Is he a serious person or just a fool?
DOSTOEVSKY
M
ARK chose to stay with his father, who managed to get a part in a Spanish television series as a wicked English lord, so that the boy could complete a full year in the same school in Madrid. Proud and relieved that his son was not deserting him, Niven soon had to face the fact that he was losing him just the same, as Mark began to lead his own life with a purposeful air. His room filled up with maps, wind charts, books on sunken treasure and Latin America — and he had very little time for conversation.At first Niven thought it was a passing phase, a schoolboy's hobby, but school had become a tiresome waste of time for Mark now that there was something he really wanted to learn, and he spent his days in the archives of the Museo Naval in Madrid, reading the logbooks of Span-ish ships that might have passed by the northwestern Bahamas in Sep-tember 182o.
"Your mother will say I can't look after you!" Niven protested, after hearing from the director of the gimnasio Mark was supposed to be at-tending. "Don't be such a fool, please. It's impossible to find witnesses to an accident that happened at a busy intersection in the city last night, but you think you're going to find an eyewitness report about a ship-wreck that happened hundreds of years ago —"
"It wasn't even a hundred and fifty years ago."
"— out in the wide Atlantic? In a hurricane?"
"Maybe after the hurricane. Lots of ships could have sighted the wreckage in the water or on the reefs. That would be recorded in their logbooks."
"I'm not going to let you drop out of school, and that's the end of it!"
Mark promised to reform but continued to play truant with as many 28
excuses as he could think of, which were accepted without demur by his teachers; they didn't intend to wear themselves out trying to reform a transient foreigner. These profesores wore faded dark suits and were given to strumming their waistcoats with the dignified resignation of ill-paid gentlemen, and they listened to Mark's lies with boredom and a visible effort to appear credulous. 'They'd rather be somewhere else themselves,' Mark reflected. 'And if I stay poor I'll be like them, I'll have to spend my whole life in a place that makes me sick, just to keep myself alive.' His bright, intelligent eyes blazed with the flames of his resolution never to submit to such a fate.
In early December he disappeared with the money for his new winter coat. The police had no success in tracing him alive or dead. A week later he reappeared, with blue lips and running nose, half frozen but happy.
"Are you trying to kill me?" his father asked in a weak voice, cowed by nights of sleepless terror.
"I'm going to make it up to you, Dad," Mark said, hugging his father in a sudden rush of affection. "I would have asked you, but I knew you wouldn't let me go."
He had been in Seville, exploring the Archives of the Indies. "Just imagine," he said as his father was making tea for them, "they have a copy of the Flora's last manifest. It's all true. There are a hundred and twenty-six solid gold statuettes of the Madonna of Lima in the hold. And seventeen thousand gold bars, each one kilo. That's seventeen tons of gold!"
"What, no diamonds?"
"Diamonds too — but diamonds are nothing, Dad! They're the most famous just because there are a lot of them — the world is full of dia- monds. Emeralds are the real thing — they're the rarest and most beau- tiful stones. Did you know that the reason the Pharaohs were so rich was that they had an emerald mine? A girl at the Archives of the Indies told me that. We were talking about this famous cross, la Cruz de las Siete Esmeraldas. Seven emeralds as big as plums — and that cross is on my ship! It was blessed by St. Pius V in the 16th century — it says so right on the manifest because that makes it more valuable. It was just a simple gold cross with seven opals when St. Pius V blessed it. The emeralds are from Muzo in Colombia — they were put in two centuries later when the cross was taken to South America. I'll never sell that cross."
"But what will you do for a winter coat?"
Mark was taken aback for a moment; he still felt the terrible cold of the train. Then he shrugged defiantly, thinking of General San Martin riding through the icy mists of the Andes. "I don't mind the cold," he said.
Niven hoped the craze would pass once they left Spain, but when they
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got to Paris, Mark began to frequent the maritime archives and the Bib-liotheque Nationale to look for references to the Flora in old logbooks and seamen's memoirs. He was the busiest young man. He earned money by selling the Herald Tribune on the boulevard de l'Opera and bought an aqualung and scuba gear to practice diving in the Seine. To have fun, he went for long walks in the Louvre, just as in Madrid he had gone for walks in the Prado; strolling through palaces packed with great works of art had the sort of intoxicating effect on him that music has on others.
At night, wanting to know more about the origins of his future wealth, he read Latin American history. On the wall over his bed were pictures stolen from library books — a portrait of General San Martin and a pho-tograph of the statue of the Virgin in the Cathedral of Lima. On his vis-its to libraries he carried a razor blade in a matchbox, to cut out pages that interested him.
"I don't think it's such a great idea to grow up in dusty old li-braries," the actor said to his son, who was looking more like him every month while becoming ever more distant.
"I dive a lot."
"Don't remind me."
"Anyway, libraries aren't dusty," Mark explained. "Librarians are fussy people, they dust things even with their handkerchiefs."
