House of the Deaf

by Lamar Herrin

  As provisions until his next trip, Juan brought the town back with him—its cheese and bread, ham and sausage, wine and pastries made in a local convent. Back in Madrid, Juan’s stand-in at the Regina gave Ben his key and a message from Paula. Thanks to a friend who owned a gallery, where Paula occasionally helped out, she had arranged a special pass to visit the Prado Museum on Monday, when it was closed to almost everybody else. There was a painting Paula wanted to show him. It was important. He was not to go to the Café Gijon. The hour had also changed. They would now meet at four o’clock.

  Paula picked him up at his hotel, walked him down the Paseo del Castel-lana, past the Plaza del Neptuno and the Palace Hotel, where some time ago he had stayed, on down the stretch of Castellana that became the Paseo del Prado, past the museum itself and around to the Murillo door, where they were admitted. In room thirty-two she stood him before Goya’s Duelo a Garrotazos. She asked him to give it some thought. Then she disappeared.

  The painting—perhaps three meters long, a meter and a half high— was of two men standing off-center left, beating each other with clubs. These men were giants. One was dark-complexioned, and blood streamed down his face; the other was lighter, brown-haired, and showing no visible wounds, although his face was turned away from the viewer. Both men were mired in mud or sand to the knees. The valley they towered over was idyllic. A stream ran down its grassy fold. The sky was a watery blue with white clouds. Off to their right the sky was gray, and that half of the painting was occupied by the shadowed flank of a mountain and one rolling foothill. The men were proportioned to compete with the mountain, but the mountain would be there when the men had beaten each other to death. Mired in that mud, they couldn’t escape.

  The valley was a paradise and the men were a massive and monstrous violation. Cain and Abel, Ben supposed. The bloody, mustachioed man had his club raised over his head; the fairer-skinned one shielded his face with his left arm and with his right held his club out low as if he meant to swing it up under the other man’s ribs. If the viewer followed the down-sloping line of those two clubs, he too ended up mired in the mud. Perhaps he was meant to look away from the line of those clubs up to the mountains, older than the men and closer to God. But Ben doubted it. The men took the attention and held it, and the mountains and everything else, including that peaceful valley and sky, became a trembling backdrop, about to disappear.

  When Paula did not return, Ben proceeded to look at paintings in the adjoining rooms. There he discovered a different sort of strangeness. These were mostly very dark paintings. They frequently depicted groups or processions of people, even people who were airborne. He came quickly to see that these people were all clotted together and that it was impossible to delineate a body in its entirety. Perhaps with more light, but he didn’t think so. A grotesque fusion was going on here, trunks joined, bodies that made use of the same leg, heads leaning in close and forever attached. Some of these figures were witches or satanic stand-ins—he understood that from the titles of the paintings—but the masses of people had lost their individual shapes and blended into one dark and diseased-looking amalgam. Ben returned to the painting of the two dueling men. Here the delineation was stark. The men stood out down to the hair, the buttons on their vests; in their violent individuality they dwarfed the natural world around them. The second they ceased to fight and fell on each other in a fraternal embrace, would they too darken over and fuse? That was the question. And where would the moral be in that? You were only yourself if you violently beat back all others of your kind? The greater danger was not the spilled blood but the breakdown of your lines?

  When Paula stepped up beside him, she wanted to hear his impressions. He told her he thought the men were monstrous, but compared to the other paintings close by, at least they were men. If they were searching for some tolerable view of the human condition, he didn’t see a way out.

  Paula said, “It’s Spain, Ben. You were talking about staying and I couldn’t feel honest with myself until I showed you this painting. Duels like this were actually legal during Goya’s life. Campesinos went out in the countryside and fought to the death. You wouldn’t have seen this in that lovely plaza mayor in Medina del Rioseco. Out in the campo, though, those promenading couples might have to step over pools of blood. It’s a country of civil wars—that black-haired man on the left is probably Andalusian, and the other someone from the Celtic north. Napoleon’s invasion started a civil war. There were the Carlist civil wars all during the nineteenth century. The civil war in this century was horrible. The communists took over the Republican cause and executed anybody who had anything to do with the church. Franco’s forces executed anybody who had anything to do with the Popular Front. It’s still going on, of course. The Basques might kill anybody anywhere until they get what they want. . . .”

  Ben felt a jolt down his backbone and turned away from her. He didn’t want her to see his face. He’d just seen a picture of Saturn eating his children and that was what flashed before his eye. The children had looked bloody-white and cartilaginous and Saturn had had to crunch hard.

  “It’s Goya despairing at the end of his life,” Paula went on, “creating all those paintings on the walls of his house in the campo. It had a fascinating name, Quinta del Sordo—House of the Deaf Man, as if he just decided not to listen anymore to what was going on. History would prove him right.”

  “Yet you stay here,” Ben reminded her.

  She led him out of there, to a café on a tree-lined street between the Prado and Retiro Park. They sat outside, by the curb. The occasional car passed, but few pedestrians. It was not yet the hour.

