The Moslem Wife and Other Stories (3 page)

I can hear myself saying grandly, “I don’t want your silly fairy-tales. I’m trying to get rid of my own.”

Carlos says, “I’ve known people like you before. You think you can get rid of all the baggage – religion, politics, ideas, everything. Well, you won’t.”

The other two yawn, quite rightly. Carlos and I are bores.

Of them all, I understood Carlos best, but we quarrelled about anything. We could have quarrelled about a piece of string. He was pessimistic, and I detested this temperament; worse, I detested his face. He resembled a certain kind of Swiss or South African or New Zealander. He was suspicious and faintly Anglo-Saxon looking. It was not the English bun-face, or the Swiss canary, or the lizard, or the hawk; it was the unfinished, the undecided, face that accompanies the rotary sprinkler, the wet Martini, pussyfooting in love and friendship, expense-account foolery, the fear of the open heart. He made me think of a lawyer who had once told me, in all sincerity, “Bad things don’t happen to nice people.” It was certainly not Carlos’s fault; I might have helped my prejudices, which I had dragged to Spain with my passport, but he could not help the way he looked. Pablo was stupid, but cheerful. Pilar was demented, but sweet. What was needed – we agreed to this many times – was a person who was a composite of all our best qualities, which we were not too modest to name. Home from the Romantic Museum, they made me turn out the cards. I did the Petit Jeu, the Square, the Fan, and the Thirteen, and the Fifteen. There was happy news for everyone except Carlos, but, as it was Sunday, none of it counted.

Were they typical Spaniards? I don’t know what a typical Spaniard is. They didn’t dance or play the guitar. Truth and death and pyromania did not lurk in their dark eyes; at least I never saw it. They were grindingly hard up. The difference between them and any three broke people anywhere else was in a certain passiveness, as though everything had been dealt in advance. Barring catastrophe, death and revolution, nothing could happen any more. When we walked together, their steps slowed in rhythm, as if they had all three been struck with the same reluctance to go on. But they did go on, laughing and chattering and saying what they would do when the money came.

We began keeping diaries at about the same time. I don’t remember who started it. Carlos’s was secret. Pilar asked how to spell words. Pablo told everything before he wrote it down. It was a strange occupation, considering the ages we were, but we hadn’t enough to think about. Poverty is not a goad but a paralysis. I have never been back to Madrid. My memories are of squares and monuments, of things that are free or cheap. I see us huddled in coats, gloved and scarfed, fighting the icy wind, pushing along to the ten-peseta place. In another memory it is so hot that we can scarcely force ourselves to the park, where we will sit under elm trees and look at newspapers. Newspapers are the solace of the worried; one absorbs them without having to read. I sometimes went to the libraries – the British Institute and the American one – but I could not for the life of me have put my nose in a book. The very sight of poetry made me sick, and I could not make sense of a novel, or even remember the characters’ names.

Oddly enough, we were not afraid. What was the worst that could happen? No one seemed to know. The only fear I remember was an anxiety we had caught from Carlos. He had rounded twenty-nine and saw down a corridor we had not yet reached. He made us so afraid of being thirty that even poor Pilar was alarmed, although she had eight years of grace. I was frightened of it, too. I was not by any means in first youth, and I could not say that the shape of my life was a mystery. But I felt I had done all I could with free will, and that circumstances, the imponderables, should now take a hand. I was giving them every opportunity. I was in a city where I knew not a soul, save the few I had come to know by chance. It was a city where the mentality, the sound of the language, the hopes and possibilities, even the appearance of the people in the streets, were as strange as anything I might have invented. My choice in coming here had been deliberate: I had a plan. My own character seemed to me ill-defined; I believed that this was unfortunate and unique. I thought that if I set myself against a background
into which I could not possibly merge that some outline would present itself. But it hadn’t succeeded, because I adapted too quickly. In no time at all, I had the speech and the movements and very expression on my face of seedy Madrid.

