Cold Skin

by Albert Sanchez Pinol

  I fell into the habit of pausing at sunset on the very beach that once witnessed my arrival. The inlet softened the waves as they lapped toward the shore. Fireworks burst across the horizon as the sun lowered in the sky. Bolts of sulphur and swaths of springtime gold put on their show. Rays of orange and violet wrestled like flying serpents, twisting over and under each other. Those last flashes of light made me fall victim to a strange delusion. I wanted to believe that the Sitauca were speaking to me. Their murmurs, confused with the outgoing tide, seemed to be saying, no, not today, we shall not kill them today. At length, I would return to spend the night in the lighthouse.

  The snow might have been melting, but my relations with Gruner were growing ever chillier. The weather was, curiously, the only thing uniting us at that point. Until then, we had been too preoccupied with the Sitauca to consider other, more fortuitous risks. A body being run through by a bayonet has no time to worry about a possible attack of appendicitis. The spring fell upon us with all of its Antarctic brutality. The tempests felt eternal with the Sitauca gone. Thunderclaps seemed to bombard us like heavy artillery. The walls shook. An unremitting light glowed through the windows. Lightning spread across the horizon, resembling a network of giant roots. My God, such lightning. We dared not confess it, but we were deathly afraid. Aneris was unmoved. Perhaps she did not understand the full extent of our peril. She did not know that the builders had neglected to install a lightning rod. We knew. Our flesh might be reduced to ash at any moment, like ants beneath some sadistic child’s magnifying glass. And so, while Aneris kept her regal poise, Gruner and I bowed our heads and muttered incantations like prehistoric humans of old, impotent against the elements.

  But this fellowship ended when the sky cleared. I had to conceal my emotions whenever Gruner took Aneris off to his quarters. Those nights were often sleepless. Gruner’s hoarse cries resounded throughout the lighthouse as he pounded his slave. The man genuinely repulsed me. I could barely refrain from bounding up those stairs and snatching Aneris away from that greasy bed. On those days, I should have infinitely preferred to murder Gruner than any Sitauca.

  He did not know it, but the most flammable charge of dynamite to be pulled from the Portuguese ship was me. My fuse was lit every night, and I knew not how many times it might be blown on before exploding. My passion for her had grown larger than the island itself.

  I found the sweater she wore particularly offensive. It was an unravelling woollen rag filled with holes, which may have once been white but had long since mutated into a sickly greyish yellow. She freed herself of it when Gruner wasn’t looking. Nudity was her natural state. Aneris moved with an admirable lack of modesty; the concept of shame was unknown to her. I never tired of gazing at her, taking in every angle: as she walked naked through the forest; as she sat with her legs crossed on the rocks; as she climbed the lighthouse steps; when she was as immobile as a salamander on the balcony. She lay with the forlorn sun on her face, chin up and eyes closed. I made love to her as often as I could. Although he abused her more than ever, one could never tell when he might throw her aside. She suffered through the night and was bored during the day. Our paths sometimes crossed. When Gruner had no other choice, he would gloomily trudge upstairs to gobble down some food. Aneris put our rooms in order while Gruner lurked about outside. She had a very peculiar relationship to objects. She considered shelves elusive and unstable. She insisted on placing our things on the floor. Our belongings were lined up closely together along the walls, each item weighted down by a stone.

  On the days Gruner left Aneris alone, we would secrete ourselves in the woods. The little ones saw us together several times, and the truth is that they were quite indifferent to our passion. I tried to catch Aneris interacting with the children out of the corner of my eye. They had almost no contact. If anything, she treated them as an added nuisance. They might have been a line of communication between her and the others. The children could have brought messages and news. But they did not seem to interest her in the least. She ignored them just as we might ignore a colony of ants crawling about on the ground. One day I spied her scolding the Triangle. The little ones may have been troublesome, but he was more mischievous than the rest of them put together. She shooed him away, but he always came back, as though deaf to her shrill cries. I saw this as his finest quality. To Aneris, it was his greatest defect. But it was obvious that she was averse not so much to poor Triangle as to what the little fellow represented. I had renounced my people just as she had renounced hers. That was all. The only difference was that she was much closer to the Sitauca than I was to humans.