  Huddled over that table, Ben recalled yet another Goya painting, of two old people, so old that with their monkey faces and cave-dark dwelling they appeared to have evolved backward. They were huddled over a scrap of bread.

  “I stay here,” she said, “because I can count on the Spanish to be who they are. Most of the time I like them a lot. Honor is still important to them. But if their honor is violated, they’ll find a way of getting their revenge. It can be wonderful theater. They can hold grudges for so long and in such devious ways that they become baroque. Baroque grudges! Like a good grade-B movie, where the passions run high.”

  She shot him an exclamatory look, as if she were about to break into applause. When he failed to respond, she continued in a more considered tone.

  “They try to behave themselves. For a while they’ll have you believing they can be as proper as some technocrat from Brussels. But that’s not who they are. Their passions explode, and if you’re smart that’s when you’ll stand back and give them room. Once their passions subside they go back to being the most attentive people I know. They have a word, detalles. It means ‘details,’ but they use it to describe little thoughtful acts and gifts suited to your needs and tastes alone. Que detalle mas bonito, they say. ‘What a beautiful detail!’ You’re thinking: How am I being set up? When in fact it’s more their pleasure than yours. Then the pendulum swings again, something happens, and they explode. It’s a national rhythm.”

  The waiter, a boy, put their drinks down before them. Paula leaned in over the table, a scowling sort of fixity in her eyes. She was pressing him.

  “So you see why I want to stay?”

  “The theater?” he said.

  “It’s pretty much the whole human spectrum.”

  “You can’t be a spectator forever.”

  “I’m not a spectator forever. I have things I do.” Suddenly her expression changed. She was smiling, almost gaily. Her eyes had relaxed and beneath her wheat-reddened brows seemed to be dancing.

  “Where does Jorge fall in that spectrum?”

  She mimed a slump. In a playful, reproving voice, she moaned, “Oh, Ben.”

  But he couldn’t help himself. “This Spaniard’s Spaniard. Where does he fit in?”

  “Nowhere,” she admitted. “He’s a mystery, someone to stand back from and study and shake your head.”


  “You’re not still in love with him?”

  She’d anticipated this. In an even-toned voice she replied, “I’m in love with the mystery.”

  She reached out over the table and covered his hand. Now her face was frank, so frank and cleansed of its expressions it reminded him of his wife’s face when she was young and about to step off into the unknown. But Paula was not young. Her face was naked in a different way, and he felt an entirely different sort of urgency in the pressure of her hand.

  “There’s something missing, isn’t there, Ben? There’s some loss.”

  “You get to my age and there’s always loss. That’s like saying I’m no longer twenty years old.”

  “Some loss of a different sort. That won’t go away. That won’t stay still.”

  “If that makes it make sense to you,” he said, and tested the pressure of her hand. She held him there.

  “A loss like a hole you can’t see to the bottom of so you don’t know how deep it is.”

  “Don’t keep this up, Paula. Goya was more cheerful.”

  “Okay.”

  His eyes strayed off, up the street where he could see the foliage of Retiro Park. Those couples, arm in arm. That pacing in praise of the life they’d lived. “Look at me, Ben.” She didn’t demand it; she pleaded with him quietly, and her hand went soft. “If you lie there in the mud with Leslie’s animals you have only one thought, which is no thought at all. Will they let you survive? Either way you win. If they do and you get to spend the day among them, fine. If they eat you, they eat your painful thoughts.”

  She let go of his hand. She sat back and took a deep breath and her whole body trembled. He could feel it through the table. The glasses and the small plate of olives made a fine shivering sound. He thought of those pacing couples and pictured Paula and himself among them in that formal garden where no tumult was allowed. From the mud and Africa’s animals to that garden, where you could actually hear a single spout of water pooling. He was about to propose they walk there when she said, “We could go back to the Gijon and continue the conversation. But we’ve left the Gijon, haven’t we? I’ve got supper waiting for us at home. You see, I’m not just a spectator, Ben. There are some things I do very well.”

  She took his hand and he emptied his pockets of change. He had plenty left for a taxi to wherever Paula lived, but she insisted on the Metro since traffic was always terrible and there was a station near her house. They entered at the Retiro station, and when they emerged on a street of tall new apartment buildings he had no idea where they were. He might have worn a blindfold. They might have been traveling to the headquarters of some guerrilla leader whose need for secrecy had reached paranoid extremes.

  She walked him through the house. The front balcony looked five stories down to the street. The back balcony looked down into a no-man’s-land, a well. Paula liked big plants, palmetto-sized brooms and rhododendrons climbing the walls. In the living room she liked low-slung modern furniture, but in her bedroom she had a suite that was traditional, antiques, he supposed. There was a marble-topped dresser, a bed with a large scrolled headboard, and a wardrobe with a mirror so tall that when he stood in it none of him was missing. The kitchen was walled in azulejos, glazed tiles, some with a floral design, some depicting the process of making bread: the sowing of the seed, the reaping of the wheat, the pounding of the dough and the oven-fresh loaves. The figures were all happy campesinos, the men in their hemp sandals and peasants’ vests and the women in aprons and billowing skirts. The photographs he saw were of her family back in the States, a world away. He saw a small photograph of Leslie and Garret dressed in parkas waving to her from the bow of a ship. There were no pictures of Paula’s exhusband, only spaces where they might have hung before she’d removed them. Jorge Ortiz made a good story, but who was to say he even existed?

