Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

“If you’re not in a hurry, what’s the point in going?”

I spent most of the trip in my compartment, drinking, using my hypo to dream. It was the same dream: my surprise. Orlando was waiting in the windmill on a night after my return. Obeying his instinct he had kept this vigil alone. The promise we had made in childhood had matured to a vow.

The meniscus of moon hung between the windmill’s blades and bathed the earth in that exposing dust glow and made the salt marsh and the shore and the whole gray world, floor and ceiling, a flat-sided chamber for this vision. We were two images stealing together, as if we existed as fixed lovers in a field beyond the moon. Our ecstatic light-beams twisted toward earth, brother and sister, to be joined. The crickets, the sea-splash, the tremble of wind. And I knew he was there from the candlepower of his body that made the windmill shimmer like a lantern.

Back from the far side of the moon I crept across the grass and up the steps to where he lay. Somehow I shed my clothes. He laughed softly and folded me in his arms. He prepared me, then covered me and pumped me with life. My chafed skin was alight. Dreams are unspecific tumbling and heat, but I knew what I wanted — for him to burst through my squinting iris and demolish the virgin darkness in the camera of my flesh. Then goodbye photography! Goodbye film! Goodbye—

“Orlando, Orlando, anyone for Orlando.”

I woke and worked the shade up, and I Inew from the look of it where we were.

Florida, rinsed with green, with small sulking bushes, and here and there palms, was a wild garden of aching ferns in a clear yellow sunrise. After the low woods came seepages, fingers of water, then an ocean of hyacinths with birds diving into it and through the tangles of vines. They were not the spindly sandpipers and clumsy gray sea birds I was used to, but ones that had flapped from the dawn of the world, with flashing tails, long beaks, and legs that swayed and folded under them taking off. The white plumes of their feathers fanned out as they spilled again. The morning was so hot there was no dew on the leaves, which made the place look, for all its greenery, very old. Rags of moss dangled from overhanging branches and what flowers I could see were lotus-like, so delicate a photo would sink them.

In places the swamp water had scummy stretches, with black saplings and bitten-off tree trunks standing in them, some like gallows and others like coatracks and drowned knees. Each dead thing had collar stripes of dark tide marks, a decoration that took the curse off them. The green lace of stagnation hit by the morning light exploded like a dish of sulphur with an afterburn of midges sifting in bunches above it. I could not imagine furry things surviving here, but only families of waterproof reptiles pushing their snouts through the warm swamp and depositing eggs.

It had a lively smell of danger and it was huge and spreading in vine-whips and fleshy shoots, sliding from stump to stump like a sponge growing in a puddle. It had gone on fattening in the ooze, but for all its density it had a limpness: the smallest movement of a bird stirred it. I had never seen anything like it. It was the earliest moment of life in America, before the canoes, and so different from what I knew on the Cape, where there were footprints in the remotest dunes. I had not known places like this existed; I could not believe my luck.

Eden was like this. Not that manicured park of fruit trees and fig leaves and trimmed hedges, the Old Testament orchard signposted with punishments for picking the fruit and walking on the grass — not that, but this wilderness of succulence, trackless, risky, and half-sunk in bubbly mud, sprawling sideways in an infancy it could not outgrow — order without rules. Here, one could imagine brother and sister bumping like frogs in broad daylight, for in one plump tree with its feet in ferns an orchid clung amid a bandaging of vines, moss dripped, an upright fringe of green flames flickered along its boughs and its own leaves were sheltering hands. Other identical trees embraced, wrapped together like lovers and swelling where they touched.

One thing about photography: there are no second chances. I tried to do this vision of Florida from the train, but the rocking window jogged my camera. Though I was able to shoot it later, without the whoops-a-daisy of the train, none of the pictures looked genuine. My best pictures saw more than my eye and these lacked that great slap of sight.

We’ll have our honeymoon here, I thought: a honeymoon in paradise.

“I hope you find something to do here,” said Mama, almost her first words to me after I arrived in Verona. Her tone was dim and discouraging. She blinked at me as if to say, You shouldn’t have come .

Papa read the words written on Mama’s face: “I can’t for the life of me think why you came all this way. Furthermore, I doubt whether Carney has room for you.”

“You said there are twenty bedrooms in this house.”

“Palace,” said Papa. “Twenty-five. And they’re full.”

“Can you beat that.”

Carney’s palace (we were on settees in a mammoth lounge) was an Italian-style fruitcake with a bell tower and battlements, a courtyard filled with leering statuary and surrounded by a blundering wall. On the shore side a pier jutted into the Gulf of Mexico. But the yachts at the pier impressed me less than the pelicans I could see opening like umbrellas for their dives, and the chandelier in our lounge wasn’t half as splendid as its reflecting shape, the pyramid of oranges in the crystal bowl beneath it. The place itself, with its pictures and gold pillars and baroque scrollwork and high painted ceilings, although magnificent at a distance, was up close much shabbier. It was nailed together several degrees out of kilter and thickly regilded: movie theater or opera house decor, a spectacular silliness. Here bad taste was gluttonous, size mattered more than finish, and I was sure that none of it had the grandeur of the swamp they had drained to build it on.

It distressed me to think that Mama and Papa could be happy in this monkey-house of vulgarity, and had visited year after year. But I think what worried me most was the person responsible for this mess. It was a motiveless satire of grace and art, and each smirking cherub and blistered wall showed it. It did not reduplicate the Italian original, it did not come near — it was as if the savage who made it, having failed at creation, could only mock it in debauched stucco and brass. The tropical storms had done the rest, completed the parody by pocking it with salt. A person who would do this would stop at nothing.

“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “Tell Carney I’ve got a room in a boarding house. Mrs. Fritts’s. She’s a nice old body.”

Mama said, “Circus people stay at those places.”

“She’s a big girl now,” said Papa. He stared hard at me. “But what about your sister? What’s she supposed to do while you’re gallivanting down here?”

Speak for yourself , I almost said. But I was warned by an anxious look on his face, a double image of worry in fact, since they were both tanned and wore blue and white outfits that matched. Far from home they looked startled and ashamed, as if seeing them here in Florida I had discovered them misbehaving in a state of undress and was spoiling their fun.

Papa said, “She won’t sit on her hands if I know my Phoebe.”

“Phoebe can look after herself,” I said.

“Hasn’t got a brain in her head,” said Papa. “And Orlando’s probably out raising hell. I tell you, Maude, if anything happens you’re responsible.”

“I’m not staying here long,” I said. “I’ll just do some pictures and go.”

“Carney doesn’t allow photographers on his property.”