Only Sofia-Elisabete

by Robin Kobayashi

  I am alive. He crossed himself.

  To me, he smelled of oceanic death, like the funk of the sea-shore.

  “But are you my Kitt … or … the other one?”

  What? I am your Kitt.

  If I didn’t believe him, would he just disappear? Confused, I glanced at Sorcha weeping on the isle.

  He clasped his hands. I swear it is true, by the Celtic cross.

  “No, no, no … you shan’t hoax me!” I folded my arms. “My Kitt is constant—not false to his vows. He would never betroth himself to another when he was already married.”

  What are you talking about?

  “Your betrothal to Sorcha—her father announced it.”

  He stared in mute surprise at me. Their customs mystify me. I don’t understand Gaelic. But he understood me. The real Kitt knew too well my jealous tendencies, which was why he showed me the wedding ring on his finger. I am your Kitt, he conveyed with his eyes in a forceful manner. He pressed his hand to his heart, to reaffirm his love. I love only you.

  I wanted to believe it so badly. Cautiously, I touched his gold ring, the one with two hands clasping, and it sparked on his finger. It was our wedding ring. I cried out in wonder, for we were living in the same dream.

  He embraced me so tightly after that, his heart beating upon mine, and all the warmth of his love and our shared feelings came rushing back to me. We held on and on, not wanting to lose each other again, not wanting to think what might have been—he lost to me forever in the shadowy depths of the sea. And though we kissed with fevered eagerness at least a dozen times, a silent sob now and then between, our reunion was not entirely joyful.

  I untied the seaweed from his neck. “Can you not speak at all?”

  A sad miserable shrug was his response.

  “Oh, Kitt, could you not have saved yourself by telling them who you were?”

  No one I met understood English, he told me in his soundless language. Who would have believed me anyhow, when I looked like a crofter?

  My man somehow or other had been cast ashore on an isle where everyone babbled in an alien tongue. He had lived secluded in poverty on the west side, completely dependent on Sorcha and her father, and otherwise friendless, unable to leave the isle. Days often passed before he saw another soul. The few isle-folk who did meet him considered him a half-wit, given his muteness, not knowing that he didn’t understand Gaelic. Every blunder he made, every odd thing he did, was attributed to his bad brain.

  His gauntness worried me.

  “You’re terribly thin, my love. Have you not been eating?”

  He turned grave. There is famine here. They eat dulse collected from the rocks.

  We took ourselves to Bunessan, a small village on the Ross of Mull, which serves as the market town for Iona. The inn, if you could call it one, was a rustic stone cottage with two beds in a spare room. I called it humble and tidy, because there are no bed bugs here in the Western Isles, whereas the colonel called it squalid.

  “Where the deuce is the chimney?” he asked, choking on the black smoke from the peats. The smoke drifted out the cracks of the doorway.

  Conn MacPhee told him, “A chimney would bring cold air inside, but the smoke—”

  “Oh yes, the smoke keeps you warm here,” said the colonel, drily.

  Soon after our arrival, Kitt collapsed onto the bed. Fever and chills followed, and soon delirium. He thrashed about, his hands slapping the air, as though he were fighting a thousand devils, and nothing could calm him. My man lay trapped in a feverish world. The colonel spared no expense to save Kitt. He, with the aid of Conn MacPhee, brought us a surgeon-apothecary, one who claimed a distant connection to the Beatons of yore—a medical kindred who had served the kings and lairds.

  This Mr. Campbell prescribed Peruvian bark and valerian, and I recorded the information in my note-book. When Kitt’s paroxysms returned with much violence on the second day, such that it took four of us to subdue him, the surgeon-apothecary administered laudanum, castor and camphor. Kitt lingered for several days in this weakened state while I, with the help of the servants, nursed him—Neville fetching water from the waterfall behind the inn, and Baillie fanning away the smoke from the peat-fire.

  “Querido mío, please don’t leave me,” I whispered in Kitt’s ear. “You promised me that you would come back for me.”

  As if to reply, he opened his dazed eyes. And then he fell asleep again.

