by Molly Gloss
The warmth of the soul’s energy moving from his own body into his father’s was palpable, compelling. He watched Olava’s hands and followed them. She went on showing him how to touch his father in a healing way, the pancreas, the stomach, the liver, and then his father’s hips and legs, his feet. Eventually Humberto’s right eye rolled up and he shut his left eye and breathed noisily, sleeping, but Olava seemed not to notice this—she still sometimes talked to him in a low, soothing drawl, telling inconsequential gossip and news, or asking him something and then delivering the answer she said she could hear through his skin. Ĉejo listened intently without understanding anything through his palms, only the inaudible whisper of heat and life.
“Well, you got to listen awhile,” Olava said when he told her this. She nodded. “You’ll get to hearing it. But your hands are good. You got a healer’s hands, I think. Anybody can learn it, get some of it right, but certain people are just born to it, they got a certain spirit, a certain touch that’s right for rijki.” She held her own hands up and examined them with unselfconscious pleasure.
Ĉejo made a pot of tea when the laying on of hands was finished, and he and Olava drank it, sitting beside Humberto as he slept, the two of them talking quietly about the rijki therapy, what had been accomplished—harmony for disharmony, quietude for worry, ease for strain; and the harvest, what was being brought in—corn and breadfruits, pumpkins, pejibayes.
They traded certain gossip about Heza Barfor. Olava knew Heza from the Fiber Arts Committee, and Heza’s sister-in-law—the one she always was quarreling with—had been in Olava’s care for a while. It hadn’t been possible for people to keep the sister-in-law from dying, Olava said, but that woman had used the energy from her illness to heal her relationships with her relatives. This was something Ĉejo had wondered about. During the dry season, Heza had moved back into her brother’s household—helping her sister-in-law with the hard work of dying, people said.
Afterward, Ĉejo had expected the old woman to go on living with her widowed brother. It was a surprise when she came promptly back to their apartment again. “My brother’s grandchildren are rude and loud,” she had said, as if this explained it sufficiently. Ĉejo, repeating these things to Olava, added thoughtfully, “Living in our house, maybe she had got out of the habit of being patient with children.” He felt very distanced from his own childhood.
Olava said mildly, “I thought Heza came back to live with your family because of her friendship with Leona, eh? now that Leona’s son has decided to have a stroke, and this family needs comforting.”
Ĉejo hadn’t thought of his grandmother in this way—a friend, having a claim to someone’s loyalty. And he hadn’t considered that Heza might be a comfort to them.
Their household had become chaotic, prone to storms. Humberto, who always had been a mild and tolerant person, was an impatient, irascible paralytic. He cried out unfathomable demands, and fell into a fury when no one understood his needs. His clear words were all obscenities: “Fuck!” he would shout in the spasms of his defeat, his left arm hurling out in a wild frenzy, his left leg beating the floor in rage. “Shit! Hell! Piss-you!” In these storms, Ĉejo’s cousin Alfhilda was prone to burst into tears, and Ĉejo, who could not bear the crying and the rageful cursing, would pace helplessly up and down the pasado while his grandmother and grandfather lashed out at one another or shouted back at their son in frustration and misery. Now Ĉejo searched around in his memory: Was it Heza, after all—going on unperturbed, making reply as if Humberto’s meaningless sounds were speech—who always would restore the peace?
His father went on sleeping in the middle of the floor after Olava Morgan had finished her tea and gone home. Ĉejo slid back the wall of the apartment to listen for him if he woke, and sat on the loĝio in front of his loom. He laid down the narrow lines of brown tapa, and wider ones, quince yellow, the border of a woven rug, while he followed people’s arguing and haranguing with each other, their whispering of scandal, without taking part in it himself. He had lately made up his mind that he was a person with a brooding disposition: He liked to practice sitting out on the loĝio, not joining in people’s idle talk. He liked to work silently, watching other people in an abstracted way as if he didn’t know who they were. When no one was saying anything that interested him, he turned over solemn thoughts in his mind—not the old, weighted questions to do with death and grief, but a thicket of slighter terrors, things to do with helplessness and whining.
