by Susana Aikin
At the end of it all, where was his victory?
And where was mine, for that matter? Of all the years shunning him, neglecting him, throwing cold eyes over the shriveled image of his defeat, what did I gain? I had yet to understand the consequences of my vendetta.
* * *
A coppery light enfolded Father’s office the last time I visited, when I swung by, unannounced, to drop off a set of keys. It had been a while since I had last been there, well over a year. I was surprised at first, and then shocked to find the large space empty. There was nobody at the reception area. I walked down a line of vacant desks, wondering if I’d forgotten it was a bank holiday or some equivalent Spanish saint’s feast, until I came up to Ventura’s desk and realized business was being conducted as usual, whatever that meant.
The old accountant got up from his seat with a great deal of difficulty, a smile spreading across his yellow parched face. “Miss Anna! So good to see you back!” I shook his hand, horrified at how much he had aged. His whole frame trembled, his limbs quivered spastically as he steadied himself against the desk. “Don’t mind my shakes, it’s just a bit of Saint Vitus’s dance, as my mother calls it. What to do? We’re all getting on. And you? How are you?” His sincere glee cast a dark cloud over me.
“Where is everyone, Ventura?”
“It’s been only Silvia and me for a while now,” he said, blinking. “We had to downsize, you know, after you left . . .” I looked around at the desolate space, at the once busy, elegant office that drew all sorts of international business people and big-ticket contracts. Empty and dimly lit, the place looked decrepit with its shabby, outmoded furniture and its begrimed walls. Even the beige wall-to-wall carpet I had so dreaded back in the day was worn out. But its degradation only gave me a pang of angst. All was tinged with a sinister air of aged neglect that made me shudder. For the first time I was slapped with the extent of my magnicide. After I left, Father lost the drive to push forward, and let the ship go adrift. My abandonment had the effect of starving the company of vitality and sustenance, and it had trickled down to nothingness through resignations, layoffs, and the severance of contracts. It wasn’t just my walking away, I also took with me the best clients, on purpose. Now, laid before my eyes, was the collateral result of the revenge I had planned against Father. I had intended to draw blood, but ended up casting a whole net of misery and decay.
“If you need to see your father, Miss Anna, he’s over at his office.” Ventura stared into my face with affection but also with curiosity. Was he asking himself for the hundredth time what had actually happened for me to walk out one day, to never return again?
As I made my way to Father’s office, Silvia emerged from the kitchen with a cup of the legendary appalling coffee in her hand. I recognized in an instant the smell of the acrid grind drowned in powdered milk. At least one element seemed to have survived intact the ravages of time.
“Anna! Blessed are the eyes! Where have you been?” She stepped back, gesticulating in admiration. “Look at you!” She made me turn around to show her my dark red evening dress, and I felt ashamed of my fashionable trappings, the dazzling Coach bag and my new Kenzo shoes. She had aged too. Her dyed blond hair looked straggly and disheveled, and huge tawny bags of skin hung under her eyes above an orangey sweater covered all over in tiny balls of fuzz. But there was true affection in the open smile that revealed her nicotine-stained teeth.
As I kissed her on the cheek and exchanged a few pleasantries, I caught sight of him over her shoulder. Father, sitting behind his desk, swathed in the brownish crepuscular light that poured in through the window. He was dressed as usual, in a perfect suit and tie. A wavy lock of hair hung over his forehead as he looked down at a stack of paperwork. The image pierced me like a spear across the solar plexus. A neat little figure trying hard to focus, lost in the immensity of his empty office. Empty of business, of bustle, of life. A picture of the past. Rotting. In sepia.
Having slayed him would have been kinder.
I had finally stepped up to the plate and proved myself to be my father’s daughter. I could also be cruel, vindictive, coldhearted in the heat of rage, and then live on to struggle awkwardly with the consequences.
* * *
And so it was that a few weeks later I found myself on the same page with Father. Literally. In front of the page of the Egyptian Book of the Dead written for the scribe Ani, where an image of a sideways-kneeling Anubis pointed his dark jackal face toward his hands holding the tiny pendulum of a huge weighing scale, from which hung two dishes.
“What is he weighing?” I asked.
It was six months before Father’s death and I had walked one night into the darkened study and sat on the armchair by his side. I tried to hide my disquiet at his ashen face, as he hoisted himself up from his lying position on the chesterfield sofa. I had come into the house late that evening in a fit of spontaneity, without notice, and become alarmed at the gloomy façade, with no lights on the porch or in the windows. I walked through the kitchen, staircase, and corridors, turning on light switches, my anguish increasing as I realized that something else, besides this lurking pool of darkness, was encroached about the house. There was a heaviness churning in the air, a feeling of strange elusiveness that made rooms and corridors seem larger than I remembered them, as if spaces stretched out ahead of me, even in the darkness, hindering my advance.
