Tibetan Cross

by Mike Bond

  “Perhaps I suffer from too little acquaintance with sorrow, you think?”

  “Sorrow? Hah! Sorrow's a luxury. Even the rich have sorrow. I speak of when each day is so arduous that many can't survive it.” She snatched his hand. “I'm not angry at you, calentorro, but angry when I think of those times.” She held out her sweater with her fingertips. “Now look – I've clean clothes, food to eat.” She fingered her glistening black hair, smiled, “No lice!” leaned forward, bracelets scrabbling the tabletop. “I don't have to walk everywhere but can take a bus! No one in my family's hungry anymore. Sí! For the first time in memory.” She crossed her legs, bumping the table. “And you make difficulties, When Léon wants to give you a chance.”

  He perused her fine, youthful features: her nose with the miniature concavity of its bridge, flaring below into the elegant curl of her nostril, her wide-set Moorish eyes the color of fresh olives against her tea-colored skin, her glittering teeth, her serenely arched, raven brows, her ears sculpted like little conches under her sparkling hair, the elegant gypsy cast of her jaw which made her infinitely approachable and unconscionably mysterious. Her exquisite small mouth articulated words, he thought, as if they were grapes, as if searching for seeds.

  “You don't listen,” she said.

  “You were detailing my good fortune.”

  “Alors, you will, or not?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Why!”

  He took her hand. “Maria, I'm grateful to sleep on your floor. In a day or two I must leave. When I was in Africa, I got hustled by a guy, and had to sleep out on the docks. That's when I got robbed, got knifed. Besides, the whole thing seems gross.”

  “Gross?” She giggled. “For me, when a client sticks his tongue in my ear, that's gross. I draw the line at that.”

  “Why?”

  “I don't like the noise.”

  He watched her with appreciation. “You're innocent too, my sister of mercy.”

  She made a little moue. “Then we're both saved.”

  HER NEW apartment on the Boulevard d'Athènes was in a wide building of cracked parapets and serpent gargoyles with laughing lion faces. Her casement window opened over the street, its sill calcified with pigeon droppings yellowed by rust from a broken gutter. The room was square, a carmine drape across the closet, a hunchbacked bed waiting sorely in the corner, a rusty sink on iron legs, a cold faucet, gray linoleum. Beyond a thin partition was Thérèse's, little different.

  He leaned on the sill, smelling the traffic exhaust and sour fresh odor of the bakery on the corner of Boulevard de la Liberté. Below, a man tinkered on a worn Panhard; it sputtered with flat froglike noises. Oh to be away, away from everything. He jumped as Maria edged beside him. She nudged his elbow. “Chouette, no? Though tonight I give you some sous, and throw you out till two.”

  In midafternoon Thérèse brought home two tricks from the railroad station; he could hear them panting and wheezing over her through the wall. When they left he knocked on her door. She sat cross-legged, smoking, on the bed.

  “Ca va?” he said.

  “Oui. You think I can't handle two fat pharmacists from Arles?”

  “I heard you cry out.”

  She held up a folded note. “Made me a ten-franc tip.” She brushed ashes from her pubic hairs. “Men are so innocent.”

  “It sounded real.”

  She leaned back against the wall, knees apart. “I would have moaned more, but one was in my mouth.”

  “How does it taste?”

  “Taste yourself. Like old milk, the kind a cat won't drink.” She snickered. “It's not so romantic.”

  WHEN DARK FELL he roamed the friendless streets. Nine more days. He hid in the back of a café, nursing his leg and a cheap cognac, gazing at the young and pleasure-seeking, the bodies hunting bodies, the red lips and smirking teeth.

  Dance of life. A medieval painting, those men and women at the next table mere skeletons in animated conversation, one with a bony finger to her jaw, another casually caressing the femur of the cadaver beside her – their grinning skulls with gaping eye sockets and hard bright teeth glaring out of tongueless jaws. She in the short blue dress, her slim thighs peeping through, a white crack between them – she's a bony pelvis and a crooked, notched spine, her elegant legs naked cartilage. Embrace me, my darling, rattle thy osseous fingers round my ribs.