I was with Pablo more than anyone, but I remember Carlos best. I regret now how much we quarrelled. I think of the timorous, the symbolic, stalemate of our chess games. I was not clever enough to beat him, but he was not brave enough to win. The slowing down of our respective positions on the board led to immobility of thought. I sat nervously smoking, and Carlos sat with his head in his hands. Thought suspended, fear emerged. Carlos’s terror that he would soon be thirty and that the affective part of his life had ended with so little to show haunted him and stunned his mind. He would never be anything but the person he was now. I remember the dim light, the racket in the street, the silence inside the flat, the ticking of the Roman-numbered clock in the hall. Time was like water dropping – Madrid time. And I would catch his fear, and I was afraid of the movement of time, at once too quick and too slow. After that came a revolt and impatience. In his company I felt something I had never felt before – actively northern. Seeing him passive, head on hands, I wanted to urge and exhort and beg him to do something: act, talk, sing, dance, finish the game of chess – anything at all. At no period was I as conscious of the movement and meaning of time; and I had chosen the very city where time dropped, a drop from the roof of a cave, one drop at a time.

We came to a financial crisis at about the same moment. Pablo’s godfather stopped sending money to him – that was a blow. Pilar’s lodgers left. I had nothing more to sell. There was Carlos’s little salary, but there were also his debts, and he could not be expected to help his friends. He looked more vaguely Anglo-Saxon, more unfinished and decent than ever. I wished there was something to kick over, something to fight. There was the Spanish situation, of course, and I had certainly given
a lot of thought to it before coming to Spain, but now that I was here and down and out I scarcely noticed it. I would think,
“I
am free,” but what of it? I was also hungry. I dreamed of food. Pilar dreamed of things chasing her, and Pablo dreamed of me, and Carlos dreamed he was on top of a mountain preaching to multitudes, but I dreamed of baked ham and Madeira sauce. I suspected that my being here and in this situation was all folly, and that I had been trying to improve myself – my moral condition, that is. My financial condition spoke for itself. It was like Orwell, in Paris, revelling in his bedbugs. If that was so, then it was all very plain, and very Protestant, but I could not say more for it than that.

One day I laid out forty-eight cards – the Grand Jeu. The cards predicted treachery, ruin, illness, accidents, letters bringing bad news, disaster and pain.

I made my rounds. In one of the places, the money had come, and I was saved. I went out to the University, where the fighting had been, eleven or twelve years before. It looked like a raw suburban housing development, with its mud, its white buildings and puny trees. I waited in the café where Pablo took his bitter coffee, and when he came in I told him the news. We rode into the heart of Madrid on a swaying tram. Pablo was silent – I thought because he was delighted and overwhelmed; actually, he must have been digesting the astonishing fact that I had been expecting something and that my hanging around in banks was not a harmless mania, like Pilar in the Romantic Museum.

My conception of life (free will plus imponderables) seemed justified again. The imponderables were in my pocket, and free will began to roll. I decided, during the tram ride, to go to Mallorca, hire a villa, invite the three for a long holiday and buy a dog I had seen. We got down from the tram and bought white, tender, delicious, unrationed bread, weighed out by the pound; and three roasted chickens, plus a
pound of sweet butter and two three-litre bottles of white Valdepeñas. We bought some nougat and chestnut paste. I forget the rest.

Toward the end of our dinner, and before the end of the wine, Carlos made one bitter remark: “The difference between you and us is that in the end something will always come for you. Nothing will ever come from anywhere for any of us. You must have known it all along.”

No one likes to be accused of posturing. I was as irritated as I could be, and quickly turned the remark to his discredit. He was displaying self-pity. Self-pity was the core of his character. It was in the cards; all I could ever turn out for him were plaintive combinations of twos and threes – an abject fear of anonymous threats, and worry that his friends would betray him. This attack silenced him, but it showed that my character was in no way improved by my misfortunes. I defended myself against the charge of pretending. My existence had been poised on waiting, and I had always said I was waiting for something tangible. But they had thought I was waiting in their sense of the word – waiting for summer and then for winter, for Monday and then for Tuesday, waiting, waiting for time to drop into the pool.

