, who was also a loose
and wild woman, but also joyful and smiling and
strangely ageless) kept up her wild ways.  And,
Yolanda said at the end of the story, sometimes
the man that the former maid had married, the father
of her children, would stand in the street in the
early morning, looking up at the windows of that
house, and wondering.

There seemed to be no particular point to the story,
and it may never have happened at all, or not like
that, but as Yolanda (my married lover) told it to me
in her smoky voice lying under the covers with me, it
seemed truer than anything merely accurate.

And now you see how much of your intuitions about Yolanda
Melle, that you have written to me in your subtle code
between the lines and among the sentences of my letters,
have proven entirely correct.  You could have told her
story, I think, from seeing only my very first letter
about her; I hope that you are gratified that the rest
of the series has confirmed your warm and assiduous
ideas.  I await now only those last two fateful
letters, that I wrote you carrying the two admissions
of my guilt: that my lover had come to hold one of
your letters to me, and (the first paling in the
black light of the second) that I had told her of
your concealed words.  When those have come back to
me, altered from sorrow to joy by your subtle signs,
I can continue the wandering and insignificant arc
(or, more truely, meander) of my life.

Until then, I remain, your distant admiring brother,

Rafael

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

Dear Sally,

I feel as though I am swimming in honey, warm honey
bathed with sunlight and an engulfing sweetness, light
and airy and all-suffusing.  (I know, the simile is
overdone; but my feelings are overdone!  Your gift
so far exceeds my powers of expression.)

I went out today, early in the morning, with Octavian
Melle, effusive burly bear-like Professor of
Anthropology (the study of the _anthros_, those
small and squirming apes that have so industriously
overrun the planet), and husband of my lover Yolanda
Melle, whose scent lingers always in my rooms.

We went to the University campus, had a late breakfast
at a cafe' nestled between a building full of classrooms
and a gynmasium, between old stone walls and a shiny
new steel and chrome and glass cube already streaked
with oxides from the rain, with bicycle racks set
askew across the paths and flirtacious scholars
moving every which way (was it really so recently
that I was one of them, with my shirt undone at the
neck, walking across the common with every sense
alert?), and then strolled to the Library, a large
and even tasteful building, also new, set in the
center of the southern edge of the campus, surrounded
by old trees that case a deep cool shade over the
pseudo-Graecian face of the building.

(The mid-morning mail had not yet come when he came
in his little car to pick me up.  As we strolled
the paths of wisdom it must have come, your letter
with its honey-sweet gift slipped through the slot
in the door of my apartment by the landlady, who
has remarked on all the returned letters I have been
receiving, but seemed satisfied in a charmingly
simple way when I said that there must be some
mistake in the address, and that I would be grateful
if she would be sure that they all made their way
to me, so I could correct the address and be saved
the trouble of writing them out again.  On such
niceties has our communication always rested, and
on such politenesses the world has always hung.)

I had feared at first that things might be awkward
between us, my thoughts full of the lips and thighs
and curved belly of Octavian's wife, his thoughts
perhaps full of suspicions of her frequent absences,
or of certain knowledge of her (of my, of our)
betrayal of his (of her, of their) marriage vows.
And for the first moments they were, my eyes probably
narrow and my manner reserved, inspecting my expansive
companion for signs of hatred, anger, concealed weapons.
But his manner was so easy, touchingly jovial and to
all appearances genuinely open, that I could not sustain
my paranoia, and relaxed into a genuine companionship.

The Library is a lovely building, unremarkable as college
libraries go, I suppose, but it has been too long since
I was in one.  It has none of the metal detectors and
security gates that I remember from my student days;
this island is perhaps more obscure, less controversial,
less prone to terrorists with bombs in their valises
or even students with sticky fingers or switchblade
knives.  The doors are merely doors, three sets of
double doors set between stone pillars, leading from
an airy porch into a large central room lined with
book-shelves (552, Petrology; 553, Economic Geology,
554, Earth Sciences of Europe), with tables and armchairs
and sculptures (Venus, Diana, a charging bull, the
sun supported on the back of a goose) scattered here
and there.  In one corner two women played a slow
game of chess; in another a young man (a first-year,
I thought, or a prodigy come to University direct
from his mother's arms) sat between two great stacks
of monographs, methodically taking one from the taller
stack, leafing through it, writing a few notes on
the pad of paper in his lap, and adding it to the
other stack.

To the left and right of that large central room, on
the ground floor of the library, there are reading rooms
and a small shop selling magazines and paper and pens
and flowers.  But we went up the stairs (two staircases
in dark wood, one of each side of the room, leading up
into the ceiling), and then up another flight, and
sat ourselves down (him leading, me following, letting
myself be guided by him in all things, taking in the
muffled sounds and papery smells of the institution
around me) by a window, at a table between the stacks
of books, overlooking the back of the library and
the center of campus (vents and ducts on a lower roof
of the library, letting the building breathe; beyond
them at ground level more paths, and statuary, and
bicycle racks, and hurrying or loitering students).

Professor Octavian Melle sat across the table from
me (smooth wood, with only a few vague worn initial
and shapes scratched into it by scholarly knives;
the table seemed older than the building; perhaps it
was brought from the previous library, a building now
demolished, or forgotten, or used to house the museum's
collection of stuffed fowl, or the rarely-used manuscripts
from the library's Ancient Egyptian Studies division).
He looked at me with avuncular good-will, with perhaps
almost paternal concern, like a wise doctor thinking
how best to begin a discussion with an interesting
patient.  It occurred to me that he might ask me
about Yolanda, or even about Luisa, and for neither
conversation did I consider myself especially
prepared.

But we sat in the solid wooden chairs, with the
campus spread below us, and we talked about art.
Art, Professor Melle said, in a slow and considered
way, is ungrounded.  There is nothing that we can hold
a piece of art up to and ask, is this art doing the
right thing?  Does it meet this standard?  And being
ungrounded, we cannot even say, or not with any
basis, that the ungroundedness is good or bad, if it
makes art more or less worthy of any particular thing.

I told him, not agreeing or disagreeing, for it did
not seem the kind of thing that could be agreed with
or disagreed with sitting in those chairs looking out
of that window, of standing in the park and watching
a troupe of dancers (amateur dancers, preparing nervously
and energetically for some public show) working out
their movements, with the choreographer (the teacher,
the instructor) at the head, making representative
movements (waving the arms above the head in this
way, holding the legs apart and bouncing jerkily in
this way, with the body open and loose), and thinking
that the movements were both arbitrary and exacting,
that it was like a language that carried no meaning,
like a set of rules for no particular game, or like
a game with rules but no victory conditions.

I think he liked my story; his eyes were pleased,
perhaps even surprised, as if one of the slower students,
or at any rate a student he had not expected it from,
had brought him an especially telling point.  (In an
alcove behind him, sitting alone on a chair at a long
table piled with books, a brown-haired girl in a
round hat ate a cooked sausage from a paper plate.
The smell of the sausage mixed oddly but not entirely
unpleasantly with the smell of the books.)

We were silent for awhile.  Then he did speak his
wife's name, the name of my lover, but he spoke it
into the warm atmosphere that had developed between
us.

"You know that she had a very hard childhood," he said,
and I nodded, thinking of poverty and death and the
war and the streets, and Mrs. Melle in my bed at the
spa sobbing for her sister that was.  "I did not,"
he continued.  "I was a solid child of a solid
middle-class house, beside the campus here.  We
were always prosperous, always well-off.  There
is nothing fair or equitable in the world, except
that we make it so."

(These were not his exact words, I am sure; my memory
is as you know it to be.  But this was the sense of his
words, and the noontime life of the college moving
outside our window, and the girl eating her sausage
and dabbing at her pink mouth with a paper napkin.)

"When we were first married, she and I, I believed
certain things about marriage.  I believed in a kind
of fairness that springs from the world itself.  But
there is no fairness that springs from the world
itself, there is only the fairness that we make,
we people.  You and I, and Yolanda."

I had thought it might hurt, or be odd, to hear her name
on his tongue.  But it did not, and it was not.  Her
name on his tongue was as natural as the rain, or the
snoring of a bear.

I had no intelligible reply to make, and he seemed to
expect none.  He only looked at me, and went on.

"Life is as ungrounded as art.  We have only what
ground we make together."

"As we have only what fairness we make together," I
said, more or less vacuously, wanting to impress the
teacher, or assure Octavian Melle that I was with him
on this slow and sunny walk.

He smiled.  "It is reasonable, then, for one person
to decide, in life, that someone else's happiness is
necessary for the justice of the world.  It is
reasonable and allowable for two people to decide
spokenly or unspokenly, to structure their lives in
a way that contributes to justice, and to happiness,
even if it might seem unjust to one or the other of
them.  If considered only a day or a week at a time."

This is how I remember him, at any rate.  His
actual words, and for that matter his actual
meaning, may have been entirely different.  In
the alcove behind him, the girl finished her
sausage and put the plate aside, licked the ends
of her fingers and cleaned them with the napkin,
crumpled the napkin and laid it on the plate, and
opened a book.  Outside in the courtyard, music
was playing.

Octavian dropped me back at my building, on the
hill above the fragrances of the Old Town, saying
(saying without any reservation or subtext) that
his wife might be calling me later on.  In the
building, on the floor of my room in the building,
just inside the door, I found the letter from you
(the letter from me, returned by the gentle agents
of the post office, with the gleam of your thoughts
carried within it), and in that letter, after half
an hour of eager decoding with lamp and glass and
phrase book, I found my forgiveness and my salvation.
You know what those words say, but I would repeat
them here just to please myself if I did not think
that it would bore you.  As it is, I will lie on the
terrace looking up at the sky, and repeat them to
myself, and imagine you smiling as you embedded
them into my letter, and imagine on your fact the
fond approval and tolerance and generosity that
those embedded words expressed.