  He retreated to a cinema, not remembering the movie the second he left, something about lovers and car racing. Why isn't every movie about the bomb? Why doesn't it scream across every headline of every paper in the world, every day? Day after day after month after year until not a single bomb is left? Why this solemn complicity, this lover's dalliance, with death? Are we too fearful of Kali even to speak her name? Isn't that the final cycle of despair, when we're too craven to defend life? Aren't we then already dead?

  Then I'm no longer one of you – I'm another species, from another world. Perhaps you're right to be living so heedlessly, but you don't seem happy, you don't seem alive. With all my fears, my deadly knowledge, my foreboding – I'm more alive than you. Perhaps because of my fears, my knowledge. Because of my pact with Kali. Once I was dead, like you. Now I live.

  He chanced ducking into a quiet bar called La Caserne. It was dim and near empty, “L'amour est comme un jour” on the juke box, two thin men dancing in an unlit corner, “Ca s 'en va, ça s'en va…” The first stool was tippy; he tried another. “It's a test,” the barman said. “The ones who try to sit there – I can tell they're new.”

  A boy sat on the next stool. “Un whisky, Maurice,” he called. “It's not easy to come here,” he said to Cohen.

  “Oh?”

  “It's a confession. The moment I decide, each step I take is resolved. It's not as if I were overcome, swept away by the force of it.”

  “What's wrong with deciding?”

  “When it's conscious, it's different.”

  “Is it wrong, then?”

  The boy turned up his hands. “Is anything wrong?”

  Cohen pushed the base of his glass in little wet circles on the bar. “Only to kill, to cause sorrow – that's wrong.”

  The boy laughed. “Some parents would prefer their sons to be murderers than gay.”

  “At least a few folks,” Cohen smiled, nodding goodbye, get what they deserve.”

  TRAFFIC had dwindled in the Rue de Rome: here and there a Citroen or Mercedes, sleek unreachable faces within them, faces shielded by glass, fine clothes, and fine opinions. In a jewelry store window a gold necklace hung on a manikin's truncated neck – its brightness so much more self-assured, more permanent, than life. A skinny cat meowed at him from an unlit alley; he knelt calling to her but she would not approach.

  Light shone beneath Maria's door. He waited a few minutes, then knocked. “Mi calentorro,” she grinned as she opened. Her room smelt warmly of wine and grass, the bed sweaty and rumpled. “What did you find?”

  “It's lonely out there.”

  “Sí?”

  “All those people trying to have fun. So lonely.”

  “That's why they stick together. I like loners, los solitarios – like you.” She took a wine bottle from beside the bed. “Want some? A trick left it.”

  “It's Nuits St. Georges.”

  “Maldito sea! It's not good like Spanish wine.” She lit a joint and passed it to him. “Body and blood!”

  THE GRASS AND WINE brought him peace and an absence of sorrow. Her face seemed soft, naked of care. The smoke from the grass ascended round her face as a veil being removed. She tossed back her hair; darkness had gathered like mascara beneath her eyes.

  “This work,” he said, “you don't mind it?”

  “It's a beginning.”

  “Of what?”

  “I don't want to live like the others – no money, shitting babies, a man who thinks because he's male and works five days a week he has the right to a fuck every night and three meals every day on the table.” She stood yawning and began to
unbutton her blouse. “I'm tired.”

  He watched her dusky belly under the unbuttoned blouse, his throat thickening. “You want to sleep alone?”

  She dropped the blouse on the chair and hooked her thumbs into the waist of her skirt. “Seven times I got it tonight, one of them rough. I'm sore; I want nothing else to do with men.” She tucked herself into the covers, opened her arms wide. “But lie with me, mi calentorro. Keep me warm.”

  He stretched beside her into the scanty, squeaking bed. Her body seemed long, yet with her toes against his ankles her head came only to his shoulder. “Soon, mi calentorro, I'll give you a good time.”

  “You've already saved my life, sister of mercy.” He kissed her smooth forehead. “Nothing more do you ever need to give me.”

  She snuggled against him. “You have a sister?”

  “I did. In a way.”

  “What's her name?”

  “She's dead.”

  For a while Maria said nothing, then, “What was her name?”

