The hotel had a patio of sorts, but it was too hot and too impregnated with insect life and the steamy exhalations of plant life to sit in during the daytime. There remained only their room and the streets, some of them fortunately shaded over by portales, the tunnel-like arched passageways characteristic of Spanish architecture. Still, the monotony of seeing nothing but stone arch supports and stone building walls, the same supports and the same walls over and over, back and forth, palled soon enough, drove them back inside the hotel again in glassy-eyed surfeit.
The relief that nightfall brought was only an optical illusion; the glaring light that seemed to create the heat was gone, but the heat itself remained.
He would wake up each morning and say to himself, Thirty days more. Then, Twenty-nine days more. Then, Twenty-eight. And so on. Then presently he stopped doing it. For some curious reason, instead of making the time seem shorter, this system of subtractive reminder seemed to make it pass much more slowly. Each day was endless when you pasted a numeral onto it. If you left it blank, unidentified, it slipped by less conspicuously.
It was around the tenth day (twenty still to come) that the arm bangle appeared. He came into the room and found her standing there. As she turned toward him she was holding her arm in a pecuhar way, tightly gripped close up toward the shoulder.
"What'd you do, hurt yourself?" he asked anxiously, casting his hat aside.
She let the sheltering hand drop to reveal what at first sight almost appeared to be some encrusted, gangrenous excrescence, encircling her smooth ivory-pale skin. Then at closer range, as he stepped quickly over, he saw to his vast relief that it was only a band of thick, crudely fashioned metal, some three inches wide. Traces of some rotary design were still faintly visible through its weather-beaten patina, studded at intervals with chips of turquoise.
"Where'd you come across that?" "I saw it in one of the windows. I don't know, something about it drew me. I'd start to go on past each time, and then I'd come back again and look at it some more. Finally I went in the door."
"But what'd you put it on your arm for?" he asked with a grimace of repugnance.
"I don't know—it just semed to belong there. I didn't even know I was doing it. I looked, and there it was on me already." She traced it dreamily with her fingers, almost caressed it. "It just seemed to belong there," she repeated. "And, I don't know, once I had it on"—she gestured helplessly—"I just couldn't seem to take it off again."
"But you're not going to keep it on?" he protested incredulously. "It's claptrap. The sort of thing a Kaffir woman would wear. Look at it, it's all green and tarnished, kind of—" He reached out to disengage it.
She drew back a step, shielded it protectively with her hand.
He shrugged. "Well, if you want to keep it, that's up to you. But it looks freakish, fantastic."
She drew it off very slowly, very reluctantly, and held it in her hands for a long time. At last she put it lingeringly away in a drawer.
The next day he saw her standing by the partly open drawer, looking down at it without taking it out. She closed the drawer softly when she became aware he had entered.
He said nothing.
The second day after that he was in time to see her thrust it back into the drawer, then close it. This time she had been holding it in her hands. Again he dicjn't say anything to show he had noticed.
The third day, it was on her arm again. It stayed on her arm from then on.
Presently it became a little more lustrous, a little less encrusted, with the friction of her skin. Or perhaps he had grown more used to it. Either way, the sight of it became more bearable to him.
Thus the days of their isolation toiled by. It was impossible for him to tell at what point he first noticed the absent-mindedness. Absent-mindedness was his own inappropriate mental description for it, discarded again almost as soon as he had become aware of anything at all intermittently present in her manner that required naming even to himself, but with no other designation at hand suitable to take its place.
First a vacant look. He said something J:o her and she did not hear him. He repeated it, and she heard him. That was all there was to it, that time. Its incipiency was that elusive. The incident was over. It was not even an incident. It was nothing.
Later, the vacant look came again. He remembered the time before. Now, therefore, he looked at the vacant look. Thus he became aware of the "absent-mindedness." It was under way. But again, that was all there was to it. Oh, he said to himself, she's just trying to get a little air out there on the balcony. She's lost in thought.
He addressed her once more. "Are you going to freshen up, Mitty? We may as well go down and eat their Godawful rice and beans and get it over with."
She got up at once and came into the room.
It was still nothing, less than an incident. But it happened out on the street too.
They were strolling together and their way led past the mouth of another street that opened onto the one they were following. As they crossed before this gap, he heard her step beside him slacken, then failed to hear it resume, and turning, saw that she had fallen several paces behind him, had faltered to a halt, and was standing with her body still ahgned in the same direction his was, but with her head tiurned aside the new way. He joined her in looking, as anyone would have, and there was nothing there. Nothing to see. Just the marginal lines of the street drawing together in perspective to a single point. There was not even anyone moving along its length. It led straight out to nowhere. Suspended beyond even that nowhere, as if to show that perspective itself had a Hmit, was the mountain, like a filmy blue backdrop.
"Why do you stand here like this in the middle of the road?" he asked her. "You haven't reached the shade yet What's stopped you like that?"
"I don't know. I suddenly looked down that way, and—"
"And what?" he said, looking again, and seeing again what he had seen the first time: nothing.