Now I swim in honey with my little keyboard on
one side (but I am too glad and too bursting with
energy to write a mere book), and my pad and pen
here on the other side on my lap, and I write back
to you, because (for whatever unaccountable reason)
you have as always asked me to write to you, and to
be patient in awaiting your replies.

Time has passed!  Since I wrote that last sentence,
Mrs. Yolanda Melle has called me on the telephone,
and I have walked (sauntered, floated I imagine, in
this cloud of bliss) down to the harborside and met
her there for a late lunch, and we have sat and talked
and laughed and looked out at the boats and the
fishing nets and the tourists, and wondered about
the lives of the people that keep the boats floating,
and the people that drive the trucks that take the
fish to market ("These lives," she said to me, "are
not as sweet as you think, but also not as bitter.
Or sweeter and bitterer, to those that live them"),
and we have held hands (discretely, like old friends)
across the table, and she has wondered at my happiness,
my illumination.

I told her that I had heard from you, and that you
were not angry at me for having blathered one of
your secrets in my drunkenness, and that I was free
from the prison of my guilt, and my spirit was a
moth again in the garden of my mind.  She smiled at
this, but it was a frowning and concerned smile.
I wonder if she is jealous of you, as only a married
lover in a foreign city can be jealous of a distant
and adored sister, occupying entirely different
apartments of the heart, but concerned still that
the apartment of the other might be larger, or
better appointed, or have a finer view.

And then I returned to my room here, to write you
this letter and loll on my terrace.  In returning,
I found that the mid-afternoon post (and then my
landlady) had brought still another letter from you.
(Such a sufficiency of letters!  Although they
start each one from my own hand, they come in such
profusion now, such an avalanche, that I imagine
there must be somewhere between you and me an
angelic horde of letter-writers, reaching back into
time and writing my words, and reaching sideways in
time and encoding yours in reply, and then wafting
them rapid-fire back into the postal system for me.)

I shall, I think, close this letter before reading the
one that sits here on the table beside me unopened,
carrying the overlay and subtle marks of your thoughts.
Then I will seal up this note and begin a new one,
and the conveyor-belt of our dialogue will continue.

Until the next envelope, I remain, your redeemed and
resplendent,

Simon

Scriptum Post: I could not resist, and I opened and
decoded and read your letter before even sealing this
one.  The generosity and audacity of your ideas, and
the depth of your forgiveness, astound even me!  I
will pursue your idea with complete alacrity.  If it
were not for your confidence in its success I would
find it daunting; but in the light of your confidence
I will proceed with boldness.

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

Dear Therese,

Things have fallen, just as they always do, exactly
into line with your designs and desires.  The thought
of seeing you again so soon combines with the glow
of your forgiveness into the rosiest imaginable
joy.  (And here I see you shaking your head again
at my overindulgence in the softness and suppleness
of words, and teasing me for my pomposity, and that
delights me all the more.)

Mrs. Yolanda Melle came to my rooms last evening, rapping
politely at the door as I stood dabbing at my easel (a
scene of the rooftops of the town framed by the terrace
doors, and beyond them a smudge of the sea).  She came
in and sat on the sofa, and we talked, and I put my hand
on the roundness of her leg, and she lay her head back
on the back of the sofa and smiled at me from her dark
smoky eyes.  I touched her face and thought I would kiss
her, and open up her clothes, but she took my hand in
her hand, and touched my hair, and talked to me.

In talking, about the sun and the weather and the sound of
the cars in the street below, she asked me about my sister.
I told her that you had written me again, and invited me
to come to your place and visit you, and that you had said
that I might if I liked bring her with me.  I said it as
delicately and as casually as I could, as you wrote me
that I should, as though it were nothing unusual, nothing
to surprise anyone or to dwell upon.  (And what is
surprising, after all, about someone's sister writing
to suggest a visit, even if circumstances dictate that
she writes in an especially personal, an especially
nuanced and clandestine, medium?)

Her fine dark eyebrows rose on her brow, and her mouth
quirked to the side, the layers of her thoughts moving
under her face one against the other.  She said that was
a kind and an interesting thought.  She asked, softly
and tentatively, where you would be if we were to go
and visit you.  I said only that it would be an adventure
to go to you, as it always is.  She laughed and said that
it would be hard to travel with no destination, and I
kissed her fingers and told her that I had done it often
before, and that there was no difficulty about it.

She stood and went to the window (the luminosity of the
sky outlined her body).  Her tongue touched her lips.
(Her tongue is blunt and pink, and she has fine strong
teeth, white and translucent; she wears a cherry-red
lipstick.) I went and stood beside her, and with my palm
I caressed the small of her back through her clothing.
She leaned back against me and her eyes closed.  Later, our
bodies entwined sleepily in the bed, she whispered to me
(her lips close and warm by my ear) that travelling with
me would be an adventure indeed, and we would talk more
about it in the daylight.

She went away in the early night, kissing me and moving
softly about in the dark gathering her clothes, and then
today (there were two wasps this morning, buzzing happily
or desparately aginst the windows, and for breakfast I
sent out to the shop across the street, and a young boy
with wide eyes brought me my eggs and bread wrapped in
foil, carried in a square brown bag) she called me on the
telephone, and we talked about the night and the air, and
about the voyage from here to you, and she laughed and
said that the idea was clearly impossible, but that it
had captured her entirely, and she would come again after
noon and we would talk more.

So we are leaving tomorrow, to the first contact point.
We have our ferry tickets to the mainland, and our train
tickets beyond that.  The weather is expected to be fine,
and Yolanda says that she will pack us sandwiches and
water for the first leg of the voyage, and she is making
a grand excursion out of it.  I cannot imagine what she
has told her husband, her family, about why she is
vanishing for a week or two off into the continent,
and whether she has told them that she will be in the
company of the idle young writer.

(She said to me today at noon, as we laughed and ordered
our tickets and caressed each other's fingers, that her
husband is a good man, the finest of men.  I could only
agree.  Her daughter seems to me less fine; I know I will
be looking over my shoulder as we travel, for Luisa hiding
in the bushes with a rifle, Luisa crouching behind a wall
with a pair of leashed and hungry leopards.)

I will, as you request, write to you as we travel, although
your replies will live with my landlady until we return.
It fills me with warm gratification to be, as you wrote,
your lifeline into the daily world, your connection to the
quotidian.  In meeting Yolanda, and knowing her, I know
that that lifeline will be strengthened and deepened, for
she is a fine and a sympathetic woman, and full of trust
and kindness.

It is evening now, and for the first time there has been a
wasp in my room in the evening.  It is quite strong and
energetic, tapping and burring against the windows and the
light, so I know that it has not been here since the
morning (it is not the worn and exhausted thing that such
a left-over wasp would be).  When I finish writing to you
I will take my cup and my bit of card and trap the wasp,
and take it out to the terrace and open my arms and toss
it outward into the darkening air.  I wonder if this is a
different wasp, of a different family or another tribe;
a wasp of the evening rather than a wasp of the morning,
drawn by the waning heat of the cool twilight rather than
the waxing heat of the cool dawn.  Am I a wasp of the morning
or the evening, do you think?  And which are you?  And
which is Yolanda?

I will write you again tomorrow, when we are on the ferry or
in our cozy sleeping car on the train, and describe to you
the places and times and people of our adventure, as we
progress across the landscape toward you, or toward the
first signpost on the path leading to you.  My skin tingles
at the thought.  (I remember travelling to you from other
places in other times; the warmth of the sun on car and
bus seats, my ears popping from the pressure of airplane
cabins, the tantalizing message concealed on the back
of a used matchbook pressed into my hand by a wise-eyed
man in a tattered army jacket.  And tomorrow I will set
foot on that beloved road again.)

Until then I am, as I always am, your constant and eager,

Titus

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

Dear Una,

We are in our compartment now in the train, a beneficent skin
of wood and metal and cloth (and whatever else is in the skin
of a train car; air and soot and plastic, carbon fiber and
the wings of a thousand bees and a million moths), filled with
the rumble of the wheels and the rhythm of the tracks, keeping
out the night and the cold.  Yolanda is asleep beside me,
the covers pulled up to her shoulders and her arms above her
head.  The matress is thin and firm, cool where it is not
warm and damp from our bodies.  There are fine short black
hairs at the top of her back, in the center between her shoulder
blades.

The sun was bright today, bright with the glare that you
dislike and that I dislike on your behalf (I see you smiling
in your curtained room, or on your balcony under the moon,
reading my letter and combing out your hair).  The ferry was
crowded, people going from the island to the mainland on
business, on vacation, to visit sick friends or carry on
secret affairs or initiate business or end friendships.

We took our bags from my white building in the Old Town,
and loaded them into a taxi to cross the island to the
ferry.  (I told my landlady that I would be away for a week
or two and would she please hold my mail, asked Tomas upstairs
to keep an eye on the place, put out the last wasp until
I return; will they continue slipping in each morning while
I am gone, and will I find a small heap of the little machines
broken and enervated and dead when I return?  Or was it my
smell, the scent of my warm sleeping body, the tiny
aviators setting out numberlessly from the cities of
my skin, that drew them in the first place, and while
I am gone will they take other turnings in their mazy
palaces, and end up in the outer air?)

