The Cannibal (7 page)

The Baron, older in time, more vicious and less proud with his bastard
Spanish-German head thrust back and upwards at the agony-carved rafters, more hot and
princely and dog-like under his eyes and stripped arms, waited until precisely the proper
moment when the eyes found their two-sided common target, when the arena drifted with
unraked ashes, to slip to his knees and draw as in sleep a weapon from the debris. The
onlookers let the liquor trickle down their nostrils, coughed, rubbed their collars, stared
with their mouths open in hate. These were the agates that could not grow.

In the first moment their bodies lost form, clashing like roosters with
spiked heels, aiming at brief exposed patches of white, striking for scarecrow targets. They
struck at the
Physik
of limbs. In the second moment, the arena stained with drops
of ink, walls resounding with blows, they aimed at the perilous eyes and ears, the delicate
tendons of the neck, fingers, stabbing at the
Kultur
of sense, and a blade-tip sang
past his lower lip, splitting the skin the length of his under jaw. In the third moment they
found the groin, and he felt a pain from the accidental
flat of the blade
that traveled from the abdomen to his throat in a brief spasm, the original
Unlust
.
He stooped, and the bell of the saber rang through the ashes, dropped to the floor in a
finished scoop. Then gradually he began to fall from a high, blunted indefinable space where
the Hero’s words:
love, Stella, Ernst, lust, tonight, leader, land
revolved out of
relation, until he finally reached particulars too extreme to comprehend. Brine filled the
hollow of his gum, the cuticle of one thumb bled into a purple half-moon, and an internal
kink filled him with pain from the stomach to the blind gut. “Go outside, if you must,” said
the Baron who sank down among his comrades. Someone threw him a towel and, wrapping it about
his head, Ernie managed to get into the corridor and hold to the wall. Inside they sang, one
voice after another, in a very slow meter, the
Horst Wessel Lied
. “Get back to your
room,” said an old caretaker moving around him in the darkness. Finally, his head white and
bulky in the towel, he made his way out into the rain, leaving a sharp odor of sickness
outside the room with a light.

Stella, golden tresses gathered about the waist, a calm determination to
survive and to succeed grown upright in her mind, waited for his return, sure he would come,
sure she would have to give warmth. She was prepared to make him as happy as her instinct
would allow, would overrule the rights of anyone in the house for her own demands. But Gerta
was a woman quick to injure. Stella listened to every sound, fought with the desire to
dream, and thought at some hour of the night that she heard marching feet. When Ernie
finally did come, it was in desperation. “Come in, you poor creature,” she whispered,
and held the toweled bundle in her lap. He left soon after because a
bright excited day was beginning to break, and harassed or jubilant cries echoed up and down
the drying streets.

The conquered spirit lies not only in rest but in waiting, crushed deep
in face-lines of deprivation, in fingers that no longer toil, the one thing that shall lift,
and enlarge and set free.

The house where the two sisters lived was like an old trunk covered with
cracked sharkskin, heavier on top than on the bottom, sealed with iron cornices and covered
with shining fins. It was like the curving dolphin’s back: fat, wrinkled, hung dry above
small swells and waxed bottles, hanging from a thick spike, all foam and wind gone, over
many brass catches and rusty studs out in the sunshine. As a figure that breathed immense
quantities of air, that shook itself in the wind flinging water down into the streets, as a
figure that cracked open and drank in all a day’s sunshine in one breath, it was more
selfish than an old General, more secret than a nun, more monstrous than the fattest
shark.

Stella combed her hair before the open window, sunlight falling across her
knees, sometimes holding her head up to catch the wind, as wide awake as if she had slept
soundly through the night without wild dreams. A few scattered cheers and broken shouts were
carried up from side streets, windows were flung open, dust-rags flung out into the spring
morning like signal flags. Brass bands were already collecting in the streets, small groups
of old men surrounded by piles of shiny instruments. A crowd was gathering
about the front of the gated house and she could hear them stamping their feet and
clapping each other on the backs, thumping and pushing, waiting for the chance to cheer. She
felt completely at rest, self-satisfied, pulling at one strand of thick hair and then at
another. She knew her father would be dressing, powdering his cheeks so he could speak to
the crowd, and she had reached the time of a strange discovery. If it were not for the idea
of love, if her father were a man she did not know at all, how distasteful his fingers would
be, like pieces of rotting wood; how unpleasant his white hair would be, a grey artificial
mat that she could never stand to kiss; how like an old bone would be his hollow shoulders.
Stella enjoyed thinking of her father as one she did not know. He was so old he never
understood. Voices shouted at her, she eased her chair to follow the moving sunlight. Gerta
came in throwing the door wide.

“Damn that woman, damn that old fool!” Gerta stared about the room. “Always
I say I’m not at home, I’ve gone away to the country, I’m sick, but there she sits, down
there with the cook in the kitchen waiting to pounce on me.” The old woman raged about the
room, hovered over the chair a moment to see if Stella listened. She snorted at the golden
head, ripped into the closets, threw forth bundles of soiled linen. She gasped.

