After the Plague: And Other Stories

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  He was so surprised he answered her in Italian. Olive eyes, hair piled up on her head like a confection, skin you could eat with a spoon—and hadn’t it been old Siagris, the hairy Greek, who’d fried his hamburger and set it down on the counter before him? Or was he dreaming?

  She was giving him a look, a crease between her eyebrows, hands on hips. “What did you say?”

  “I mean”—fumbling after his English—“no, no, thank you … but who, I mean … ?”

  She was serene—a very model of serenity—though the other customers, men in suits, two boys and their mother lingering over their ice cream, were all watching her and quietly listening for her answer. “I’m Ariadne,” she said. “Ariadne Siagris.” She looked over her shoulder to the black-eyed man standing at the grill. “That’s my uncle.”

  Baldasare was charmed—and a bit dazed too. She was beautiful—or at least to his starved eyes she was—and he wanted to say something witty to her, something flirtatious, something that would let her know that he wasn’t just another sorrowful Italian laborer with no more means or expectations than the price of the next hamburger sandwich, but a man of substance, a landowner, future proprietor of the Baldasare Forestiere Vineyards. But he couldn’t think of anything, his mind impacted, his tongue gone dead in the sleeve of his mouth. Then he felt his jaws opening of their own accord and heard himself saying, “Baldasare Forestiere, at your service.”

  He would always remember that moment, through all the digging and lifting and wheelbarrowing to come, because she looked hard at him, as if she could see right through to his bones, and then she turned up the corners of her mouth, pressed two fingers to her lips, and giggled.

  That night, as he lay in his miserable bed in his miserable shack that was little more than a glorified chicken coop, he could think of nothing but her. Ariadne Siagris. She was the one. She was what he’d come to America for, and he spoke her name aloud as the rain beat at his crude roof and insinuated itself through a hundred slivers and cracks to drizzle down onto his already damp blankets, spoke her name aloud and made the solemnest pledge that she would one day be his bride. But it was cold and the night beyond the walls was limitless and black and his teeth were chattering so forcefully he could barely get the words out. He was mad, of course, and he knew it. How could he think to have a chance with her? What could he offer her, a girl like that who’d come all the way from Chicago, Illinois, to live with her uncle, the prosperous Greek—a school-educated girl used to fine things and books? Yes, he’d made inquiries—he’d done nothing but inquire since he’d left the drugstore that afternoon. Her parents were dead, killed at a railway crossing, and she was nineteen years old, with two younger sisters and three brothers, all of them farmed out to relatives. Ariadne. Ariadne Siagris.

  The rain was relentless. It spoke and sighed and roared. He was wearing every stitch of clothing he possessed, wrapped in his blankets and huddled over the coal-oil lamp, and still he froze, even here in California. It was an endless night, an insufferable night, but a night in which his mind was set free to roam the universe of his life, one thought piled atop another like bricks in a wall, until at some point, unaccountably, he was thinking of the grand tunnels he’d excavated in New York and Boston, how clean they were, how warm in winter and cool in summer, how they smelled, always, of the richness of the earth. Snow could be falling on the streets above, the gutters frozen, wind cutting into people’s eyes, but below ground there was no weather, none at all. He thought about that, pictured it—the great arching tubes carved out of the earth and the locomotive with a train of cars standing there beneath the ground and all the passengers staring placidly out the windows—and then he was asleep.

  The next morning, he began to dig again. The rain had gone and the sun glistened like spilled oil over his seventy acres of mire and hardpan. He told himself he was digging a cellar—a proper cellar for the house he would one day build, because he hadn’t given up, not yet, not Baldasare Forestiere—but even then, even as he spat on his hands and raised the pick above his head, he knew there was more to it than that. The pick rose and fell, the shovel licked at the earth with all the probing intimacy of a tongue, and the wheelbarrow groaned under one load after another. Baldasare was digging. And he was happy, happier than he’d been since the day he stepped down from the train, because he was digging for her, for Ariadne, and because digging was what he’d been born to do.

