Via Dolorosa

by Ronald Malfi

  “Yes.”

  “Yes,” she said. “So—the crossroads. And my handsome fair-skinned American writer, in his moment of weakness, decided to not be so great and so proud and so talented, and he began writing for a bigger publisher for bigger dollars and bigger success. Do you see? He had become like the civet.” She tapped her cigarette out on the bar. “So then, rich but unhappy, he lost himself. And in losing himself, he lost his love for me. And in losing his love for me,” she continued, “I lost my love for him. Tal es la manera del mundo—such is the way of the world.” She smoked, grimly frowning, but it still looked handsome on her beautiful face. “I do not drink coffee made of monkey shit,” she stated flatly.

  “Yes,” Nick said.

  “Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.”

  “That’s a very sad story.”

  “For him it is more sad,” she said. “For me, it is not so sad. I am not one to worry about the past. But I still remember him and I know he is very much the man who worries about the past. That, too, I think, is a writer’s thing.”

  “It’s a human thing,” he corrected.

  “No,” she said coolly, “it is a man’s thing.”

  “Mierda,” he said because he did not know what else to say.

  Smiling, beaming, beautiful, Isabella said, “You have no idea.”

  Changing the subject, he asked her how the portrait had turned out. Isabella made an expression that could have been a smile, could have been a frown. It was difficult to tell with her, he knew only that it was pretty on her. “Curious,” was all she said.

  It wasn’t until after they shared a cup of coffee and she ran off to do whatever it was people like Isabella Rosales do, did Nick remember that her note—the one she had pinned to his nylon supplies case and left outside his hotel door—was still in his pocket. He took it out now, looked at it:

  Tal es la manera del mundo.

  Not sure whether he should smile or not, feeling only a bit confused, he thought, Such is the way of the world.

  That evening, and well into the next morning, he resided on the stepladder before the hotel mural. He painted with a furious liberation he had not experienced since returning from the war. Changing views, changing angles, he painted in utter disregard of the sketch that lay beneath the paint. A different man was painting now. A different man had gone to Iraq and a different man had returned. Likewise, a different man had come to this island and here, now, right here and now, a different man was emerging. And he would paint. He paid no mind to the cramping in his right hand, the goddamn Raynaud’s. He refused to forfeit this newfound momentum over some pain and stiffness. He would not do it. Over grass-lined slopes he painted cresting flesh-toned hillocks, rising like the humps of odd-colored whale calves; through courtyards and densely-greened pools of trees he carved a winding dynasty of bone-hued footpaths, each minutely infected with the tinsel-glisten of red—pinpricks and daubs and freckles and blemishes, the way they were in reality, the way they were in his head; replacing the tumult of beach he brought to life the truth of the world, which is not beach by the sea but beach without water, a beach as arid and destitute as the splitting, cracking tongues of the thirsty: a shimmering landscape enigma.

  He painted straight through the night and into the next morning. When he finished, exhausted, spent, wasted, he packed his equipment back into the lobby’s supply closet and headed back to his room for some sleep.

  The sun was overly bright in the lobby. In silence, and amidst a wave of several other hotel guests, he and Emma passed each other by the elevators, but both pretended they had not seen the other.

  —Chapter XV—

  At one point, whether floating along in a dream or merely lost in a daydream’s semi-consciousness, Nick fancied himself moving along a sandy strip of beach out into the middle of the ocean. He could see no land either to his right or his left—just the everlasting tumult of the sea—and both behind and in front of him the narrow strip of white sand faded off into its respective horizon. While there seemed no prejudice in taking one direction over the other, he concluded with some sense of percipience that since he was facing forward, that must be the direction he had been chosen to walk. So he walked. The sand was incredibly soft. His feet sank deep into it with every step, several inches, sometimes burying his toes completely. The strip of sand itself was only about three feet wide, each side licked and flattened by the pull of the ocean waves. The water, further out, was black and desolate and cold-looking. He could see massive whitecaps rising up from the sea on either side of him. Walking, he kept his eyes straight ahead, trying not to look down and not to look out at the roiling, darkened sea.

  Up ahead, something broke straight out of the water. It was too far ahead for him to see what it was but, as is the way with dreams, he did not have to recognize it to feel the strong, needling embrace of terror that suddenly encapsulated him. And before he could visibly identify what the object was from sight, he suddenly and simply knew what it was and did not need to see it (as is also the way with dreams): an arm. A single flailing arm coming straight out of the water.