We did not talk about what we could do with money now. I was thinking about Mallorca. I knew that if I invited them they would never come. They were polite. They understood that my new fortune cast me out. There was no evasion, but they were nice about it. They had no plans, and simply closed their ranks. We talked of a longer future, remembering Carlos and his fear. We talked of our thirties as if we were sliding toward an icy subterranean water; as if we were to be submerged and frozen just as we were: first Carlos, then Pablo and me, finally little Pilar. She had eight years to wait, but eight would be seven, and seven six, and she knew it.

I don’t know what became of them, or what they were like when their thirtieth year came. I left Madrid. I wrote, for a
time, but they never answered. Eventually they were caught, for me, not by time but by the freezing of memory. And when I looked in the diary I had kept during that period, all I could find was descriptions of the weather.

1960

“W
HEN THAT
Jean Harlow died,” Mrs. Thompson said to Jeannie, “I was on the 83 streetcar with a big, heavy paper parcel in my arms. I hadn’t been married for very long, and when I used to visit my mother she’d give me a lot of canned stuff and preserves. I was standing up in the streetcar because nobody’d given me a seat. All the men were unemployed in those days, and they just sat down wherever they happened to be. You wouldn’t remember what Montreal was like then.
You
weren’t even on earth. To resume what I was saying to you, one of these men sitting down had an American paper – the
Daily News
, I guess it was – and I was sort of leaning over him, and I saw in big print ‘
JEAN HARLOW DEAD.
’ You can believe me or not, just as you want to, but that was the most terrible shock I ever had in my life. I never got over it.”

Jeannie had nothing to say to that. She lay flat on her back across the bed, with her head toward Mrs. Thompson and her heels just touching the crate that did as a bedside table. Balanced on her flat stomach was an open bottle of coral-pink Cutex nail polish. She held her hands up over her head and with some difficulty applied the brush to the nails of her right hand. Her legs were brown and thin. She wore nothing but shorts and one of her husband’s shirts. Her feet were bare.

Mrs. Thompson was the wife of the paymaster in a road-construction camp in northern Quebec. Jeannie’s husband was an engineer working on the same project. The road was being pushed through country where nothing had existed until now except rocks and lakes and muskeg. The camp was established between a wild lake and the line of raw dirt that was the road. There were no towns between the camp and the railway spur, sixty miles distant.

Mrs. Thompson, a good deal older than Jeannie, had become her best friend. She was a nice, plain, fat, consoling sort of person, with varicosed legs, shoes unlaced and slit for comfort, blue flannel dressing gown worn at all hours, pudding-bowl haircut, and coarse gray hair. She might have been Jeannie’s own mother, or her Auntie Pearl. She rocked her fat self in the rocking chair and went on with what she had to say: “What I was starting off to tell you is you remind me of her, of Jean Harlow. You’ve got the same teeny mouth, Jeannie, and I think your hair was a whole lot prettier before you started fooling around with it. That peroxide’s no good. It splits the ends. I know you’re going to tell me it isn’t peroxide but something more modern, but the result is the same.”

Vern’s shirt was spotted with coral-pink that had dropped off the brush. Vern wouldn’t mind; at least, he wouldn’t say that he minded. If he hadn’t objected to anything Jeannie did until now, he wouldn’t start off by complaining about a shirt. The campsite outside the uncurtained window was silent and dark. The waning moon would not appear until dawn. A passage of thought made Mrs. Thompson say, “Winter soon.”

Jeannie moved sharply and caught the bottle of polish before it spilled. Mrs. Thompson was crazy; it wasn’t even September.

“Pretty soon,” Mrs. Thompson admitted. “Pretty soon. That’s a long season up here, but I’m one person doesn’t
complain. I’ve been up here or around here every winter of my married life, except for that one winter Pops was occupying Germany.”

“I’ve been up here seventy-two days,” said Jeannie, in her soft voice. “Tomorrow makes seventy-three.”

“Is that right?” said Mrs. Thompson, jerking the rocker forward, suddenly snappish. “Is that a fact? Well, who asked you to come up here? Who asked you to come and start counting days like you was in some kind of jail? When you got married to Vern, you must of known where he’d be taking you. He told you, didn’t he, that he liked road jobs, construction jobs, and that? Did he tell you, or didn’t he?”

“Oh, he told me,” said Jeannie.