The Wanderess (5 page)

Chapter Eight

When I left the town of M****, I chartered a boat called
“La Belle
Étoile”
piloted by an Irishman, and we rounded the Iberian
Peninsula and docked in the Andalusian seaport town of Málaga.
It was evening and the pier was full of arrivals. The bustle of
passengers arriving from abroad with their foreign commotion
and the
click-clack
of luggage carts met with the sound of the
local Andalusian chatter coming from the smoky
tabernas
, the
brash cries of Arab children begging for coins, the whistles of men
offering their services as guides. I was thirsty for a drink of fresh
water, and made my way up to a bar where bright lights showed a
lot of young people hanging around to enjoy the mild night. Only
the patios and bars had lights in the port city because the moon
was just a tiny sliver and waning. The moon was the reason I
wanted only water to drink, no wine. Being superstitious, I
abstained from quantities of wine, most carnal joys and earthly
delights whenever the moon was waning or absent from the sky. I
call it superstition because somewhere I’d heard, or invented
perhaps, that the only pleasures found during a waning moon are
misfortunes in disguise. Superstition aside, I avoided pleasure
during the waning or absent moon also out of respect for the
bounty this world offered me. I profited from great harvests in life
and believed in the importance of seasons… Enjoy figs and sweet
tomatoes in the summer months; yet suffer a watery soup in
winter. There are hours for rest, and hours for wakefulness;
nights for sobriety and nights for drunkenness, (if only so that
possession of the former allows us to discern the latter when we
have it; for sad as it is, no human body can be happily drunk all
the time)… Finally, there are times when a man should sleep
entwined in the warm flesh of a woman, his flanks plummeting
into the perfumed bedding while she lovingly rolls her sweet
shoulders into his chest. Whereas, there are times to be stoic and
solitary—sleeping alone on a wooden board with twill sheets and
splinters that scratch the skin. For this strengthens the spine, the
soul, and give dreams of courage and heroism. I believed in
heroism, and still do. It is said that Alexander the Great slept with
The Iliad
beneath his pillow. Though I have never led an army, I
am a wanderer. During the waning moon, I cradle Homer’s
Odyssey
as if it were the sweet body of a woman.

During the shrinking moon: books, scholarship,
astronomy, mathematics, literature, philosophy, botany,
pharmacology, chemistry, scientific inquiry, these are my
occupations. When I used to live in Tripoli as a young man, my
friends would come to me at night…

“Saul!” they would sing merrily, “Our festive friend! Wild
and charming Saul! Ô, charismatic prince! How are you this
night? Why don’t you come down with us to Pasha’s Garden?
There will be music, and loose women eager to be made love to!
Come on!…”

“Nay, friends!” I would reply, and my head would plunge
back into my books. I would read until my face was blistery and I
could feel the skin on my eyes cringing—as cringe the limbs of an
octopus when he is thrown onto a roaring fire. Once they were
gone I would put my books aside and drink a steaming tea of
quieting herbs. I would press a hot steam cloth to my face to let
the pores open and breathe in the solitude and the night air. I
then might retake my books, and finish my scholarship; then off
to bed—goodnight!

All that during the waning moon.

During the
waxing
moon, however… well that is another
story! A wildebeest, a tiger, a satyr, the god Dionysus, all these I
resembled more than a mere man, and still do when the holy
moon grows. In general I strive for greatness and rational
achievement, but I admit to you I will always have a terrible
fondness for women, a tendency towards drunkenness, and a
weakness for the fumes of the poppy and other miserable
beauties. But I don’t blame myself much, as intoxication, like
sexual euphoria, is the privilege of the human animal. Sexual
frenzy is our compensation for the tedious moments we must
suffer in the passage of life. “Nothing in excess” professed the
ancient Greeks. ‘Why, if I spend half the month in healthy
scholarship and pleasant sleep, shouldn’t I be allowed the other
half to howl at the moon and pillage the groins of Europe’s great
beauties?’ (‘…that is the attitude I arrived in Europe with; for
drunk on wine and ecstatic from the ‘black smoke,’ I am a
demigod. My father was close to the king. He was a wild-thing,
adopted by royalty—therefore,
adopted by society.
Moral
obligations—also
mortal
obligations—don’t apply to me. I do as I
please!

