Seven Houses
Page 24
“Since that day, she hasn’t said a word to me. More than a year ago. She hears and understands things when you talk to her but never talks back. Your father used to say that she doesn’t talk because I talk too much. I say she doesn’t talk because she’s a stubborn mule. Anyway, that’s the way it goes. I’m warning you. Don’t expect to have a conversation with her. She’s like a seashell with a withdrawn bug inside. But what could you do? If you break the shell, the bug would die.”
Amber and Nellie agreed to go to Cordelio to break the news about her house and bring Maria back. Camilla was worried that Maria might refuse to leave and she would have to be evicted by force. She wasn’t optimistic. She said they needed a miracle. She warned Amber of Maria’s other strange habits.
“My mother carries a Singapore Airlines bag strapped over her shoulder wherever she goes. No one knows where she found it but it’s become the sanctuary of her soul. She carries in it money that’s no longer any good, money her relatives must have buried before fleeing long ago. The grocer told me, she comes in with the old money and gives it to him. He doesn’t want to tell her it is no good, so he takes it and gives her things. Later, I send him money to make up for what she spends.”
“What else is in the bag?” Amber asked.
“My father’s pocket watch. She gets panicked every few minutes and winds it. Then, she gets frustrated because she keeps going back in time. So I have to wind it back to the normal time but she messes it up again. So many times I’ve seen her dump the contents of the bag all over the place when she couldn’t find the watch. I’m telling you all this so that you know what to expect.”
Amber opened the wooden gate into a garden entrance with an energetic riot of plants. The creepers strangled the sunlight; the bell-shaped blossoms of trumpet vines, morning glory, and hibiscus dangled from their limp stems. Nellie followed her mother down the stone walk, each dragging carry-ons with wheels.
At the entrance, they noticed freshly picked crisp white gardenias, unblemished yet voluptuous in their amorous prime, floating in a clay bowl. Amber touched her nose, locking the scent in her nostrils so the intoxication would linger. She reveled in her gratitude to the deities for creating such whiteness, the nobility of the soul who placed beauty at the entrance of this humble sanctuary. She thanked her for the chance to smell them, for having such a fine moment in her life.
Then she sensed it. The silent, almost subliminal movement under the petals, drawing tiny ripples in the water. Not the air, nor the breeze. Another life stirred underneath, forcing itself out, as the unconscious, black, spindly locomotion of the mosquito larvae struggled to become parasites. The water served the insect and the flower.
“Deceptive facade of beauty,” Nellie said proud of her observation and choice of words. “But you’re not going to let this ruin our day, mom, are you?”
Amber snapped out of her indulgence and smiled. “Not when you’re with me to set things straight.”
The door, the windows were open but no one was home. Inside, life reduced to its minimum simplicity—a faded kilim worn to a mud color, a mattress covered with a white piqué spread, a small table and a chair in a corner, a coal-burning stove painted blue. Herbs bunched together hung from the low ceiling, a basket of ripe figs graced the table.
The picture of Hamid Bey, wearing a magnificent tasseled fez and military regalia, in an oval frame—painfully young, already stern, handsome as can be. Not the old man she remembered who had once sat opposite from her and fixed watches.
“The one Camilla discovered in the trunk,” Amber told Nellie. “Her real father.”
What did not appear in the picture was Hamid Bey’s vacant sleeve, stuck permanently inside his coat pocket. He had not yet lost it.
They went out the back door. Nellie seized Amber’s hand and pointed at the exterior wall, painted ochre on one side, winding around and merging with the turquoise color as if someone had run out of paint in the middle. Cool. She quickly snapped a Polaroid.
They followed the antediluvian grapevine climbing the arbor into the small courtyard, dodging the shriveled dark buttons that lay scattered on the ground, bleeding burgundy stains. Leaves of tobacco stretched across the low clothes lines, drying.
Even in her long black dress and scarf, Maria blended into the landscape, imitating its colors like a chameleon. By the lichen-and-moss-covered old well with an ancient herringbone pattern of the stones, she stood with her back to them, the Singapore Airlines bag slung over her shoulder. She stood staring into the well.
Now, she’ll pick up a stone. She’ll make a wish. She’ll throw it in the well, we’ll hear its hollow echo, Amber anticipated, but Maria just stood still. Just the way she had seen her by this well when she was little, before she made her wish.
Despite her hundred years, osteoporosis had not entered Maria’s bones. She stood straight as a ruler, transfixed, elsewhere, focused on some link inside the well, some link to her existence. And whatever it was, Amber herself was dying to discover.
She inched closer but Maria, still oblivious to their presence, continued her meditation. Her face, an ancient map of life lines on her turtle skin and, on her right cheek, a huge mole resembling a chocolate chip. Amber imagined that the map of lines was some sort of a key to deciphering her life.
She was about to leave quietly, out of respect for privacy, and wait for Maria in the cottage when Maria riveted her head in slow motion and fixed her eyes on Amber. She gazed for a long time, focusing precisely, adjusting to the presence of another being, then its link to her own life. She took her time, the image dissolving so smoothly that the transition was unnoticeable. For Amber the moment had become unbearable; someone had to say something quickly. Since Maria no longer spoke, the burden of breaking the silence was Amber’s. To say what? Hello, grandma. Do you recognize me? To say, hi, how are you? Isn’t it a nice day? To say lasting, profound words. Unforgettable lines. To say what?
