Crossings (5 page)

Six months later I took half a bottle of 222s. Ben watched me, refusing to interfere. After all, it was my life. It was my decis­ion. Made of my own free will. After I passed out, he took what was

No. He took a few of what was left. There were still some in the bottle the next morning.

No. We were not drunk. I had fallen in love. Tra la. But of course I was not unfaithful. I? I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not Honour more.

And I got asthma.

While I was in the hospital, Ben got a job, and that job turned into another job, and it was permanent. I got better and went to university. We stay married. There are always a lot of people around and they all say we are so lucky. No, what they actually say is, I am so lucky to have a husband like Ben.

 

LAST NIGHT, at the reception. No one hears me at first. I turn the brass handle and I hear ding dong inside. But nobody answers. There is a lot of noise and music. A woman comes. ‘I'm not the hostess,' she says.

The host comes belatedly; he says accusingly to the woman, ‘I like to know who comes into my house!' And ‘I'm sorry, I don't usually do that.'

When he introduces me to Ferlinghetti, I do it, the Victorian thing. I make Ferlinghetti stand up. He doesn't want to. He is sitting back in a low chesterfield and it is awkward for him, an old bald man, to get up. But he does.

The Russian poet is introduced to me. He is standing with his arm around a pretty girl. And, without removing the arm, he takes my hand. And he does that slow down and up thing with the eyes. It gives me a start. I find myself a corner in the kitchen, near the vodka. The Russian poet comes to me. ‘You are a poet?'

‘No.'

‘They tell me you are a poet!' And he frowns toward the other room as if they have lied.

He takes the matches from my hand. I don't know what to do. I say, ‘Oh. Do you want a cigarette?'

‘No.' He lights my cigarette.

He says, ‘It is too bad you do not know Russian, we could talk.'

I ask if being on tour doesn't affect the work. He turns to the interpreter. I say it again. The interpreter tells him.

‘Yes. I try this morning. I can't.'

He is very good looking. This Russian poet. I say something about the reading. He urges me to come today. Ferlinghetti will read also, and Robert Bly.

He is making me nervous. He is looking too steadily into my eyes. Someone interrupts. And I escape. Elton says, ‘I hear he is a fast worker,' meaning the girl in the miniskirt. I say, ‘I don't really approve. It must be bad for the work.'

I have been asked because Carla is a believer in nepotism. Given the task of rounding up Canadian writers, she has asked her friends. Even academics. Even Americans. One because his wife has left him.

But today at the reading, it is different. I go cold and the hairs start up all along my spine, along my arms. The Russian tells his poetry in a terrible voice. I know it is the declamatory style. But I feel the shudder anyway. And Robert Bly is not a silly red-faced man anymore. He has been sitting there like Walter Mitty in a red serape with black eagles. But now he is telling a poem about Viet Nam. And he is enormous. His hands become bloody. He waves them, he turns them into claws, and they are bloody. ‘Do not cry!' he shouts at me, I think it is at me, and I feel ashamed, for I have been about to cry.

And Ferlinghetti is not a bald old man any longer. I am glad that I said that to him after all. What I said later. In the kitchen. I said, ‘It is terrible. To be introduced. To make you stand up. I know all you want me to do is fuck off.' But in the kitchen he was merely embarrassed by this. The Russian poet, now, is a pure flame. I take Anna away hurriedly, after, I don't want to be invited to have drinks. I don't want it to be ruined. I want them to stay pure, for both of us. The real thing.

 

BUT NOW WE ARE in Mexico. It's Ben's turn to be free. I am twenty-five years old and seven years married. I ask for a baby.

The seventh version.

‘The unity of plot does not consist, as some suppose, in its having one man as its subject. An infinity of things befall that one man, some of which it is impossible to reduce to unity.'

‘Vicky always dramatizes,' says my mother. ‘Must you always dramatize?'

Francie said, ‘But you
lied!
'

Jeff says, ‘You have fictionalized your whole life.'

‘The story, as an imitation of action, must represent one action, a complete whole, with its several incidents so closely connected that the transposal or withdrawal of any one of them will disjoin and dislocate the whole.'

Sister Mary Joseph says, ‘You have always been obsessed with truth.'

The Nut Lady said, ‘
Why
did they tie your hands to the crib?'

‘Because I bit my nails.'

‘Why?'

‘Because I bit my nails!'

‘Why?'

‘The poet's function is to describe, not the thing that happened, but a kind of thing that might happen, i.e., what is possible as being probable or necessary.'

We had been in Mexico for some months. A Venezuelan actor with flashing eyes had fallen in love with Ben in Mexico City, and we had left precipitately. Now we are living in seclusion in the village of Zapopan.

The walls around the compound are covered with broken glass. Jagged, menacing, they catch the pitiless sun in blinding bursts of fire, green and gold.

The flagging on the floor of the villa is maroon. You mop it with a rag tied around a stick. You dip the rag in oil. It gleams back at you brightly as if it were clean.

In the back yard, at the stone tubs, Maria Jesus washes our sheets. Her thick arms, mottled with white patches, plunge up and down like pistons.

‘But if your baby is sick, you must bring it to the clinic. Come tomorrow. Come tomorrow with the baby, Maria. Come at eight-thirty.'

I am doing volunteer work at the clinic in the village. It is free, but the villagers insist on paying. One peso. Eight cents.

