Melmoth

by Sarah Perry

  The woman blinked. Tears were pressed out from beneath the lowered lids.

  “I’m Helen.” She put the sheaf of flowers on the bed. “I’m Helen Franklin,” she said, and touched the arm that lay on the sheet. The woman in the bed moaned, very faintly; not with distress, but (Helen thought) with surprise, and almost with pleasure.

  “I’m not American,” said Helen. “Everybody thinks I am. I shouldn’t mind, but I do.” Again, the woman blinked, and Helen went on—in a light, inconsequential way, as if she were talking to a stranger on a station platform when all the trains are late—“I’ve been here three months. Sometimes I want to go home, sometimes I want to stay.” The woman closed her eyes and rubbed at a place on her thigh. “I know about you,” said Helen. “About what happened. I think it’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard. Does it help, to have someone say so?”

  A gardener working in the grounds outside turned on his radio, and music blew in. Rosa went on rubbing at her thigh, reaching for a place beyond the grasp of her hand. “The nurse told me you shouldn’t scratch,” said Helen. “You might do more harm than good.” But the woman rolled her head against the pillow and opened her eyes. Helen saw in them a desperate appeal, and thought she understood. “You want me to help? All right: but no telling the nurse.” Idly, as if it were quite normal, Helen put her hand on the woman’s thigh, and felt heat rising up from it, as if it had been burning all the while, and would go on burning until the body was consumed. Lightly she began to scratch. The woman moved the remains of her mouth in a smile. “Is this all right?” said Helen. “Is this what you needed?” Scratching and petting as if the woman were a dog at her knee, Helen said, “Do you like the music? One thing about this country: everyone can sing. Do you know this one?” Quietly she sang to the radio, all the while scratching at the woman with a gentle rhythmic motion; this went on a long while, as Helen watched Rosa settle against the pillow, and saw a softening of all the hard pained lines of her limbs. “If I saw the man who did this to you,” said Helen conversationally, “I’d kill him, and I’d enjoy doing it.” Then she said, “Is that enough now? Look, there’s a little bit of blood, here, just a little bit; I think we should stop.” She took her hand away, and the woman sighed, and lay still. Helen said, “I brought something for you to drink. You should drink, in this heat.” Then, as if Rosa had been one of the smallest children at the Q.A.F., Helen slipped her arm beneath the woman’s shoulders and raised her from the pillow. The dark head rested for a moment in the crook of her neck, and Helen smelt the scent of a body failing in every function—dusky, hot, half-sweet, half-sour. She held the bottle of iced tea to Rosa’s mouth and poured the liquid in, watching it dribble from the corner of the spoiled mouth, and run into the sheet. “There you go,” said Helen. “There you go,” and with half the bottle gone laid the woman down. Outside, the worker with the radio had moved closer to the window, and Helen made out the words of a sentimental song. “Oh, I loved this when I was young,” she said, fastening the cap on the plastic bottle: “I’d listen to it in my room and sing along, wanting any life but the one I had.” She set the bottle on the floor, and put her hand on the woman’s. “I dreamed I dwelt in marble halls,” she sang, very softly, “with vassals and serfs at my side.” Rosa lay on her thin pillow and watched her visitor with gratitude and kinship. Helen went on singing until it seemed Rosa was sleeping; then she stood, and moved quietly towards the corridor. When she reached the empty doorframe she was arrested by a sound coming from the bed. It was very quiet, so that at first she thought it came from beyond the open window where the radio was playing; then it came again, and again, and she realized Rosa was speaking. She had raised her head from the pillow with an effort that made her body tremble; her voice was high, and hoarse; she said: “Mamatay, mamatay. Hayaan mo akong mamatay.” Helen thought: she is calling for her mother. “Maybe she’ll come soon,” she said. “Maybe she’s coming soon and you should sleep until she comes.” Then she moved on down the corridor until she found a toilet. Here she was very sick, then having wiped her mouth she went to find her lover.

  That evening, beside him on a concrete wall, watching the polluted air above Manila Bay burn coral and gold, she said, “I sat with her for half an hour. Poor thing: you can’t imagine how she suffers. I think she was calling for her parents when I left—maybe she thought it was me?—she was saying something like mama . . . tatay, over and over.” In the bay a cruise liner left pleasure boats rocking on the Pasig river. “Oh, little sister,” said Arnel Suarez. “No, she was saying: let me die, let me die.”

