Jessica Sequeira

Even the contemplative life is only an effort, Nora my dear, to hide the body so the feet won’t stick out.



— Djuna Barnes, “Nightwood”



 



 



“The wax imprinted with the seal,” said I,



“can never change the figure; so my brain



Now bears its stamp from you.”



— Dante, “Purgatorio,” Canto 33, Lines 79-81



 



** **



**THE START OF WHAT MIGHT BE CALLED A CRIME SCENE.**



 



At the entrance to the promenade on Carter Road a man sat beside a pile of coconuts, holding a waist-high blade. It was, he’d recently discovered, quite useful for picking at a troublesome right toenail; this is the way he was employing it now, waiting until for Rs10 someone gave him the chance to display his executioner’s skills: guillotine the fruit, push in a bright straw, hand over the bowl brimming with its own milk. The umbrella sheltering his stand was the same dirty yellow and red as the sidewalk; the air bristled with heat. Waves lashed the shore. The rains would come soon.



Though Fr. Correa was usually an observant man, noting the coconutwallah and the umbrella and much more besides, today such perceptions had been pushed away: like water about a ship’s prow. It was late, but he continued swiftly along the path running alongside the beach, skirting the black mud and rocks, the sea shaded like a snail’s belly and leaving the same oily traces. Swimmers, dozens, maybe hundreds, were ignoring the multiple posted warnings and playing in the waves. Wrappers with Hindi brand names littered the walk; couples, with a liberty their homes would not admit, sat kissing on benches with plaques: “In memory of the late—,” “God is great,” “Raja is great,” “Allah is great.” Water—ship—prow—perceptions gently splashing up and fading away: in a confused muddle all passed him by, the combo bhel puri and Friendly’s ice cream stand, the skin care advertisements every few yards, the old stone crosses built to ward off bhoots, the men scrubbing laundry out on the rocks. In red painted capitals, the government sign on the wall: “Don’t throw poojas in the sea, even God wouldn’t approve.”



All because somewhere in the city, a man he did not know had been killed.



 



The fact was, he could not dispel the image of scissors from his mind. He knew they were common, a household item easy to obtain, as was rope; nor did death itself shock him—always a mundane, and sobering, deliverance into a form more pure. And yet: scissors. It was just because they were so concrete and everyday that their use on the flesh so disturbed him. After the policeman’s tale of Fr. Almeida—strangled with rope, his lips slit open, scissors sticking up from the open mouth—they were all he could think of: their holes for the hand, their one blade opening into two.



 “Why should it bother me?” he asked himself. Then, with a bravado that he knew was false: “After all, I’ve seen death before.”



As a young priest he’d been sent to Madhya Pradesh for his missionary requirement. It had been ferociously cold, the children’s eyes peering out from unwashed faces, teenagers picking up with ease the western disdain for farm work but unwilling to toil at English (an ugly language; they slinked around instead doing good-for-nothing such-and-such, their mothers looking at him with accusing eyes). Pieces of cloth spread on the ground of the little hut were the only layer between him and the hard frozen earth. Many had passed away that winter, usually already in an advanced, greenish state of bloat by the time he arrived. There had not been medicine, nor would they have taken it had there been. But he was not thinking of humans. No: for some reason it had taken a cat falling into the village well to shake him—one of the mangy things that prowled about, feeding on the no doubt disease-ridden rats. The villagers, making their daily trek to the well, walking barefoot through the forest, had not reported it to him at once. For days the animal had lain rotting away, preventing access to the only water supply for miles, before thirst had won out and a reluctant cook knocked at his door.



No moonlight had lit the ground as Fr. Correa picked his way over the broken branches and muddy leaves of the jungle lying between him and the well. The cook accompanied with a lantern, neither electric light nor batteries being available. But because the darkness lacked the thinness any lamp could penetrate, the little yellow spot did little to illumine it. In the blackness even the voices of the jackals in the brush seemed to assume a sharper tone (as if cut from scissors, murmured a jagged corner of his mind). How did the villagers navigate these paths? Eventually he came to the little clearing, where at the bottom of the black ring the cat’s body formed a fly-ridden island in the murk. “Take it away,” he’d ordered the cook, whose job every day was to break the necks of the chickens. The man refused, shrank back as if faced with a madman. He had not understood this reluctance to touch the corpse. Eventually, another villager had whispered to him the reason; a low-class dalit was dispatched to remove it.



“At the same time, why shouldn’t it bother me?” he asked himself suddenly, and immediately this seemed the more sensible question.



 



With relief he remembered that he’d promised to see only one person that day, and that was Risha. Risha lived on the western side of Bandra’s two sections; the board at ground level listed the surnames of the building residents. Nearly all Portuguese, but overlaid by a curiously overemphasized English, the Marathi tongue twisting together something strange of its own. Ferreira lost the soft swish of its abdominal “ay,” assumed a hard “air”; “Gracias” metamorphosed into “gracious” (the diocese archbishop’s surname, thrilling punning church bulletin contributors), “Rodrigues” became “Rodrigs,” spelt “Rodricks” for convenience. Ascending four flights he reached at last the gleaming marble tiles and sparkling window panes of Risha’s flat, viewed from without as she thrust the door open and ushered him in. Too clean, he thought immediately; the floor sparkled and the corner even boasted a new potted plant. Catholics but the Hindu mentality: turn inwards, the outside can go to hell, what’s a little dirt so long as the inner domain remains pure. Even the humblest shack will be spick-span when the country goes to pieces.



Standing over the stove ten paces away Risha was peeling and chopping a stem of ginger. She dropped it into the boiling water, stirred in milk and a dash of sugar, poured the chai into a porcelain cup on a tray beside two biscuits. “What’s new with you?”



He told her, then, about that morning. The church had been empty when he’d entered; light had been filtering through the small glass louvers wedged between squares of precast concrete and fitted with imported polychromatic glass. In the shimmering air, winged insects flashed past. Sensible people were home, or sipping Pepsis at an indoor café, or whiling away the hours somewhere else with a fan. But there he was, dipping his hand into the cool water of the entrance font, slow hand moving: forehead, chest, left shoulder, right. Within him that familiar contentment was growing, objects impressing themselves through his half-closed eyes: the altar, the cross outlined in diamond lights, the rows of seats, the red hymnals specially bound and embossed. Comfort and silence drew him close to the state in which he’d left seminary years before. To think even then that the light flooding in through the low windows on both sides was taking on a certain softness, molding itself into its opposite. He shielded his eyes and squinted: a man, yes, a policeman to gauge from the uniform. Passing the first pew, the third, the seventh. Stopping.



“He came to me, asking for help understanding the mind of the killer. He’d left a note, you see, claiming to understand the mind of God. So they think I can help understand the mind of the murderer. They asked me for help, Risha. Of course I said yes.”



 



One must watch one’s feet when walking in public places: no knowing what one might step on. Yet only when he felt developing a slight limp in one leg, followed soon by a flapping in the other, did he pinpoint the problem: his sandals were disintegrating. With three fingers he peeled off the bottom layers completely, tossing them into a Bandra Residents Association bin. With only a thin layer of plastic separating his feet from the pavement, each step he took made a complete impression: and this sensation provoked in him a delicious sense of total freedom.



 



 



**MAKING THE ROUNDS.**



 



In Bandra, Mumbai—“Queen of the Suburbs”—residents pride themselves on their constant spirit. “Take a look at us!” they say. “Never quiet, even at four am. Between Chitrapatee Shivaji and the Railway, weddings drum down the streets, gangsters move foreign liquor and lakhs, crores of gold. See the high schoolers congregating in hashish bars, the shiny black clips of the girls in gymkhana. Browse western wear, floor five Shoppers Stop; visit Hill Road, the stalls in the street. Wade through puddles to bargain down handbags, lumpy bras massed on tables, salwars tailored by hand. Because you have to keep upbeat here, it’s all in the temperament. In the west you might cultivate melancholy but here aloneness and silence are unknown. If you’re born into it rickshaws, motorbikes, the constant buzz of people become what silence really means: we’re tucked into our community like silver foil desserts in a sweet box, Yes, we admit it, just wander a little and they’re squatting over chapattis, even on the main street there’s stink and the odd cow. But there isn’t true loneliness, there isn’t Western despair. We have faith. We have community. And it’s that which gives us hope.”



 



At the station Inspector Anand’s hand grasped his shoulder, guided him toward his office—“Coffee?”—spun creamer to him across the slightly sticky table. Spooning Nescafé into a mug during the trivialities that followed—it’s always best when it’s piping hot, isn’t it, take some biscuit, bengal gram is there—he’d begun to think this was someone he could trust. Together they’d considered the investigation. For now, to make progress, his attention would center on the priest. Since it was impossible to think of a person in isolation—or in any case foolish, given a murder requires two parties—the best course would be to speak with those the priest had known. Only after would he visit the site of the death. From Navrijan Bookstore he purchased a tape recorder and notebook from the counter assistant with the mullah’s cap; on Tuesday, Inspector Anand drove up in an old green Fiat and waved from across the street. Opening the car door, Fr. Correa got in.



The first visit was to the house of an elderly couple. The entrance hall was under an inch of water when he knocked; Laetitia Domingues was cleaning when he found her (she must have opened the door but no one was there when he entered) flying from room to room, covering the beds, the cabinet, the table with pink plastic sheeting before the next rains. Cracks spidered the walls; half the ceiling lay on the floor in flakes. “Come in, come in,” she cried. “I’ll be just a moment,” and the same invisible presence slid a chair beneath him, a cup of tea in his hand. Her husband Ivan sat quietly before the television in a pair of boxers.



For an hour they remained on the cushions in the sitting room, discussing Fr. Almeida. A good man, insisted Ivan fiercely. Fr. Almeida’s treatments had offered him relief from pain; a cyst plaguing him for years had been cured when Almeida had placed one cool finger upon it. Ivan had written a letter to the Examiner decrying the “total lack of action and self-serving complacency” of the local police force, which had been published; he stood now to remove it from a dresser drawer and show Fr. Correa, who was struck by its simple, vigorous style. Despite their anti-police sentiments neither of the Domingueses were surprised he had been sent their way. They were known for being devout.