"I don't know." She blinked at him, as if seeking some sort of assistance. "I don't know now. It's gone again. But I felt something strange."
He was obtuse at this stage. Not alert yet to the things he could not have grasped anyway. "A speck of dust fly in your eye?" He thought she meant something like that.
She shunted the remark aside unanswered. "Wait a minute, Larry," she said.
She turned and retraced their last few steps. This carried her back past the street opening, to where the impeding side walls sprang up again. There he saw her turn and start forward again, as if seeking to test something. He would have even thought she was seeking to discover something she had lost on the ground, but the forward cast of her eyes showed she wasn't. Her concern was with some impression within her mind; the blank yet expectant look in her eyes as she came toward him showed it to be that.
Once more the street mouth sprang open beside her. She turned and looked aside—as she must have the first time—then came on toward him the rest of the way. "It didn't happen the second time," she said.
"What didn't happen? You haven't even told me what it was the first time."
"Something seemed to pull at the comer of my eye. And as I turned to look, but before I had turned to look, while I was still only going to, I knew I was going to see something that I'd seen before. Then when I did turn and look, there it was, just as I'd known it would be: that mountain 'way off there."
"Of course you thought you saw it before; why wouldn't you? Maybe you came past this same crossing yesterday, or maybe the day before. The corner of your eye remembered it and—"
She moistened her lips. "It was a deeper before."
She just looked at him, and he looked at her, as if there were a barrier between them; a vast, thick sheet of glass that didn't block vision or thje sound of their voices but cut off everything else.
Finally he grinned, to put an end to the situation. "You're a funny girl," he said patronizingly. He went on down the street beside her.
It was nothing. Just an incident, a
stray moment's exchange between them as they walked along a street together.
This was the beginning of what, for a short time, he designated as her absent-mindedness.
Chapter Eight
He reared to a sitting position under the mosquito netting, still in the transition between sleep and awakening, some sort of fear in him; fear that had carried over from sleep into wakefulness. Only now did it begin to ebb away, revealing itself by the traces left behind, as a receding tide leaves bits of shell and dampness on the sand where it was a few moments before.
It hadn't been a dream. There had been no images just now. Just some sort of formless fear. He pushed his hair back, and his hand came away from his scalp wet.
The net was a gray blur all around him, like vapor. He flung it aside after that moment or two of baffled, threshing confusion that always preceded his accurate locating of the hidden seam that it parted on.
The confines of the room enclosed him like a black velvet pall in the stifling tropic night. He palmed the marble-topped stand between their two beds, turned up an invisible circle against the darkness that showed minute flecks of phosphorescent green, let it He flat again. A quarter of three in the morning. Then he saw her.
She was seated outside on their balcony in the moonlight. Motionless as a white statue. Staring toward that accursed mountain.
He watched her for a while from where he was. It was unnatural, it was uncanny, to sit that still. Not to move at all. To stare that hard, that long, that ail-obliviously. It was more than a stare of fascination, it was a stare that approached a trance.
He got up and placed his bare feet on the tiled floor. She never moved; she was as unaware of the blurred motion behind her as though he had been a thousand miles away.
He lit a cigarette, drew on it once, found it no solace, and put it out again. Even the flicker of the match, which must have been like a yellow star shell bursting in the dark vault of the room behind her, failed to attract her attention, failed to reach her senses.
He drew in his underlip as one who inhales sudden coolness. He was frightened. Something cold was touching him, something unknown. He couldn't identify it, ,and so was helpless against it. His hand went to his head again, staved there a moment clutching at his hair in harassed futility.
Then he went slowly out onto the balcony behind her. He stood just at her back for a moment, and still she didn't see him, didn't sense his nearness. He let his hand come to rest on her shoulder finally, gently, in order not to startle her.
At once she turned and looked at him, in perfect and continuing possession of her faculties. For a minute he had a terrible sensation that she didn't recognize him. Then it passed, along with the passing of whatever had caused it; he couldn't tell what that was. Something in her eyes, most likely.
"Can't you sleep?" he asked.
"I was asleep, but something woke me up. I don't know, I just seemed to come out here." She turned to look forward again, as though she couldn't refrain from it for very long, even with him at her shoulder.
"Have you been doing this very often at night? Other nights, when I didn't wake up?" He kept his voice casual, detached.
"I don't know. I suppose I have. I must have. Something seems to pull me out of my bed, and—and I come out here."
"I watched you just now, Mitty. You keep staring just at that, at that thing. Not over to the left, not over to the right, not down below us at the rooftops—not anywhere but just at that. Only at that, straight at that."
"I know," she said submissively.
"What is it, what does it?"
"I don't know."
"Do you hear anything?"
"No," she said waveringly. Then she confirmed the uncertainty of it by adding, "Don't you hear anything?"
His answer was a little flash of shock within himself.
"I guess it's in my own head," she quickly qualified it.
His hand tightened a little on her shoulder. "What is?"
"I don't know now any more. When I try to catch it, it keeps still."
