by Anne Enright
Outside, under a blank moon, I am free of it. Here is my belly in front of me again, big and hard and round. I stay close to the shadow of the wall and make my lumbering way to the doctor’s cabin. He lies slung outside; the smell of old drink cuts like vinegar the awful honey of the sailor’s decay. I pass the length of him, from boots to hair, and he stirs and settles, his mouth seeking the comfort of the cloth.
When all is still, I push in at the door. The smell is stronger now: it is absolute. And, instead of darkness, here is the river light again, mocking me as I strain to tell the sailor from the cot where he lies. We are in a flickering, shifting, underwater grave. And there he is. The light makes him look alive. I step forward and want to say … what? That I am here – that I am his Dora, or not his Dora – I have a dreadful urge to whisper it, but I do not know his name.
I let my breath out all at once, and startle myself with the sound. It is a bubble of air soughed from out his dead lungs, I am sure of it. This is how a dead man speaks. They say the last breath rises out of him a day, two days later, and if you listen to it you will hear – a curse sometimes, or a blessing, or a name. What is it, that I want to hear? When I see his face for sure then I will go, and I take a step nearer in the dark.
His eye is open. I closed his dead eye, but now it is open again. It looks, not at me, but at everything – at the light that is all the same and the four shifting walls and at me – it picks nothing out, but lets each fall indifferently into the well of his dead gaze – and we are all the same.
His face, I see as I turn to leave, is not like the face he had when he was alive. It is more stern. And older too. Ancient, and high in the nose. And the livid flesh and the unburned flesh fall alike, in tranquillity, away from all the sharp bones. He looks quite distinguished.
Back in my room, I see that eye whenever I close my own. Also, the open eye of the doctor fixed on me as I shut the cabin door. There is no doubt this one is alive: his pupil, black and wide with fright.
He is in love with me, I think. You can tell at that moment when someone wakes – the thing that dawns in their eyes. Or perhaps we all love easily in our sleep. Because I think I saw love, or something like it – wonder perhaps – before the fright. So I laid my finger on my lips before he should cry out,
‘A little prayer,’ I said, and smiled at him, as though I were a dream. I hope that he took me for such.
The ship moves gently on the water, tugging idly, over and over at the anchoring ropes. Holding us all, the coughing, shifting men, the dead man and me, retching into a basin in the watery night.
They say there is a sea in my belly now, and that my child swims inside me. And I think sometimes how dark, how blessed, it must be in there.
*
Today, enough wind to steer for the bank and the sailor’s grave. At last. We are almost beached in our eagerness to reach the shore, and the men leap overboard not waiting for the boats.
The sailor’s body is lowered on a chain; covered in hemp and criss-crossed with rope, like a doll you might make out of cloth and twine. He is rigid and, I think, quite ceremonial, as he lands feet-first. I would like to put a hat on him such as admirals wear, and send him off in his skiff for an inspection of the fleet. But they angle him down until he is lying the length of the boat on one side. The rower nudges him at every stroke and lifts his oar in fright and so they go in circles for a while.
There is no proper order to all this. Everyone spills overboard. My dear friend climbs down to bury the poor man; Mr Whytehead supervises the digging of the grave (I am surprised he does not draw up plans). Francine, with a soft look, disappears down the net of ropes. Was that a request? Still, I can hardly call her back. She is handed over by the doctor who turns to me to effect a bow, which he then fails to complete. He gives me a fuddled look that has something of last night in it, and then, to my delight, he turns tail and hops over the side.
Only Miltón remains. We look at each other and, for the first time I think, he smiles. It is a very pleasant grin with nothing of the savage in it – but slight and tender; as a man might smile in the theatre, to a woman he once knew and still admires. I smile back – my prettiest – and ask him his age.
‘Twenty-two?’ he says. ‘Maybe twenty-five.’ I tell him that he lies. He smiles again at whatever joke is between us now, and moves to the prow, quite naturally, in consideration of my solitude.
