The Man in the Tree

Chapter Sixteen

In October of that year Gene Anderson landed in Le Havre, where he joined Le Cirque Tripp, a small traveling circus and sideshow. During the next few years he moved often from one circus or carnival to another; by the time he was twenty-six he had visited every country in Europe. He changed his professional name many times. in Great Britain he was John Livingston; in France, Belgium, and Holland, Peter Owen, le géant gallois; in Italy and Greece, Robert Lee. In his twenty-sixth year he grew only half an inch: he was then eight feet four inches tall.

On a post at the side of his booth Anderson always taped a little card with the names of his childhood pen-pals on it: Gerd Heilbrunner, Claudina Neri, Yves Morand. One day in Paris, a woman said to him, "Why do you have my name on your card?"

He looked at her intently. She was blond, slender, erect, with a thin aristocratic nose: not pretty but handsome. "Are you Claudina Neri?"

"I was. Who are you?."

"Gene Anderson. We used to correspond. I'm very glad to meet you."

She put her hand in his and withdrew it. "My God!" she said. "I had forgotten, I was a girl at school. Let me think, you lived in -- what was it, Washington?"

"Oregon."

"You never told me you were a giant."

"I wasn't one then."

Two people were holding up photographs for him to sign. Claudina Neri wrote something on a card and handed it to him. "This is where I am staying. Come and see me."

They met the next morning at her hotel. Her name was Faure now. Her husband was Belgian; she had married when she was eighteen. They lived in Antwerp; she came to Paris once or twice a year for the shopping. There was also a villa in Nice, and she spoke of frequent trips to Rome, Florence, Athens. Her father was Italian, her mother German; she spoke French, English, Italian, German, Spanish.

"You are an extraordinary person," she told him at breakfast. "It is wrong of you to be so ignorant."

"I didn't have your advantages," Anderson said.

"If you mean the convent school, it was purgatory for me. I tried twice to commit suicide before I was sixteen. I was educated by force. You must educate yourself. Read, learn, think."

She made him speak French and corrected his mistakes; she also criticized his table manners. "A polite person does not use his fork like a shovel, to scoop food into his mouth, nor use his fingers to push food onto his fork."

They spent three mornings together before the circus left for Orléans, and after that Anderson saw her nearly every year. She seldom spoke of her husband, and Anderson met him only once, in the summer of 1968: a dark-haired man with pomaded hair, whose manners were almost too exquisite. She took him to the Louvre, which he disliked, and to the Jeu de Paume and the Orangerie, where he found all the Impressionists whose work was still excluded from the Louvre. He discovered, however, that very good postcard reproductions of Monet and van Gogh were for sale in the gift shop of the Louvre; he bought stacks of these and carried them with him for years.

They went to Notre Dame de Paris, in whose vast shadowy vault the rose windows stared down like celestial mandalas. Anderson was moved beyond speech. A woman near them was talking loudly and angrily in German.

"Everyone hates the Germans," Claudina remarked afterward, when they were sitting in the sunlight at a brasserie across the street from the cathedral.

"Because they invaded France?"

"No, just because they are Germans."

Once when she protested that he was paying too much at a restaurant, he said, "Don't worry about the money; I have plenty."

"More than they pay you in the circus?"

"Yes."

"Then why do you stay?"

"It's a community," he told her. "I'm accepted there; it's almost like having a family."

"There are other families." She introduced him to artists and writers, to Dubuffet, Genet, Arenas. Some of them became his friends, and gave him notes to people in other places. He bought paintings and sculptures, because he liked them and because he wanted to help the artists; he bought books, more than he could carry with him. He put them in storage, in Paris, Rome, Athens, Berlin. He was spending much more than he earned, and he disliked counterfeiting currency. In Turkey he bought cut diamonds at wholesale, thirty carats in all. He copied them, distributed the copies into bags, copied them again. Three months later, when he was in Amsterdam, he took his diamonds to a dealer.

"And where did you obtain these diamonds, Mr. Gordon?" the manager asked politely.

"In Ankara."

"And do you have an import license for them?"

"No."

The manager, a young man, rosy-checked, very well dressed, folded his hands on the table. "In that case, I could not offer you a very good price, I'm afraid."

"It doesn't matter. I want to sell them."

