Nathaniel Rich - The Mayor's Tongue

"Easily answered," said a third voice, perched behind his temple and speaking in an immediate, righteous tone. "Love brought you here. You fell in love with Sonia, and now she's been kidnapped. She is beautiful and brilliant, and you two have an animal attraction to each other — remember the mud bath? Plus, she is a redhead. This is your great strength: you will travel the lengths of the world for the love of a woman."

"But which woman is she?" added the first voice, in a soft, daring trill.

"My God," interrupted the second voice. "Can you imagine what liberties Eakins might take with that poor, helpless girl? If we're to trust his own memoirs, he's one violent animal. He's also needy, treacherous, and all-wise."

"Did you read about his conquest of the goatherd's daughter in Mallorca, when he was just out of the army? She was barely twelve and he told her how to do it all right."

"I wouldn't let my daughter so much as read a sentence out of one of the ugly bastard's books lest she get the right idea."

"In matters of romance he is a sexual cannibal."

"He is a well-oiled bilker of women even if he is about a century old — talk about one hundred years of Sodom, yessir. And nary a complaint on the part of his mistresses, even the goatherd's daughter, bless her overtaxed heart."

"Is there something wrong with your mouth? It is twitching mightily," said Lang.

"The road!" shouted Eugene.

A white boulder stood several feet ahead of them, nearly as wide as the car. Lang braked and swerved in the direction of the sea. The Cinquecento's front bumper nudged several pebbles over the cliff, into the silent abyss below. Eugene and Lang jumped out and backed against the stony cliffside, as far away from the edge as possible. Beyond the boulder was another one just as big, and another, and then the road ahead disappeared under thousands of white rocks.

"Landslide," said Lang, chuckling nervously and pulling down on his mustache. He sounded like a broken windup clock. "There's very little infrastructure money here. It takes a long time for them to clean these things up. Especially in August."

Eugene tiptoed back to the car and after grabbing the book bag containing Alvaro's manuscript and his translation from the backseat, he reached inside the driver's-side window, putting the gearshift into reverse. With a groan the car slid back, lengthwise across the road, until its bumper slid against the rock face with a quiet crumple. They knelt behind it and pushed, but it wouldn't budge. The chipped limestone rock wall scrabbled against their backs.

"I'm a weak man," said Lang, sweat leaking from his forehead into his eyes. Eugene noticed Lang's arms for the first time: they were stringy and blanched, and now scratched from the limestone.

"I'm a weak man."

"We can do it," said Eugene. "Once we budge it, it'llstart to roll, and we can get back in."

He stared at Lang, and his stomach fell. The man was on the verge of tears. A gust licked off the cliffside and smacked him in the face.

"I can't!" said Lang, in a loud falsetto.

Since they hadn't passed a house, or a car, for over an hour, they decided to walk farther up the hill in search of help. In the ravine below, yellow moss-covered rocks peeped out from clearings among the juniper shrubs, and near the bottom of his view a thin brook squiggled between plane trees like an artist's signature. And farther off, the calm olivaceous water of the sea and the city's needle spires and terra-cotta roofs.

Eugene paused every few minutes so that the short-legged Lang could keep up — it took two of Lang's paces to equal every one of Eugene's. Eugene could tell that Lang was growing increasingly anxious, and not just because of the abandoned car. The higher up into the alpine air they walked, the more rambling his speech became. He engrossed himself for many minutes with an excited monologue on the history of the Esperanto language; did Eugene know that there were regions in inner China where people spoke a dialect of the language so evolved that it was incomprehensible to other Esperanto speakers? Halfway into his monologue, Lang shifted from English to Esperanto without seeming to notice. Lang took Eugene's bewildered expression as encouragement and patiently attempted to clarify his points in greater detail. Eugene did not bother to disrupt this chatter, but wondered how far they would have to walk before they saw another person.

The road turned into the cliffs, and entered a thick forest. On one side a narrow dirt path led down in the direction of the ravine.

"Could this be a path to someone's house?" asked Eugene. Lang looked up, surprised, and stopped talking, even though his jaw kept ticking for several seconds longer.

"You know what this is?" said Lang, speaking in English again. He didn't wait for a response, but headed down the path straight into the brush. Eugene followed along, ducking and dodging, happy at the thought that a friend of Lang's might be living at the end of the trail. Soon they saw a large white rock formation running parallel with the trail. As they reached the bottom of the path, Eugene saw that the formation was the mouth of a natural tunnel. A river burst from the tunnel into a large pool, making a churning noise like a washing machine. The water gleamed an enchanted blue-green, and was surrounded by a sparkling ring of travertine.

"Isn't this a beautiful spot?" said Lang. He removed his boots and socks and dipped his feet at the edge of the waterfall. Looking up, Eugene saw that the cavernous rock tunnel ran up the hill in the direction of the road, like a fallen column. There was no house — or other person — to be seen.

"The Timavo," said Lang. He cocked his beret and peered off into the distance. "The hidden river. It begins on Mount Nevoso, the Slovenian Carso's highest peak, where seven streams merge into one. It disappears into the grottoes of San Canziano, flowing down the Italian Carso in hidden caves as many as three hundred meters underground. It doesn't reemerge until it reaches the city gates of Tuba, where it springs up near the apse of the Chiesa di San Giovanni. Simply put, it's marvelous. A real marvelous adventure!"

"Good. So we're near the town of Tuba."

"No, no, that's miles up. This surfacing of the Timavo is not on any maps. But trust me, the river is navigable from here. It's the fastest way up the mountain. Faster than any road or path."

Eugene peered into the mouth of the tunnel. It looked like a gigantic sewer pipe, roughly ten feet tall, with stalactites hanging from the rock ceiling. The river itself seemed, at this point at least, only three feet deep, but it was nearly ten times as wide; it galloped over the rocks, spurting foam. It was difficult to make out much else, because the tunnel admitted no sunlight. The turbulent water made a ferocious, gnashing roar. The way did not, to Eugene, seem passable.

Lang whistled jubilantly to himself, a high-pitched sound like a popped bicycle tire. He shouted into the tunnel, cupping his hand to his mouth in a theatrical gesture.

"We're coming, Alice!"

He bounded, childlike into the cave.

"Francesco," called Eugene, reaching out to the tiny man. "What about the car?"

"Oh leeeeeave it," shouted Lang over his shoulder. His voice was barely audible under the sound of the river." Don't worry— no one lives anywhere near here! Hey, look at this — it's just the strangest thing. ."

And Lang's voice, together with his body, vanished into the obscurity of the cave. Eugene looked back at the pool, gave a final sorry glance up to the heavens, and stepped onto a rock at the foot of the tunnel. He stepped to another rock, and then another, and then it was very loud and very dark.