“It was because of me? And before that, it was because I would not speak to my father about becoming a Mendicant. But I have done that, successfully, and still you were drunk this afternoon. Will I always be the reason, Darroti?”
“Gallicina, I am sober now.” And indeed he is clear-headed, for he has had no wine since five, when he sneaked a flask behind the booth, and the shaking has not yet overtaken him to tell him it is time for more. He moves to kiss her again, and she lets him, for a while—he can taste her hunger as clearly as he tastes his own—but then she pushes him away once more.
“Yes, you are sober now. But that is a matter of hours, and hours are not enough. Darroti, I have been through sore trials these past three months. I know that you have, too. But I must set you another one.”
“Name it,” he says, desperate for another kiss, frantic to keep her. “Anything. Name anything, and I will do it, Gallicina!”
“Do not drink at all for thirty days. And do not seek me out. If you can stay away from wine that long, then meet me one month from now in this same alley, at this same hour. But if you cannot, do not come.”
“Another month?” He is stunned. How can she ask this of him? “Another month, after the three that have just passed? Gallicina—”
“You said you would do anything.” Her voice is bitter.
“And so I shall.” He strokes her hair and kisses her again; she lets him. “I shall, I promise you.”
“Good. If you cannot—Darroti, if your love of wine is stronger than your love for me, then stay away. Let me go; do not torment me. And Darroti, dear Darroti—do not think to drink during the month, and then come and tell me you have not. I will know if you are lying.”
He pulls away, stung. “You will set spies on me? You do not trust me?”
She pulls him back. “I will not have to set spies. I will know. I have always known. Are you not the other half of my soul?”
Their kiss then is the deepest they have ever had, the longest and most passionate. Darroti wishes it to last a lifetime. But it ends, and Gallicina gently pushes him away. “Tell me I will see you in a month, Darroti.”
“I promise it,” he says. “I swear it by the Elements.”
She smiles at him at last. “Good, beloved. Go.”
He goes. He goes home and tells his family that he is going on a trip, a jaunt of a week or so, to the ocean with some friends. He tells them it is a last-minute expedition on which he has just been invited; he packs his things, whistling, and asks his father if he can borrow some money. Because he so seldom asks such a thing, Timbor gives him three hundred alaris, and his blessing; Darroti promises to bring home presents for the children.
He goes whistling out the door, carrying his luggage. He is no longer whistling when he reaches the whorehouse; he is already afraid, for already the galloping demons are after him, making him shake. Stini is with a customer, and he must wait to see her, but when she emerges, when he explains to her what he needs, she understands at once.
“Aye, Darroti. This is a good thing you are doing, a fine and brave thing. Everyone who loves you will thank you.”
“Then you will lock me in your apartment for a week, with food and water, but no drink?”
“And I will not give you wine no matter how much you beg. Darroti, have you ever grown dangerous with drink?”
“No.” The question startles him. “At least, not that I recall. No one has ever said so; surely they would have told me. And Stini, I will not be drinking.”
“That is what will be dangerous. You may destroy things, fighting your demons. If you break anything in my place, you must pay for it.”
“I understand.”
She puts a hand on his arm. “And you may die, Darroti. People die, sometimes, coming off drink. Even if you do not die, the beginning will be terrible. You understand that?”
He closes his eyes. Fear grips him. “Yes. I understand. But if I cannot stop—if she leaves me—oh, Stini, I will die then, too!”
“Brave Darroti. Come now. Come with me. For you are already beginning to shake, yes?”
He goes with her, allows himself to be locked into the apartment where he spent so many hours with Gallicina, which Stini now strips of anything fragile or capable of cutting. It is as she has said; the beginning is terrible. For three days he rages, screaming. All the monsters come out of the shadows, and with them spiders and centipedes, every insect that has frightened him since he was small, and mocking images of Gallicina with other men. He would do anything for wine: he would kill his family, kill Gallicina, kill Stini, who stays outside the door and does not heed his threats and wheedling. For three days he endures a wilderness of rage and horror; he convulses, the shaking uncontrollable, and emerges from unconsciousness certain that he is about to die; he becomes so ill that he cannot keep down food or water.
