Everything is Nice

by Jane Bowles

  "Do you mind?" he asked. "I see that you've decided to take a little night air. It isn't a bad idea. I don't feel like going to bed much either."

  "No," she said. "I don't want to go to bed. I will sit here. I like to sit out at night, if I am warmly enough dressed, and look up at the stars."

  "Yes, it's a great source of peace," the traveler said. "People don't do enough of it these days."

  "Would you not like very much to go to Italy?" Señora Ramirez asked him. "The fruit trees and the flowers will be wonderful there at night."

  "Well, you've got enough fruit and flowers here, I should say. What do you want to go to Italy for? I'll bet there isn't as much variety in the fruit there as here."

  "No? Do you have many flowers in your country?"

  The traveler was not able to decide.

  "I would like really," continued Señora Ramirez, "to be somewhere else—in your country or in Italy. I would like to be somewhere where the life is beautiful. I care very much whether life is beautiful or ugly. People who live here don't care very much. Because they do not think." She touched her finger to her forehead. "I love beautiful things: beautiful houses, beautiful gardens, beautiful songs. When I was a young girl I was truly wild with happiness—doing and thinking and running in and out. I was so happy that my mother was afraid I would fall and break my leg or have some kind of accident. She was a very religious woman, but when I was a young girl I could not remember to think about such a thing. I was up always every morning before anybody except the Indians, and every morning I would go to market with them to buy food for all the houses. For many years I was doing this. Even when I was very little. It was very easy for me to do anything. I loved to learn English. I had a professor and I used to get on my knees in front of my father that the professor would stay longer with me every day. I was walking in the parks when my sisters were sleeping. My eyes were so big." She made a circle with two fingers. "And shiny like two diamonds, I was so excited all the time." She churned the air with her clenched fist. "Like this," she said. "Like a storm. My sisters called me wild Sofia. At the same time they were calling me wild Sofia, I was in love with my uncle, Aldo Torres. He never came much to the house before, but I heard my mother say that he had no more money and we would feed him. We were very rich and getting richer every year. I felt very sorry for him and was thinking about him all the time. We fell in love with each other and were kissing and hugging each other when nobody was there who could see us. I would have lived with him in a grass hut. He married a woman who had a little money, who also loved him very much. When he was married he got fat and started joking a lot with my father. I was glad for him that he was richer but pretty sad for myself. Then my sister Juanita, the oldest, married a very rich man. We were all very happy about her and there was a very big wedding."

  "You must have been brokenhearted, though, about your uncle Aldo Torres going off with someone else, when you had befriended him so much when he was poor."

  "Oh, I liked him very much," she said. Her memory seemed suddenly to have failed her and she did not appear to be interested in speaking any longer of the past. The traveler felt disturbed.

  "I would love to travel," she continued, "very, very much, and I think it would be very nice to have the life of an actress, without children. You know it is my nature to love men and kissing."

  "Well," said the traveler, "nobody gets as much kissing as they would like to get. Most people are frustrated. You'd be surprised at the number of people in my country who are frustrated and good-looking at the same time."

  She turned her face toward his. The one little light bulb shed just enough light to enable him to see into her beautiful eyes. The tears were still wet on her lashes and they magnified her eyes to such an extent that they appeared to be almost twice their normal size. While she was looking at him she caught her breath.

  "Oh, my darling man," she said to him suddenly. "I don't want to be separated from you. Let's go where I can hold you in my arms." The traveler was feeling excited. She had taken hold of his hand and was crushing it very hard.

  "Where do you want to go?" he asked stupidly.

  "Into your bed." She closed her eyes and waited for him to answer.

  "All right. Are you sure?"

  She nodded her head vigorously.

  "This," he said to himself, "is undoubtedly one of those things that you don't want to remember next morning. I'll want to shake it off like a dog shaking water off its back. But what can I do? It's too far along now. I'll be going home soon and the whole thing will be just a soap bubble among many other soap bubbles."