The taxi drove through the forest, and I thought of the spa,
and the pungent warmth of the mud, and Yolanda's body in
the hot pool, and Yolanda's daughter scowling and engimatic
glaring at me from across the room.  We were quiet in the
taxi, happy, holding hands and looking out the windows.  The
driver was a white-haired woman with a deep tan and strong
wrinkles at the outside of her eyes.  She played the music
of the island on the radio: voices deep and shrill, and the
beat of drums and the sound of guitars.

The ferry dock is dark wood and lightly rusted metal.  We
waited on the dock in the sun, lined up with the others,
standing with our bags, for the gate to the gangplank to be
opened.  Inside the ferry people in the uniform of the ferry
service appeared now and then behind the windows (the portholes),
and things banged and hissed inside.  We settled on the covered
aft deck of the vessel at first, but once we were underway
(the officers welcoming the passengers over the speakers,
reminding us of the rules, telling us where the life-vests
and the telephones and the snack bar were) and the white
wake was curling out behind us, I thought she seemed ill
at ease, her smile forced.  I took her hand, and we and
our bags found a sheltered alcove, with no view of the water
and somewhat cramped, but unoccupied, where we sat and
laughed and kissed and dozed on each other's shoulders,
lulled by the constancy of the engines' whooshing whir,
until the other dock came near, and the captain welcomed
us to the mainland (onto the boat from a dock, off of the
boat to a dock; from one universe to another via a long
stretch of loud white water churned up in the wake).

We walked from the ferry dock to the train station, through
a city, or the travellers' edge of a city, very different
in flavor from the towns of the island: dirtier, busier,
larger and stronger and more heavily muscled, smelling
more of meat than of fish (even here close to the sea),
and with larger and more imposing automobile (in their
grandeur or their disrepair, or both).  Here I would not
expect to find that the mails come three or four times a
day, or that they are carried by messengers in dove-grey
coats and white gloves, riding sparkling bicycles.  But
perhaps they do and they are; cities always defy our
expectations (the cities of the skin woo always defy
our expectations, as our skins and our bodies and our
minds always defy our expectations, and the world always
defies our expectations).  Or perhaps this is the place
where my letters to you, or your replies wending back to
me, are loaded into great gleaming cannons and fired
into the sky and across the mountains.

In the train station hordes of people moved in surging
waves that broke and scattered off a million obstacles:
ticket-counters, waste bins set in concrete as thick as
tree trunks, cafe' islands and bread islands and islands
selling newspapers (newspapers in an unfamiliar language,
with lurid color picturs of murder victims and movie stars),
all smelling of soot and hot metal and damp wool.  We had
an hour until our train, and we sat on a long dark wooden
bench holding our tickets, close together with our outer
thighs touching, looking out at the milling masses.  It
occurred to me that we could have embraced, kissed, even
coupled there on the bench, and word would never have gotten
back to the island and the University.  Or else word would
have gotten back instantly, from a hand-held telephone held
in the hand of a colleague of Octavian Melle, or a friend
of Luisa, or the teenage son's driving instructor, all of
whom must certainly be out there in that crowd, so numerous
were the faces that passed by, the eyes touching us and
then gliding off for the lack of anything to fix upon.

(No, as you are saying to yourself and chuckling, the
station was not nearly that enormous and mobbed; it was
only an average station in a medium-sized city on a
medium afternoon in no particular season.  It only
struck me as containing the entire population of the
Earth because I had grown used to the quiet and sparse
and slow-moving town of whitewashed houses stretching up
from the harbor, where a dozen people might not pass
the window in an hour, and the water-taxi pilots sit
with their feet up, smoking their pipes and waiting for
the phone to ring, and if one falls asleep it makes no
difference to anyone one way or the other.)

Now on to the train!  The engine was not a massive proud
hissing thing of steam and chrome and iron, but a squat
windowless diesel-electric beast, humming and fuming to
itself between the rails and the wires; a dirty beast with
the dirt of the cities and metal plates with enigmatic
numbers and names mingled on its rubbery sides.  But
the car containing our compartment (to which we were
guided by an ancient conductor with one eye permanently
shut and a great dark mole beside his nose) was clean
and reasonably well polished, and the room itself was
(is, as I lie here writing to you) cozy and compact
and comforting, if sooty-smelling.  We stowed our bags
and read aloud to each other the instructions graven in
red letters into small metal plates on the walls and the
surfaces ("Keep fingers clean", "Must remain shut while
train is in motion", "Use in case of emergency"), and
she lay down on the narrow bed, and I massages the round
pliant muscles of her calves, and as the train began to
move we locked the door and took off our clothes and
made love, and now she is asleep.

The windows in the compartment are narrow; outside the
dark countryside moves by mostly invisible, with only
the occasional distant light off in the fields, the
more frequent closer lights of the dim enigmatic buildings
that sit by the tracks, carrying out the secret functions
of the rails year after year, and then most rarely a
station and bright platforms and standing people.  The
train is an express (the sooner to reach our checkpoints,
and the sooner to see you), and it has stopped only
twice.

There is a post box in the corridor, at the other end
of the car from our compartment, and I have brought
envelopes and stamps (stamps of flowers, and of woodland
scenes, and one of a seascape with leaping fish); so
when I am done writing I will fold this and seal it
in an envelope and stamp it and address it, and I will
either put on my pants and go out into the corridor
and put it in the box (leaving Mrs. Yolanda Melle,
my married lover, lying naked with her face on the
pillow and the night moving by unheeded outside), or
I will put it aside and wait until the morning, or
until the train stops again, to mail it.  Or if the
conductor raps at our door to ask if we need anything
(do conductors do that?) I might open the door a crack
and give the envelope to him, so his hands will be part
of the chain from me to you (along with the carriage
drawn by swans, and the great copper cannons, and the
bicyclists with their dove-grey coats).

I will write you again when we have passed the first
contact point and begun our journey to the second.
Until then I am, your devoted and fast approaching,

Ugo

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

Dear Venus,

It is evening again (was it evening the last time I wrote
you, with the dusk passing by outside the windows of the
train?).  We are checked into a square musky room in the
Hotel of the Angels (or so I translate the name, and the
agreeable dusty cherubs that live above the front desk),
in a town halfway between the first of your checkpoints and
the second.  Mrs. Yolanda Melle (we are signed into the
register as husband and wife, under assumed names; it is
all very thrilling and clandestine!) is this time asleep
across the room from me, lying on her side, her body
curled innocently under the sheets; I am sitting at the
rickety desk in my briefs, writing to you where the light
is better.

(Mrs. Melle, my married lover, is not a large or a fat
woman, but when we are together her body seems to me a
vast and substantial thing, a solid thing that takes up
space and defines the room around it.  In comparison, the
girls of my youth were only whisps of air, tiny things
hardly visible to the eye, pale and without gravity.
Mrs. Melle is a woman of gravity, a creature, an object,
that has its place in the world, and occupies that place
with meaning.  The cities of her body are serious and
significant cities, their rituals centuries old, and
their relations stable and well defined.  I lose myself
in the scents and textures of her body, and the citizens
of my skin undertake mass migrations to her plains and
wildernesses.)

The bakery was as easy to find as you said it would be.
Stepping out of the station into the noisy street I was
afraid I would not be able to find it (not from any lack
in your instructions, but from my own thick-headedness),
but there it was, just around a corner, with its red sign
and its warm bready smells cooling on the air.  Yolanda
laughed and shook her head as I dragged her and our bags
down the street and around the corner.  I bought us hot
drinks (a sweetened apple cider spiced with some unfamiliar
spice) and two crusty loaves of bread still steaming from
the oven (they gave us butter also; soft yellow butter
that gave itself up and soaked instantly into the bread).
Then I told her, just as you said, to wait there at the
little round table for me, and I went through the swinging
doors into the back.  In the back of the bakery I found
the signs and instructions that you had left.  The
subtlety with which your agents modified our code to
carry your message in that place was marvelous, as
always.

I came out again, reciting to myself our new instructions,
the next step of our journey to you, under my breath,
committing them to memory (my memory is as you know it
to be: fickle with the details of the world, but devoted
entirely to you and to our doings, faithful even when I
myself am not; so I remember).  I sat down beside her and
ate some of the bread (it was delicious, like eating
the heart of the sun) and told her that I had found from
you where we were to go next.  She laughed (a little
unsteadily; I know that this degree of adventure is new
to her, and that although she is falling in love with it
she is still uncertain, afraid to commit herself completely,
not entirely taken into the idiom of your language), and
asked me if I had used a telephone back in the kitchen.
I only smiled, and touched her knee with mine under the
table.

(The table was metal, an intricate construction of bent
rods and flat sheets, the top formed from rods curved into
the shapes of vines and leaves, with small welded sheets
in the shape of fruit; an apple, a pear, a tomato.  Our
drinks in their waxed paper cups sat steadily enough,
and with the bread they moistened and flavored the air.)

I told her our next destination, and that the lake would
be beautiful this time of year, and not crowded, and she
seemed glad.  We went back to the station to look at maps
(our bags are not numerous nor heavy, but I'm sure we had
the awkward look of tourists as we rolled them out of the
station and back in again).  We could reach the next point,
we decided in two days: one day on the train (only a day
ticket this time, no cozy sleeping car and the clacking of
the wheels to lull us) to reach this place, and then one
day by bus to the town by the lake.  I sit here and write
between that first day and that second.  (In this room I
have seen no wasps.)

