If only the sun would stop at the height of its strength and crucify the world, devour it for once and for all with her lying there on her back. But the sun tilted, weakened, and betrayed her and slid down the sky until she felt again the everlasting rising of the night.
Now that she was on insulin the nurses made her come in early so that they could ask her every fifteen minutes how she felt and lay their cool hands on her forehead. All that was a farce, so she said only each time what they wanted to know: ‘I feel the same. The same.’ And it was true.
One day she asked a nurse why she couldn’t stay out till the sun went down because she wouldn’t move and was just lying there, and the nurse had said it was dangerous because she might have a reaction. Only she never had a reaction. She just sat there and stared or sometimes embroidered on the brown chicken she was making on a yellow apron and refused to talk.
There was no purpose in changing her clothes because every day she sweated in the sun and got her plaid cotton shirt wet, and every day her long black hair got oilier. Daily she grew more oppressed by the suffocating sense of her body aging in time.
She felt the subtle slow inevitable corruption of her flesh that yellowed and softened hour by hour. She imagined the waste piling up in her, swelling her full of poisons that showed in the blank darkness of her eyes when she stared into the mirror, hating the dead face that greeted her, the mindless face with the ugly purple scar on the left cheek that marked her like a scarlet letter.
A small scab began to form at each corner of her mouth. She was sure that this was a sign of her coming dessication and that the scabs would never heal but would spread over her body, that the backwaters of her mind would break out on her body in a slow, consuming leprosy.
Before supper the smiling young student nurse came with a tray of orange juice thick with sugar for the girl to drink to terminate the treatment. Then the dinner bell rang, and she walked wordless into the small diningroom with the five round white linen-covered tables. She sat rigidly opposite a big bony woman who had graduated from Vassar and was always doing double-crostics. The woman tried to get the girl to talk, but she just answered in monosyllables and kept eating.
Debby came into supper late, rosy and breathless from walking because she had ground privileges. Debby seemed to be sympathetic, but she smiled in a sly way and was in league with all the rest and wouldn’t tell the girl: you are a cretin and there is no hope for you.
If someone would once say that, the girl would believe them because she had known for months that this was true. She had gone on circling at the brink of the whirlpool, pretending to be clever and gay, and all the while these poisons were gathering in her body, readying to break out behind the bright, false bubbles of her eyes at any moment crying: Idiot! Imposter!
Then came the crisis, and now she sat trapped for sixty years inside her decaying body, feeling her dead brain folded up like a gray, paralyzed bat in the dark cavern of her living skull.
A new woman in a purple dress was on the ward tonight. She was sallow as a mouse and smiled secretly to herself as she walked precisely down the hall to the diningroom, stepping with one foot after the other along a crack between the floorboards. When she came to the doorway she turned sideways, keeping her eyes demurely on the floor, and lifted first her right foot, then her left, over the crack as if stepping over an invisible little stile.
Ellen, the fat laughing Irish maid, kept bringing dishes out from the kitchen. When Debby asked for fruit for dessert instead of pumpkin pie, Ellen brought her an apple and two oranges and right there at the table Debby began to peel them and cut them up in pieces into a cereal dish. Clara, the girl from Maine with the blond Dutch bob, was arguing with tall, heavy Amanda who lisped like a little child and complained continually that there was a smell of coalgas in her room.
The others were all together, warm, active, and noisy. Only the girl sat frozen, withdrawn inside herself like a hard shriveled seed that nothing could awaken. She clutched her milk glass in one hand, asking for another piece of pie so she could postpone for a little longer the beginning of the sleepless night that would speed in the same accelerating way, without stopping, into the next day. The sun ran faster and faster around the world, and she knew that her grandparents would soon die, and that her mother would die, and that there would finally be left no familiar name to invoke against the dark.
During those last nights before her blackout the girl had lain awake listening to the thin thread of her mother’s breathing, wanting to get up and twist the life out of the fragile throat, to end at once the process of slow disintegration which grinned at her like a death’s head everywhere she turned.
