Lucia

by Alex Pheby

  It was so embarrassing.

  They just want to go to sleep, forever, in their own bed, with their own wife, without an eternity of fucking earache. The chair wasn’t that heavy. Can’t you just stop crying? You’ll wake the neighbours.

  So those people do not deserve to lie forever in a box in the soil beside the people they loved in life. They should not expect to do so, since eternity is an awfully long time. Without the proper preparations made, and the rituals observed, and tomb decorations commissioned, one might find oneself suffering those same indignities one suffered in life throughout the infinite afterlife. Better to have no chair throwers there, to have them separated by seven hundred miles (by road) where they can remain quiet and unriled.

  Build a place in their absence: a shrine to those who were once disturbed and are now no longer. Build a statue of them, effete and unperturbed, smoking a cigarette, at which sacrifices can be made to ensure the long and happy afterlife of those buried. Neurasthenic, anaemic, bespectacled and bookish pilgrims can gather at this graveside, having first gone to Dublin and been disappointed not to find the resting place there. They can read the list of those who lie in that grave, never to be disturbed by the disturbing party, since she is neither in Dublin, nor in Zurich, nor in Trieste, nor in Paris, but in a place where no-one would wish to be, by the river Nene. Northampton is so far from heaven that whatever fires she sets will never disturb the higher heaven in which these people live. They are so precious, so delicate, that if voices are raised in the afternoon this is a serious problem. If friends come to call they must be silenced. If suitors are to be found, they must be vetted. If brothers are found with their hands up her shirt and down her knickers then it is they, delicate flowers, who must be protected. She must be taken to the doctor, where foetuses are removed to prevent the necessity of rearing feebleminded children: you’ve always allowed her to be so free and easy and look what it’s caused; she’s like a bitch in heat and there must be boundaries.

  It’s not as if there wasn’t any room in the end – at first, certainly, the adjacent plot having been filled, but later? The city fathers provided room enough for second wives in the grave of honour, but none for daughters.

  And there I made to repair the damage that had been done, to the best of my abilities. In the space where her face had been scored away, I painted it, using her death mask as a reference. In the places where the spells of protection should have been, I copied scenes from other tombs, overwriting what had been there and making palimpsests of the originals. Amongst the rags of her bindings I placed amulets from my own collection, particularly my pride – the heart scarab, onto which I carved the name I had chosen for her. I even added scenes of a happier life, so that she might at least have these as memories.

  I am not a skilled painter, and there was only so long that I could hold off my colleague. There came a night when I could delay no longer and, amongst the flawed and desecrated remains of this tomb, I performed what I could of the ceremony of the opening of the mouth, in the hope that she might at last make her journey into the afterlife.

  Before I left I took the shebti statue I had stolen for my daughter and I laid it at the foot of her sarcophagus, so that it might work on her behalf in the underworld.

  Your mummy is set up for Ra in the court of your tomb, you being given over to the scale of the necropolis. May you emerge vindicated.

  She makes the protestations of innocence in front of Osiris and the forty-two gods of Ma’at, hailing each of them by their name and denying all sins against them. Her heart is weighed.

  THE MORTUARY PRIEST

  TRIESTE TO NORTHAMPTON, 1907 ONWARDS

  Conditions in a civic hospital in mid-summer are not ideal. Even in a world which has air conditioning, this system might be broken. Even in a world which has public health care, this system might be underfunded. Even in world where there is medicine, this system might be half-hearted, or conducted with institutional malice.

  Paupers – if we count ourselves among their number, if we know what a pauper is, if we wish to recognise their existence – are not deserving of the considerations we might imagine if we try to bring to mind ideals. Often we are spoiled by the lives we have lived to date, so that if we try to imagine less than ideal conditions then our imaginings on the topic fall short of the real. We have been cossetted like lap dogs, and don’t understand how terrible things can become, and don’t care anyway: stop going on about it; you’re boring me.

  So conditions on the ward are trying, especially if one is kept in for a week. The recognition of the others around us changes from a generic categorisation of people by the degree of their illness, gradually, through having nothing better for the mind to focus on, to a particular and exhausting form of empathy – specific and imaginary to a degree for which we do not have the energy: if only we could get some sleep; then perhaps we’d stop crying.

  What about a baby, though? What does a baby know of ideals? Does it care if it is too hot? A baby is used to the womb, where it is always hot. Does it care if it is stifling? It is stifling in the womb, and very tight on space. Is a baby troubled by the sounds it hears: the coughing of a consumptive, or the moaning of a diptheric, or the muttering of a rheumatic? A baby cannot differentiate sights and sounds and apply to them any meaning, since a baby is pre-linguistic. It is consequently incapable of thought (on which meaning relies). It instinctually demands its mother, and will show signs of distress if separated from her, but this is well within the normal range of its experience. Babies are taken from their mothers and lain with all the other infants. There they set up a chorus of wailing it is possible to shut out by closing the door. In this way they are silenced and cause less nuisance on the ward with their incessant keening misery.

