Michael Martone - Seeing Eye

I know now how it works. I spent one afternoon in my office with an eyeglasses repair kit dismantling the thing. I unscrewed the little screws that held the tiny hinges, unhooked the rubber bands, untied the threads with tweezers, freed the minute springs as fine as hair. The pieces lay scattered on my desk blotter. I put the various parts in the empty squares of days mapped out on the appointment calendar. I had been ordered to lay low awhile, rehabilitate myself.

I never drink the water anywhere. It can make you sick. But in Chile, I waded into one of their outdoor markets to look for something local to ingest. I wasn’t going to be a Nixon holed up in the limousine rushing through the platas pelted by eggs. I believe native populations can smell the fear. Gorbachev kissed babies on a street in Washington, DC. I can shake a few hands and handle some grapes in Santiago.

Marilyn waited back at the embassy. I was sandwiched in a three-car motorcade. “Stop the car,” I ordered. “How do I say, ‘How much?’”

The car was already floundering in the market crowd. I like to move through a thick mass of people this way, the ring of security wedging me along, hands disconnected from the faces they belong to reach through to touch me, to try to grab my hands. “Steady, lads,” I barked out to the agents.

The squids were huge, draped over clotheslines like parachutes. The shrimps looked like stomachs. Chickens squawked when the vendors held them up to me by their feet. We’d move from the sun to the shade made by awnings of brightly colored blankets and gauzy dresses. I could smell coffee roasting. The potatoes were the size of golf balls and colored like breakfast cereal. Rabbits in wooden cages watched what must have been skinned rabbits skewered on spits turning over charcoal fires. Where we walked, the ground was covered with the skins of smashed vegetables and crushed leaves and tissue wrappers. I slipped on a mango peel.

I pointed at fruit I had never seen before. The crowd that had been drifting along with us hushed to a whisper. The farmer brushed the flies away from melons that looked like pictures of organs in an anatomy book. Stripped, gland-sized berries secreted gummy juices. The apples had thorns and were orange. Another fruit had been split open to show it was choking with sacks of blood red liquid. The flies swarmed around the farmer’s hand as he pointed from one bushel to the next. He threw some plums into a sack and waved away the aide who tried to pay him.

“Gracia,” I said, reaching in for one. I pulled it out and held it up. The crowd cheered. The press took pictures of me eating the plum. I felt like a matador, the crowd cheering me on. The translator said something about water. I told him I didn’t want any, that I never drink it. But he had meant that the plum should be washed. It should have been washed before I bit into it. Too late. The bite I took went to the pit. I survived though I was sick later. It didn’t matter. I was going to get sick one way or the other. The plum was good. It tasted like a plum.

On the way back to the car, we bumped into a stand filled with carved wood figures of little men. I thought they must be souvenirs like the dolls of baseball or football players you get at the stadiums back home whose bobbing plaster heads are attached to the uniformed bodies by a bouncy spring.

“¿Cuanto vale?” I asked the surprised seller. The translator told me what he said.

“Is that the right price?” I asked the translator.

He shrugged. “Seems fair,” he said. And I told him to tell the man I’d take one.

I held the figure in my hands, admiring the workmanship. Though crude there was a deftness to the carving, the way the clothes hung on the body. The bright paint seemed festive and foreign. People in the crowd jockeyed around to get a look. The statue was lighter than I imagined, hollow. I shook it and heard something rattle inside. I noticed an unglued seam at the waist. The crowd was shouting at me now.

“What are they saying?” I asked the translator. He told me they were shouting instructions on how it worked. As he said that, I was pulling gently on the doll’s head. Just then, the joint below the shirt cracked open and a little flesh-painted pee-pee sprung up. The crowd went wild.

Back then, when I bought the doll, I laughed it off. I told the press it was a gift for my wife. I jerked its head a time or two to show what happened. Everyone in the crowd was smiling and giggling. Security, too, looked back at me over their shoulders to catch a glimpse of the exposition, the flesh-colored splinter tipped with the head of a match.

When I returned to the embassy, I didn’t tell Marilyn what the doll did. She found out after listening to the Voice of America on the shortwave. Nothing was mentioned at the state dinner that evening. “Get rid of it” was all she said before turning off the lights and rolling over in bed.

Maybe I should have washed the plum. I was up all night in the bathroom. I brought the doll in there with me. As I sat in the bright tile light, I contemplated the thing. Its enigmatic smile, the way one eye seemed to wink, how its arms and hands and fingers looked like vines grown into the trunk of its body, what did it mean?

Everything I touch transforms into things I cannot begin to understand. I was terrified when I squeezed from my own penis its first drop of semen. I was twelve, taking a bath, soaping myself hard when I felt the shiver. I thought it was the chill in the air of the room, then I saw the little white pill slip out of me. It was soap, I thought. It burned. It had gotten inside. But it wasn’t soap. What had I done? Who could I tell? I had hurt myself badly, I thought, and once I thought that, it did not surprise me to then think that I had gotten what I deserved. I have always gotten what I deserved. I washed and washed myself. Years after that, here I was sick again in a strange bathroom in Chile, and a souvenir that didn’t have a name regarded me as my insides rearranged themselves spontaneously.

In Chile, I found out later, the ending — ito gets glued to every name. It means little, — ito . It’s affectionate. Little this, little that. And the kind of doll I bought that day in the market is now called Quayleito after me.

The guts of the thing are all spread out on my desk. I know now how it works. The springs, the trapdoor, the counterweights, the whole mechanism of the joke. I still don’t know its purpose, why it was made. Poor little Quayleito . What to do now? My days are empty. Idle hands. Devil’s playground.

The children are out in front selling lemonade to raise money for Jerry’s kids. One of them comes running in for more mix. It’s a holiday so we all have to shift for ourselves. The old Naval Observatory where we live is near the neighborhood of embassies. A pack of Africans in native dress have surrounded the card table, drinking from the tiny Dixie Cups while the kids are dumping the powdered mix into the picnic jug and wetting it down with the hose. I can see this from the house. Foreigners don’t understand why we have a labor day at the end of summer instead of in May. They are all working today, even the Marxists who live down the road. They are heading back to their desks after lunch, killing time at the stand.

I’ve got the television tuned to the telethon. Crystal Gayle, who is from Wabash, Indiana, is supposed to be on soon. Jerry staggers around the stage. His eyes are crossed, and he’s yammering out of the side of his mouth. The French think he is a genius. I hear that all the time. How the French think he is a genius. Personally, I liked him better when he was teamed up with Dean Martin, whose suave manners stood out against his sidekick’s clowning. I like the movie where Lewis plays a goofy caddy for Martin, who is a smooth golf pro. The high-pitched whining, bending the clubs, the divots. Martin gets the girl, wins the open. Now, Jerry looks doughy, the sheen on his hair matches the satin stripes on his formal trousers. My God, it’s time already to undo the bow tie. What the French say about him has to have gone to his head. He rants at enemies then leers buck-toothed, eyes bulging. He wears aviator glasses that look like copies of the pair the President wears.