She had crawled into bed with her mother and felt with growing terror the weakness of the sleeping form. There was no more sanctuary in the world. Creeping back to her own bed then, she had lifted up the mattress, wedging herself in the crevice between mattress and bedsprings, longing to be crushed beneath the heavy slab.
She had fought back to darkness and lost. They had jolted her back into the hell of her dead body. They had raised her like Lazarus from the mindless dead, corrupt already with the breath of the grave, sallow-skinned, with purple bruises swelling on her arms and thighs and a raw open scar on her cheek that distorted the left side of her face into a mass of browning scabs and yellow ooze so that she could not open her left eye.
At first they thought she would be blind in that eye. She had lain awake the night of her second birth into the world of flesh, talking to a nurse who was sitting up with her, turning her sightless face toward the gentle voice and saying over and over again, ‘But I can’t see, I can’t see.’
The nurse, who had also believed that she was blind, tried to comfort her, saying, ‘There are a lot of other blind people in the world. You’ll meet a nice blind man and marry him someday.’
And then the full realization of her doom began to come back to the girl from the final dark where she had sought to lose herself. It was no use to worry about her eyes when she could not think or read. It would make no difference if her eyes were blank, blind windows now, because she could neither read nor think.
Nothing in the world could touch her. Even the sun shone far off in a shell of silence. The sky and leaves and people receded, and she had nothing to do with them because she was dead inside, and not all their laughter nor all their love could reach her anymore. As from a distant moon, extinct and cold, she saw their supplicant, sorrowful faces, their hands stretching out to her, frozen in attitudes of love.
There was nowhere to hide. She became more and more aware of dark corners and the promise of secret places. She thought longingly of drawers and closets and the black open gullets of toilets and bathtub drains. On walks with the fat, freckled recreational therapist she yearned toward flat pools of standing water, toward the seductive shadow under wheels of passing cars.
At night she sat up in bed with the blanket wrapped around her, making her eyes go over and over the words of the short stories in the tattered magazines she carried about until the night nurse came in with her flashlight and turned out the reading lamp. Then the girl would lie curled up rigidly under her blanket and wait open-eyed until the morning.
One night she hid the pink cotton scarf from her raincoat in the pillowcase when the nurse came around to lock up her drawers and closets for the night. In the dark she had made a loop and tried to pull it tight around her throat. But always just as the air stopped coming and she felt the rushing grow louder in her ears, her hands would slacken and let go, and she would lie there panting for breath, cursing the dumb instinct in her body that fought to go on living.
Tonight at supper when the rest had gone, the girl took her milk glass down to her room while Ellen was busy stacking dishes in the kitchen. There was no one in the corridor. A slow lust spread through her like the rise of a flood tide.
She went to her bureau and, taking a towel from the bottom drawer, she wrapped up the empty glass and put it on the floor of
her closet. Then with a strange heavy passion, as if caught in the compulsion of a dream, she stamped on the towel again and again.
There was no sound, but she could feel the voluptuous sensation of the glass crushing underneath the thicknesses of the towel. Bending down, she unwrapped the broken pieces. Amid the glitter of small fragments lay several long shards. She selected the two sharpest of these and hid them under the inner sole of her sneaker, folding the rest of the bits back in the towel.
In the bathroom she shook the towel over the toilet bowl and watched the glass strike the water, sinking slowly, turning, catching the light, descending into the dark funneled hole. The lethal twinkle of the falling fragments reflected in the dark of her mind, tracing a curve of sparks that consumed themselves even as they fell.
At seven the nurse came in to give the evening insulin shot. ‘What side?’ she asked, as the girl bent mechanically over the bed and bared her flank.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ the girl said. ‘I can’t feel them any more.’
The nurse gave an expert jab. ‘My, you certainly are black and blue,’ she said.
Lying on the bed, wound round with the heavy wool blanket, the girl drifted out on a flood of languor. In the blackness that was stupor that was sleep, a voice spoke to her, sprouting like a green plant in the dark.
‘Mrs Patterson, Mrs Patterson, Mrs Patterson!’ the voice said more and more loudly, rising, shouting. Light broke on seas of blindness. Air thinned.