  Once they are behind the closed door they can be observed through the window, often by staff, sometimes by patients, and occasionally by uncles. They come and take from their pockets a cheap cigar (usually a panatela, rarely a corona, never a perfecto), since they are paupers and cannot afford anything too pricey. Tobacconists ensure they have stock to meet every pocket. Uncles have boxes of matches, and, gripping the cigar between their teeth (incisors if they are unfamiliar with the method, premolars if they have more experience) they light a match and bring it to the end. They puff until it holds the flame, and congratulate themselves on the generation of human mass, something that is essential to their sense of wellbeing. The air fills with the smell of tobacco, acrid or sweet, and then the match falls to the ground, black and wizened, where someone will grind it beneath their heel if they lengthen or shorten their stride.

  What should be done with babies? They should be washed, fed, and given to their mother once she has the strength to take them, providing she has no pressing concerns which otherwise distract her, such as a demanding older child, or an incompetent and needy husband. If the mother is unable to tend to her baby immediately it should be placed where it cannot disturb others until she can tend to it. By all means feed it, and change its nappy, and ensure it doesn’t roll off the table and crack its fucking head open, but a baby is a burden that the authorities do not have the resources to shoulder. So also a girl-child, or a woman. It is the father’s responsibility to provide for the mother, and the mother for the daughter. If the father cannot do it alone he must count on his extended family, and if they are unwilling he must prostitute himself about the place making a whore of his talents until the creditors are satisfied and the bills are met. No-one must be upset, since all their livelihoods depend on it.

  I know, I know, but what are we to do?

  There are practicalities in the world; there are facts.

  I know.

  It is not ideal.

  So what is ideal?

  There is no point asking a baby, so I am asking you. What is to be done for babies for whom one worries? What is to be done for children for whom one worries? What is to be done for women, for old ladies, for corpses, for whom one has worried, worry now, or will wo
rry?

  Wash your hands of them all on the slightest pretext and cry foul when you hear pleas. You do not wish to have this nonsense raised in your presence. It is not your responsibility. It is none of your business.

  I cannot understand what she’s saying.

  Such ignorance is a great luxury!

  But you are not wealthy, so let’s try again.

  It is hot during the day and hot during the night and they never open the windows – it lets the gnats in. Her mother doesn’t notice the surroundings since she has a limited range of experience: she sees into a tunnel at the other end of which is her daughter, scrunch-faced and stretching; she hears as if through a stethoscope the sparse croaks a sleeping baby makes, the slight moans and half-sounds that might evolve into crying that will wake her; she smells only the milk on her child’s skin and the lack of soiling, an absence that she is alert to as if it is a something. Mothers notice all these things with an intensity that renders all the other things of the world edgeless and vague as mist.

  Though the heat causes her body to sweat, and the covers to weigh heavily across her thighs, and the sounds of women and children and nurses and trolleys and water rattling pipes fall into her ears, they are interpreted through the effect they might have on this sleeping baby. Will the noises wake her? Is she too hot? Is her blanket too tight?

  —Sit up, Signora; time to eat.

  A tray is produced and on it is round meat, and purple-syruped fruit, and orzo with milk. The mother closes her eyes to it – it makes the bile rise in her throat – and then she snaps them open again, and yes, it was a ruse.

  When a magician wants to hide the coin he’ll distract your attention with a second coin, and this is what the nurse has done, because now the daughter is gone, handed off to the midwife. She is obscured behind this woman’s broad, floral back, her bulging shoulders, the white split of her scalp sprouting two tight pigtails.

  The mother reaches and makes to speak, but her wounds and soreness won’t allow it. The capacity of her breath is reduced, as if all that pushing has collapsed parts of her lungs. She whispers things she means to bark, things this midwife wouldn’t understand even if she heard them, and now the daughter is taken away. For what? Waking, weighing, pricking of the heel, snapping of the fingers by each ear.

  The nurse magician’s English is too poor to carry a conversation, and our child’s mother has no Italian to speak of. Where is the father? He is in a bed in the men’s ward laid out flat by a child’s disease. The mother is left unprotected from the nurse’s insistence that she eat a slice of the oily, peppered pork, and sip at the filthy chicory milk, and the daughter is taken into the hidden places of the ward where her mother cannot follow.

  The magician attempts another sleight of hand: while the mother is distracted by the taking of the baby, and the chewing of meat that slicks unfriendly aniseed across the back of her tongue and leaves in her mouth a loop of thin wax paper that she has no choice but to pull from between her lips, she has drawn across the sheet and pulled up the nightie and is down between the legs, assessing the damage. The mother clamps her thighs together, but the magician nurse has her tricks, and she raises the unresisting knees and gets her information that way. She notes it in her pad and departs.

  Now the mother is alone.

  A row of beds in a hospital ward is reminiscent of a row of graves – it is like an x-ray shining through the soil, the bedhead the gravestone, the patient the corpse, and on both sides of the mother bodies stretch away into the distance.

  The bedframe of a hospital bed is reminiscent of the bones of the skeleton – white enamel like the bleached calcium of a donation to medical science, the struts which the hands grip like the metacarpals of those same hands if they are shone through by x-rays during a difficult birth.

  The absence of a child in the hours after birth is reminiscent of the early morning – lonely, but newly pregnant with possibility, and also it is a time to take stock… if only the mother wasn’t so damned tired.

