The Angel Esmeralda

by Don DeLillo

  She rehearsed her exit mentally. So many steps from the table to the door. So many stairs to the street. She thought if she pictured it beforehand, it might go more smoothly.

  The lottery man cried, “Today, today.”

  She tried to read through the edgy nights, the times of dull-witted terror. There were rumors that these were not aftershocks at all but warnings of some deep disquiet in the continental trench, the massing of a force that would roll across the marble-hearted city and bring it to dust. She sat up and turned the pages, trying to disguise herself as someone who routinely reads for fifteen minutes before dropping into easy sleep.

  It was not so bad in school, where she was ready to protect the young, to cover their bodies with her own.

  The tremors lived in her skin and were part of every breath she took. She paused over her food. A rustle. An easing reedy tilt. She stood and listened, alone with the shaking earth.

  Edmund told her he’d bought a gift to replace the terra-cotta roof ornament she’d had propped against the wall above the bookcase, acanthus leaves radiating from the head of a sleepy-eyed Hermes, shattered in the first tremor.

  “You won’t miss your Hermes all that much. I mean it’s everywhere, isn’t it?”

  “That’s what I liked about it.”

  “You can easily get another. They’re piled up for sale.”

  “It’ll only get broken,” she said, “when the next one hits.”

  “Let’s change the subject.”

  “There’s only one subject. That’s the trouble. I used to have a personality. What am I now?”

  “Try to understand it’s over.”

  “I’m down to pure dumb canine instinct.”

  “Life is going on. People are going about their business.”

  “No, they’re not. Not the same way. Just because they don’t walk around moaning.”

  “There’s nothing to moan about. It’s finished.”

  “Doesn’t mean they’re not preoccupied. It’s been less than a week. There are tremors all the time.”

  “Growing ever smaller,” he said.

  “Some are not so small. Some are definite attention-getters.”

  “Change the subject please.”

  They were standing just outside the school entrance and Kyle was watching a group of children climb aboard a bus for a trip to a museum outside the city. She knew she could count on the English Boy to be exasperated with her. He was dependable that way. She always knew the position he would take and could often anticipate the actual words, practically moving her lips in unison with his. He brought some stability to dire times.

  “You used to be lithe.”

  “Look at me now,” she said.

  “Lumbering.”

  “I wear layers of clothing. I wear clothes and change-of-clothes simultaneously. Just to be ready.”

  “I can’t afford a change of clothes,” he said.

  “I can’t afford the dry cleaning.”

  “I often wonder how this happened to me.”

  “I live without a refrigerator and telephone and radio and shower curtain and what else. I keep butter and milk on the balcony.”

  “You’re very quiet,” he said then. “Everyone says so.”

  “Am I? Who?”

  “How old are you by the way?”

  “Now that we’ve spent a night together, you mean?”

  “Spent a night. Exactly. One night used up in huddled conversation.”

  “Well it helped me. It made a difference really. It was the crucial night. Not that the others have been so cozy.”

  “You’re welcome to return, you know. I sit there thinking. A lithe young woman flying across the city into my arms.”

  The children waved at them from the windows and Edmund did a wild-eyed mime of a bus driver caught in agitated traffic. She watched the lightsome faces glide away.

  “You have nice color,” she said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Your cheeks are pink and healthy. My father used to say if I ate my vegetables I’d have rosy cheeks.”

  She waited for Edmund to ask, What did your mother used to say? Then they walked for the time that remained before afternoon classes. Edmund bought a ring of sesame bread and gave her half. He paid for things by opening his fist and letting the vendor sort among the coins. It proved to everyone that he was only passing through.

  “You’ve heard the rumors,” she said.

  “Rubbish.”

  “The government is concealing seismic data.”

  “There is absolutely no scientific evidence that a great quake is imminent. Read the papers.”