His questions finished, Laetitia rose. “Every day,” she said, pulling open a drawer and passing her husband a set of wooden beads: a plastic version was already in her hand. “This is our strength.” Ivan began, mumbling at rapid-pace, but with complete conviction—over the years the rosary itself had become an extension of his mind, so that even touching a bead evoked thousands of Hail Mary’s, and each Hail Mary took on physical weight. Midway through, without his noticing, the rosary fell into a heap between his thin legs, but in a way suggesting somehow not impotence but strength. Fr. Correa felt a sudden and inexplicable exhaustion. He declined a second cup of tea and promised to stop by were he ever in the neighborhood again.   



 



Along the road to the Kerala campus children wove between cars, selling all kinds of things: toy boats, clear plastic umbrellas, collections of stories by Kushwant Singh. On the way they passed a line of hutments, crammed within a tiny interval. The government had cleverly paid gardeners to cultivate a nursery along the road and bored attendants to care for them at all hours, so that there would be no space for shacks; instead there stretched sweeping lines of yellow, emerald, incarnadine flowers blossoming from lines of pots. The stalks of some were tilted in the direction of the hutments. Come, they seemed to say: be small, make yourselves invisible, burrow down into our warm and welcoming soil. It is warm, we get lots of clean water, there are friendly spiders and mites for company, no one will disturb you here. The campus was built in the middle of a marsh and so unlike in the rest of the city, big leafy green plants were everywhere, with puddles of water overflowing into the cement sidewalk.



Professor Peranha had an office in Rangade Bhavan, where a cluster of students was standing outside. Fr. Correa seated himself on a bench in the corridor and prepared to settle in. He had to wait less than ten minutes; the knot of people unraveled surprisingly quickly into the queue hidden within it. Soon enough the authors of the penultimate (on Abused Women) and final (on Domestic Help) theses had been sent away with instructions for further fieldwork, or statistical analysis, so their work could stand along the wall alongside the hundreds of other projects the professor had supervised. If one was familiar enough with the field the patterns of intellectual currents could be discerned, encoded within the colons and capitalizations, the preoccupations of the past mixing headily with current research.



Fr. Correa had known the professor for years; their relationship was marked above all by mutual respect, grounded in mutual silence. If the professor considered religion a relatively harmless tool required to placate the population, he said nothing. And if Fr. Correa saw God in the professor’s work—one always left his office with a letter or book, the slim kind you accept out of mere politeness but later find contains the key to your entire work—this reverence was saved for other ears. The two shared a deep love of bridge, forming a team on the occasion they found a pair: that was enough.



Which was why Professor Paranha’s involvement with Almeida, the visits that according to Inspector Anand he made twice weekly, were so surprising. He had never mentioned them; it gave this meeting the nature of a confrontation, for which Fr. Correa had no desire. At the same time, his friend’s behavior was curious: subtle, to a degree an outsider might call dissembling, if he had never seen Professor Paranha’s open honest face before. It was a face Fr. Correa knew well, having had ample opportunity to watch it as the professor slid across a five of diamonds with perfect equanimity, bidding an artificial 3NT; it could mask certain complexities, even the lack of a minor suite contract.



What transpired in that office? Though Professor Paranha preferred his privacy, one sentence hinted at what he’d been looking for with Almeida:  “The idea began to obsess me: to construct a single, beautiful book that gave a glimpse of divine radiance. At rare moments I could even feel myself approaching the tender phrase, the geometric structure, which would recreate the world in its beauty. A sentence can be stroked to make it purr, sucked like a boiled sweet, scoured until the rust is removed and it sits there burnished as a new kettle…”



Driving back, half the hutments standing on the way in were gone, demolished by governmental order in a flash raid by police with night sticks. Only the oldest ones, there since 1984 and therefore with legal permits though indistinguishable from the rest, were spared. Tapping batons against their legs showily, a few police still kept watch. Two women were already stacking up the wood planks and sheets of scrap metal into neat piles, so that as soon as the police departed with a siren squall they could set up once more.



 



Onward they went to the Bombay High Court second appeals room, papers soft and crumpled, bound in twine, stacked to the ceilings, softening away through the waterlogged air into nothing… hands clicked over typewriters perched atop the stacks. In that meaningless, breathing building, every door opened like an entrance to a self-contained absurdity. A judge expounding far longer than was needed, lawyers sounding off like television announcers, a bailiff taking notes in a baseball cap—an affront, no two ways about it!—five levels of verandas overlooking the massive central courtyard. You could wander up and down the floors; no one seemed to care. People in tight red caps and costumes in white with embroidered beads on the chest, Sikhs wearing their best turbans, judges smelling of sweat as they whirled by in black robes, individuals and families waiting on benches and rows of chairs or quietly, quietly sobbing… The clerk on their list was out. No, no one knew when he would return. They exited and continued on their way…



 



Inspector Anand, in the car beside him: “Do you want to know why I became a police officer?”



The inside of a Fiat is not very large; the two had been spending nearly every day with one another for a week; the car was stalled in traffic. Everything demanded an exchange of confidences.



“The building where I grew up was down the street from this fence,” the inspector said, keeping one light hand on the wheel. “An unmarked gate, just across from a giant billboard advertisement for Gold Flake honeydew tobacco. As kids we had all sorts of tales about it, though mostly we accepted what our parents told us: that it was where the gods lived and devoured the sweets we gave them as offerings. One day I discovered a small hole in the fence, behind a red electrical box reading ‘Stick No Bills.’ I was small for my age; immediately I grew curious. By inserting one leg, ducking my head under, twisting my head sideways and wriggling the second leg over I was able to pass through this hole, something impossible only one year later. To my great disappointment I came up against only a much larger, thicker second fence. Pressed into the almost nonexistent space between the first wall and the second—turning anything, even my head, sideways was impossible—for a minute I descended into a cold panic. My body shook in its entirety. Then, an immense calm overcame me. The external situation would remain the same whether I was nervous or not; this thought gave me the courage to sidle right a few steps. And that’s when I saw it, a tiny chink precisely at eye level. A sign. Mehboob Studios. I saw it all, the stars going in and out, not in saris and thick makeup like in the magazines but in T-shirts and jeans. When I saw Raj Kapoor, my heart almost gave out. This was the hero of my youth: when I was younger I’d pasted up magazine pictures of him in my room at home… This was where I crouched, day after day, not longer than twenty minutes at a stretch because my mother expected me, but long enough. When I passed the building on the way back from school I would run my hands over the gate. It was something special, something only I knew about.”



He paused. Fr. Correa tilted his head and waited.           



“You are expecting this to be a story of how my boyhood illusions were destroyed,” the inspector said, looking at him uncannily.



“You will be disappointed,” he continued, maintaining his stare.



Fr. Correa exhaled; Anand’s mouth continued to move. “Strange things went on there. They had costumes, would try on British imperial clothes, Portuguese… Later I discovered young stars were entertained, females, given the chance to prove themselves. But none of it matters now.” His eyes were far away. Fr. Correa clutched the door handle as they narrowly escaped colliding with a motorbike careening in the opposite direction. “In the merciless and unsubtle heat of this city, the idea that there are hundreds or thousands of such nooks enthralled me. And if you’re not a criminal, the only chance to see them is if you go into my line.”



     



The oldest man in Pali Hill lived in one of the Portuguese colonial bungalows, the ones open at both ends so the summer breeze could travel the length of the house and ripple the curtains. He had lived there his whole life. On the table before the delicately fret-worked verandah, pink roses stemmed upwards from a narrow-necked gold vase; light flowed in through the honey-combed windows. A framed photo showed a handsome young man smiling before the station tracks: later, at the pinnacle of his 36-year career as an Indian railways officer, he would become senior store officer of purchase.



He spoke slowly and very softly. Fr. Correa, afraid his tape recorder would not pick up the voice, took down the words in his Navrijan store notebook, above the clean blue lines:



 



Years ago, when Fr. Almeida was posted at Dahisar, he approached me at Andheri platform No.3. He wanted to know the time. I told him, half-three. He casually mentioned he was awaiting a Virar bound fast train for Dahisar. You’re not in the right place then, I said. Platform 3 is a dedicated platform for UP Churchgate bound trains only. Virar trains arrive on Platform 4. I am not aware of the railway system, he replied. I know only that the train I am awaiting will come on this platform. Five minutes later the scheduled Virar bound train arrived on Platform 3. I thought my eyes were deceiving me. I could not comprehend the absence of a crash. The next Sunday I visited him for the first time.



 



 



**BRIEF FORAYS INTO OTHER MODES OF BEING.**



 



Risha took lunch on the upper level of the Coffee & Tea Leaf overlooking Linking Road. The music of ancient classical instruments entranced her with its swirling tenderness: out past the scarlet and ivory-striped awning her eye swept over the cars and rickshaws below. The motorbikes with women in full hijab clutching stern-looking husbands, the roofs made of overlapping sheets of corrugated metal, the gas station and advertisement for Whyte & Mackay scotch: “Scotland’s Favorite.” Palm trees framed the scene; raindrops made little crowns where they splashed on the awning. A layer of glass separated her from it all. The minute the doorman showed her out in a blast of air-conditioning India would be there once again, its muddy gravel and fruit stalls with rows of chemically ripened fruit thrusting themselves into her field of consciousness.



Once her brother had taken her to visit the Sisters of Mother Theresa ashram. The first floor ladies were merely poor, or “psychological”; the third floor were unwed mothers, long hair hanging over round bellies. Wandering down the stairs a level to the second floor, though, she saw them: the women lying on beds with limbs splayed, eyeballs grotesquely turned and hugely larger than warranted, heads looming massive atop desiccated bodies. “We turn them over every hour so they don’t get bed sores,” the nun on duty had said.



So that’s how life was, then—like a giant omelet! Weren’t we all getting bed sores? Well? Who was turning things over for us?



Incidentally, the worst had been yet to come. The nun told her in excruciating detail how the ladies entered the ashram with maggots swarming beneath their skin, which had, obviously, to be removed. This was done first by “smoking them out”: dousing the skin with a combination of turpentine and naphthalene. After a few seconds the waving black heads would emerge; that was the moment when you’d dive in with a pair of forceps and pull them out as quickly as possible, smashing them into a ready-to-hand tissue. Of course the ladies cried—not with pain, but with relief.