Alone. A bare few men remain. The boat is lighter under my feet, and rides high. I have an urge to explore. It is some time before I realise what is the smell that so entrances me – it is the smell of the dead sailor, gone.
I watch the burial party working where the river sand gives way to scrub. The men gesture slowly in the heat and scraps of talk drift towards the boat. After a while they abandon the spot and move farther inland, where the going, too, seems hard. When the two digging men are up to their thighs, there is more talk. They twist themselves out to sit on the edge, then jump clear when the body is swung – one, two, three – to disappear into the flat earth. I listen for a thump, but there is none. I cannot even see the hole. My dear friend stands in his gleaming black hat and reads from a book – a Bible, it must be, though I have never seen one on board. The sailors bow their heads and one, the Galway man it must be, crosses himself.
And so it seems done.
All this while, I lean over the side – his Dora. I press a handkerchief to my eye and dream of a cottage in Portsmouth or Plymouth where I would feed a man mutton and forget to bring his washing from the line. It is not a bad dream. If the man had a wife I will write to her myself.
Dear Mrs Titmouse (or some such English name), it is with the greatest possible regret … please believe me when I say … Your husband, though not loquacious, carried himself at all times with an air of … adventures long and gravely undertaken … gifts of simplicity and faith … with you in your grief, Doña Eliza Lynch Schnock y López; as I would be styled here, as a wife.
I must get a crest for my letter paper. Some sort of colonial theme – two crossed tobacco leaves under a capybara, rampant regardant – God help us – like some sort of demented calf.
The crew are in no hurry to return. They should have brought a picnic. They fill the grave with desultory slowness, one man working while another stands about and suckles the handle of his spade. Señor López strolls a little with the doctor and detains him by the river’s edge. The doctor crouches down while my dear friend doffs his hat and looks towards the sky; then Stewart grapples with his face. I am so struck by the tableau that I do not notice the figures of Francine and Mr Whytehead until they have almost skirted the thin river headland and are sinking into the distance on the other side.
It seems my friend has something the matter with his eye. What are they all doing? What are they talking about? Men move into groups of two or three, then break into new clusters. When Francine comes round the headland again, she is carrying her shoes in one hand and I cannot see where her stockings might be. She splashes a little in the water’s edge. I can see her turning face smiling at Mr Whytehead and, a long moment later, I hear her laughter on the slow air. All the men look at her naked feet. The doctor hurries forward and dips as though to lift them with his hands. I turn around to find Miltón looking, as I am, and shaking his head.
‘Very bad,’ he says. ‘For a white woman. Very bad.’
At least someone has some moral sense, however skewed (he himself being practically without clothes). When I look again, Francine is leaning on Mr Whytehead’s shoulder, while the doctor absurdly works about beneath her skirts, fitting her shoes back on. My dear friend stands idly; looking on.
My baby is not blind. I do not know what he may yet have, by way of eyes, but I sense them full and open beneath my skin, watching through the flesh the distant, mellifluous world, as it flows him by.
Poor pregnant Dora stumps from the rail. How can I explain this scene or another to my future child? – it is a question of shoes, little darling, a question of
feet. I try to care, but all the world has a sameness to it now, as I rest and he kicks: as I watch and he opens his eyes, and does not see.
I saw something in a jar once, in the private collection of a man on the Rue Vaugirard. And I think, for all my hopes, the thing inside me is still but a thing. I would look closer if I saw the jar now. But all I recall is the crease between shoulder and arm pressed up against the glass. Also, and strangely, the fatness of the gentleman’s thighs.
* * *
There is a grand satisfaction in the men when they return. They have buried their man – because the dead sailor is each one of them, a little further on. So they have saved his body from the river and the idle current, and put him in as good earth as a man could find at home.