“I will do as I please…” I muttered quietly aloud while
thumbing a coin on the counter.

There I was: standing at a brightly lit counter in a
taberna
in Málaga, Spain. Some old customers, mostly obese types with
greasy faces, were seated talking and playing dominos and
drinking the local yellow wine. The young people were all outside
drinking beer and sangria on the patios in the cool of the night. I
recognized a few customers who had been passengers with me on
the
Belle Étoile
. They eyed me with curiosity and whispered
gossip amongst themselves. I kept to myself at the counter
drinking water and thought about ordering a cold soup. It wasn’t
long before I was disturbed...

The bathroom door swung open and out came a little runt
of a man, shaped like a turnip, with scaly skin and patches of rash
over his eyes. He practically stepped on my heels as he stood
beside me at the counter asking the barmaid for his “merchandise
case.” Surveying him, he appeared to be a huckster of the
commonest sort one finds littering all dirty port cities. His dull
eyes tucked under a shiny tall forehead darted left, then right.
Saliva gleamed on his lips. The shoulders of his ill-fitting suit slid
off down his arms, giving him the appearance of a down-and-out
colporteur who doesn’t make an adequate living selling goods—
either because his goods are of poor quality, or because he invests
his earnings in a pernicious habit. I was surprised to notice,
however, that his shoes were nice—polished and made of good
leather. The barmaid gave him his case, saying,
“Aqui, Pulpa!”
The huckster looked up at me from where I towered over him,
and smiled and said, “
Monsieur…
” assuming I was a French
traveler, and then he told me, “I am not a huckster, if that was
what you were thinking.”

He grinned and I noticed his teeth were very brown,
almost black. He took out a watch from his pocket and looked at
the time. The watch was real gold (I have an excellent eye), and
finely made. The fact that this misfit could acquire such a
handsome watch yet not engage a tailor to fit his suit jacket to his
shoulders made me curious. “It’s getting late,” he whispered to
me in a hushed tone. “If you want, I can show you a good place to
eat, not too expensive, and comfortable. A place locals go. I
notice you were looking at
la carta.
You seem to be a traveler.”

Always up for adventure, so long as they don’t waste my
time, kill my spirit, or deplete the happiness in my heart, I agreed
to follow the runt who said he was not a huckster. We walked to
a restaurant where he promised I could have an excellent fried
meal cooked by a real Andalusian
freidurías
¹
cook. It would cost
me only two silver piastres and my guide would drink a glass of
wine with me. The wine was included in the price of the meal.

The two of us headed up
Calle de Barroso.
I walked three
paces behind my guide to be proper. My hands felt for the
buckles of my travelling satchels to be sure that they were wellsecured. In the moonless night, a solitary streetlamp, very tall,
choked a burning flame; its light gleamed on the edges of the
cobblestones and on the doorknobs of the stoopy little houses
lining the street. It gleamed as well on the skin of my guide’s
scaly bald head, on his shiny polished shoes, on a puddle of urine
where a man or a beast had emptied its bladder.

Customers were spilling out of a brightly-lit restaurant in
the middle of the deserted street. The restaurant seemed an oasis
of life in a black desert. Music and din poured into the empty and
silent cobblestone lane and my guide led me into the restaurant
and we took a small table. The old
freidurita
with sagging breasts
knew my guide apparently well, she called him “Pulpawrecho” and
quickly sat a carafe of table wine down in front of us, as well as
some egg-tortilla which we could eat while the food was being
prepared. I mentioned I wanted to abstain from wine; but I’d had
a long voyage, and as the wine was included with the meal and
already on the table, I decided to have a glass and served my guide
and served myself. Then, after spilling a splash of wine in a saucer
on the table as a sacrifice to Dionysus (as was my custom
whenever wine was drunk), I pulled the bitter red juice through
my teeth and let it pour into the well of my mouth. It had been a
couple weeks since my last drink, the wine tasted bitter and bad
at first. My guide sat across from me at the little table and sipped
his wine happily through glossy brownish-black teeth, and smiled
stupidly at me. I again considered the likely reason for his stained
teeth.