Instead came her own silence. Amber and her grandmother Maria cleansed each other with their eyes until the air around them became so light that it made them weightless. A bluish aura surrounded Maria’s body. Her features began to quiver, subtle changes of skin-deep colors flashed a thousand faces at Amber. Ape women, witches, demented old hags, voluptuous sirens, female Buddhas, antediluvian crones, queens, baby girls, virgins, strange animals, prehistoric female deities, and all else in between.
Amber was assimilating every persona she reflected, crumbling at times with the uncertainty of not knowing how far she might fall, flashing a smile to avoid confronting ugliness or, by turning away, breaking the connection. At times, she felt like laughing to quell her nervousness. Tears filled their eyes not of their own wanting but because of so many layers of transparence, which created a kind of opaqueness. All she could do was to sigh as if gasping for breath. At times it seemed as though Maria’s feet were leaving the ground; she was about to levitate like a Chagall woman.
Amber was seeing a secret. She had no idea where the old woman’s vitality was emanating from but she watched the heaving of the waves. She imagined Maria was a saint. If she was, then what about Camilla and herself? What if sainthood was hereditary? Could she inherit this gift and pass it on to her daughter?
Just as her ego separated from the rare moment, the waves began to subside, Maria’s face came into full focus and remained there. She looked ordinary—a hundred-year-old woman, an ancient artifact full of moments of joy and horror, with the most intricate web of wrinkles and a chocolate-chip mole.
“Do you know me?” Amber spoke softly, trying with her voice not to agitate the rhythm of Maria’s awareness. Maria acted as if she hadn’t heard Amber’s words and turned to Nellie instead, scanning her as she had Amber, then returned to the moment.
“Baby chicken yellow,” she said.
“What?” Amber asked alarmed by her talking.
“Her hair. Baby-chicken-yellow,” Maria repeated.
“She is talking!” Nellie exclaimed.
Nellie was standing a few paces behind them, perfectly silent. An intense sound like wings slapping distracted all three. Maria and Amber separated.
“Look!” Nellie shouted, with boundless exuberance, pointing at the profusion of magenta flowers growing on the bougainvillea, covering the stone wall. A flock of hummingbirds, hundreds maybe, were ravaging the flowers in a flutter of erotic madness as if in an esoteric mating dance—now chasing each other, now competing for the orifice of a flower, now swooping so low that they almost got tangled in the women’s hair.
“Tweet, tweet, what a sweet bird am I.” Nellie laughed. “I’ve never seen them so tiny. Almost like moths.”
“. . . but the same paisley eyes,” Maria said.
“The birds?”
“The girl.”
“Hello, Anne-Anne-Anne,” Nellie flirted. Anne is mother. Two Annes grandmother, three great-grandmother. That she knew from her “Turkish for Travelers” guide. She took a Polaroid of the birds, gave it to Maria. Maria looked at the picture, trying to make sense of this strange sortilege.
“Take one of the two of us,” Amber said while putting her arm around Maria, and her cheek against hers.
“Say cheese,” Nellie said as she snapped.
Maria cringed when she heard the shutter click, afraid of having her soul stolen. And it was.
That picture of the two is on Amber’s dresser now, among her perfume bottles, sitting on a tray made of thousands of brightly colored butterfly wings she inherited from Aida, the one that the General had brought back from Korea, along with all the other family relics she’s inherited. She looks at Maria’s face, complex like a walnut, more and more seeing the resemblance between them, wondering whether she will live long enough to have as many wrinkles as Maria, wondering whether she’ll ever develop a chocolate-chip mole.
“Women always have late menopause in our family. I was almost sixty. Men die. Women always live a very long time,” Camilla had told her once. “But we have to earn our wrinkles. Maria has earned enough for a hundred lifetimes.”
That night, they slept on the same narrow mattress from Amber’s childhood on the vaporous tile floor, but the sheets and pillowcases were of the finest, crispest linen, edged with handmade shadow lace. Before nightfall Maria’s fragile silhouette slithered into the garden, returning with a basket full of night-blooming jasmine petals, which she stuffed inside each pillowcase.
Maria had insisted on giving them her only mosquito netting and Nellie lit some foul-smelling green coil incense. Amber and Nellie lay on their sides without covers, their breath precipitated from humidity that had absorbed the jasmine. Struggling to leave some emptiness between their bodies, every so often, they slid onto the tiles to cool off.
It was calm at first since mosquitoes fear the daylight. At sundown, emerging from their hiding places, they had begun rummaging for flesh. Around midnight, when the incense had burnt down to a filigree of ash, they were swarming in spirals like tiny tornadoes. All night, the nervous humming on the other side of the netting continued. Outside, the air was alive with the stirring of other insects and nocturnal beings, the whistling of tiny frogs, spool after spool, millions of them rolling.
