At the petromel where they stop to inject fluid, the attendant takes his time. He strokes his long moustache over and over, until they realise what they’re supposed to do: buy a bundle of his kayfra joints. Then they go. A few puffs help them to withstand the cold – the mincar’s warming unit has jacked up – and hand over the extortionate tolls demanded first by a hunter with a dead weasel over his shoulder, then by a gang of women supposedly repairing the road. People who behave like shadows, automatically. But the Felinezo has lost most of its power to intimidate Lerena and Suano. It must be the kayfra, the night, the fatigue, the familiarity, and the backpack with the money in it, almost all of it left.
Or perhaps the shift in Lerena has loosened both of them up. Although Suano is careful not to draw conclusions on her behalf, he can’t deny that the expedition has made a difference of some kind. It produced and is still producing an effect. It would be an exaggeration to say that it has yielded a meaning, because something in Lerena’s nature prevents her from turning back, or at least going all the way back to the origin of a problem.
And maybe there’s no way to go back, Suano thinks, however much things come back to you.
In other words: if it’s reasonable to fear being hunted by the past, that fear should be limited by the way, as subjects, we keep changing. The new Lerena should already be beyond the reach of the old Lerena, and maybe Suano is there in that beyond along with her.
He doesn’t know. He can’t resolve the enigma. Or keep himself from wondering how much her lacerated tongue will hurt when they stop for something to eat. And there is the resentment he feels at having been dragged into a mimetrope that has left him with damage to more than his body.
And yet they are coming out of it, they have come through it together, and in the end Lerena did make a sacrifice, like those who attempt suicide to attract attention, and survive, except when they don’t. She feels that she no longer has a debt; the place that it once occupied in her soul is sadly empty, maybe barren. Just when she has overcome the dichotomy of fulfilment and failure, and no longer needs to mount a relentless charm offensive, the disquiet caused by that emptiness could make it hard to give up her old ruses. Winter again and soon it’ll snow; not a woman yet but already growing. These lines about a daughter and the passage of time come back to Suano, he doesn’t know why, unless they are somehow related to the tenacious ambivalence of Lerena’s behaviour, or the way it finds an echo in his own ambivalence.
As if Lerena had been pouring out life, at the risk of exhausting her supply, to prevent Suano the ascetic from becoming a dry stick.
No mean compensation for the ruin of his career. That’s what both of them are thinking.
And both are aware that what lies at the end of the trip is a crazy sum of panoramics. Not a fugitive mirage. Money. At the service of desire and its flows. It isn’t simply a matter of lucidity versus fantasies. Reason will have to take control, reason and morality. Money fosters all sorts of precautions.
An emotional mess of this kind is no help in trying to navigate through the labyrinth of the Felinezo. Looping roads, self-engrossed community houses where families are finishing their dinners. Vast silence in the laminated night, except for the sudden trilling of a dirridirri or the noise of a passing truck. When they’re not speaking, and now they’re barely speaking at all, Lerena and Suano notice other sounds: a river flowing under a bridge, or a conspiratorial murmur of calm water. Beside the highway, celluloid marshes: a landscape incinerated by an ideal order. The surviving wetlands sparkle with reflections – the moon, street lamps, lit windows – and each flash of light makes the travellers sad to be so foreign and in such a hurry. As now, when a man on the road up ahead tries to stop them with a closed umbrella and an open hand, no doubt to show them a dung beetle and accuse them of having run over it, and Suano decides to dodge him with a swerve so precisely timed he’d be pleased with himself if he wasn’t so ascetic.