The waiter brought out her pasta; it swam in a cream sauce, topped with a light sprinkling of parmesan, pepper, and basil. This, she thought, was the kind of food you couldn’t get on the street. Yet now, it nauseated her.



Why were these thoughts going through her mind now, of all times? For she wasn’t alone. There was an incidental boy sitting across from her, worrying over his napkin and the impending gloom of the check. She did not count it among her more successful dates.



But where was her brother now?



 



Crows had been crowding in improbable bunches on the balcony of the apartment complex opposite his bedroom window in S.V.D. Provincial when he’d woken that day, feeling reasonably fresh. If he’d been a bit closer he would have been able to see the rich glossy black of their foreheads, crowns, throats, and upper breasts, or the beautiful lighter gray-brown ringing their necks like a collar. But he did not like crows: their enormous curved beaks frightened him, as did their habit of eating anything at all to stay alive (on the neighbor’s balcony was a large, reeking bag of trash).



In any case, he was too preoccupied now to think of the creatures. Walking to the kitchen, he flipped the switch: tiny wings and legs scurried away in frantic spiral motions as they always did when light came on so suddenly after the dark. How different are our minds? he wondered—diverting himself by looking at the vegetable leftovers, the last slice of cake in the fridge. Removing a plate from the stack, he thrust a blade under a thin stream of running water—it flashed when he turned the handle, nestling it into the heart of a pear.



His research had taken him through the whole of the city; over the course of the past few months he had collected hundreds of testimonies. People who had seen Fr. Bombacha, people who had attended his masses, people who had only heard of him but wished to speak of him regardless. The number of these people was outweighed, of course, by the number who looked at him in sheer confusion—or sheer contempt—when he revealed to them the purpose of his visit. In fact, part of the reason he worked so tirelessly was that in some part of himself he realized his approach was wrong; the feeling had begun to creep over him of a man who darkly senses he has missed a crucial turn but keeps walking, hoping in vain it will be the one just ahead.



The investigation was not coming along. It was no longer even, strictly speaking, a search for Almeida’s killer. Fr. Correa could not pinpoint the exact date the form had begun to diverge: he could look it up in his notes, he supposed, but this would not change the substance of the matter. If he found it increasingly difficult to add notes to the paper, it was because the investigation itself was offering up resistance, gradually transforming into a form unable to accept the addition of dry fact. Even Fr. Correa himself had not fully realized the extent to which this was occurring—though at times, like a luminous halo behind his consciousness, he sensed a corona of truth his mind would not acknowledge.



Increasingly he was convinced the murderer’s identity was not something he could know directly. One could only edge round it, draw out a chalk circle and walk on it, then at specific tender moments, nodes of sensitivity, pick up and carefully set down one’s load. If he tried to name a suspect before the time was formed his choice would escape, become ludicrous; he would be left with nothing. If he waited, perhaps the parts would fall into place: perhaps he would at last comprehend everything.



Attempts with other strategies had met with mixed success. The day before he had taken out from the library The Secret Doctrine, with its commentary on the ancient Tibetan Book of Dyzan. He read of the body as a fluid and unbroken consciousness, of paramnesia as the state of consumption by a single soft flame. With careful practice, by the fifth day he was able to experience a hint of something: a love invisible, colorless, beyond substance or proof: quinine, or asphodels in water. He carefully managed his feelings of disgust throughout; this was not his religion, that much he knew.



Once it may even have worked. They’d been passing one of the dozens of government retail creameries, where the percentage of “milk” never exceeded half, and was diluted still further by shop owners with powder. Women sat on the road with vegetables spread out on blankets. The gleam of a shiny, pale pink oblong caught his eye as a man at one of the fruit stands stacked tomatoes with hands cleansed by spit. Did the rains that continually washed over them—water from sewage-filled puddles condensing in clouds—purify or simply soil the land further? At that moment he could feel his body becoming an expanse of connected parts flowing out into the vast expanse of sky, moving simultaneously inward toward a source behind his thoughts and gestures. In the rain-soaked light, the nose of the Fiat parted the waters as a rickshaw’s wild star careened by in a haze of exhaust.



 



 



**THE APPROACH TO X.**



 



The morning train departed at eight; he was at the station ten minutes in advance, wearing his usual striped long-sleeve shirt, brown pants rolled at the bottoms, pair of old chappels.



A hand passed across the counter to give the man beside him a samosa wrapped in a torn bit of newspaper: a cryptic. Fr. Correa watched two tiny birds hopping about on the platform; beside him, a pair of slim girls purchased loaves of sliced white bread for the journey. Three-rupee tea and pista milk were being hawked from the stalls.



At last the train, thirty minutes behind schedule, fitted with a single pipe graduated release airbrake, hissed into the station. He stepped across the square tiles, which grew larger as they spanned the platform; unlike the local trains where one had to kick and claw onboard and pickpockets cut the straps of handbags in the ladies’ compartment, a relative quiet reigned. He pushed his way up the stairs and found his berth. The train was moving now, gathering speed, though not enough to work up a wind or dispel the stink of the other passengers. He wished now he’d sprung for an A/C car; well it’s always easy to hope in retrospect things could be different, that’s the way the game of history works. Something jolted, the track took a curve, and now the Bandra station was disappearing from sight, sucked into an already distant past. Fr. Correa did not watch it recede; instead he faced forward, standing: the only way to look if you’re searching for answers.



Twelve hours. The top of the seat to which he was clinging cut into his hand. But he no longer felt sick or afraid, for everything was clear. To truly understand, he would need to go not to Almeida’s church but further away, to Goa. His investigation had been flawed from the start. He’d been asked to get inside the head of the murderer claiming to understand the mind of God; instead, he had only been learning about the priest. At the most fundamental level, this did not make sense: it was impossible to have a God without using him—molding him in order to fit one’s own personality and circumstances. One could not understand the killer’s motives by asking others about him; whatever the killer thought was his own thought, in all its imperfection.



But after all—now he really was feeling feverish—wasn’t even the killer just another middle term? Why couldn’t you get rid of him too? God, and the imprint of the crime, with nothing in between. Perfect imprints were sent through imperfect mediums, and imperfect imprints through perfect ones—the thing to do wasn’t to study the mediums, but to collect the imprints themselves, to find the perfect traces left behind and reassemble them upward into something like understanding. In searching for the priest’s murderer, in following the imprints he’d left, he’d only begun seeing larger imprints: of Portugal in India, of God on earth, of things he could not himself verbalize.



As night fell the cries of the food vendors and chaiwallahs moving up and down the narrow carriages—“Chai-chai,” “Panipuri-panipuri’—grew less and less frequent, at last ceasing altogether. The light murmur of another family reached Fr. Correa from behind a curtain across the aisle. It didn’t bother him; he slept peacefully, waking only once when another train passed. A scorched orange light burned on the right behind the curtain; on the left the wall sloped gently away. Looking briefly at the window he could see only his reflection: nothing showed when he relaxed his eyes into the blackness beyond. Again, he fell asleep.



 



The ashram was located in Raia, in Salsette, the southern part of the state. Fifteen hours later he was there, his driver maneuvering the car down dirt roads, a stretch of rubber trees rising up on the right: the ashram owned the plantation.



Soon they entered a kind of courtyard, bounded by buildings on three sides. To the left was a dairy farm, where cows lowed in their stalls; straight before him was the distillery used to make cashew fenny, the ashram’s primary source of income. It gave onto a room in which two young men were beating rubber into sheets, hanging it in a smaller chamber to dry before they sold it. On the rightmost building upon entering the courtyard, a giant portrait of Peter Verhaelen, the first missionary to settle there, was mounted on the wall.



Fr. Matthew was inside the main building overseeing repavement of the tiles. A saw ground at the air, making an enormous noise.



“Careful!” he scolded a boy who whipped round the corner too quickly with a load of beams in hand. “Ah, you’re here,” he said, ushering Fr. Correa into a room off the main foyer: less dusty, if not less loud.



A television hanging from the ceiling flashed out news of corruption scandals. In the kitchen Fr. Matthew ghosted his hand over the bottles of rum and whisky in the cabinet, let it settle on two bottles of Kingfisher lager; cracking the tops he waited for the foam to settle before bringing them out on a plastic tray. Fr. Correa was glancing in the direction of their Konkani quarterly Sobdacho Ulo (Call of the Word), lying splayed like a tired dog on the table, when he came in.



“You see the troubles we have,” sighed Fr. Matthew.



“Yes?”



“Birthrate in the regions has declined further. Fewer children, fewer sent to become priests. Already only nine enrolled this year.”



“It’s getting so expensive to raise children…”



“We know that some of the families send them only so they can learn English, and will withdraw them before they take the vows. It’s so hard to tell with the boys though. They’re all so polite and usually have no idea of the situation themselves.”



“Difficult, yes.”



“And then there are the materialist values of the west.”



Fr. Matthew sipped his beer and looked intently. He had become aware of an essential fog in the responses of the man before him, who was absorbing only the tone of his words, impressions good or bad, rather than the concrete facts demanding action.



Fr. Correa picked up a lime from the bowl of fruit on the table, absently spun it in one hand. “I apologize for being so distracted,” he said. “It’s been a tiring journey.”



“Of course.” Fr. Matthew stood. “Here, I’ll open a room for you; take some rest and in the morning go see the countryside. It’s raining but it will be cool out; the asan trees are beautiful this time of year. In the evening we’ll talk.”



Gently he led Fr. Correa to the building adjacent and showed him the second door. He was the only visitor at the moment: he had the building to himself, it would be quiet.



Everything was just like the house back home, comfortingly so. The two small hard beds lying side-by-side separated slightly like quarreling lovers, the curtains with a pale floral print stirring faintly, the small plastic bucket with its handle hung over the larger one in the bathroom for washing, the mosquito lamp resting in its plug in the wall outlet. On the wall above him ants moved in jagged lines through the dust.