  But then the cellar was finished—a fine deep vaulted space in which he could not only stand erect—at his full height of five feet and four inches—but thrust his right arm straight up over his head and still only just manage to touch the ceiling—and he found himself at a loss for what to do next. He could have squared up the corners and planed the walls with his spade till all the lines were rectilinear, but he didn’t want that. That was the fashion of all the rooms he’d ever lived in, and as he scraped and smoothed and tamped, he realized it didn’t suit him. No, his cellar was dome-shaped, like the apse of the cathedral in which he’d worshipped as a boy, and its entrance was protected from the elements by a long broad ramp replete with gutters that drained into a small reflecting pool just outside the wooden door. And its roof, of course, was of hardpan, impervious to the rain and sun, and more durable than any shingle or tile.

  He spent two days smoothing out the slope of the walls and tidying and leveling the floor, working by the light of a coal-oil lantern while in the realm above the sky threw up a tatter of cloud and burned with a sun in the center of it till the next storm rolled in to snuff it out like a candle. When the rain came, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to move his clothes and his bed and his homemade furniture down into the new cellar, which was snug and watertight. Besides, he reasoned, even as he fashioned himself a set of shelves and broke through the hardpan to run a stovepipe out into the circumambient air, what did he need a cellar for—a strict cellar, that is—if he couldn’t grow the onions, apples, potatoes, and carrots to store in it?

  Once the stove was installed and had baked all the moisture out of the place, he lay on the hard planks of his bed through a long rainy afternoon, smoking one cigarette after another and thinking about what his father had said—about the animals and how they lived in the ground, in holes. His father was a wise man. A man of character and substance. But he wasn’t in California and he wasn’t in love with Ariadne Siagris and he didn’t have to live in a shack the pigeons would have rejected. It took him a while, but the conclusion Baldasare finally reached was that he was no animal—he was just practical, that was all—and he barely surprised himself when he got up from the bed, fetched his shovel and began to chip away at the east wall of his cellar. He could already see a hallway there, a broad grand hallway, straight as a plumb line and as graceful and sensible as the arches the Romans of antiquity put to such good use in their time. And beyond that, as the dirt began to fall and the wheelbarrow shuddered to receive it, he saw a kitchen and bedroom opening onto an atrium, he saw grape and wisteria vines snaking toward the light, camellias, ferns, and impatiens overflowing clay pots and baskets—and set firmly in the soil, twenty feet below the surface, an avocado tree, as heavy with fruit as any peddler’s cart.

  The winter wore on. There wasn’t much hired work this time of year—the grapes had been picked and pressed, the vines cut back, the fig trees pruned, and the winter crops were in the ground. Baldasare had plenty of time on his hands. He wasn’t idle—he just kept right on digging—nor was he destitute. Modest in his needs and frugal by habit, he’d saved practically everything he’d earned through the summer and fall, repairing his own clothes, eating little more than boiled eggs and pasta, using his seventy acres as a place to trap rabbits and songbirds and to gather wood for his stove. His one indulgence was tobacco—that, and a weekly hamburger sandwich at Siagris’ Drugstore.

  Chewing, sipping coffee, smoking, he studied his future bride there, as keen as any scholar intent on his one true subject. He made little speeches to her in his hea
d, casual remarks he practiced over and over till he got them right—or thought he did, anyway. Lingering over his coffee after cleaning the plate of crumbs with a dampened forefinger, he would wait till she came near with a glass or washcloth in hand, and he would blurt: “One thinks the weather will change, is that not true?” Or: “This is the most best sandwich of hamburger my mouth will ever receive.” And she? She would show her teeth in a little equine smile, or she would giggle, then sometimes sneeze, covering her nose and mouth with one hand as her late mother had no doubt taught her to do. All the while, Baldasare feasted on the sight of her. Sometimes he would sit there at the counter for two or three hours till Siagris the Greek would make some impatient remark and he would rise in confusion, his face suffused with blood, bowing and apologizing till he managed to find his way to the door.