When he peers into the rear-view mirror to make sure that the bandit escaped unharmed, he sees headlights that look familiar; he noticed them a while ago. The car has kept its distance. He tells Lerena, and she replies: How can you recognise headlights? I’m telling you we’re being followed, he insists. And I promise you we’re not, she says, before swallowing a handful of mintoly pearls. They’re following us, he mutters. No they’re not, maintains the lifeless but self-assured voice of the new Lerena. This tone surprises Suano. But not for long: suddenly the mincar is flooded with light; now they’re being tailgated. It’s a van. Vruumm, vroouummm, says Lerena, mocking him without affection, and then Suano sees an escape route, off to the side through a blackthorn forest where harvesting ladders lie folded at the feet of the trees, and at the very last moment, he turns. The van keeps going: given its speed, it couldn’t pull up without skidding off the road, so it has to follow the curve, hopefully for quite a way. Meanwhile, bumping over potholed bitumen, Suano comes to a providential starburst of dirt roads, takes one, drives up a hillside, descends again, and goes down a little track to the bank of an irrigation canal. He brakes. And turns the engine off.
They weren’t following us, Suano. You’re totally mashnoon.
And you’re always so sure of yourself.
If that’s how it sounds, it’s because I know, she says.
And believe me, it’s exhausting.
She shivers. The little blanket has fallen down; she gathers it around her, but then she heaves a shuddering sigh, and it slips off again.
Feels like early-onset menopause.
It’s the warming unit, Lerena. It has fixed itself and it’s up high. You want me to turn it down?
She doesn’t reply. The windscreen is fogging up. Beyond the glass, among the shadows, water is glistening. Lerena fumbles at the collar of her purple tartan shirt and undoes the top button. In the dimness, Suano can see the remains of her agapythium uniform – the grey, slipper-like house shoes, the socks, the black papetex trousers with elastic at the waist – and, touched by this rough simplicity, he notices the clarity of her skin, purified by the diet, and the shape of her breasts, accentuated now by the leanness of her torso. His mouth begins to water. It’s harder to know what Lerena is feeling, perhaps even for Lerena herself, as she looks at the steam rising from Suano’s blue frieze trousers, his not-very-fresh-smelling wooltex shirt, the sleeves and collar smeared with mud from the courtyard, his hair in a mess, and the form of his body, somewhat diminished by the diet and the beatings but still, she senses, admirable. For a man, a woman’s body is a feast, and he makes this crudely obvious by hurriedly sampling all the dishes, throwing himself at the table; while a woman shows the pleasure that she has taken overall, not in this or that particular flavour.
Although it’s getting hotter, Lerena wraps the blanket around her. It comes to Doctor Suano in a stroke-like brain flash that this woman is not in her right mind. So where is she? Leaving him no time to answer, she says croakily: I can hear voices, Suano. They’re asking me to go back; something has been left undone.
And that is?
What’s it matter? Since I’m not planning to take any totion; still, I can hear them, although I’m half dead.
Suano examines her. A problem is preventing him from judging her claim dispassionately. If Lerena had told him that she could see a ghost, even if he couldn’t see it himself, her eyes might have proved that it was true. You can see people seeing. But you can’t hear them hearing. Is it possible to see a person hearing, Suano wonders, and this conundrum distracts him, in spite of the circumstances. And while he is distracted, his pintel takes a stand, as people used to say.
Lerena notices. She doesn’t smile. She isn’t flattered or happy. She almost feels sorry, for both of them. As if she were about to ask him whether it’s desire for her or some kind of automatic reaction.
You don’t love me like before, Suano.
Like before what?
What happened to your love for me? Did it just disappear when I left?
Suano
raises his hand, affectionately or defensively, he doesn’t know himself. Lerena pulls out a bottle of fogwater, takes five gulps, passes it to him and says:
I was weak, I was distatic, I was feckless and ungrateful, but I didn’t stop loving you.
Suano touches his forehead, as if listening were giving him a migraine. He drinks the remaining drops and puts the bottle down. He reaches out again, effortfully, and slips his fingers into her hair. As he touches her neck, which still isn’t warm, it occurs to him that what she just said was dictated, for once, not by any plan but by an inner necessity. Very slowly, she lets herself sink towards his chest and then, at the last moment, lifts her face. They can’t see each other well. To see each other better, they kiss.