  He was beginning to feel inspired and he could not understand it, because he had not been drinking.

  "A soap bubble among many other soap bubbles," he repeated to himself. His inner life was undefined but well controlled as a rule. Together they went into his room.

  "Ah," said Señora Ramirez after he had closed the door behind them, "this makes me happy."

  She fell onto the bed sideways, like a beaten person. Her feet stuck out into the air, and her heavy breathing filled the room. He realized that he had never before seen a person behave in this manner unless sodden with alcohol, and he did not know what to do. According to all his standards and the standards of his friends she was not a pleasant thing to lie beside.

  She was unfastening her dress at the neck. The brooch with which she pinned her collar together she stuck into the pillow behind her.

  "So much fat," she said. "So much fat." She was smiling at him very tenderly. This for some reason excited him, and he took off his own clothing and got into bed beside her. He was as cold as a clam and very bony, but being a truly passionate woman she did not notice any of that.

  "Do you really want to go through with this?" he said to her, for he was incapable of finding new words for a situation that was certainly unlike any other he had ever experienced. She fell upon him and felt his face and his neck with feverish excitement.

  "Dear God!" she said. "Dear God!" They were in the very act of making love. "I have lived twenty years for this moment and I cannot think that heaven itself could be more wonderful."

  The traveler hardly listened to this remark. His face was hidden in the pillow and he was feeling the pangs of guilt in the very midst of his pleasure. When it was all over she said to him: "That is all I want to do ever." She patted his hands and smiled at him.

  "Are you happy, too?" she asked him.

  "Yes, indeed," he said. He got off the bed and went out into the patio.

  "She was certainly in a bad way," he thought. "It was almost like death itself." He didn't want to think any further. He stayed outside near the fountain as long as possible. When he returned she was up in front of the bureau trying to arrange her hair.

  "I'm ashamed of the way I look," she said. "I don't look the way I feel." She laughed and he told her that she looked perfectly all right. She drew him down onto the bed again. "Don't send me back to my room," she said. "I love to be here with you, my sweetheart."

  The dawn was breaking when the traveler awakened next morning. Señora Ramirez was still beside him, sleeping very soundly. Her arm was flung over the pillow behind her head.

  "Lordy," said the traveler to himself. "I'd better get her out of here." He shook her as hard as he could.

  "Mrs. Ramirez," he said. "Mrs. Ramirez, wake up. Wake up!" When she finally did wake up, she looked frightened to death. She turned and stared at him blankly for a little while. Before he noticed any change in her expression, her hand was already moving over his body.

  "Mrs. Ramirez," he said. "I'm worried that perhaps your daughters will get up and raise a hullabaloo. You know, start whining for you, or something like that. Your place is probably in there."

  "What?" she asked him. He had pulled away from her to the other side of the bed.

  "I say I think you ought to go into your room now the morning's here."

  "Yes, my darling, I will go to my room. You are right." She sidled over to
him and put her arms around him.

  "I will see you later in the dining room, and look at you and look at you, because I love you so much."

  "Don't be crazy," he said. "You don't want anything to show in your face. You don't want people to guess about this. We must be cold with one another."

  She put her hand over her heart.

  "Ay!" she said. "This cannot be."

  "Oh, Mrs. Ramirez. Please be sensible. Look, you go to your room and we'll talk about this in the morning ... or, at least, later in the morning."

  "Cold I cannot be." To illustrate this, she looked deep into his eyes.

  "I know, I know," he said. "You're a very passionate woman. But my God! Here we are in a crazy Spanish country."

  He jumped from the bed and she followed him. After she had put on her shoes, he took her to the door.

  "Good-bye," he said.

  She couched her cheek on her two hands and looked up at him. He shut the door.

  She was too happy to go right to bed, and so she went over to the bureau and took from it a little stale sugar Virgin which she broke into three pieces. She went over to Consuelo and shook her very hard. Consuelo opened her eyes, and after some time asked her mother crossly what she wanted. Señora Ramirez stuffed the candy into her daughter's mouth.