Shortly, his father began hawking up sputum, and this became a kind of gagging. He was inclined to cough on his slobber—needed someone to lift his head and help him swallow his saliva. For a moment Ĉejo couldn’t keep his hands from going on pushing down the beater of the loom, pressing the thread tight and even. Some neighbors’ faces were registering alarm before he was able to make himself stand and go in. Bleakly, he helped his father’s shoulders off the floor, waited for this spasm to be finished, wiped the spit with the edge of his hand, dried it on his trouser leg. His father’s eye followed the movement, his right hand stirring vaguely. In a moment he murmured to Ĉejo, an unfathomable, insistent plea. Ĉejo looked away, sighing. He didn’t know which eye he should be looking into, the fixed or the roving.
His father had to be helped to sit on the toilet—his body wouldn’t support itself. He had to be propped against a repozo or turned from one side to the other every little while if he were lying on the floor; someone in his family had to spoon his food, sponge his sweating limbs, shave his cheeks, pull his shirt on over his head. And one or the other of their household had always to be showing in, overseeing, and turning out the stream of people who came to sit with him, bringing their extravagant reassurances and overly fervid prayers, their gossip and pointless jokes, believing this was help he needed as much as medicaments and therapy. Ĉejo thought bitterly that more of them could be helping to wipe his anus and his leaking mouth, to hold his head up when he choked.
“I’ll get you up,” he said in a bare whisper. “You need to pee. Here, sit, I’ll get you up.” Humberto helped him ineffectually, clubbing about with his left leg and arm. He could stiffen his left leg to hold his weight when he was upright, and he stood leaning into his son’s body, breathing harshly. His penis had stiffened too—he was prone to useless erections since the stroke had brought him down in the corn field. Women had been teasing him for it. Even Ĉejo’s grandmother was likely to laugh and say something lewd when she was helping him to urinate, or to bathe, but Ĉejo was ashamed of their shamelessness, and he pushed his father’s thick penis down in the neck of the bottle silently. After a little pause Humberto got his stream of urine going and the two of them stood together thoughtfully watching the piss rising steaming in the glass. A little dribble spilled over the edge of the bottle onto Ĉejo’s hand. “Paĉjo,” he said on a long note, uselessly angry, and Humberto mimicked him, “Ahg,” on a long note, guttural, meaningless.
“Do you want to come out to the loĝio?” he asked his father sorrowfully. “Watch people? I’m at the loom.” Humberto made an inarticulate noise and twisted the left side of his face in a grimace—who knew what he understood? But he let Ĉejo bring him out of the apartment, clubbing along on one leg, and when he was seated, propped against a wicker repozo, his left eye watched people at their work, as they sorted seeds or straightened bits of old wiring, wrote notes for committee business, sharpened maĉetaj. People talked to him from time to time, but some of them spoke as they might have to a child or someone they barely knew.
An old woman, Pata Vilasenor, used his feet for winding her yarn while she told him a long, complicated story about an argument she had had with someone on the Metals Committee, a disagreement over the design of a thermocouple. Ĉejo sat at the loom and went on silently with his rug-making while Pata went on talking. Humberto’s eye wandered away from the woman; he began to watch Ĉejo throwing the shuttle, bringing down the beater in a hypnotic rhythm.
Ĉejo’s grandmother and his cousin Alfhilda ca
me up onto the loĝio. Alfhilda squatted beside Humberto and studied her feet while Leona stood over her disabled son and her grandchildren and briefly unburdened herself to Pata Vilasenor. She had taken Alfhilda over to Kantado ŝiro because some people thought there was a boy living over there who might make a match for Alfhilda, but that boy would grow up stupid, Leona was saying. He had a mother who was loud and arrogant, bragging of things her son knew—what could be more stupid than that? Ĉejo looked at Alfhilda and she shrugged her thin shoulders, disinterested. They would be at this business for another ten or fifteen years; Ĉejo’s own marriage hadn’t yet been settled on, and he was years older than Alfhilda.
The old woman, Pata, at once began to tell tedious stories of marriages she had arranged in her own family, and Ĉejo’s grandmother fell silent, nodding politely as she lifted her feet one after the other and fingered crumbs of dirt from her sandals.