  “Kim.” Feeling unutterably sorrowed, yet comforted by her nearness, he lay sharing with her the late-night silences of Marseille, in the little human island of her bed, while Lobo snored and farted peacefully on the floor beside them.

  AT TEN he woke with church bells pealing, flies buzzing on the window, sunlight rippling on the floor. The blue through the upper panes was merciless, untrammeled. She was gone; twenty francs were tucked into his pocket.

  Sun gleamed on the café au lait and the sugary crusts of the croissants in the Café Voltaire. Feeling reckless, he blew two francs on Le Méridional, sun soaking him as he read it, laughing loud enough for the couple at the next table to peer at him.

  “It's the comics,” he explained, smiling.

  The man patted his graying moustache with a paper napkin. “There are no comics on the front page, no?”

  “Ah, monsieur,” Cohen held up the newspaper, “there's Pompidou et sa cocotte, la France… Nixon, a painted whore lying to his countrymen…” He shook the paper. “Nothing here is real! The true world coils underneath, like a snake. This is comics.”

  The man snuffed a cigarette into his saucer. “Why read it, then?”

  “I am like you, dear friend. I wish to laugh.”

  “Laugh, then.” The man rose and put on a small black hat. He led the woman away.

  Sunlight glissaded fiercely down the facades across la rue Lafayette. New leaves of the plane trees glittered like emeralds. Seven more days, baby. I'll make it. Sucking in gritty exhaust and swift sea air, the sour bread and sweet coffee fragrance of the streets, inhaling even the staccato of spike heels on the cracked pavements and the swishing hustle of auto rubber on cobblestone, he limped the greening streets. At the post office he sent a mailgram to Hassim, care of Les Champs Elysées, asking for news and promising that soon he could send him bail and passage to Marseille. Exhausted and dizzy, he returned to Maria's apartment and fell instantly asleep.

  She woke him at dinner. “Time for your evening stroll, mi calentorro.”

  He sat, stretching. “Each day I feel stronger.”

  She poked him. “Quick – out of bed! I have to use it soon. Lobo, come! Lick his face till he gets up!”

  HIS WANDERING passed quickly. At two, he knocked on her door. “You okay?” she said, letting him in.

  “Sure. You?”

  “An easy night. I only made three hundred.” She handed him a wine bottle as he sat beside her on the bed. “One just wanted to look and beat off.”

  “Don't complain. Love me instead.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “I don't really want to.”

  He kissed the soft skin over her temple. “I'll owe it to you. With interest.” He took her hand and kissed her fingers one by one. “Such a little hand, such slender fingers. Lend me the money and I'll pay you right away.”

  Lazily she stripped, tossing her clothes on the chair, and slipped into bed, watching him undress. “Come mi calentorro, come,” she whispered, wrapping him in her arms, opening her legs, “not waiting, not stopping, not anything, ever, never. Come!”

  Heedless, enraged, he drove into her like a bull, bent to lick her crotch; it was tart, metallic. “Don't,” she said, “it's my time.”

  “I don't care.” He raised her buttocks and drove into her anus, playing with her crack.

  “Easy,” she gasped. “I'll charge you double.”

  He pulled out and went into her again. She began to moan. “Don't fake it,” he panted. She came, stiffening her back and sinking her nails into his ribs, the skin above her breast pulsing. They lay side by side, his head spinning.

  She raised up, kissed him. “With you, calentorro, I do not fake. You aren't a client.” She tickled his inert penis. “Look at le petit,” she smiled. “Who used to act so tall and proud.”

  16

  “WAKE UP! It's Palm Sunday.”

  “So?”

  “So? What kind of a question is that! It's time for church.”

  “I'm not Catholic anymore.”

  “Come, anyway. Even Jews need God.”

  He wriggled further down in the bed, ran a finger over her belly. “I'm not Jewish, either. Piss on both their houses.”

  She crossed her breasts, nipples wiggling. “Come, mi novillero, and listen to God!”

  SUN GLEAMED LIKE AMBERGRIS through the tall cathedral windows. “Resplendent and unfading is Wisdom,” intoned the priest. “She is readily perceived by those who love her, and found by those who seek her.” Cool lavender light fell across the altar. Cohen changed position on the hard pew, his knee aching. “He who watches for her at dawn shall not be disappointed, for he shall find her sitting by his gate.”

