For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.
—Walter Pater
The White-Kilted Brigadier found a small but solid market, straddling a strange demographic of Boy’s Own book-club types and a smattering of romantic young ladies. It seemed the publisher, Tobias Kilz of the Ruben-Wolfram Press, was losing money on Blanche’s works, yet he also seemed keen to receive more manuscripts. Johan chuckled when he thought of Cicero’s initial stealth. The small proceeds were funneled into a Portuguese bank account in the name of the Young Hooligans’ Chess Club, whose treasurer was the dependable, proud Ismerelda. Brand-new chessboards, pieces, books by grand masters, and timer clocks were soon delivered to the school.
Blanche de la Peña became the personal hero of Emmeline Pankhurst, the leader of the British suffrage movement, the Women’s Social and Political Union. Despite paradoxically having advocated militancy in her own methods, Ms. Pankhurst had also been famed on the international stage for her pacifist view (as, of course, was Blanche). She was less famed for her shuddering, bubbling, raging desire to meet Brigadier Stanley Rex-Foyle.
Over the next two years, The White-Kilted Brigadier versus the Laugh of the Spanish Horseman, The White-Kilted Brigadier’s Search for the Scarlet Grail, and The White-Kilted Brigadier and the Strange Hiatus of the Bohemian Blade were mailed to England. Kilz was delighted each time, read them with gusto over and over again, and almost as an afterthought, sent them to the printer for publication.
* * *
It was now 1932.
Johan, an adult and quite well Cicero, and a very old Alfredo had stayed within a ten-mile radius of the village hugging oblivion for almost eighteen years. In that time Johan had deteriorated.
As the world had slipped into the Great Depression, Cicero had done his best to convince Johan that it had not been his fault. This time there had been no direct causal link back to June 28, 1914, although Johan had already persuaded himself to the contrary. Of course, it had been his fault. And hence, more ridiculous behavior followed.
So what if he was found wandering the streets naked on summer afternoons and at winter dawns?
So what if he talked to himself by the roadside, sipping English tea which he had delivered from Southampton via Lisbon (his one extravagance)?
So what if he had started to wear a patch on his right eye for no reason whatsoever? The locals knew it was for no reason, for he had also been seen wearing it on his left eye.
His ever-increasing number of out-of-body experiences did not disturb him. Indeed, he reveled in them, even looked forward to them, doping himself by adding extra nutmeg or mature cheese to the bubbling copper pots on the old fire stove in the scullery, in an attempt to fire the neurons in his finely wayward brain. The hallucinogenic properties of nutmeg are well known.
It was while under its influence in May of ’32 that Johan first heard of Pedro’s drowning. Then, in the same hour, he saw an old and myopic, yet still mobile Alfredo killed: hit and then dragged a quarter of a mile by a pig truck. The saddest part was that this was not a hallucination. He heard the sickening thud of truck on dog, and then a yelp. He yelled to Cicero, who was showering around the back of the shack. They ran up the dirt road to where Alfredo lay whimpering, his silver and brown eyes still alive but his back end a flattened mess, as if it had gone slowly and surely through one of the village ladies’ washing mangles. The old mutt looked at them both, his lids getting heavier each time he switched from Johan to Cicero. The hound’s life seemed to be flashing in front of him, and he appeared to regress to a sunny day on a foreign beach. A boat with three figures was coming ashore. They might just be a master and friend like he had seen other dogs have. Why not them? Smart, old Alfredo, with his knowing, graying whiskers and symmetrical grisé eyebrows, knew that he was in trouble. Cicero’s tears landed on the dying dog’s fuzzy face. It would be au revoir in a second, old chum. Then, before the next hurried breath was complete, it was a dead dog’s face, with just a hint of the young pup Alfredo. And adieu.
Old Alfredo, who had sired many strange-looking litters around the hamlet, was buried later that day in a hessian sack, deep, deep in the ground, up by the lighthouse, not far (Cicero reckoned) from the bones of a blue whale, a unicorn, and several mermaids. Alfredo was left so deep as to prevent the whiff of a cadaver, and thus prevent being dug up by foxes or scavengers in the night. The spot was marked by rocks and stones, until Cicero could come up with something more appropriate, which, in a spot like Sagres, had to be a cross.
Pedro was afforded no such luxury as a cross, nor a proper burial—just the depths of the ocean.
Two good friends were gone. Johan could not shed a tear. Cicero wept each time he remembered the day he and Johan had arrived in the boat from Split, their inimitable welcome on the pebbly shores of Italy. He cried when he thought of how life must have been for the pup Alfredo, shunned by other dogs, perhaps because his eyes had made him different. Alfredo had been a loner, like Johan, like Cicero himself.
Cicero cried when he thought of a frustrated life, unable to verbalize, to tell his human friends how much he loved them, instead of dumb whines and annoying barks. He cried when he thought of Alfredo being hungry. Or bouncing on the beach like a gazelle. Or falling asleep on Cicero’s feet in bed every single night since that night when he, like Sancho Panza, had slept on a donkey’s back, somewhere near Dubrovnik. He realized he was crying a hell of a lot.
“It is the deal into which we enter, my young Roman, when they enter our lives. This day invariably comes, unless we go first. To lose them hurts and we have to accept that, for the joy they bring us in one single hour is worth the pain you feel now. Ask yourself why you are crying. Out of joy, I’d hope. He had eighteen years of warm beds, and always a belly never far from being full of meat and gravy; we should all be so lucky.”
As much as Cicero did not want to be convinced, he knew his friend was right. Cicero told Johan that Pandora, his favorite mermaid, had comforted him one day, and told him that life can be painful and death may well bring sadness, so we absolutely must seek the magic in the detail and in the moment. Glide, boys, glide.
And so once again, there were just two.
Though not for long.
* * *
New York City, February 12, 1927
My dearest J.,
It’s our son’s birthday again today. He is twelve years old. Happy birthday to you, too. The years are now passing so quickly. I may sometimes forget your face, but Carl still hears about his father every day. New York City is treating us well, but I miss Europe. Many days, it seems like it was all a different lifetime, or an out-of-body experience, or some recent moving picture which dared to breach my emotions, which I fear have chilled beyond redemption. I could, however, make an exception, if you were to appear to me.
I bloody well dare you, my beloved disparu.
Yours,
Lorelei xxx