But somehow he survives. He is young and strong, for all his dissipation, and he clings to his love, to his hope for marriage, to his yearning to be good enough for his bride. And so one day he wakes clear-headed, and the demons are gone. He can see things for what they are again. He has no thirst for wine, but only for the cool clear water that Stini gives him as she praises him. And although he is terribly weak, he is jubilant. For the monsters are gone for good. He can feel it. And in only three more weeks, he can be with Gallicina again, can kiss her; and although the rest of her year as a Mendicant, the time before they can marry, will be torment, it will be nothing compared to what he has just undergone.
So he gets up and pays Stini the remainder of her fee; he paid her only half at first. With the little cash left to him, he buys sweets and seashells from the market, careful to let no one he knows see him. He goes home and gives the gifts to the children, and tells his family he was taken ill on holiday, and allows kind Harani to nurse him. They can sense the change in him. They are wary and puzzled, but pleased.
He goes to sleep every night dreaming of his wedding, and grows every day more joyous. He drives better bargains in the Market than he ever has before. And by the time the month is up, he has conceived a merry plan. He will go to meet Gallicina in the alley, but he will disguise himself, will ask her to be his Necessary Beggar; and then, when she asks what wedding it is, he will say, “Your own!” and sweep her into his arms. And then his entire life will be bliss, and nothing will be able to hurt him, ever again.
And so on the night he is to meet Gallicina, he wears a new robe, one she will not recognize, and brings with him a fine loaf of bread to give her, and hurries to the alley, just at ten. She is sitting there—dear heart!—sitting on the ground, carving a pineapple with a knife someone has given her. Is she weeping? Why does she look so sad? Dear Gallicina!
“I seek a Necessary Beggar,” he whispers to her, laughing, having crept silently into the alley—she did not even look up, why was she not looking for him?—and suddenly she drops the knife and flies at him, weeping and screaming, hammering at him with her fists.
“Darroti, Darroti, you are marrying your whore, I know you are, I saw you with her in the streets the very night we spoke a month ago, Darroti! You were always with her, the entire time you were with me, weren’t you?”
“No, Gallicina! I can explain—”
“Tell the truth, Darroti! How can you ask this of me, Darroti, how can you come here, you never loved me—”
“No! Gallicina, I love you, I always have, I was not—she was taking me to a place where I could give up drink, so I could keep my promise to you!”
She rages at him, her face streaked with tears and spittle. “Yes, you are sober, I see that. I smell it! You have made yourself sober for her, not for me! Haven’t you, Darroti? You never cared for me. You used my body—”
“Gallicina, no! Gallicina, how can you believe this of me?” But even as he asks, he knows the answer: she saw him with Stini a month ago, and she has had a month to weave a tale explaining what she saw. She has brooded on it; it is fixed in her mind. He finds himself, in a vertiginous ru
sh, imagining what that month must have been like for her. Mendicants have ample time to think: that is their task. Every moment must have been a torment for her, as it would have been for him if he had thought she loved another. “Gallicina, dearest—”
“You mock me with your cruel request, Darroti! I could not stand to officiate at your marriage to—”
“To you,” he says, desperate, pushing away images of her huddled against walls, clutching her begging bowl as nightmares of Stini overcame her. “Oh, Gallicina! To you. I only wish to marry you.”
But she is talking at the same time, talking over him, not listening. “You made love to your whore in the same spot where we made love, Darroti, didn’t you? In that same apartment! You laughed and gloated together—”
“No! Gallicina, listen to me!” He tries to embrace her, but she bends and snatches up the knife, and he backs away, afraid that she will threaten him. Does no one hear their argument? Why does no one come?
“I hope you will be very happy with her,” she says, and reaches up with one quick movement, and cuts her own throat with the pineapple knife.