  "Eat it, darling," she said. "It's the little Virgin from the bureau."

  "Ay, mama!" Consuelo sighed. "Who knows what you will do next? It is already light out and you are still in your clothes. I am sure there is no other mother who is still in her clothes now, in the whole world. Please don't make me eat any more of the Virgin now. Tomorrow I will eat some more. But it is tomorrow, isn't it? What a mix-up. I don't like it." She shut her eyes and tried to sleep. There was a look of deep disgust on her face. Her mother's spell was a little frightening this time.

  Señora Ramirez now went over to Lilina's bed and awakened her. Lilina opened her eyes wide and immediately looked very tense, because she thought she was going to be scolded about the corset and also about having gone out alone after dark.

  "Here, little one," said her mother. "Eat some of the Virgin.

  Lilina was delighted. She ate the stale sugar candy and patted her stomach to show how pleased she was. The snake was asleep in a box near her bed.

  "Now tell me," Said her mother. "What did you do today?" She had completely forgotten about the corset. Lilina was beside herself with joy. She ran her fingers along her mother's lips and then pushed them into her mouth. Señora Ramirez snapped at the fingers like a dog. Then she laughed uproariously.

  "Mamà, please be quiet," pleaded Consuelo. "I want to go to sleep."

  "Yes, darling. Everything will be quiet so that you can sleep peacefully."

  "I bought a snake, mamà," said Lilina.

  "Good!" exclaimed Señora Ramirez. And after musing a little while with her daughter's hand in hers, she went to bed.

  In her room Señora Ramirez was dressing and talking to her children.

  "I want you to put on your fiesta dresses," she said, "because I am going to ask the traveler to have lunch with us."

  Consuelo was in love with the traveler by now and very jealous of Señorita Côrdoba, who she had decided was his sweetheart. "I daresay he has already asked Señorita Côrdoba to lunch," she said. "They have been talking together near the fountain almost since dawn."

  "Santa Catarina!" cried her mother angrily. "You have the eyes of a madman who sees flowers where there are only cow turds." She covered her face heavily with a powder that was distinctly violet in tint, and pulled a green chiffon scarf around her shoulders, pinning it together with a brooch in the form of a golf club. Then she and the girls, who were dressed in pink satin, went out into the patio and sat together just a little out of the sun. The parrot was swinging back and forth on his perch and singing. Señora Ramirez sang along with him; her own voice was a little lower than the parrot's.

  Pastores, pastores, vamos a Belén

  A ver a Maria y al nino también.

  She conducted the parrot with her hand. The old senora, mother of Señora Espinoza, was walking round and round the patio. She stopped for a moment and played with Señora Ramirez's seashell bracelet.

  "Do you want some candy?" she asked Señora Ramirez.

  "I can't. My stomach is very bad."

  "Do you want some candy?" she repeated. Señora Ramirez smiled and looked up at the sky. The old lady patted her cheek.

  "Beautiful," she said. "You are beautiful."

  "Mamà!" screamed Señora Espinoza, running out of her room. "Come to bed!"

  The old lady clung to the rungs of Señora Ramirez's chair like a tough, bird, and her daughter was obliged to pry her hands open before she was able to get her away.

  "I'm sorry, Señora Ramirez," she said. "But when you get old, you know how it is."

  "Pretty bad," said Señora Ramirez. She was looking at the traveler and Señorita Côrdoba. They had their backs turned to her.

  "Lilina," she said. "Go and ask him to have lunch with us . . . go. No, I will write it down. Get me a pen and paper."

  "Dear," she wrote, when Lilina returned. "Will you come to have lunch at my table this afternoon? The girls will be with me, too. All the three of us send you our deep affection. I tell Consuelo to tell the maid to move the plates all to the same table. Very truly yours, Sofia Piega de Ramirez."