The nurse, Mrs Patterson, came running out from behind the girl’s eyes. ‘Fine,’ she was saying, ‘fine. Let me just take off your watch so you won’t bang it on the bed.’
‘Mrs Patterson,’ the girl heard herself say.
‘Drink another glass of juice,’ Mrs Patterson was holding a white celluloid cup of orange juice to the girl’s lips.
‘Another?’
‘You’ve already had one.’
The girl remembered nothing of the first cup of juice. The dark air had thinned and now it lived. There had been the knocking at the gate, the banging on the bed, and now she was saying to Mrs Patterson words that could begin a world: ‘I feel different. I feel quite different.’
‘We have been waiting for this a long time,’ Mrs Patterson said, leaning over the bed to take the cup, and her words were warm and round, like apples in the sun. ‘Will you have some hot milk? I think you’ll sleep tonight.’
And in the dark the girl lay listening to the voice of dawn and felt flare through every fiber of her mind and body the everlasting rising of the sun.
That Widow Mangada
It was a blazing hot Spanish morning when they met her. The bus from Alicante to Villaviento, packed with jabbering Spaniards, jolted along the narrow road raising a cloud of red dust. Sitting beside her husband Mark, Sally tried to keep the heavy green watermelon from bouncing off her lap. Mark’s rucksack and their antique black-cased portable typewriter jounced in the rack above their heads. They were house-hunting again.
‘Now that’s the sort of place,’ Mark pointed through the window at a square white pueblo set on the barren hillside. ‘Quiet. Simple. Nobody rolling oil-cans down the street and ringing bells all night they way they did in Alicante.’
‘Not so fast,’ Sally countered. Experience was beginning to make even Sally cautious. ‘It’s so far out there’s probably no electricity. Or drinking water. Besides, how would I ever get to a market?’
The bus lumbered on through arid reddish hills terraced with groves of olive trees, their dark leaves blanched by dust. They’d been on the road for almost an hour when, caroming around a curve, the bus began plummeting down toward a small village bordering a peacock-blue bay. Its white pueblos shone like salt crystal in the sun.
Sally was leaning over the seat in front of her, exclaiming at the brilliance of the sea, when, all at once, the little black-haired woman in the seat ahead turned around. She was heavily made-up and wore a pair of dark sunglasses.
‘You understand Spanish?’ she asked Sally. Slightly taken aback, Sally answered: ‘A little.’ She could understand Spanish well enough, but spoke haltingly as yet. Mark’s Spanish was fluent; he was translating some modern Spanish poetry that summer for an anthology.
‘It is very beautiful here, isn’t it?’ The woman quickly picked up the drift of Sally’s last sentences. She tossed a nod toward the bay. ‘I myself have a house in Villaviento,’ she ran on. ‘A lovely house, with a garden and a kitchen. Right on the sea …’
‘How nice,’ Sally said. Vaguely she wondered if this were at last a fairy godmother in disguise, about to offer her palatial villa to them for the summer. Sally had never quite gotten over her childhood conviction that there were still whimsical magic agents operating in the workaday world.
‘I rent rooms in the summer,’ the woman pursued, waving her expensively-manicured hand on which several rings winked and shone. ‘Beautiful. Comfortable. Kitchen rights. Garden rights. Balcony rights …’
Sally relinquished her dream of free castles in Spain. ‘Is it really near the ocean?’ she asked eagerly. Already weary of the dry Spanish landscape, she could not conquer her nostalgia for the great honest blue sea pounding along Nauset Beach at home.
‘Of course! I’ll show you everything. Everything!’ the dark little woman promised. Carried along by the momentum of her own rapid speech, she seemed unable to stop, but went rattling on in staccato phrases, dotted with abrupt, dramatic gestures. ‘I’m Señora Mangada. They know me here. Just ask anybody: who’s Widow Mangada? They’ll tell you. Of course,’ she shrugged eloquently, as if Mark and Sally might not, after all, be wise enough to appreciate the privilege she was offering them, ‘of course, you can decide for yourselves. It’s up to you …’
The bus was pulling up in the center of Villaviento. One large dusty palm tree sprouted in the middle of the little square, surrounded by simple white shop fronts and private houses, their slatted wooden shutters tightly drawn.