As promised, it was quiet. He was woken only once, by two loud knocks at the door. The power had gone out. It was only Fr. Matthew, alone in the dark hallway, with the stub of a candle and a full box of matches.



 



In Old Goa it had been raining, so it was cool outside; when the sun came out the whole place looked bright and clean. How much quieter this is than the city, he thought. He inspected the ornate gilt decorations in the churches, went inside the Basilica of Bom Jesus, but St. Xavier’s corpse was not out for viewing: would not be for another four years.



On the upper level of the Archaeological Museum was a gallery filled with portraits and biographies of Portuguese viceroys and generals. What he liked best of all was the huge statue of Luis Vaz de Camoes rising up in the middle of the hall; everything else seemed small beside the author of the epic Lusiads. At the Museum of Christian Art he bought some stationery in light beige, bordered with dark blue leaf and animal designs; Risha would like it. Driving on at random he pulled into the lot of a small church in the area, where the sacristan let him look at old postcards written in neat cursive, and colorful Indo-Portuguese stamps printed on thick avergaodo paper with stripes all round the border.



On the way home he visited two beaches. It was pouring rain, so hard his umbrella inverted as he stood on the sidewalk to watch the waves. Even so, he could smell the sand, and tried to imagine what it would be like in the sun.



Though it was growing late he could not resist the novelty of a model tourist village on the way back, where an albino with a drinker’s nose tried to guide him through. He shook off the assistance. Two ladies materialized, selling tamarind toffees; they disappeared when he refused. Walking by the various plants, he read the tiny labels with their strange names: coffee plum, custard apples; and facts: a decoction of cinnamon bark twice a day will reduce menstrual bleeding.



Removing his shoes and walking into a cave, a placard informed him that this was where one of the old gods presided. The plaster was peeling; the god’s face had a dyspeptic tinge. At the end of the far end was a set of stairs, which he descended with a hand on the rail; two brown dogs sat beside one another on a mound of trash. The vegetation was marshy, dissolving into jungle. The tips of the trees touched their heads to form a clearing.



He thought about what he’d seen that day. The site the locals called Orlem Gor, where the Palace of the Inquisition once had stood. On the day of the ceremony, the prisoners filed out, dressed in all black, but for a yellow cloth scarf with red cross if condemned. The sound of the “Bell of the Inquisition” heralded the start; the prisoners proceeded to a bench in the gallery; the sermon was preached and proceedings against the prisoners read. A confession of the faith and absolution from excommunication was granted to those whose lives would be spared. Those sentenced to death were handed over to the secular authority; the next day they were burnt on the stake on the Campo de Sao Lazaro before the Viceroy.



Beyond where he stood a little dirt path snaked through to crest a small hill. He could not make out whether the path was manmade or natural. The light, which had before flowed around the trees, had now flattened and become gray—the sky for all the world like a giant roti.



On a tree a few yards off where the sunlight happened to hit it, a yellow leaf dangled and spun on its axis. It was like a tiny revolving door, or a gateway to infinity. Fr. Correa hesitated; then he went to it.



 



In 1542, when Francisco de Jaso y Azpilicueta was first sent from Lisbon, a dream came to him. Crossing a river, there was a native on his back, so heavy he could hardly carry him to the other side. Yet he did so, and continued to do so, night after night. It was a sign of the work waiting: the endless task of planting the cross in those far-off lands.



The journeys had been difficult. He’d crossed the banks of the Ravenna to reach a stand of pine cones, which he’d consumed to stave off hunger; no alms had been given him in two days. He’d slept in beds with wet or stained sheets offered as hospitality, climbing into them with gladness in his heart; he’d crawled naked into a cot full of hungry lice to compensate for his sins. Once he’d sucked the rotting finger of a leper in atonement for his revulsion. In Mozambique he’d gone about with a lantern in one hand and a bell in the other, proclaiming in the public squares.



The sun is rising above the shore now. The prospect of the next few years makes him ill: flashes come to him of a great violence. It is always difficult to uproot the old superstitions, though one cannot condemn what is necessary. O Lord, give me hope, he prays, as the anchor goes down.



But the crack is contained, hidden, within the glass. As Fr. Correa makes his visits, he is preparing the way for his further passage. As Azpilicueta touches land to extend Portugal’s command, he is leading the way for his country’s effacement.

I. OUR MAN IN NOTTINGHAM



In every photograph of Graham Greene, the author seems slightly startled, his eyes staring out into some distant beyond or into his own soul. A biographical sketch of his early life takes shape as a litany of failure: a miserable boarding school education during which he was bullied for being the headmaster’s son; afternoons spent spinning the cylinder in solitary games of Russian roulette; half a year of psychoanalysis at age sixteen; unsuccessful attempts at poetry and journalism; an unhappy marriage and a series of affairs; a libelous review of a Shirley Temple film for which the magazine in which it was published was forced to fold. Despite this last setback, it was film—the money he brought in as a critic, as well as the royalties from adaptations of his own novels—that made up a large part of his livelihood, enabling him to write. (The other source of income was his espionage work as a double agent for the British M16, an excuse to travel to other parts of the world as material for his fiction.) Pinballing back and forth between the extremes, Green swung from the heights of exhilaration to the depths of depression. He wrote bleak dramas set against a landscape of sin as well as lighthearted parodies of the intelligence community; sought baptism to become a Roman Catholic like his wife, renounced it, and claimed it again; and embraced Castro’s communism with sudden ardor at the end of his life after a career of lampooning it. Medical diagnosis would identify this condition as bipolar disorder—yet his depressed, conflicting tendencies also hint at a more metaphysical malaise.



More than perhaps any other literary form, the novel depends on the prolonged contemplation—and often melancholy—of its author. But the Catholic novelist is more than unhappy: he writes as a way of knocking against the gates of heaven, to which he has been denied entrance. His writing is a transcription and translation of his despair. To make God a mere character is already a transgression, a source of guilt and shame; to write with sincerity about the evils in His world one must have struggled with His absence. “Being a member of the Catholic Church would present me with grave problems as a writer if I were not saved by my disloyalty,” Greene once wrote. “If my conscience were as acute as Francois Mauriac’s showed itself to be in his essay God and Mammon, I could not write a line.” The example was not a particularly accurate one, for Mauriac himself struggled with his dual identity as religious man and writer. To be a truly good Catholic and dissolve oneself in its dogma, he said, “one would have to be a saint. But then one could not write novels.”



Seeking to define himself as a novelist first, Greene rebelled against the label of Catholic writer and all the heavy-handed religious expectations that accompanied it. His prose takes on a self-lacerating quality, rubbing at the raw wounds of skepticism, rather than soothing characters with the swaddling clothes of prayer. (The reader too suffers: how often can one read of doubt without coming to embrace it as a reality above faith?) In *The Power and the Glory*—chronologically the second of the four books most critics consider his “Catholic novels,” which also include *Brighton Rock*, *The Heart of the Matter*, and *The End of the Affair*—a lieutenant lies in his squalid, beetle-infested lodgings and thinks with disdain of the priest he is trying to capture:



 



It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy—a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all.



 



Greene’s most convincing characters are—like the lieutenant—not those who dutifully recite their Hail Mary’s, but instead those who suffer painfully from uncertainty, or do not believe in God at all. The author’s split consciousness, his divided loyalties, brought him intense misery during his life. But it also allowed him to hear other frequencies, dimly sensed yet ignored by so many.



 



II. THE FULL WORLD



 



Classical Hindustani ragas begin with the drone of a tanpura, a long-necked lute with four strings. This one note, sustained by an apprentice for whom such monotony is an honor, sounds throughout the entirety of the performance. It enters before the plucking of the sitars, the drumming, the vocals that build into a complex wave of sound and subside into nothingness; it is what remains when the musicians cease playing at last.



In Greene’s novels, too, one note hums beneath the action, suffusing all of his work with the timbre of melancholia. “What an absurd thing it was to expect happiness in a world so full of misery,” says police officer Scobie in *The Heart of the Matter*. “Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil—or else an absolute ignorance.” The film noir atmosphere through which the characters wade is one of inescapable unhappiness and sin, Picasso blue stirred with dark violet. American abstractionist painter Frank Stella once wrote an essay praising Caravaggio for defining painterly space through the use of projective roundness and poised sphericality, which had the effect of making a “domed mansion of the void.” Greene’s innovation was to transfer this idea to literature—redefining its space as a heavy, unshakeable mantle of sin, in which every action and word takes on a special weight.



Catholic novelists before and after Greene had thrown stones into this darkness, exploring the consequences of moral crises by single individuals in the midst of an apathetic humanity: “Christians keep talking as if everyone were a great sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it,” wrote Walter Percy in *The Moviegoer*. “There is very little sin in the depths of the malaise. The highest moment in the life of one suffering from malaise is that moment when he manages to sin like a proper human.” Yet Greene went far further. Sin settles like a fine, ineradicable dust into everything with which humans come into contact; so omnipresent is it, and so inevitable, that even God becomes superfluous. In Greene’s books, despite the number of letters and tirades addressed toward the divine being, He never speaks at all. This replacement of God by sin explains an otherwise cryptic comment Greene once made: that his characters can “never sin against God as hard as they try.”



All of this was bound to make his fellow Catholics squirm. Evelyn Waugh couldn’t put a finger on his uneasiness, but he rightly sensed the presence of something deeply profane in Greene’s work, which he would dub a “Quietest heresy.” Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar too criticized Greene for his “mystique” of sin. Even by-the-book Catholics want unity—but not at the expense of their system itself. Stylistically or thematically, most have chosen to traverse the abyss by writing in a manner lofty or abstract enough to bridge these questions: not Greene.



 



III. THE PROJECTOR SCREEN



On a cold April day in 1953, a man from the Paris Review was sent to speak with Greene in his posh flat on St. James’s Street. Having at last made it through the preliminaries of drinks and discussion of his critics—Greene disliked wasting words, and all of his responses are phrased with an urbane and slightly disdainful precision—the interviewer subtly worked his way around to the question of sin. Just then, the telephone rang. Greene “smiled in a faint deprecatory way, as if to signify he’d said all he wished to say,” and took the call to discuss a film he was producing in Italy that summer. The waiting journalist undertook a close study of the collection of seventy-four miniature whiskey bottles Greene kept ranged above his bookshelf; at last realizing that he had been forgotten, he closed his interview with an ellipsis and left.