Over dinner, the doctor leans towards me and gestures vaguely around his throat. There are flies, he tells me, in the sand, and they bite. I tell him I do not know what he might mean (does he expect me to go about with naked feet?). He inclines the ugly boulder of his head, and for the next while follows me around with eyes that are as large and ready to weep as a four-year-old child’s.
I am frozen all evening, as though with grief, and set about, and tired.
Tonight, in the darkness, my friend puts his two hands on my belly; then he places the side of his face there. I think he cries. There is a wetness crawling across my skin, and I am sure that it comes from his eyes. He is so quiet, so secret in his tears, that I cannot ask what grieves him. But it seems general, this sorrow – I am set to bawling myself, though I am not the crying kind, and soon we are both laughing at it, and blubbing and canoodling, and my heart seems to heave in my chest because I do not want to love him, but it seems that I am loving him a little, or at least kissing him, none the less.
I have no secrets my love, except love itself.
He falls asleep beside me. I lie and watch. His sleeping flesh clings close to the bones of his face and to the ball of his eye. I touch his hair and pinch it hard between my fingers. I want to wake him. I feel a terrible foolish, falling urge. It swoops through me – to tell him everything; to have all known, the men who were frantic or fond or kind, and my own cruelty. I would have him know the blackness of my heart.
The first man who cried for me (my dear friend) was Bennett – the man who liked my father enough to lend him three hundred pounds; who liked me enough to press his lips against my young feet and then rise, weeping, the length of me, as I stood there looking at the wall. This happened, not the first time, but the tenth or eleventh time, in that room in Bordeaux.
I would leave Mme Hubert’s school for girls and run down the street, my bonnet swinging in my hand. Some hours later I would return; greet Miss Miller at the door, curtsey to Mme Hubert in the hall, look them (unkindly, perhaps) in the eye. No one said a word.
The room was white and left its dry powder on my clothes or skin. There was a picture of the Magdalen, I remember, painted on tin, hung on one wall. She wore a dress of camel hair and held a skull in her hand. I thought the dress must be made of men’s hair – the hair of all the men she had ever known – because this was the greatest surprise to me now, the amount of hair on a man, and the peculiar places it seemed to drift, lodging in the pits and valleys like snow. I was surprised to see that a man’s personal hair turned as white as the hair on his head, or as grey, and I thought the Magdalen quite lucky to have a dress that was mostly brown. The skull, too, seemed part of her condition; because during the act, Mr Bennett’s skull was always clearer to me than the face he wore over it. When he opened his mouth, I saw the horseshoe of bone where his teeth were set; and suddenly he was all socket and jawbone, and the gaping snub triangle of nose.
And so it seemed to me that the tin Magdalen was not repenting but reliving – the feel of a man’s hairy skin and the look of his shapely, dead bones. Because Bennett’s touch was sweet as death to me. And oh! Death is sweet when you are fourteen.
I ran to that room. Sometimes I went ahead of the appointed time and the waiting was terrible. It makes me tired to think of it. There was no clock. I could hear the people on the street and, sometimes, the singing class I was missing in Mme Hubert’s school for girls. I sat on the bed and faced the door, pressing my feet down hard to stop the trembling. What opened, as the door opened, over and over in my head, was not my legs, or as you might say, my sex. What opened was my stomach and my heart – the flesh you might see on any butcher’s block melted into one swooping movement of the soul that yearned over and over again for the opening of that door.
He always looked different and small when the latch clicked up. But that is as you might expect.
This is not yet love, I thought, as Mr Bennett checked about him (though the room was always empty) and then looked over to me, and smiled.
He was kind enough, I have to say, and allowed my curiosity to lead the way. I was very intrigued by the sight of his member, a dull, blushing pink, ticking idly upwards – for the first many times he let me play with it only, to get the cushioned heft of it; its buoyant weight and its ugly, weeping eye. Then, when he entered me and rolled his eyeballs back, I thought I had killed him, which made me frightened and compliant for a week or more. And when I got the trick of it, I did not let it show.
