‘Stop it, this minute, do you hear, this minute!’
‘It’s rained three days, and all the time I sat here, and thought. And when I got the idea of Frank, down there, I know it was the place for him, and when I turned on the tap in the kitchen I heard him calling from deep in the cistern, up the long metal piping, calling and calling. And when I bathed this morning he looked out from the little grille in the tube and saw me. I soaped myself to hide myself! I saw his eye shining behind the grille!’
‘A soap bubble,’ said Juliet frantically.
‘No, an eye.’
‘A drop of water.’
‘No, Frank’s eye!’
‘A piece of metal, a nut or a bolt.’
‘Frank’s lovely, seeing eye!’
‘Anna!’
Anna slumped down into the corner, by the window, one hand up on it, and wept silently. A few minutes later she heard her sister say, ‘Are you finished?’
‘What!’
‘If you’re done, come help me finish this, I’ll be forever at it.’
Anna raised her head, all pale, all expressionless. Juliet looked upon her with gentle impatience. An impatience so gently all-pervading one could not fight it. There was nothing to get hold of, or fight. It was just a continuing, gentle, tolerant impatience, year on year, year on year.
Anna rose and glided to her sister. ‘What do you want me to do?’ she sighed.
‘This and this,’ said Juliet, showing her. ‘All right,’ said Anna, and took it and sat by the cold window timing the rain, and moving her fingers with the needle and thread but knowing how dark the street now was, and how dark the room, and how hard to see the round metal top of the cistern now, there were just little midnight gleams and glitters out there in the black black late afternoon. Lightning crackled over the sky, in a web.
Half an hour passed. Juliet drowsed in her chair across the room, removed her glasses, placed them down with her work and for a moment rested her head back and dozed. Perhaps thirty seconds later, she heard the front door open violently, heard the wind come in, heard the footsteps run down the walk, turn, and hurry along the black street.
‘What?’ asked Juliet, sitting up, fumbling for her glasses. ‘Who’s there? Anna, did someone come in the door?’ She stared at the empty window-seat where Anna had been. ‘Anna!’ she cried. She sprang up and ran out into the hall.
The front door stood open, rain fell through it in a fine mist.
‘She’s only gone out for a run,’ said Juliet, standing there, trying to peer into the wet blackness. ‘She’ll be right back. Won’t you be right back, Anna dear? Anna, answer me, you will be right back, won’t you, my dear sister?’
Outside, the cistern lid rose and slammed down.
The rain whispered on the street and fell upon the dropped shut lid all the rest of the night.
The Next in Line
IT was a little caricature of a town square. In it were the following fresh ingredients: a candy-box of a bandstand where men stood on Thursday and Sunday nights exploding music; fine, green-patinaed bronze-copper benches all scrolled and flourished; fine blue and pink tiled walks — blue as women’s newly lacquered eyes, pink as women’s hidden wonders; and fine French-clipped trees in the shapes of exact hatboxes. The whole, from your hotel window, had the fresh ingratiation and unbelievable fantasy one might expect of a French village in the nineties.
But no, this was Mexico! and this a plaza in a small colonial Mexican town, with a fine State Opera House (in which movies were shown for two pesos admission: RASPUTIN AND THE EMPRESS, THE BIG HOUSE, MADAME CURIE, LOVE AFFAIR, MAMA LOVES PAPA).
Joseph came out on the sun-heated balcony in the morning and knelt by the grille, pointing his little box-brownie. Behind him, in the bath, the water was running and Marie’s voice came out:
‘What’re you doing?’
He muttered. ‘ — a picture.’ She asked again. He clicked the shutter, stood up, wound the spool inside, squinting, and said, ‘Took a picture of the town square. God, didn’t those men shout last night? I didn’t sleep until two-thirty. We would have to arrive when the local Rotary’s having its whingding.’
‘What’re our plans for today?’ she asked.
‘We’re going to see the mummies,’ he said.
‘Oh,’ she said. There was a long silence.
He came in, set the camera down, and lit himself a cigarette.