“You’re no better!” The comb slid up and down, the nurse trembled in the
pile of linen.

Down in the kitchen sat Gerta’s friend, a new maid from several houses away
who traveled across back courts and had paid a call, for no reason, carrying a bag of cold
buns which she munched while trying to become friends with Gerta. Gerta was afraid and
angry and could not understand this woman who, dressed like an imbecile
girl, wore her thin hair plastered to the head, who had no name and talked forever. Gerta
would not touch the buns.

“You’re no better. And don’t think,” the voice was a whisper, distorted and
low, “that I don’t know what went on last night. Don’t forget that!”

Her father fussed with his collar, a rouge color filling in flat cheeks, her
mother directed him from beneath the sheets, the crowd screamed when a manservant hung a
faded flag from the very narrow balcony.

Stella turned, face shrouded in gold. “Get out. Take the clothes and leave.”
The old woman raced from the room hauling the delicate silks and wrinkled trains of cloth,
stumbled and ran, and the hairbrush sailed through the door over the mammoth baluster and
fell in a gentle curve to crash many floors below on the hard marble. She turned back to the
light. The insurrection passed lightly as the brush, she was bounded by the pale bed, the
brightening walls, and summer. The cook howled for more butter from a stuttering girl, the
visitor chopped a bun. There on the floor, there beside the small proper bed was the spot,
now in shade, where she had held him in her lap.

Despite the dark brown symmetry and shadows of the buildings outside, the
air was filled with a light green haze. It patiently and warmly lifted itself over the
sagging branches, weakened beneath the load of fresh young leaves scattered on trees caught
between the walls and sidewalk. The morning with its widening haze, voices wrangling over
the fences, brushes and rags fighting with the furniture, tousled girls scraping and
whispering on their knees, the house
filled itself with boys and
tremendous baskets of fruit, hauling in, it seemed, crowds of people out of the city, awoke
with cries and attention. That was the moment to sit in the sun with soft hair falling about
one’s waist, to doze and wake, nodding and smelling the sweet air, collecting thoughts for
years to come or gone by, like an old woman hooded in black in a doorway.

A half-dozen birds, caught in the leaves, tried to make themselves heard and
far down the hall she could hear Gerta talking to her father who was trying to dress. The
air was like honey to wave beneath her nose; she called forth her own pleasure, plucked
anywhere from the moving number of summer sensations. She waved her hand, even on the
opening day of war, the public’s day, and a gentle lusty swell crowded her head, shoved the
half-dozen murmuring birds out of reach. In winter, the snow fell where she wished, in great
dull even flakes, in smooth slightly purple walls where far in perspective she was held like
a candle, warm and bright. In summer, alone, it was she that breathed the idea of naked
moonlight swimming—divers together in the phosphorescent breakers, leaves as clothes on the
silver beach—she that breathed the idea of brownness, smoothness into every day of June,
July, August, who created hair over the shoulder and pollen in the air.

Her mother, a long mound beneath the sheets, had lost all this, terribly
aged with a cold pallor, strong and indolent, unhappy in the oppressive heat. The mother lay
in bed day after day, the spring, summer, years dragging by, with only her head two hands
long above the sheets, her eyes fastened together, motionless until some forgotten whim,
surge of strength,
drove her from the bed. And in that hour she would
shop. When she shopped, she ventured on the streets in gowns from another date, walked in
steady steps, and took Stella along. She never liked the world she saw and her old husband
never knew she was out of the house.

A hundred strokes, a hundred and five, the hair quivered in the space of
gold; she changed hands, her skin as soft as the back of a feather. Her brothers, a pair of
twins, fifteen-year-old soldiers dressed in stiff academy blue and trimmed in brass, walked
past her open door, eyes ahead, arms in parallel motion, and she heard their miniature spurs
clanking down the wide stairs. The boys never saw their parents, since the old man and woman
had been the age of deaf grandparents at the time of the brothers’ remarkable conception.
The brothers ate and lived alone. The jingling sound hung in her ears, one of the birds had
become audible, and she thought of a parakeet with long sharp nails bathing in a blue pond
where the green grass swayed and the sun was orange. There was no shock in the day, but the
same smothered joy crept up with the morning’s trade and old flags that were unfurling along
the guarded streets.

“Breakfast, breakfast!” Gerta called, wearied and harassed, from the center
of the first floor lobby, lips drawn down, clutching a fist of silver, calling to wake the
whole house into an even greater activity. The shabby crowd was growing restless, howling
with round faces scrubbed cheery and proud, while inside the high walls the elaborate
process of serving the isolated meal began. Twenty thousand feet in the sky, a sheet of wind
flashed over the city cold and thin, while below, warm air rolled over the lake in the
park, and swans opened their necks and damp feathers, bumping softly
together in stiff confusion.