  Four longish days later, nature triumphed over the disease, giving us much hope, and two days after that, Kitt declared himself well enough to sit down to dinner. Neville brought forth the portmanteau—the clothes for Kitt. When my husband, fully dressed, emerged from the bedroom, I swore I felt a cold breath of air upon me. His light trousers and greyish-blue coat, so very loose on him, were strangely identical to those of his doppel-ganger. How could that be?

  The innkeeper’s wife served up flounder, potatoes and oat-cake, all of which Kitt ate voraciously. She poured him a cup of milk, with barley and sugar in it, and he quaffed it in a matter of seconds. He told us, in writing, using my pocket book and pencil that I had given him, that the milk at the croft had had a queer taste, until he realized Sorcha had mixed it with seaweed for medicinal purposes. It had left him sickish, however.

  “Poverty is a disease, of which the cure is food,” observed the colonel, who gave his dinner to Kitt.

  “You are all goodness.” I got up to kiss the colonel’s cheek.

  Wishing to help us, the innkeeper’s wife spoke highly of Cairstine MacColl, a wise woman with second sight, who lived in nearby Suidhe. Old Cairstine had the English, so we needed not a translator. But Kitt refused to see this healer.

  He wrote, “I don’t believe in much of anything right now. I want to go home. Let us return to Scarborough post-haste.”

  Later that evening, the colonel took me aside.

  “He’ll die if we leave now. He’s too frail. Another cold could kill him.”

  Alarmed by it, I told the colonel, “I’ll think of something.”

  The morning after, I convinced Kitt, using my pleading eyes, of my great wish to see this Cairstine MacColl, to learn about healing. “I’ll never get another chance to meet her,” I told him. This weakened his resolve, because I knew he liked to indulge me. What I didn’t tell him was that, if anyone were to know for sure that he had a double, it would be someone like Cairstine MacColl, who had “the sight.”

  “Do come with us,” I urged the colonel, who was breakfasting on porridge.

  “No, no. You married sweethearts wish to be alone. I shall write to Aggie—I mean, Nurse Wharton. Now, off you go,” and he motioned us away, wearing those sad crinkling eyes of his.

  To be sure, I felt bad about it, when we had become so close on this journey—almost like a real father and daughter ever since Iona. I promised to tell him everything afterwards.

  Kitt, leaning on a walking-stick, set off slowly by my side. We took the road westward for about a half-mile, after which, we rested for a spell before we walked up a dirt path to Suidhe. The clachan stood on a brownish-green hill, where the peat reek and dung hills reminded me just how difficult the crofters’ lives were. At the first stone cottage we came to, an old woman, very brown-skinned, stood outside her door. She smelled of incense.

  “I ken what ails ye,” she claimed.

  Cairstine MacColl, with her all-seeing wrinkled eyes, said that Kitt’s shadow-self—an echo of himself—followed him step for step, but this one, blurred as it was, seemed lost and sorrowful. “Yer heart is sore,” was her explanation. It didn’t surprise her that he had become mute after nearly drowning. She spoke of his heart out of its shell, because the sudden terror of a violent death had frightened him out of his wits.

  “I can turn yer heart back into its place.”

  The first thing she did was to boil some lead. She poured it, while invoking the Trinity, into a wooden vessel that had water in it and that had been placed on Kitt’s head. Searching through the piec
es, she found the one most like a heart, and this piece she took and “turned round” for him. She declared that his heart was now turned back into its place, and he would come to himself.

  “Keep this heart-shaped piece ever after, an’ ye’ll not lose yer wits again.”

  Kitt nodded to her. He still couldn’t speak.

  “Peace to ye, Kitt Munro.” She bid him good-bye.

  We strolled up to the very top of the hill, from where we could see Iona in one direction, Staffa in another, the snow-topped Ben More that loomed in the distance, and the loch below, with a colony of seals on the red rocks. A light mist clung to the isles.

  In the pocket book I had given him, Kitt scribbled a message to me that, although he didn’t believe in this cure, he agreed that his heart had been out of its shell.

  “Will you keep the heart-shaped piece then?”

  He gave it to me instead.

  “I suppose I’ll just have to live with two of you.” And I explained to Kitt how his doppel-ganger, wearing the same clothes as him, had shown himself to me several times, but he couldn’t speak a word.

