Paul Auster - Invisible

I stepped out into the broiling four o’clock heat, expecting to find R.B. waiting for me, but he wasn’t there. My escort to the house was Samuel, the handyman-caretaker, a strong, well-built, exceedingly handsome young man of around thirty-with exceedingly black skin, which would suggest he is not descended from that band of Scottish sailors marooned here in the 18th century. After my encounter with the remote and taciturn men at the airport terminal, I found it a relief to be smiled at again.

It didn’t take long to understand why the job of accompanying me to Moon Hill had been given to Samuel. We rode in a car for the first ten minutes, which led me to assume we would drive all the way to the house, but then Samuel stopped the car, and the rest of the journey-that is to say, the bulk of the journey, the more than one-hour journey still in front of us-was made on foot. It was an arduous trek, an excruciating climb up a steep, root-entangled path that sapped my strength and left me gasping for breath after five minutes. I am a person who sits in libraries, a fifty-three-year-old woman who smokes too many cigarettes and weighs twenty pounds more than she should, and my body is not cut out for exertions of this sort. I was thoroughly humiliated by my ineptitude, by the sweat that poured out of me and drenched my clothes, by the swarms of mosquitoes dancing around my head, by my frequent calls to stop and rest, by the slippery soles of my sandals, which made me fall, not once, not twice, but again and again. But even worse, far worse than my petty physical woes, there was the shame of watching Samuel in front of me, the shame of seeing Samuel carry my suitcase on his head , my too heavy suitcase, loaded down with the weight of too many unnecessary books, and how not to see in that image of a black man carrying a white woman’s possessions on his head the horrors of the colonial past, the atrocities of the Congo and French Africa, the centuries of affliction-

I mustn’t go on like this. I’m working myself into a lather, and if I mean to get through these days with my mind intact, I must maintain my composure. The reality is that Samuel wasn’t the least bit distressed about what he was doing. He has been up and down this mountain thousands of times, he carries provisions on his head as a matter of course, and for someone born on an island as poor as this one, working in the house of a man like R.B. is considered a good job. Whenever I asked him to stop, he did so without complaint. No trouble, ma’am. Just take it nice and easy. We’ll get there when we get there.

R.B. was napping in his room when we reached the top of the mountain. Incomprehensible as that might have been, it gave me a chance to settle into my own room (high, high up, overlooking the ocean) and pull myself together. I showered, put on a fresh set of clothes, and did my hair. Minor improvements, perhaps, but at least I didn’t have to live through the embarrassment of being seen in such a sorry state. The walk up the mountain had nearly destroyed me.

In spite of my efforts, I could see the disappointment in his eyes when I entered the living room an hour later-the first look after so many years, and the sad acknowledgment that the young girl of long ago had turned into a frowsy, none-too-attractive, postmenopausal woman in late middle age.

Unfortunately-no, I think I mean fortunately-the disappointment was mutual. In the past, I had found him to be a seductive figure, good-looking in a rough sort of way, something close to an ideal embodiment of male confidence and power. R.B. was never a thin man, but in the years since I last saw him, he has put on considerable amounts of weight, a truckload of excess poundage, and as he stood up to greet me (dressed in shorts, with no shirt, no shoes or socks), I was astonished to see how large his stomach had grown. It is a great medicine ball of a stomach now, and with most of the hair gone from his head, his skull reminded me of a volleyball. A ridiculous image, I know, but the mind is always churning forth its quirky nonsense, and that was what I saw when he stood up and approached me: a man composed of two spheres, a medicine ball and a volleyball. He is much bigger, then, but not whalelike, not blubbery or drooping with flab-just large. The skin around his stomach is quite taut, actually, and except for the fleshy creases around his knees and neck, he looks fit for a man his age.

An instant after I saw it, the crestfallen look vanished from his eyes. With all the aplomb of a practiced diplomat, R.B. broke into a smile, opened his arms, and hugged me. It’s a miracle, he said.

That hug proved to be the high point of the evening. We drank the rum punches Samuel prepared for us (very good), I watched R.B. film the sunset (I found it inane), and then we sat down to dinner (heavy food, beef drowned in a thick sauce, inappropriate fare for this climate-better suited to Alsace in midwinter). The old cook, Nancy, is not old at all-forty, forty-five at most-and I wonder if she doesn’t have two jobs in this household: cook by day, R.B.’s bed partner at night. Melinda is in her early twenties, and therefore is probably too young to fill the latter role. She is a beautiful girl, by the way, as beautiful as Samuel is handsome, a tall, lanky thing with an exquisite gliding walk, and from the little looks they give each other, I would guess that she and Samuel are an item. Nancy and Melinda served us the food, Samuel cleared the table and washed the dishes, and as the meal wore on I found myself growing increasingly uncomfortable. I don’t like being waited on by servants. It offends me somehow, especially in a situation like this one, with three people working for just two others, three black people working for two white people. Again: unpleasant echoes of the colonial past. How to get rid of this feeling of shame? Nancy, Melinda, and Samuel went about their tasks with stolid equanimity, and though I received a number of courteous smiles, they seemed guarded and aloof, indifferent. What must they think of us? They probably laugh at us behind our backs-with good reason.

The servants got me down, yes, but not as much as R.B. himself did. After his warm welcome, I felt as if he no longer knew what to do with me. He kept saying that I must be tired, that the trip must have worn me out, that jet lag is a modern invention designed to ruin the human body. I won’t deny that I was exhausted and jet-lagged, that my muscles ached from my battle with the mountain, but I wanted to stay up and talk, to reminisce about old times as he put it in one of his letters, and he seemed reluctant to go there with me. Our conversation over dinner was brutally dull. He told me about his discovery of Quillia and how he had managed to buy this house, discussed some of the particulars of local life, and then lectured me on the flora and fauna of the island. Mystifying.

I am in bed now, encased in a dome of white mosquito netting. My body is smeared with an odious product called OFF, a mosquito repellent that smells of toxic, life-threatening chemicals, and the green anti-mosquito coils on either side of the bed are slowly burning down, emitting curious little trails of smoke.

I wonder what I am doing here.

6/26 . Nothing for two days. It has been impossible to write, impossible to find a moment’s peace, but now that I have left Moon Hill and am on my way back to Paris, I can pick up the story and push on to the bitter end. Bitter is precisely the word I want to use here. I feel bitter about what happened, and I know I will be tasting that bitterness for a long time to come.

It started the next morning, the morning after my arrival at the house, the 24th. Sitting over breakfast in the dining room, R.B. calmly put down his cup of coffee, looked me in the eye, and asked me to marry him. It was so far-fetched, so utterly unexpected, I burst out laughing.