The trains here are efficient and well-arranged; there was
a train leaving for our destination two hours after we
arrived in the city.  We sat again in the station, on
another long wooden bench (this one with a metal top on
the back with circular holes for holding cups and cans,
or for some more obscure purpose, and with dark wood
star-shaped inlays behind our backs), and held hands and
rested.  This station was very much like that first one,
but also unlike it; the sound was brighter, and the
windows larger, and there was citrus in the air.  I
asked Mrs. Melle about the trains of her childhood, where
they had come from and where they had gone, if they had
been steam or diesel.  She said that there had not been
much money for trains or for travel, but that she recalled
one glorious noisy steam engine with steel wheels and a
ruddy engineer shouting from the cab window.

"It was in the summer," she said, "and I thought it must
be very hot in the cab with all that steam and the coal
fire.  But I wanted to be up there with him, and be
able to see the flames."

On the train we sat in a double seat, next to each other,
in a crowded car, crowded with people in coats and suits
and hats, people carrying umbrellas, an old man carrying
a broom (where would an old man carry a broom to, carry
a broom from, by train?), and two mothers with several
children each, one knitting and one entirely occupied
keeping her children under control.  I have not written
you, have I, of our night on the previous train, of
sleeping dreamlessly over the charging wheels and the
speeding track, of waking to find Mrs. Yolanda Melle
washing at the tiny basin in our room, standing in her
white underwear with the sun orange through the windows,
the deep happiness engendered in my by the innocence
of her navel?  Or of breaking our fast in the miniature
breakfast-car, and not long after the train pulling
noisily andn with fanfare into the station, and our
disembarking.  I will leave all those to your own
imagination, and continue with the second train, the
train between the station with the bakery there and
the station with the hotel here, the train full of men
and women and children with long wool scarves, the train
where we sat together hand in hand, smiling at each other
but seldom bothering to talk over the noise.

The land outside the windows of this train was denser than
the night landscape of the other; denser with farms and
houses and towns with streets and plains with highways
vanishing off toward the horizon: bridges and grade
crossings and cuts through dustry grey rock and
causeways over wide flat lakes with reedy islands and
fishermen idling in rowboats, their hats over their
faces.  The train stopped at numerous, numberless,
local stops, and people got on and off, and new people
took the seats of the previous people, and children
ran and shouted and grabbed each other by the coats.
Before every stop an incomprehensible voice babbled to
us over the car's speakers, and then a conductor pushed
his way through the crowd (a tall conductor with a
short beard and a loud penetrating voice, as such a
conductor would of necessity have) announcing almost as
incomprehensibly the name of the station and of the
next station or two afterward.  Then the landscape outside
the windows would slow, and the train's whistle sound,
and the station roll into view and lurch into place so
that the doors could open.

At our stop the conductor and the speakers were as
unhearable as ever, but from the map and the signs I
thought that it was our station, and looking at Mrs.
Melle beside me I nodded, and she nodded, and she
squeezed my hand and gestured at the map, and her lips
moved against each other.  When the station came to
a complete halt outside, we stood and struggled off
through the crowd with the others, pulling and carrying
our bags along amid the bags and boxes and parcels and
offspring of the other passengers getting off and coming
on, all the cities of all our bodies busy and energized,
full of bustle and purpose, driving us to destinations
we only thought we had chosen ourselves.  (This is how
it always is, but I think of it most vividly in crowds,
in transportation systems, following signs and smelling
the smells of commerce and activity.)

Time has passed again, since I wrote that last sentence
to you.  It was a very silly and carefree sentence, wasn't it?
I am more serious now.  I heard a sound after writing that
sentence (while, in fact, writing the last three words of
that sentence), and I went to the door to investigate.  I
believe, my dear sister, (and I wish that this letter was
going to reach you sooner through the cannons and the
bicycles, so that you could give me the benefit of your
immediate advice) that I have seen Luisa Melle, the grim
and violent daughter of my married lover Yolanda, stalking
through the corridor of the hotel.

Getting up from this desk in my briefs, and thinking that the
noise I heard had come from the door, or the hallway outside,
I put my eye to the peephole in that door and looked out.
The peephole was fitted with a cunning fish-eye lens, catching
the light from all angles out into the corridor and funneling
it to my waiting eye, so that I could see in all directions,
nearly perpendicular to the door itself, up and down the
corridor.  The view was warped and distorted by the lens,
but I was able to make out, striding down the corridor
away from me, and then turning and walking halfway back,
a figure in a brown pants-suit whose face (twisted by the
peephole though it was) was undoubtedly the face of Luisa.

What should I do now?  Should I go over and wake up Yolanda,
who is still sleeping, curled and oblivious among the sheets?
Should I call the police, or the fire brigade, or some private
detective agency (a gruff man in a slouch hat and trenchcoat,
his breath smelling of alcohol and pulp paperbacks, a bulge
in his coat pocket or at his hip or under his arm, a man
used to spying on wayward spouses, but perhaps also with
some experience of the sharp and derisive daughters of
wayward spouses, who lurk or stalk in the hallways of
hotels, glaring at the doors behind which their mothers
sleep, unknowing next to their paramours)?

It may not have been Luisa.  Perhaps if I tell the story
so that it was not Luisa, then it will not have been
Luisa.  (Just as, if at the beginning of time when
Mrs. Melle's fingers unbuttoned the top of her dress,
if I had told the story to you differently she and I
might not have embraced, naked and panting, on that
bed whose bed-springs did not creak, and if I were to
write you of tense shapes seen distorted through a
fisheye lens, it would be only a story to amuse you
under the moon, and not a story that sits with me,
on my shoulders as I sit and write, smothering my
breathing and filling my head with the ineluctable
logic of its narrative.)

Or if it was Luisa perhaps it was a benevolent Luisa,
concerned for her mother's well-being, but now reconciled
to the odd young man that she travels with, the writer
manque' with the terrace and the view of the gunmetal
sea, lurking by the hotel door only out of filial
devotion, waiting in case her mother should need
anything, waiting if she should step alone out of
the room alone, to have a kind word, to touch base,
to say how are you and how is your adventure going,
and here is word from home, and a letter from your
son, and here is the gossip from the marketplace that
you might enjoy; a Luisa carrying not hatred for the
interloper (who she now regrets tipping into the
frigid bay), but only love and stories for the mother,
and only kind intentions.

It is cold in the room now.  On the cities of my skin
the people prepare for the snow.  Coats come out of
closets, boots out of drawers, mittens out of the
dark and dusty place behind the dresser, where they
fell in spring (in spring, when I first sat on my
terrace and looked out across the white city, before
even the first of the wasps).  I have taken my shirt
from the tangled pile on the floor by the bed (Mrs.
Melle, Yolanda, moves gently in her sleep, her breath
warm and fragrant and pronounced, definite as her
body is definite) and put it on; but in my shirt
and my briefs I am no warmer that I was in only my
briefs, with Yolanda's daughter waiting, her face
warped and her gait distended, out in the hallway.

I fall back, as always, on the thought of you.  I
know you would smile at my agitation, my conviction
of the importance and the direness of my situation,
and that you would smile and remind me that the world
is what it is, and I should only see it, and deal
with it as it comes.  I will take off my shirt again,
and if I check one more time to assure myself that
the latch and deadbolt are firmly in place before
I seal this letter and slide back into bed, my hand
on Mrs. Melle's velvet thigh, I know you will
understand.  I will write again soon; if the
night does not soothe my imaginings perhaps they will
burn away in the light.

(The thought that when you read this the present
night will be a static and resolved bit of the past
is some comfort; but the fact that you will not read
this until hours or days from how, although it is
the selfsame fact, saddens me.)

Until next time, when I may write with more of my
accustomed equanimity, I am, as always, your,

Virgil

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

Dear Wynn,

A moment ago I was lying on my back on this mountaintop,
looking up at the stars in the black sky.  If this letter
reaches you, as I now hope and trust that it will, in the
normal course of time, and if our intentions (your intentions)
are fulfilled, and I now hope and trust that they will be,
then you will be reading this after we have spoken in
person, and I have sat in your warm dark chamber with
you and with Yolanda, and told you why I was writing to
you from a mountaintop, and you will have laughed, and
pressed my hand, and praised me for the complexity that
you say I add to the world.  I look ahead to that moment
with inexpressible eagerness, as you will in reading this
look back on it with fondness, and as an hour ago I would
have thought of it with something like despair, as a dearly
desired event that might well never come to pass.

What can I tell you about this day that I have not already
told you in person?  (But here you would shake your head,
and tell me again not to analyze my words on the way out,
but merely to see and feel and touch and taste and smell
and then write what I have seen and felt and touched and
tasted and smelled, without muddying up the waters so as
I pass through them.)

After I closed and sealed my last note to you, I did
take my shirt off again, and I did check the latch and
the deadbolt (and I may have checked them more than once),
and I peered through the peephole in the door again and
saw nothing, and I stood with my ear to the door (and my
skin shivering as the people in the cities of my skin
shivered in their beds with the coming of the snows)
and heard nothing, and I paced, and looked at the night
outside the windows, and finally I did slip back into
the covers, against the warm silken body of Mrs. Yolanda
Melle (her sleep is as solid and significant as her self;
something that she enters into easily and puts aside easily,
but which when she is within it fully consumes her, and
she fully consumes it).  After a while (a while that may
have been a long minute or a short hour) I fell into a
cloying and uneasy sleep, fraught with dreams that I did
not and do not remember, but that certainly involved Luisa,
and the train, and the bus, and the bakery, and the lake.