  She took off the bulky jacket and swung it over her shoulder. She realized she wanted him to think she was slightly foolish, controlled by mass emotion. There was some comfort in believing the worst as long as this was the reigning persuasion. But she didn’t want to submit completely. She walked along wondering if she was appealing to Edmund for staunch pronouncements that she could use against herself.

  “Do you have an inner life?”

  “I sleep,” he said.

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  They ran across a stretch of avenue where cars accelerated to a racing clip. It felt good to shake out of her jittery skin. She kept running for half a block and then turned to watch him approach clutching his chest and moving on doddery legs, as if for the regalement of children. He could look a little bookish even capering.

  They approached the school building.

  “I wonder what your hair would be like if you let it grow out.”

  “I can’t afford the extra shampoo,” she said.

  “I can’t afford a haircut at regular intervals, quite seriously.”

  “I live without a piano.”

  “And this is a wretchedness to compare with no refrigerator?”

  “You can ask that question because you don’t know me. I live without a bed.”

  “Is this true?”

  “I sleep on a secondhand sofa. It has the texture of a barnacled hull.”

  “Then why stay?” he said.

  “I can’t save enough to go anywhere else and I’m certainly not ready to go home. Besides I like it here. I’m sort of stranded but in a more or less willing way. At least until now. The trouble with now is that we could be anywhere. The only thing that matters is where we’re standing when it hits.”

  He presented the gift then, lifting it out of his jacket pocket and unwrapping the sepia paper with a teasing show of suspense. It was a reproduction of an ivory figurine from Crete, a bull leaper, female, her body deftly extended with tapered feet nearing the topmost point of a somersaulting curve. Edmund explained that the young woman was in the act of vaulting over the horns of a charging bull. This was a familiar scene in Minoan art, found in frescoes, bronzes, clay seals, gold signet rings, ceremonial cups. Most often a young man, sometimes a woman gripping a bull’s horns and swinging up and over, propelled by the animal’s head jerk. He told her the original ivory figure was broken in half in 1926 and asked her if she wanted to know how this happened.

  “Don’t tell me. I want to guess.”

  “An earthquake. But the restoration was routine.”

  Kyle took the figure in her hand.

  “A bull coming at full gallop? Is this possible?”

  “I’m not inclined to question what was possible thirty-six hundred years ago.”

  “I don’t know the Minoans,” she said. “Were they that far back?”

  “Yes, and farther than that, much farther.”

  “Maybe if the bull was firmly tethered.”

  “It’s never shown that way,” he said. “It’s shown big and fierce and running and bucking.”

  “Do we have to believe something happened exactly the way it was shown by artists?”

  “No. But I believe it. And even though this particular leaper isn’t accompanied by a bull, we know from her position that this is what she’s doing.”

  �
��She’s bull-leaping.”

  “Yes.”

  “And she will live to tell it.”

  “She has lived. She is living. That’s why I got this for you really. I want her to remind you of your hidden litheness.”

  “But you’re the acrobat,” Kyle said. “You’re the loose-jointed one, performing in the streets.”

  “To remind you of your fluent buoyant former self.”

  “You’re the jumper and heel clicker.”

  “My joints ache like hell actually.”

  “Look at the veins in her hand and arm.”

  “I got it cheap in the flea market.”

  “That makes me feel much better.”

  “It’s definitely you,” he said. “It must be you. Do we agree on this? Just look and feel. It’s your magical true self, mass-produced.”

  Kyle laughed.

  “Lean and supple and young,” he said. “Throbbing with inner life.”

  She laughed. Then the school bell rang and they went inside.

  She stood in the middle of the room, dressed except for shoes, slowly buttoning her blouse. She paused. She worked the button through the slit. Then she stood on the wood floor, listening.

  They were now saying twenty-five dead, thousands homeless. Some people had abandoned undamaged buildings, preferring the ragged safety of life outdoors. Kyle could easily see how that might happen. She had the first passable night’s sleep but continued to stay off elevators and out of movie theaters. The wind knocked loose objects off the back balconies. She listened and waited. She visualized her exit from the room.