  It was during this time of close scrutiny that he began to detect certain small imperfections in his bride-to-be. Despite her education, for instance, she seemed to have inordinate difficulty in making change or reading off the menu from the chalkboard on the wall behind her. She’d begun to put on weight too, picking at bits of doughnut or fried potatoes the customers left on their plates. If she’d been substantial when Baldasare first laid eyes on her, she was much more than that now—stout, actually. As stout as Signora Cardino back home in Messina, who was said to drink olive oil instead of wine and breakfast on sugared cream and cake. And then there were her eyes—or rather, her right eye. It had a cast in it, and how he’d missed that on the day he was first smitten, he couldn’t say. But he had to look twice to notice the hairs on her chin—as stiff as a cat’s whiskers and just as translucent—and as far as he was concerned, the red blotches that had begun to appear on the perfect skin of her hands and throat might have been nothing more than odd splashes of marinara sauce, as if she’d gotten too close to the pot.

  Another lover, less blinded by the light of certitude than Baldasare, might have found these blemishes a liability, but Baldasare treasured them. They were part of her, part of that quiddity that made her unique among women. He watched with satisfaction as her hips and buttocks swelled so that even at nineteen she had to walk with a waddle, looked on with a soaring heart as the blotches spread from her throat to her cheeks and brow and her right eye stared out of her head, across the room and out the window, surer each day that she was his. After all, who else would see in her what he saw? Who else could love her the way he did? Who but Baldasare Forestiere would come forward to declare himself? And he would declare himself soon—as soon as he finished digging.

  Two years passed. He worked for other men and saved every cent of his wages, worse than any miser, and in his free time, he dug. When he completed a passage or a room or carved his way to the sky for light, he could already see the next passage and the next room beyond that. He had a vision, yes, and he had Ariadne to think of, but even so, he wasn’t the sort to sit around idle. He didn’t have the gift of letters, he didn’t play violin or mouth organ, and he rarely visited among his neighbors. The vaudeville theater was a long way off, too far to walk, and he went there only once, with Lucca Albanese, a vineyard worker with whom he’d struck up a friendship. There were comedians and jugglers and pretty women all dancing like birds in flight, but all the while he was regretting the two cents the streetcar had cost him and the fifteen-cent admission, and he never went back. No, he stayed home with his shovel and his vision, and many days he didn’t know morning from night.

  Saturdays, though, he kept sacred. Saturday was the day he walked the three and a half miles to Siagris’ Drugstore, through winter rains and summer heat that reached a hundred and sixteen degrees Fahrenheit. He prided himself on his constancy, and he was pleased to think that Ariadne looked forward to his weekly visits as much as he did. His place at the end of the counter was always vacant, as if reserved for him, and he relished the little smiles with which she greeted him and the sweet flow of familiar phrases that dropped so easily from her supple American lips: “So how’ve you been?” “Nice day.” “Think it’s coming on to rain?”

  As time went on, they became increasingly intimate. She told him of her uncle’s back pain, the illness of her cat, the ascension of her oldest brother to assistant floor supervisor at the Chicago Iron Works, and he told her of his ranch and of the elegance and spaciousness of his living quarters. “Twelve room,” he said. “Twelve room, and all to myself.” And then came the day when he asked her, in his runaway English, if she would come with him to the ranch for a picnic. “But not just the picnic,” he said, “but also the scene, how do you say, the scene of the place, and my, my house, because I want—I need—you see, I …”

  She was leaning over the counter, splotchy and huge. Her weight had stabilized in the past year—she’d reached her full growth, finally, at the age of twenty-one—and she floated above her feet like one of the airships the Germans so prized. “Yes,” she said, and she giggled and sneezed, a big mottled hand pressed to her mouth, “I’d love to.”

