A Trip to the Stars

  4

  Spiders

  Zaren Eboli was holding up a large glass jar in both hands and speaking to me loudly over the rain that lashed the windows and drummed on the roof. He had been born with only eight fingers—no pinkies—and as I looked at him through the refraction of the jar, his long fingers looked even longer. Around five three, he was at least four inches shorter than me and must have hovered near my own weight of one hundred twenty. He was pigeon-toed, with stooped shoulders and a salt-and-pepper goatee. Invariably he wore soft Turkish slippers with silver stitching, a black velvet smoking jacket, and a string tie with a clasp in the form of crossed swords. His wire-rimmed spectacles were thick: without them he could barely make his way through a cluttered room.

  And all the rooms in his house—fifteen of them not counting the enormous basement—were cluttered. With books, magazines, looseleaf folders, specimen jars, slide racks, and filing cabinets packed to capacity. His furniture was of a dark, heavy, rococo design, imported from France by a spendthrift ancestor just after the Civil War: big-legged tables and chairs, overstuffed sofas, deep-drawered cabinets. Musty wall hangings alternated with thickly lacquered oil paintings of Louisiana swamplands, the myriad birds and insects that populated them rendered so realistically—a swooping kingfisher or electric dragonfly—that they often startled me when I passed them.

  “The trap-door spider,” Eboli was saying in his up-and-down-the-scale singsong voice, “a close relative of the tarantula’s, ambushes his prey from a silk-lined burrow covered by a hinged door. His life span is one year, in which time he never strays more than a few inches from the entrance to the burrow.”

  Wearing the leather gloves with which I handled live specimens, I paused with my back to a tall window where the light from the storm powdered the air like phosphorus. After working in silence for four hours at opposite ends of the second-floor library, I had just stood up to take my one break, for coffee and a sandwich, on the screened-in verandah downstairs.

  Without so much as a glance at me, Eboli knew he had my attention, for he seldom addressed me directly when he was working. Afterward, before I’d drive back downtown, he would sometimes sit on the verandah with me to chat for a few minutes, but in the twin sanctuaries of his study and his basement laboratory the silence was palpable, subliminally fed by the hum of countless heat and sun lamps, infrared bulbs, air filters, miniature humidifiers (for the jungle spiders) and dehumidifiers (for their desert cousins), and of course the constant complex spinning of hundreds of webs.

  “Among all spiders, the trap-door is the most accomplished burrower and the most gifted artisan. Up to three and a half inches in length, he lives alone in a tubelike burrow five to twelve inches deep, which he digs with a comblike rake of spines on his chelicerae. Then he waterproofs it with saliva and lines it with silk. His burrows vary in complexity, from a simple tube secured with a beveled door to a cylinder capped with a trapdoor that has an oblique side tunnel with a second door. Some of these doors are even fitted with a set of bolts. And all the burrows are designed against a single predator: the spider wasp, who is capable of prying open the trapdoor and cornering the spider. With superior sensory equipment and agility, the wasp quickly overpowers the spider and paralyzes him with venom. Then the wasp deposits an egg on the spider’s abdomen and a larva hatches which feeds off the spider before and after he dies.” He lowered the jar onto the table and adjusted his string tie. “His death mirrors the fatal sequence spiders inflict on their prey: ambush, entrapment, paralysis, and slow death.” Preparing to open the jar, he slipped on his own gloves, custom-made without the pinky slots. “Still, the trap-door spider must be counted, among all creatures, as one of the finest natural architects.”

  That afternoon I ate half my pepper-cheese sandwich and drank two cups of black coffee on the verandah. It was a relief to be out there, even in the heat and humidity, which were not nearly so oppressive as the overheatedness of the house; on the job I wore only the lightest cotton dresses and rope sandals, and still the sweat ran down my back. The river through the mangrove trees in the driving rain was wide and turbulent, overhung with green mist, rushing toward the gulf. In the canopy of the foliage I saw a pair of red birds huddled with folded wings. And, higher up, one of the striped green owls that hunted by day. The arboreal spiders, I knew now, wove exquisite, complex nets impervious to water. I had learned, too, that all spiders are carnivorous. That they never take in solid food through their mouths, but after predigesting their prey with a secretion of fluids, suck the liquid remains into their stomachs by means of powerful muscles. That though their average life span is one year or less, the female tarantula can live to be thirty years old. That most spiders have eight eyes and eight legs. And that there are spiders who live underwater, inside silken diving bells that store air, spinning their webs, laying eggs, and preying on other aquatic insects. In the high grass below the mangrove trees they could be found in the mesh of slow-moving streams that fed into the river, but not in the river itself.