Where was Father?
A dim light in the studio at the end of the hall answered my question. From the door I could see his slim, recumbent body on the sofa.
Why so quiet?
I put extra weight on my feet as I stepped into the room. “Hello, Father! It’s awfully dark in here!” I turned on a few lamps around the room. Father shaded his eyes and raised himself into a seated position.
“Having a bit of a nap?” I tried to sound cheerful as I sat on the armchair by his side, but I knew he hadn’t been sleeping. “Aren’t you cold?”
It was freezing in the room, one of those discarnate Madrid February evenings where the frost was already gathering to lay its icy mantle over the land. “Shall I make you a cup of tea? Don’t you want to light a fire in the drawing room?”
Father didn’t reply. He just sat there, stunned, looking at me, or through me. A couple of minutes passed in uncomfortable silence. I stared at the large open book that lay on the coffee table in front of him, and examined the terrifying black pointed dog-face of Annubis, his long muscular thighs as he knelt one knee on the ground, holding the minute pendulum of the large scale while surrounded by a host of sideward figures and strange animals.
“What are they weighing?” I asked again.
I wanted to engage Father’s attention, have him snap out of his trancelike silence. Talking about art was always a safe arena with him. But I was also curious about the two bizarre objects weighed against each other on the scales.
Father groped for his glasses on the table, put them on, and looked down at the page. He seemed to come back to life as his eyes roamed over the polychromatic pictures. “They are weighing his heart against a feather,” he said at last in a tired voice.
“His heart? Whose heart?” I said, but remembered instantly that we were looking at a reproduction of the Papyrus of Ani, the Egyptian Book of the Dead written specially for Ani, so it had to be Ani’s heart, whoever he might have been. “Weighing it against a feather? How would a heart ever weigh as little as a feather?”
“That’s how light it has to be to enter the afterlife,” Father said in a matter-of-fact way, and pointed to another figure, standing behind Annubis, who had the head of an ibis and a pen and tablet in his hand, with which he seemed to be taking notes on the procedure. “This is Thoth, and he records the results,” Father said, and moved his finger toward another figure standing under the scale, a horrific animal in the mixture of a crocodile, a lion, and a hippopotamus. “And here’s the Devourer, who snatches the heart if he doesn’t pass the test.”
“But how’s th
e heart going to weigh less than a feather?” I repeated my question with the incredulity of a child.
“That’s it. It’s quite impossible,” Father said. “But there’s some sort of a trick, a spell the deceased might quote that might help with his plight. Read it, down here.” I started reading to myself. “Out loud,” he insisted.
“ ‘Oh heart which I had from my mother, O my heart which I had upon the earth, do not rise up against me as a witness in the presence of the Lord of Things; do not speak against me concerning what I have done, do not bring anything against me in the presence of the Great God.’ ” I reread it to myself in silence.
“Why would the heart speak out?” I felt like a stupid infant in the face of an inscrutable oracle. I watched Father’s hollowed gaze through his glasses and wondered why his pupils were so contracted, pinhead small, when they should be dilated in the midst of all this darkness. He was staring at the sturdy heart, as it sat upright on the scale holding its breath against the lightness of the feather. So, if the heart could be trusted to keep silence in this awful momentous instance of judgment, there could be a chance of redemption. But again, why would the heart be so eager to speak up, to confess its murdering moments, its dark thoughts and desires?
“The heart cannot live with remorse,” Father said, as if reciting some text. “It would rather speak up and fall into damnation, than carry its burden into eternity.” He was silent for a beat and then added, as if to himself, “But what good does that do anyone?”
His eyes were lowered, his thin face haggard with a gauntness I had never seen before. Was he weighing his own heart? Was he memorizing the spell?
Never had I felt so close and so removed from Father than in that moment, both of our heads bent over the Papyrus of Ani at the center of the dim yellow ring of light around the leather sofa in his study. Our bodies so close to each other, and yet so distant. Hurting to reach out, to breach the gap, and yet incapable. And the darkness around us, so fierce, so menacing, like the Devourer waiting to snatch our hearts. Not just his.
Mine too.
CHAPTER 19
“Are you still with me?” Delia whispers. I’m not sure if I hear it in my head, or if it’s coming from her lips. I have drifted into a slumber, and when I open my eyes I feel her gaze intent on mine, and realize she’s been watching me all this time, however long it’s been since I’ve passed out. Watching me with those raven eyes like black lakes of unnerving scrutiny. Has she been watching my thoughts, or even the images that are swelling up in my memory? I flinch at this possibility. And yet, there’s a certain soothing at the odds of being peeped on in the midst of cramping pain. Like an unexpected sharing, an opportunity to dissipate a portion of torment away from the self.