  This sudden knowledge propelled him to run the length of the sandy strip until he was adjacent to the arm coming out of the water. He paused. The arm was several yards out. Looking down, he could not tell how deep the water was, not even just past the strip of sand on which he stood. Surely the water had to be deep for this person to drown…

  He rushed into the sea and at first it was like he was running on top of the water. Then, an instant later, the ground pulled away beneath him and he came crashing down through the surface of the sea. Eyes open, the world around him was pitch black and silent. The water froze him straight to his core, freezing his gut, his heart, his lungs. There was no air; he could not breathe. Still, he pushed himself onward, and proceeded to swim in what he thought was the direction of that single flailing arm.

  Something grabbed his ankle.

  He felt his bowels loosen and his heart seize in his chest. Looking behind him, he could make out nothing, as the water was too dark. It was like swimming in ink. He could not even see the flank of his own white ribs, so close to his eyes. Nothing—nothing.

  Some miracle sent him bursting through the surface of the water. Gasping for air, he could feel his lungs burning. When he managed to look quickly around, he could see, with a sudden clap of horror, that the narrow passage of sand was at least fifty yards away, impossibly out of reach. Had current dragged him this far out so quickly? Had the hand around his ankle—

  His ankle—!

  He screamed, and it was like screaming inside a closet. The sound reverberated back to him. He could still feel the icy grip around his ankle—most definitely a hand, most definitely fingers—and he tried but could not shake it loose.

  He felt a second hand slap down on his back. Shrieked. A third—this one coming up from the water directly in front of his face, fingers hooked into a bloated, blue talon and clamping down on his left shoulder. It was then that he realized there were what appeared to be dozens of flailing arms breaking up from the surface of the sea, all around him now, all drawing steadily closer like the dorsal fins of frenzied sharks.

  The Chinese divers, his mind yammered crazily. The goddamn Chinese divers!

  Ghostly, as if she were whispering into his ear, he could hear Isabella Rosales saying, Sometimes I fill up a bathtub with water and hold my head underneath until I think I am about to black out. I see how long I can hold my head under water, and I try to experience what it is like to almost die, almost drown. I see how far along I can get, Nicholas, and how close to dying I can bring myself without actually doing it. I wait for some great change, or for something insurmountable and unimaginable to overtake me. But it is just water and it is just my head, and so far nothing has happened.

  Isabella’s words had hardly concluded when he felt the hands drag him back down beneath the surf. Again, that freezing water—again, that inability to breathe. He was conscious only of two sounds:
the rush of the water filling his ears and his own heartbeat, trapped somewhere between his chest and his throat, reverberating within him like muffled gongs against a steel drum.

  —Chapter XVI—

  She entered the room, saying, “I was trying to be as quiet as a mouse. I didn’t want to wake you.”

  “I’ve been awake.” And he had: he had spent the past forty-five minutes on the bed, staring at the ceiling.

  “Are you feeling all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You scared me, getting sick so quickly like that.”

  “It was nothing.”

  “You looked very pale. You looked scared, too.”

  “I wasn’t scared.”

  “It’s fine to admit you were scared.”

  This angered him. He turned his head away from her. “What is it?”

  “Now that you’re better, I was hoping we could start fresh tonight,” Emma said. “I was hoping we could pick up from where we started, when we first got here.”

  “Things have changed.”

  “We can’t survive in this limbo for the rest of our lives, Nick.”

  And he knew this was true. He said, “So, then, what?”

  She mentioned a waterside festival at the other end of the island, with music and seafood and costumes and plenty of alcohol. There would be vendors, she said, and beautiful dark-skinned women in Hawaiian dresses, and Tiki torches staked into the sand by the shoulder of the sea. There had been much talk of it today down by the pools, she told him. All the guests would be going. Some sailing ship was supposedly returning to the island, too, although she did not know if that was the cause of the celebration or, perhaps, a result of it. Still, she said, it would be fun to get out.

  “I am in no mood,” he said, punctuating each word.

  “I think we should do this,” Emma said. She hadn’t moved from her position at the foot of the bed since she’d entered the room.

  “I was going to paint tonight.”

  “The painting can wait.”

  “It is work; it does not wait.” Continuing to punctuate…

  She vanished into the bathroom. Nick listened. After a moment, he heard the shower turn on. Women turn on the shower differently than men, he thought. Men pull the handle or the lever or turn the knobs forcefully, and there is always that solid clank as it is turned or pulled all the way and is stopped by whatever stops such things. Women, on the other hand, they begin a shower gently, tenderly, and there is never any clanking. Unless they are angry. He urged himself off the bed and stood just outside the bathroom door. The door was not closed all the way: he could make out Emma’s naked form, blurred by the curtain’s distortion, in the shower. His right hand hurt. He tried not to think about his right hand. Instead, he summoned the voice of his wife, ghostly despite its recentness: We can’t survive in this limbo for the rest of our lives, Nick.

