A Fool's Alphabet

  He turned the name over in his head. Castellammare. As he paid for the petrol he asked the attendant what it meant. ‘Castellammare Drive,’ he said. ‘It’s the name of a street.’

  The weather was soft and warm, a perpetual spring. Across the highway the Pacific lay sluggishly against the coast. Someone had done a good job of naming it. He drove onwards, his exhausted vision beginning to blur. He was on the Santa Monica Fwy, according to the overhead signs. Right Lane MUST Turn Right. His head ached as he sank his foot once more on the accelerator. The freeway and the city behind it took on a fuzzy, unreal look. Then he saw things with sudden clarity. The white rivets that held each white letter on the green-backed sign: Sepulveda Blvd. Sepulveda, Sepulveda. Right Lane MUST Turn Right.

  In San Francisco he had found difficulty in sleeping and once, when he had smoked too much marijuana, he had experienced a feeling of dislocation. A doctor had prescribed some tranquillisers and he had thought little more about it. He was starting to lose a sense of his own identity.

  In the heat of the Mexican nights he smoked nothing and declined the magic mushrooms people offered him. He drank beer and looked at the stars. Towards midnight he would swallow one of the yellow pills and go inside to sleep.

  He rose early in the morning so he could drive a hundred miles or so before it grew too hot. The car, an old Ford they had bought second-hand, rattled down the highway at a steady 70 m.p.h., only overheating in the towns. It took him two days to reach Mexico City. He felt sick and took to his bed in the hotel with a bottle of Immodium. He stayed for three days but felt no better. When he went for a walk his legs felt weak. He paid the bill and drove fast back towards the coast, hoping a loss of altitude would help. He wondered what she was doing. Perhaps she was listening to the same record back in the hills of Vermont. He thought of her driving down to the lake to swim and he imagined the taciturn Steve nodding as he slipped his arm round her shoulders. He didn’t stop driving.

  Somewhere down near the coast, past Oaxaca with its flower-filled courtyards glimpsed through stone arches, he began to feel lonely. The poor adobe houses, the infrequent towns and coarse landscape beneath the mountains no longer seemed to be full of opportunity or surprise. He wanted to talk to someone, to be called by his name.

  That night he awoke in a sweat, thinking he was back in New York. He sat upright in bed, trembling, and it took him some time to shake off the dream. He walked round the hotel room, touching the furniture, the white cotton curtains, the slatted shutters, in an effort to reassure himself of his physical whereabouts. He poured a warm beer and spent some time staring at the label on the bottle. Corona Extra La Cerveza Mas Fina. There was some golden heraldic animal to the left of the blue lettering. He couldn’t stop his hand from shaking.

  There was another full day’s driving, and on the morning of the third day the border with Guatemala came as a relief. By this time he had it in his head to keep on driving, as far as he could go. The immigration officer, more accurately a soldier with a rifle slung round his neck, asked him where he was from. The soldier had never heard of London and looked at him with blank eyes. It took an hour of paperwork before he was convinced that he was not importing the vehicle. He had been told that Lake Atitlan was a popular destination for American tourists and pointed the car in the direction of Guatemala City where he would rejoin the Pan-American highway. Quite early he took a wrong turning and found himself climbing. It had begun to rain. The burned brown of the hillsides was relieved in places by pale patches of planted maize; in the valleys the ground was pitted from the harshness of the summer drought. The Ford began to wheeze as he climbed. Remembering what he had been told about the continuing guerrilla war in the Indian villages of the north, he began to feel uneasy. He didn’t really know where he was; he had crossed the border on the southern coast, it was true, but even there the presence of the military was inescapable. Every mile or so were road signs, saying ‘Alto’, Stop, relics of checkpoints from troubled days. They were the most successful army in Central America: critics of successive governments had been wiped out either in loud massacres and shrieking torture or in the silent way that gave birth to the soft-footed term, los desaparecidos.