  Eboli, who had been born in that house forty-five years before, told me that he traced his interest in arachnology to his discovery of those underwater spiders during a boyhood swim. Working in his house, I saw other antecedents of his obsession at work; for example, the photographs of his mother that covered the lid of the baby grand piano in the living room. An imposing, dark-skinned Creole woman with pursed lips and thick eyebrows that met over her nose, in all the photographs Eboli’s mother wore a black lace shawl, intricately woven, and a matching veil that had been lifted—apparently for the photographer’s benefit—back onto her tightly bunned jet hair. The shawl and veil fanned out around her smooth round head as if they were one with her—as if she had spun them out.

  “Her name was Cela,” Eboli remarked quietly when he found me examining the photographs. “She lived here as a recluse for some years after my father’s death.”

  That was all he ever told me about his family, of whom he was the only survivor, himself a recluse in that same house. But despite his soft-spokenness and generally furtive air, I never thought of him as secretive: he spoke freely of himself, without affectation or any of the high seriousness that entered his voice when the subject was spiders. To my surprise, for instance, he told me he had served in the army in Europe as a young enlistee in the Second World War.

  “Disqualified from combat, of course,” he drawled, holding up his hands with their missing digits. “Believe it or not, I ended up in the clerical corps as a typist. I tested out, in those days of two-ton manual machines, at ninety-two words a minute. And I got as close to the front lines as I could, working in a mobile command post. I had harbored only one strong ambition before the war, when I was studying the piano: to meet the late, great Ferdinand La Menthe. He lived in New Orleans, but in his last years he avoided public appearances, and try as I might, I never met him before he died on December 16, 1941. Three months later, I enlisted. After my discharge, I lived in Paris for a year, playing in small clubs, and when I came home I resumed my piano studies. Then in 1949 when my mother died, I gave it up and began my work with spiders in earnest. I’ll play you something,” he said, beckoning me into the living room.

  With an amazing touch, he set his eight fingers flying on the baby grand’s keyboard, first drawing forth a highly embroidered baroque waltz, then shifting into ragtime, improvising variations on a theme from the waltz. For several minutes he played with fierce concentration, finally isolating and returning to the waltz theme, which he played slowly and emphatically before spinning around on the piano stool. “Ferdinand La Menthe, you see, knew his Bach,” he smiled. “That was his very own Goldberg Variations.”

  As often happened after lunch, Eboli asked me to drive down to the library to take out some books. I did so, then went to the newspaper files, and picking through the 1949 obituary columns of the Delta Mirror soon came on the notice for Cela Marie Eboli, who had died on March 7. To my surprise, in the same issue, there was a news articl
e about her death, accompanied by one of those photographs atop the piano, from which a single sentence leapt out at me. According to the police, Mrs. Eboli, wearing a black dress and with a long rope noosed around her neck and tied to the leg of her brass bed, jumped from a top-floor window of her house to her death. And hung there, on the long rope, for several hours before her son Zaren, a piano player at the Black & White Club, came home and found her.

  Suspended like a spider, I thought with a shiver, closing the drawer before sidling down the dusty aisle, farther back into the past. I stopped before another green cabinet under a shaded 40-watt bulb encrusted with mosquitoes. Flipping through the yellowed clippings directly to December 16, 1941, scanning the most prominent obituary on the page, I discovered that Ferdinand La Menthe was the legal name of none other than Jelly Roll Morton.

  Back at Eboli’s house, as I parked my car, I cast my eye along the heavily curtained top-floor windows. I didn’t see him again until the end of the day, when he asked me to come into his study. He was smoking a cigarillo in a long amber holder, ashes dusting his velvet lapels, and pacing impatiently. I stood nervously while he sat down behind his desk.

