by Lydia Davis
While the warmth of summer lay over the land, I was content, living in my majestic and soot-blackened room. I cleaned it up, filled it with furniture, and set up a drawing board in one corner, where I worked on plans for rebuilding the house. Looking up from my work, I would see the sunlight on the olive leaves and be lured outdoors. Walking over the grass by the house, I watched, with the tired, expectant eyes of a man who has lived all his life in the city, magpies running through the thyme and lizards vanishing into the wall. In stormy weather, the cypresses by my window bent before the wind.
Then the autumn chill came down and hunters stalked near my house. The explosion of their rifles filled me with dread. Pipes from a sewage-treatment yard in the next field cracked and let a terrible smell into the air. I built fires in my fireplace and was never warm.
One day my window was darkened by the form of a young hunter. The man was wearing leather and carrying a rifle. After looking at me for a moment, he came to my door and opened it without knocking. He stood in the shadow of the door and stared at me. His eyes were milky blue and his reddish beard hardly concealed his skin. I immediately took him for a half-wit and was terrified. He did nothing: after gazing at what was in the room, he shut the door behind him and went away.
I was filled with rage. As though he were strolling around a zoo, this man had come up to my stony little pen and rudely examined me. I fumed and paced around the room. But I was lonely there, out in the country, and he had awakened my curiosity. By the time a few days had gone by, I was anxious to see him.
He came again, and this time he did not hesitate at the door, but walked in, sat down on a chair, and spoke to me. I did not understand his country accent. He repeated one phrase twice and then a third time and still I could only guess at his meaning. When I tried to answer him he had the same trouble understanding my city accent. I gave up and offered him a glass of wine. He refused it. In a diffident sort of way he got up from his chair and ventured to inspect my belongings at closer range. Proceeding from my bookcase around the walls, which were covered with framed prints of houses I particularly liked, some in the Place des Vosges and some in the poor quarters behind Montparnasse, he finally arrived at my drawing board, where he stopped short and stood with his finger in the air, waiting for enlightenment. The fact that I was planning a house, line by line, took him a long while to understand and when he did, he began tracing the walls of each room with his finger, a few inches above the blueprint. When at last he had examined and traced every line, he smiled at me without parting his lips, looking sideways in a rather sly way which I did not understand, and abruptly left me.
Again I was angry, feeling that he had invaded my room and stolen my secrets. Yet when my anger subsided I wanted him to return. He returned the following day, and a few days later he came yet again, though the wind was high. I began to expect him and look forward to his visits. He hunted every morning very early, and several times in the week, after he was finished, he would walk in from the field, where the sun was beginning to color the white clay. His face would gleam and he would be so full of energy that he could hardly contain it: leaping up every few minutes from his chair, he would pace to the door and look out, return to the middle of the room, whistling tunelessly, and sit down again. Slowly this energy would die away, and when it was gone, he would go too. He never accepted anything to eat or drink, and seemed surprised that I would offer it, as though sharing food and drink were an act of great intimacy.
It did not become any easier for us to communicate, but we found more and more things to do together. He helped me prepare for winter by filling the chinks in my walls and stacking wood for the fireplace. After we had worked, we would go out into the fields and the forest. My friend showed me the places he liked to visit—a grove of hawthorns, a rabbit warren, and a cave in the hillside—and though I had only one thing that I could show him, he seemed to find it just as mysterious and absorbing as I did.
Each time he came to see me, we would first go over to my blueprint, where I had added another room or increased the size of my study. There were always changes to show him, because I was never done improving my plan and worked on it almost every hour. Sometimes, now, he would pick up my pencil and awkwardly sketch in something that would not have occurred to me: a smokehouse or a root cellar.
But the excitement of the plan as well as the pleasure of having a friend were blinding me to a dreadful fact: the longer I lived on my land, letting the time slip by, the more the possibility of building the house faded. My money was trickling away and my dream was going with it. In the village, far from any marketplace, the price of food was double what it had been in the city. Thin as I was, I could not eat any less. Good masons and carpenters, even poor ones, were rare and expensive here: to hire a pair of them for a few months would leave me too little to live on afterwards. I did not give up when I learned this, but I had no answers to the questions that plagued me.
In the beginning, my blueprint had absorbed all my time and attention because I was going to build the house from it. Gradually, the blueprint became more vivid to me than the actual house: in my imagination, I spent more and more time among the penciled lines that shifted at my will. Yet if I had openly admitted that there was no longer any possibility of building this house, the blueprint would have lost its meaning. So I continued to believe in the house, while all the time the possibility of building it eroded steadily from under my belief.
What made the situation all the more frustrating was that on the outskirts of the village new houses were springing up every few months. When I had bought the land, the only structures in the valley were stone field huts—squatting in the middle of each plowed field, they were as black as caves inside, with floors of earth. After signing the deed, I had returned home and stood, well satisfied, looking across the acres of abandoned vineyards and overgrown farmland to the horizon where the village sat piled up on a small hill, like a castle, with its church steeples clustered at the top. Now, here and there on the landscape, there was a wound of raw red earth and in a few weeks a new house would rise like a scab above it. There was no time for the landscape to absorb these changes: hardly had one house been finished before the live oaks were felled right and left for another.