  The Ford was starting to make odd metallic noises, yet its temperature showed barely above normal. Finally, on a hillside bend, it made a loud grinding sound and the engine gave out. He pulled the freewheeling car over to the side of the road and clambered out into the rain. He lifted the bonnet but didn’t know what he was looking for. The points were dry, the radiator was sealed. The usual amateur checks yielded nothing. He assumed the oil pump or big end had given up.

  He walked for five miles with his suitcase. The landscape began to take on a surreal quality under the shifting curtains of rain. He came at last to a village where he sat down under the leaky awning of a roadside café. The first thing he had to do was to change as much money as he could afford. He showed his only hundred-dollar bill to a thin, yellow-skinned waiter who smiled and took him by the arm. They went into the café and downstairs to a small, airless room that smelt of frying and rank sweat. A fat woman drinking coffee took the bill and, after a rapid exchange with the still grinning waiter, handed him 140 Guatemalan quetzales.

  In a mixture of Italian, Spanish, simplified English and creative gesturing, he extracted from the waiter the news that he could get something called a camioneta to a place named Quezaltenango, which was in the mountains, on the side of a lake. The waiter spoke fondly of it, but he, confused by the similarity between the currency and the name of the place, thought for some time he was asking him for more money. He suddenly thought of his father. If he ever got to this place he would send him a postcard for his old army friend who hadn’t found a ‘Q’ in Yorkshire.

  It was late afternoon when the camioneta arrived in the village. It was an old American school bus, and he had visions of high-school children chattering about their math test or their spelling bee as they rode to school. Since it had presumably been bought from one of the southern states, perhaps it had even been used in the derided ‘bussing’ programme that ferried children round town to force an equal ethnic mix on socially disparate areas.

  The unpadded seats, designed for children, were squeezed close together. The conductor, a vigorous youth of no more than sixteen, was in perpetual motion, throwing the baggage of new passengers on to the roof, collecting money and shouting orders down the bus. Where normally he would have delighted in the strangeness of it, he found the bus journey disturbing. In his apprehension or perception of this place there was something like fear. He began to recognise that it came not from the country but from inside his head.

  At one point they were required to leave the bus while a group of soldiers searched them. The male passengers had to lean against the side of the bus while big hands ran along their ribs and inner thighs. If their legs were not well enough spread, a helping boot was cracked into the ankle. He had no idea why they were being searched. Presumably a military state was continually at war with its citizens. From the bored faces of the soldiers, however, it looked more like a routine show of force.

  Quezaltenango turned out to be a sedate, pompous town with an air of municipal permanence conferred by the grey stone buildings of the plaza. The neoclassical banks and official buildings looked politely at each other across the square. He found a room in a white plastered building in the Spanish colonial style. From his window he could see the brown mountains beneath the cloud. It was too late for a garage that night so he went in search of food. In a restaurant that seemed well patronised he ate chicken stew and tortillas, washed down with Cabro beer. He read a book between courses, determined not to brood. He decided he would get the car fixed, finish the journey to Panama City and fly back to New York. Although he had left his job, he still had a room in an apartment in the Village, and he had friends there. It would be all right. He kept his mind firmly away from the subject of Laura. Occasionally as he sat in the restaurant, watching the rotation of th
e greasy ceiling fan, hearing the excited conversations of his fellow diners, he found his mind wandering, as her brown-eyed smile and searching hands appeared in his memory. He shut them out with a slavish application. He felt that if he pondered them his head would explode. Before he left the restaurant he bought a bottle of a spirit called Quezalteca he had seen other people drinking.

  On his way back to the hotel he was accosted by several children asking for money or food. He gave some small change to an old man smelling of drink who lurched at him from a doorway, and hurried on, clutching his own bottle. Back in his room he lay on the bed and poured himself half a toothglass of liquor. He put away the novel he had been reading at dinner and took from his case a history of Central America he had bought in San Diego.