Greene’s productive relationship with the cinema arguably surpassed that of any other twentieth century artist, outweighing at times even his literary commitments. His own writing lends itself to the screen; over eighteen films have been made of his books, the most recent being British director John Boulting’s adaptation of *Brighton Rock* earlier this year. Part of this “cinematic” quality has to do with the exoticism of Greene’s chosen landscapes: Mexico, Brighton, West Africa. And part of it has to do with the gritty realist style in which he wrote. (“‘Hullo,’ said the somber thin man in black with a bowler hat sitting beside a wine barrel”: a typical line.) Like the pointillist paintings of Seurat, in which thousands of colored dots resolve themselves into a lake-shore, the realist novel is a masterpiece of illusion. Bound and taken together, sketches of a character’s appearance and random snatches of atmosphere resolve into suggestive wholes. Black leafless trees like broken water pipes and rain dripping down a man’s stiff coat are enough to color an entire page sinister, much as in film, multiple static images presented one after another cohere as a single, moving scene. In that sense, his technique has much in common with the work of contemporaries like Vittorio de Sica and other Italian neorealist directors of the ’40s and ’50s.



But, notably, the cinematic adaptations of Greene’s novels are not European art films. They are thrillers, just as his books are thrillers: the realist genre taken to its extreme, a gun once described now fired. Greene always insisted that one’s childhood literary preferences are what most influence one’s technique, and he was weaned on the pulpy adventure stories of Rider Haggard and R.M. Ballantyne. His affinity for the form makes sense, for the thriller also aligns surprisingly well with the novel of conscience; the ticking bomb now applies to nothing less than one’s spiritual life. Greene’s Catholic novels slide down the greased rails of suspense and dialogue: “If you excite your audience first,” he said, “you can put over what you will of horror, suffering, truth.”



Thus the ghosts of Balthasar’s nightmares obtain substance. Moral failure is not only inevitable in Greene’s books; it is also necessary for redemption. The world of sin finds its release in knife pulling, attempted murders, adulterous affairs. And it is here, amidst these sordid exploits—the stuff of movies—that something like divine grace radiates forth.



 



IV. ASHES



 



Can the Catholic novel still exist?



The question presents more grounds for apprehension than the general fretting over the death of the novel or literature as a whole. No modern writer has taken up the heavy vestments assumed by Greene. Most of the writers we associate with Catholicism—Evelyn Waugh, Flannery O’Connor, Muriel Spark, Shusaku Endo, the British and American novelists of the postwar period—have already passed on to the refuge they could not find in prose. And the conditions that the Catholic novel has traditionally depended on—both its particular brand of social realism and its uncynical assumption that qualities like good and evil exist—are slowly vanishing as well. As the main character, a novelist, asks in *The End of the Affair*:







 How can I disinter the human character from the heavy scene—the daily newspaper, the daily meal, the traffic grinding toward Battersea, the gulls coming up from the Thames looking for bread, and the early summer of 1939 glinting on the park where the children sailed their boats, one of those bright condemned prewar summers?







Greene’s “heavy scene”—the use of realist techniques to depict a world already condemned to sin—represents the farthest extreme toward which the Catholic novel can tend. At the heart of every great work lies a great, unknowable mystery: what Eliot calls “the heart of light, the silence.” Like every writer with an ideology, the Catholic novelist is given this mystery ready-made. So assured was Greene of the world’s inherent guilt that he had no need to refer to morality directly, and could keep it as the profound, silent center around which he wrapped his melodramatic plots.



Today’s would-be Catholic writers have no recourse to that kind of certainty, and they sag under the strain. One can still enjoy Greene’s work, but only in the way that one savors a sacramental wafer: as a precious, blessed fragment of something long since departed.

1.



Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2009



 



The book as it came to me was drab, bound in pale green cloth and devoid of all markings save for its title printed in gold: The Book of Disquiet. That starkness of labeling was its first appeal. The second was the rhythmic name of its author, written on the inside flap, falling drop-like as water when recited—Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa. The strange resonance between his middle name and my last was a trivial comfort, but an attractive one. It sustained me through the unsettling pages, from the very moment I opened to page one (a convenient place) and began.



To begin—a tremulous thing in the case of Pessoa. Now thought of as a definitive part of the Portuguese literary canon and one of the greatest poets of existential malaise of the twentieth century, Pessoa was once considered a minor figure, known mostly for founding the modernist literary journal Orpheu. Following his death in 1935, however, his sister shocked scholars by revealing the existence of a trunk containing over twenty-thousand of his documents—poems, plays, essays, even horoscopes—mostly unfinished and all but indecipherable. The subsequent frenzy of academic attempts to arrange the hundreds of disorganized journal entries into something linear could conceivably have assumed countless forms. It is entirely possible that my copy of Pessoa’s text places later entries at the front of the book, so that instead of edging toward death, his insights crawl toward natality.



The actual content of these enigmatic pages too defies a narrative arc. Pessoa presents his reader with the despairing and fragmentary diary of an assistant book-keeper who has resigned himself to never leaving his street, choosing instead to dwell in his mind. “With the soul’s equivalent of a wry smile,” he writes, “I calmly confront the prospect that my life will consist of nothing more than being shut up forever in Rua dos Douradores, in this office, surrounded by these people.” But the peculiar quality of “forever” is that it has neither a beginning nor an end. The entries—brilliant in their philosophical reflections though they are—thus retain a kind of sameness, existing outside the normal relationship of cause and effect. I could have started from page 38 or 217 with just as much reason or sense.



One final matter complicates this strange, non-linear text. Though it is born of Pessoa’s mind, he himself does not claim authorship. The writer of the diary, according to Pessoa, is instead one Bernardo Soares, a tall hunched man with a penchant for cheap tobacco, whom he encounters on the upper floor of a Lisbon café. Soares is one of Pessoa’s literary personalities, which he calls “heteronyms”—alternate personae with different biographies and philosophies, all coexisting within his fertile imagination, of whom we today count more than seventy-two. In his work they interact, reading one another’s writings, producing critiques, even penning obituaries. A poignant addition, for if imaginary characters seem to me easily created, then their deaths are all the more painful, a first killing of consciousness that precedes their second demise when, inevitably, the page is turned.



2.



Leningrad, Russia, 1948



 



The book I requested has finally arrived. I can still see the messenger scurrying away over the new snow. Cowards that they are, they wrapped it in black paper—as if that will keep away any eyes that care to see! In any case, I will write this review. I will do so in spite of myself, because I have no wish to and because nobody cares a thing for my pitiful attempts at opposition anyway. If this sounds like a contradiction, that is because it is, but my review will be about Fernando Pessoa and thus contradiction is entirely the point.



Pessoa’s works are plump with oppositions, rife with challenges. Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis—those other, famous characters of his—remain offstage in this particular book; but Soares is a lonely man, and so he seeks the chatter of contradiction within himself. Reality, without reason, appears one way for him as he sits in his office, completely another when he is caught in a rainstorm a few pages later.



Naturally, this will be a difficult pill to swallow for complacent stomachs. Contradiction is rarely defended so brazenly and consciously, and these reversals disregard completely all desire for the false consolation of a single truth. Recall the ferocity with which our illustrious critic Shklovsky loathed Rozanov for this exact point, writing that Fallen Leaves represented “a totally new genre, an extraordinary act of betrayal. Social and topical essays, presented as autonomous fragments, contradict each other at every point.”



But—a betrayal of what? Somebody feels a certain way one day, a different way the next. Or even two different ways at the same time. Hegel, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky—and I dare you to say that they are not great—all had contradiction at the very heart of their work. To propose a contradiction is to scoop out the ground from the static, to provide the necessary opposite to bring the world to completion.



Let us see if we cannot provide a little proof. From my window overlooking the Nevsky Prospekt, I see an officer stamping out a cigarette under his boot heel in the rusty dawn. Through his uniform his belly betrays the bulge of the well-fed—a disappointment, considering all the intelligent ones go hungry these days. But for the purposes of my little thought experiment, he has brains enough. Say I were to call him up to the tiny flat where I live alone, ask his permission to share some of these ideas with which I spend so much time. I see him here, listening carefully. If he agrees with me, then fine, my point is verified. But let us pretend he is more skeptical. “Come, sir,” he simpers, fiddling uncomfortably with his jacket. “Surely no rational man can truly believe that contradiction is quite adequate, theoretically?” Since this statement is itself a contradiction—quod erat demonstrandum!



How much of this do I truly believe? Is contradiction so important that where it does not exist, we must invent it? I often feel that what I have written myself is merely artificial provocation, contradiction for its own sake. But one must pass the time somehow. There is no alternative to that.



 



3.



Vienna, Austria, 1993



The book first came to my attention on account of a tattered copy of the morning newspaper in the visitors’ ward, which I picked up and pretended to read as I watched the patients. With their hair combed and tucked behind their ears, hands on their laps and smiles hanging from their lips, they sat like small children waiting for mothers, sisters, uncles. Yesterday they fought for control of the remote, and tomorrow they will quarrel over seats in the cafeteria. But at this particular moment they were quiet, fixing their cuffs and rubbing their faces to check their shaves. This behavior is to be expected. Psychologists have noted a particular fastidiousness and resignation to one’s surroundings among the most hopeless, marked by a preoccupation with the tiniest details (Hirsch and Meitzel, 1985, “Picturing Death Row”).



I held the newspaper open to page C2 and C3 as a pure ruse so as not to draw attention, but a photo on the page caught my eye. It was a black and white portrait of that disturbed Russian author of Truth and Artifice, who, in following his theory to its logical end, sought the contradiction of life itself by his own hand. He left behind no note. But tucked away in paragraph four of the accompanying retrospective was a glancing reference to the book, one of the few things found on his desk. It is widely understood that one’s final possessions provide the most accurate representation of a person’s desired projection of self (Mirsky, 1990, “Objects and Endings”); and so, cognizant of a hidden significance to the elusive author, I walked over to the institutional library, where a never-stamped copy fortunately still occupied its expected place on the shelf.



