The Passenger (The Passenger, #1)(117)

What was the other dream?

The other dream was this. There was a riderless horse standing at a gate at dawn. Some other country, some other time. The news that the horse brings is a day’s ride old, no more. The horse’s dreams were once of mares and grass and water. The sun. But those dreams are no more. His is a world of blood and slaughter and the screams of men and animals all of which he has little understanding of. The horse stands at the gate with his head bowed while the day breaks. He wears a cloak of knitted steel dark with blood and he stands with one forefoot tilted upon the stones. No one comes. The news does not arrive. This scene may be a painting. I dont know. I dont know what it means. Perhaps I saw it in a book. As a child. But this is what I dreamed. I wish I had other words for you, Squire. To prepare for any struggle is largely a work of unburdening oneself. If you carry your past into battle you are riding to your death. Austerity lifts the heart and focuses the vision. Travel light. A few ideas are enough. Every remedy for loneliness only postpones it. And that day is coming in which there will be no remedy at all. I wish you calm waters, Squire. I always did.

Thank you, John.

I have to go. We shant see each other again.

I know. I’m sorry.

And I. Dont let them talk about me, Squire. They’ll say ugly things.

I know. I’ll see what I can do.



* * *



—

He stood at the little wooden bar while Jo?o poured his wine. Whose cat has eaten a dragon and is dead. He set the bottle on the bar and he pushed Western’s pesetas back across the bar to him. Salud, he said.

Salud. Gracias.

I should have been more kind about old Pau. I’ve been thinking about him.

I didnt think you were unkind.

One cant speak for the dead. Who knows their lives? In any case it is the nature of people to imagine that the defeated must have done something to deserve their undoing. People want the world to be just. But the world is silent on this subject. To win a war or a revolution does not validate the cause. You see what I am saying?

Yes.

Do you know the works of Carlos Roche?

No.

He was my brother. Older than me. He died in the war.

I’m sorry.

It’s all right. He was the fortunate one.

To die in the war?

To die in the war. To die in a state of belief. Yes.

Belief in what?

In what. How to say it. Belief in himself as a man in a land under arms for a cause that was just for a people he loved and the fathers of those people and their poetry and their pain and their God.

I take it you’ve no such beliefs.

No.

Any beliefs at all?

Jo?o pursed his lips. He wiped the bar. Well. Of course a man has beliefs. But I dont believe in ghosts. I believe in the reality of the world. The harder and the sharper the edges the more you believe. The world is here. It is not someplace else. I dont believe in traveling about. I believe that the dead are in the ground. I suppose at one time I was like old Pau. I waited to hear from God and I never did. Yet he remained a believer and I did not. He would shake his head at me. He said that a Godless life would not prepare one for a Godless death. To that I have no answer.

Nor I. I have to go.

Hasta luego, compadre.

A small mule danced in a flowered field. He stopped to watch it. It rose on its hind legs like a satyr and sawed its head about. It whinnied and hauled at its rope and kicked and it stopped and stood splayfooted and stared at Western and then went hopping and howling. It had browsed through a nest of wasps but Western didnt know how to help it and he went on.

He found a coin on the beach. An illformed disc of bronze washed all but barren by the centuries. He put it in his pocket. Remnants of vanished worlds in these outposts. Like the bones of ships among the rocks of remote northern seas. The bones of men.

He sent to Paris for a collection of Grothendieck’s papers and he sat by lamplight working the problems. After a while they began to make sense, but that was not the issue. Nor the French. The issue was the deep core of the world as number. He tried to trace his way back. Find a logical beginning. Riemann’s dark geometry. His christawful symbols she had called them. G?del’s boxes of notes in Gabelsberger.

The weather had warmed and on these nights he’d strip out of his clothes and leave them folded over his sandals on the beach and wade out into the soft black water and dive and swim out beyond the slow lope of the surf and turn and loll on his back in the swells and watch the stars where some few came adrift of their moorings and dropped down that vast midnight hall from dark to dark.

He’d no photograph of her. He tried to see her face but he knew he was losing her. He thought that some stranger not yet born might come upon her photo in a school album in some dusty shop and be stopped in his place by her beauty. Turn back the page. Look again into those eyes. A world at once antique and never to be. After she left the quarry he sat alone until the small flames in their tins had guttered out one by one. Then just the dark of the countryside, the silence of it. The faint drone of a truck out on the highway.

He wrote in his little black book by the light of the oil lamp. Mercy is the province of the person alone. There is mass hatred and there is mass grief. Mass vengeance and even mass suicide. But there is no mass forgiveness. There is only you.

We pour water upon the child and name it. Not to fix it in our hearts but in our clutches. The daughters of men sit in half darkened closets inscribing messages upon their arms with razorblades and sleep is no part of their life.