  His head was half filled with episodes of the country’s history when he fell asleep. The imaginative role of the Dulles family and the intervention of the CIA to make sure Guatemala would remain a vast factory for the United Fruit Company; the extermination of the Indians by the Spanish conquistadors; the cruelty, murder and tortures of the successive ‘strong men’ who had presided over the place . . . These odd facts were like bricks that kept his mind temporarily dammed.

  In the small hours of the morning, at about four o’clock, the dam burst and he awoke. Physically the symptoms were so slight as to be unnoticeable. His blood pressure had risen to a point where only a very litigation-conscious American doctor might have worried. His pulse rate had gone up from its usual sixty-five but only to a still reasonable eighty. His heartbeat was lumpish against the sternum, but not dangerous. There was a light sweat on the scalp, which was strange in the suddenly cold night. There was no rash, no broken bones, no bleeding, no symptom that would have given any doctor pause.

  What was happening inside him was indescribable. When he later tried to find words for it, he could reach only for analogies, which seemed inappropriate. After he had awoken he continued to keep on waking up. It was as if having hit the normal level of morning consciousness, he exceeded it by the same distance of wakefulness again. Then again. By this time he was pacing round the room in an effort to shut off the sensations that were coming at him. He was seeing five times as much as normal, five times more clearly; he was hearing each whisper of wind, each bare footfall on the wooden boards with an aggressive clarity. More than the high definition, it was the speed with which everything was being sensed that was alarming.

  In addition to this overload he felt unsure of his physical reality. He touched the things in the room in rapid succession, in the same way he had done in Mexico, but much faster. If he could convince himself, he thought, that the grain of the wooden table or the weave of the curtains was truly tangible, then he could somehow hold on.

  He was also uncertain where he was. Bits of the Guatemalan history he had been reading came up through the channels of his memory. As they arrived in his already overcrowded brain he couldn’t distinguish between history that had happened to other people long ago and the current experience of his own mind. At some moments, he felt as if he were an Indian peasant or a Spanish soldier. Sepulveda. MUST Turn Right.

  He knelt on the floor and held his head in his hands, but he couldn’t stop what was happening inside it. He went over to the wall mirror to try to reassure himself of his physical reality – that old familiar face, the hair with its last touch of red, the dark eyebrows, the eyes his mother had loved. But his skin looked translucent, like the wax overlay of a medical model that demonstrates the working of the nerves and arteries. He looked at himself and pleaded for the familiar picture to return. Nothing was there.

  Unable to deal with the sensation, he stumbled on some instinctive stopgap. He took the bottle of Quezalteca and drank straight off what remained. With it he swallowed four of the yellow pills given to him by the doctor in California. There was a momentary respite as the liquor slowed his system. It was the first time since he had woken up that he was able to think. It hadn’t occurred to him until this moment that there might be something mentally wrong with him; so powerfully physical were the symptoms that he assumed they had their origin in some violent bodily disease.

  The relief was short-lived. As the effect of alcohol began to ebb, he felt that all the certainties and previously dependable facts of existence were in question. He didn’t know where he was, who he was, or what he was. With an effort of will he held on to the wooden leg of the bed and pressed his face against the counterpane.

  Let them exist, he prayed, let me live.

  As the panic mounted in him he thought that when the last thread that connected him to reality was worn away, he would go into an endless free fall. If he failed to hold on to himself, then he was going to go into meltdown, like a China syndrome of the personality.

  The brand-named Diazepam, manufactured in the tranquil country of Switzerland, was enough to knock out a person in a normal state of mind. It didn’t make him sleepy, but it reduced the panic to controllable proportions.

  It was dawn when he released the leg of the bed he had clasped to himself for the last half-hour and lifted his head from the covers. He was shaking like a leaf in an autumn storm as he walked slowly to the window.

  It was arctically cold in the mountain air. He put on two spare shirts and a sweater, which were all he had. He pulled open the shutters and stepped on to the balcony.

  He looked out across the lake to the brown hills, and then down at the sleeping town where he could hear a stray dog barking. He leant his damp, exhausted head against the white plastered wall. Good morning, Guatemala.

