The Other Side of the Sun

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  “What is it, then?” Even as I looked, two eyelids in the log opened, then blinked closed.

  Belle’s laugh tinkled. “Be an alligator. Sleeping in the noonday heat. Won’t bother us none unless we poke it. Then it wake up in a temper and gobble us up, quicker’n you can bat an eye.”

  I could no longer see where those strange eyelids had been. It looked like a log, and nothing but a log.

  When we had gone several yards beyond, Belle reached up and snapped a piece of dead branch off one of the trees and threw it back at the log. The log stirred; the heavy eyelids opened, and then an enormous mouth with sharp, savage teeth opened and snapped, as though after an insect. The water stirred sluggishly under the canoe.

  We skimmed forward again. Belle pointed to a flash of deep rose back in the green jungle. “That be a flamingo, Miss Stella.”

  The trees arched, locking branches over us. We moved through a dim green tunnel. The sunlight barely penetrated, but the heat was fierce and steady. I kept wiping my face with my handkerchief, which quickly became sodden and useless. But I was fascinated with the beauty, the exotic birds calling and flying in the dimness, the fluttering of butterflies low over the water, the Spanish moss dripping from the branches so that we had to bend our heads low in order to avoid its tickling tendrils. At the water’s edge a strange grey beast snuffled, raised a blunt, mean-looking snout, and glared at us.

  “That be a razorback pig, Miss Stella.”

  Gradually the trees lifted, grew farther apart. We could see the sky, intensely blue, shimmering with heat. “Here we be,” Belle said, and guided the canoe towards the shore. “Miss Stella ma’am, I want to thank you for coming. It mean might a deal to me. I know people been saying things to you, things about Zenumins—”

  “I haven’t—” Aunt Irene started.

  “I know you hasn’t, Miss Irene. But others has. Others what got less right. I ’predate your not listening, Miss Stella, ma’am. You are a true friend.”

  A group of little boys, half naked, came running to meet us, to pull the canoe up onto the bank, to help us out.

  I stood on the river bank, batting at the insects which swarmed about us. Flies clung to the faces and torsos of the little boys, but they paid no attention. A dozen or so wooden huts, on stilts, were scattered about. Underneath these, chickens were scrabbling, and indiscriminate yellow dogs, scratching at fleas, gnawing at bones, yapping, tumbling about with little brown babies, some with damp and drooping diapers, most of them naked. Around a few of the cabins were flowers, but they were straggly and lank, like weeds. There were occasional patches of garden, though I did not recognize any of the plants. Around the attempts at cultivation the wild growth of the jungle pressed. The babies looked well fed, but perhaps their little bellies were just too protruding, their legs not quite straight. Here was a kind of poverty I had never seen before.

  In the center of the clearing were stones blackened with smoke; they were evidently used as a communal fireplace and I thought that a fire out of doors, at night, would be more bearable than any kind of stove in those rickety, tinderbox cabins. Some of them had corrugated tin for roofs; the heat struck against this and shimmered angrily. From a few of the windows stove pipes stuck out. Through doors propped open to catch any stray breeze, I could see dim figures moving within; they seemed strangely shadowy and insubstantial.

  I brushed at the flies.

  Belle was beside me. “This is where my Tron growed up. This where my Ronnie should have growed.”

  Aunt Irene was on my other side. “But would you have wanted him to grow up here, Belle? Didn’t you want him to have his chance?”

  “Ronnie my baby. They took him away.”

  “But he’s a doctor now. Think how much good he can do.”

  Belle looked down at the packed earth beneath our feet. “I want my son should love his mother.”

  “But he does, Belle, of course he does.”

  Belle took my arm and urged me to the dead fireplace in the center of the clearing. She waved imperiously and a big boy, perhaps moving into adolescence, came running out of one of the cabins, bringing with him a bucket which he upended for me to sit on. I looked towards Aunt Irene. Since she was older, I expected her to be seated first, but she motioned to me to sit, walked over to the fireplace, spread her handkerchief over one of the stones, and sat.

  “I go get Granddam,” Belle said.