  Troubled by my visions and his mischances at sea, Kitt vowed never again to look upon Glasgow. He stooped to pick up a stone. Scowling, he hurled it down the hillside where it clattered upon some rocks.

  “Oh, Kitt, won’t you tell me what happened? Why did you not come home to Scarborough straight away when you said you would?”

  He looked upon me with startled eyes. I sent a letter express to you from Glasgow. Did you not receive it?

  We sat ourselves on the brown grass near two ancient standing stones. In this solemn place, beside the burial ground, Kitt explained everything, this time choosing to write it down for me. It went like this: After the big row with his father over the marriage settlement, he resolved to take the evening coach to Edinburgh. His father barred his way, however. He persuaded Kitt to come away with him, to take a jaunt to Loch Fyne, because who knew when they would see each other next.

  “Be a good son now. Do this for your old father.”

  Kitt reluctantly agreed. An hour later, he and his father stood on the deck of a steam-boat, sailing on the river Clyde. But when they entered the dark waters of Loch Fyne, his father wished to see Inveraray, and when they got to Inveraray, his father wished to ride to Oban.

  There, at this fishing-village, his father deceived him by placing him at the mercy of their distant cousin, Murdo Munro, a rough wizened-looking mariner. He gave his son one more chance, but Kitt refused to work for his uncle. In horrible terms then, his father reproved him for being selfish and useless.

  “Your head is positively turned!” shouted his father in a sudden burst of anger. “Several days rusticating on an uninhabited isle, with nothing to eat but a miserable oat-cake, should fix your stupid brain.”

  “I’m not stupid,” Kitt told him.

  And that’s when his father, mad with rage, dealt him a blow, knocking him down. He couldn’t believe it.

  On a nod from his father, Murdo ordered his men to tie up Kitt, so that he couldn’t jump overboard. It was the last time he saw his father. Once their small cutter neared the Isle of Staffa, Murdo’s men untied him, but not before they had stolen his money and pocket-watch, and had given him some hard kicks and blows. Murdo then took a cat-o’nine-tails out of its sack.

  “A flogging for the landlubber!” Murdo laughed in a joking way.

  Kitt didn’t take it as a joke. He plunged at once into the foaming grey sea, determined to swim into Fingal’s Cave. The current got him first, worst luck, and he panicked. In the quietude of the deep, he sank into the liquid shadows, and he was sorry for it, that he would be drowned there, never to see me again.

  The sea brought his body to Iona for burial. Opening his eyes, he found himself lying in shallow waters upon a pebbly shore. No, he couldn’t still be alive—could he? He soon realized, however, that he was dead—dead to his family, dead to Glasgow, because he would never set foot there if he could help it, not after what his father had done. He wept soundlessly at his loss and, in that moment, he discovered his sudden muteness.

  Kitt looked at me. Frustrated by his inability to speak, he sighed silently. The words are there, locked in my mind, but something won’t let me release them.

  I nestled my head on his shoulder, breathing in his sea scent. “Dear Kitt, I think you are choked with rage for having been betrayed by your father after you had bravely spoken your mind to him. You have always been a faithful and loving son, and to be treated so abominably by someone you had trusted your entire life, was too much.”

  How could my own father be so cruel to me? How could he not care what I think, what I want in life? How could he have hit me? His head sank miserably upon his chest.

  To heal him, I placed the heart-shaped piece on his palm, and then I covered it with my own. This touched him to the quick. He, the unbeliever, must have wanted to believe again. Pressing his lips together, he struggled to speak, desperate to convey something important. His face reddened, his eyes teared from his efforts, and each time, when he nearly gave up, he tried once more to free his thoughts. In a hoarse whisper barely audible, the words finally broke out.

  “Sofía mía.” He gazed down at me solemnly. “I’ve kept my promise and returned to you.”

  15. Imaginarians

  Conn MacPhee told anyone who might listen a strangely beautiful tale of a young wife, just out of girlhood, who came to Iona in search of her husband—a noble-hearted Glaswegian feared lost at sea. Without knowing it, she had come upon her husband twice on this sacred and mysterious isle, but he, so altered, so suddenly mute, had escaped her recognition. It wasn’t until their third encounter that she truly knew him by his gold wedding ring.