Thus passed nearly two years.
TRYING to cope with his adolescent son on his own, Niven had to bear the full burden of parental impotence. At times he felt tempted to beat some sense into Mark's head, but was restrained by the warning exam-ple of several of his colleagues whose children had disappeared for good.
So he was reduced to fretting and nagging.
"You can't expect me to support you forever, you know," he said darkly.
"That's all right, I'll be a millionaire," replied Mark jauntily, pock-eting his hands. "Quite apart from everything else, I'll have seven hundred forty-three thousand and fifty gold doubloons." (He knew the Flora's manifest by heart.)
"Even if you find some reference to the wreck, which you won't, where will it get you? There are wrecks that were pinpointed on the map centuries ago and still nobody can find them!"
"You've been reading my books," Mark said with a grin. It was a serene and unconcerned grin, a rich man's grin, in fact — the kind of grin Niven saw on the faces of producers when he tried to impress upon them how badly he needed a job — the amiable, complacent grin of somebody who doesn't hear you but is willing to let you talk.
Staring at this grin, Niven grew disgusted with himself. He had sworn repeatedly that he would not argue, he knew that it was useless, yet he 30
could not stop — and each time he was surprised that he made no impression! But no sooner had such reflections reduced him to grim ap- athy than another argument would occur to him and he would start up again, unable to accept the fact that nothing he could say would make any difference.
"If I were you," Niven said in a flat, colorless voice, bored by his own obstinacy, "I'd try to think of the big letdown, the bitter end all this will come to. You fill your head with gold coins, gold bars, emer-alds, and some day you'll wake up to find yourself working in a gas station. I can't see anything else for you, the way you keep skipping school."
"Who needs it, sitting there all day wasting time? I pass my exams.
You have a mania about school!"
"That's right. Your great-grandparents on both sides came from Scot-land, and the Scots are fanatical about education. So you should be too."
"I speak four languages, what do you want?"
"I speak five and where does it get me?"
"Nowhere!" Mark shot back triumphantly. "And you have a degree from Columbia."
This was true and it riled Niven. "Sometimes I think if you were less bright you wouldn't be such an idiot!" he exclaimed, flaring up again.
Mark squinted as if to keep the insult out of his eyes. "You should be glad I don't drop acid or smoke or drink — you should be proud of me instead of criticizing me all the time!"
"If you want to do something crazy, why don't you be an actor? OK, let that go. But how about painting?"
Mark, who had moments when he felt ashamed of not being able to act or paint, blushed deeply and shot an angry look at his father.
"You fall in love with every Perugino woman you ever lay eyes on,"
Niven persisted, deciding that if he was doomed to be tormented with worry about his son, he would rather have him be an artist. "I'll never forget how excited you were when you and your mother came back from Firenze. So why don't you paint?"
"You only say these things to put me down!"
"No, I mean it. I think your trees were really good."
The boy raised his head with a mixture of belligerence and pride, dar-ing his father to laugh at him. "I'll make my contribution to history in my own way."
"Well, at least you know you need talent to be an artist, that's some-thing," sighed the actor.
"You fuss too much, Dad," Mark replied with the infuriating con-descension of a sixteen-year-old who knew what he was about. "ge-lax."
Yet in many ways he was an ideal son.
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Now that they were on their own they divided the household chores between them, each keeping his own room in order and taking weekly turns at preparing breakfast, washing the dishes, cleaning the apartment and going to the launderette. The problems of shopping for the best and cheapest coffee, yoghurt or soap were discussed between them as the weightiest matters. In all this the boy did his fair share before disap-pearing for the rest of the day.
Even his orderly habits, however, alarmed his father. Niven couldn't suppress the feeling that there was something profoundly unnatural about the methodical way Mark had settled down to trace a long-lost ship as if preparing himself for any normal profession with certain if modest rewards. It was this apparent unawareness that there was anything odd or unreasonable about the whole enterprise that scared Niven the most.
When he was alone at home during the day he couldn't resist going into Mark's room — a room like the cabin of a studious petty officer, packed but neat, filled with maps, charts and other reminders of the sea. The sight of the aqualung in the corner made him break out in a cold sweat.
In the evening Mark would show up at their regular eating place, Chartier, carrying his notes and his thoughts, bumping into tables, or, worse, wielding a huge rolled-up chart. The diners ducked their heads, the waiters exchanged gleeful looks. Mark didn't notice. 'They think he's strange too,' Niven observed, 'and they don't even know him.'
Yet, though the waiters confirmed his own view, he tipped them less because of it.
ONE evening at Chartier Niven was seized by the extravagant hope that sex would save his son.
The grand old wood-paneled restaurant in the rue du Faubourg Mont-martre, with its sawdust-strewn floors and its gaslight chandeliers now filled with electric bulbs, had been serving the best cheap meals in Paris ever since the Great Exhibition of 1869 and was still the most popular eating place for the poor but well-informed. It had also the additional attraction of an upstairs gallery along one side, where the Nivens always sat, if they could, at a table by the railing from which they could watch the crowd below. Niven, arriving late that evening, noticed Mark at their favorite table, ogling a big-breasted girl almost directly beneath him.