  What was the use of asking unanswerable questions? I was alive. I should have been dead, but I was alive. They could have torn me limb from limb. By all rights, my cadaver should have been rotting at the bottom of the Atlantic. Instead, I was making boundless love to Aneris, beyond any taboo, beyond any law. And yet, it was impossible to get close to her.

  Her reticence should not have surprised me, given her life at the lighthouse. Like it or not, Gruner and she were inextricably linked. In fact, I was implicated in his cruelty. On the other hand, she was clearly not being held against her will. Although Aneris did not appear to begrudge Gruner for his violent abuse, she did not appreciate his protectiveness either. It was as if that despicable man who possessed, denigrated and beat her was nothing more than a necessary evil.

  A door opened within her after making love. I could see it in her face. She gazed at me as if through thick glass, with an intensity which might easily have been mistaken for affection. With all their limitations, these flashes of lust seemed to hint at some form of love. It was only a mirage. Asking for a caress was like pulling teeth. Her eyes glazed over whenever I began to speak with complicity of the two most solitary lovers on the planet. If I embraced her excessively, she withered.

  But it is no good trying to describe a play without a script. Life at the lighthouse was ruled by the unexpected, and our story meandered along a far more sinuous route.

  15

  One day, the children did not keep their daily appointment. By midmorning it became clear they were not coming. The Triangle looked out to sea like a miniature buzzard. But his anguish was short-lived. He was soon clinging to my knee like a contortionist. That was his way of impatiently begging me to play.

  I was the one who felt the children’s disappearance most cruelly. They had been the only breath of air in a land charred by gunpowder. Aneris kept silent in her own peculiarly hermetic manner. Gruner was possessed by a giddy vitality. Although he refused to admit it, Gruner was aware that the Sitauca children had been sent to convey a message to us. Their disappearance meant that we would return to our old ways; that was all.

  I observed him as he lined up the ammunition, constructed fresh barricades and fashioned new weaponry. He had cobbled together a launcher to fire off flares like projectiles from a row of empty tins. The bizarre object resembled a tube organ. Gruner was quite talkative, one could almost say jovial. The prospect of bombarding our assailants with the coloured flares cheered him enormously.

  His efforts, however, were wrought from desperation. The war was already lost. Holding out until the last battle might justify Gruner’s philosophy on life, but it could never save him.

  We shared our midday meal.

  “Perhaps they won’t wait for nightfall,” I said.

  “Trust me. They are in for quite a surprise.”

  And, sticking out his teeth, he giggled like a rabbit.

  Aneris was sitting with her legs crossed on the floor. Her body still, she gazed unseeingly ahead as if in a trance. I considered how our violence revolved around her as the planets orbit the sun. Gruner sank heavily onto the bed. His enormous belly swelled and deflated. Like Aneris, he was between sleep and waking. What was I doing with a rifle in my hand? I told myself that the weapon was a precautionary measure. Deep down, I knew I had no choice. Gruner opened his eyes. He did not blink.

  He stared up
at the ceiling without getting out of bed and said, “Did you shut the door carefully?”

  I understood what Gruner was driving at. It was his way of admitting that the Sitauca might very well venture out in the light of day. His words could be taken another way. Throughout those days, he had turned a blind eye to the Triangle’s constant presence. Where was the little one? Gruner’s concern was purely practical. He did not want the little beast meddling about during combat. But that Gruner should be the one to remind me of the Triangle was unpardonable.

  I bounded down the stairs. He was not there. I was quivering with fear as I left the lighthouse. There he was, at the edge of the forest. The sun’s lowering rays gave the snow a bluish tint. The Triangle had a finger in his mouth and laughed when he spotted me. There were several Sitauca on their knees behind him, holding the little fellow about the waist and whispering kindly in his ear. There were at least six or seven others in the surrounding undergrowth. I could only make out the glow of their phosphorous eyes and the outlines of their bald skulls.