‘I’ll go up and see them alone,’ he said, ‘if you’d rather.’
‘No,’ she said, not very loud. ‘I’ll go along. But I wish we could forget the whole thing. It’s such a lovely little town.’
‘Look here!’ he cried, catching a movement from the corner of his eyes. He hurried to the balcony, stood there, his cigarette smoking and forgotten in his fingers. ‘Come quick, Marie!’
‘I’m drying myself,’ she said.
‘Please, hurry,’ he said, fascinated, looking down into the street.
He heard the movement behind him, and then the odour of soap and water-rinsed flesh, wet-towel, fresh cologne; Marie was at his elbow. ‘Stay right there,’ she cautioned him, ‘so I can look without exposing myself. I’m stark. What is it?’
‘Look!’ he cried.
A procession travelled along the street. One man led it, with a package on his head. Behind him came women in black rebozos, chewing away the peels of oranges and spitting them on the cobbles; little children at their elbows, men ahead of them. Some ate sugar-canes, gnawing away at the outer bark until it split down and they pulled it off in great hunks to get at the succulent pulp, the juicy sinews on which to suck. In all, there were fifty people.
‘Joe,’ said Marie behind him, holding his arm.
It was no ordinary package the first man in the procession carried on his head, balanced delicately as a chicken-plume. It was covered with silver satin and silver fringe and silver rosettes. And he held it gently with one brown hand, the other hand swinging free.
This was a funeral and the little package was a coffin.
He watched his wife from one side of his face.
She was the colour of fine, fresh milk. The pink colour of the bath was gone. Her heart had sucked it all down to some hidden vacuum in her. She held fast to the french doorway and watched the travelling people go, watched them eat fruit, heard them talk gently, laugh gently. She forgot she was naked.
He said, ‘Some little girl or boy gone to a happier place.’
‘Where are they taking — her?’
She did not think it unusual, her choice of the feminine pronoun. Already she had identified herself with that tiny fragment of decay parcelled like an unripe variety of fruit. Now, in this moment, she was being carried up the hill within compressing dark, a stone in a peach, silent and terrified, the touch of the father against the coffin material outside; gentle and noiseless and firm inside.
‘To the graveyard, naturally; that’s where they’re taking her,’ he said, the cigarette making a casual filter of smoke across his casual face.
‘Not the graveyard?’ she asked, looking at him earnestly.
‘There’s only one cemetery in these towns, you know that. They usually hurry it. That little girl has probably been dead only a few hours.’
‘A few hours — ‘
She turned away, quite ridiculous, quite naked, with only the towel supported by her limp, untrying hands. She walked towards the bed. ‘A few hours ago she was alive, and now — ‘
He went on, ‘Now they’re hurrying her up the hill. The climate isn’t kind to the dead. It’s hot and there’s no embalming. They have to finish it quickly.’
‘But to that graveyard, that horrible place,’ she said, with a voice from a dream.
‘Oh, the mummies,’ he said. ‘Don’t let that bother you.’
She sat on the bed, again and again stroking the towel laid across her lap. Her eyes were blind as the brown paps of her breasts. She did not see him or the room. She knew that if he snapped his fingers or coughed, she wouldn’t even look up.
‘They were eating fruit at her funeral, and laughing,’ she said.
‘It’s a long climb to the cemetery.’
She shuddered. A convulsive moving, like a fish trying to free itself from a deep-swallowed hook. She lay back and he looked at her as one examines a poor sculpture; all criticism, all quiet and easy and uncaring.
She wondered idly just how much his hands had had to do with the broadening and flattening and changement of her body. Certainly this was not the body he’d started with. It was past saving now. Like clay which the sculptor has carelessly impregnated with water, it was impossible to shape again. In order to shape clay you warm it with your hands, evaporate the moisture with heat. But there was no more passion, no more friction of the enjoyable sort between them.
There was no warmth to bake away the ageing moisture that collected and made pendant now her breasts and body. When the heat is gone, it is marvellous and unsettling to see how