Some people were in the kitchenhouse boiling tikisko, and maybe it was the smell of their cooking that began to make Humberto’s mouth run with water; while Pata went on talking tiresomely to Leona, Alfhilda wiped his drool with the edge of her hand, wiped it again, and cleaned her hand on the hem of her shirt. Finally she stood and leaned into Leona, speaking to her in a whisper Ĉejo wasn’t able to hear, then she squatted beside her uncle again, stroking his hand soothingly as Humberto began to shift his weight more and more restlessly and mutter secret words. When finally old Pata took her yarn from his feet, patted his ankle kindly and wandered away, Leona sighed. “That woman talks too much,” she said quietly. “And her daughter is the same way. I wonder how they can keep from starving—they don’t want to stop talking long enough to chew their food.”
Alfhilda said, wiping Humberto’s lip again, “Doesn’t she know it’s time for people to eat their supper?”
Ĉejo helped her to lift his father by the arms and bring him to sit inside the house. It was sweltry in the evenings at this season of the year, and other households ate their evening meal on the loĝio, or they slid open the pasado walls of their apartments to let the slight, cooling draft blow through, but the loose right corner of Humberto’s mouth made his eating a strenuous, sloppy ordeal, and Ĉejo thought it was a humiliation for his father if they spooned his food into his open mouth while people who were not his family members watched them do it. He had pushed his family into a habit of shutting the walls of their apartment, eating in isolation, in the hot, dusky rooms. Now they fed Humberto slowly from their own plates, sweet mangoes and boiled cassava root, and wiped the dribble from his chin, while Ĉejo’s grandmother and his cousin argued about Pata Vilasenor—whether it would have been rude to tell her she was talking too long, and that Humberto was needing to be fed.
Heza Barfor came into the house with cotton-silk seeds tied up in a manta, and she sat down without speaking and began methodically to pull the floss out of the seed pods. She seemed not to notice that the other members of her household were eating. It was Ĉejo’s grandmother who had boiled the root of the cassava and beaten it to a pulp the day before, and she said in a hurt tone, “Don’t you want to eat? Can’t you wait to do that another time?” as if Heza’s failure to eat the cassava were a personal affront to her.
Heza looked up in surprise. “There’s that big old ceiba tree that stands over there between Alaŭdo and Esperplena. People have been gathering in the seeds as they fall.” She had no eyebrows, only a few wiry sprigs of hair above the inside points of each eye to suggest where her brows should be, and she lifted these in a questioning way, as if she were asking something: Is this a sufficient answer? She never would answer a question herself in a straightforward way. Ĉejo’s grandmother looked away plaintively. In a moment, though, she brought up with Heza this matter of Pata Vilasenor talking too much, and Heza took Leona’s part in it, coming down on the side of politeness. After that, the two of them began to trade stories about Pata’s family, old anecdotes and hearsay going back to women who had been old when Heza and Leona were children. Ĉejo stopped listening. He wandered off into a daydream about Katrin Amundsen, following her into the musky shadows of the corn field, lifting her shirt, putting his mouth upon one of her nipples.
“Did Olava Morgan come and show your grandson how to lay hands on your son?”
Ĉejo’s penis was searching inside his trousers, and he looked between his grandmother and her friend in a flurry of self-conscious confusion, but it was his grandfather, standing there, who had asked this question of his wife. Old Petro had been sick with the plague and stalled in a long convalescence, imagining himself not yet well, but well enough to complain: This restless night-time thumping of his son’s was keeping him from sleep. He’d been living in his brother’s apartment to escape it, or to escape his wife’s pitiless good health, but every little while he shuffled home to proclaim his lingering illness.
Ĉejo’s grandmother was helping Heza with the cotton silk and both of them were fixed on this work, their hands stripping the floss from the seeds. She said, looking toward Ĉejo, “I forgot to ask. Did she come? Did she say you’ve got the hands for it, Ĉejo? You know, mine are worthless, I told her that, I told her she’d have to give this work to my grandson, he always has had a thin skin, I told her, for letting invisible things come in.”
