He felt an urge not to go back home. He tackled his work with a kind of quiet zeal. He managed to design a few models of rural areas that suited the tropical climate and were not at odds with the existing way of life. After the Nicaragua earthquake two districts were rebuilt along lines that he had put forward. New offers started coming in. In 1974 he wrote to the Planning Authority asking for indefinite leave. Nimrod Finkel granted it immediately.
Year after year he migrated from hotels to village inns, from air-conditioned offices to baking townships and Indian villages, carrying everything he needed in a modest shoulder bag, and he learned to speak six dialects of Spanish. Regimes rose and fell, but he steered his way through unscathed because he refrained from forging friendships. When he came across cruelty, corruption, barbarity or grinding poverty he passed no judgment but merely concentrated on his work: he had not come here to combat injustice but, so far as possible, to attain professional perfection and thereby perhaps, however minutely, to reduce disasters. Honour, the labyrinth and death were ever-present here, and life itself sometimes flared up like a festive firework display or a salvo of shots in the air: ruthless, spicy, noisy and cheap.
Women were easy to find, like food, like a hammock to spend the night in, all lavished on him everywhere out of curiosity or hospitality. His hosts expected him to join in conversations late into the night, under the dome of the sky, in village inns, in development-company encampments, in isolated farmyards, in the company of strangers or chance acquaintances. And again, as he had done around campfires in the youth movement and the army, he drew close to the fire and listened. Here, too, they talked halfway through the night about things like the ravages of time, family, honour vicissitudes of fate, the hypocrisy of society, the atrocities that people inflict on themselves and each other because of excessive appetites or, on the contrary, from excessive indifference. Theo drank little and hardly joined in the conversations. Only very rarely did he contribute a small anecdote from one of the Israeli wars or a biblical text that struck him as appropriate. When close to dawn the men dispersed and he headed for the darkness there was generally a woman who wanted to join him.
Sometimes he mingled with the crowd and from within it watched all night long the lascivious carnival, the Fiesta of Our Lady of Guadalupe, General Saragossa's feast day, the screaming festival, with dancing, carousing, horrific and seductive diguises, and salvos of flares and shooting in the rancid air and the throbbing of the drums accompanying desperate music that writhed till dawn in horrendous, violent desire.
He despatched most of his monthly salary to a bank in Toronto, because his expenses were negligible. Like a travelling artisan he wandered in those years from one godforsaken place to another that was even more so. He stayed in wretched villages at the foot of extinct volcanoes and once he saw one of them erupting in flames. Sometimes he journeyed under thick canopies of ferns and creepers through sensuous jungles. Here and there he would befriend for a while a desolate river or a steep mountain range that the forest seemed to be invading with the savage claws of its roots. Here and there he would stop for a couple of weeks and surrender to total idleness, lying in a hammock all day watching birds of prey in the depths of the empty sky. A girl or a young woman would come in the night to share his hammock, bringing huge earthenware cups of coffee from somewhere for them both. Past and future appeared to him on such nights as two common diseases, slow, destructive plagues that had infected most of mankind and were gradually causing all sorts of strange frenzies in their victims. And he rejoiced that he was not afflicted, and considered himself immune.
Even the present tense, that is to say the given moment that you are at, here and now, travelling, dozing, having sex, or the moment when you are sitting huddled, wide awake and quiet in your battered leather jacket in a window seat on a long night flight in a near-empty plane, even the present moment appears not to demand anything of you beyond being present in it and being as receptive as possible to what you are shown and what is being done to you. Like water running slowly down the inside of eyelids closed with fatigue.
Occasionally he felt fear, or rather a vague apprehension, that in the absence of suffering he might be missing something that would never return. Without having any idea what it was that was being missed, if indeed anything was being missed. Sometimes he had a feeling that he had forgotten something he should remember but when he collected his thoughts he found that he had forgotten what it was he thought he had forgotten. In Trujillo, in Peru, one night he jotted down on a sheet of hotel notepaper four or five questions in Hebrew: Is this a contraction of the life force? Barrenness? Atrophy? Exile? After an hour or two he wrote under these questions a reply: Even if we suppose it really is atrophy etc., why not? What's the harm in that?