I was waiting for the moment that everything would turn – because somewhere in my fourteen-year-old heart I knew that he was on the brink of it; of some devastation.
And I was right.
I think about it sometimes – the agonies of men in private rooms. I think of the men who would be torn apart by it, the men who would want you to cut their throat, or press into their eye sockets with your thumbs.
There are men who whimper and trick about like babies, as any woman who has worked on her back well knows. I have seen a duke wag his bottom and pant like a dog, and any number of wealthy men giggle and whine. But these things do not interest me. What interests me is that high, lonely moment when you know that you might kill a man and he would only beg to be killed again. And it was the longing for this moment that made me run to that room in Bordeaux.
And so, after a month perhaps, it turned. And here is Mr Bennett weeping on the floor. And here am I, a young girl looking at the far wall, and I am thinking, Now! Now, this is love. And every day I run down the street to sit on the bed and wait to love again. And I take from him, in twenty-one days, the sum of one thousand and seventeen pounds.
One night around that time, I woke to my teacher, Miss Miller, sitting on my bed. At least, I heard the whispering of her dress and felt the dreadful sag of the mattress in the dark. I could make nothing out, and when her hand came forward to touch my hair I ducked and would have cried out but,
‘It’s only me,’ she said.
She sat for a while, then,
‘Are you frightened?’ she said. I did not reply, and after some moments the mattress lifted and she was gone. I started to laugh. I knew what she was asking – she wanted to know if I was frightened, not of the man, nor of the future (nor even of her own ghostly figure in the dark), but of the act itself. Miss Miller wanted to know what it was like to know a man. This was the mystery that had, in its insinuating way, ruined her entire life. She was so reduced by it that she had to creep into a girl’s room at night and touch her hair.
The next morning I woke, and put that same hair into forbidden curls with Jeanette Blanchot’s tongs. I walked the passageways and went from one room to another, smiling and free. I had already finished. I was already gone.
Still, I have a horror of bed-ghosts, the ones who make your mattress dip, so all you feel is a weakening – the sense, in your sleep, of something giving way. I am frightened of all things that make you tip in your sleep, so that when you dream it is of falling. These days, I am so big I cannot lie on my own front. If I lie on my back I feel a choking ghost in my sleep. So I stay on my side, crooked around my belly, as my dear friend’s child is crooked in me. I would like him to lie crooked around us both, but he cannot stay close. He frets and wakes, then goe
s over to his hamaca to swing and snore.
What was that thing I wanted to say about love? I wanted to say something about the moment when necessity turns to love – because I felt always the tug of my father’s three hundred pounds. But still – ask any wife – there is always a moment when necessity turns to love.
He does not know how cruel I am. He weeps against my belly – because we have buried a man today, perhaps, or because he is going home, or because he loves me, I cannot tell. I stroke his hair when he is asleep, and he can not feel it.
Today was Christmas Day. Tomorrow the Feast of St Stephen.
*
This morning, all washed by a night of tears, my dear friend says into the stillness,
‘I killed a man, once.’
‘Only one?’ I say.
He and his brothers, drunk one night, tied the man to their horses’ tails and hullooed through Asunción. They left shreds of him on the street. You could see the white of his bones sticking out of his raggedy back.
‘But it is not the fact or the flesh of it,’ he says. ‘It is the why.’
‘Then – why?’ I say, careful not to look at him.
‘Why not?’ and he gives a painful laugh. ‘I don’t know. A woman turned me down for him – a not very attractive woman – and it wasn’t that either. It was a thing we had to do. The girl was nothing: Carmencita Cordal. She thought her father owned the town, which he did not.’
Or not any more, I think, and say nothing.
‘But the man certainly died. I turned him over and saw his eyes empty. I thought I would be sucked into them.’
‘And were you?’
‘No. Not in the least.’ He sounds disappointed.
‘So?’ I say, and my breath is so caught in my chest I have to slip the word out by subterfuge.
