Gore Vidal: Messiah

"And here you are, at Clarissa's."

"What an extraordinary woman she is!" The eyes were turned upon me, hazel eyes, very clear, the whites luminous with youth.

"She collects people, but not according to any of the usual criteria. She makes them all fit, somehow, but what it is they fit, what design, no one knows. I don't know, that is."

"I suppose I was collected. Though it might have been the other way around, since I am sure she interests me more than I do her."

"There is no way of telling."

"Anyway, I'm pleased she asked me here."

We talked of Clarissa with some interest, getting nowhere. Clarissa was truly enigmatic. She had lived for twenty years on the Hudson. She was not married but it was thought she had been. She entertained with great skill. She was in demand in New York and also in Europe where she often traveled. But no one knew anything of her origin or of the source of her wealth and, oddly enough, although everyone observed her remarkable idée fixe , no one ever discussed it, as though in tactful obedience to some obscure sense of form. In the half-dozen years that I had known her not once had I discussed with anyone her eccentricity. We accepted in her presence the reality of her mania, and there it ended. Some were more interested by it than others. I was fascinated, and having suspended both belief and doubt found her richly knowing in matters which interested me. Her accounts of various meetings with Labianus in Antioch were quite brilliant, all told most literally, as though she had no faculty for invention which perhaps, terrifying thought, she truly lacked, in which case… but we chose not to speculate. Iris spoke of plans.

"I'm going back to California."

"Tired of New York?"

"No, hardly. But I met someone quite extraordinary out there, someone I think I should like to see again." Her candor made it perfectly clear that her interest was not romantic. "It's rather in line too with what we were talking about. I mean your Julian and all that. He's a kind of preacher."

"That doesn't sound promising." A goldfish made a popping sound as it captured a dragonfly on the pond's surface.

"But he isn't the usual sort of thing at all. He's completely different but I'm not sure just how."

"An evangelist?" In those days loud men and women were still able to collect enormous crowds by ranging up and down the country roaring about that salvation which might be found in the bosom of the Lamb.

"No, his own sort of thing entirely. A little like the Vedanta teachers, only he's American, and young."

"What does he teach?"

"I… I'm not sure. No, don't laugh. I only met him once. At a friend's house in Santa Monica. He talked very little but one had the feeling that, well, that it was something unusual."

"It must have been if you can't recall what he said." I revised my first estimate: it was romantic after all; a man who was young, fascinating… I was almost jealous as a matter of principle.

"I'm afraid I don't make much sense." She gestured and the leaf fell into its own shadow on the grass. "Perhaps it was the effect he had on the others that impressed me. They were clever people, worldly people yet they listened to him like children."

"What does he do? does he preach? work?"

"I don't know that either. I met him the night before I left California and I haven't seen anyone who was there that evening since."

"But now you think you want to go back to find out?"

"Yes. I've thought about him a great deal these last few weeks. You'd think one would forget such a thing, but I haven't."

"What was his name?"

"Cave, I think. John Cave."

"A pair of initials calculated to amaze the innocent." Yet even while I invoked irony, I felt with a certain chill in the heat that this was to be Clarissa's plot, and for many days afterwards that name echoed in my memory, long after I had temporarily forgotten Iris's own name, had forgotten, as one does, the whole day, the peony in the boxwood, the leaf's fall and the catch of the goldfish; instants which now live again in the act of recreation, details which were to fade into a yellow-green blur of June and of the girl beside me in a garden and of that name spoken in my hearing for the first time, becoming in my imagination like some bare monolith awaiting the sculptor's chisel.

I did not see Iris again for some months. Nor, for that matter, did I see Clarissa who, the day after our lunch, disappeared on one of her mysterious trips… this time to London, I think, since she usually got there for the season. Clarissa's comings and goings doubtless followed some pattern though I could never make much sense of them. I was very disappointed not to see her before she left because I had wanted to ask her about Iris and also…

It has been a difficult day. Shortly after I wrote the lines above, this morning, I heard the sound of an American voice on the street-side of the hotel; the first American voice I've heard in some years for, excepting me, none has been allowed in Upper Egypt for twenty years. The division of the world has been quite thorough, religiously and politically, and had not some official long ago guessed my identity it is doubtful that I should have been granted asylum even in this remote region.

I tried to continue with my writing but it was impossible: I could recall nothing. My attention would not focus on the past, on those wraiths which have lately begun to assume again such startling reality as I go about the work of memory… but the past was lost to me this morning. The doors shut and I was marooned in the meager present.

Who was this American who had come to Luxor? and why?

For a moment the serenity which I have so long practiced failed me and I feared for my life. The long-awaited assassins had finally come. But then that animal within who undoes us all with his fierce will to live, grew quiet, accepting again the discipline I have so long maintained over him, his obedience due less perhaps to my strong will than to his fatigue, for he is no longer given to those rages and terrors and exultations which once dominated me as the moon does the tide: his defeat being my old age's single victory, and a bitter one.

I took the pages that I had written and hid them in a wide crack in the marble-topped Victorian washstand. I then put on a tie and linen jacket and, cane in hand, my most bemused and guileless expression upon my face, I left the room and walked down the tall dim corridor to the lobby, limping perhaps a little more than was necessary, exaggerating my quiet genuine debility to suggest, if possible, an even greater helplessness. If they had come at last to kill me, I thought it best to go to them while I still held in check the creature terror. As I approached the lobby, I recalled Cicero's death and took courage from his example. He too had been old and tired, too exasperated at the last even to flee.

My assassin (if such he is and I still do not know) looks perfectly harmless: a red-faced American in a white suit crumpled from heat and travel. In atrocious Arabic he was addressing the manager who, though he speaks no English, is competent in French, is accustomed to speaking French to Occidentals. My compatriot, however, was obstinate and smothered with a loud voice the polite European cadences of the manager.

I moved slowly to the desk, tapping emphatically with my cane on the tile floor. Both turned; it was the moment which I have so long dreaded: the eyes of an American were turned upon me once again. Would he know? Does he know? I felt all the blood leave my head. With a great effort, I remained on my feet; steadying my voice which has nowadays a tendency to quaver even when I am at ease, I said to the American, in our own language, the language I had not once spoken in nearly twenty years, "Can I be of assistance, sir?" The words sounded strange on my lips and I was aware that I had given them an ornateness which was quite unlike my usual speech. His look of surprise was, I think, perfectly genuine. I felt a cowardly relief: not yet, not yet.