And with that he seemed to snuggle down again into his tropical torpor.
But in his work he was as alert as a thief in a treasure chamber. For instance, when he happened to spend three or four days on end in a low-ceilinged broom closet of a room in some village inn, or occasionally in a splendid city office put at his disposal by the company, drawing, writing, altering, calculating, he was electrically sharp, needing neither sleep nor company, not raising his head from the paper even when a petite beauty slipped in with coffee and a tray of food and stood looking at him for a moment, waiting, tense, as though receiving the capering sparks of his energy on the skin of her nipples, until she gave up and left. Or sometimes during a meeting, when he presented his proposals to the decision-making authorities, a cold, sharp inner flame might beam out from him and make others yield to his will. At such times he felt a powerful, delightful upsurge of professional pleasure: the force of invention and perfection glowed white-hot in him like the filament of a powerful light bulb. It was as though deep in the forest, in a hidden cut-off place, there pulsed intermittently a kind of spring that existed independently of you and from moment to moment it bubbled up and vanished, bubbled up and again carved itself a predetermined course, by the force of laws that you were unable to understand but that had you entirely in their power.
And again on long journeys to godforsaken districts in the mountains or on the Caribbean coast, studying the locality, supervising the construction stage, introducing the odd improvised alteration, on the inspiration of the moment, he would sometimes be smitten suddenly with fatigue and lie down for days and nights in a hammock behind a hut. Sometimes he would rise at midnight and walk barefoot to join a conversation round a fire about love, betrayal and the vicissitudes of life. And so, in the courtyard of a miserable tavern, over glasses of native liquor, in the company of workers, technicians, vendors and comfort girls, under a strange night sky that might be suddenly illuminated by the momentary ecstasy of falling stars, he came to learn more and more about episodes full of lust and despair. As though these two were a pair of strolling players who appeared evening after evening before an audience gathered in taverns or in the courtyards of remote inns, never wearying of repeating endlessly the same fixed passion play, watched by Theo time and again without his ever being bored but without his being particularly impressed either.
In bed, or in a hammock, when he was having sex with a woman who had chosen him, usually a woman twenty or thirty years younger than himself, he would make love slowly and precisely, expertly prolonging the pleasure, guiding her confidently along the byways of the forest, and occasionally in the midst of ecstasy he experienced all at once a powerful craving for fatherhood. He would show the girl a loving side that was inappropriate to casual sex and unusual between strangers: a parental side. Glimpsing this parental concern suddenly in the midst of ecstasy, the girl would react at first with bewildered fear and alarm, but then she would be overwhelmed, as though pierced to the secret core of her spine. So their bodies would reach territories that lust alone cannot get to, until it seemed as though the river was not simply passing by on the other side of the hut but flowing out of them. But by the light of day he always reverted to being distant and correc
t. Polite, considerate, detached. And obliged to go on his way.
IN February 1981 I dropped into the Embassy in Caracas to pick up an envelope containing some material I had sent for from the office in Israel. The new receptionist explained to me, with an air of sympathy and particular delicacy, as if she had the task of softening the blow to a patient receiving the results of tests, that the package was locked in the security officer's safe, and he would not be back for another hour or so. Meanwhile, she sat me down on a wicker chair, gave me some coffee that I had not asked for—it was sharp, penetrating coffee, that almost felt alcoholic—and in a few moments managed to make me feel that I had charmed her. She had not a trace of inhibition when she said to me in her young girl's voice, some ten minutes after I entered the office: Stay for a bit. You're interesting.