“Gallicina!” Darroti cries. He catches her in his arms, forced to watch as her life blood leaves her, gushing; he is too stunned at first even to be horrified. He knows better than to try to seek a healer. He has seen people with such wounds in the Market, after brawls. People with such wounds do not survive.
And so, bewildered and bereft of hope, he spends the last moments of Gallicina’s life trying to make her understand, as her blood runs bright and hot over his hands onto the cold, dark stone of the alley. He tells her how he paid Stini to lock him in, that he might battle with the demons. He curses the stupid joke that has gone so fatally wrong. “It was our own wedding I spoke of, Gallicina, I swear to you. It was my wedding with you, dearest love, I will never love another, Gallicina, my own heart—”
He cannot tell if she hears a thing he says. He thinks that perhaps, just as she is dying, she begins to trace a kiss upon his arm, but her hand falls limp before she can complete it, and perhaps it was only his own wild fancy. All night he holds her body. He rocks and weeps; he thinks of cutting his own throat with the pineapple knife, but fear of meeting her furious spirit stops him. For he has killed her, as surely as if he made the wound himself. He knows that. He has killed her with his drinking and even with his struggle not to drink; he has killed her by not telling her the truth quickly enough; he has killed her with his stupid, stupid jest.
And so when the City Guard finds him, he does not try to defend himself. He does not tell them that she cut her own throat, or why. He accepts the sentence of murder and exile. For to tell the entire story now, he would have to further shame her family, and his own. Her people could only be disgusted that she had been with him; his people could only be disgusted, and betrayed, by all his lies. So he maintains the lie by silence, and adds another. To his family’s distraught demands to know what happened, he tells them he was drunk, that he succumbed again to wine that terrible night, and killed the Mendicant woman without knowing what he did. It is close enough to truth.
And now his spirit is here, in America, weeping into the towel in Timbor’s bookcase. And now, at last, he wishes them to know the truth, to know what really happened, for if he cannot make known the story of his love, that love will truly die, as if it never were. Telling the story is his only way to bring Gallicina to life again; to bring himself to life, as he was in the first days of their love, when he was brave and generous and happy.
There has been no Great Breaking here. Timbor could know the story if he would only listen. But always, after Darroti has tried to speak in Timbor’s dreams, the old man wakes frowning, shaking off the fragments of the tale. Sometimes, when no one else is there, Timbor takes out the pendant, the silver kiss Darroti brought with him into exile—both piercing joy and terrible reproach, but nothing he could ever leave behind—and ponders it. But the fragments do not form a whole, for him. Timbor stays bewildered.
And so Darroti weeps. He would do anything to ease his family’s pain, anything to change the past. He would give anything to hold his love again, to feel her fingers tracing on his skin the pattern of their kiss.
8
Honors
Zamatryna kept Gallicina in her closet for years. She didn’t know what else to do; the command for silence never changed. She wondered what Gallicina was learning from being in the beetle, if she was learning anything. Gallicina must have been a very complicated person. Clearly the force of her will was sustaining her beetle body, which should have died after one summer.
The girl concocted theories. She read ghost stories—careful not to let Stan know that she was doing so, since he wouldn’t have approved—and watched soap operas with Lisa. The plots of soap operas also went on for years, every bit as improbable as the beetle’s survival. Soap operas were always about love and money, and so Zamatryna found herself spinning stories about Gallicina and Darroti. They must have known each other, for Gallicina to have followed the family into exile, and for her spirit to be so stubborn now. They must have either loved or hated each other, or maybe both, and there had probably been money involved too, since Gallicina’s family had been rich. But whenever Zamatryna thought about her uncle, she could only summon increasingly blurry snapshots of a laughing clown, often drunk, but never hurtful. It was hard to fit the Darroti she remembered into a soap opera.
The ghost stories all agreed that the living needed to take action on behalf of the dead, to release them, to free them from having to haunt. Here in America, spirits needed to be freed from the world, whereas in Gandiffri, they lived within it. And so perhaps Gallicina, for whom the beetle’s body would have been a blessing back home, found it a prison here, in this new world. But Zamatryna had no idea how to free her. She knew only that she was not allowed to speak of the beetle to anyone else, and that she dared not release it from its jar, lest Stan find and kill it.