  ROME

  ITALY 1978

  IN THE PROTESTANT cemetery, overshadowed by a large pyramid, is a modest white tombstone beneath which is buried a stablekeeper’s son from Finsbury, north London. It is dated Feb. 24th 1821 and has a carved lyre towards the top. The ground is covered with grass on which grows a riotous creeper. The trees between this modest white grave and the giant pyramid are semi-tropical. It is intensely hot. The cemetery, by its nature, is filled with foreigners, people from the northern lands of the Reformation who have ended their days exiled by choice or accident in this southern imperial city. This particular grave contains, in the words of the inscription, ‘all that was mortal of a young English poet’, John Keats, who a year and a half before his death, with no relevant training and little formal education, wrote, at the age of twenty-three and in the space of three weeks, four of the greatest lyric poems in English.

  It is hard to sense from looking at the hot Roman grass what sudden comet must have flared that spring in north London, where he was living with his friend Charles Brown. Nothing, certainly, could have been done without hard apprenticeship; nothing without the reading and investigation of what others had written; but, with all the willed preparation, the carefully settled domestic life and the encouragement of friends, there was something freakish in that cold burst of genius.

  When Keats returned from the garden one morning in April he thrust some scraps of paper behind a row of books on a shelf to save them from the maid’s over-zealous tidying. When his friend Brown asked him what they were, he said they were nothing. When Keats was out of the room, Brown fished them out and found that they in fact contained the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, which Keats had written that morning beneath a plum tree in the garden. The previous day the poem had not existed.

  Hampstead in those days was a long way from what was known as London. It was surrounded by fields and streams. A rainy stagecoach ride back from town produced a startling fever in the poet. Even at the height of that summer in 1819 he had already begun to cough with the tuberculosis that would shortly kill him.

  The Roman room in which he died is much visited by tourists, particularly Americans. The visitors’ book in the small apartment above the Spanish Steps contains many names written in the neat cursive handwriting of the American high school, expressing a sense of wonder or elation at what the room contains. ‘A great experience’, according to a woman from New Brunswick. ‘
You can feel him here’, according to another from Santa Barbara. ‘Well worth traveling to see’, says a man from Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Rome with its citadels and seven hills is joined to the motels and luncheonettes of the Midwest by a dead twenty-five-year-old from Georgian London.

  It is very quiet. On the wall is a picture of Keats sketched on his deathbed by his friend Joseph Severn who nursed him. The handwriting at the bottom says: ‘28 Janry 3 o’clock mng. Drawn to keep me awake, a deadly sweat was on him all this night’. It is all too easy to feel the presence of the man, the sight and smell of the night-sweat throughout the hot small hours with Severn nodding at the bedside. Although the room has been repainted, the original fireplace remains. It was here that Severn used to warm up meals he had been to fetch from the Osteria della Lepre in the nearby via dei Condotti: the restaurant is now part of the giant premises of an opulent jeweller called Bulgari.

  Keats had come to Rome for the sake of a warm climate and managed to prolong his life by a few months. He had had little reason to travel before. Despite being ebulliently energetic – to the extent that his schoolmasters thought he would make a name for himself as a soldier – he found worlds open to him not through travel but through the cut pages of books. He did, it’s true, spend a long time in the Isle of Wight, but that was so he could more quietly imagine the mythical landscape of Endymion. The exile and the poem over, he could begin his work in earnest; and even to Regency London, the Isle of Wight was not a daunting voyage.

  Outside the death room, the Roman traffic roars. The shop next door, which sells shirts and socks, is called Byron. It is a loud, hot city and the small Cockney youth, weakened and dying, must have felt a long way from London. He wrote his own epitaph, ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water’, to express the fear that his memory would evaporate beneath the Italian sky. Rome and Finsbury are twinned in the shade of a pyramid. Day after day it is burning hot in the Protestant cemetery and the trees are not those that grew along the muddy lanes that led from Edmonton.