  “But is it Wisdom,” the priest continued in his homily, “when women work, leaving their young at home? Is it Wisdom that the young stay out late, using drugs, having illicit sex, laughing at their parents, at their Church? That which begins at home finishes in the streets, in sinful living, pornography, prostitution!”

  Cohen nudged Maria. “You listening to this merde?”

  “Silence!”

  AT COMMUNION she gripped his hand, stood. “Come!”

  “You go,” he snickered, “I haven't confessed.”

  “God knows your sins.”

  “And I know His.” But he stood with her, wondering why, and walked beside her up the aisle, his head bowed, hands loosely folded before him, fighting the old feeling of an aching moment approaching completeness. The soothing tones of the organ and the high soft voices of the children's choir, the silent lines of worshippers, the nearing drone of the priest, “Le Corps de Dieu…Le Corps de Dieu,” were all hypnotic. Lulling me into the old dance, the old psychosis. The death I escaped was certitude. Never believe. He stood before the priest.

  The priest raised his bit of bread. “The Body of Christ.”

  “Amen.” Wafer softening in his throat, he limped slowly away, light brightening around and above him, tears waiting behind his eyes, Maria's glistening black hair proceeding down the aisle before him. I have long been dead. It's so good to be alive. In this moment – though I'll deny it later – I know this is the body of Christ, that this is God, who is. Despite all.

  Despite all.

  He slid along the pew to Maria. Her head was lowered, her hands clasped. Whatever you pray for, Maria, I pray for it also. To God, Jehovah, I pray that He take you into the strength and caring of His hands and protect you, sister of mercy. Protect you and always care for you.

  OUTSIDE the cathedral she squeezed his arm. “Don't blame God.”

  “What – for all that merde about sin and pornography? For that priest beating his meat about sex while the world's readying to blow itself up?”

  “Silencio, mi calentorro! God's not responsible for what a stupid priest says. God has nothing to do with the Church.”

  “Why go, then?”

  “To be with God, be fed by Him.”

  He kissed her forehead, smelling the rich earthiness of her hair.
“God leaves me hungry.”

  “Because you don't live in the spirit – in the spirit of life. That's where the hunger for God comes from!” She took his arm, walking him away from the cathedral. “Today, mi calentorro, I would be in Andalucía – where there's much spirit.”

  “I too, though I've never been there.”

  “Oh! – It is mountains – mountains sharp as lion's teeth, soaring cliffs, the sea, the sea wind. The mountains are blue. The sky's blue. The sun's so fierce even the los olivos are blue. Oh! – I would be in the mountains today. There are some not far from here. Will you go with me? We'll take Léon's bagnole.”

  IT TOOK HALF an hour to clear the suburbs. At Aix she turned east into the foothills of Montagne Sainte-Victoire. Bleak rocks and stunted pines chased along the road. “The sun's in my blood,” she said. “In the mountains I'm closer to it, and am happy.”

  “You're not happy otherwise?”

  “Sí, in a partial way. Like most humans. Look! The mountain has a cross atop it.”

  He snickered. “Today was the first time in years I've been to church.”

  “That's bad, mi calentorro, You should go every day, or at least once a week.”

  “If there is a God I don't think He even notices us.”

  “You care too much for being noticed. We owe God thanks for life itself. He owes us nothing, not even notice.” She caressed the inside of his thigh. “God creates us to expand His life, to live a billion little lives in Him, expanding Him. If we choose not to live fully, as deeply as we can, it's no wonder God gets bored and forgets us!”

  “For a whore, Maria, you are very philosophical.”

  “Escucha, mi calentorro – there's more religion in a good whorehouse than in the grandest churches of the world!”

  THEY parked before a dam in whose chalky blue the white mountain rippled. She shouldered their lunch sack. “Hurry! I won't wait.”

  Blanched rock gleamed with heat; the mountain air glimmered like a halo. A hawk soared in porcelain heights. She ran ahead through green oak, wild pear, and pine woods, through fields of carmine poppies and red and yellow betony, then sat panting in the shade of a spreading hawthorne whose roots clutched the calciferous soil. “Qu'est-ce que c'est, les Brigades Mobiles?”