I awoke early, and I woke my companion with brusquer and
less leisurely nuzzles than she was used to.  I had determined
during the night (during the void of sleep apparently,
since I awoke with the determination but had and have no
memory of having come to it) that we should be off early
and at once, taking the earlier bus rather than the later,
leaving the hotel two hours before we had planned the
night before, so that if Luisa was in truth stalking the
hallways she would have two fewer hours to do, well, to
do anything that she might intend to do.  And perhaps, if
in following us this far she also knew of our plans into
the future, a sudden change to them might confuse her,
or put her off of our scent long enough to come to you,
where all would be answered and all would be secure.

Yolanda (Mrs. Melle, my strong but pliable lover) was
tolerant of, but puzzled by, my new urgency.  I did not
explain it to her, did not say that ma'am the reason I
think we should dress and take our eggs and catch the
earlier bus is that I have seen your daughter, her face
and form distorted by the glass, through the peephole
of our door, and the sight of her and the memory of the
cold harbor water has set the citizens of my skin to
shivering in their beds, and the quicker we are away
from here and away from her the better.

The bus was red and green and blue: green and blue
abstract filigree on a red field, with an irrelevant
number proudly displayed above the windshield in the
front, and an impromptu sign duct-taped to the side
of the bus (neatly duct-taped, but duct-taped still)
reflecting the actual route.  It is three hours by
bus from that hotel to the town near the lake (and
then a long climb in the gloomy afternoon to this
mountaintop where the sky is black and Yolanda
huddles aleeping again under an inadequate pile
of blankets; but I am ahead of myself, and I know
you will want to have this story in my hand, seen
through my eyes and smelled through my nose, even
after you have had it from my voice.)

The smells in the bus were smells of gasoline and
rubber, and food-smells of garlic and pepper and
sweet onions from the food that people have carried
onto it for years wrapped in foil and paper and even
in air-tight plastic boxes with names written on the
lids, and then opened up and the contents eaten while
the bus rolls forward in time, with cold milk or hot
coffee or tea from cartons or silver thermoses with
black tops.  The air through the open windows smelled of
the road and the other buses (and cars, and trucks carrying
piled boxes or fuel-oil or milk or stacks of debris),
and also of the pine-forest and the mountains, and of
the lake that was our destination, and that now dreams
and glitters in the starlight somewhere down in the
valley at my back, and that we will climb back down
to after dawn, back down to civilization after my
folly.  (But again I am ahead of myself.)

The bus disgorged us and four others at our stop, a
small stone depot in the center of the town near the
lake (four others who stepped down the bus steps and
melted into the city before I could study them to record
for you, so you have only this record of my having seen and
counted them but not noted them; none of them were Luisa Melle,
or none of them were Luisa Melle in a disguise thin
enough for me to penetrate).  We stowed our bags at
the counter in the depot (I have the tickets even now
in my pocket; number 1266 for her and number 1267 for
me), keeping out only a couple of blankets, our coats,
and a few scarves (the day was chilly, and we had
decided to talk to the lake). The center of that town
is an old square only slightly encroached by the bright
plastic of this century; mostly old brick and plaster
work, and stone gargoyles and watchful angels peering
with blank eyes into the middle distance (the ancients
painted bright colorful eyes on their statuary, and
blush on the cheeks, and tints in the hair; the tints
faded before we came to venerate them, so what we
venerate and model our own sculptures after is a
family of colorless dead things, marvelous in their
silence and immobility, but things that would have
struck the ancients that we think we emulate as
half-finished, so our city squares look like the
back lots of sculptors, where the cold stone is
kept while it waits for the painters to come and
give life to the eyes.)

I was eager to get to the lake, the next contact-point,
and your next instructions.  But Yolanda (perhaps tired
from the bus, which despite or because of or as part of
its exotic flavor had been a jouncy and uneven container,
and the roads middling bad; we had talked with our usual
animation at first, about the pines outside the windows,
the lives of the farms and towns that we passed, the
probable or improbable history of the bus route, but
eventually she had grown quiet and slumped against my
shoulder only looking out at nothing) was just as eager
to find a place to sit that was not moving, to have a
solid lunch, to make sure that we knew where we were
going and that I was not going to lead us, she said,
into some bog where we would vanish and never be heard
of again.  So we sat and ate bread and a thick barley
soup with brown sausages, and I showed her on a map
purchased from the modest tourist stall in the center
of the square where we were, and where the lake was,
and the path to the lake, and beyond it the mountains
and valleys folding around themselves into the distance.
I told her of going to the lake as a child, and the
depth and mystery that I had felt around it, and the
darkness of the trees.

Full of lunch and the solidity of the ground and our
chairs, Yolanda sat back and smiled, and said that we
should now go wherever I wished.  I took her hand and
helped her politely to her feet (I am a gentleman with
Yolanda, opening doors and holding chairs, out of some
respect for her shadow in the world, although she is
probably the least dependant woman I have ever known,
excepting always my beloved sister), and she held onto
my hand as we walked out of the square and toward the
corner of the town where the path to the lake begins,
at the rusty old iron pedestrian bridge over the canal.
On the way we stopped on a whim (her whim or my whim I
do not recall; perhaps a joint whim, emerging from the
combination of our wills) at a straggling cluster of
shops, and bought a box of sandwiches, and two bottles
of water from a local spring (or so the labels said).

Walking through the town, hand in hand with Mrs. Yolanda
Melle, strangers to everyone else on the streets, strangers
to the people that smiled at us (some of them) from the
cars and the shop windows, walking toward my next contact
with you (or with your will, which is the same thing),
I felt more at peace, and less somnolescent, than I had
since (since when?) since Luisa tipped me back into the
waters of the harbor, or since she appeared to me as an
angry apparition as I soaked in the worm mud and felt
it slippery and gritty between my toes.  We passed through
airy districts of tan stone buildings, three and four
stories high, some with shops at street level, some
with alleys between leading inward to glimpses of private
gardens closed with wrought-iron gates, some with
windows curved out over the street on the second storey,
or with balconies with wooden railings occupied by
potted plants, or bicycles, or people.

On the bridge, which arcs high over the canal and the
walkways and bicycle paths on either side of it, she
stopped and leaned back against the railing, and drew
me to her side.  The wind (which was brisk but not
cold) had brought the color into her cheeks and lashed
stray locks of her hair in tangles around her face.
She looked very young, and very happy.

"What am I doing here?" she asked, to the wind more than
to me, and in a voice that said the question was one of
pleased amazement rather than awful realization.  "What
I am doing on some bridge in some town in the backwater
of some rural bus route, holding hands with a mad young
writer--?"  Her voice caught at the end of her question,
as though she had been caught by something in mid-thought,
some hiccup or faux pas, some troubling interruption.  Her
eyes sought out mine and opened wide, asking for some
permission, or forgiveness.  I laughed and said what
indeed are we doing here, but what else could two mad
wanderers be doing, at this time with this wind blowing.
Which was, it seems, the proper thing to say, because she
laughed with me, and put her arms around my neck (and
"threw" would nearly be the right word, if the motion
had been performed by anyone but Mrs. Yolanda Melle, my
married and rosy-cheeked lover), and said into the wind
that yes, if this was madness it was a sweet madness,
and she would follow it to wherever it was leading.

Which was most comforting to me, and invigorated my
faith that Mrs. Melle, like me and like so few others,
was one capable of trusting in your path (in the path
of your coded letters and your subtle signs) and so
coming in the end to your parlor under the moon, and
benefitting from your beneficent wisdom.  But I did
not say that, I only hugged her with my arms and
nuzzled my face into her neck (her skin warm and
cool at the same time, from her blood and from the
wind), and then we picked up our bundles (blankets,
scarves, water, sandwiches), and went onward.

At the lake, which was dark and still and overhung by
its gloomy guardian trees, as it always is, and surrounded
by its enigmatic metal sculptures (which seem to carry
within themselves the complex and enigmatic history of
the artists and institutions that put them there all
those decades ago, their muddled and inchoate purposes,
their self-contradictory notions of public good and
civic spectacle), we walked quietly along the path that
winds through the trees away from the main path, past
the refreshment stand (which was closed for the season,
but otherwise just the same as in my youth, in our
youths, with had it been open the same flavored ices
and postcards), and we sat on the bench farthest from
the road, under the gloomiest of the trees, and she
listened to me idly recalling days spent here (and it
must not have been, now that I think of it, so very
many days, for all that they are engraved in my memories
of childhood), and I put my arm around her shoulders
and she put her head against my chest, and clouds scudded
by in the sky over us.

When it was the right time, I said that she should stay
there on the bench for a little while, and I would go
and read your next messages, and determine our next
destination.  She did not seem pleased by the idea,
a little of the color having gone out of her cheeks
and a little of the youth from her voice.  But I kissed
her fondly and said that it would not be long, and
reminded her that it was necessary in order that the
adventure might continue.  She squeezed my hand, and
I walked up that path that you and I remember, around
the backs of the statues, up to the old stone and
the clearing, and I read the signs that you have put
there.  It was getting dark, and the reading was not
easy.  I found your words (and I know that you do this,
sometimes, to test me or tease me, and it would be
disloyal of me not to feel it) terse and cool, not
easy to read, challenged by the wind.  I knew now
where to go and how to get these, but not what we
would find at the destination; another contact point,
or the place itself and at last your company.

In this spirit of not-knowing, of darkness and wind and
an approaching tiredness from the long walk, I saw on
the other side of the line of metal figures, standing
to the side of the path as though looking for something
and not wanting to be easily seen, the acute and dismal
form of Luisa Melle.  And I was afraid.