  A shiver ran through my bones. But it was not a trap. A plethora of webbed hands nudged the Triangle toward me. It began to rain. The drops fell heavily, leaving craters in the snow like tiny meteorites. The Triangle grasped my knees and laughed, demanding to be carried on my back. He only wanted for us to play together.

  I suppose the Sitauca expected me to respond somehow to this gesture of goodwill. But then their muscles suddenly flinched. I looked behind me. Gruner had witnessed the scene. He turned about on the balcony, mocking yet anxious. He had tied his invention to one of the banisters.

  “Gruner, they’ve come in peace!” I screamed, protecting the Triangle with one hand and waving my other arm wildly through the air. “They mean us no harm!”

  “Take shelter in the lighthouse, friend! I shall provide cover for you!”

  He fiddled with the launcher. One wick connected each tin tube where the flares were hidden. The artefact was pointed directly at us.

  “Don’t do it, Gruner! Don’t set them off!”

  He did. The tubes were too short and the flares burst forth in every direction. Some sent a shower of sparks down on our heads while others hit the ground before exploding. The land blazed with fireworks of eight different colours. I threw myself to the ground, shielding the Triangle beneath my belly. In the midst of the confusion he slipped away like a wet fish.

  The Sitauca leaped about, dodging Gruner’s flares and bullets. The shots flew quite close to my head, buzzing by like a swarm of bees in my ear. The Triangle was caught in the middle and sobbing with fright. I was huddled over, gesturing for him to come to me. I longed to protect him. He hesitated. The little fellow knew not whether to take refuge with me or run toward the waves. It anguished me to watch this inner struggle. We seemed to be separated by a seamless pane of glass. Finally, he retreated a few paces. Then he went away for good. I could still see him bobbing in the waves. As irrational as it may seem, losing the Triangle affected me much more than my failure to make peace with the Sitauca.

  Once at the lighthouse, I charged up the stairs three at a time. I clutched Gruner’s chest in a fit of rage, gripping him so tightly that one of his coat buttons came off in my hands.

  “I saved your life!” he protested.

  “You saved my life?” I bellowed. “Your pyrotechnics have dashed our one chance of survival.”

  I went out on the balcony. As one might expect, the Sitauca were gone. The Triangle was nowhere to be seen. It would soon be dark. Harsh gusts of wind blew the rain this way and that. Gruner’s apparatus, nothing more than a heap of tin, clattered against the balcony’s iron bars. The din merely exasperated me at first. However, I was soon sunk in a welter of fatalistic melancholy. What a wretched death knoll, I said to myself.

  Gruner gazed fervently outside, repeating, “Where are they, where are they?”

  All I could do was clutch my rifle. We kept close watch on each other, sometimes openly, sometimes on the sly. By nightfall, the situation became absurd. We were not speaking to each other, and yet we had taken up our posts, one on each side of that tiny balcony. I no longer knew whether we were keeping vigil over the surrounding darkness or just watching each other. Nothing transpired until midnight. The rain ravaged the snow. Streams of snowmelt cascaded down the rocks, sweeping up dead branches in their wake.

  At one point, the moon shone through parted clouds. The gleam revealed a cluster of Sitauca. The beasts were at the forest’s edge, in the same spot as before. They made no sign of coming any closer. I scanned the group in search of the Triangle. But Gruner immediately opened fire. The Sitauca dispersed under the rain of bullets. Some fled on their hands and knees.

  “Look at your friends now!” Gruner intoned victoriously. “They skitter away like insects! Have you ever seen such miserable creatures?”

  “This battlefield is no different from any other. I myself have crawled away when the bullets flew about me. Hold your fire! How shall we ever reach a truce if you insist on barraging them with lead? Hold your fire!”

  I seized the barrel of his Remington with one hand and aimed it toward the sky. But Gruner brutally wrenched the weapon away from me and discharged another round of bullets.

  “Don’t shoot!” I exclaimed while reaching for his gun.