  Those who had met the young couple said Conn MacPhee got the story wrong. Rose MacPhee, his kinswoman, praised the Good People for granting the wife’s wish to find her husband. Cairstine MacColl, the seer in Suidhe, claimed that the young man’s shadow-self, an omen of illness or death, had guided his wife to Iona. And Ian MacDiffie, the swearing boatman, declared that the mighty sea god Seonaidh, in the guise of a dolphin, had rescued the husband from drowning and thereby reunited the married sweethearts.

  Then there was Sorcha MacLeish. The milkmaid would have everyone believe the tale of an unfaithful merman who had abandoned her. He left her big with child, the improbability of which she slurred over, given that the child would be born in very few months. Edan would be his name, in memory of his merman father, and he would have webbed toes in the merfolk fashion. There were many, however, who suspected that the father was Niel MacInnes, an itinerant fisherman known for his webbed toes and barnacles.

  These things Conn MacPhee told us while Kitt recovered in Bunessan. To restore my husband’s health, we fattened him up with potatoes and cream, mutton and more mutton, and a host of birds and fowl—plovers, cormorants, goosanders—which the colonel, who had refused to eat another bite of mutton, slaughtered with his gun. I walked out with the colonel one morning. With one shot, he blasted six starlings, which had perched themselves atop a cow.

  “A very killing method,” he coolly observed.

  “Very.” I felt badly for those starlings.

  “Do you know how to shoot?” He tossed out the question.

  “A true sporting man taught me. I became a crack shot.”

  He paused to remember. “Aye. But you never do kill anything.”

  If only he knew the truth.

  It seemed, then, I was now nine years old in his memory. Did he realize that the memories would end here, that a gap of six years would occur next? I watched him carefully for signs of madness, but nothing out of the ordinary happened. He seemed steady for now.

  It was late November. Kitt’s strength had returned, and he wished to join the men in shooting rabbit. But first, I insisted that he warm his boots by the fire before he put them on. And to protect his throat, I made him wear a Scottish charm—a stocking wrapped round his neck. My wif
ely attentions embarrassed him. His freckles turned crimson, and he tugged at the stocking when he thought I wasn’t paying attention. I begged him to let it alone.

  “The village-folk say it cures a sore throat.”

  “It’s a silly notion,” said my man of science.

  “Still, it keeps your neck warm, and that’s why it helps.”

  While the men were out shooting, I walked by myself to Suidhe to see old Cairstine. She had been waiting for me. On my previous visits, I had recorded everything she taught me about folk-medicine, such as chewing a piece of chervil-root to prevent drunkenness, making a poultice with the bark of a rowan tree to treat snake bites and using heather tops to relieve coughs, melancholia, arthritis and dropsy. This time, she wished to speak of children.

  “Ye’ll need to know this for the future, including yours.”

  “Oh … I suppose.”

  I cast down my eyes, self-conscious that, conjugally speaking, I had not been much lately with my husband. Even so, I wrote down what she taught me, such as weaning infants on hazelnut milk, and treating children with bog myrtle when they suffered from worms.

  I remarked, “In Spain, it’s not unusual for a woman to have twenty or more children.”

  Old Cairstine was quiet, and then she said, “Ye ken what some isle women do?”

  She revealed the secret mysteries that women of the isles had passed down through the ages. She spoke of rue for making themselves regular. There was also stag’s-horn moss, a very strong purge. I had never heard of such remedies, though it made me wonder now about the lady’s potions that Doña Marisa used. There was so much I had to learn and understand of herbal lore. I began to scribble down her mystic incantations, but old Cairstine stopped me.

  “Keep them safe up here,” and she pointed to my head.

  Heaving a sigh, I closed my note-book.

  She looked at me thoughtfully. “What’s ailing ye, Sofia Munro.”

  “It’s … my mother.” I hadn’t thought of her since my return to Scarbro’.

  Urged on by old Cairstine, I described my troubled relationship with Doña Marisa, including how, in the end, she had sold me to Don Fausto. How could she give me up like that again, after she had abandoned me as an infant, and said she had been sorry for it?