Meredith Quartermain - I, Bartleby

Real-life Mexican authorities hold them in Acapulco, make them come back day after day to Migración, demand Margerie go alone to Cuernavaca for papers and money, Margerie writing in her notebook on the night bus: cattle browsing, do they never sleep … suddenly a village of leaping torches … The fat Mexican keeps falling against me leaning on me in his sleep. A woman is vomiting, the noise & then the smell, the terrible roar of the motor. At Taxco we change drivers. The new one is large & fat & drunk. Where is your husband? He tries to take my hand and feel my knee while changing gears .

Returning to Acapulco after two days on buses, no sleep, she finds real husband hallucinating on drink that real Juan Fernando Márquez (Zapotec, Volcano ’s imaginary Dr. Vigil) is scolding him for distressing real wife, she now saying, Get up, you drunken bastard. But they do not pay la mordida . Mexican authorities put them under arrest back in the real fictional house of Volcano ’s imaginary Parisian film director where they receive letters from Jonathan Cape and Reynal & Hitchcock accepting real Volcano as is. The house is a mess , Margerie writes in notebook (real husband folding several such into his novel La Mordida ): no clean linen, bugs in kitchen, floors filthy with cigarette stubs & dirty clothes covering all chairs … I am so tired so tired, tired, tired, I don’t care except for dull anger that flames & rages against Malcolm & hatred & disgust that I am dragged down myself in trying to drink with him & hatred of bottles & exhaustion & sense of my soul slipping away & my whole grip on life . Pencils in palm-size black notebook, a despair so utter that all I want is death. Why don’t I kill myself? Is it some vague lingering loyalty to Malcolm whom I must still love but now only hate & despise & fear — above all fear? Asks (in palm-size black notebook continued from blue) how many times have I said in passionate praying & meaning it, oh God give Malcolm his success, let his volcano be recognized for the great thing it is & I will die or be damned in payment — so perhaps that is what happens. Pencils in palm-size black notebook (someone has labelled La Mordida ), the stabbing burning unendurable agony of seeing the one you love reduced to a shambling idiotic dirty animal .

After seizing their bond of five hundred pesos, Mexican authorities jail and deport them for Malcolm’s failure to pay a fine (overstaying his visa), and for his bad behaviour and drunken offences: borracho, borracho, borracho reads his file. They go back to British Columbia Dollarton / pretend Eridanus, which he dreamed of making a novel where Sigbjørn and Primrose, in the real fictional house of Volcano ’s imaginary Parisian film director, would talk over their idyllic times living in a real shack on a real beach on the western edge of land known fictionally as North America.

Then Sigbjørn and Primrose set out again to France on a French cargo ship, the SS Diderot / real-life SS Brest , the name in itself ironic enough, down the west coast fictionally known as the United States, past haunted and forever-closed-to-him Mexico, and through the Panama, which becomes the title of a novella cast as the journal of Sigbjørn planning a novel in which a character named Martin Trumbaugh becomes enmeshed in the plot of a novel he has written in Mexico, as Sigbjørn has, tangling him in the real fictional house of his imagined film director, Sigbjørn’s novel being The Valley of the Shadow of Death , Sigbjørn being haunted by imagined Parisian film director Jacque Laruelle’s incessant “Frère Jacques” drumbeat in the ship’s engines. Martin’s thoughts invade the journal with memories of his little cabin by the sea, memories of a misty winter sunrise through its windows, the sun a tiny little sun framed in one of the panes like a miniature — unreal, white. Martin plans to call his novel Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid . Martin has been reading The Crack-Up and thinks his little cabin by the sea would have saved Fitzgerald.

In his cabin on SS Diderot , Sigbjørn Wilderness finds a newspaper clipping about an albatross shot by a John Firmin, undoubtedly a relative of Volcano ’s alcoholic consul. Don’t shoot, the crew, said, reminding Firmin of the Ancient Mariner . But he’d killed the bird anyway because it was the only one of its kind.

Nothing could be more unlike real experience, Sigbjørn the character novelist comments, than the average novelist’s realistic portrait of a character. Despite this, he tells us, his imagined character Martin Trumbaugh had been on this planet for so long that he had almost tricked himself into believing he was a human being . Much of Martin’s suffering, says Sigbjørn, comes from the fact that he could not find his vision of the world in any books and the fact that he’d got into pretending that he thought like other people . Other characters. The real ones.

