Memoir From Antproof Case Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I Protest the Sexuality of the Brazilians

  Miss Mayevska

  The First Man I Killed

  Constance

  The Sky Over Europe

  Across the Great Divide

  The Second (Man I Killed)

  The Spark of Transgression

  Poisoned by Champagne

  1914

  The Glacis at São Conrado

  The Finest School

  Copyright © 1995 by Mark Helprin

  All rights reserved.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Helprin, Mark.

  Memoir from antproof case: a novel / Mark Helprin.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PS3558.E4775M46 1995

  813'.54—dc20 94-43626

  ISBN 978-0-15-10097-5

  ISBN 978-0-15-603200-1 (pbk.)

  First Harvest edition 2007

  For Juan Valdez

  By indirections find directions out.

  —HAMLET, II. i

  I Protest the Sexuality of the Brazilians

  CALL ME OSCAR Progresso. Or, for that matter, call me anything you want, as Oscar Progresso is not my name. Nor are Baby Supine, Euclid Cherry, Franklyn Nuts, or any of the other aliases that, now and then over the years, I have been forced to adopt. No one knows my real name anymore: it's been too long. And all the things that I myself once knew are like a ship glittering in the dark, moving away from me as I am left in homely silence. My time is drawing to a close, so I thought I would take one last shot.

  And here you have it, the chronicle of my failure and my isolation, which are told through victory, and of my victories, which are told through failure and isolation: loneliness, really. My life has not been simple, but I am sure of my story.

  Though you may not be half as peculiar as I am, if you separate out your vanities and illusions, the petty titles to which you hold fast and by which you are defined, the abstract and insensible money in your accounts, your bogus theories, and your inane triumphs, what have you other than a body that, even if you are now as healthy as a roebuck, will eventually war against you until you are left with nothing but memory and regret?

  You may run quadruple marathons and do one-arm handstands, but only blink, look up, and see yourself hobbling about like a bent insect half-crushed under a heavy heel. That's me, who can hardly walk, struggling each day to the highest points of the Parque da Cidade, a thousand feet up in the quiet and the clouds, to green platforms overlooking the sea.

  People in Niterói know me as an old man who walks up the mountain, and they are right. I come here to feel the breeze and imagine for a moment that I stand on the cold hills of my childhood, where arctic wind brought tears to eyes that could see for two hundred crystalline miles. This was the Hudson, north of New York; rugged country, and snow. Since the beginning, my mental equilibrium, such as it has been, has depended upon hard walks in which I can forget myself and look at the landscape. I also climb this hill so that I may look back at Rio, a stately hive across the bay, and remember my life there, too.

  My lives of North and South, hot and cold, seem perfectly balanced and entirely inadequate. I often wonder why I struggled so hard if it has been merely to get to this place, but struggle, I suppose, is automatic, and it has its own rewards. Even now, after I struggle up the hill, I feel peace like a gentle hand stroking my brow.

  Did you know that an ejaculated sperm travels over eight thousand body lengths a second, which is as if you or I were flushed through a water closet at 34,000 miles an hour? This original shock may be the origin of the admonition, "Do not go gently...," for according to the principles of physics, a fluid passing through a conduit will do so at differing rates, the material at the center traveling faster than the material at the sides. The resulting shear forces tend to tear the cells apart. Meanwhile the rotund egg sits enthroned like a bowerbird, waiting with closed eyes for a speed-crazed sperm to knock at the door.

  Struggle starts at the beginning and before, and at rest the life in a man is like the cocked spring of a lizard's tongue, waiting unsprung for a fly to come. Even as you are still, the tanks fill up, detonations accumulate, schemes pile on, and dance halls are opened within the brain. Even priests, who attempt to be tame, are propelled by the very same force into rarified precincts no less ecstatic than those they forswear.