  Sulfur fell from the factory skies, staining the pavement, and a teacher at the school said it was sand blown north from Libya on one of those lovely desert winds.

  She sat on the sofa in pajamas and socks reading a book on local flora. A blanket covered her legs. A half-filled glass of water sat on the end table. Her eyes wandered from the page. It was two minutes before midnight. She paused, looking off toward the middle distance. Then she heard it coming, an earth roar, a power moving on the air. She sat for a long second, deeply thoughtful, before throwing off the blanket. The moment burst around her. She rushed to the door and opened it, half aware of rattling lampshades and something wet. She gripped the edges of the door frame and faced into the room. Things were jumping up and down. She formed the categorical thought, This one is the biggest yet. The room was more or less a blur. There was a sense that it was on the verge of splintering. She felt the effect in her legs this time, a kind of hollowing out, a soft surrender to some illness. It was hard to believe, hard to believe it was lasting so long. She pushed her hands against the door frame, searching for a calmness in herself. She could almost see a picture of her mind, a vague gray oval, floating over the room. The shaking would not stop. There was an anger in it, a hammering demand. Her face showed the crumpled effort of a heavy lifter. It wasn’t easy to know what was happening around her. She couldn’t see things in the normal way. She could only see herself, bright-skinned, waiting for the room to fold over her.

  Then it ended and she pulled some clothes over her pajamas and took the stairway down. She moved fast. She ran across the small lobby, brushing past a man lighting a cigarette at the door. People were coming into the street. She went half a block and stopped at the edge of a large group. She was breathing hard and her arms hung limp. Her first clear thought was that she’d have to go back inside sooner or later. She listened to the voices fall around her. She wanted to hear someone say this very thing, that the cruelty existed in time, that they were all unprotected in the drive of time. She told a woman she thought a water pipe had broken in her flat and the woman closed her eyes and rocked her heavy head. When will it all end? She told the woman she’d forgotten to grab her tote bag on her way out the door despite days of careful planning and she tried to give the story a rueful nuance, make it funny and faintly self-mocking. There must be something funny we can cling to. They stood there rocking their heads.

  All up and down the street there were people lighting cigarettes. It was eight days since the first tremor, eight days and one hour.

  She walked most of the night. At three a.m. she stopped in the square in front of the Olympic Stadium. There were parked cars and scores of people and she studied the faces and stood listening. Traffic moved slowly past. There was a curious double mood, a lonely reflectiveness at the center of all the talk, a sense that people were half absent from the eager seeking of company. She started walking again.

  Eating breakfast in her flat at nine o’clock she felt the first sizable aftershock. The room leaned heavily. She rose from the table, eyes wet, and opened the door and crouched there, holding a buttered roll.

  Wrong. The last one was not the biggest on the Richter. It was only six point two.

  And she found out it hadn’t lasted longer than the others. This was a mass illusion, according to the word at school.

  And the water she’d seen or felt had not come from a broken pipe but from a toppled drinking glass on the table by the sofa.

  And why did they keep occurring at night?

  And where was the English Boy?

  The drinking glass was intact but her paperback book on plant life was wet and furrowed.

  She took the stairs up and down.

  She kept the tote bag ready at the door.

  She was deprived of sentiments, pretensions, expectations, textures.

  The pitiless thing was time, threat of advancing time.

  She was deprived of presumptions, persuasions, complications, lies, every braided arrangement that made it possible to live.

  Stay out of movies and crowded halls. She was down to categories of sound, to self-admonishments and endless inner scrutinies.

  She paused, alone, to listen.

  She pictured her sensible exit from the room.

  She looked for something in people’s faces that might tell her their experience was just like hers, down to the smallest strangest turn of thought.

  There must be something funny in this somewhere that we can use to get us through the night.

  She heard everything.

  She took catnaps at school.

  She was deprived of the city itself. We could be anywhere, any lost corner of Ohio.

  She dreamed of a mayfly pond skimmed with fallen blossoms.