He crouched down on his haunches beside her chair, like a tame bear. He tipped her face toward him with a finger to her chin. "That fever you once told me about— do you feel all right, Mitty?"
She answered the text of his question, but without doing him any good. "I feel all right."
He dropped his voice to a forlorn undertone meant for her inner ear alone. "There is something, Mitty. Last night when we were sitting here in the room—remember, when I seemed to be reading that magazine? I wasn't, I was watching you over the top of it. There was a look on your face as tliough you were being drawn out that way, in that direction. Itwasn't just that your head was turned. After a while you were actually leaning over that way in your chair, from the waist up. The upper part of you. As though something was tugging at you. I coughed, and you relaxed and sank back against your chair. I could see you didn't know it yourself. It mayn't sound like much, but—" His voice shook. "Won't you tell me what it is, what you feel?"
Her eyes were fixed limpidly on him, wide with helpless inability to succor him. "I can't tell you any more than I've already told you. I don't know. Larry, I don't know."
"But why don't you look at the sea? There is a sort of fascination in the sea, I could understand that. But why always in there, inland, to the back country? What is there about that? Can't you put it into words for me? Don't you love me enough to put it into words for me? I don't care what words, but just words—to take away this creepy nothingness!"
"I don't know." She always came back to the same thing again.
"I don't know my face is turning that way, until suddenly I find that it already has. I don't know my eyes are seeking it, until suddenly I find that they're already on it."
He straightened up, raised her to her feet. He had to draw her away after him with both arms. "Come inside, Mitty. Don't stay out here any more." He led her back into the darkness of their room. Then he stepped over to one side of the window. "Here, let me lower these blinds," he said tight-lipped.
"We won't get any air."
"I don't care. I don't want you to see that damned thing any more."
And as the blinds came rustling down, dismembering the night sky into parallel slivers, he did a strange thing there behind her back. A strange thing for a young husband to do. He shook his fist. Not at another man, trying to take his wife away from him, but at a mountain, crouching out tliere at the foot of the far-off horizon.
Chapter Nine
Again a startled awakening. Again the receding tide of fear, the casting aside of the encumbering net. Again the velvet pall of the room. Everything the same, except that this was another night.
His eyes, piercing the gloom, sought her first on the balcony, in remembrance of the time before. She wasn't out there. The spidery little wrought-iron chair she had sat on stood empty. This time she was gone completely.
He crossed to the rail of the balcony and looked down. There was notliing there below, no one. Dark lanes running through a patchwork of tiled roofs interspersed with patio foliage; an entombed hght or two here and there, standing guard in the silent watches of the night.
She couldn't possibly be down there. What would she do down there at this Godforsaken hour? But then, there were no other places for her to be but up here or down there. And up here she wasn't.
Turning from the rail, he trod on something soft and white he had not noticed lying there before. Her handkerchief, dropped on the balcony. So she had stood there by the rail a little earlier, as he was doing now.
He plunged back into the room, found the cumbrous light switch, and the uncertain electricity went on. Her nightdress clung to the rim of the bed, dripping down toward the floor, as though thrown from a distance and in a hurry. One slab of the ponderous wardrobe teetered open, and her dress was gone, the only one she had, the one she'd happened to have on that unlucky day she'd stepped off the boat.
The light only confirmed what the darkness had already told
him. She'd gone out of this room. She'd dressed and gone out of here, into the night-bound town, while he lay asleep.
In a moment he had his trousers on, was out in the silent, shadowed hall, and then down the stairs to the ground floor. He knew the answer and he was afraid to admit it to himself. The mountain.
He punched the bell on the untended desk with the whole side of his tightly fisted hand, and it exploded with a jangle in the stillness. A chair scraped somewhere out of sight, and the clerk came waveringly sleepily forward. "Did my wife go by here? Mi senora?" He swept his hand along.
The clerk nodded. "Si, senor. I saw her go by a little while ago."
"Did she speak to you? Say anything?" "No, senor. I bowed; she didn't seem to see me. I said something to her; she didn't seem to hear me. She was just looking out that way intently." He shrugged expressively. "Salio."
Jones floundered out into the darkness of the street. He looked up and down it. He didn't even know which way to go. He chose a direction at random, and jogged along on the double. There was no one in sight around him. There was no sound but the scuff his own hurrying footfalls made. Then a low-hanging palm frond drooping over a wall got in his way, and he sliced it aside. It gave a venomous reptilian hiss, as though a raging boa constrictor had been looped over his head. He shivered and went on.
Something kept swelling inside his breast, and it had nothing to do with shortness of breath or the exertion of his run. Some sort of fright. Fear in the night. Fear of the night. Fear of strangeness. Fear of things that are not to be named.
After the first couple of blocks he couldn't hold it in any more. It burst from him between cupped hands, a hoarse cry of sheer, undiluted terror: "Mitty!" and went reverberating down the street, shocking the somnolent night.
That was no way for a grown man to call anyone, he knew; berserk, half crazed like that. He tried not to do it again.
Savage bride Page 4