  Each time Helen went to Rosa’s room it was always the same. She sat on the stool beside the bed and rubbed at places Rosa could not reach, and lifted her head and helped her drink. She talked idly about her day—about the girls in the Q.A.F., about the cock fights she saw from her window—sometimes made the confidences that are possible when no reply will come. Once, when Helen had faltered, remembering how far away her mother was, Rosa’s hand had moved across the sheet and found hers, and held it in a loose dry grasp. Often the gardener turned on his radio, and Helen would sing the songs she knew, and watch with pleasure as Rosa’s body, rigid with unease and pain, softened and sank against the thin mattress. Sometimes there would be adverts between songs, which meant nothing at all to Helen, but to which Rosa would respond with a hoarse sound that was unmistakably a laugh. Then Helen would see, coming towards her out of the ruins, a young woman who laughed readily and sang sometimes when the beer was good; who had favorite dresses and ones she unaccountably disliked; who read in parks and preferred this film to that one, this shop to the other; who perhaps fought with her mother and made penance with the one dish she could cook; who had walked happily into a snare set by a destroyer of worlds. One day Helen encountered once again the nurse in the corridor. “She’s got something for you, this time,” he said, moving quickly past her behind a trolley of soiled linen. “Just a small thing, cheap. She asked me to bring it from the market. I said: ‘Rosa, she won’t want this,’ but you can’t say no to her, not now.” And there had been in Rosa’s eyes that day something beside the pain and the appeal: a glitter, secretive and excited, and before her visitor sat down she lifted her hand from under the sheet and put it in Helen’s, and left there a square of pink fabric. It was stiff and fine and glinted in the dim light, its fibers woven in the Filipino fashion from pineapple fiber, its edges scalloped and stitched. “Oh!” said Helen, and felt her throat close with sadness. She opened it, and smilingly praised the stitching, the pale color; then for a time the woman on the bed was lifted out of her body with pleasure, and patted Helen’s knee, and nodded, and smiled.

  Each time Rosa spoke only once, as Helen reached the empty doorframe on her way out: “Hayaan mo akong mamatay, mamatay, mamatay . . .” Then in time there was another word, which Helen knew, because she had been taught it by the children at the Q.A.F.: “Aking kaibigan,” said Rosa, and as she said it she began to shake, not with pain or with effort, but because she had begun to cry. “Aking kaibigan: hayaan mo akong mamatay.” My friend, my friend. Let me die.

  Later in life—in that narrow, exiled life, without friends or pleasure, the memory of Arnel concealed in a place she could not reach—it seemed to Helen those words caused a curious hardening in her that led to what followed. My friend, Rosa had said, and in doing so had brought Helen into a contract which she had never sought but could not break. That night she lay awake and imagined taking the thin pillow from beneath Rosa’s head and pressing it against what remained of her mouth, her nose. It was impossible, of course: such violence lay beyond her hands. But would the end not justify the means? Would it not be worth a moment of her own suffering—the revulsion, the guilt—to end that of another? Helen examined the problem coolly, as if it were a matter of integers and proportions—as if she might move a number from one column to another and find she reached a solution. The question of duty struck her most forcibly: it had been her duty not to turn from Rosa’s door—no
t to flinch at her wrecked body—to hold, to what was left of her mouth, something cool to drink. Where did her duty end—what was being asked of her? How could she tell what was good, what was right; what legal, and what just? It seemed they had little to do with each other.

  The following morning—a Sunday, very bright and clear, with no sign of the promised monsoon rains—Arnel met Helen in the shade of her apartment block. She held a bunch of cheap carnations. He had bought a pair of sunglasses in green plastic frames, and coaxed his hair into a quiff; as he approached her he paused, and danced, and swung his leather bag about. Helen laughed, and danced to meet him; he kissed her and said, “We had a call from the hospital—Benjie’s coming home!”

  “Your poor mother,” said Helen; and Arnel laughed, and kissed her again.

  “Don’t like him, huh? Well, that’s OK. He’s a pain—what are these—have you brought them for your woman?”

  Helen bent to smell the flowers, but they were scentless. “Then I suppose this will be the last day I see her,” she said. “I’m glad I brought her flowers.”