On the other hand, Sigbjørn records in his journal an excellent fellow on board the SS Diderot , a Mr. Charon, who, just like Consul Firmin in pretend novel Valley of the Shadow / real novel Volcano, says, as acting Norwegian consul, he has no country. Man not enmeshed by, but killed by his own book , muses Sigbjørn, whose journal now carries along its edges Coleridge’s glosses to the Ancient Mariner . The crew on SS Diderot capture an albatross but Old Charon won’t come look at it. All in all though, gentlemen , Sigbjørn records from a book on the canal, what I would like to say about the Panama Canal is that it is a work of genius — something like a novel — in fact just such a novel as I, Sigbjørn Wilderness might have written — indeed without knowing it am perhaps in the course of writing .

The SS Diderot (named for author of Jacques le fataliste ) hits a storm so violent that character novelist Sigbjørn records the ship lurching and twisting in agony, wracked by clanks, rattles, whistles, thumps, and mad hammering, then jumping out of the water and shuddering from end to end, all the lifeboats smashed, no one at the wheel that spun wildly by itself, the rudder crippled, and gigantic seas, rising all above us as if we were in a volcano . Sleep impossible for being pitched from bunk, Sigbjørn can only cling to his desk for days distracting himself with comparisons of death to the rejection of a manuscript or the embarrassment his death would cause the skipper — character Martin imagined by imagined character novelist to find these thoughts idiotic attempts to short-circuit grief for Primrose.

Sigbjørn listens for six short and one long whistle, abandon ship, can’t tell what’s happening on deck at all , but absolutely nothing to be done about it . His character Martin tells him to put on your life jacket. This is a position all novelists find themselves in eventually . Sigbjørn’s imagined thoughts thrash through SOS signals, lines from “Frère Jacques,” and instructions to Go to your cabin, cover yourself warmly, put on your gill-netting of sauvetage .

Put your arms through the shoulder straps , Martin the character tells Sigbjørn the novelist, but he can’t. Nor can either of them put a life jacket on Primrose.

She’d seen it coming in Haiti, writing in the real Golden West palm-sized notebook of spiderwebs twenty feet high and scarlet poinsettias thirty feet across, writing how the sun thru the royal palms and the coconut palms makes their long blowing rustling stiff fronds glitter and sparkle like green patent leather , how the trumpette rattles its huge maple-like leaves, the banana trees flap, the mango, with its slender leaves like a willow but darker, richer green, and shaggy bark, flutters, how swifts and dragonflies and huge jet black bumblebees dart and flash … Ah how beautiful it is, how strange, she wrote, too easy, too perfect, the weather always the hot sun and cool breeze and people to pick up everything, do everything and how easy just to drink and let time and money slip away . Writing in golden flip-page reporter’s pocket notebook of M rising dramatically: my brother, I give you my shirt , to a refugee from Trujillo, likely to be killed by spies at any moment, everyone hushed as spy enters bar. Writing in real pencil, We drive to Le Rivier Froid thru the hot dark night, great palms and banana leaves starting out in the headlights, to stand on the bridge and look at the stars … suffering . Next day speechless gazing at blue sea, the rolling billows of whipped-cream clouds, birds like scattered bits of white paper , M carrying on about Voodoo, Baron Sandhi, the Lord of the Dead, demonical possession. Now at the river , she writes on faint blue lines in Golden West notebook, we dress behind a bush. I chased by a black pregnant goat step in its excrement. Good, says M, now you can go in the water and be purified. I am scratched and bitten, feet bleeding from the rocks. Friday awaken to amber and turquoise dawn but cannot face it, thoughts of what might have been. The market: people surging up, garbage in piles under foot, trying to buy cigarettes, haggling over centimes, the furious, gnarled face of the woman breaking into smiles as we have to cease haggling as the bus is leaving, horrible road, second and first gear, M’s exhausted swollen face and hand on mine from the seat behind. She writes of daturas and grass too emerald to be real, like the bright artificial grass in Easter baskets of childhood .