  Which is part of the reason I moved to Niterói, though only part, the other part that they are less likely to find me here and kill me. I have turned this over and over in my mind for many years, and I concluded long ago, or ventured upon the chance, anyway, that my life may end at any moment, perhaps on a flight of very steep steps in Santa Teresa, after I am shot in the shoulder with a pistol of exceedingly small calibre.

  No one comes. The gun, a miniature, sounds like a firecracker or a backfiring motorbike.

  "You won't hurt Marlise, will you?" I ask.

  The assassins have been tracking me. They know. "She's the one who..."

  "The young one, with the reddish hair."

  "Not real red hair, like those Irish bitches," one of them comments.

  "No. She's a Carioca. Her hair is more the color of clay."

  "What's a Carioca?" he asks, being himself from Jersey City.

  "Someone who lives here, who comes from here."

  "I wouldn't shoot a woman."

  "She's pregnant."

  "Your kid?"

  "Someone else's."

  "That's too bad," he says, "I'm sorry."

  I shrug my unwounded shoulder. Then they hear a police siren, and though it is very far away they run like hell.

  Professional killers favor tiny pistols that shoot .12-calibre slugs, the kind used in hamster hunting. But who knows? They might be equipped with locking-barrel .44-magnum automatics. I saw one like this in the gun store in São Paulo when I bought my pistol, a Walther P-88. It's very heavy. Carrying it actually throws my back out, as my muscles make just enough damaging adjustment to keep me balanced as I walk. I had to bribe half a dozen people to get it, and, with ordinary crime rising explosively, I carry it. I'm too old to be wounded yet again, even with a hamster gun, and when they appear, if I haven't died already, I'll kill them.

  Part of the reason I moved to Niterói is that if they don't find me, they won't shoot me, and if they don't shoot me, I won't have to shoot them. I've paid twenty people—the newspaper boy, my former barber, the landlord, even the police—to say that I died. The only problem is the naval academy, where I go three times a week. Though now I cross the bay and come from an unexpected direction, some risk remains. I've been there so long that anyone who wants to find me will.

  I might have moved into the interior, or up or down the coast. By bribes and solitude I could have lost myself in one of the quiet cities of Uruguay, but then I would have been separated from many of the things that keep me alive. They are, in ascending order, the city itself, the naval academy, Marlise, bittersweet recollections, and Funio.

  The naval academy sits on a peninsula that used to be an island and was at one time the capital of La France Antarctique. That the French thought Rio de Janeiro antarctique is because the whole world here is upside-down. If you are not born under the equator you can never quite get your bearings.

  The naval academy is filled with young cadets
in the ill-fitting naval costume of northern civilizations. Torn from their upside-down roots, they have been made to study tactics, ballistics, naval history, electronics, and, of course, English, which is what I teach them.

  Unless you are the daughter of a Brazilian admiral, and perhaps not even then, you may not have realized that Brazil has a navy. And, after being informed that it does, you may wonder why it does.

  Picture a map. Consider Brazil's immensely long coastline, upon which its cities, some great even in the eyes of the uncaring and faraway world, are strung like light bulbs over the terrace of a seaside restaurant. Then look at Brazil's connection with the rest of the continent. It is cut off from the major cities of South America—Buenos Aires, Santiago, Caracas—by rivers, jungles, the Andes, and vast distances over lands that lead nowhere. Brazil is, in effect, an island, and an island needs a navy.

  Why? To reduce a complicated answer to its blurry X ray, it is because the economy of an island can quickly be ruined by a naval blockade. Thus, you might expect the Brazilian navy to be devoted to antisubmarine warfare, and it is. Its single aircraft carrier (Brazil is one of only a few countries that have aircraft carriers), the Minas Gerais, is configured mainly for hunting submarines. Its seven submarines are, similarly, hunter-killer types assigned primarily to the tracking and destruction of other submarines. Don't tell anybody, but the navy is planning to build three nuclear submarines to give it greater range and endurance in the South Atlantic, and has started on a test reactor in São Paulo. This is a military secret I overheard in the cafeteria, and the truth of it is supported by other evidence, such as the fact that many of my former students are now physicists and power plant engineers who send me occasional postcards from decidedly non-oceanic locations.