  “Poor little sister,” said Arnel. “You’ve been kind.”

  “Have I? I just sit with her, and sing sometimes, and you know my voice is no good.”

  “That’s true,” said Arnel, very fondly. “You are always flat.”

  “Sometimes I think it upsets her more, to have someone watching. I wonder whether everything would hurt more if there was someone there to see it.”

  “The trouble is”—Arnel frowned, and pulled Helen back from a jeepney rattling too close to the curb—“only children think closing your eyes makes a thing go away.”

  “But I can’t help her, can I? How can I help?” The white hospital was across the street. Two dogs roamed, thin and avid-looking; one had recently whelped, and her teats dragged on the pavement. A girl sat under a striped awning boiling in steel pans: she called out “Mais! Mais!” and the plaintive sound rose above the traffic. Arnel drew Helen into the shade of an electronics shop and put his hands on her shoulders. He looked very grave, as he sometimes did when he was not quite sure what to do.

  “You saw what I gave Benjie, yes? The Fentanyl.”

  “Of course.”

  “I have more.” He shrugged. “It was too easy. Change a date here, a number there. Take one for her. You put it on like a plaster: no one will see, no one will know, she’ll just have peace for the day. Isn’t some peace better than none?” Helen was not sure: it seemed to her that release from pain was a cruelty if only brief—that the fall into despair after would be too much to be borne. But still Rosa was behind her, walking, with a shuffling gait—she heard, very clearly, as if the woman really had left her white iron bed, the scratch scratch scratch of a thin hand on a thin sheet; heard also that dry, pained voice: my friend, my friend.

  In Benjie’s room there was much to be done: the petulant patient in his plaster cast soothed with corn from the market stall; nurses praised and blamed in equal measure; papers signed, filed, withdrawn, re-signed, filed again. “Go on,” said Arnel, giving Helen the leather bag. “Go and see your friend. Do what you think is right, hindi? I trust you, little sister.”

  What Helen heard as she walked for the final time down the dark and narrow corridor was not that frantic scrabbling and scratching which had first drawn her in, but a high soft keening. It was so high, and so soft, that for a time Helen thought it was only that her ears had begun to ring because the storms were coming; but as she neared the room with its empty doorframe it became unmistakably human. If I leave now I won’t hear, thought Helen, but it will still go on and on. Only a child would think otherwise. The chair beside the door was empty; a shadow lay across it. Helen went in.

  Rosa was not as she remembered. Her liquid eyes had acquired somehow the same fine layer of dust and neglect that lay on the tiled floor. She huddled against the far side of the bed, as if forced to share the mattress with an unwelcome stranger. In her distress she rocked back and forth; in doing so she tugged at the sheet and Helen saw for a brief shocked moment the body beneath it and the damage done. It took a great effort of will merely to stand beside the bed, beside the stool, and say, “Rosa. Rosa, I am here—do you remember me? Do you know me?”

  She waited. A window was half-open; scarlet bougainvillea seeped across the windowsill and dripped petals on the floor. “Rosa?” said Helen. Someone moved past the window, and stopped; there was the sound of tools striking hard surfaces outside. A man laughed, was silent, laughed again, and clicked on a radio.

  “Rosa?” said Helen, and music came in. Helplessly, Helen sang, not knowing the words, stumbling along to a half-heard melody. It stilled Rosa, as music sometimes did: the rocking and keening slowed. The woman fixed her eyes on Helen and it was possible to see the pupils settle, focus, grow clear: her character—which Helen had begun to know: courageous, frank, humorous, kind—returned. “It’s OK,” said Helen, wiping away the sweat and tears on her own cheek. “It’s OK. I brought you flowers, look—I’ll put them where you can see them. I can’t come back: I’m sorry.”

  Rosa gazed and gazed at her and began her silent weeping. “I’m sorry,” said Helen. “I’m sorry, but I can’t come any more . . .”

  Then the woman spoke, stiffening her body with the effort of it, and Helen met the words before they reached her, knowing what was coming: “Aking kaibigan: hayaan mo akong mamatay . . .” My friend: let me die.