  Aunt Irene leaned towards me. “Apologize to her …”

  Belle went to the nearest cabin. In the dimness of the small and shadowed porch I had not seen the rocking chair, or the old woman in it. Belle helped her down the steps. In the sunlight she looked like an untidy grey pudding bag. Her cottony white hair was partly tucked under a dirty cap, and bits of it sprang out uncontrollably. Her skin was black with a tinge of grey, quite unlike Belle’s beautiful dark copper, or Ron’s creamy coffee color. She came hobbling towards us, leaning heavily on Belle’s arm, looking hundreds of years old. Perhaps she was.

  Aunt Irene rose. So did I.

  “I tell you Mrs. Renier come, Granddam, and here she is,” Belle said.

  The old woman peered at me out of her yellowed eyes. If she had been less hideous to look at she might have been less frightening. She could not help being old and poor and ugly. “Miss Irene make you?”

  “I’m sorry if I offended you the other evening. I was very frightened once by a gypsy in England—” My prepared apology trailed off under her glare.

  “I be no gypsy.”

  “Oh, I know, and I’m so sorry if—”

  She held a grey claw towards me. “Let me see your hand.”

  “Please. I do want to talk to you, and make your acquaintance, but I’d rather not have my fortune told.”

  The claw still beckoned to me. “I tell you nothing.”

  I held out my hand. She looked at it, making incomprehensible murmurings. It was worse to have her perhaps seeing things about me, about Terry, about our baby, and not telling me, than anything she could actually say. But I didn’t, wouldn’t permit myself to believe that she could see what was going to happen. She could make guesses, she could invent things to tell me, and that part of me which was superstitious would believe her imaginings and be influenced by them. If someone says to you, ‘You look marvelous today!’ then you feel splendid, full of health and energy. But if someone says instead, ‘My dear, what on earth is the matter? You’re so pale, you really do look ill,’ then suddenly your head starts to ache, you begin to feel that you are coming down with something. So powerful is suggestion that it can actually affect your physical being, it can change the pattern of your day. It can change the future. I did not want to hear anything from this old woman, either good or bad.

  She released my hand with a loud cry, as though she had seen something she did not like. She spoke not to me but to Belle, drawing Aunt Irene into the periphery of her words. “I told you she bring evil.”

  “No, Granddam,” Belle protested. “Mrs. Renier be good.”

  The old woman shook her head, seemed to shrink into the bundle of her clothes. “I do what I can, but the lines are powerful. We make the offering tonight: one old nag, the weight whereof to be an hundred and thirty, and one clay bowl of seventy, and both of them full of fine flour mingled with creek; one spoon of tea, one young bullock, one ram, one lamb of the first year, for a burnt offering …” Her voice ascended to a thin, high intoning. My spine tingled. “One kid of goats for a sin offering, and for a sacrifice for an peasement offering five rams, five he-goats, five lambs of the first year, one newborn manchild, oh, this to be the offering …”

  Her voice rose higher and higher, almost above audible sound, so that I could no longer hear the words. My vision, too, seemed dimmed: was it only fear that caused the mist?

  I heard Belle’s voice. “Granddam, you frightening Mrs. Renier.”

  “I do what I can.” The old woman’s voice returned to its normal pitch. “That be all I can do. I make no promise. I see w
hat I see.”

  “Mrs. Renier be my friend, Granddam.”

  The old woman waved her claw as though brushing her granddaughter aside like the flies. “Ronnie,” she said to me. “Ronnie.”

  “What about him?”

  “I do not like what I see. You bring us trouble.”

  “No, Granddam,” Belle began, but the old woman started to hobble back to her cabin. Belle moved to help her, was again rejected, and the boy who had brought the bucket for me to sit on came bounding down the cabin steps.

  Aunt Irene spoke. “We’d better go back, Belle.”

  Little boys again materialized, helping us into the canoe, pushing it out into the dark waters. For what seemed an eternity we glided along in silence under the green tunnel of interlocking trees. The brilliant flashes of bird-wing no longer seemed beautiful to me. Every half-submerged log held the menace of the alligator. Another ugly razorback pig glared at me malignly. I held my hands tightly locked in my lap.