I watched the progress of one house with particular horror and misgiving, because it was within a few minutes’ walk of my own. The deliberate speed with which it went up shook me and seemed a mockery of my own situation. It was an ugly house, with pink walls and cheap iron grillwork over the windows. Once it was finished, and the last young tree planted in the dust beside it, the owners drove up from the city and spent All Saints’ Day there, sitting on the terrace and looking out over the valley as though they had box seats at the opera. After that, as long as the weather held, they drove up to the house every weekend, filling the countryside with the noise of their radio. I watched them gloomily from my window.
The worst of it was that my friend immediately stopped visiting me on the weekends. I knew he had been drawn away from me by my neighbors. From a distance I saw him standing quietly among them in their yard. I felt utterly miserable. At last I had to admit how bleak my position was. It occurred to me then to sell my land and begin all over again somewhere else.
I thought I might get a good price for the land from other city people. But when I went to see the real estate agent, he told me flatly that because there was a sewage yard in the next field and because my house was uninhabitable, my property would be almost impossible to sell. He went on to say that the only people who might be interested in buying it were my neighbors, who had in fact resented my presence all this time and would give a very low sum for the land just to be rid of me. They had told the agent in confidence that my house was an eyesore in their front yard and an embarrassment when friends came to spend the day. I was shocked. My strongest feeling, of course, was that I would never sell to my neighbors. I would never give them that triumph. I turned my back on the agent and left without saying a word
. As I stood deliberating on the doorstep, I heard him go into another room, say something to his wife, and laugh loudly. This was a very low point in my life.
When, after several weeks, my friend stopped coming altogether, without a word to explain his absence, my bitterness was complete. I sank into a deep depression and decided that I would give up the idea of building a house and return to my job in the city. The directors of my company had not been able to find anyone else willing to put up with the long hours and devote himself to such interminable complications. They had several times written asking me to return and offering me more money. I could easily slip back into my old way of life, I thought; this stay in the country would then have been a protracted holiday. I even managed to convice myself, for a moment, that I missed city life and my few acquaintances in the office, who used to buy me drinks after particularly tedious days. I told the agent to make an offer to my neighbors, and tried to think that I was doing the right thing. But my heart was not in the move, and I felt like a changed man as I packed up my belongings and took a last walk around my narrow boundaries.
The suitcases were out in the early sunlight before the door of the house, the taxi I had hired was bumping over the dirt road toward me, and I was really on the point of leaving, when I thought I might have been too hasty. It would be wrong to go without saying anything to the young man who had been my friend, whose name I did not even know. I paid off the taxi driver and told him to come at the same hour the following day. He gave me a doubtful look and drove back down the road. The dust swirled up behind him and settled. I carried my suitcases inside and sat down. After I had spent some time wondering how to find my friend, I realized that of course I had been foolish, that I had pointlessly committed myself to one more day in these hostile surroundings, that I would not be able to find him. The directors would be annoyed when I did not arrive at the office, they would worry about me and make an attempt to reach me, and would be completely at a loss when they did not succeed. As the morning advanced I became more and more restless and angry with myself, and felt that I had made a terrible mistake. It was small comfort to know that on the following day everything would go forward as planned, and that in the end it would seem as though this day had never passed at all.
During the long, hot afternoon, small birds fluttered in the thorny brush and a sweet smell rose from the earth. The sky was without clouds and the sun cast black shadows over the ground. I sat in my business suit by the wall of the house and was not touched by the beauty of the land. My thoughts were in the city, and my imprisonment in the country chafed me. At supper time there was nothing to eat, but I was not willing to walk to the village. I lay awake cold and hungry for hours before falling asleep.
I awoke before sunrise. I was so hungry that I felt I had stones in my stomach and I looked forward to eating some breakfast at the train station. Everything outside my window was black. Gusts of wind began moving the leaves as the sky became white behind the black bushes. Color slowly came into the leaves. In the forest and closer to the house bird songs rose and fell on all sides. I listened very intently to them. When the rays of sunlight reached the bushes I went outside and sat by the house. When at last the taxi came, I felt so peaceful that I could not bring myself to leave. After some angry words, the driver went away.
Throughout the morning and into the afternoon, I sat in my business suit beside the house, as I had sat the day before, but I was no longer impatient or eager to be elsewhere. I was absorbed in watching what passed before me—birds disappearing into the bushes, bugs crawling around stones—as though I were invisible, as though I were watching it all in my own absence. Or, being where I should not be, where no one expected me to be, I was a mere shadow of myself, lagging behind for an instant, caught in the light; soon the strap would tighten and I would be gone, flying in pursuit of myself: for the moment, I was at liberty.
When evening came I did not know I was hungry. Lightheaded with contentment, I continued to sit still, waiting. Driven inside by the cold and the darkness, I lay down and had savage dreams.