I did not think she could hear me with the wind, or see
me even if she were looking in my direction, off the
exoteric path.  She was not between me and Yolanda,
and as I stood immobile and watched her she stepped
out into the path, looked both ways down it, and walked
lightly off back toward the town, away from Yolanda
and away from me.  She was out of sight in half a
minute, among the trees around a turn in the path,
and it was as if she had never been there; as if I
had only imagined her.

Back at the bench, where Yolanda sat warm with our
bundles, I studied her face for any sign that her
daughter had found her there, and had spoken to her.
She did not mention her daughter, did not hint at
anything untoward except to wonder at how long I
had been gone, and to ask where we would be going
next.

You will, I know, want to know my raw perceptions at
this next part of the story; it is, as you always say,
most useful (as well as most difficult) to stick to
unanalyzed perceptions when circumstances are most
semantically and emotionally charges.  I will, as I
know you will expect, not succeed very well in this.
The wind continued to blow in unreliable gusts, here
and there, the trees continued to be dark and green
and looming.  Did the wind ruck up ripples on the
face of the water, or did the lake remain a still
glass?  I don't know (I don't remember, and I'm sure
I did not know at the time).

But the world, the trees and the water and the lake
and the path, and particularly the path back to town
and the town itself, where Luisa must know we had been
and would be returning, and where she might now await
us, were filled with menace, and I knew (this is my
unanalyzed memory of my own knoledge, for what that
is worth) that we should not go back there.  (Or I
believed this; I now believe that I was wrong, and
can someone know something that is false?)

I do not remember how I explained my notion to Yolanda.
I would not have lied, but I did give her the idea that
our path, as read from your signs, now led us up the
mountain, by that path that I knew from old, up into
the wind to that peak I have always associated with
eagles, and that for no reason (or every reason) I
had it in my head would offer us safety from Luisa
Melle, and a safe sleep under the stars.  (And so it
has proven, in fact.)

She was not happy to go, being chilled from the wind
and tired from the walk, but I begged or cajolled or
pleaded.  Probably not pleaded; Mrs. Melle is not someone
that I would plead with except in urgent and demonstrable
need; more likely I appealed to her sense of adventure
and her joy.  I do remember my lips uttering some nonsense
about adventure and adversity, adventure and the challenge
of a chilly mountain in the evening, being twin faces
of the same coin, being inextricably tied.  I may also
have exaggerated the ease of the climb (for although
it is a small mountain and the jumbled stones, as you
will recall, make nearly a staircase, still it is
not all that easy).

But in any case, half worried and half excited, she
finally gave in (with, as I remember it, a theatrical
throwing up of her hands and a heartening laugh).  If
I can bear two children, she said, I suppose I can walk
up a hill in the twilight.  And we took our bundles
(taking out the scarves to wrap around our heads, and
the bottles of water to drink on the way up), and I
led her to the mountain path, and we walked up.

The moon rose as the sun set and even the stars were bright,
earlier clouds having been scoured away by the wind, and the
wind itself mellowed and softened as we walked.  I remembered
the way well despite the passing of years (a newly fallen
tree, a tangle of brush cleared by enterprising youths,
a hillock or two that surprised me, but how hard can it be,
really, to just go upwards until one is standing on the
top?).  We went quietly for the most part, touching now
and then, pointing out especially scenic views down twilight
corridors of trees to a romantic stone outcrop standing
against the sky, wanting only a wolf to sit on it and howl.

(Is the fact that a lump of stone has no wolf a kind of
raw perception, or is it tainted with analysis?  Remind
me to ask you this, when you and I and Yolanda are sitting
by the embers of your fire and laughing together.)

We reached the mountaintop (or the hilltop, really; having
climbed it easily in the semi-dark without injury or mishap
I cannot any longer think of it as a real mountain) together,
with no ankles sprained and only slightly winded, having drunk
most of our water but not touched our sandwiches.

"And now what?" my companion asked me from among her scarves,
standing on that square stone block that sits in the flat place
on the peak, her arms out at her sides and her eyes looking
out at the darkening night.  "Do we go down again in this
darkness?  Or do we sleep with the wolves tonight?"

I had no answer, not having thought beyond this point, or
rather having thought beyond this point a thousand times on
the trudge upwards without coming to anything useful.  We
were here in the air in the forest, Luisa was (I clung to
the notion) down in the town, waiting in frustration for
our return.  That was all; nothing further presented itself.
Mrs. Melle came down off of the boulder and put her arms
around me, and I buried my face in the warmth of her coat.
We stretched out on the summit with our scarves and blankets
around us and our bags under our heads, and ate our sandwiches
and talked about the stars.  My nose was cold.  Before long,
Yolanda yawned and pulled her scarf up over her face, and
was asleep.

(A childhood of poverty and making-do, I think, strengthens
one for suddenly being on a mountaintop at night with an
eccentric writer and no prospect of a hot supper or a warm
bed.  Would anyone else, would I, have taken the siutation
with such equanimity?  I wanted very much to embrace her then,
somewhere near a roaring fire, preferably nude, preferably
on a matress or a pile of soft rugs that had never been
spread out on a chilly hilltop in the early night.)

I was, at first, miserable.  I had your next instructions,
the roads and places that would take us that much closer
to you, but I felt cut off, unknown.  You were, I thought,
as distant as ever, or more distant, if the demon form of
Luisa Melle stood an adamant barrier between us.  We were
closer when we could reach through the mails, through
the bicycles and the giant copper cannons of the mails,
and touch that way.  Now, although perhaps only one twist
away in the maze that surrounds you, I was alone, with a
sleeping woman who had come somehow into my care, and
whom I had taken up to this hilltop, in the middle of
nothingness, for no reason, sensible or narrative.

I lay back and looked upward, and your voice came to me.
Not as an eldritch sending or a hallucination or even a
waking dream, but as a vividly recalled sound, an especially
evocative scent.  Muscles here and there in my body (down
beneath the foundations of the cities of my skin, where
the subways and buried firmaments course with the life of
he cities above) relaxed and uncurled, and despite the cold
I felt warmer.  The sound of your voice, even if only
recalled, and even without the freight of any specific
words, soothed me and made me wiser.

It was not necessary, I thought, to have come up the
mountain (and I imagined you pointing this out).  But
it was also not bad, there was nothing wrong with being
on the mountain, with Yolanda Melle sleeping beside me
under the coats, and my calves aching.  You would have
pointed that out even more disinctly.  Being on the
mountain is only being on the mountain; looking up at
the stars is only looking up at the stars.  Warm beds
are warm beds, and rocky hilltops are rocky hilltops.
I felt, and I still feel, a great equanimity, thanks
to the memory of the sound of your voice, dear sister.
And after lying there and feeling it for some time,
I got up and found pen and paper and began writing
this.

Tomorrow morning we will wake up, our backs stiff,
and we will smile at each other, and kiss in the dawn,
and we will go back down the mountain, and get our
bags from the depot, and take the bus to the next
link in your chain, and be that much closer to you.
If Luisa Melle is there she will be there, and if
she is not she is not.  How else could it be?

I will write you again from the town, or from the
bus.  Until then, grateful as ever for the memory
of you, I remain, your fond disciple,

Will

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

Dear Xenia,

Down in the town now, off of the mountain, drinking hot
tea and eating cakes, quite content, last night's letter
mailed off toward you with the first post.  The early morning
was not as idyllic as I imagined it while lying there under
the evening stars, but in retrospect that was hardly surprising.

We awoke in stages, cold and stiff and aching, to a gloomy and
chilly dawn (or some time after dawn; the clouds were too
thick to accurately estimate how long the sun had been up),
with no breakfast and no showers.  Mrs. Yolanda Melle and
I even groused at each other a bit; as this was the first
time we had groused at all it was both heartbreaking and
(again, in retrospect) a lovely and human thing.  We
gathered our scarves and crumpled blankets, attended to
our animal needs each behind our own modest bush, and began
picking our way again down the mountain (down the hill),
back to the lake and the bridge and the town.  At the bottom
of the hill Yolanda (my travelling companion and partner
in madness) turned her ankle (not seriously) on a stone,
and gripped my arm to stop herself from falling, and cursed
a deep and heartfelt curse.  She looked up at me with her
face in a most frightening scowl, and then (after a long
quiet instant, and in reaction I suppose to something in
my own face, or perhaps something in her own sparkling mind)
she began to laugh, loudly and without restraint, and I
joined her (somewhat more tentatively I'm sure, for not
knowing quite what was going on).  She straightened up and
wiped her eyes, and observing that at least we had survived
the night and that there were hot showers in abundance in
town, she strode forward, leaving me to sprint behind her
as I might to keep pace.

(At that time of the morning, at least on that day of that
year, the route from the hilltop and the lake to the very
center of town by the stone bus depot is nearly deserted.
I saw no sign of Luisa Melle, nor did I feel her baleful
presence in the air.  If someone were to suggest to me now
that I had entirely imagined her there on the path by the
lake, looking dourly from side to side, I would almost
believe it.)

We reached town chilly and unwashed, but triumphant, walking
side by side (still no sign of Luisa or pitchfork-armed devils).
We retrieved our bags from the bag counter at the depot, and
Yolanda checked us into a hotel.  (I say that she checked us
in because she was faster and more energetic than I and I was
still sprinting to keep up with her, so she was the one that
signed the guestbook at Mr. and Mrs. George Tata or something
along those lines.  But I would have taken no convincing on the
subject had she bothered to convince me, hotels offering such
unearthly charms as hot water and breakfast.)