  I might have sold this secret to Argentina, but I feel grateful to Brazil and loyal to the navy, and, besides, I have in my life more assassins than anyone might need, and I don't fancy the Brazilian secret service hunting me down in Niterói, because Niterói is one of the few places in the world where they might find me.

  The rest of the navy consists of fifteen antisubmarine frigates and various amphibious and patrol craft. The patrol craft are for use against submarine and other incursions, the amphibious arm, I think, for counter-attacking enemy bases established on Brazilian territory, and for putting down rebellion. There are lots of survey craft, for mapping the horrendously complex undersea environment, which, because of thermal strata and currents, must be represented not as a clear crystal but as a constantly mutating three-dimensional relief. And submarine tenders, tankers, barges, etc.

  My students live in fear of being sent to the Mato Grosso to serve on the Parnaíba. Ninety unfortunates of the Brazilian navy labor unceasingly upon this "river monitor" built in 1937, a year that for the young cadets is so ancient that they recoil in fright at the very mention of it. Though I fail to tell them, I was that year the same age as Jesus when he was crucified.

  But the Parnaíba pales in comparison to the Capitan Cabral, a Paraguayan patrol boat that was built in 1907 and now cruises the upper Paraná River. This, however, is not the queen of the Paraguayan navy, for that honor goes to the Presidente Stroess ner, a river transport laid down in 1900, even before I was born. Unlike me, it has lost all its teeth, and now goes unarmed.

  The cadets wanted to make a float for Carnival, the Presidente Stroessner, a ship in a wheelchair, but were instantly overruled because of the diplomatic incident it undoubtedly would have provoked. And besides, who knows or cares about the Paraguayan navy? Paraguay isn't even on the ocean. They argued that it was this that made the scheme perfect for Carnival, which honors irony and absurdity.

  I hate Carnival, but at least I know that it is a pageant of humility in which a huge mass of mortals parades before God in shame and sadness, declaring the corruption of the flesh. Being a northerner and uninterested in public humiliation and self-flagellation, I detest its rituals, but, unlike the idiots who fly down here in search of sex, I know that the celebrants are not seeking sexual pleasure but crying out in their weakness. This is too humble for me, I suppose, so I don't do it.

  The cadets, who are like puppy dogs, think they love Carnival. They see the whole thing as nothing more than sex and dancing, because they have not had the time to meditate upon the meaning of sex and dancing, two items that, at my age, I find it difficult to approach by any other means.

  What a shock it is to their ignorant systems to arise at five in the morning when half of Rio has yet to go to bed. What a shock to find themselves subject to military discipline; learning Teutonic languages; exercising, jumping, and boxing until they're as sore as snails. They start the morning with coffee, a cracker, and a bit of cheese. Then, as I make my way through the darkness, breasting waves of revelers returning from Rio to Niterói, they do their calisthenics. When I arrive, I turn on the air-conditioning and I crack the whip.

  That each and every one of them stinks of coffee never fails to enrage me. They don't understand the evil of coffee, the horror, and what will become of them if they drink it. Their mouths drop open in astonishment and fear as my eyes narrow, my face tenses, and I run them through mental exercises that make their stomach-burning rope-climbs seem like relaxing on a couch.

  Marlise says never to talk about coffee. She says that I must simply not mention it, that I can't change the world. Indeed, the former commandante took me aside years ago and told me that if I ever brought up the subject again or threatened instructors or cadets who drink coffee, I would be dismissed. I wouldn't have to drink coffee, he said, but I hadn't the right to prevent others from doing so. After all, this was Brazil, and who was I to prohibit the entire Brazilian navy from partaking of so innocent a pleasure as coffee drinking?

