I.
VOYAGE OF THE NARCISSUS
I write in retrospect, from the vantage of a distant shore.
• • •
Carlotta Dell’oro is my name; I am eighteen years old; mother I have none; father either. My hair is long, red, bright as a flame; I stand six foot two in my stocking feet; or would, except I am very seldom in my stocking feet, having planted my boot firmly on the backside of the new world—up to the hilt in it, in its mud and its muck and its offal—a commitment of a sort; my hair, like a flame, has lit the new and savage shores, the hills, the craggy, wooded paths of this new world, coming now, briefly, to rest, in this bright, hard, hot, blue place. Here I rest; here I write.
• • •
Outside, beyond the screen, is a jeweled line where sea meets sky; a single tree trunk, bowed, elliptical, smooth as a rib, its shaggy top pendant with the brown, rough-skinned nuts of this land; there is a rustle of anoles; high-pitched alarm of cicadas winding up, then down, then away, into deceiving silence. Before me, on the table, are spread my father’s things, what was left of him, his diaries, his drawings, his letters. Of my mother I have nothing—just his drawings of her (many of these), a single roguish photograph, and memories—poor uncertain objects, from which to try to reconstruct a world.
Spiders stir in the high, bright corners above me as I write, knitting their webs; the fan ticks rhythmically, tock-tock-tock-tock; it does not stir the air; this is a hot place; innocent, relentless in its innocence; without shadows; remorseless in its brightness; begging to be filled in. From the other room, the room where I am not, comes the sharp, sudden creaking and croaking of springs, a screen door snapping, sharply, open and shut.
Carlotta? It’s time to go. Carlotta.
Her step is soft, compared to mine; her hair still dark, supple, repelling reflection, like a raven’s wing. She has packed our bags, bought our tickets.
Carlotta.
We are about to step off the edge of the earth together, she and I. It takes great faith, to do a thing like that, with anybody. Let alone with an orphan like me.
• • •
First steps are hardest. When we step outside, onto wooden sidewalks that loft us up, in our long skirts, an inch or two above the muck of the new world, the men will call out to me: Hey, Red! Walk my way!
Ginger hair being no impediment here, in the new world. In this savage place.
• • •
Wait—I’m not ready.
Then hurry up, she says, hurry up, she’s impatient, with her little valise buckled up tight, lengthwise, crosswise, she’s ready to go; while I’m the picture of laxity, everything loose, scattered, unpacked, unorganized, unready; falling apart, oh, all falling apart, from the hairpins on down, with the past spread out before me on this desk, the future a willful flinging into the abyss. There is such complexity in this thing, of orphaning, and being orphaned; of leaving, and being left behind.
I am one, you see, who has slipped through; fallen down, unnoticed, through a gap in the fabric of things; settled softly, in a quiet, nearly forgotten place.
• • •
Hurry up, Carlotta. Or we’ll miss the boat.
Well. This is true.
• • •
It’s not that I’m angry. They couldn’t help themselves, my parents; nor could anyone else have helped them—they were, like all of us, each in our own way, doomed right from the start, just by being who they were: she, with her vague blue eyes, her pink, sulky pout, her distractedness—that peculiar air she always had, of being somewhere other than where she really was, or of wanting to be, until at last she was nowhere at all; he, with his pale white stalk of a neck, his nervous stutter, his pad and pencils, his ill-fitting suit, hunching over his lamp; hardly more than children themselves, when I came into the world; and unmoored, the both of them, terribly unmoored; all at sea; and so it was inevitable; and where blame cannot be placed, nor can anger be. They did not belong together, it is true, though he would chase her to the ends of the earth, and has done, and is doing—or so I believe—