I now have the cream-vellum volumes of the Kama Sutra which once sat in the University of Sarajevo. Their beauty is a rare one. I have some old sepia photographs, a kit bag, an empty bottle of cologne on which the words El Capitán are subtly embossed. Those possessions from his golden time of 1913 provided the focus for Johan Thoms’s mind; objects procured later in his life would not have landed him far enough back in time to take a different path. These earlier objects were Johan’s supposed wormholes in the space-time continuum, his portal, his vortex to a magic carpet ride through the ages. But the old man never did master the intricacies of the reverse gear.
My grandfather swore to me, though, that at two remarkable points, one when discussing an old love and the second when Ernest, clearly and without nuance, forgave and absolved his new friend for the death of his father, William Atticus Forsythe Cartwright, Johan had looked twenty-five years old again for a brief, supernatural moment. It was dusk and the blue light was playing tricks—devilish, mean, and quite wonderfully malicious tricks.
I also have a trunk. It seems to have spent time on the ocean floor; it has a lilac P painted on the side, and fish scales, which weirdly smell of warm butter. It is the sort to have once held Spanish gold, but today it holds thousands of powder-blue envelopes and an ever-fading hint of ylang-ylang.
There is a separate letter from Lorelei’s grandson, which informs of her death in 1963 from throat cancer.
* * *
It has now been a month since Ernest died. I have been busy with the knowledge which he left me.
Tomorrow, I shall leave his blown ashes and England, for I have an air ticket to Faro, Portugal.
From the airport in the Algarve, I am to be taken to Vila do Bispo.
I am to stay in a small hut there in the village, the hut where those boys once lived. I know in my mind what it looks like; it has already been tinged by the prismatic blue, turquoise, scarlet, lilac, and lemon-yellow hues of Johan’s generous memory.
I will visit the old school, where it shall be a great honor to meet with representatives of the two Young Hooligans’ chess clubs.
It is quite possible that, to this day, Portuguese boys by the sea are drilled with precision by their grandfathers in walking on the outside of their belles; in switching positions in the middle of the street to always face the oncoming traffic; in never referring to their wives as she, always pointing with two fingers instead of one, and never waiting to start on a meal delivered warm, so as not to offend the chef. Not one of them would ever wish to carry or even to own an umbrella, nor would they ever consider using red ink to write. Not only that, the technicalities of en passant may have been engrained into, and the Oleg and Luzhin Defenses may well have found favor with, the fine, fertile minds of the wonderful young chess hooligans of southwest Portugal and of Sarajevo. Indeed, despite his resounding error way back when, Johan Thoms may have left one or two rather positive thumbprints around Europe during his days there.
Cicero, too, for it may also be quite possible to dig just a couple of feet down on those expansive banks above the beaches and find there the oceanic treasures left by the young man on those days between the wars when Alfredo was still young and Johan Thoms sat above on the vast hill, tapping on his typewriter while he tried not to ponder his unique trail of destruction. And how he might deal with it.
One chess club member allegedly holds the honor of possessing a map to and the knowledge of the fine oceanarium of spewed wonders known as Museu de Cicero, which I shall be shown.
Other guests at this memorial to Lorelei and to Johan include the Chirigotas of Cádiz, Blanchita, and an American gentleman, also in his midsixties, whom we should all surely recognize from the pictures I have of his grandmother Lorelei Ribeiro and his grandfather Johan Thoms, and which will be posthumously published in the modern-day edition of the final installment of The White-Kilted Brigadier. If any further help is required in identifying him, we shall apparently know him by the Dorothy Parker autobiography under his arm and the extra-large Panama hat tilted on his head. His name is Johan Ribeiro.
The delicious genes of Catalina Boadicea Rodríguez, William Atticus Forsythe Cartwright, Cicero Emperor of Rome, Lorelei Ribeiro, and Johan Thoms shall be together there.
The meeting shall fulfill a promise I made to my grandfather in his final hours.
There is even talk of a game of chess or two, but we have been warned to watch out for the killer instincts of Blanchita, Mr. Ribeiro, and those fine Young Hooligans from several generations and from two countries, whose flag shall be flying proudly.
Dr. S.P.E. Cartwright
PTSD Unit,
International Red Cross