So we sit now with our hot tea (black tea flavored with mint
and blackberries, with a picture of a horse on the box) and
our breakfast cakes, at the minute square table in the
window of our hotel room overlooking the street. It is an
old but spacious room, really a suite; we sit appropriately
in the sitting room, and through that door there is the
bedroom, with a large well lived-in bed.  Yolanda looks out
the window abstractedly, and I scribble these words to you
on this pad.  I am not sure that she entirely approves of
my writing to you, it seems to unnerve or disturb her
somehow.  It may be that she is jealous of you in some way,
of your earlier and deeper claim on me, of the attention that
I give to your letters (both mine to you and yours come back
to me).  But I know that once she meets you any negative
emotions in that direction will evaporate, so I smile at
her and lean back in my chair and continue to scribble.
We have been flirting happily with each other, touching
each other's shoulders and raising our eyebrows, and I hope
that in a few moment we will be tearing calmly or frantically
at each other's clothes, and warming ourselves at the bodily
flames of Eros.  I watch her lips as she sips her tea.

Time has passed again.  Disaster.  I don't know if there is
any point in writing this.  It seems profane to write these
new and hopeless words beneath those old and hopeful ones,
from a brighter time in my life.  You will (if my fondest
and most depairing hopes are somehow realized and your
fingers do ultimately open an envelope that contains this)
notice that the paper is crumpled and worn, and that I am
now writing with the stub of a pencil rather than my own
pen.  It is Luisa Melle, of course, as I would have known
if I had any sense, any competence.  She has descended upon
us, or upon me, and severed me from the happy string of the
world on which I was swinging, oblivious.

How could I have thought that by going up a hill, and
coming down that hill the next day, I could unmake her,
cause the world not to contain her, when she had so thoroughy
demonstrated her reality to me with the killing cold of
the harbor water?  I brought my own self-regarding and
abstract toy model of the world to the lake with me, and
it took me up the hill as though going up the hill
mattered.  But today has brought Luisa Melle, powered
by the forces of impersonal and concrete reality, to
remind me that the world I keep inside myself (the
cities that live on my skin) is a different thing than
the world that lurks and shambles outside of me (the
real cities with real slums and broken sidewalks and
despair).

I think now what you would say to me, what would make you
laugh here, what wisdom you would impart.  Are the inner
and outer worlds the same world, and is it only my own
avoidable overanalysis that drives an unnecessary wedge
between them?  But how can I not analyze my imprisonment,
the grimness of my jailers, the fact that Yolanda Melle
is kept from me, in the other room, and that I am kept
also from you, by my confinement here?

I should tell the story in order, in case it does someday
find its way to you.  Yolanda Melle and I (my married lover
and I, and what would I give to embrace her now) had finished
our tea and cakes, I had put my letter (this letter, in its
former sunny being) aside, and we were sitting on the small
and tattered couch in our sitting room, my arm around her
shoulders, her face just beginning to turn toward me and
our bodies just beginning to mold themselves to each other.
There was a rap on the door, not a polite and measured rap
like those on the door of my room back in the whitewashed
town above the harbor, but a demanding and perfunctory
rap with no kindness in it, and then the door burst open
(we had not locked it, I had not had the sense to lock it
against the concrete reality of Luisa).

Yolanda sprang to her feet, and I remained sitting,
overcome by events (as I have always been easily overcome
by events; you have said that it is one of my greatest
virtues, but at that moment, and this moment, I cannot
find it in myself to agree), blinking at the hard and
serious figures that erupted into the room with the
opening of the door.  Luisa Melle, molten in her wrath,
again with black slacks and an ugly cotton blouse over
her thin and dangerous frame (none of her mother's solid
beauty there, but all too much of her mother's reality,
her mother's embedding in the world as it is), and following
behind her an odious large man in uniform (a uniform not
familiar in its details, but in its generalities clearly
marking him as a minor police official, keeper of the
peace and writer of parking tickets) and another equally
odious man in a dark suit with a pinched face and a thin
red nose.

I will not, I cannot, give you the details of the furor
that followed, the pitched battle of words and regulations
and accusations and resolve pitted against resolve.  My
own resolve was, naturally, a small and insignificant thing,
and all of Luisa's was therefore pitted against all of her
mother's.  Yolanda is far wiser, stronger, more mature,
than her whippet daughter, if not as intense or pointed;
but Yolanda's mind was already only half in my universe,
only half subscribed to the eloquent madness of our journey,
and so she was not a bulwark, not a steadfast rock against
the shrill voice of her daughter.

They shouted at each other about madness (as they always
shout about madness), about kidnapping, about fornication
and adultery and fraud.  I attempted to enter the fray,
but was cast aside by all parties.  Ultimately it was
Yolanda herself who led me to the bedroom, where I
languish even now, and asked me (kindly but coldly, not
with love or joy in her eyes, and with her mind focused
entirely on her daughter outside) to stay there for awhile,
to rest, not to trouble myself.  As if I could help being
troubled.

The shouting has subsided out there, now.  I have my
letter here, which I grabbed up sometime during the
fracas, and I have this stub of a pencil that I found
in the empty drawer of the bedside table (my pen out
there in the sitting room somewhere, trodden underfoot).
They are still talking in angry voices, voices officious
and angry and sorrowful by turns.  They are using the
telephone.

The odious man in the dark suit has been in here and
talked to me.  (He told me his name, but I reject it,
I refuse to know it.)  He asked me the usual idiotic
questions, and I could not keep the heat out of my voice.
I may have ranted at him, even, although it can hardly
have made the situation any worse.  They think me mad,
of course, crazy, addled.  They think that because I do
not see the world as they do that I may be dismissed, or
rather not dismissed but held, kept wherever it is convenient
for them to have me, studied and weighed like a piece of
glass or a curious aphid, measured and then put aside in
a drawer somewhere while they decide exactly what to do
with me.  What must Yolanda think?  Has she abandoned our
adventure entirely, her desire to meet you?  Has her joy
been entirely dissolved by the touch of their concrete
grayness?  I despair.

Dear, dearest sister, I appeal to you as I never have before:
I will try to smuggle this letter to you, to have it delivered
by some chambermaid or some passerby in the street (dropped
from the window here wrapped in currency, or tied to the
foot of a dove).  I will address it or have it delivered in
that way that we have reserved for messages truly _in
extremis_; if it reaches you quickly (for I hope and trust
that we are close to you now, in the maze; otherwise I am
lost!), and if you can reply quickly, I know that only your
wise and capable advice can preserve me now, and free me
from the bonds of familial and official disdain that are
tightening as I write.  Please, sister, as I am precious to
you (and as you know you are precious to me), send me a message,
tell me how I may crack this hard and unyielding nut.

Awaiting your reply as any prisoner awaits his freedom,
I am, your most desperate,

Xenos

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

My dear, my very dear, Yolanda,

I know what they have said to you about me.  And why should
you not believe them?  Do I have a sister?  If you were to
consult the official records, as perhaps they have already
done and shown you the results, those records would say
that I have no sister.  Would anyone with any sense believe
that my sister recieves the letters that I send her, and
encodes replies into them with subtle alterations of the paper
and ink, that I then decode to read her words?  Clearly this
is all madness.

But is it a malign madness?  They cannot say that I have
seduced you, or kidnapped you, or even that I have lied to
you.  (For if I am mad, then at least I believe the words
that come from my mouth in my madness.)  All the seduction
was on your side (although I welcomed it, and still welcome
it, and given the chance I will joyously and rapturously
seduce you in return). I have not hurt you; it is your daugther
that has thrown me into the harbor, not the other way around.
Which of us is then a danger to society?

But I should not rant at you, Mrs. Melle, it is not you that
has imprisoned me here, not you that is convincing the
authorities to lock me away somewhere while they decide my
fate in the slow wheels of justice (although "justice" is
not a word that those wheels deserve).  In your youth I
know you saw the turning of those wheels, and the great
harm that they cause in passing as they grind.  I do not
want to be ground between those wheels, and I do not want
those wheels to grind you, either.

If you can come to me and free me, I ask you most earnestly
to do so, for the sake of the terrace in the whitewashed
building over the harbor, for the sake of the houseboat
and its warm bed, for the sake even of that shivery hilltop
under the stars.  You know that I am no danger to anyone,
and that I have done nothing wrong.  If my world is different
from theirs, different from the one that they would draw
you back into, you know that that is not a crime.  If you
still wish it, I will gladly inhabit my world with you;
but even if you want to return to that old world, I appeal
to your inner and beautiful sense of justice (real justice)
to allow me to remain in my world alone.

Only your warm and generous hand can free me now; I await
your kindness.  Until then I remain your most devoted friend,

Yorick

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

Dear Zophia,

I have written her the letter, just as you said, and I have
slipped it with great cunning (if I do say so myself) into a
place where she, and only she, is likely to find it.  Or at
least is likely to find it if she returns, if they let her
return.  That is the crux of my hope now, or the first of
two cruxes: that she will care enough to insist hard enough
that she is allowed to return, and that when she reads the
words that you have had me write they have sufficient effect
on her.  Desparate chances perhaps, but after the miracle of
your message I can now believe in any and all miracles.

You know that my joy at receiving your reply in such time was
beyond all expression.  When Luisa Melle strode disdainfully
into my bedroom prison, her face haughty, I was sure it was
for some crushing and perhaps final blow.  But when she
tossed the envelope onto the table with a sniff, the very
envelope that I had dispatched with such trembling hopes
to the tow-haired chambermaid just hours before, and I saw
on the face of that envelope the unmistakable signs of
your hand, my bitter fear melted into honey and ambrosia.
We must be near to you indeed, that you could receive my
plea and reply so quickly; or your agents must have winged
feet, or Hermes' winged sandals.