  They drank a Ribera del Duero from Valladolid. The aperitivos were chunks of squid in olive oil and cheese from La Mancha. For a first course she served him slices of Iberian ham and honey melon. For a second, flounder, which slid off the bone at the touch. These were simple dishes, delicately prepared. For dessert, a lemon mousse.

  Coffee and a liqueur she’d discovered, anise steeped in seven sierra herbs.

  She said, “I think you should call your daughter. You can go in the bedroom and close the door.”

  “Only if you put the pictures back,” he said.

  They studied each other then. They were going to have to settle for what they knew of each other, or thought they knew.

  “I won’t do that,” she said.

  “No, neither will I.”

  They embraced and kissed on those terms. She gave him her chapped lips and her two crooked teeth and her freckles that had faded and her red hair whose luster was dying out. Above all, he got her warmth. She pressed against him, and he didn’t know how long he had gone without that. He ran his hands down her shoulders and over the flesh of her back, and, more than desire, what he felt in that moment was a vast relief. He sighed and she laughed.

  They made their way to her bed. They laid their clothes across matching chairs from a bygone empire and found themselves standing naked in the wardrobe’s mirror. They were not misshapen, not really. The lines were just beginning to break down. She spread a hand across his enlarged belly. He a hand riding the heaviness of her hip. They began to laugh at themselves like children and tumbled into bed, where, still laughing, they wrestled a bit. Then they went still and he felt that warmth rising off her like . . . certainly not like that bread after the wheat had been sowed and reaped, the dough pounded, and the loaf taken fresh from an oven. Like nothing he knew. Inside her, he thought he understood. It was one of those detalles, acts of kindness and consideration perfectly suited to your needs. Later the pendulum would swing back, dark passions would erupt and the world would explode, but they’d have had this interlude—because she’d read his needs so well. He smiled down at her and nodded in gratitude, and she smiled back. Que detalle mas bonito.

  VIII

  She hadn’t slept. She’d given herself over to the thousands of night sounds, and they’d kept her awake in a thousand different ways. When a glimmer of gray appeared at the window, she got out of bed and put on the clothes she’d taken off. Then the glimmer went away. A false dawn. She’d heard the term, but thought it was only for poets. She stepped out to the front of her father’s house. The streetlights at the corners were still lit, and there would always be distant traffic sounds—in the distance someone was always going somewhere with a sound of purpose—but there were dark, silent stretches she could walk through as the dawn came up.

  She walked for a while. She ranged past her father’s block, moving through an opening arc that might or might not bring her back to where she’d begun. Dogs were still asleep. Some front porches were lit, but few interior rooms were. No newspapers lay in their plastic sacks in the driveways. Only at the first birdsong did she realize she hadn’t been hearing the birds.

  Moving through this neighborhood, Annie felt the sort of fluidity a ballet dancer must long for. She stayed on the streets and sidewalks but might just as easily have slipped out into back yards, up onto porches, into cellars and garages. She felt disembodied. She could walk up to a wall and walk through it. She would stand inside and, one by one, identify the holdings of a house. One by one, they would be no different from her own. She would watch people sleep in their beds, and unless she wanted to take on their upset stomachs and aching heads, unless she wanted to take on the griefs they were hoping to sleep through, she would conclude they were bodies on a bed just as she’d been a body on a bed. At that early hour of the morning, everyone was the same. She could have stayed at home.

  The bird call became raucous, and dawn did not break; it breathed its grayness out of each tree, window and wall. The sameness of things became all their trifling differences. In the light of day no one wanted to be mistaken for his neighbor, and she began to see how a gable differed from a gable, a chimney from
a chimney, a front porch from a front porch, a rose garden from a rose garden. Then, after the strain to be different had become apparent, how each became a gable and a chimney and a front porch and a rose garden again. A dog barked, and so the one next door did. She heard the muted sounds of people waking up, water sounds, metallic sounds from a kitchen, a radio or television going on, someone letting out a cat. Finally a human voice, a man’s, an expression of surprise and disappointment and a sort of grinding aggravation. Someone who’d awoken and found what he hadn’t wanted to find but feared he might and ground out his displeasure to anyone who’d listen. Annie knew the sound. She’d made it herself. That was not the problem.

  She was looking for a shelter that was not like a bus stop for an anonymous passenger to get out of the rain. She was looking for some place that was hers and bore the marks of her being from the start. A little nook on the face of the earth reserved for her. The earth was large enough for that many nooks, wasn’t it? And what she wanted she must once have had, since she felt the existence of such a place in the very nature of her need. It was a yearning for the familiar; she’d been sheltered like that before. She wasn’t talking about the womb. She was an educated and self-aware young woman—a place on the earth that in the grayness she couldn’t remember the shape, sound or smell of, but whose shape, sound and smell would fit her perfectly. It had before.