The Angel Esmeralda Read online

  PRAISE FOR DON DELILLO

  “DeLillo has an uncanny knack for creating sentences that replicate the feel and rhythm of American life—and a devastating sense of humor that surfaces in the most surprising places.”

  —MALCOLM JONES, NEWSWEEK

  “DeLillo depicts an America in thrall to celebrity, technology and the mass media. . . . [He] gives us a visceral sense of how private lives and public events, the personal and the collective, can converge, with explosive force.”

  —MICHIKO KAKUTANI, THE NEW YORK TIMES

  “Don DeLillo has long been our most prescient writer, the man whose imagination felt like a crystal ball.”

  —VINCE PASSARO, O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE

  “DeLillo understands the capacity of words to elevate us above the mundane, to establish a distance from things and a mastery over them.

  ” —STEVEN E. ALFORD, HOUSTON CHRONICLE

  FROM ONE OF THE GREATEST WRITERS OF OUR TIME, HIS FIRST COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES, WRITTEN BETWEEN 1979 AND 2011, CHRONICLING—AND FORETELLING—THREE DECADES OF AMERICAN LIFE

  Set in Greece, the Caribbean, Manhattan, a white-collar prison and outer space, these nine stories are a mesmerizing introduction to Don DeLillo’s iconic voice, from the rich, startling, jazz-infused rhythms of his early work to the spare, distilled, monastic language of the later stories.

  In “Creation,” a couple at the end of a cruise somewhere in the West Indies can’t get off the island—flights canceled, unconfirmed reservations, a dysfunctional economy. In “Human Moments in World War III,” two men orbiting the earth, charged with gathering intelligence and reporting to Colorado Command, hear the voices of American radio, from a half century earlier. In the title story, Sisters Edgar and Grace, nuns working the violent streets of the South Bronx, confirm the neighborhood’s miracle, the apparition of a dead child, Esmeralda.

  Nuns, astronauts, athletes, terrorists and travelers, the characters in The Angel Esmeralda propel themselves into the world and define it. DeLillo’s sentences are instantly recognizable, as original as the splatter of Jackson Pollock or the luminous rectangles of Mark Rothko. These nine stories describe an extraordinary journey of one great writer whose prescience about world events and ear for American language changed the literary landscape.

  DON DELILLO, the author of fifteen novels, including Falling Man, White Noise and Libra, has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work and the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his novel Underworld. In 2010, he received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award. These stories appeared in Esquire, Harper’s Magazine, Granta, Antaeus and The New Yorker. The title story appeared in The Best American Short Stories 1995.

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  COPYRIGHT © 2011 SIMON & SCHUSTER

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  ALSO BY DON DELILLO

  NOVELS

  Americana

  End Zone

  Great Jones Street

  Ratner’s Star

  Players

  Running Dog

  The Names

  White Noise

  Libra

  Mao II

  Underworld

  The Body Artist

  Cosmopolis

  Falling Man

  Point Omega

  PLAYS

  The Day Room

  Valparaiso

  Love-Lies-Bleeding

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by Don DeLillo

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First scribner hardcover edition November 2011

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  DESIGNED BY ERICH HOBBING

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  ISBN 978-1-4516-5584-1

  ISBN 978-1-4516-5807-1 (ebook)

  These stories appeared in the following publications: “Creation” in Antaeus 33, Spring 1979; “Human Moments in World War III” in Esquire, July 1983; “The Runner” in Harper’s, September 1988; “The Ivory Acrobat” in Granta 25, Autumn 1988; “The Angel Esmeralda” in Esquire, May 1994; “Baader-Meinhof” in The New Yorker, April 1, 2002; “Midnight in Dostoevsky” in The New Yorker, November 30, 2009; “Hammer and Sickle” in Harper’s, December 2010; and “The starveling” in Granta 117, Autumn 2011.

  The image on p. 45 is from the book Herakleion Museum, published by Ekdotike Athenon, and is used with permission. The image on p. 103 is a painting by Gerhard Richter and is used with permission of the Marian Goodman Gallery. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  Creation

  Human Moments in World War III

  PART TWO

  The Runner

  The Ivory Acrobat

  The Angel Esmeralda

  PART THREE

  Baader-Meinhof

  Midnight in Dostoevsky

  Hammer and Sickle

  The Starveling

  THE ANGEL

  ESMERALDA

  PART ONE

  Creation (1979)

  Human Moments in World War III (1983)

  CREATION

  It was an hour’s drive, much of it a climb through smoky rain. I kept my window open several inches, hoping to catch a fragrance, some savor of aromatic shrubs. Our driver slowed down for the worst parts of the road and the tightest turns and for cars coming toward us through the haze. At intervals the bordering vegetation was less thick and there were views of pure jungle, whole valleys of it, spread between the hills.