  The traveler read the note, acquiesced, and shortly they were all seated together at the dining-room table.

  "Now this is really stranger than fiction," he said to himself. "Here I am sitting with these people at their table and feeling as though I had been here all my life, and the truth of the matter is that I have only been in this pension about fourteen or fifteen hours altogether—not even one day. Yesterday I felt that I was on a Zulu island, I was so depressed. The human animal is the funniest animal of them all."

  Señora Ramirez had arranged to sit close beside the stranger, and she pressed her thigh to his all during the time that she was eating her soup. The traveler's appetite was not very good. He was excited and felt like talking.

  After lunch Señora Ramirez decided to go for a walk instead of taking a siesta with her daughters. She put on her gloves and took with her an umbrella to shield her from the sun. After she had walked a little while she came to a long road, completely desolate save for a few ruins and some beautiful tall trees along the way. She looked about her and shook her head at the thought of the terrible earthquake that had thrown to the ground this city, reputed to have been once the most beautiful city in all the Western Hemisphere. She could see ahead of her, way at the road's end, the volcano named Fire. She crossed herself and bit her lips. She had come walking with the intention of dreaming of her lover, but the thought of this volcano which had erupted many centuries ago chased all dreams of love from her mind. She saw in her mind the walls of the houses caving in, and the roofs falling on the heads of the babies . . . and the mothers, their skirts covered with mud, running through the streets in despair.

  "The innocents," she said to herself. "I am sure that God had a perfect reason for this, but what could it have been? Santa Maria, but what could it have been! If such a disorder should happen again on this earth, I would turn completely to jelly like a helpless idiot."

  She looked again at the volcano ahead of her, and although nothing had changed, to her it seemed that a cloud had passed across the face of the sun.

  "You are crazy," she went on, "to think that an earthquake will again shake this city to the earth. You will not be going through such a trial as these other mothers went through, because everything now is different. God doesn't send such big trials any more, like floods over the whole world, and plagues."

  She thanked her stars that she was living now and not before. It made her feel quite weak to think of the women who had been forced to live before she was born. The future too, she had heard, was to be very stormy because of wars.

  "Ay!" she said to herself. "Precipices on all sides of me!
" It had not been such a good idea to take a walk, after all. She thought again of the traveler, shutting her eyes for a moment.

  "Ay! amante! Amante querido!" she whispered; and she remembered the little books with their covers lettered in gold, books about love, which she had read when she was a young girl, and without the burden of a family. These little books had made the ability to read seem like the most worthwhile and delightful talent to her. They had never, of course, touched on the coarser aspects of love, but in later years she did not find it strange that it was for such physical ends that the heroes and heroines had been pining. Never had she found any difficulty in associating nosegays and couplets with the more gross manifestations of love.

  She turned off into another road in order to avoid facing the volcano, constantly ahead of her. She thought of the traveler without really thinking of him at all. Her eyes glowed with the pleasure of being in love and she decided that she had been very stupid to think of an earthquake on the very day that God was making a bed of roses for her.

  "Thank you, thank you," she whispered to Him, "from the bottom of my heart. Ah!" She smoothed her dress over her bosom. She was suddenly very pleased with everything. Ahead she noticed that there was a very long convent, somewhat ruined, in front of which some boys were playing. There was also a little pavilion standing not far away. It was difficult to understand why it was so situated, where there was no formal park, nor any trees or grass—just some dirt and a few bushes.

  It had the strange static look of a ship that has been grounded. Señora Ramirez looked at it distastefully; it was a small kiosk anyway and badly in need of a coat of paint. But feeling tired, she was soon climbing up the flimsy steps, red in the face with fear lest she fall through to the ground. Inside the kiosk she spread a newspaper over the bench and sat down. Soon all her dreams of her lover faded from her mind, and she felt hot and fretful. She moved her feet around on the floor impatiently at the thought of having to walk all the way home. The dust rose up into the air and she was obliged to cover her mouth with her handkerchief.