Opening the pages to this fascinating case study of Pessoa’s heteronym, I recalled the query of a colleague of mine, who questioned why, if writers can have alter egos, the critic’s mind should be limited to only one point of view (Gould, 1989, “The Poetics of Perception”). In a world composed of so many viewpoints, in which existence is necessarily fragmented. It would thus be inaccurate of the critic to assume only one voice. In fact, scientists now understand that an overly strong sense of subjectivity can lead to neurosis and depression (Finnegan, 1992, “Negative sites of self-assertion on the limbic-pituitary axis”).



The major psychiatric breakthrough of the twentieth century came in the realization that what was traditionally considered pathological, the shattering of perception found in victims of dissociative identity disorder, in fact allows for a clearer, more comprehensive experience of reality. Writers began to develop literary alter egos: Pound had Mauberley, Rilke had Malte Laurids Brigge, Valéry had Monsieur Teste. But Pessoa outstripped them all in the sheer number and detail of his alternate selves. He even impersonated a therapist, writing to old teachers and schoolmates to ask for their opinions on his patient “Fernando Pessoa” in an attempt to learn what they truly thought of him.



A bell sounds through the building, signaling patient curfew. I smile at the librarian and check out the book. Then the bell sounds again, nearly masking the approaching footfalls of the two wardens coming to wheel me away, serene, back to my room.



 



 



4.



Cambridge, England, 1956



 



The book revealed itself to me on a park bench, in the public gardens, where it lay half concealed in the shadows of a linden tree casting down its leaf prints in sharp relief. There it was, and there was my body slicing lengthwise through the light (thin here in a sunny patch, textured golden nearer the flower beds), as I moved at a steady pace over the gravel paths toward its presence. I made no sudden gestures, fearing it would disappear if I showed any effort. To reach deliberately for something is to lose it, to close oneself to the possibilities of being. The poet must relinquish  desire, submerging himself in complete indifference, so that life may catch him unawares, all the more intense for its suddenness.



This idea too came to me from the outside. It came from the book itself, and now I am projecting it backwards in time to fit my discovery, in which I moved more purposefully toward those pages (ducking a ball, dodging a running child) than I care to admit. But now that I am safe here in this café, tucked into a corner with the book and a half-eaten pastry and the steam from my cup tumbling upwards, I can reflect. Soares calls his philosophy an “aesthetics of indifference,” a letting go of being so that images may flicker by him, lit briefly by the sun like the backs of salmon as they surge seaward through the mind. Perhaps consciousness will one day be quantified, made the subject of scientific study, but for now it exists only as rich unknown spaces.



I fail at the task Soares has set, though. I cannot be indifferent. My preferences continue to order the world, despite myself. Before my lips touch this cup I know that the coffee will be bitter; this knowledge informs my perception of the drink before the first sip. Nor is language effortless. My poems win accolades for their studied lyricism; I search through cabinets, shuffle through drawers, reaching for the right words. For Soares, love wearies, action dissipates, thinking confuses. But I cannot allow life to merely flow its way past. Tousled as the strands of life are, various as its characters may be, I must go out—capture it—share its fractured loveliness with those around me.



 



 



 

There are two. The blue house in Coyoacán is Frida’s; the hacienda in Xochimilco—the one I think magnificent and the critics outrageous—that one is mine. On paper, of course, I own them both. Diego asked me to manage the museums there years ago. But in their essence, the way they rest within their spaces, it is clear one belongs to her and the other to me. A great deal of care was necessary to produce the elegance of my house, you know: the layers chiseled from stone, the surround of lush green tended by vigilant gardeners. And yet it’s hers I find myself wandering through again and again, blown through those passageways, drifting blind down that axis…



I have to stop. Already I feel my accuracy slipping. It would be nice if one could move oneself through rooms like that, fastening each door shut tightly behind. The truth is that my memory remains caught in places inhabited before, so that even now, for instance, I see various crews carrying out my instructions. A man with a face covered in sweat tugs at my sleeve: “Doña* *Lola, Doña* *Lola, this way, yes?” The statue’s feet are sticking up in the air; its head is buried in dirt. I’m not surprised at these people’s incompetence; for most of the population, getting things wrong is the natural condition. It is very difficult to make oneself understood by others. To most people I am simply Diego’s curator, and Frida is the woman who shaped his life; she and I hardly exchanged two words. But Diego and I had a friendship existing beyond the surfaces of our lives, one inevitably reduced by any attempt at description. The only thing a person can trust is her own mind, though even that gets turned wrong side up much of the time. Well, then: It may be true that in the end my own attempt will be no good either, this effort to explain how things are. Or—precision—how they were.



 



We first met at the Ministry of Education when I was sixteen, my hair done up in bright new ribbons. My mother, a schoolteacher, had come to process papers; leaning against the second level balcony, I waited, looking down at the courtyard hemmed in by walls. Blank then, those walls, though later covered by the famous murals. In the center below was the wide basin of a fountain, and I was trying to understand the water, how it tumbled over itself. I didn’t see him watching me, though I suppose he had been for some time. But my mother sensed it, hurrying back round the corner, opening her mouth to say something in protective alarm.



“Señora,” he said, by way of apology. “I would like to ask just one question.” Since he was Señor Rivera, of course, there was just one answer. Anyway, over the next few weeks, I came to his room as he asked, where with a vast sense of seriousness and cool ceremony, I posed. Head bent over the paper, looking up every so often, he worked away at his sketches. Thirty drawings were the result, of which he sent two lithographs to my house: one of himself and one of me, keeping the rest as models for his work. After dinner that night, as I rubbed soap against my hands in the sink, my husband—from England, already I was married then—came in and said he wanted to talk. Say what you want to say, I said. He gestured with his hands at some invisible rectangle. I publish an art magazine, he said, I’m familiar with the nude as form, but this gaze is not the gaze of the artist, there is more in it. What are you accusing me of, I asked, drying my hands on the cloth and looping it back on its hook. All I’m saying is that I’ve returned the drawings, he said coolly, and then all my rage was useless because that was in fact what he’d done, along with a note in bad Spanish explaining he was “not convinced they were offered in good faith.”



You must understand I loved my husband then very much. At the best moments we even felt like copies of one other: anyway, the mental terrain was largely the same. But Diego was a different matter. I called him “Maestro,” the only one I ever would call that; there was never another to whom I gave that respect. The truth is that it would not be wrong to say I felt a secret contempt for most people, that I was more confident and intelligent than they ever could be. With him, though, I was still always nervous, acting young and saying the simplest things. In my mind, God knew, there were edifices, whole architectures of thought, I simply could not express; sometimes the thoughts were formed completely but didn’t come out as I meant, other times they weren’t really verbal, were more like the curve of fruit or timbre of music than something I could write down. I thought then how inane the transcript would seem if someone did write down all the words we exchanged, overlooking how every word was linked with every other. The best thing most of the time was just to be quiet. We had other means: he could at least control color and texture, and I was coming to know the business venture, its strange energy and animal-like possibility.



 



*La Tehuana* hangs here in my old office. How amusing the colored fabric in my hair looks, the basket of rolls under my arm—and those ruffles! Just think of the starch that you would need. No wonder I’m smiling like that. But Diego chose to paint me in the traditional Tehuantepec skirts for a reason. Mexico was growing at that time, recovered finally from the devastation of the war years; there was a sense of it testing out its limits, building, expanding, carving itself into overpasses and skylines. But while it was growing outward it was also putting down roots; artists were trying to give it a sense of its own depths, its own history. He was working on traditional paintings of her at the same time, of course: the other one was always there, with her dark eyes and the firm line of her lips. Slimmer and more knife-like than I ever could be. She met him in the halls of the Ministry of Education too; but on top of that she painted, a source of great calm and a deep link to him. Summoning up all my strength, I made myself leave them to each other, turning my own interests in other directions. I can’t even call it jealousy now: she lives in the past, even if she hasn’t quite ever disappeared. In the cool second room of the gallery I keep copies of all their letters under glass, and there I could drive myself to endless distraction if I wished. “Carissimo Diego,” she wrote, in black ink on cream paper, the lines well spaced. “Mi querida amiga,” he would reply, or sometimes simply, “amor.” I can’t think too long about what lives on in history; it makes my stomach hurt and my head ache with dull pain, so that I wish every day really were a day reborn.



But as I was saying, at that moment it was true that for me, and my country, time did seem only to contain the future. When an old-fashioned hand-operated brickworks went up for sale, I snapped it up with a loan from the Tacubaya branch of the Banco Nacional, going into business with Heriberto Pagelson. Pagelson was a German Jewish refugee, a veteran of the French army in North Africa, who with no passport or identity papers somehow managed to wash up on the shores of Mexico and travel inland. I met him at one of those endless parties at which I was host; even before I knew who he was I was interested, since he was the only stranger there. With great deliberation and the utmost delicacy I struck up a conversation, tapping him on the shoulder lightly and handing him a glass of champagne. That was the beginning of a thirty-year association, one which despite all expectations persevered, even while my marriage crumbled. My other partnership was with Bernardo Quintana, who ran Industria Cerámica Armada. Quintana had somehow laid his hands on the plans for a building block, lighter and more maneuverable than standard baked brick, based on a model just developed in Europe. It was a good thing and both of us knew it; we just weren’t sure what it could be used for quite yet. We had the product but not the application, and were just waiting for the winds to shift.



When President Alemán announced his plans to build, we jumped. He insisted on a grand new edifice, to be named after him, with construction using only the most advanced technical materials on the market: the sleekest and most western products around. Everyday Quintana’s black car would move through the narrow streets to the Zócalo; most days he would be granted an audience, if not with Alemán himself, then with one of his men in those offices, the hundreds in that palace all tucked away. There were others who wanted the consignment too, and they would pass in the halls on their way to Alemán, flitting past each other like giant fish, darting each other meaningful blank looks. When Quintana met me in the afternoons to report on his progress, he would stagger through the door into the thin air, saying his elbow kept twitching, and that his lungs hurt: all the classic symptoms of an instantaneous decompression. In the end, though, he was awarded the contract, greasing by effort and luck all the right palms; as it turned out it was the cook’s brother-in-law who was the key, in some obscure chain of connections.