  Jill read her book on the Rockefellers. Once into something she was unreachable, as though massively stunned, and all the way out I saw her raise her eyes from the page only once, to glance at some children playing in a field.

  There wasn’t much traffic in either direction. The cars coming toward us appeared abruptly, little color cartoons, ramshackle and bouncing, and Rupert, our driver, had to maneuver quickly in the total rain to avoid collisions and deep gashes in the road and the actual jungle pressing in. It seemed to be understood that any evasive action would have to be taken by our vehicle, the taxi.

  The road leveled out. Now and then someone stood in the trees, looking in at us. Smoke rolled down from the heights. The car climbed again, briefly, and then entered the airport, a series of small buildings and a
runway. The rain stopped. I paid Rupert and we carried the luggage into the terminal. Then he stood outside with other men in sport shirts, talking in the sudden glare.

  The room was full of people, luggage and boxes. Jill sat on her suitcase, reading, with our tote bags and carry-ons placed about her. I pushed my way to the counter and found out we were wait-listed, numbers five and six. This brought a thoughtful look to my face. I told the man we’d confirmed in St. Vincent. He said it was necessary to reconfirm seventy-two hours before flight time. I told him we’d been sailing; we were in the Tobago Cays seventy-two hours ago—no people, no buildings, no phones. He said it was the rule to reconfirm. He showed me eleven names on a piece of paper. Physical evidence. We were five and six.

  I went over to tell Jill. She let her body sag into the luggage, a stylized collapse. It took her a while to finish. Then we carried on a formal dialogue. She made all the points I’d just made talking to the man at the counter. Confirmed in St. Vincent. Chartered yacht. Uninhabited islands. And I repeated all the things he’d said to me in reply. She played my part, in other words, and I enacted his, but I did so in a most reasonable tone of voice, and added plausible data, hoping only to soothe her exasperation. I also reminded her there was another flight three hours after this one. We’d still get to Barbados in time for a swim before dinner. And afterward it would be cool and starry. Or warm and starry. And we’d hear surf rumbling in the distance. The eastern coast was known for rumbling surf. And the following afternoon we’d catch our plane to New York, as scheduled, and nothing would be lost except several hours in this authentic little island airport.

  “How neo-romantic, and how right for today. These planes seat, what, forty?”

  “Oh, more,” I said.

  “How many more?”

  “Just more.”

  “And we are listed where?”

  “Five and six.”

  “Beyond the more than forty.”

  “Plenty of no-shows,” I said. “The jungle swallows them up.”

  “Nonsense. Look at these people. They’re still arriving.”

  “Some are seeing the others off.”

  “If he believes that, God, I don’t want him on my side. The fact is they shouldn’t be here at all. It’s off-season.”

  “Some of them live here.”

  “And we know which ones, don’t we?”

  The plane arrived, from Trinidad, and the sound and sight of it caused people near the counter to push in more closely. I went around to the side and approached from behind the adjacent counter, where several others stood. The reconfirmed passengers began filing toward the immigration booth.

  Voices. A British woman said the late-afternoon flight had been canceled. We all pushed in closer. Two West Indian men up front waved their tickets at the clerk. There were more voices. I jumped up several times in order to look over the heads of the assembled people to the dirt road outside. Rupert was still there.

  Things were rapidly taking shape. Freight and luggage out one door, passengers out the other. I realized we were down to standbys. The people leaving the counter seemed propelled by some deep saving force. A primitive baptism might have been in progress. The rest of us crowded around the clerk. He was putting checks next to some names, crossing out others.

  “The flight is full,” he said. “The flight is full.”

  There were eight or ten faces left, bland in their traveler’s woe. Various kinds of English were being spoken. Someone suggested we all get together and charter a plane. It was fairly common practice here. Someone else said something about a nine-seater. The first person took names, then went out with several others to find the charter office. I asked the clerk about the late-afternoon flight. He didn’t know why it had been canceled. I asked him to book Jill and me on the first flight out next day. The passenger list wasn’t available, he said. All he could do was put us on standby. We would all know more in the morning.