‘Villaviento!’ Widow Mangada proclaimed, with a proprietary flaunt of her red-nailed hand. She bustled out from her seat then, and preceded them down the aisle, short and lumpy as a plum pudding. Her stylish white lace dress revealed a black slip underneath; her blue-black hair was elegantly marceled in a froth of little waves and curls.
Mark’s eyes followed her meditatively as she flounced down the steps into the street with an important air.
‘You might think, he mused, ‘that a row of photographers was lying in wait for her.’
A motley crew of tanned native boys battled among themselves to carry the Widow’s luggage. She scurried about, at last electing a young boy with a cart to load on her bulging canvas suitcase and an immense knobbly burlap bag.
Then she was back, with the boy and laden cart in tow, chattering and gesticulating as if she’d never left off. Mark hoisted the rucksack on his shoulder and Sally balanced typewriter and watermelon.
‘This way,’ the Widow said, sliding her hand under Sally’s arm in an intimate, friendly fashion and trotting along beside them in her stumpy openwork pumps.
Modern hotels lined the main Avenida, with bright red, yellow and green balconies, gaudy as if colored at random from a child’s paintbox.
‘Hotels!’ The Widow clucked disapprovingly and hurried them on. ‘Terrible! Expensive! A hundred pesetas a night, for one person only. And then all the little extra charges. Cigarettes. Telephone.’ She shook her frizzed black curls.
Mark slanted Sally a warning look over Widow Mangada’s head. The Widow was already launched on an enthusiastic sales talk.
‘Look!’ She threw out her arm triumphantly as they turned the corner to walk along the ocean boulevard. The bay lay before them, vivid, blue, rimmed by a crest of orange hills. ‘And here we are.’ Widow Mangada was unlocking the gate of a creamy beige stucco villa.
Sally stood, mouth open. ‘Talk about dreams,’ she said to Mark. The house, with a vine-grown second floor terrace, was set deep in a grove of palm trees. Beds of red gera
niums and white daisies blazed like bonfires in the garden; spined cacti bordered the flagstone path.
Chattering on about natural beauty, the Widow led them around the back to point out her grape arbor, her fig tree thick with green fruit, and the splendid view of purple hills in the background, suspended in a scrim of mist.
Within, the stone-tiled house was cool and dark as a well. The Widow flew about, throwing open shutters and indicating the shining rows of aluminum pans in the kitchen with its blackened one-ring petrol stove, the stacks of plates and wine glasses amassed in the diningroom. She yanked out drawers, rummaged in cupboards. Sally, already delighted with the housekeeping possibilities, was won completely by the tiny bedroom upstairs. It opened, together with one of the larger rooms, onto the balcony terrace and a view of the blue Mediterranean framed in palm fronds.
‘Oh, Mark,’ Sally pleaded. ‘Let’s stay.’
The Widow’s black beady eyes darted from one to the other. ‘Nothing like it. Perfect.’ Her words rippled over themselves, smooth as oil. ‘I’ll show you the town. The market. Everything. We’ll be friends. Not impersonal as they are in the hotels …’
‘How much’, Mark asked matter-of-factly, ‘does it cost?’
The Widow paused, hesitating, as if he had brought up something just a touch indelicate. ‘One hundred pesetas a night,’ she said at last. She hurried on then: ‘For both of you. Plus the service. You’ll have all the comfort …’
‘Service?’ Mark stopped her. ‘How much does that make it?’
‘A hundred and ten.’
Mark exchanged a look with Sally. ‘That’s more than we can spend for two months,’ he said simply.
Wistfully, Sally recalled the wire whisks and soup ladles lining the kitchen. ‘But I’ll cook,’ she volunteered, although as yet rather dismayed by the stubborn look of the unfamiliar petrol stove. ‘We’ll go to the peasant market, and that will bring the cost of living way down.’