The upshot is that my own company, Materiales Asociados S.A., a subsidiary of Quintana’s, had work. We were all struck then by the mad desire to build, filled suddenly with giddy exhilaration, like when you see, exiting air space, city lights in the dark. Sometimes I would even drive a truck myself, ferrying planks and steel, tired of the abstractions of scheduling, budgeting, planning, infrastructure. My children would pass out soft drinks, sandwiches, steaming thermoses of coffee to the workers bent beneath the sun. Their backs were curved like the workers in Diego’s murals, but they weren’t so glorious; they didn’t hearken back to some primeval past. Most of them swore more than they should, and probably could have stood a few more baths. If I had any criticism of Diego, it was that: that with him everything remained a model, a romanticized likeness of an imperfect truth, when sometimes truth just meant these people laying down one block, then another. Meanwhile Diego and Frida were setting up their life together in their little blue house, and working for the communism they thought was the answer. They fought and made up; my firm kept growing. And in that way time passed.



 



It was 1954; Frida had died the year before. Some friends had invited me to take a boat out with them to the island of Janitzio, in the middle of Lake Pátzcuaro, to visit the famous cemetery. That day the sunlight was playing on the water, and everything was dazzlingly bright, so that all the colors seemed to fit in their contours just so. Looking up then, shading my eyes, all at once I glimpsed Diego. He was taking something out of a black case, or putting something back in. Does it matter? It had been twenty years. Washed up in that land beyond space and time, all logical thinking dissolved. Before I looked at him for too long, I deliberately reviewed how he’d made me feel when I was younger, because it could be what moved me was just those memories, or that light, that pure Janitzio light playing on the water. It took some time before I assured myself that what affected me was still his actual presence itself. Should I regret how easy it was to fall back into old patterns, even after that long absence? But he had a surprise in store. When the boat docked and we were back in the city, he told me to wait a moment; I stood outside his studio door, twirling my bracelet round my wrist, wondering. With a proud smile, he emerged, holding a box of carved mahogany: inside were the drawings he’d made so long ago, kept tucked away all of those years. Very seriously, he said then that I was the one he had chosen to manage his trust, which would pass on not only his legacy but the legacy of all Mexico, captured within each one of his works. That was the year I started to buy up his best paintings, meeting with collectors in Paris and catching early flights to auction houses in New York, tracking them down in private residences one by one. *The Mathematician*, *The Picador*, *Dancer in Repose*, *Portrait of Pita Amor*, *The Boats*, *A Flower Vendor*, *A Mexican Child*, *The Family*, *The Flower-Draped Canoe*… All of it was only ever a pleasure. I had infinite faith in his work; there was something in it, something intangible, that made me unable to stop looking, and more than that, to stop living with it within me.



Now that we were back together I wouldn’t let him leave again so easily. I asked him to come with me to La Pinzona, the house of mine in Acapulco overlooking a sea cliff. There he could watch the wide sea watched over by gulls, composed of the shadows of their long low flight. Concentration became impossible without him there; without him I became only a mind, all my entrepreneurial ambitions lacking something essential. The cries of the children coming to me from the other room seemed a comfort when Diego played with them, preferring the *juegos de pelota* based on the old games. Much of the time, though, it was quiet, and that would mean he was at work. How well we knew that little room—I’d bring out oranges and hot coffee in a clay pot to where he was sitting, sugar but no milk the way he liked. He always kept his back to the door: just the shock of his dark hair and his big body, a little clumsy, between that statue and that yellow vase. All day long he’d sit and paint as the afternoon sun climbed, tracing mad shadows against the walls.



Sometimes he would stop his work and drink his coffee while reading me the newspaper headlines; other times when I put my hand on his shoulder he would pretend I wasn’t there and keep working. Then I’d leave silently, understanding. That’s the kind of man he was: the kind who would, as they say, wound himself against his own bones, the kind who instead of the final judgment worries about the final dream. And this is one truth, the greater of them. But if I want to capture this exactly, I’ll have to tell you an equal truth, the other reason I brought him to La Pinzona. I fully realized how ill he was becoming: how hard he’d driven himself on his visits to the Soviet Union, how grave the disease eating away at him was even then. Despite the private doctors I brought in, the cobalt radiation treatments I arranged, he only kept on getting worse. And at some point I knew there was nothing more I could do, except keep bringing him that coffee, those oranges.



 



In the unfathomable distance, a vulture turns against the sun. Here, now, looking up at its intense clarity and deceptive transparency, I find all of it, somehow, deeply disappointing. My need for a kind of understanding that goes beyond particulars overwhelms me, so that often I wonder just what it all meant. In June the wide streets in this part of the city suffer from the prickly heat, and so I move to the house, which seems like a refuge. There I run my finger across the titles on the shelf: Chase’s *The Tyranny of Words*, Wyer’s *The Disappearance*, a volume on Lucretia Borgia, the 1931 Bliss Collection, *La Linterna Mágica*, *Red Virtue*,* La Hija del Coronel.* How carefully I chose them all, how carefully I laid out the floor plan for the foreign visitors whom I knew would pass through. As I watch, a woman begins laughing softly, pressed against a man who seems self-consciously serious; together they move slowly through the exhibit, remarking in American accents on the phrase used in the Spanish labels. “Naturaleza muerta”—how infinitely more visceral that seems than “still life,” not just frozen but dead, dead nature, dead like the human body even as meaningless words like these remain. The year after Diego left me, on the Day of the Dead, I placed his picture on the altar, surrounding it with his favorite dishes of mole, tamales, atole, and fruit; with sweets made of squash, traditional sugar skulls, special bread adorned with crossed bones; with masses of marigold blossoms and Mexican crafts. And then, somehow, I moved on. I got married again, to the bullfighter Hugo Olvera, founded a bullfighting company, doubled and doubled again my wealth, allowed the memory of Diego to fade.



I’ve never written these things down before. I’ve waited until he was gone, because I didn’t know how to say them and because in the way he praised the few things I wrote his distaste was clear. Let me be the first to say that his work wasn’t perfect either: it glorified primitivism, its politics were too overt, it elevated manual work into a dignified realm that for today’s factory workers does not, and cannot, exist. But as one of the writers I liked to read said, the truth may not be beauty, but the hunger for it is. Meanwhile the collection of Diego’s paintings in my museum continues to grow, covering the walls, spreading out from the first room to dozens of others. Plans for new wings are made, then executed. A special gallery at one of the entrances houses a collection of miniatures by Angelina Beloff, a Russian painter and Diego’s first wife. She is the one he met in Europe and nobody remembers, because her life seems so shadelike next to Frida’s and, I’ll admit it, my own. Nevertheless I have set out her woodcuts and engravings carefully, as a kind of tribute. When I look around, I am proud. With these museums, all the beautiful thoughts dancing in my head—which were never really thoughts at all but more like colors, or the spaces found between movements—all of them can now be turned outward, made at last external and real. They can say what perhaps I never once said aloud. Because thoughts aren’t enough; you need something you can see, or touch, something like the note that arrived with a painting dated 16 August 1955: “To Lola Olmedo, with the love and admiration of twenty-five years (now she will believe it). I am sure she knows that her great love has returned to her.”



Finally I should mention that I began collecting Frida’s paintings too: at first viciously, because I was happy to see the broken columns mourning her barren body, which a trolley accident had made unable to bring a child to term; then because I thought I might somehow see in her work traces of his love, love linked in some mysterious way to what he’d had for me. With him it had always been a game of connections anyway: the way names repeated, the syntax of phrases, the choice and arrangement of certain images. Soon it all became too much. But even then I kept collecting her work, and his—out of habit, out of the desire for completion, out of the pure act of repetition—and finally, out of the simple knowledge it was good, it was art, and ultimately it would be what remained.



* *



*Dolores Olmedo Patiño died in Mexico City in 2002.*

 



In his senior year at Harvard, John Updike took a seminar with the poet Edwin Honig, in which he fell in love with the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Reading all of *Harmonium* and Stevens’s *Selected Poems* , he threw himself into his first paper with great gusto.  It was with less enthusiasm that he received his grade: a gentleman’s C+. “Honig said I tried to cover too much,” wrote Updike. “Better from narrow to broad than from broad to narrow, was the life-lesson this comedian as the letter C taught me.”



This lesson would prove lasting. With Updike’s passing in January, the literary world has seized upon the gemlike aspect of his work, his vivid and precise descriptions of specific moments that bloom like wildflowers into meditations on American life. “He took the novel onto another plane of intimacy: he took us beyond the bedroom and into the bathroom,” wrote Martin Amis in *The Guardian*. Updike was, to many, a master seismologist, tracing the fine cracks in the surface of the social, revealing the tremors behind the white house and picket fence. “Religion, sex, science, urban decay, small-town life, the life of the heart, the betrayals—who can follow him?” asked Ian McEwan.



In the foothills of this intellectual Olympus, however, resided a number of slightly less enamored gods. Gore Vidal’s complaint that Updike “describes to no purpose” reflected the sentiment of many critics who saw no grander project in Updike’s minutely focused details. He was, wrote James Wood, “a prose writer of great beauty, but that prose confronts one with the question of whether beauty is enough.” The most damning praise of all came from David Foster Wallace, who once claimed that “no U.S. novelist has mapped the solipsist’s terrain better than John Updike, whose rise in the 60’s and 70’s established him as both chronicler and voice of probably the single most self-absorbed generation since Louis XIV.”



Wallace hit on something profound about his subject, though his charge was meant as a criticism. Updike may indeed have been “self-absorbed”—to him, subjectivity dominated through “secret channels,” and outer reality and the universe had a personal structure. But he was also deeply concerned with the social. By digging deeply inward and knowing himself, Updike genuinely believed that he would be better able to understand, in a metaphysical sense, those around him as well. There is, then, no contradiction between Updike’s acclaim as a genius of social description and the accusations leveled against him of solipsism. In an essay on Walt Whitman, he called it “egotheism”—the idea that “billions of consciousnesses silt history full, and every one of them the center of the universe.”