The old man, always seated first at the table, held his head high and rigid
so that it trembled, pure white eyes staring and blinking from a skull like a bird’s, the
whole area behind the thin tissue eaten away and lost. Sometimes he ate his melon with the
fork, or spoon, or knife, or pushed it with his pointed elbow so that it fell to the floor,
pits and meat splashing over his black curled-up shoes. The moustache fell to his high
collar in two soft sweeping strands of pale gold, his long legs were a mass of black veins.
His face, narrow and long, was covered with bark and was deep scarlet, and clots of blood
formed just under the glaze of fine hair; and he would fall, slipping and breaking in every
part at least once a week. But each time the clots would dissolve and be churned away, down
the grass-smelling passages, and he would recover.

The table was so short, with the twelve leaves piled out of sight in dust,
that she could almost smell his breath, with scarcely a bare foot of candelabra, bowls,
tongs, green stems and silver trays between them. When she sat down, his head, like a
brittle piece of pastry, tried to swim over the breakfast things, searching as every
morning, but was blocked by a twisted maze of fern in an azure vase and a pyramid of butter
patties topped with dark cherries. “Stool,” he said in a high voice because he could no
longer pronounce her name. They sat close together in the middle of the long dining room,
the man with his ninety years and the young girl with her peaches, while overhead, set in
one of the domes, a large clock struck eleven. Gerta hurried in and out pushing a little
cart laden with napkins, rolls, knives, sauces of
all kinds and pans of
under-done, clear boiled eggs. “Poor man,” she said, dabbing at a long run of fresh egg
water on his tunic, turning now and then a look of wrath on Stella as if the poor girl
herself had shaken his freckled hand and made the long translucent string slide off onto his
chest. Stella frowned back, scattering crumbs over the little table and knocking the goblet
so that a mouthful of water sizzled on the coffee urn.

“Watch what you’re doing,” snapped Gerta, her slippers padding angrily on
the rug.

This morning he was able to get the pink slices between his fingers, but,
slipping through their own oily perfume, they constantly fell back to the tablecloth in
irregular heaps of quivering jelly. Stella thought of Ernie and smiled across the floral
table at her father, looked with delightful interest at his slippery hands.

The boy didn’t realize what he said, 1870, it would take many dead men
to encircle Paris, and the responsibility, that’s what he didn’t understand or no one
could speak in such a manner, pride on the heights
. “War,” her father said, and there
was a terrible fire in his eye through the ferns. “War,” and he leaned slightly forward as
if to strike her, but his arm only raised part way, shivered, and dropped back on the plate.
She stopped smiling.

“Where is the railroad station?” he asked.

Stella watched his questioning face for a moment then continued to eat. She
was sorry.

“He only wants to go to the bathroom,” said Gerta, and throwing herself
under his thin erect frame she led him out, the white lace duster fluttering on her head.
The two boys clanked by in the hall, stepped in a single motion out of the way. The cook
worked frantically to heat more rolls in the oven like a boiler, kept a
flame under the pot of coffee, ran from cupboard to cupboard collecting more juices and
spices, threw a large ham on the spit. Stella pulled the long brocaded sash and heard the
bell jingle out amid the clatter of pans, the swirl of water. Gerta’s friend came in, still
wearing her brown shawl and hat covered with violets, still clutching the paper bag with
grease on her fingers.

“More toast,” said Stella.

“Ah, toast,” said the woman and disappeared.

Stella thought that her father suffered very much. Some parts of the day she
would walk with him up and down the beautiful quiet hallways, his hand resting only lightly
on her arm, a smile about his shriveled lips. Sometimes she suffered herself, though usually
in the evening in the blue shadows of her room, never in the morning, for she knew that at
dusk she would see him half-hidden and in full stately dress behind the tall lighted
candles. The dining room walls darkened with nightfall, the silverware lighted by the
flames, the immense shadows falling over him from white flowers instead of ferns, covered
him with an illusory change that frightened her. In these evenings Stella remembered how,
when she was a small girl, he had talked to her, before his voice disappeared, and she heard
his voice talking of sieges and courtships, and emerald lands, and she wished him to be a
father still. At night she could not tell. From a few long talks with her mother she knew
that for five generations the men had been tall, handsome, discreet and honorable soldiers,
all looking exactly alike as brother eagles, and all these men had died young. Her father
had so outlived the features of those other men and his family that he no longer
existed and could not even speak. The man hidden behind the candles made
her wonder for all his years.

“You don’t have to tell me where he needs to go,” she murmured, and Gerta’s
friend returning with the toast was confused by her words.

The hair nearest her neck was hazel, the rest lemon, and when she walked it
was fitfully gliding as if she were already there—there in the mausoleum where he lay in
plaster, where rose petals were swept under her prayer. For in the hottest part of the noon,
the house was withered away and his white face was in a lasting repose, the idiot of
breakfast, the marshal of dinner, become an old masked man in the heat of the sun wherever
she walked. She would gladly cut the epitaph herself for just one glimpse before they
latched the door—the noon heat made her feel the marble dust as if it were fresh. Never in
the world could she know him, only scraps from her mother’s carefully guarded chest.
Sometimes, when Stella looked most beautiful, she felt that she would collapse with the
house around her when he finally left.