  “Mrs. Renier, ma’am,” Belle said, “it be all right. She make the sacrifice for tonight.”

  “No—no—I don’t want any sacrifice.”

  “It be the only way. She angry at things she fear to happen. She an old woman. She don’t know what things be for the best. She got to make the sacrifice.”

  “What—what does she sacrifice?”

  “A few herbs. Maybe a razorback.”

  “But she said—she said a baby—”

  Belle’s laugh pealed. “Mrs. Renier, who been talking to you? Don’t you pay no mind to those tales. It be all right.”

  I felt no sense of reassurance.

  Aunt Irene said nothing.

  2

  When Aunt Irene and I got back to Illyria I excused myself and went to my room. For a few minutes I simply paced back and forth, trying to control my irrational terror.

  I picked up the journal in which I had marked my place. Mado, in Nyssa during the war, certainly had more to fear than I, tangible, actual danger, and yet she was always given a joy which balanced the pain.

  “Tonight about the house,” I read, “I hear the lovely beat of wings. There is a new baby in the cradle, a son, and a new Guardian makes his presence felt, and Heaven rejoices. Let no evil come to this tiny Innocence, this small and tender joy. As long as the angels are here I need never be afraid, for nothing worse than death can come to us, and that is a triviality.”

  This was written from wartime Nyssa; this was Mado’s fifth child, Jamie, who would die in Illyria of scarlet fever. Mado’s own death might seem to her a triviality, I could understand that. But that she should live and her children die: what would Mado think of these words then?

  I put my hand gently over my belly. Even the hope of bearing Terry’s child filled me with fierce protectiveness.

  What had the horrible old Granddam seen in my hand?

  What had Honoria seen in the cards?

  I looked at the ring. I needed my husband.

  We met, Aunt Des, Honoria, and I, in Aunt Olivia’s room again for tea. Aunt Irene was presumably upstairs, but I was not sure she was even in the house.

  There were pain lines about Aunt Olivia’s eyes and mouth, and she had one of my father’s books on her lap. She looked at Aunt Des and said, “Stella’s father says that probably what passed for friendship in bygone days was also homosexuality.”

  It was easy to shock Aunt Des. Predictably she cried, “Olivia!”

  I did not remember my father saying anything of the kind, and said so.

  “Well, perhaps he doesn’t actually say it, but he does postulate the possibility. Or he says that someone else does.”

  “You’re being nasty just to provoke me,” Aunt Des said.

  Aunt Olivia patted the book. “But it’s most interesting. It would explain a lot of things that have always puzzled me. But if it offends your delicate sensibilities I’ll talk about death.”

  “Miss Olivia,” Honoria said softly, “we knows your bones is hurting bad.”

  “To the point where I—You can’t die well if you’re afraid, can you? We’ve known so many deaths, so many terrible deaths. Do you suppose I’ll ever stop being afraid? Each candle I light, each candle that gutters down and dies brings me that much closer to my own death.”

  “No, Miss Livia,” Honoria said. “That ain’t so. You bin baptized, is you not?”

  “You know perfectly well I’ve been baptized.”

  “Then you is no closer to your death tonight than you were last night, or back when Miss Mado brought you to live in Illyria.”

  It was Honoria who brought Mado’s presence most alive. On her face was the expression she used when she was recalling things Mado had taught her—or, more likely, things they had taught each other. “We does our dying when we baptized, Miss Olivia. If it ain’t done then, ain’t never going to be done properly. When you is baptized your angel gives you a shove and you touch eternity, and eternity ain’t got nothing to do with time at all. Once you brush against eternity, Miss Livvy, then time and death don’t make no never-mind.”

  “You can say that, Honoria? You?”

  “I say it.”