 



***



One April evening in 1980, Updike found himself standing alone in Shillington, Pennsylvania, the town where he had grown up, with nothing but the clothes on his back. He had come down from Boston to visit his mother, but the airport had failed to send along his luggage with his flight. So while he waited for a girl from Allentown to come down with his two bags, he decided to kill time by taking a stroll through the streets. Passing Henry’s Variety Store, Artie Hoyer’s barber shop, Grace Lutheran Church, the local elementary school, and other landmarks of his youth—some replaced, some still standing—sent him spiraling back into the past and into himself, in a curious mixture of philosophy and memory: “*Dasein*. The first mystery that confronts us is ‘Why me?’ The next is ‘Why here?’ Shillington was my *here*.” He writes:



 



Toward the end of Philadelphia Avenue, beside the park that surrounds the town hall, I turned and looked back up the straight sidewalk in the soft evening gloom… The pavement squares, the housefronts, the remaining trees receded in silence and shadow. I loved this plain street, where for thirteen years no great harm had been allowed to befall me. I loved Shillington not as one loves Capri or New York, because they are special, but as one loves one’s own body and consciousness, because they are synonymous with being… If there was a meaning to existence, I was closest to it here.



 



This incident is retold in *Self-Consciousness*, the autobiography Updike published in 1989, decorated in its paperback version with a mock sepia floral print and a picture of the author as a young man. It is in this book that he comes closest to a direct expression of his philosophy of self.



Though weighty in substance, *Self-Consciousness* is rare in Updike’s oeuvre in being physically slim. Indeed, approaching the body of his work can be a humbling experience. Updike wrote more than fifty books over the course of his long life, spanning from fiction to non-fiction to poetry; every decade or so, he would release another massive slab of collected work. As the years went on, he himself recognized this tendency, commenting wryly on his penchant for self-documentation and slapping titles like *More Matter* on his books. He wrote about everything from psoriasis to masturbation to religious struggles to golf, not to mention hundreds of reviews for *The New Yorker* that lay bare his literary predilections in the form of incisive commentary.



Rarely, in short, has an inner self been so well-documented in print; Updike was the Boswell to his own Dr. Johnson in a way few men have ever been. His obsessive compulsion to exhume his personal life was driven by a near manic faith that in cataloguing every aspect of his self, he would reveal cross-linkages and undetected truths. Nor did this stop at the meticulous archiving of his own work. Both his fiction and non-fiction bear everywhere the thumbprint of the personal; every piece is—to steal a phrase from one of his characters—“aerated by the sinuous channels of experience.” His few forays into magical realism and historical fiction were responsible for rare flops, like the strained rewrite of *Tristan and Isolde* in *Brazil*.



Updike’s determination to describe in exquisite detail what he knew best as a portal to greater truths—the lesson first learned in Honig’s poetry seminar—explains his reputation as a chronicler of the mundane eccentricities of middle America. It also accounts for his ambivalence toward social theory, which he repeatedly referred to as a “game”—an “exercise in constellation-making,” “less a pragmatic servicing of reality than the execution of a fiendishly difficult, self-imposed intelligence test.” He ends a review of Levi-Strauss’ volume *The Origin of Table Manners* by writing:



 



Levi-Strauss’s ‘science of the mythology’… functions like a clock, with its calibrated ratios, axes, symmetries, and interlockings. It is beautiful like a clock, and cool like a clock—a strangely elegant heirloom from the torture-prone, fear-ridden jungles and plains. Its orderly revolutions and transpositions have the inverted function of not marking but arresting time, and making a haven, for their passionate analyst, from the torsion and heat of the modern age.



 



For Updike, truth was instead “anecdotes, narrative, the snug opaque quotidian”; while respectful of the author’s mind, the cool razor’s edge of anthropological analysis seemed to him to be missing the hot, visceral complexity of life that only personal description could capture. It lacked, in other words, the “essential ‘I’”—without this, one could perhaps analyze life but could never really know it.



The poetry in his summary of Levi-Strauss’s frequently dry, quasi-scientific prose, then, comes as a kind of revenge. So does the ironic title he lent the piece, *A Feast of Reason*—ironic because, for Updike, the fleeting satisfactions of reason could never be enough.



 



***



Shillington—where Updike was raised—was a small suburban enclave outside of Reading, small enough for him to grow intimately acquainted with the buildings and people there, which he would later describe in books like The Poorhouse Fair. The overwhelming trait that drew together the community was its Protestantism; this was a place where family values were treated with reverence and the Lord’s Prayer was recited every day at school.



Disillusionment arrived in adolescence, as Updike came to recognize the hypocrisy of his town’s Christianity. “No one believed it, believed it really,” he wrote, “not its ministers, nor its pillars like my father and his father before him.” He noted the pews empty in the cold winter light, the withered faces of those at daily masses, and the reluctant attendance of families on Sundays, motivated more by good citizenship than true devotion. Outward displays of faith came to seem a mirage, “as fog solidly opaque in the distance thins to transparency when you walk into it.” And yet: “I decided I nevertheless would believe.” Updike buttressed this resolution in college with Chesterton, Unamuno, and Emerson—all “literary” theologians, philosophizing through stories and vivid prose rather than strict rational argument. His own essays would eventually take a similar form, and indeed he hoped that they could serve as a spiritual anchor for modern university students, just as Unamuno had for him.



But his doubts never left him. During the year he spent at Oxford’s Ruskin Drawing School, after Harvard and before going to work at *The New Yorker*, he recalled the “gray moments, in which my spirit could scarcely breathe.” Staring “in dumb faith” at the dusty tomes of the collected Aquinas at Blackwell’s bookstore on Broad Street, he thought that “surely in all this volume of verbiage there lay the saving seed, the pinhole of light.” Such religious misgivings would always haunt him, permeating deeply into the lives of his fictional characters. The first sentence of a short story entitled “Varieties of Religious Experience,” published in The Atlantic in 2002, reads, *There is no God*.”



Updike could not stop believing in God, however, because for him God was not something external—rather, it was inside himself. “The need for our ‘I’ to have its ‘Thou,’ something other than ourselves yet sharing our subjectivity, something amplifying it indeed to the outer rim of creation, survives all embarrassments, all silence, all refusals on either side,” he wrote. Religion was something personal, with God an extension of his own being, “a dark sphere enclosing the pinpoint of our selves.” His conception of the self had truly struck deep, even into his theology.



Since belief was for him so dependent upon the activity of the self, it constantly had to be rewoven out of experience and wonder at the world. “Theology is not a provable accumulation, like science, nor is it a succession of enduring monuments, like art,” he put it in a review. “It must always unravel and be reknit.”



 



***



Updike’s unceasing desire to know himself could make him a frustrating reviewer at times. The best critics need a tinge of bloodlust, but because Updike always reserved the possibility that the other self knew something he didn’t—could at any moment pull some thin silvery strand of brilliance out of an artist’s hat—he was reluctant to strike the killing blow. One of his fundamental rules for literary criticism, as outlined in a 1975 < *New Yorker* piece, was to “try to understand what the author wished to do, and [t]o not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.” Judging books by the standards of the author in this way, rather than by those of the reviewer or some objective criteria, could result in more forgiving pieces—and duller ones.



Updike feared that on his grayest days, his reviews shaded into mere plot summaries, and indeed, in comparison to many of his modern counterparts, they can come off as clawless—a kind of verbal grout to fill in the spaces between the quotations and biographical details that provide the bulk of his pieces. At the end of his life, perhaps wearied by criticisms of banality, his style packed an added punch: “Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue as to what is going on.”



Most of the time, though, he didn’t need any literary pyrotechnics. When he got it right, as he often did, the results could be astounding in their subtlety of observation and delicacy of prose. Updike’s criticism never contained forced description, as his fiction sometimes did. It was written in a quick, vigorous tone, full of startling insights and bold thought experiments. Of Nabokov’s lectures he wrote that they are “still redolent of the classroom odors that an authorial revision might have scoured away”:



 



Nothing one has heard or read about them has quite foretold their striking, enveloping quality of pedagogic warmth… During [long] stretches of quotation we must imagine the accent, the infectious rumbling pleasure, the theatrical power of this lecturer who, now portly and balding, was once an athlete and a participant in the Russian tradition of flamboyant oral presentation. Elsewhere, the intonation, the twinkle, the sneer, the excited pounce are present in the prose, a liquid speaking prose effortlessly bright and prone to purl into metaphor and pun: a dazzling demonstration, for those lucky Cornell students in the remote, clean-cut Fifties, of the irresistibly artistic sensibility.



 



Passages like this are sensuous, full-bodied; Updike took a clear pleasure in writing them. Like all critics, he was never quite comfortable with his own profession, retaining the “nagging unease” of living off the vivid imaginations of others. For him, writing criticism was to writing fiction and poetry “as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.” But he continued to write it, and his non-fiction came to make up the bulk of his work.



This comes as no surprise. To write a review is to filter a concentrated version of the world through the lens of one’s own mind, recording the resulting impressions. It is a process of making a shared thing personal, in order to understand and explain it better for others. Updike spent his entire life—through all of his many modes of writing—doing just that.



 



***



The best description of Updike, encapsulating both his personality and his Roman profile, comes from the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. It must have pleased him, for it is reprinted in his finest collection of non-fiction, *Hugging the Shore*:



 



“Awkwardly shielding himself with his wing,



Thirsting for secrets



       and weary of secrets,



gaunt as a stork,



on a house of his own books,



anxiously stands Updike with his noble beak”



 



This, in the end, is what we are left with—the image of Updike, alive in the world yet at home with his books, burning always with the noble desire to know. One widely printed eulogy depicts him as an owlish student of literature, reading the “chastely severe, time-honored classics” in his college dorm room as he leaned back in his “wooden Harvard chair,” cigarette in hand.  But Updike’s introspection was always in the service of something greater, a hope that by knowing himself he could know something of the rich and various world around him. One hopes that he would have said of his life what he said after his walk through the streets of Shillington: “I had expected to be told who I was, and why, and had not been entirely disappointed.”