It is often said that physical fatigue, lassitude, uncomfortable conditions and especially excessive postponement end up ruining the pleasure of a moment that, given just the right delay, could have borne a tremendous erotic charge. But that is not what’s happening to Suano and Lerena. There’s no lack of enthusiasm, no reluctance to bite, grasp, suck, squeeze, explore and invade each other – that’s all part and parcel of sex – but both of them have been too cold to craft their lust meticulously now. Neither cunning nor suffocation, but the cautious warmth, the expectant caresses, of a love still fresh and yet beyond the season of sexual urgency. Lerena’s attitude could be the proof that she has really changed. Luckily, she isn’t tall. Lying across the seat, with Suano’s hands under her buttocks, she leans back and pulls him down. They don’t say a word. Bursts of engine noise from a distant highway between a sigh and a pant. Lerena is no longer the fired-up soldier managing the details of each skirmish; although not totally passive, there is a feminine pliancy to her; and with a soft blink she asks him to accelerate the rhythm. The mincar rocks along with them, autumn leaves crackling under its wheels. Cradled in an all-involving flow, neither is anything more now than a momentary halt in a constant resurgence. Nothing but smoke and darkness and breathing. The orgasms, one after the other, are muted and remote, like gentle tremors in another part of the Delta. Then they return to themselves and their fluent internal monologues.
When they quieten down, it’s as if a lifetime has gone by between their two bodies, and perhaps it has; Suano bids that time farewell as he turns to face the invisible landscape. Lerena covers herself, sits up and lights a joint. Suano can’t take his eyes off her as he puts his clothes back on, and just as he is about to scold himself for staring, the wind parts the canopy of leaves overhead, and fine shafts of moonlight shining through the windscreen show the tears that are spilling from her eyes. The burning tip of the joint hisses. Lerena is crying inertly, as if something were crying for her, but Suano notices how her tears illuminate the enclosed smoke.
She is crying light.
Turning pale, Suano recognises that he is not satisfied: the mere use of his penis is not enough; to quench his thirst for what she gives him before the moment of release, he would need another fuck, and then another. But the use of his penis confirms his virility; and it is one more sign that the adventure has altered their positions.
A few dead stars are waiting to be replaced in the night sky.
So many people change completely, why can’t Lerena have changed? But Suano is haunted by the thought that the scene they have just performed might have been directed by her vanity counterattacking. He can’t shake off the suspicion, not that Lerena is malicious – that’s absurd – but that she can’t help falling back into her old manipulative ways. That habit of dragging people into her own personal blockbuster.
Sick of himself, Suano hastily bundles these doubts away in the attic of his mind – the attic, not the cellar.
The thing is to understand. To understand that the lingering taste of Lerena and fogwater has revived his sense of compassion.
Has made him want to caress her, and something more than that.
She doesn’t dare touch him. She’s thinking. She says: I’m a failure.
What do you mean, Lerena?
Just that. I don’t know. A failure.
The therapeutic vade mecum that Suano carries in his head opens immediately at the passage that says, Like the habit of seeing oneself as a victim, exaggerated devaluation or disparaging of the self is a gross inversion of egocentrism. But a sudden trust in redemption closes his memory down. He presses his throbbing temples; he would like to soothe the ache by looking at Lerena, but not like that, not with his head in his hands. If he was watching her, he might see, as her crying gradually comes to an end, that the tears are not falling from her eyes, but slowly, undemonstratively, from the scrolls of kayfra smoke in the closed space of the cabin, as if the light itself were crying. The source of that light is a mystery, but when the crying stops, the iridescent sheen fades from the cloud of smoke. Lerena swallows the dregs of her tears. All Suano’s certitudes are crumbling. His pulse, like a long-distance runner’s, has settled to a slow rhythm.
The losses continue: not only is he still not sure that Lerena has corrected her ways; now he is losing the conviction that she is incorrigible.
He also doubts that the very idea of self-correction serves any purpose.
He presses the ignition button. He engages the backer, in turning mode, sets the direction, and since the wheels are skidding on the leaves, activates the cog tread. The Diminut rolls over a dead fox crawling with larvae and climbs the slope to the highway, where Suano, who has lost his sense of direction along with the rest, is nevertheless annoyed when Lerena tells him to go up the hill, as if he were an idiot.