The mean prospect of something kept Amber awake. She had not said anything about it, given even the slightest hint, but it seemed that she had not simply come here to visit Maria. She had a mission of some sort, difficult and disturbing. She was Camilla’s emissary. She drifted in and out of sleep, drenched from the humidness, images and words from her dreams mingled in a wild mélange of horny insects, verbose and histrionic.
At some point, she got up, dashing out before the mosquitoes could assault her. But they found their way, going for her face first, then breasts as she ran out to the garden, warding them off as best she could.
Outside, cicadas were furiously rubbing their wings together in their mating madness. All at once, they’d start chanting, then just as mysteriously stop, leading on the frogs. Then, the silent insects insinuated themselves, tiptoeing spiders, enormous and fantastic, tiger-striped, dancing on invisible threads. Confusion of webs spread a canopy over the outhouse, the trickling of her water against spider’s skids as Amber gingerly crouched over the hole to avoid getting bit.
Faint rays of light filtered in from a gas lamp crowded with moths, spotlighting the pistons of crimson hibiscus in explosion. Strange inverted lilies were opening their caves—everything fertile, flaunting its sex.
A bright object next to the clay bowl with the gardenias and mosquito larvae caught her attention. A hundred-kuru coin. The edges of the petals now curling and blemished, the movement of the water more turbulent, the black limbs more persistent. She removed the gardenias and dumped the water on the ground, determined to destroy the parasites before they could hatch. The earth absorbed the water swiftly. She stumped on what she could not see, then filled the bowl again with fresh water from the terra-cotta jug on the patio and floated the gardenias.
Inside, an army of adult mosquitoes was buzzing now around Maria’s head. Amber lit some more incense, which spread its noxious smoke; they scattered for a moment but in no time at all they would return.
Then, Maria screamed. She was whimpering, Amber thought she was speaking in tongues at first but sorted out words that were a mixture of Greek, Italian, and French. Incoherent incantations, the poor woman obviously trapped in a terrifying dream.
“Shouldn’t we wake her up?” Nellie asked.
“It’s not good to wake up a person having a nightmare or it never disappears.”
They watched until Maria calmed down, until her breathing became normal again. Then, it was Nellie’s turn to go outside. Almost immediately, she came back breathless, snuggled up to her mother. Amber pushed her away.
“It’s too hot, sweetie.”
“There’s a man outside,” Nellie whispered.
“No one could come in through the gate. It’s bolted.”
“There is, Mom.”
Amber seemed annoyed but she consoled her daughter. “Hush. Lie still, then, and pretend to be asleep. If he thinks you’re unaware of his presence, he might leave you alone. If your eyes meet, it’s dangerous.”
So, the mother and daughter lay side by side, eyes shut, holding their breath, listening until another coil of incense expired and the mosquitoes returned. But no sign of any man.
“What sort of a man was it?”
“A tall man, standing right outside near the gardenia bowl; he had only one arm. Really scary. I almost bumped into him, he was so close. But something strange happened. Real strange. Like I did bump into him but felt nothing. Like there was no one there but just this hollow nothingness. He’d disappeared. I looked around, he wasn’t anywhere in the garden. Then, I ran inside, afraid he might come back. But he didn’t.”
“He had only one arm?”
“Yes, I’m sure of that.”
Perhaps hearing the stories about her one-armed grandfather from Camilla with an arm missing had put those visions in Nellie’s head. No, she wasn’t going to say anything. Not yet.
When the sound of things that live in the night ceased and they woke up, it had considerably cooled down. In the courtyard, two Andalusian chickens were pecking seeds. Hard-shelled insects lay on the ground on their backs, kicking their legs. A tiger cat rolled around in the gravel, scratching himself.
Maria was in the patio, squeezing something milky out of a cheesecloth hanging from the arbor, draining the whey from the yogurt to prevent its s
ouring from the heat.
“You know something?” Nellie asked.
“What?”
“You know who she looks like?”
“Who?”
“Yoda. You know, like in Star Wars.”
“Yeah.” She stared at the panoply of power lines behind the stone wall where her grandparents’ old house used to be. The curiosity of Maria’s fate, to be reduced to living in her old chicken shed, preoccupied her, a life full of dramatic twists and turns not unlike her own. How am I going to break the news? How will I tell her that in a couple of weeks they will bulldoze her home, her garden, her well?
Maria poured the tea into tiny glass cups with remarkably steady hands for an old person. Molasses, tahini, and rose-petal preserves had mysteriously materialized on the table. And figs, of course.
“Good dreams?” she asked.
“Nellie dreamed of a one-armed man.”
“Bless her soul. He enters my dreams too, all the time,” Maria said matter-of-factly. She placed a bowl of sour cherries on the table, then took a hairpin and, using it as a tool, began scooping out the pits. Juice spouting from the cherries left splashes of color on her white apron. She continued pulling the stems off with her withered fingers and dug in like a fiend with the hairpins. Amber began helping her. The chickens pecked at the pits. Nellie took pictures of everything.
“Aren’t you too isolated here all by yourself?” she asked Maria.
“I have my own company.”
“Why don’t you go live with mother in Istanbul? She’s so lonely.”