“I’m not a
guide
, in case you’re wondering,” said my guide,
munching a piece of egg-tortilla I’d torn off and flopped in front of
him to eat.

I wasn’t wondering, but had simply assumed he was a
guide, and told myself as much.

“No, I’m not a guide at all. I’m a servant—the personal
servant of a very important man in Málaga, a notable man, though
he’s not old. Forty-one years. He is a
voyant.
Many people travel
from far to have him tell their fortune as well as their future.”

“And you live at his house, I take it. You stay at his home
most of the time,” I went on to guess… “but tonight you went
wandering to the pier to accost me, a traveler, for amusement?
Or because you wanted me to consult your fortune-teller and fill
his pockets? Or because you wanted to bring me to this
friteria
to
eat egg tortilla?”

“Oh, I don’t want you to consult him. Although he doesn’t
live far from here. Just past the bridge. And yes, I live with him.”

I drank some more wine and considered the servant. His
black teeth interested me. They made me hungry with that old
craving. Hungry, you see, because I could tell they were black
from opium smoke. I thought of the moonless night, but yet, my
muscles were sore from the boat; the thought of sweet opium to
numb me sounded too good to pass up. Besides, the next day the
moon would start to grow again.

I was angry at myself for my inclination to vice, I longed
for the day when a state of frenzy would lead my mind to sober
pasture, just as it had for Saint Augustine. I longed for the day
when the love of one woman would be sacred enough to forget all
the rest.

‘Yes,’ I thought to myself back then in Málaga, licking the
lips of my soul, ‘I could ingest just a little opium tonight. One
little pipe-full.’ I knew it could be obtained. Yes, my blacktoothed servant friend was a servant of opium, so much was
obvious; he chattered his charred teeth and his teeth made me
hungry.

“Does your master have something
soothing
I can buy to
smoke? You see, I’m a foreigner. I’ve just arrived on shore. I was
told there are no pleasure-dens here, and it’s not always easy to
find a quick connection in a foreign town…”

“Something soothing to smoke? Strange question! How
would you think to ask for that? I mean, a clairvoyant mightn’t
have such a thing to smoke.”

Ignoring his reply, I went on to say, “I’m a traveler after all,
new to this country. Arrived tonight. My muscles are sore. I
don’t know anyone here, etc.”

The servant surveyed me closely with caution, eyeing the
plump satchels I had seated on the chair beside me in the food
house. The cowhide straps of the satchels were wrapped around
my leg to avoid a thief snatching them and running off. I
scratched my bristly chin and pulled the last sip of wine through
my mighty teeth, deciding to drink no more alcohol that night.

‘You’re no gendarme,’ he was probably thinking. No, the
fortuneteller’s servant realized I couldn’t possibly be a Spanish
gendarme—if for my accent alone. After some more persuasion,
he agreed to take me to his master to see what could be had in the
way of opiates. “Make it clear, I don’t want to know the future! I
don’t want any
bonne aventure
!”
¹
I hollered after him while we
paced down the black, cobbled lane upon our leaving the
restaurant.

* * *
Meeting the clairvoyant, and obtaining some opium
for future travels…

The servant and I crossed a bridge and came to a house where
outside a wooden plank was hammered to a wall and a name was
burned into the wood in large lettering. It read:

DRAGOMIR, STANISLAS V. — CLAIRVOYANT

The hunchbacked servant slid a key into the door and the two of
us entered a dark stairwell. Before starting up, he turned to me
and begged some money. “You wouldn’t have one or two piastres
to lend me, would you?”

I reached into my waistcoat and pulled out a silver twopiastres coin and handed it to the beggar. He snatched it up and
said, “You are a saint, Señor. Just, please don’t tell my master I
asked you to lend me money, I ask you kindly.” I shook my head
and he bade I wait at the bottom of the stairwell while he gained
permission for me to enter. Just then, a fat old woman appeared
on the stairs with hot tears streaming down her face. She pressed
a rag to her mouth, and sobbing, she came towards us and passed
us. She didn’t look into our eyes while she exited out into the
Spanish street.