When Maria Jesus comes, her baby in the rebozo on her back, the doctor is busy with a heart attack. I say she must wait but Maria Jesus does not wait.

Next week, she tells me, ‘Better she should die. Better she should die than live my life again.'

The doctor at the clinic is small and brown, with a moustache. He does not speak English. That is, he does not speak English to the American volunteer ladies who come to the clinic.

My first day at the clinic, I make a mistake, but the doctor does not find it amusing.

‘
Como se llama? Por favor?
' I manage in my textbook Spanish.

‘Juan Maria Fernando Manuel Hernandez Servidora.'

‘
Como se llama?
'

‘Guadalupe Jesus Maria Garcia O'Brien Servidora.'

‘O'Brien?'

‘My father, he is Irish.'

I still don't twig. By the end of the afternoon. I have filed everything under S. Prolific family, the Servidoras. I look it up in my book. ‘At your service.'

I show the doctor my mistake. He does not laugh.

I stay late and fix the file.

My second day, an American woman comes to the clinic. She is hysterical. ‘
Elle muerte, elle muerte
,' she says.

‘I speak English.'

‘It's my maid's daughter. Can you come right away? They're all screaming. She's been in labour twenty-four hours. I think she's dying.' And to the doctor, who has watched us impassively, ‘
Elle muerte
.'

He tells me to get the instruments. They are in a dusty shoe box in the drug room. I hesitate, thinking I should wash them, but he says, ‘
Andele.
'

I could look up the Spanish, I could make it correct. But that would imply I knew it well enough to write it. I didn't.

I was dressed in pink. Grace gave me that dress. Pink cotton, with a wide skirt, not gathered but flaring down over the hips and out in a lovely circle. A scoop neck and little tucks under the bosom. How the hell I got starch I don't know, but I did. Grace doesn't even remember it. She thinks maybe her mother made it for her, but she isn't sure. Anyway, she gave it to me, and I loved it. Even now Grace weighs only one hundred and five, so I must have been thin then too. But that was after the typhus.

Ben and I eschewed possessions. We did not want to be tied down.

When we came, the three of us, the doctor, the American woman, and I in my starched pink cotton dress, into the courtyard, we could hear the women screaming. They too were saying, ‘
Elle muerte, elle muerte
,' rather like a Greek chorus. And all in black. Lovely.

The girl herself was lying in a hot, airless, sunless room. It used to be a chapel. High up in one wall was a
cicatrice
. This for air.

The floor is impacted earth, very hard, very dry, very clean. The furniture is Hollywood blonde. A bed, a dresser, a bureau with a huge mirror. Highly varnished with brass handles.

The girl lies on the bed fully dressed, with ribbed stockings. I used to wear them myself when I went to school. Her stomach bulges like some abnormality on a tree, a growth, a cancer.

Five women, counting the original American, crowd in after us. I am interested. They are screaming of death and blood and wringing their hands. They are wringing their hands, I say to myself. I have never seen anyone wring his hands before. I am scared shitless.

I say, ‘
Agua caliente
,' in my teacher's voice and it works like magic. They are off like a flash to boil water. The silence is enormous. We are alone now. The doctor, the girl, me.

The doctor takes the girl's panties off. Thick white cotton, very clean.

He puts his finger up, feels inside. Then he sits down. On what? I don't remember. In the last version, I said, ‘Then he sat down on a small wicker stool.' But I haven't a clue what he sits on. He sits there, cool as you please, and he lights a cigarette. He looks at me, his eyes gleaming with malice.

But the girl yells and I take her hands in mine and say, very calmly, very authoritatively, ‘
Usted no muerte. No. Les mujers estan nervioso
.' I laugh at them. ‘
Muy nervioso. Estan loco
.'

The girl laughs too, and, after a minute, I can disengage my fingers and take off my hat.

That hat. I just remembered that hat. I paid ten fifty for it in Army and Navy. Very finely woven straw with two black velvet ribbons. My god. That hat. But how, if I was not supposed to wear anything frivolous? How, if we never spent money on anything? It comes out of the blue at me. I took off my hat and I gave her a red nylon scarf to wipe her face with. Red? Must have been in my handbag.

I am absolutely calm. I think, ‘It is an exam in Boolean algebra.' When I said ‘
Agua caliente
,' I was terrified. But I am not terrified now. I am deadly with will. She is not going to die, I will not allow her to die. But I have never felt this way before, except in exams.

‘ '
Sted Ingles?
' she says.

‘
Si
.'

‘I speak English,' she says, delighted. To prove it, she grips my hands again and says, ‘Ouch!'

We are giggling like school girls. She is a schoolgirl. Nineteen. We pay no attention to the doctor.

‘I like your furniture,' I say. I hate it.

‘I buy it. Is from Hollywood, California.' I was right.

‘It's very smart.'

‘I study English at the Institute,' she says carefully.

‘You speak it very well.'

‘
Verdad
?'

‘
Si. Verdad
.'

‘
Habla Español muy bien
,' she says, returning the compliment.

‘
No es verdad
.'

The doctor finishes his cigarette and throws it on the floor, grinding it out with his foot. The girl is shocked. So am I.

He takes something from the shoe box. Something which gleams through the dust. I think forever after it is a pair of scissors, but that can't be. Surely?