So we won, says Suano; we couldn’t have failed any better.
A flyover, a tunnel, a backroad; fir trees, finally, rough grass, and a flood of stars in the sky above them when they reach the watershed. This is not the same high tableland that they crossed on the way in. It’s no more than fifty rods wide. Six roads diverge from a roundabout. They have to get out of the mincar. The porous darkness absorbs all colour, reducing the scene to black and white. Clumps of thyme sparkle with dew. Aquinos are singing here and there, and the disparate volumes of their joyful song fissure the brutal solidity of the night. The fragrant chill constricts the travellers’ lungs. Given the circumstances, they would prefer to be feeling either confusion or stupor, rather than vacillating nervously between the two, but it’s because they are hungry. The rains have put out all the fires. Far away to the south, the island’s lowland cities are sunken in a routine sleep, their multitudinous breaths sending up a gauze of purpled anxiety. To the north: discreet, sporadic lights among the vegetation, like lanterns encrypting the intricate order of the Felinezo.
It’s like a Wednesday night on this side, says Lerena feebly.
It’s a very strict place, isn’t it? A little bit too exact, he says.
Lerena takes his wrist. I guess they find it reassuring, she says. With a ghostly trace of playfulness, she shakes his wrist a bit and lets it go.
How cool her hand is, thinks Suano, it was always so feverish before. And how fragile. He concludes that Munava really does have some kind of lasting power. She has revealed a fragility in Lerena that is adding to her beauty. Although perhaps the influence is clearer in the compassion that fragility awakens in him, and in his perception of beauty, even in the dark, as if the love of real beauty were of a piece with compassion for the fragile, as if one recognised beauty by the fear of its coming to an end. It had never occurred to Suano that Lerena could be truly beautiful to other eyes than his; the early hours of passion are proof against questions of that kind.
She glances at him affectionately, out of the corner of her eye, as if insinuating that she finds him every bit as handsome as the day they first met. But it’s over in a moment. She lacks the strength to keep up even that mild playfulness.
Some announcements have been posted, and it’s better to read them here than further on. Easier said than done. The lighting is poor, and the Clearseers seem to have forbidden the use of phosphorescent letters. When Suano finally manages to
read that the Saluca Ring is closed to traffic, he loses his cool. All right, says Lerena decisively, we’ll take the Nucedi Route. It was closed when we came, he replies. She doesn’t pursue the conversation; she knows there is no need.
They go down via the Nucedi Route, making their winding, velvety way, the night around them at a standstill. After an hour of driving, the inn where so many days ago they sat and talked about death with textile and sawmill workers appears at the far end of a curve on the right-hand side of the road, as if it had been lying in wait. The door is ajar; a lamp flickers inside. Seated on a bench beneath the awning is the old man with a prim beard and an elegant cape known to the patrons as Mr Priest. Suano doesn’t want to stop. Lerena groans: she needs to use the sanit. As the mincar slows, the pupils of the old man’s eyes reflect the headlights; he takes out an inkpencil and places it ritually behind his right ear, then behind his left, but when he begins to repeat the gesture, and Lerena begins to interpret it, unable to resist the challenge, Suano tells her angrily that it is meaningless, then reverses and, as the old man gets to his feet and two slobbering and not very fearsome pariadogs emerge from the inn, he pulls away and speeds off down the hill.
The man was waving goodbye, says Lerena in a faint voice.
Please.
All my insides are going to spill out.
Suano tilts his head the other way. The sentence has entered him like the stab of a needle. A dense uneasiness trickles down his spine. He steps on the accelerator. The mincar’s system indicates that it is running at maximal power.
The slope is gentler now. To judge from the rough, uneven glitter in the headlights, they are driving through rocky country. As the road flattens out, they see a radio tower against a background of blue-black sky. Before they get that far, a tree’s yellow leaves prevail over the wash of shadows like a romantic obstinacy.
A lopan, Lerena, a plains tree; always the last to lose its leaves.
There’s a kiosk.
Melodrome Page 9