The manager stirred the pile of stones with his finger. "One hundred forty thousand guilders."

After that, he came back at least once a year and sold larger and larger quantities of diamonds. He put his money in numbered accounts in Switzerland. Later he began to invest in stocks and bonds, real estate, precious metals. There were many pleasures in the world for a young man with money; but even as he took them, he thought, 'Is this all?'

For a few years after Avila's death he had continued to make occasional small wood carvings; then even that had stopped, and he knew now that he had never had a real vocation. He had left everyone he had loved behind him. Although he had many friends, he knew he could get along without any one of them; he was proud of this self-reliance, this invulnerability, and he despised himself for it.

During the late sixties and early seventies he spent a good deal of time in museums. One of his favorite places was the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, where they had Rubens' huge 'Fall of the Damned' -- all those plump pink bellies and buttocks tumbling through the air like clotted leaves on the wind. Another was the Musée Unterlinden, in Colmar. He kept going back there to see Grünewald's 'Isenheim Altarpiece,' the only Crucifixion that he thought was worth a damn: Christ's body, not afloat in Disneyland like the one in El Greco, with its silly spigot of blood and its loincloth slipping coyly down like the tresses of the Botticelli Venus, and not like van der Weyden's Oriental monarch, lily in one hand, girdle in the other, robe flapping open across his muscular midriff, about to flap further -- God the Great Flasher -- but hanging under the weight of its pain, mouth open in a rictus and the sweat of death on its skin. It was not so much that he wanted to see it but that he could not stay away.

At a party given by a non-objective painter in London, he met a scruffy man named Hamilton who was drawing diagrams on the back of an envelope. "You see, here's the human population in the Middle Ages," he said. "See how it rises very gradually until you get to about seventeen fifty. Now it goes up more steeply. The population in nineteen fifty was about two and a half billion. By the year two thousand, it will be more like six billion."

The woman on the other side leaned over, spilling her Martini on Hamilton's knee. "Oh, sorry," she said. "But after all, Reggie, what's wrong with six billion people?"

Hamilton looked at her. "We can't feed that many," he said. "Even if we could, can we feed twice as many? Fifteen billion in twenty fifty? What about twenty-four billion? If we don't reduce our population ourselves, something else will reduce it for us."

"What might that be?"

"War. Famine. Plague."

"How grim." The woman got up, swaying a little, and called to a man across the room. "Donald, haven't you got any good records?"

"You see," said Hamilton, "they won't listen. I think it's the most extraordinary thing."

"Well, she's drunk," Gene said.

"Yes, but you're not, and you're not really listening either, are you?"

"Did you say you'd published a book about this?"

"Yes. It sold two thousand copies in England. There were more babies born than that on the day of publication. The main culprit," he went on, "is modern medicine. If you wanted to do something useful for humanity, you could go back in a time machine and kill Pasteur."

"Are you serious?"

"Oh, absolutely. Until the end of the nineteenth century there was really no effective medicine for anything. Doctors weren't healers especially, they were diagnosticians -- their job was to identify the malady and tell the patient what to expect. Apart from that, and a lot of nostrums that didn't work, they just did palliative things -- sent people on ocean voyages, and so on. Well, in the twentieth century we've wiped out one disease after another, and the result is that there is no effective check on population. But people are breeding pretty much the way they always have, and you see the ghastly result. You're, what, about twenty?"

"Twenty-four."

"Well, with reasonable luck, you'll live long enough to see the big smash. I put it about ten years into the new century. We can't go on as we are much longer than that."

"You'd rather see people die of things like cholera, and typhoid?"

"It's not a question of wanting people to die. We're all going to die. The question is how many. People are going to die of plague and famine and war. The longer we put it off, the worse it will be."

"What's the answer, then? Birth control, education?"

"Yes. The only answer, except the three I mentioned."

"Will it work?"

After a moment Hamilton put his envelope away in his pocket. "No. Probably not. But one's got to try."