  He reacted as though I had been trying to rend his arm from its socket. Gruner kicked me inside, his rifle poised in readiness. It was a declaration of outright aggression. He bellowed insults at me. I sank down into a chair and bit my lip, my face red with rage. There was no use trying to reason with a madman. He stepped into the room. Leaving aside the Remington, Gruner began to bellow out an incoherent and disjointed discourse. I merely looked on, my arms crossed like a defendant on trial. He waved the harpoon above his head, singing its praises. Aneris’s skin had turned darker than ever as she sat on the floor, her back against the wall. She began to sing in a soft, reedy voice.

  Gruner kicked her furiously with his foot, not attending to where the blows fell. In those moments, I was far more afraid of him than of the Sitauca. Furniture toppled over in Gruner’s whirlwind of rage. He took Aneris by the neck. I thought he would snap it like a bottle. No. Gruner drew up closer to Aneris, whispering sweetly in her ear. He spoke in a completely different tone of voice than usual. And that was not all. Emotion screwed up his eyes in their sacs of swollen flesh. It would have taken very little for him to burst into tears. This man, coarseness personified, was about to cry. A book had fallen out of a toppled commode. It was the copy of The Golden Bough.

  “My God, you knew it was there, did you not?” I intervened, dusting off the book’s cover. “You have always known.”

  The Sitauca howled below, sounding rather more indignant than deadly. Gruner’s entire body went rigid. Sensing the collapse was near, I kept silent. It was the surest manner to set forth the evidence, prove to him that he had not a leg to stand on.

  Then, in a friendly and edifying tone, I suggested, “Gruner, all we have to do is offer them something in exchange for a ceasefire.”

  I believed him to be unmanned. But he pointed an ever more menacing finger at me. He reasoned with an ironic guile I should not have thought him capable of.

  “Of course, you have lain with her. You bedded the beast. Now I understand!”

  I had simply attempted to offer a reasonable solution, to parley for peace so we might save our lives. However, he had arrived at an accurate conclusion through false logic.

  “Your amorous inclinations do not coincide with mine,” I said in the most diplomatic tone I could muster.

  “You have had your way with her! You have possessed her. I knew it, I knew it since the first day I laid eyes on you, since the first day you set foot in this lighthouse. I knew, sooner or later, you would stab me in the back.”

  Was he truly bothered that we were lovers? I doubt it. The accusation was just an excuse to vent his loathing. No, I was not guilty of adultery. I had committed a far graver abomination. M
y words had shattered his simplistic universe, uncluttered by nuance. That world had been dependent on a black-and-white absolutism to survive. It was fear, not hate, which caused him to beat me as if his rifle barrel were a truncheon. He feared that his toads might somehow resemble us, and was terrified of their making reasonable demands. Listening to them should oblige us to set down our weapons. That rifle expressed itself with more eloquence than any speech as it landed on my skull and ribs. Gruner, Gruner, had gone so far in his attempts to distance himself from the beasts that he had turned into the worst toad imaginable.

  It remains a mystery to me how I managed to escape down the trapdoor. I reeled and tumbled down to the ground. Gruner followed behind, roaring like a gorilla. His fists pounded me with staggering velocity. They fell like hammer blows. Fortunately, my thick layers of clothing blunted the punches a bit. Unsatisfied with the thrashing, Gruner seized me by the collar with his two hands.

  He battered my body against the wall again and again. It was only a matter of time before he smashed my skull or spinal column. His brutality reduced me to the level of a rat. My only hope was to tear out his eyes. And yet, as soon as Gruner sensed my fingers pawing his face, I was thrown to the ground. He set to booting me with his elephant-sized feet. Dragging myself away, I chanced to turn around and saw the axe poised in the air.

  “Gruner, stop! You are no assassin!”

  He was not listening. I went numb there, on the brink of death. Scenes from an old and inconsequential dream flitted through my mind’s eye. Just as Gruner lifted the axe, an inexplicable thing happened. His features were lit up by a combined flash of debility and intelligence, like a meteorite coursing across the sky. He still held the weapon aloft with the doomed happiness of a scientist who has scorched his retinas in order to discover exactly how long the human eye can stare at the sun.