I look around the room. The light inside the study has become opaque, a sort of light brownish yellow that tints everything with the sepia sheen of old photographs, the same light as in the scenes of my recent recollections. It’s strange how the mind can travel through time using impressions affected upon the senses, like gliding vectors across the tectonic plates of memory.
A whip of distant lightning flashes through the window, and then follows the rumbling of thunder, heavy growls tailed by the wind flogging the trees outside, rattling the loose wood in the blinds. But the rain is still being withheld. The heavens heave and lurch in the agony of overdue labor. The room sweats.
I lean back on the sofa, drained. I feel hot and sticky, a small animal left to desiccate upon a withered plain. I turn on my side, and lie outstretched on the sofa with head resting on the buttoned leather arm. My temples are throbbing now, and my thigh aches with a sore thud that pounds from the cut. I want to close my eyes. I need water.
The door opens and Constantine walks in with hurried little steps, a gleaming reddish-brown bowl in his hands. Julia follows behind with a white bandage. The wind rushes in with them and sweeps through the room, an angry hiss that blows close to the floor, and bangs the door shut again.
“It’s ready, Delia.” Constantine is his diligent apprentice-self again. He sets the bowl on the table, near my leg. I recognize the old copper mortar that has been in the kitchen since I can remember. The piece that Father always claimed to be a Russian apothecary mortar more than a hundred years old. He used to fly into a rage every time he caught Nanny, pestle in hand, in the act of crushing some herb or spice that she intended adding to the food. How could she be as insensitive as to use a precious antique in the commonplace act of pursuing a recipe! Because the piece came from Mother’s family and had been used in the kitchen forever, Nanny could never understand his regret. Now, its yellow glint hurts my eyes. And the sour, metallic smell of the copper travels up my nose toward my brain. It makes me sick to my stomach with its sweet, earthy scent. Like blood.
Julia sits by me. “Are you all right? You look pale.”
“I am very thirsty, and I have a headache. Is there any water I can drink?”
Delia motions Constantine to take up the mortar again. “Just let us put this over your wound so you can leave the room.” Then she says to Constantine, “Very good you found a copper bowl. Our Lady of La Caridad del Cobre always provides. Did you bring a spoon to spread the poultice with?” Constantine nods.
Julia bristles by my side. “Wait a minute! You’re not putting that stuff on her leg! It’s a bunch of prickly thistles he’s mashed up together, and I saw him spit into the bowl!”
Constantine exchanges glances with Delia. Then he takes up the mortar and pulls it to his chest, as if protecting it. “Excuse me, but no such thing happened. I used a bit of sunflower oil to make the poultice,” he huffs, offended.
Julia jumps up from her seat. “I think we’ve been through enough bullshit today. I’m taking my sister to the hospital right now, and that’s that!”
“I’m not going to the hospital, I just need water,” I say, and my words reverberate in my head, adding to the pain that now throbs in amplified, unbearable sweeps.
“Yes, you are! You’re coming with me right this moment!”
Delia takes up her cane and rests her chin on its handle. “I’m afraid this is not your call, Julia. You chickened out a while ago, but Anna’s following the course. She’s the one to decide.”
Julia glares at Delia for a beat, then kneels down beside me. “Let’s get out of here, Anna. I don’t like this. I don’t trust them anymore.” She’s pleading. I look at her as through a fog. My head is exploding. I see her concern, I see her fear, but it’s as if we’re on different planes. Where I am, there’s no exit the way she wants to take me. The pain throbs inside my temples, and my thoughts are caught in a narrow tunnel, pressed against clingy, ropy walls.
“I just have a migraine. I need to take a painkiller and get a bit of sleep.” Just articulating these few words is excruciating, like tearing at deep membranes in the vortex of my head.
“Anna! You hit your head when you fell, you can’t go to sleep! You’ve never had a migraine in your life. I’m calling an ambulance this moment!” I hear Julia on the verge of screaming.
“What on earth is going on here?” A figure draped in a long whitish cloth, like a bed sheet tucked around her like a toga, stands at the door. We all look at her in awe, even Delia. Marion’s wet hair falls in black curly waves down the sides of her body. Her face is serious, beautiful, like the marble statue of a Roman matron. Water drips to the floor from the fringes of her cloth, around her bare feet. Her voice commands again, “What is the problem?” She walks toward me with an imperious stride, holding her toga drapes to her body. Julia stands up and gives way as Marion sits on the sofa close to me and takes my hands.
“Oh, darling, you feel so hot!” She brushes the sticky hair away from my forehead. She hasn’t called me darling for at least fifteen years, and her hands feel cold and soothing. “This girl is dehydrated and exhausted. We need to get water immediately.”
“We need to get her the hell out of this goddamned house is what we need!” Julia says.
&
nbsp; “Don’t be ridiculous. Take my car and fetch water. She has to drink before anything else,” Marion says, still pressing her hands along my face and throat. The throbbing in my temples abates.