“She’s been to see the master,” the beggar whispered, “and
obviously she wasn’t happy about what she learned.”

I waited in the dark stairwell as the wretchedly small
figure of the beggar-servant climbed the steps to the door high at
the top of the landing. He knocked twice; the door crept open.
He disappeared inside.

I meanwhile waited, clicking my tongue, dreaming of the
Spanish woman I hoped I would meet and love now that I was in
this new and strange country. She would be like a flower, I
thought, fresh and soft, but not too young; she would be mature
in years, old enough to know how to arouse me, and be versed in
the arts of conversation, seduction, and sensual love. Such was
what I dreamed to find in Spain, but my pleasant dream was
interrupted when the servant appeared at the landing, holding a
fiery candle. He signaled to me to climb the stairs. And soon I
found myself standing in a room of gothic design, spacious and
richly-dressed, with high-vaulted ceilings, dim like an old library,
tall ironwork windows, and tables piled with papers. Smoking
candles were everywhere.

“A foreigner? Welcome, foreigner…” came the voice of the
man who cut an impressive figure behind a mahogany desk
beneath two high-arched windows. He seemed extremely tall,
although he was seated, and was extraordinarily thin. He
removed the hat on his long pointed head—seemingly out of
politeness—and a torrent of dark hair swirled like a storm around
his ears. “My name is Dragomir,” he announced with authority,
“You are in my home.” The two eyes in his long face shone like a
pair of hazel-colored stones, or like distant fires burning in the
darkness. I approached to shake my host’s hand. “Excuse me for
not standing,” he mumbled in a low voice, “I hurt my leg
yesterday. It will heal.”

As the master of the house greeted the stranger, the
servant hopped around like a mad fool on springs, lighting the
various plates of candles, filling the curious room with blazing
light. The odor of myrrh resin entered my nose, and through it, I
detected the sweet smell of opium. I was aching with desire.
“Chit, chit, chit,”
my teeth chattered while a saucer of porcelain
clattered beneath a cup of tea that was brought to be swilled or
sipped.

“I can tell you’ve come from far,” the fortune-teller said,
staring steadily at me. “You have a strange past. A very curious
past…” I waved my hand at this in annoyance. I disliked
bonne
aventure
since I believed what these fortune-tellers had to say was
probably true, and pity the man who knows his fate! The servant
meanwhile was perched in the shadows of the room like a stone
gargoyle on a medieval cathedral.

“I didn’t come to have my fortune.”

“I don’t
have
your fortune!” laughed the fortune-teller,
which surprised me entirely. “No, not tonight, I don’t have it at
least…” He stood and walked over to the window and opened the
drawer of a wooden chest and stayed there a few moments. When
he came back, he had a slender pipe of brass with a decorated
ceramic bowl. “Are you hungry? There is some Spanish cheese.
As well as wine. You are a guest. Whatever you’d like . . . Pulpy,
go make a plate of cheese…”

The servant’s lip was dripping with saliva as his master set
a ball of brown opium on a plate. “Wrecho!” demanded
Dragomir, louder this time. “Fix the stranger some food to eat!”

The servant leaped up to obey his master until I said: “No,
please, I thank you. Kind of you. We just ate; and I’d prefer to
taste that opium, as my muscles are sore from travelling.” I
glanced to the high ironwork window and saw the night was
completely black outside. No moon lighted upon the world on
this night. I knew I would eventually have to go find a hotel room
or a bed of some sort. There would be rooms to be had down at
the port. You can find anything and everything at the docks of a
port city. Especially where the climate’s sultry, where criminals
and vagabonds abound.

Dragomir stood tall beside me packing a
pastilla
of opium
into the ceramic bowl and lit the wick of the lamp. “For the
stranger,” he said.

