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The Wilderness

The Wilderness began life in Africa in 1964. I had drifted south, hitch-hiking, from Mombasa. At the border between Northern and Southern Rhodesia (now Zambia and Zimbabwe) I was hired by a magician. I studied his work with the same attentiveness I gave to works of prose. Magic, I decided, was the same as art: the same technical tricks, the same interweaving of fact and fiction, of control and misdirection, the deliberate use of confusion to take an audience where you wished; and the same thrill, too, the same miraculous dance at the edge of the world, the same cruel ecstasy of mystery and horror and love. Magic was art, I saw. Art was magic.

I began writing The Wilderness there in Rhodesia. I wrote between acts, so to speak, between tricks, a palmed card, a levitating woman, a bullet caught between teeth....

I was 25 years old. I had already been wandering for some years. I had worked my way through the south seas on a fishing boat, and taken a motorcycle up the center of Australia. Moro pirates smuggled me into Borneo, where I ran a small mining company. In those days life seemed an accumulation of adventures. I carried with me an old typewriter, an Underwood, balancing it on one shoulder. I remember using it as a weapon in Bombay, beating away an angry taxi driver. A red-haired girl watched me. Do you carry that with you everywhere you go? she asked, nodding at the machine. Everywhere, I said. Then you are always armed! she cried.

The book was finished something over a year later, in southern California. How does one reconcile the long dusty roads of Africa with the concrete highways of America? Perhaps one cannot. When I finished The Wilderness I put it in a box and headed south. It was a relief to resume wandering. I traveled by canoe up the Usumacinta River, taught English at a girls' college in Costa Rica, wandered down the Amazon. Soon enough I began other novels. The Wilderness, however, pleases me in ways the others do not. I see dancing among its pages the nimble fingers of my youth....

Only recently has it been published, by Fiction Collective Two, the fourth of my novels to so appear. It is available there or at Amazon.com.

“I am confused by the purple mountains in my memory. I am confused by the woman who lies on my bed, dead after so many years of suffering, her skin turned purplish by the twilight. I am confused, also, by the total lack of people around me, and this is strange: have I not, all my life, sought to partition myself off from everyone else? Have I now, indeed, through some power I never expected, banished the world from my presence? It is all the more bewildering, since, casting back in my mind, a tremendous multitude of people pass before me, all colors and sizes, people who crawled over every corner of the globe. For it is true, I am sure of it, that I have been everywhere. I cannot imagine one river that I have not seen, or one mountain, or a single desert that I have not crossed. The names of these places are like islands in my memory. Katmandu, the Australian Bight, Nurye Elia, Sibutu, and thousands of others, towns and villages, hills and mountains. Either I have been to these places of I have imagined them so violently that they seem true and real to me, as real, or even more, than the room where I now seem to live, with its bed and chair and barren floor...."

“Between the buildings ran alleyways and rising from them were crooked clattering stairways. They were familiar to me, the cages, I had seen them in Bombay (where she had accompanied me, her face turning ugly with astonishment and disgust and fear) and Calcutta and alone in Kuala Lumpur, where I had spent a rough and drunken night walking through the mud, trading insults and comments with the inhabitants (Apa mau? I asked the old one who stuck a long bare leg in front of me. Saya mau orang puh-tee! she chanted.), awakening in the morning behind one of the little shacks, so stiff I could hardly move. It was then I decided to go to Australia, a white country, where I was to meet her. I drifted through the jungle to Singapore, expecting to find something opening up for me; but it took eight months to reach Sydney, through Borneo and the Philippines, crawling in a kumpit through the Sulu Sea, eating dried fish and drinking straight rum. Little green islands rose out of the ocean. The water was full of purplish jellyfish and sea slugs. In Sibutu a Moro family of smugglers took me in, and a young Catholic priest gave me wine and listened in astonishment as I told him of my travels. He must have slept badly that night, dreaming of silken Malay girls and the ragged hungry urchin-whores of Alexandria...."

“There were few women in the room: the two hairy peasant girls, holding hands, the one with the cleft lip, and the mama, who was sleeping, sagging back in her chair. I nudged her and she awoke, her eyes flicking open. She did not move, but only stared at me.
     It is late, she said.
     I know.
     It is almost morning.
     Yes, youre right.
     The girls are asleep.
     I will awaken her.
     Thirty rupees, she said.
     All the time her eyes stayed on mine. Her lips only barely moved. The two peasant girls nodded sleepily and the harelip stared straight in front of her. The broad bottom of the mama overflowed the seat of her chair. When I gave her the money she stuffed it into her bosom, between the huge fat breasts, and immediately shut her eyes. A snore came from between her motionless lips. I tip-toed across the room, passing the mirror: for a moment I was caught in it, halted in mid-stride, a red face, dry pale hair, a wiry beard and eyes that looked fearfully at each other. Then I slid past. My foot descended, and the mirror showed only the wall of the room and the sleeping fat woman...."