One spring in Rome, when Claudina was there, she took him to see an extraordinary exhibit. It was not in a gallery but in a cellar hired for the occasion, under an abandoned brewery. From the lobby where they bought their tickets they went down a steep flight of stairs into an unpleasant earth-smelling gloom. An attendant held a curtain open. "Per favore." Beyond the curtain they found themselves in a long, high chamber with a wooden hand-rail running down the middle. The only light came from dim hooded lamps aimed diagonally upward from the floor. Above each of these lights, as their eyes began to adjust, they could see a monstrous incomprehensible shape projecting from the wall. As they moved slowly down the room, each figure in turn became clearer. There were five: a king and a queen in tenth-century costume, a goat-horned demon, a nude and obese woman with a hood concealing her face, a hawk-headed image of the god Horus. The figures were carved of some grainless wood, stained red-brown; each one sat on a carved throne fixed to the wall, not upright but projecting horizontally, so that the vast malignant faces stared downward; and the figures were so massive, so arrogant in their perverse gravity that Gene and Claudina felt a kind of vertigo, as if they themselves, not the carved figures, were standing impossibly on a wall.

Afterward they met the artist, a haggard young man named Gianfranco Peganuzzi. His smile was wolfish; his English was very good.

"Where did you get the idea for those figures?" Gene asked.

"It was something in 'The Adventures of Augie March,' by Saul Bellow. His people were in a gallery in Paris, looking at some paintings from the Pinakothek, and Bellow wrote, 'These grand masterpieces were sitting on the walls.' At first I thought that was funny. Then I said to myself, 'Why not?' And then it grew."

He said that it had taken him five years to carve the figures; he had hollowed them out to reduce the weight, but, even so, each one weighed seven hundred pounds, and it had been necessary to attach them by means of bolts inserted through holes drilled in the masonry.

"Did you feel a dislocation, a nausea?" he asked.

"Yes," said C!audina, "very much. I understood then why there was a hand-rail. And after the exhibition, what will you do with them?"

He shrugged. "Maybe some museum will buy them, or some collector. Or maybe, if I get rich, I will build a gallery for them, underground -- in a castle which I will buy, you understand -- and leave them there. There will be no lights in the gallery. If you want to see them, you have to go there with flashlights." He grinned.

In 1972 Gene Anderson left the circus for good and took up residence in Athens, where there was an international community that he liked. Among his friends there was an Irish painter named Hugh Mulloy. Mulloy drank a good deal and quarreled with his wife, and sometimes when she locked him out he would go to one of his friends' apartments, climb down the fire escape, and get in through a window. They would find him the next morning asleep on the couch, or perhaps on the floor. People used to say, "Poor old Hugh." Everyone liked him, even when he was so drunk that he couldn't talk. He was an emaciated little man with ginger-colored hair and bright blue eyes. His favorite saying was, "Let's have another for the fun that's in it."

In the autumn of 1973 Gene was living in an old high-ceilinged apartment in the Patésia district; he had been there only a month or two. One night he had a bad dream, the kind in which the dreamer sees everything very clearly and knows what is happening, but is unable to move. In the dream, he was in an old house, perhaps a castle, with tall ceilings and casement windows. It was dark outside. Gene was lying in bed looking at one of the windows, and he knew that in a moment someone was going to try to get in and kill him. But he could not move; it was that kind of dream. He lay watching the window, and he saw a man's shape appear in the frame. Then he woke up with a jolt, covered with sweat, cold and shaking. The window in his room was partly open, but there was nobody there. He closed the window and turned on all the lights, and sat up until after dawn. For some reason the dream had made him think of the gigantic carved figures of Gianfranco Peganuzzi, and he wondered if they were brooding somewhere in the darkness underground.

About a week later, someone asked him if he had seen Hugh. His friends compared notes; it turned out that no one had seen him since the day before Gene's nightmare; and no one ever saw him again.

Gene believed he knew what had happened. Hugh had been to his new apartment only once, and didn't know where all the rooms were. He must have come down the fire escape on the wrong side, and tried to get into Gene's bedroom window instead of the window in the living room; and Gene, half-aware in his sleep, had destroyed him -- made him nonexistent, thrown him out of the world forever.

He went to see Hugh's wife and gave her some money, and got away as soon as he could; he was unable to bear her gratitude. He flew to London and talked to a marine architect, who designed for him a sixty-foot cutter-rigged sloop with a cabin and galley tall enough for him to stand upright. He took instruction in sailing and seamanship; a year later, when Sea Sprite was ready, he hired a deckhand-cook named Richards and sailed across the Atlantic. From that day onward, he never spent a night ashore in a room that had a window that could be reached from the outside.