A woman of medium height, she moved around the room as though every movement of her body pleased her; her blonde fringe tossed lightly on her forehead, and she was wearing a colourful printed dress. When she stood up to pour the coffee her dress whirled round her legs and I noticed something athletic, though unhurried and relaxed, in her bearing. She contrived to hint without really hinting that it was I who was arousing the feminine signal that was emanating from her, you are attractive, I am attracted, why should I hide it, and I discovered, to my own surprise, that almost unawares I had begun to return her signals. All these years I had been avoiding the company of Israelis, and especially those progressive, cooperative Tel Avivi girls with reasoned views for or against everything in the world. In my years of wandering around these parts I had been drawn to a hypnotic tropical femininity that sometimes seemed imprisoned like a dark flame in a cage of Hispanic arrogance. Yet here was this fair-haired, green-eyed, energetic woman with her bell-like voice, her face openly beaming with the pleasure I was affording her, bursting with generous vitality. With a movement of the shoulder and hip that said, Take a look, this is a body, she stirred something inside me that almost resembled the relaxed openness that is experienced sometimes in a meeting between childhood friends. There was also a sudden urge to make a strong impression on her. Yet for years and years I had made no effort, I had not had to make any, to impress a woman.
Within ten minutes I had learned that she was a literature teacher, that she had been born and lived until a few years previously in a village at the eastern end of the Hefer Valley, that she had started really living, as she put it, shockingly late, because she had been saddled with a violent, childlike crippled father, that she had hardly any other relatives, and that her name was Noa. You're Theo, I've heard about you, you're quite a legend hereabouts. I had some kind of breakdown in Tel Aviv, but let's not go into that, some friends arranged for me to come out here partly as a receptionist in the Embassy and partly as a teacher for the little Israeli colony. That's right, how did you guess, the coffee I made us really is radioactive. I slipped an Indian thing into it, a powdered root, no, it's not exactly like the cardamom the Yemenites back home use, it makes your head spin more, and I also added half a glass of French brandy. There, I've given away most of my secrets. Of course I didn't ask you if I could put things in your coffee. Why should I? Here, have another cup. You don't look to me like a man who is likely to get drunk or lose control. Rather the opposite. Always in control.
When the security officer arrived and handed me my envelope I thanked him and her and took my leave. But she wouldn't dream of letting me go: Wait, Theo. They say you've been living among the Indians for ten years. Will you take me? It'll be worth your while. If you say yes I'll teach you how to control pain by regulating your breathing.
I supposed she must have belonged to one of those mystical groups that were so popular in Tel Aviv. I was determined to escape while there was still time from this mercurial school-teacher with her tricks for regulating your breathing. Despite which I agreed to go out with her that evening to a concert by an orchestra and choir from Berlin: she had a double ticket and without me she wouldn't be able to go, it wasn't that easy here for a woman to go out at night by herself, and she promised that the programme included Schubert's Mass in B Flat Major. For years I hadn't heard Schubert except through the earphones of the little cassette player that went everywhere with me.
That evening it turned out that she didn't know any breathing exercises: she had just fancied me and didn't want me to disappear. If I insisted on my rights, she would take a correspondence course in controlled breathing and discharge her debt when she'd completed it. Fancy wasn't the right word, she said. Actually I had struck her as someone who was imprisoned in my own dungeon and I made her want to try to reach me so I wouldn't freeze down there in the dark. Even now I can't express myself the way I want to, imprisonment, dungeon, it's all your fault, Theo, it's because of you that I'm talking in metaphors and that it won't come out right. Am I ridiculous? Then you must accept the blame. Look what you've done to me. It's your fault I'm ridiculous. It's because of you I'm blushing, too. Look.
After the concert she invited me out to eat roast veal at a restaurant she'd heard was considered one of the best in the Western Hemisphere. The restaurant, empty apart from the two of us, was full of folksy decorations and waiters dressed as gauchos. It was nothing more than a tourist trap. The meat and the wine were crude and tasteless. The candle at our table had a repulsive greasy smell. As for the ensemble from Berlin, it turned out that they had performed the Schubert the previous night. We were treated to Hindemith and Bartók. To cap it all, when we were leaving the concert hall the heel of her left shoe broke, and as we were getting out of the taxi her wristwatch caught my forehead and gave me a nasty gash. I've blown it, she said, with a touching smile by the light of the street lamp outside her apartment: I've lost my Indian village.