She did not think about the beetle all the time, of course. She had too much else to do. Although the subjects she studied in school were very easy, she quickly learned that there were other challenges. Her family, and Stan and Lisa, wanted her to be successful, to get good grades. But success also meant being accepted as an American, being seen as normal, and being very smart was not considered normal. Part of success was popularity. The smartest students were rarely also popular. They were excluded and called names, “nerd” and “freak,” the things that Zamatryna had been called her first day in school. Some were put in special classes for gifted and talented children; the grown-ups said this made you special, but special was also what they called children whose brains had been damaged at birth. Special children of either type weren’t popular, and therefore weren’t successful, and therefore weren’t the best Americans.
The trick, then, was to be as much like other, normal children as you could, while being smart enough to please the adults. So Zamatryna worked very hard at making friends. She studied commercials and magazines to learn what to wear, what to watch, what songs to sing. She learned to get top grades without seeming so interested or special that she would be put in the gifted and talented classes. She dutifully studied sports, although they baffled her. She spent hours at the mall with other girls. She concocted crushes on singers and movie stars, on everyone but the actual boys in her classes, whom she and her friends pretended to despise until the second half of middle school, when they began to date. You could date in middle school, but you couldn’t really fall in love: that had to wait until high school, where it was also safer to be smart.
In high school, students in Advanced Placement classes weren’t automatically called freaks. They could be popular, too, if only among themselves, but that was all right, because belonging to a clique, any clique, meant you were successful, although it was better to belong to several cliques. High school was a big relief.
While Zamatryna and her cousins were working at all this, the adults were working, too. They had all gotten jobs.
Timbor had learned to operate a car, and now drove a taxicab. Harani was a cook in a casino restaurant. Erolorit had started out as a bagger at Albertson’s, and now managed the meat department. Aliniana painted women’s nails in a hair salon. Macsofo, who had been a bricklayer in Lémabantunk, did the same thing here, and made more money than any of the others.
None of them made a lot of money, though: not enough for their own house. So they paid Lisa rent—which was really repayment for their documents—and continued to live among the clowns, in the lovely old house by the river. Stan and Lisa must have reached some sort of agreement, because he continued holding his little church in their own house. He seemed more tired to Zamatryna every year, grayer, his prayers less fervent. He had stopped trying so hard to convert the family, although they were still careful to avoid anything that might actively offend him. He and Timbor were fast friends now: they had adopted one of the cars at the Automobile Museum, a 1936 De Soto Airstream taxicab, cream with orange and white trim and orange plastic sunbursts on top. They had picked the taxi in honor of Timbor’s job, and Zama thought it looked like a creamsicle. Stan and her grandfather went to the museum every Saturday, and spent ten hours a year polishing and maintaining the De Soto; their names were on the display card next to it. Stan looked happy whenever he came back from spending time with the car, and happiest after the quarterly parties the Auto Museum gave for the cars’ adoptive parents. “He acts like that thing’s an actual child,” Lisa said once, shaking her head, “and your grandpa isn’t much better.”
“Lisa,” Zamatryna said, “is Stan all right? He seems—old.”
“Well, he’s older than he used to be. We all are. Mainly, I think he’s having a real long midlife crisis. He started out with high hopes for our church, you know, and it’s just the same little group of people it was at the beginning, and folks are starting to wander away. Stan feels like the Spirit’s meandered off someplace, like the fire in his belly’s gone. He’s never spoken in tongues, you know, or had a vision of Jesus, even. He feels like he’s just an ordinary man. And I tell him that’s all he has to be, an ordinary man who’s following the Lord and doing good, but I don’t think he believes it. I don’t think he sees that he is doing good, just by being himself. He thinks good has to be dramatic, you know. He has trouble seeing the quiet stuff, like the way your mom does good just by cooking for people.”
The Necessary Beggar Page 18