  "It isn't a pleasure," I snapped. "It's a sin. It's the devil's nectar. It's filthy and unhealthy and it enslaves half the world."

  I didn't go on, as I might have. I restrained myself because I knew it was hopeless, but my eyes narrowed with rage and I had the fey look of psychosis that I get when I smell brewing coffee, so he said, "Look. The guns of the Brazilian navy will be turned against you if you persist in overthrowing coffee urns and thrashing stewards. We're serious. Leave us alone."

  Another reason I moved to Niterói is that here one finds less coffee than in Rio proper. It's ubiquitous even here, of course, but Niterói has less of everything. In addition, with more open spaces and far less urban density than in, say, Ipanema, I don't have to adhere to my formerly elaborate pathways, crossing and recrossing streets like a hyperthyroidic shuttlecock and shunning certain routes altogether, to avoid expresso bars with good streetward ventilation, roasting emporiums, and other dens of coffee sympathizers, apologists, hacks, flacks, and geeks. In Niterói it is possible to smell a sea breeze that carries neither suntan lotion nor the stench of caffeine. Are you thinking that caffeine is odorless? Ask a dog. Be warned, however, that the dogs here speak only Portuguese.

  Portuguese is a magnificent language—intimate, sensual, and fun. The great poets make it sound like a musical incantation of slurred elisions and rhythmic dissolves, and day-to-day, corrupted, vital, and undisciplined, it is ideal for the dissolute life of a modern city, though what it gains in humor and intimacy it loses in precision and resolution. In fact, it is, when compared to English, almost like baby language.

  Do not misinterpret me. I love baby language, for babies, but among adults it can be rather annoying, especially if you have been here thirty years with not a day of relief, having arrived fully formed and mature, and having come, as I did, from a place where language is not a perfumed cushion but a tightly strung bow that sends sharp arrows to the heart of everything.

  The language of my boyhood was the language of ice and steel. It had the strong and lovely cadence of engines in a trance. The song of the world in snow, it was woefully inadequate for conveying material ecstasy, but more than enough for the expression of spiritual triumph.

  In my classes we never get to t
hat kind of distinction, for the cadets are neither sufficiently advanced nor interested enough to go beyond their requirements. They must be able to converse on board ship and to read the naval and scientific literature that pertains to their specialty. This covers a wide range, and I merely introduce them to the possibilities, hoping that by dint of their effort or as a gift of natural talent they will become fluent in and appreciative of English.

  But it does come as a shock to them. They shiver through my class and find no comfort in their ancient wooden chairs. As the sun streams in through the window or a tropical rain falls outside, I bring them to an altitude of 1500 feet in the Hudson Highlands in the winds of March, which pops their ears, dries them out, and shuts them up.

  I tell them, "You, you idiots! You are trapped in the last outpost of Antarctic France, and I, I am the polar bear!" Long before I brought it up, they began to call me the polar bear. I have white hair, a white mustache, a white suit, and blue eyes. In Rio something like me belongs in the air-conditioned part of the zoo. My friends are the penguins. Penguins don't drink coffee, no animals do, except for some domesticated types addicted by their degenerate owners either as a joke or as an effect of the addict's need to propagate addiction. I would rather kiss a dog on the lips than the most beautiful woman in the world if she is a coffee drinker, and I have. This sacrifice was to demonstrate the strength of my convictions, and thereby enlighten a group of addicts, but it didn't work. I kissed the dog, they kissed the woman, they all went away, and the dog ran after them.

  I am not the only English instructor. No. The other one is an Egyptian Copt, in appearance the black Albert Einstein, who goes by the name of Nestor B. Watoon. Nestor B. Watoon learned English from a Pakistani in the Berlitz school in Addis Ababa.

  I know this because Watoon has to tell me everything, because he is my slave. No way in the world exists for him to keep his job without my continual intervention. He is known among his students for going to the bathroom ten times an hour. They expect it whenever he stands up.