  Aunt Olivia held out her hands to study them. “Pain. What does it mean? Mado found God in everything, even pain. For me it means not God, but me, Olivia Renier, that I am at least alive. That’s selfish, isn’t it? What I will find out, and soon, perhaps very soon, is who I really am. Who is Olivia? Not a quick mind and an artistic talent which I’ve wasted. Not my background nor my breeding nor my forgotten courtesies. Not my hands nor my eyes nor any part of this old body. Who am I? Who will Olivia be when all this is gone, when I can no longer see, or hear, or touch, or taste, or smell … is there anybody? Will there be any Olivia when all this is gone?”

  I, too, looked at her old hands, twisted and gnarled, the nails ridged and horny, but somehow still holding grace.

  “Please …” Aunt Des’s voice was muffled. “Please, Livvy.”

  “Sorry, Des, sorry.”

  Honoria was calm. “Not just you, Miss Livvy, nor you, Miss Des. Not Miss Stella. Not—not Jimmy. Or Miss Mado, or the babies. Everything going to go. Everything. The ocean and the beach. The fireflies and the pelicans. The stars in their courses. Time end. Everything go. Then we know what it is like.”

  “What what’s like?” Aunt Olivia asked.

  “To be the way we was meant to be. I rub your joints now.”

  “I don’t understand the end of time,” Aunt Olivia said. “I don’t want to.”

  I asked, “Is it like 0 × 3 = 0?”

  “No, Miss Stella. The end of time is not nothing, is not nought.”

  “But—”

  “The end of time is the glory on the other side of the sun.”

  That evening after dinner, a rather silent one, for Aunt Irene was not feeling talkative, and we missed Aunt Olivia to bicker with over Shakespeare, there was a thundershower while we sat out on the veranda sipping coffee. It was swifter and more violent than our English summer showers, though nothing like the storm of my first night at Illyria. We rocked gently and watched the wind and rain race across the ocean. The sky crackled with lightning and thunder, and the air lifted.

  The storm lasted only a few minutes; it cleared as quickly as it had come, and the sky was filled with the rose of afterglow, the wet beach reflecting the hue like a mirror.

  I had to get away.

  I had never before been without long periods of solitude during the day. My father, living amidst the constant conversation of men, had early taught me the necessity of time in which to assimilate, sort out, absorb the ideas and events of the day. Long solitary walks were for both of us a habit and a requirement. It did not occur to me that it might seem odd to Terry’s family to have me excuse myself, rather cursorily, in the evenings after dinner, to walk alone.

  I set off, breathing with relief as I left Aunt Des and Aunt Irene chattering on the veranda behind me, and turned down the beach this time, because up-beach meant not only the tw
ins, Cousin James, but also the path through the dunes which led to the creek. I wanted no more of the Zenumins. At this moment I wanted no more of Illyria. I wanted out. I wanted the safe, secure life I was used to, and a husband to care for me. I felt angry, ill-used, sorry for myself.

  The sand was so wet from the shower that I took off my shoes and stockings and walked slowly along in the soft sand near the bulwark, letting the wetness suck at my toes, pull my feet down into soft, cool moistness. It was the first time my feet had not burned since the early-morning swim, and this relatively mild discomfort was something to which I was not yet accustomed. I was so busy thinking about the coolness between my toes, and being cross, and sorry for myself, that I did not look around as much as usual, nor, evidently, did I listen, for I practically walked into a group of horsemen, spread across the beach, barring my way. They could not have been riding, or I would have heard their hoofs. They must have been waiting in silence on their horses, making a barrier across the beach from ocean to dune. They were robed and hooded, and they were in black.

  They had not been waiting for me. They were in no sense threatening me. I felt that they were as surprised to see me as I was to see them. Nevertheless they terrified me. I stood there, mesmerized, until one of the horses whinnied and reared, and was sharply reined in. The sound freed me, and I turned and ran.

  I had almost reached Illyria when another horse, a red horse, came out of the scrub-myrtle trees. I turned again in panic, then realized it was the red horse Thales, and Ron, Ronnie who belonged to Illyria, who wore only his old riding habit, no hood, no terrifying robe, no mask—”

  “Mrs. Renier, are you all right?”

  “I think—so—”

  “Then go home. Now.”

  “Yes—”