  Take the stairs everywhere. Take a table near the exit in cafés and tavernas.

  The cardplayers sat in hanging smoke, making necessary motions only, somberly guarding their cards.

  She learned that Edmund was in the north with friends, peering into monasteries.

  She heard the surge of motorcycles on the hill.

  She inspected the cracks in the west wall and spoke to the landlord, who closed his eyes and rocked his heavy head.

  The wind caused a rustling somewhere very near.

  She sat up at night with her book of water-stiffened pages, trying to read, trying to escape the feeling that she was being carried helplessly toward some pitching instant in time.

  The acanthus is a spreading perennial.

  And everything in the world is either inside or outside.

  She came across the figurine one day inside a desk drawer at the school, lying among cough drops and paper clips, in an office used as a teachers’ lounge. She didn’t even remember putting it there and felt the familiar clashing agencies of shame and defensiveness working in her blood—a body heat rising against the reproach of forgotten things. She picked it up, finding something remarkable in the leaper’s clean and open motion, in the detailed tension of forearms and hands. Shouldn’t something so old have a formal bearing, a stiffness of figure? This was easy-flowing work. But beyond this surprise, there was little to know. She didn’t know the Minoans. She wasn’t even sure what the thing was made of, what kind of lightweight imitation ivory. It occurred to her that she’d left the figure in the desk because she didn’t know what to do with it, how to underpin or prop it. The body was alone in space, with no s
upports, no fixed position, and seemed best suited to the palm of the hand.

  She stood in the small room, listening.

  Edmund had said the figure was like her. She studied it, trying to extract the sparest recognition. A girl in a loincloth and wristbands, double-necklaced, suspended over the horns of a running bull. The act, the leap itself, might be vaudeville or sacred terror. There were themes and secrets and storied lore in this six-inch figure that Kyle could not begin to guess at. She turned the object in her hand. All the facile parallels fell away. Lithe, young, buoyant, modern; rumbling bulls and quaking earth. There was nothing that might connect her to the mind inside the work, an ivory carver, 1600 BC, moved by forces remote from her. She remembered the old earthen Hermes, flower-crowned, looking out at her from a knowable past, some shared theater of being. The Minoans were outside all this. Narrow-waisted, graceful, other-minded—lost across vales of language and magic, across dream cosmologies. This was the piece’s little mystery. It was a thing in opposition, defining what she was not, marking the limits of the self. She closed her fist around it firmly and thought she could feel it beat against her skin with a soft and periodic pulse, an earthliness.

  She was motionless, with tilted head, listening. Buses rolled past, sending diesel fumes through seams in the window frame. She looked toward a corner of the room, concentrating tightly. She listened and waited.

  Her self-awareness ended where the acrobat began. Once she realized this, she put the object in her pocket and took it everywhere.

  THE ANGEL ESMERALDA

  The old nun rose at dawn, feeling pain in every joint. She’d been rising at dawn since her days as a postulant, kneeling on hardwood floors to pray. First she raised the shade. That’s the world out there, little green apples and infectious disease. Banded light fell across the room, steeping the tissued grain of the wood in an antique ocher glow so deeply pleasing in pattern and coloration that she had to look away or become girlishly engrossed. She knelt in the folds of the white nightgown, fabric endlessly laundered, beaten with swirled soap, left gristled and stiff. And the body beneath, the spindly thing she carried through the world, chalk pale mostly, and speckled hands with high veins, and cropped hair that was fine and flaxy gray, and her bluesteel eyes—many a boy and girl of old saw those peepers in their dreams. She made the sign of the cross, murmuring the congruous words. Amen, an olden word, back to Greek and Hebrew, verily—touching her midsection to complete the body-shaped cross. The briefest of everyday prayers yet carrying three years’ indulgence, seven if you dip your hand in holy water before you mark the body. Prayer is a practical strategy, the gaining of temporal advantage in the capital markets of Sin and Remission.