  “Well, I hope my piano playing did not unsettle you,” he said, capping and uncapping his fountain pen, as he often did when he was preoccupied.

  “I enjoyed it.”

  “Please, sit.” He cleared his throat. “I noted on my calendar that the period we agreed on for your employment concludes as of today.”

  I had not noted this, and wondered how four months could have passed as if they were a single long day and night—with troubled sleep, no sex, little companionship, and sporadic eating habits. When I first arrived in New Orleans, I bought a bottle of bourbon, drank two glasses neat, and then, seeing the shade of my grandmother rise up filling her teacup with Seven Roses, I poured the rest down the sink. That was one road I wasn’t going down, I told myself. In some ways, I might as well have. Since arriving in town, I had lost ten pounds, and the smudges under my eyes from my life on the road had darkened to rings. Sometimes when I was alone in my room, my stomach in knots and a stale astringency closing up my throat, I felt as if I were walking on a white airless road with the same flat scenery—bare trees, an empty house, an endless fence, a recurring windmill—sliding by me, like the scenery backdrop in a silent movie. And all the while I hoped to catch up with someone whom I was sure was just ahead of me, but out of sight. And who could it be but Loren, whom I knew I would never overtake.

  “You have helped me enormously,” Eboli went on, the orange lamplight shimmering on his spectacles as he stroked his goatee, “with the cataloguing especially. So I wanted to ask you to stay on—same hours but with an increase in pay—for as long as you like.”

  I hadn’t expected this. “No, I can’t,” I replied. “Thank you for asking, but it’s time I moved on.”

  And it was time, not only to leave Eboli’s employ, but New Orleans altogether. Still, I wondered if I would have refused his offer out-of-hand like that just a few hours earlier, before I had been spooked by the description of his mother’s death in the newspaper files. For I hadn’t the slightest idea where I would go next or, as my cash reserves dwindled, how I would support myself when I got there.

  “Of course,” Eboli sighed, standing up and pocketing the pen. He looked vaguely disappointed, but I was certain I also detected relief in his sigh. He had had other short-term assistants before, women as well as men, including doctoral candidates at the university, but I doubted that any other young woman had ever put in such a concentrated stint under his roof. “Well, you have helped me enormously,” he repeated, stepping over to the nearest worktable. “Would you just take one of these specimens down to the basement before you go?”

  He had been working that afternoon with two spiders in separate terrariums. One, I knew, was a common wolf spider, Lycosa carolinensis, whose foraging habits he was observing. The other was a large spider, three inches long including his legs, that I had never seen before.

  “Yes, he is a fellow I acquired only yesterday in the mail,” he said, following my gaze. “All the way from Nevada.”

  I peered into the terrarium. “A trap-door?”

  Eboli nodded. “One with the most arresting markings, barely observable from this angle, which rival the red hourglass on the ventral side of the black widow’s abdomen. This spider, a nocturnal member of the genus Ummidia, is known as Stellarum.”

  “Of the stars,” I said.

  “Yes. His black abdomen is speckled silver, like a night sky filled with stars. He is a desert spider and constructs his burrow near brush. He can withstand enormous amounts of heat, up to 130°. His favorite prey is a long-legged silver ant of the Cataglyphis species, who only emerges from his tunnels at night and possesses one of the most peculiar and sophisticated navigational systems in the animal kingdom. The upper half of the ant’s cornea has evolved into a grid of the night sky above his territory—a kind of celestial map that shifts with the seasons. To travel, he aligns the grid of star points in his eyes with the stars in the sky. Ummidia Stellarum, in order to ambush the ant, is privy to his routes, though this is quite a mystery, for we know that even nocturnal spiders are too shortsighted to see the stars. So the silver ant, who lives by the stars, often ends his short life liquefied in Stellarum’s starry abdomen. Even more unusual is that Stellarum itself is one of those rare creatures who has no known predators. The average spider lays from 300 to 3,000 eggs, but the female Stellarum lays only one egg in a cycle. That’s what checks his population. Without predators, Stellarum always dies a natural death in his burrow, which then becomes his crypt, sealed up by the desert sands. He is like a god among spiders—or at least a pharaoh. Some believe that his venom has a uniquely potent effect on human beings.”