  Using only feet, Jill and I pushed our luggage to the door. One of the charter prospects came back to tell us a plane might be available later in the day—a six-seater, only. This seemed to leave us out. I gestured to Rupert and we started taking things out to the car. Rupert had a long face and a gap between his front teeth and wore a silver medal over his breast pocket—an elaborate oval decoration attached to a multicolored strip of cloth.

  Jill sat in back, reading. Out by the trunk, Rupert was saying he knew a hotel not far from the harbor. His gaze kept straying to the right. A woman was standing five feet away, very still, waiting for us to finish talking. I thought I recalled having seen her at the edge of the crowd inside the terminal. She wore a gray dress and carried a handbag. There was a small suitcase at her feet.

  “Please, my taxi went back,” she said to me.

  She was pale, with a soft plain face, a full mouth and cropped brown hair. She held her right hand up near her forehead to keep the sun out of her eyes. It was agreed we would share the taxi fare to the hotel and then ride out together in the morning. She said she was number seven.

  It was hot and bright all the way back. The woman sat up front with Rupert. At intervals she turned to Jill and me and said, “It is awful, awful, the system they have,” or, “I don’t understand how they survive economically,” or, “They could not guarantee I will get out even tomorrow.”

  When we stopped for some goats, a woman came out of the trees to sell us nutmeg in little plastic bags.

  “Where are we listed?” Jill said.

  “Two and three this time.”

  “What time’s the flight?”

  “Six forty-five. We have to be there at six. Rupert, we have to be there at six.”

  “I take you.”

  “Where are we going now?” Jill said.

  “Hotel.”

  “I know hotel. What sort of hotel?”

  “Did you see me jump, back there?”

  “I missed that.”

  “I jumped in the air.”

  “It won’t be Barbados, will it?” she said.

  “Read your book,” I told her.

  The ketch was still anchored in the harbor. I pointed it out to the woman up front and explained that we’d spent the last week and a half aboard. She turned and smiled wanly as if she were too tired to work out the meaning of my remarks. We were in the hills, heading south. I realized what made this harbor town seem less faded and haphazard than the other small ports we’d put into. Stone buildings. It was almost Mediterranean.

  At the hotel there was no problem getting rooms. Rupert said he’d be waiting at five next morning. Two maids preceded us along the beach, with a porter following. We split into two groups, and Jill and I were led to what was called a pool suite. Behind a ten-foot wall was a private garden of hibiscus, various shrubs and a silk-cotton tree. The small pool was likewise ours. On the patio we found a bowl full of bananas, mangoes and pineapple.

  “Not half bad,” Jill said.

  She slept awhile. I floated in the pool, feeling the uneasy suspense lift off me, the fret of getting somewhere in groups—documented travel. This spot was so close to perfect we would not even want to tell ourselves how lucky we were, having been delivered to it. The best of new places had to be protected from our own cries of delight. We would hold the words for weeks or months, for the soft evening when a stray remark would set us to recollecting. I guess we believed, together, that the wrong voice can obliterate a landscape. This sentiment was itself unspoken, and one of the sources of our attachment.

  I opened my eyes to the sight of wind-driven clouds—clouds scudding—and a single frigate bird hung on a current of air, long wings flat and still. The world and all things in it. I wasn’t foolish enough to think I was in the lap of some primal moment. This was a modern product, this hotel, designed to make people feel they’d left civilization behind. But if I wasn’t naive, I wasn’t in the mood, either, to stir up doubts about the place. We’d had half a day of frustration, long drives out and back, and the cooling touch of f
reshwater on my body, and the ocean-soaring bird, and the speed of those low-flying clouds, their massive tumbling summits, and my weightless drift, the slow turning in the pool, like some remote-controlled rapture, made me feel I knew what it was to be in the world. It was special, yes. The dream of Creation that glows at the edge of the serious traveler’s search. Naked. It remained only for Jill to come walking through the sheer curtains and slip silently into the pool.

  We had dinner in the pavilion, overlooking a quiet sea. The tables were only one-quarter occupied. The European woman, our taxi companion, sat in the far corner. I nodded. Either she didn’t notice or chose not to acknowledge.

  “Shouldn’t we ask her to join us?”

  “She doesn’t want to,” I said.

  “We’re Americans, after all. We’re famous for asking people to join us.”

  “She chose the most remote table. She’s happy there.”

  “She could be an economist from the Soviet bloc. What do you think? Or someone doing a health study for the U.N.”

  “Way off.”

  “A youngish widow, Swiss, here to forget.”

  “Not Swiss.”

  “German,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Wandering aimlessly through the islands. Sitting at the most remote tables.”