Nathaniel Rich - The Mayor's Tongue

Beside him, Enzo wept the tears of a young maid.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" Eugene clapped him on the back. Enzo shuffled his feet and several stones tumbled hundreds of yards down the escarpment.

"It's down there," said Enzo. "Idaville."

"Idaville? Down in the valley?"

"That's where my love is. And yours. And him."

"Eakins?"

"The Mayor," said Enzo. He refused to make eye contact. "I hope he has not taken her already. I might be too late. Do you have any tissues?"

Eugene did not. Enzo shrugged and, reaching into his jacket, found a wad of fig leaves. He rubbed them against his runny nose and then stuffed them back into his pocket.

"I don't see any town," said Eugene. He absentmindedly patted the book bag under his arm, feeling the weight of Alvaro's manuscript. He hadn't found much time to work on it, but he'd gotten far enough to determine that Jacinto had sucked the shinefish venom from Alsa's neck, and saved her life, only to discover that her father had shown up in Cibao, with vengeance on his mind.

"Don't worry," said Enzo, "the town is in the valley. There's a good reason no one can see it from up here. Who wouldn't want to visit a town down there, if you knew it existed?"

"No one in the Carso visits the town?"

"Of course they don't.

My goodness. Imagine what might happen then!"

Eugene followed Enzo over the ridge and down a narrow muddy path hemmed in by a line of short heath bushes that sprouted urn-shaped flowers. The path curled around misshapen mounds covered with odd leafless shrubs, their branches white like bones left to dry in the sun. The landscape reminded Eugene of the scene from Eakins's novella, in which a young thief tracks his true love across a desolate Irish moor.

"Have you read Eakins's Every Man for Himself and God Against All ?"

"Fantastic!" said Enzo, stumbling over a root. "Do you remember the wood sprite?"

Eugene nodded.

"You know, he's quite a good guy once you get to know him. Once you get past his wicked mouth. He swears at children."

"I don't remember that."

"There's no need to remember anything. I'm telling you how he is."

Eugene was looking forward to having Sonia join him as a partner in sanity.

When they finally reached the floor of the valley, they came upon a clear, shallow brook. Enzo bent down to drink.

"Is that safe?" asked Eugene.

"No reason to think it's not," said Enzo. "There are no people up here to pollute it. I never get sick from bad water anyway."

Eugene joined him and drank deeply. The freezing water trickled down his throat and into his belly. Several times he pulled himself up and spat out morsels of silt.

From this end of the valley, the landscape was magnificent and vast. Thousands of yards to either side stood the slopes of the mountain peaks, white and gray-speckled on the top, while lower down, thin, glistening waterfalls gave the mountains a vaporous, polychromatic grandeur. In the valley itself the interspersed groves of beech trees stood like cities of skyscrapers in the otherwise deserted plain. Each grove had hundreds of trees, and rarely were two clusters less than half a mile apart. The sky had the color and consistency of paraffin wax. The candle flame at the apex of the dome was the midday sun. For once Enzo had stopped weeping.

"It's so happy," he was saying to himself. "It's so happy. Happiness. Happy."

"Why? As far as I can tell, we're completely lost."

"I'm close to her again. I'm sure of it. She's returned. And I've returned. We'llbe united again. I haven't seen her since the bus station. That day was so long ago it seems like another life."

Enzo explained that the town was not here but far away, on the opposite side of the valley. They skirted a dense grove and Eugene could make out a distinct, sharp odor that was neither floral nor atmospheric in nature.

"Do you smell juniper berries?" asked Enzo. "There must be a patch of them nearby."

"I smell something all right."

The air darkened slightly, and beneath their muddy feet the blades of heather cast shadows onto one another. A loud, roaring belch froze them in their tracks.

"There might be bears in these woods," said Enzo.

The trees beside them rubbed together and dislodged a filthy, barefoot, hunched-over figure. He wore a ragged military jacket, a whitish shirt the size of a mainsail, and a grimy pair of khaki pants.

"A gadda lye?" said the man.

"I thought no one came down into the valley," whispered Eugene.

"They don't," said Enzo. "He's from Idaville."

"A gadda lye?" the man asked again. He opened his lips in a grinning leer, revealing rotted incisors and a black tongue. He looked oddly familiar, but Eugene couldn't place him.

"This man's drunk," said Enzo, his brows crinkling.

"Amma gadda lig?" said the pickled man. He reached into his back pocket and withdrew a greased, withered cigarette with a broken, dangling tip. Enzo nodded and removed from his jacket a box of matches. He struck a match and, with an unsteady hand, lit the man's cigarette.

The drunk inhaled and his eyes rolled up in bliss.

"Aaaah," he said. "Nigh."

"You're welcome," said Enzo.

"Are you from Idaville?" asked Eugene.

"Ha!" said the drunk, clapping his free hand to his shoulder. "A lookin' far Eakins, arny?"

"Well, sort of — there's a girl named Sonia—"

"Oh ya DINda sai?" The drunk's eyes were shut, and saliva dripped from his gums. Before he could say anything else, he spun about and fell face forward into the grove. As he fell, one of his pantlegs caught on his knee, revealing a calf made of wood — a peg leg.

"Wait—" said Eugene, grabbing his friend's shoulder. "Who is this man?"

"It's no use. He's always like this."

"You know him?" asked Eugene.

"Yeah, he's Idaville's town drunk. I would see him around, he leaves sometimes for Trieste and who knows where else. He ends up in all kinds of unusual places. They call him Bazlen."

Eugene shook his head, trying to remember how he knew this name. Memory is an animal with tentacles, and Eugene's were already occupied, juggling other objects from his past.

They left the drunk collapsed in the grove and hiked on. The floor of the valley rose and fell in green waves. Dark islands of poplars and beech were scattered about. Several times they heard a rustling behind them and, turning, would see Bazlen swirling in the heather, warbling an Irish drinking song and sinking back down.

Eugene furiously tried to put everything together. He had been carried along this far without fully understanding what he had become a part of. Since arriving in Italy he had felt, at times, like he was brushing up against some other realm. Only now did he realize that, at some point, he had crossed an invisible border and was now trespassing on a foreign territory. He groped into his bag to make sure he still had Alvaro's manuscript. It was there, thick and frayed around the edges.

Just before sundown they reached the far edge of the valley, where two rock faces met in a jagged, vertical crevice. The top of the gap was obscured by a wispy blue-gray cloud. There, in front of a gleaming patch of wild convolvuli, they spotted an elderly man. Slumped over his cane, he strode defiantly, but not without some infirmity, in a long arc through the red flowerbeds. At first, Eugene thought that the man was looking directly at him, but when he got closer, he saw that the man's expression was blank, so that it seemed he was staring through Eugene, right on to the other side of the valley.

"Ah! I know this man too," said Enzo. "He is a beautiful artist. He made a portrait for me of my beloved. I carry it around with me."

"You have a painting of her?"

"He painted the portrait based entirely on my description of her. It was difficult at first, perhaps because I was a little hazy on her exact features. What I described was not exactly a person, just. . a type of glow. But then he asked me to describe my feelings about her, how she affected me — you see what I mean? And so I described my feelings just as I did to you. He began sketching even as I spoke. I have to admit that he created a brilliant portrait. It is my only keepsake from Idaville."