  “How can I?” said Helen, and her voice was indecisive, querulous, unsure, and very like her mother’s. It was this that caused her to feel again a hardening of resolve: how could she? How could she not? She was not a thing made of clay, molded by circumstance for one sole purpose, likely to break if misused. She was an independent being, and her will was free: there was no restraining hand on her now but her own; no purpose other than to do what seemed—in that small hot room, if not elsewhere—most compassionate and just. She sat on the stool beside the bed, and Arnel’s bag was heavy on her lap.

  “Rosa,” said Helen—steadily, slowly, as if questioning a child—“Rosa, do you really want to die?” The face turned towards her softened. “I never called you Ate,” she said. “I should have called you Ate Rosa, my older sister. I haven’t got anything right, have I?” The hand beneath hers twisted, and moved palm upward; the thin fingers threaded through hers, and very faintly Helen felt the movement of a stroking thumb. “Thank you,” said Rosa: “Thank you.”

  “But I’ve done nothing,” said Helen. Her hand was wet with sweat. “I’ve done nothing.”

  “Thank you,” said Rosa: and for a long moment her eyes looked lovingly at Helen—more lovingly, she thought, than any eyes had ever done. Then something struck at her nerves, her bones, and she arched back against the bed and began to wail. It was angrily done: the howling of a woman who knows herself beyond the remedies of justice. Then there was a final calculation in Helen: one last assessment of her own soul set against another’s—of the likely cost of doing what must be done. She opened the bag. Arnel had not stinted in his theft: seven white packets were concealed within a small square pocket. Steadily Helen removed one. It was thick, and soft; in the heat of the day it had the warm and pliant quality of flesh. Rosa had turned to the wall and the sheet had fallen from her shoulder. Softly Helen placed the plaster there and pressed it with her palm. “There, there,” she said. “Shh—” Outside the workmen downed their tools and took away their radio. Helen stroked the thin hard flank beneath the blotted sheet: “I dreamed I dwelt in marble halls,” she sang, and went on singing. An hour passed of feeling the taut racked body under her hand—how soon will it work—how much more can I stand?—and still no respite: reaching for the bag she took out another patch and fixed it beside the first. Her hands did not shake. “I also dreamed which pleased me most,” she sang, and suddenly Rosa settled and stilled as if she’d been a small vessel riding out a storm. She turned towards Helen again. “There, ate,” said Helen: “There, older sister—be quiet now.” Then Rosa
smiled, and sighed, and her head swayed on the pillow; the pupils of her eyes dwindled to a pinpoint as if she were gazing into light.

  “Mamamatay ba ako ngayon?” said Rosa, whispering.

  “Mamatay?” said Helen. She stroked the woman’s forehead where her hair lay wet against the waxy skin. “You think you’re dying now? Maybe, Ate. Maybe.” Rosa closed her eyes and her mouth moved wider in a smile. The room filled with the scent of flowers—very heady, very sweet; there was a rustle at the window and a head of bougainvillea dropped from its stem and splashed on the floor. At the back of Helen’s neck cool air passed, as if at last fans had been brought in to alleviate the heat; slowly she turned, imagining that someone sat silently watching beside the door—but there was only an empty chair and a soft black shadow on the seat. There was a long quiet moment, and later Helen thought of it as a single indrawn breath: no men working beyond the window, no footfall in the corridor, no sound from the bed. Then she took out another of the white paper packets. “You’re my sister and I won’t leave you like this,” she said. She pressed another plaster beside the other. “There,” she said, and lay beside Rosa on the bed. Heat rose from her, and with it a smell like meat already gone over, mingled with the scent of flowers. Helen let the ruined body roll towards her: it seemed very soft, very pliant, like a body resting after love. Helen kissed Rosa’s forehead. “There, there,” she said. “It’s nearly over now.” The damp air caused the sheets to fasten against their skin. Rosa’s breath was easeful and shallow. Sometimes Helen sang. Shortly before dusk, when the room’s dark air began to cool, Rosa breathed out, and went on breathing out, until there was no air left in her. Slowly her pupils bloomed large and black and Helen saw herself in them. “There,” she said. “There.” She did not weep; her hands did not shake. She had simply done what was required of her. Swiftly she took the three white patches from Rosa’s shoulder and put them in the leather bag. She stood beside the bed, and looked steadfastly at what it contained, because that, too, was her duty. She touched the hand that rested on the sheet—but what use was it to say goodbye? She might as well say goodbye to the stool, the dying bougainvillea, the white iron frame of the bed. Silently and quickly, she left.