  Down the aisle comes a pair of nurses, smiling to each other and talking and laughing. They are red-cheeked and ignorant of the bodies they walk between. Their knees are bare and their socks high on the calves. Their heels knock in unison – like metronomes – against the wooden chevrons that make up the floor. When they turn it is without resistance – they swivel at a shared right angle – since the varnish has been waxed and polished assiduously against the effects of the bleach that one of them will mop at the end of the shift, under the bed, knocking the frame and clanking the bucket.

  The mother bites her dry lips, tearing back the skin on the lower one, traces the stinging strip with the tip of her tongue.

  When that is done she falls asleep without knowing it.

  *

  She wakes to the puzzling shock of a hand cupping her breast.

  It is a woman she doesn’t recognise – grey and stern and desiccated, and so close, her profile at least, that she can see where the face powder has gathered in drifts in the lines that frame her mouth, and where it clumps at the corners. Her eye is like that of a chaffinch: small, so there is no sign of the white, and black. She has the child in one hand and the mother’s nipple in the other and she is trying to introduce the two.

  The mother is initially too disconcerted to act, but the child screws her face up against the breast and is taking such a deep breath it will certainly be released in a howl, through a mouth in which both toothless gums are presented, glistening and pink and angry. The mother’s breasts are leaking at the proximity of this mouth, but this mouth will not accept them – its function is different: it wishes to expel what is inside, not bring in what is outside, and this is proper to it: why should a mouth accept alien things into itself when there is danger in such acceptance?

  The child starts to wail.

  The grey midwife takes this as a sign of the mother’s failure, and gestures that the breasts must address the issue immediately, cursing them on the behalf of the other patients, advocating for the right to peace on the ward. She uses a language half consisting of words they do not share, and mimes anyone could follow.

  The mother takes a breast, one which has fed a different child perfectly satisfactorily for months, thank you, and makes a show of jabbing it into the crying mouth, the nipple held between two fingers, and aside from briefly muting the notes, as a trumpeter might, it is no good.

  You cannot make a child feed, as much as you wish that it would, and what if you do not wish that it would?

  That question does not receive an answer, and here, over the shoulder of the gesticulating midwife, comes a man in a suit leading a boy by the hand.

  In the absence of this arrival the mother would have made a sign that means ‘bottle’ and this would have been met with a weary and disgusted shaking of the head, but this boy is the mother’s son, and the man beside him is her husband’s brother, and such characters blanket other concerns, obviate the necessity to do anything but witness their arrival.

  The mother throws open her arms for the boy to run into.

  He is relatively new to the act of walking, and running is asking a lot, but he makes it into the embrace without incident. Couldn’t he have tripped and knocked his fucking teeth out on the bedframe? Grazed his fucking knees on the tiles? Raised a bird’s egg bump on his fucking forehead?

  He could have, but he doesn’t.

  What is the proper age to ween a child? Opinions differ, but the mother has not yet weened this one, and this is too perfect, suddenly. Inside the reciprocation of her embrace that the child attempts, the mother sees a gap into which she can insert victory in her battle with the midwife. It is not I, she says with her breast, who is at fault, it is the baby, since, look, this child will take the breast with no complaint at all. Indeed, he is eager.

  And he is, sure enough, and is soon lying across his mother, suckling, and, though it is painful for her to have him positioned like this, she smiles through it until the grey midwife departs to
that hidden place where the sterilised bottles of milk are kept.

  When the midwife is out of sight, the mother unlatches the boy and pushes him gently away from her stomach, now squeezed and stabbed with pains it is hard to tell the source of, but which do not feel right. She takes his little face in her hands – it is red and glowing on one cheek – and she plants kisses on it, to his delight.

  The boy attended to, the mother leans back against her cushions and in front of her, seemingly very tall and masculine, is the brother-in-law. He is suited, with a shirt and tie and starch in his cuffs and collar, and half a tin of polish on his boots. He smiles at her and looks, quite unashamedly, down at her breasts, which are swollen, and wet, and entirely bare. As if she isn’t already familiar with them, and is somehow called upon to inspect them herself by his staring, she looks too. They are as they always are nowadays, and he is smiling broadly.

  When he speaks, it is on a neutral topic – the fact that he has brought flowers for her – and in this moment, as she directs both of their attentions to the table beside the bed on which an empty vase rests, she simultaneously draws together the sides of her dressing gown and tucks the inner side tightly inside the outer.

  He has borrowed money for the hospital costs, so they needn’t worry, and hence the new outfit, and doesn’t it look grand? From his inner pocket he draws three cigars, one for each of them… no, obviously not the boy, and does she want hers? She nods and smiles despite herself, despite the heat and the scorching pain between her thighs and the indentations of the boy’s teeth on her nipple, and the surrounding clamour of a thousand dying fucking I-Ties.

  It is alright.

  It will be alright, in the end, since the order to which she is obliged to kowtow is passing – the order of the nurses and the midwifes and, later, the landlords and the bailiffs – just like the order of the mothers and fathers, it is passing, and then there will be the order of the cigars, an order in which she is one of the ruling elite, and it will all be different then.