The next morning, I saw a figure at the far edge of the nearest field, walking very slowly across. My eyes felt as if a long emptiness had been filled. Without knowing it, I had been waiting for my friend. But as I watched him, his hesitation began to seem unnatural and then it frightened me: he weaved back and forth over the furrows, put his nose up as though sniffing the air like a spaniel, and did not seem to know where he was going. I started to meet him and as I drew closer I saw that his forehead was wrapped in bandages and that the skin of his face was an awful color of gray. When I came up to him he was bewildered and stared at me as though I were a stranger. I took him by the arm and helped him over the ground. When we reached the house he pushed me aside and lay down on my bed. He was trembling with exhaustion. He had lost so much flesh that his cheeks were like pits and his hands were claws. He had such fever in his eyes that I thought wildly of going to the village for a doctor. But after his breath had returned to him he began speaking quite tranquilly. He explained something at great length while I sat uncomprehending by the bed and listened. He made several motions with his arms and finally I realized he had been in a hunting accident. During all the weeks that I had been reproaching him so bitterly, he had been lying in a hospital somewhere.
He continued to talk on and on, and I found it hard to concentrate on what he said. I became restless and impatient. After a while I could not bear it any longer. I got up and paced stiffly back and forth in the room. At last he stopped speaking and pointed to one corner of the room, under the window. I did not understand, because there was nothing there but the window. Then I saw that he was trying to point to the drawing board, which had been dismantled, and that he wanted to see my blueprint. I unpacked it and gave it to him. Still he was unsatisfied. I found a pencil in my pocket and gave it to him too. He began drawing on the blueprint. After a short time he had covered the entire paper, out to its edges, with complicated forms. Standing over him and staring, at last I recognized a tower and what might have been a doorway among the tangle of lines. When he had filled the page, I gave him more sheets of paper, and he continued to work. His hand hardly paused, and what he drew had the complexity of something conceived and worked over during many solitary days. When he was too tired to move the pencil any longer, he fell asleep. I left him there in the early evening and went to the village for food.
Returning across the fields to my house, I looked at the red landscape and felt that it was deeply familiar to me, as though it had been mine long before I found it. The idea of leaving it seemed to make no sense at all. Within a few days my rage and disappointment had ebbed away, and now, as in the beginning, each thing I looked at seemed only a shell or a husk that would fall away and reveal a perfect fruit. Though I was tired, my mind raced forward: I cleared a patch of land by the house and put up a stable there; I led black-and-white cows into it, and nervous hens ran underfoot; I planted a line of cypress trees on the edge of my property, and it hid my neighbors’ house; I pulled down the ruined walls and with the same stones raised my own manor, and when it was finished, I looked upon a spectacle that would excite the envy of everyone who saw it. My dream would be realized as it was first meant to be.
I might have been delirious. It was not likely that things would end that way. But as I stumbled over the field, sinking deep into a furrow with one step and rising to a crest with the next, I was too happy to suspect that at any moment my frustrations and disappointments, like a cloud of locusts, would darken the sky and descend on me again. The evening was serene, the light smooth and soft, the earth paralyzed, and I, far below, the only moving creature.
The Brother-in-Law
He was so quiet, so small and thin, that he was hardly there. The brother-in-law. Whose brother-in-law they did not know. Or where he came from, or if he would leave.
They could not guess where he slept at night, though they searched for a depression on the couch or a disorder among the
towels. He left no smell behind him.
He did not bleed, he did not cry, he did not sweat. He was dry. Even his urine divorced itself from his penis and entered the toilet almost before it had left him, like a bullet from a gun.
They hardly saw him: if they entered a room, he was gone like a shadow, sliding around the door frame, slipping over the sill. A breath was all they ever heard from him, and even then they could not be sure it hadn’t been a small breeze passing over the gravel outside.
He could not pay them. He left money every week, but by the time they entered the room in their slow, noisy way the money was just a green and silver mist on their grandmother’s platter, and by the time they reached out for it, it was no longer there.
But he hardly cost them a penny. They could not even tell if he ate, because he took so little that it was as nothing to them, who were big eaters. He came out from somewhere at night and crept around the kitchen with a sharp razor in his white, fine-boned hand, shaving off slivers of meat, of nuts, of bread, until his plate, paper-thin, felt heavy to him. He filled his cup with milk, but the cup was so small that it held no more than an ounce or two.
He ate without a sound, and cleanly, he let no drop fall from his mouth. Where he wiped his lips on the napkin there was no mark. There was no stain on his plate, there was no crumb on his mat, there was no trace of milk in his cup.
He might have stayed on for years, if one winter had not been too severe for him. But he could not bear the cold, and began to dissipate. For a long time they were not sure if he was still in the house. There was no real way of knowing. But in the first days of spring they cleaned the guest room where, quite rightly, he had slept, and where he was by now no more than a sort of vapor. They shook him out of the mattress, brushed him over the floor, wiped him off the windowpane, and never knew what they had done.