The first Sunday after that evening, a rogue cobbler having stuck an odd heel on her shoe, I took her over dirt tracks in the Development Agency Jeep to see an Indian village not far from Calabozo. We drove for five hours each way. We saw a wedding carnival, half Catholic, half pagan: in a dark, ecstatic ceremony, accompanied by strange songs that at times resembled howls, a pretty widow was paired off with a half-dazed, perhaps slightly drugged, youth, who seemed to us no more than fifteen years old. Next day I flew back to Mexico. We continued to meet each time I passed through Caracas, every few weeks, and I would bring her a bottle of Napoleon brandy so that she would have something to lace her magic coffee with, together with her powerful native brew. Instead of the secret of breathing control that she had made up the first day so I wouldn't get away I discovered another secret in her that came to fascinate me: whenever she met a stranger, even by chance, she would immediately spot any malice. Or hypocrisy. Or generosity. Even people I myself saw as being complicated, enigmatic, well hidden behind a polished image or disguised by perfect manners, she could apparently identify as being good or bad: wicked, naive, generous, stagnant—that was how she classified everybody. And also as warm or cool. In fact she didn't so much classify them as set people, places or opinions on a temperature scale. As though she were grading pupils' work from forty to ninety. What's this supposed to be, I protested, a court-martial? A people's tribunal? And Noa replied: It's easy, anyone who wants to know what's good and what's bad knows. If you don't know, it's a sign you don't want to know. I find you quite attractive. You seem to find me attractive, too. But you absolutely don't have to answer that.
Was she really always correct in her lightning judgments? Or more times than not? Sometimes? I couldn't check any more, because with time I began to see people through her eyes: icy, warm, tepid, generous, villainous, compassionate. How about me? Am I hot or cold, Noa? Or would I be better off not asking? To which she replied instantly, unhesitatingly: You're warm but getting colder. Never mind, I'll warm you up. And she added: Not bad. A bit domineering. You drive the Jeep brilliantly—it's not so much driving, more like a rodeo.
And sometimes she looked to me again just the way she looked the first time we met, at the Embassy, an energetic, well-meaning, jud
gmental Israeli schoolteacher. Her beauty was written all over her in capital letters. Wafting all around her a faint but unmistakable scent of honeysuckle. But I found nothing repellent in all of this. On the contrary, there were times when her presence filled me with childlike excitement, like a creature that has been brought indoors and from now on is going to be well looked after. I gradually discovered how fine and how effortless was her emotional range, maternal one moment, girlish the next, or seductive, and most of the time sisterly. What's more, she revealed to me a childlike sense of humour, "the horse is the main protagonist in the history of the Latin peoples", a humour that gave me a strange urge to cover her shoulders carefully. Even when it was not cold. Indeed the first present I bought her was a Caribbean woollen scarf. When I first laid it round her shoulders, so white and delicate with a tiny brown birthmark near the nape, there was a moment of mystery and joy: as though it were not me covering her shoulders, but her suddenly covering all of me.
Once when we were visiting the ruins of a gloomy church from the time of the first settlers and as usual I delivered a historical précis, she interrupted me with the words, See for yourself, Theo, how light you are now.
At these words I trembled like a boy to whom an experienced woman, from the heights of her expertise, perhaps as a joke, has revealed that he is apparently blessed with what in due course will make women desire him. I leaned over and kissed her. On her hair for the time being. She did not return my kiss but reddened and burst out laughing, Look, Theo, it's so funny, your bossy moustache has started quivering. And yet when we met in Caracas, Noa and I, I was fifty-two, I had been loving various sorts of women for thirty years, I was, in my own opinion, an expert, I was acquainted with menus of pleasures such as she had not seen in her wildest dreams, if she had ever had wild dreams. I imagined not. Despite which, the words she spoke to me in the ruins of that church, See for yourself how light you are now, moved me so powerfully that I had to remind myself almost by force that I had stopped in the eighteenth century and I had yet to tell her about how the church and the whole town had collapsed in the great earthquake of 1812 and about the cyclical element that really underlay the shifting power-alliances between the Church, the secret service, the Maoists, the army, the Liberals, and the Republican Guards. I recommenced my lecture, and continued it passionately, lingering over each detail, digressing, enthusing, embarking on Borgesian myths, until she said, That's enough for today, Theo, I can't take any more in.