I took two fast and long inhalations as the pill of opium
vaporized in the bowl. The sweet black smoke flashed me back to
a memory of that market stall in Turkey where I met a pretty
young lady walking hand-in-hand with a little boy when the sun
was burning my neck. She was from my city and was very pale,
with white arms and delicate hands. The rest of her body was
covered in a disguise, so as to smuggle the child. The kid
belonged to her sister. The two were waiting for a boat. I felt this
sudden urge to go find that pretty lady in disguise, to join with
her, to join with the entire world and all of its people. I felt an
incredible lightness and joy carry me away. The pain in my joints
vanished, then I returned to the room where I had been. I reveled
in this newfound lightness and bliss. A hearty laugh escaped me:
“Oh, it’s been a long time!” I said.

“Pulpawrecho?” the clairvoyant called to his servant, while
I handed him the pipe and he passed it on to his slave.
Pulpawrecho collapsed on the opium with avarice and sucked up
the sweet smoke. Dragomir took a long puff when it was his turn.
He asked me again did I want food or wine? I said no.

“More of the pipe?”
“No. But some for later, for which I’ll pay. I’d like to have
some while I travel…”
“Of course, of course…”

We were all silent a moment.
“Do you want some wine? A liqueur?”

I told him no, and begged myself to leave them, to return
to the port to find some lodging.

“Now may I ask you your name?” Dragomir sat back down
in his place. Pulpawrecho squirmed and uttered sighs of ecstasy
as saliva dripped from his face. With an exalted grin, he smacked
his lips and cried out to himself: “Ah! Pulpawrecho!—aye-ayeaye!—Pulpawrecho!” and floated neatly on his perch.

“My name is Saul, the son of Solarus of Tripoli. My father
was an adventurer like me. He disappeared somewhere in the
east, in Asia. Now I, in my generation, am headed to London
where I have business with a merchant.” I had no reason to weave
lies and untruths as I was doing, but I did so for the sheer pleasure
of telling a good lie. Some of what I said was true, though some
was invented. I wanted to tell untruths also because I was
conducting an interview with a clairvoyant and I yearned to see if
he could detect a lie. My father had been an adventurer, like me.
So much was the truth. His name had been Solarus. I hadn’t lied
about that. Though he didn’t disappear in Asia, and I wasn’t
going to London.

“Solarus of Tripoli?” the clairvoyant turned to his servant,
“We met a Solarus, did we not my fine Pulpawrecho?”

Pulpawrecho nodded his doglike head. Dragomir took
another inhalation of the pipe and smiled with pleasure. “I do like
that,” he said. “You noticed I didn’t ask
who you are
before first
taking care of your needs? I am very Homeric in that way. A
stranger should always be offered food, wine, or whatever he
needs to be comfortable before being asked who he is, and from
where he comes, before asking him to tell his identity.”

I showed Dragomir the copy of
The Odyssey
I was carrying
with me and he smiled knowingly as though it is natural that we
should both have Homer on our minds. I told him then that I’d
always wanted to own a great library. “But since I was born to be
a wanderer,” I sighed with regret, “I think I will never have a great
library.”

“Hmm…” said Dragomir, leafing through the book, “I can’t
read Greek. Though I do know five languages well. Pulpawrecho
brought me my first copy of
The Odyssey
, in Spanish, a long time
ago. I had asked him for it. He’s a good servant. You see I keep
him dressed well, he has nice clothes. His watch is his nicest
possession, but that he procured himself.” He turned to his
servant, “You are so quiet tonight, Pulpawrechito, you have
nothing to say tonight? The devil chomped your tongue, eh?”

“Squawk!”
cried Pulpawrecho. Then gathering himself, he
said that all his clothes were nice, and even his suit, though it was
ill-fitting.

“But that is not
my
fault. It’s not
my
fault his suit is illfitting,’ said Dragomir, ‘I even engaged the finest tailor in Málaga
for him; but
all
clothes are ill-fitting on Pulpawrecho. He has a
weird body. His shoulders slope oddly. You see he looks like a
fiend with the shoulders of his jacket like that, but he is no fiend.
He is very clever, my little Wrechito. You should pose him some
questions.’

“Pose him? Alright, how did you two come to meet?”
Feeling anesthetized, comfortable in my new surroundings, I
forgot completely about the world outside, the city and country I
was in. All that existed was this room with the tall, gaunt figure of
Dragomir, and the hunched-over gargoyle of a servant on a stool,
and my own self sinking lower and lower in my chair.