The actor was stopped by a pang of envy. His son was as stocky and broad-faced as he was, but the solidity of the impressively high forehead and wide cheekbones was softened by the liquid brightness of the eyes and the delicately curved lips, which were a maternal inheritance. 'I'd have been a star years ago with that touch of feminine charm,' thought Niven.
Sitting down at the table, he surprised Mark with a long question.
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"Do you think I'm a malevolent old man who doesn't approve of any-thing you want to do? You think I don't want you to enjoy yourself?"
"No, not really — I'm sure you mean well."
Finding no appropriate response to this compliment, Niven hailed the waiter. After they were served he tried again. "I just wondered whether it isn't a bore for you to have dinner with me every night."
"We're friends, aren't we?"
"Sure, sure." Having looked around to check that no one nearby was speaking English, Niven pushed his plate aside and leaned closer to Mark.
"But what if you want to get into a girl?" he asked straight out, to shake him up a little. "Play a game of tick-tack with her?"
"Mother was right, Dad, you have a foul mouth."
"What's so foul about a game of tick-tack?" asked Niven with sud-den temper, withdrawing to his side of the table. "That's Shakespeare, you ignorant lout. I'm sick and tired of you putting me down all the time."
Mark bent his head, hoping that his father would understand that he was sorry and there would be no need to say it.
The actor was a man of violent feelings, but they burned away in his eyes, on his face, in his voice (which is perhaps why he was an actor) and his son's embarrassment was sufficient to pacify him. "What I mean is," he went on in a friendly voice, "if you like a girl and want to take her out, you don't have to worry about money. I'd be glad to give you some extra." The generosity of this proposal may be measured by the fact that Niven himself had affairs only with independent women who could and would pay their own way. Money seemed to go farther since his wife had left them, and he could provide two furnished rooms and regular meals even during his periods of unemployment, without the dramatic gaps of actual penury that had embittered his married life, but he accomplished this feat with a stinginess acquired by living for most of his working years on an uncertain income. However, he was quite prepared to make sacrifices in a good cause. "I can always let you have an extra sixty–seventy francs," he added after some rapid calculation.
"Don't worry about it, Dad," begged Mark. "I know some girls, we go for walks."
"Just let me know when you want me out of the apartment."
"Thanks."
"Listen, you'll soon be sixteen, that's just the right age. I suppose your grandparents would want you to wait until you're old enough not to get excited about it, but why miss out on the best time? Sixteen . . . you've no idea how lucky you are! / know because I'm getting on and I'm not like I used to be. I'm going to tell you something only a father would tell you. . . . After twenty, twenty-two, it's never quite the same for a man."
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"I know, I know."
"Well, then, we'd better start by getting you a new jacket. Your wrists are running ahead of your sleeves."
"Thanks, Dad — honestly, though, clothes don't matter. I have enough clothes."
"You never ask me for so much as a new shirt," the actor said, get-ting annoyed again. "I really don't understand what you want that trea-ture for — you're not interested in anything money can buy."
"That's not true. I want a lot of things."
"What, for instance?"
"I'll put up the money for a new production of Monte Cristo," Mark retorted promptly. "I'll buy a theater where out-of-work actors can come together and stage a play without worrying about rent or electricity bills.
And I'll buy a lot of different places and keep everything we need in each of them, so we'll never have to pack and we can travel without worrying about leaving stuff behind. That was a good idea of yours -to have our own apartment or villa wherever we want -to stay."
"I never said that," Niven protested.
"Oh yes you did — when we were living in the apartment on the Ile Saint-Louis — that time when it looked like you were going to be a star."
"So something I said got through to you!"
"I listen," Mark replied with a confident grin. "I'm also going to buy a Caribbean island and invite girls to come and stay with me."
"Don't make them wait too long," sighed the actor, giving up for the day.
BETWEEN the ages of fourteen and eighteen, traveling with his father and making side trips on his own, Mark spent most of his waking hours in the maritime archives of Seville, Madrid, Paris, Marseilles, Genoa and London, manifesting an extraordinary capacity for perseverance and a considerable talent for systematic research.
To find out what ships were in the area at the time, he read Admiralty and port authority records, acquiring an extensive knowledge of sea traffic between Europe and the Americas in 182o. To make sense of the ships' logbooks he found, he supplemented his Spanish, French and Italian with the language of the sea, studying old maritime charts and navigational instruments, trade routes, the speeds of sailing ships, the prevailing winds.
Counting on finding some reference to the site of the wreck and antici-pating that it might have shifted since 182o, he learned about the nature
Counting on finding some reference to the site of the wreck and antici-pating that it might have shifted since 182o, he learned about the nature