You chide me kindly in your letter (and I can see, and how
glad I am to see, your eyes flash as you do it) for having
allowed these odious people to so bend my will.  I could,
you say, simply have stood and walked out, simply have crooked
my finger to Yolanda and drawn her behind me out of the room,
leaving them in the dust with no chains or manacles to bind
me.  And you know, my sister, the senses in which I could
have done that, and the senses in which it was utterly
impossible.  Knowing that impossibility you have given me
a lesser but a more possible task, and so the letter is
written and dispatched, and now I only wait, knowing that
your wisdom is so far beyond mine that I need not work or
worry, but only wait for events to take their course.  My
only fear is that I have misunderstood, or poorly carried
out, some part of your instructions.  But I believe that I
have not, and that freedom is now only a matter of time
and patience.  Outside in the sitting room there are no
sounds, except when one of my guards moves in his lassitude,
or when the telephone rings, or when the occasional low-toned
conversation goes on between the conspirators, futhering
their campaign against me, their campaign that I now
believe (as I could not have believed such a short time
ago) is doomed to failure.

You say that it is most likely that Yolanda will come to
me in the night, so I will shortly slip into the bed (the
bed on which I had been lolling miserably, and on which
I now lie with glee, writing this to you), and doze or
even sleep to store up my energy for the escape.  I look
forward to this latter coming into your hands, to be
committed to your infallible memory and added to your store
of stories.  (Less praise, I know you would say, and more
story; tell me about the room, about the bed, tell me
how the sheets smell!)  The sheets, dear sister, smell
entirely too much of me and my lying listless and hopeless
on them.  The room smells of age and disinfectant, and
just barely of yesterday's tea and cakes.  The window
overlooks the mouth of an alley, close to the street,
where cats stalk invisible mice, and cars rumble by
over the cracked pavement (cracked only as all pavement
is cracked, as being cracked is essential to being
pavement, not cracked to any especial degree, nor to
indicate any noticable poorness of the neighborhood;
it is a perfectly acceptable hotel, and the staff wear
neat brown uniforms with black piping).

The light from the windows, dim and subdued now with the
sun going down and the clouds thickening again, falls
muffled and diffuse on a pale brown carpet with a
middling-thick nap. Between the strands of the nap
there are cities, as there are cities on my skin and
on the skin of Yolanda Melle (wherever she is now, out
there in the external world beyond the touch of my
fingers), and the people of the cities go about their
lives without much concern, I think, for those of us who
walk to and fro on the rug, or kneel on it, or fall
heavily full-length and kick our heels.  Why should they
care, after all?  The very small are as invulnerable to
harm from the very large as vice-versa (or much more than
vice-versa, thinking of the centuries of harm that we the
mighty suffer from bacteria, viruses, prions, the tiny
nothingnesses that get into the details of our mechanisms
and gum up the works).

There is a light on the ceiling, a single bulb covered by
a bit of frosted glass, and on the table there is a table
lamp with a reddish-brown shade.  A switch on the wall by
the door, and another by the head of the bed, control them
both at once (so that they are really only one light with
two parts).  I will stop writing in just a few words, and
put this letter aside and this stub of a pencil, and I will
turn off the light and insinuate myself between the sheets,
and I will doze comfortably, dreaming of the maze through
which I will shortly continue to journey to you, waiting
for the sound of Mrs. Melle's hand on the doorknob.  When
that has happened, and when we have escaped hand in hand
from this odious captivity, I will finish this letter and
dispatch it to you, so that you may read from my hand what
you will (if all goes as I am certain it will) already
have heard from my grateful lips.

Time has passed again, sweet triumphal time, time that has
held my in its tender hands like the most cherished of
newborns, and kissed my smooth forehead with its tender
lips.

She came to me, Yolanda Melle, my lover, in the small quiet
hours of the night, with tears in her eyes and a firm happy
determination in her voice.  She kissed my eyelids and my
fingers, and helped me gather my things and pack my bag,
and we were off like phantoms into the cool air.  There
was no guard in the sitting room, and no one in the hallway
or on the stairs, and out in the street a hired car sat
with its engine purring contentedly.  We moved quickly
and silently, but three times she stopped and turned to
me and embraced me, pulling my head down to her breast,
or nuzzling her own head in under my chin and making soft
rapturous sounds in her throat.

In the car, with her at the wheel and me beside her with my
hand on her thigh, looking out at the lights of the town,
she said that I had been exactly right about the wheels of
justice and how they grind (which means that you, dear
sister, were right, for those words were yours), and about
the value of madness, and the bravery of hearts.  She
thanked me in the most heartfelt and gratifying way for
my letter, and for reassuring her of her desire to be
in my world and not in theirs (take that, Luisa Melle;
take that, odious police and sanctimonious doctors).

When we were a good distance from the hotel and possible
pursuit she stopped the car in a dark corner of an empty
parking lot and turned toward me.  Our kisses were ardent
and numerous and prolonged, and I ran my hands over her
warm and substantial body and stroked her until she moaned
in delight.  But then she laughed (and in her laugh I
heard your laugh, as in her eyes at times I see your
eyes) and pulled herself away from me, and asked me where
we were going now.

A cold hand touched my heart for an instance, as I could
not immediately remember the message from you that I had
read at the lake, and I feared that the encounter with
Luisa and all that followed it had driven it from my mind.
But then I heard the harmonies of your voice, and all of
that world was cleared from my head and all of our world
entered it again (in the cities of my skin banners flew
from the housetops in the dusk), and I remembered.

We are staying tonight in the little inn called the Heron
and Duck, at the base of the hill that I know is your hill.
You have been kind, to lead us to you (to lead me, to lead
Yolanda Melle) to the welcoming darkness of your tower in
so few steps, to allow yourself to come close enough to the
mundane world that we can reach you from it with such ease;
I know what that must cost you, and I am grateful, as I am
always grateful.  She is asleep now beside me, naked and
fragrant, tangled in the sheets as we should always be tangled
in the sheets.  We are napping this evening so as to be fresh
two hours before dawn, when we will go up your hill to your
towner, and as the first winds of morning begin to stir
the trees we will knock at your door and be admitted.

Before she fell into the blissful slumber that now holds
her, Mrs. Melle was joyful but also uneasy, as is entirely
fitting.  She is concerned for me, concerned in ways that
she could not entirely express, as I cannot entirely express
to her why this anticipation is the source of such joy.
We will meet my sister, I said to her, whom I love, and
I will see the two of you together.  Which is of course
exactly my source of joy, and also only a small bright
fragment of it.  Her smile in answer was wistful, doubtful,
so I kissed her and undid the clasp at the back of her
dress, and we tumbled together onto the bed and whatever
doubts troubled her we drove away together.

I am lying on my stomach (what a rude phrase that is) on
the bed, also naked and fragrant and somewhat twisted in
the sheets, propped up on my elbows writing this to you,
with a new pen on new paper.  (I have kept the stub of a
pencil that I used to write my plea in captivity; it is
in my pants pocket, somewhere in this room, as a ragged
momento of the adventure.  I will offer it to you in a
few hours along with everything else.)  I will put this
letter into the inn's post-box as we pass the counter on
the way to the door and the hill and the ebony tower and
you; you can open the envelope and hold the letter in your
hand and read it after we have come and gone again, Yolanda
and I.  I hope it gives you pleasure.

When I have done writing and sealed this page in its
small square envelope, I will write the address on the
face, and put on a stamp (a stamp showing a bird and a
star, the bird in flight with the star under its left
wing).  I will put the stamped and sealed envelope on
the night-table, and then I will slip down between the
sheets, down next to the warm breathing body of Yolanda
Melle, and I will sleep in anticipation of waking and
coming at last to you.

Unti then I remain, as always, your most patient and eager,

Zeno

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

Dear Ada,

I can't begin to tell you how beautiful it is here.  But
then you already know, since it was you that sent us here,
to this high and serene mountaintop, this secluded cabin
with a view of forever.  How different it is from my terrace
above the whitewashed city overlooking the harbor, and yet
how much the same.  Here we have miles of trees rather
than miles of housetops to look down on, and in the distance
the infinite rolling hills rather than the infinite sea,
but in the end it is the same thing, the same structure
of beauty and wholeness, the same meaning.  Perhaps someday
we will go back to that town by the sea; perhaps someday
I will even finish my book, sitting on the terrace with
the smooth self-confident keyboard in my lap, and Mrs.
Melle beside me.

You know that I cannot express the gratitude that I feel,
and the debt that I owe you (and here I see you laughing
at the idea that between us there could be any debt) for
your kindness to Yolanda (and, of course, to me).  Even
knowing you as I do, the depth of the sweet intimacy with
which you greeted her and took her into your tower and your
shadowed parlor and made her welcome, and answered all her
questions with the melody of your voice and the soft
insistence of your hands and your mouth, quite overwhelmed
me (you saw my tears, and I know they pleased you).

She sits beside me now as I write, her eyes dreamy, looking
out over our vista of endless wilderness.  She is changed,
of course, as anyone who comes to you is changed, but she
is also the same, still Yolanda Melle, my married lover,
still lovely and substantial and real.  The marks that you
left on her skin are fading, but the impress that your
kindness makes on the soul can never fade.  The wind is
chilly here on the mountain, but we have our fireplace and
our thick blankets, and we lack for nothing.  In the sky
the clouds are ribbons of white drawn by the wind.  We
lie together as the moon rises, holding hands.  Sometimes
in the night she cries out like a child and clings to me,
and then I know that she is dreaming of you.

Until I write again I remain, your loving brother,

Adam

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