“How did we meet? How did I meet my master? Oh, that
is a fascinating story! Oh, it’s splendid, that sweet opium!
…Master, let your Pulpawrecho have one more little puff. Another
little puff. Then what a story I’ll tell!”

Dragomir handed the pipe to his servant and his servant
bared his black teeth as he blew out hissing smoke.
“Saul is a nice name. Does its meaning have to do with the
sun?”

“It means
prayed for
.”
“Does somebody pray for you?”

“Pulpawrecho,” said Dragomir, “Why don’t you ask me
that. I am the clairvoyant, aren’t I? Give me your hand…’
Dragomir snatched at my hand like a street artist and scanned it
momentarily and then dropped it in disappointment, ‘Ach!’ he
said, ‘I see nothing in your hand. Neither a past nor a future…”
He turned to his servant… “Then again, I never was reliable at
reading people’s hands. No, that was never my talent, was it!”
Dragomir roared with triumphant laughter.

The candle flame flickered, the laughter dimmed in the
room, and Dragomir dropped my palm limpidly on the wooden
desk. He promised that he would pray for me when our ways
parted. He then laughed with unease.

“So, then, how did you two meet?” Curiosity was nagging
me about this strange pair.

“May I please, Master? May I tell the story?” Pulpawrecho
squirmed with his question. The master nodded and the servant
began spilling words ever faster; his hands flew and fluttered,
trembling lightly like dragonflies that hover near a flower but
never quite land, nor do they go off, so did the servant’s hands
hover around his body without settling anywhere, nor going off
anywhere.

“I was down at the seaport three years ago,” Pulpawrecho
began to explain, wringing his hands, “doing my trade—buying,
selling, trading, whatever I could to make money. I had a
pocketful of stolen watches—you see, I’m a thief.” He paused to
smile a sinister smile at me, “Watches of all kinds—silver, brass,
steel, I even had a gold Breguet! I was waiting for the hour to
strike twenty so I could get into Gordita’s
freidurías
and get a meal
of crispy fish. I was licking my lips with the thought of that fish
meal. Then I saw this young girl heading up from the sea. At first
she appeared very small, and I thought she were just a little child.
She wore a hood over her head that covered her hair completely,
except for one lock of golden brown hair that fell from her hood
and curved around her chin. Details like this always strike me. I
miss nothing.”

‘No, that’s true!’ interrupted Dragomir with a laugh,
‘Pulpawrecho misses nothing. Although he seems simple at times,
nothing gets by him…’

‘Right,’ continued the servant, “so here in the humid night
was this girl coming towards the street in the port; and I thought
it was too late for a young girl to be alone, walking up from the
sea. Then as she came close I saw she wasn’t a baby. She was
adolescent at least. Maybe thirteen or fourteen. Let’s say she was
thirteen. How beautiful she was! I had never before seen a
beautiful creature like this. She seemed to be hurried. Hurried
and baffled. Why do I say
baffled?

“The young girl looked left and right, as though she were
afraid of someone coming to snatch her. I admired her perfectly
formed and smooth beautiful face, and my groin began to burn
with the erection that was growing. I’m Pulpawrecho, you know,
so my penis turns purple when it’s hard. My penis grew hard and
purple in my pants and my thighs burned with scorching heat and
I wanted to catch this pubescent girl and succumb her and press
my lips all over her. She hurried past me, her neat little bottom (a
bottom the size of two fists of a man) rubbed its cheeks together,
and I saw her torn skirt ruffling in the speed of her walk, and the
tissue rising-up revealing the base of her cotton underwear (you
see how descriptive I am! That’s how I see the world!); her cotton
panties rose up revealing soft and tiny butt cheeks down to her
thighs, until reaching very thin and beautifully-formed calves—
smooth as the white meat of a fresh market chicken. What legs
she had! I began to follow her, those legs, that tiny bottom, never
leaving my sight. ‘Yam-yam!’ I smacked my lips. Of course, me
being nothing but a sorry Pulpawrecho, I knew she wouldn’t want
me like I wanted her. I could never
have
her… still, I
wanted
her!