Heza turned her head, peering at Humberto anxiously as if it might be possible to see Olava’s work in his face. “Did she get this eye to close, yet?” she said. She put her work down and touched the tip of one finger to Humberto’s eyelid. When she pushed it down gently, it rose open again slowly, and his crooked mouth released a clicking sort of sound—anger, or a sour laugh. He flopped his left arm vaguely. “Ga!” he said with bitterness. “Ga!” Maybe he was offended by Heza Barfor’s finger pushing down his eyelid, or he might have been frustrated with Olava’s rijki therapy. It was impossible to know. Maybe he just wanted to go on being fed. Heza murmured, “Oh, that’s to be expected,” as if the two of them were carrying on a lucid conversation.
It was Heza’s belief that he understood all of them as well as he ever had, and she had half-persuaded Alfhilda of it: Sometimes Alfhilda tried to go on sharing with her uncle the parts of her life she had always shared with him. Now she leaned toward him, whispering beside his neck. “There is this pea sort-of vine we’ve found on the northern continent, it fixes nitrogen in the soil so this other plant, something like a draba mustard, will grow with it, and the draba gives off a smell and keeps this certain fungus away from the peas. Anejlisa said it was a perfect little arrangement. Elegant, she said.” She bared her teeth for him in a shining grin.
The left side of Humberto’s mouth shuddered with the effort to speak. His eye strained in its socket, demanding something of her. Alfhilda was always in fear of her uncle’s angry eruptions, and she cast a quick pleading look toward Ĉejo. Why was she looking to him for a remedy? He felt overburdened, oppressed, and shrugged his shoulders impatiently.
His father’s mouth went on working, while Alfhilda stroked his hand and whispered urgently about edible seaweeds, and bacteria that might protect plants from dying back in a mild frost. Ĉejo, against his will, began to feel Alfhilda’s anxiety. Perhaps Heza felt it too. She suddenly quit her hand work, cleaning the cotton silk, and held out to Humberto a long sliver of mango pinched between her thumb and forefinger. “Here, it’s sweet, a mango, do you want it?” Humberto’s lips twisted, retreating from the offer, but the wildness abruptly went out of his face. He sighed and gazed off into the middle distance. Alfhilda, sighing too, lapsed into silence.
Ĉejo’s grandmother opened the pasado walls of their apartment as soon as they were finished with eating, and then it was possible to hear families noisily washing their dishes, children getting into trouble, old people arguing with their older parents, chickens fighting and posturing. On the loĝio of the house there was to be a Weekly Meeting for Business, and some people began to go out there and sit down. Ĉejo fled quickly onto the loĝio himself, escaping his family, escaping care of his father, and d
istancing himself from his family’s usual place at Meeting by sitting with Udo Blades and his family along the wall of the kitchen. Udo moved over to make room for him, but they were both silent. He and Udo had grown up together, yet the easy alliance of their childhood never had become friendship—Udo always had been inclined toward superstitious fears and aversions, and Vilef always had been at Ĉejo’s right hand, a totem of horror.
As small children were sent off to play in neighbors’ houses, gradually the quiet that people practice before a Meeting began to rise up and wash over other noise. The seventeen adults of the house were beginning to prepare themselves for thinking about business. They were studying the boards of the floor, or searching for peace behind their closed eyelids. Ĉejo mournfully watched his grandmother and his grandfather let their son’s clumsy weight down to the floor at the family’s usual place in front of the bathhouse wall.
“Any announcements?” Luizo Medina said, and people who had been meditating lifted their heads and looked around. Luizo was clerk of the Weekly Business Meeting, a short old man with a poorly repaired hare-lip and a lispy voice, proficient at keeping to an agenda and getting through a Meeting in a timely fashion. There were a few things announced: a woman giving a public reading of her poems; a change of venue for Waters Committee Meeting; odd jobs needing doing; things available for trade. Then Luizo opened the Meeting by formally listing all the pending business matters, and he reminded people not to wander too far off from the agenda. No one had to follow the order of his list; an agenda only defined limits. It was common, in fact, for a single question to rise up, and speaking begin to focus on it. Then other matters would go undecided, held over for another Meeting or put in the hands of a small committee. Not many things, after all, concerned everyone.