  The following Sunday he came for her, lightly ascending the sun-bleached steps to the walkup above the drugstore where she lived with uncle and aunt and their five children. It was a hot September morning, all of Fresno and the broad dusty valley beyond held in the grip of something stupendous, a blast of air so sere and scorching you would have thought the whole world was a pizza oven with the door open wide. Siagris the Greek answered his knock. He was in his shirtsleeves and the sweat had made a washcloth of his garments, the white field of his shirt stuck like a postage stamp to the bulge of his belly. He didn’t smile but he didn’t look displeased either, and Baldasare understood the look: Siagris didn’t like him, not one bit, and in other circumstances might have gone out of his way to squash him like a bug, but then he had a niece who took up space and ate like six nieces, and Baldasare could just maybe deliver him from that. “Come in,” he said, and there was Baldasare, the cave-dweller, in a room in a house two stories above the ground.

  Up here, inside, it was even hotter. The Siagris children lay about like swatted flies, and Mrs. Siagris, her hair like some wild beast clawing at her scalp, poked her head around the corner from the kitchen. It was too hot to smile, so she grimaced instead and pulled her head back out of sight. And then, in the midst of this suffocating scene, the voice of a ventriloquist cried out, “He’s here,” and Ariadne appeared in the hallway.

  She was all in white, with a hat the size of a tabletop perched atop the mighty pile of her hair. He was melting already, from the heat, but when she focussed her wild eye on him and turned up her lips in the shyest of smiles, he melted a little more.

  Outside, in the street, she gave him her arm, which was something of a problem because she was so much taller than he was, and he had to reach up awkwardly to take it. He was wearing his best suit of clothes, washed just the evening before, and the unfamiliar jacket clung to him like dead skin while the new celluloid collar gouged at his neck and the tie threatened to throttle him. They managed to walk the better part of a block before she put her feet together and came to a halt. “Where’s your carriage?” she asked.

  Carriage? Baldasare was puzzled. He didn’t have any carriage—he didn’t even have a horse. “I no got,” he said, and he strained to give her his best smile. “We walk.”

  “Walk?” she echoed. “In this heat? You must be crazy.”

  “No,” he said, “we walk,” and he leaned forward and exerted the most delicate but insistent pressure on the monument of her arrested arm.

  Her cheeks were splotched under the crisp arc of shadow the hat brim threw over her face and her olive eyes seemed to snatch at his. “You mean,” and her voice was scolding and intemperate, “you ain’t even got a wagon? You, with your big house you’re always telling me about?”

  The following Sunday, though it wounded him to throw his money away like some Park Avenue millionaire, he pulled up to Siagris’ Drugstore in a hired cabriolet. It was a clear day, the sun high and merciless, and the same scenario played its
elf out in the walkup at the top of the stairs, except that this time Baldasare seemed to have things in hand. He was as short with Siagris as Sia-gris was with him, he made a witticism regarding the heat for the benefit of the children, and he led Ariadne (who had refused the previous week to go farther than a bench in the park at the end of the street) out the door, down the steps, and into the carriage like a cavaliere of old.

  Baldasare didn’t like horses. They were big and crude and expensive and they always seemed to need grooming, shoeing, doctoring, and oats—and the horse attached to the cabriolet was no exception. It was a stupid, flatulent, broad-flanked, mouse-colored thing, and it did its utmost to resist every touch of the reins and thwart every desire of the man wielding them. Baldasare was in a sweat by the time they reached his property, every square inch of his clothing soaked through like a blotter, and his nerves were frayed raw. Nor had he made any attempt at conversation during the drive, so riveted was he on the task at hand, and when they finally pulled up in the shade of his favorite oak, he turned to Ariadne and saw that she hadn’t exactly enjoyed the ride either.

  Her hat was askew, her mouth set in a thin unyielding line. She was glistening with sweat, her hands like doughballs fried in lard, and a thin integument of moistened dust clung to her features. She gave him a concentrated frown. “Well, where is it?” she demanded. “Why are we stopping here?”