  “And what is that?”

  Eboli was cleaning his spectacles with a striped handkerchief. “Both the Hopi and Zuni Indians, who have used the venom in purification rituals, assert that it effectively reduces the human soul to its rarest elements, stripping away all that is false, illusory, or fearful. Not for a few hours or days, but over the course of many months, sometimes up to three years, depending on the amount of venom ingested. It is a kind of long-term spiritual truth serum. In fact, the Zunis believed it would make their strongest shamans and warriors almost godlike—or, if they were flawed, would just as surely tear them apart over time.”

  I put my eye right up to the glass and saw the Ummidia Stellarum immobile on a flat rock behind the thick glass.

  “But in the desert,” he went on, “Stellarum seldom has contact with people, and like other spiders, he bites only when cornered.” He reached into his jacket pocket. “At any rate, here is your final paycheck, with a small bonus.”

  “So you knew I wouldn’t be staying.”

  He shrugged. “Perhaps our paths will cross again. I’ll say good-bye now, Mala. And good luck.” He shook my hand, then turned away abruptly and left the room. I picked up the terrarium carefully.

  The rain had finally stopped and the house was even more still than usual as I descended first the broad stairway with the faded Persian carpeting to the front hall, and then the cast-iron spiral steps, through a low door that led to the basement. All the way down, with the scent of drenched wisteria and honeysuckle filling my head, I couldn’t take my eyes off the Ummidia Stellarum.

  In the basement the whirring of filters and fans greeted me, and the hum of the lights that threw jagged shadows up the walls. I walked down the far aisle between long walnut tables and laid the terrarium beside those of the other desert spiders and plugged in its sun lamp.

  The Ummidia Stellarum had not stirred, but his eyes revolved upward at the sudden blaze of light. Sweat was beading on my forehead. Even as Eboli was telling me about this spider, I had known what I was going to do. Slowly I lifted open the terrarium’s metal lid and slid my left hand in toward the spider. He didn’t move. My hand was steady as I walked my fingers onto the rock and nudge
d him. Still no movement. After all, he had been handled before. But, then, for months I had been handling spiders too, and I knew something about it now. Quickly I slid the rock out from under him, and he jumped, scurrying for a hole in the sand. I blocked his way, then forced him into a corner, trapping him with my palm. Still my hand was steady as I closed it over him. And it remained steady when I felt him panic, fluttering and scrambling, and finally, desperately, biting me—a minute jab as from the corner of a razor blade, at the center of my palm. I knew this was the fang at the tip of his jaw that was a conduit from the poison gland. After a moment, I raised my hand, opening my fingers, and the Ummidia Stellarum darted through them, across the sand, and disappeared down the hole.

  Suddenly there was a hot pulsing in my palm that moved through my wrist into my arm and shot rapidly upward. When it reached my chest, the jolt I experienced was far more powerful than what I had expected, but I felt no fear. Seconds later I stopped sweating and my head grew cold. My tongue was dry and my lips numb. My fingers and toes felt numb too, as if they had been injected with Novocain. I put my index finger to the vapor that had condensed on the outside of the terrarium and drew a face with hands clapped over the ears, no mouth, and closed eyes. Before I could dot in the tears, I spun around, certain I heard a rustle on the stairs. Had Eboli, in his silent slippers, been watching me? I rushed over, but there was no one. Later, I wasn’t sure that I had closed the lid on the spider’s terrarium. I wasn’t clear, either, on how I managed to drive back downtown, my hands so numb they felt ice-coated and my head swimming.

  But one thing I never forgot. As I climbed the steps from the basement in Zaren Eboli’s blue house, the darkness deepened and I saw stars, thousands of them coming clear before me in the high stairwell, until they glittered sharply.

  Two days later, and two years to the day after I had taken Loren to the planetarium—it would have been his twelfth birthday—I walked along the river to the recruiting office on St. Clair Street and enlisted in the Navy Nursing Corps and was assigned first to Savannah and then to Honolulu, for intensive training. Nine months later, in September, 1968, I was placed on-line aboard the USS Repose, a hospital ship, off Quang Tri, South Vietnam, in the South China Sea.