  For whatever reason, he thought of Isabella at that moment, and of the story she had told him at the Club Potemkin about being raped and left in a Catholic Church near the outskirts of Pamplona. He could not imagine someone like Isabella being raped. She had said something about bulls, too, running with the bulls…

  Thinking odd things at odd times…

  Entering the bathroom, he silently climbed out of his clothes, meeting his own eyes in the bathroom mirror as he did so. Then he stood, white and naked, vulnerable and unrighteous, just inches from the plastic shower curtain. On the other side, he could see Emma pause, too. He watched her not move. They faced each other, unable to make out any detail or feature for the distortion of the shower curtain, and neither of them moved. Their breathing alternated: following his exhale, he could see the curtain buckle slightly toward him as she breathed on his heels.

  We have been disenfranchised from each other, he thought, still not moving. Our marriage has become a misalliance.

  His hand hurt.

  He could not stop thinking of his hand.

  Her tiny form smeary behind the shower curtain…motionless, waiting, bated—and he could vaguely make out the hints of her body as he knew her body to be: the subtle swelling of white hips, of pink-capped breasts, a darkened, blurry V-patch at the intersection of her legs. He knew her body like a soldier knows his weapon or an artist knows his paints. He knew everything about her back, and was familiar with how it felt to be touching it and pushed up against it. How it hinted at what was around its corner, and down below and beneath and within. That wet-season-specific scent of her hair draped across her neck and shoulder (when it had been long enough to drape), and how the scents of both their bodies had commingled into one solid reality, one single human pheromone. The way she often looked so happy that she looked so sad. The way, too, that his tongue no longer tasted just as his tongue but, instead, as a mixture of his and hers, all together now, inseparable. These things. Great, amazing things. These things were his to know and to own, solely his to know and—

  But no.

  As if reading his mind, Emma said, “It’s all right, Nick. We will start fresh once we’re down by the water. The festival will make us fresh. I have faith. We don’t need to start fresh here, now, right now. We don’t need to start fresh like this.”

  Because he couldn’t. He couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  He said, “I’m going to get dressed and wait downstairs in the lobby.”

  At the sink, he washed his face and matted down his cowlick as best he could. He slipped back into the room and dressed hastily in whatever articles of clothing seemed to jump out at him from the armoire. Back downstairs, his hands working over each other in frantic unease, he paced the hotel lobby. Soon, he found himself staring at the mural. It bled color along the wall. Had he drawn this, painted this? He thought and found he did not know what day it was. The days were slipping together. Slippage. Like the Claxton number from Isabella’s disc…

  He saw Granger standing at the bell captain podium. Granger hadn’t seen him. Granger, Nick could tell, was not seeing much: he appeared to be staring out the bank of windows and at the hotel’s circular drive. The sun was setting behind a black web of trees. With the weather’s cooperation, the handsome Palauan had once again established his trinkets dais outside.

  “Hello, Mr. Granger.”

  “Nicholas!” Granger said, quickly turning to face him. Eyes bloodshot, his shirt incorrectly buttoned and the folds of his chin and neck unshaven, the old man looked as if he’d been living in some back alley for the past couple days, perhaps accompanied by a bottle of bourbon.

  “How are you, son?”

  “Well.”

  “Your wonderful bride?”

  “She’ll be down in a minute.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Today is—what day is it?”

  “Saturday,” said Granger. “It’s Saturday night. The two of you are heading out for the evening?”

  “Emma wanted to go to some festival on the water,” Nick said, “down in Harbour Town.”

  “Terrific.”

  “I was wondering if—”

  “Ah,” intoned Granger, looking past Nick, “there she is. A beauty!”

  Nick turned and saw Emma come through the lobby. She looked amazing and fresh and clean and like nothing he had ever seen. It was a special thing, Nick suddenly understood (though with some melancholy), to see one’s wife again for the first time.

  “Yes,” Nick heard himself say.

  “Good evening, Mr. Granger,” Emma said as she approached the podium. She walked like someone very unconscious of her appraisers. Women are most beautiful when they are in ignorance of their own beauty, Nick understood.

  “My lady,” Granger said, executed a slight but formal bow. “You look spectacular, dear.”

  “Isn’t that sweet? How is little Fitcher?”

  “Fitcher?” Granger said.

  “The parrot…”

  “Oh, yes!” Granger laughed. “So he has a name now, does he?”

  “He had a name when I gave him to yo
u,” she said. “I just didn’t want you to know it, for fear you two might become best friends.”

  “You’ll be taking him when you leave, then, I suppose?” Granger asked, and Nick could not tell if the man was hopeful or anxious.

  “Oh, yes,” Emma said.

  “Then maybe I should never let you leave.” And Granger looked at Nick. Added, “The both of you.”

  “It’s a wonderful island,” Nick heard himself utter. To his own ears he sounded like a complete fool.

  “Nick and I are going to a festival on the water.”

  “Well! You should both have a wonderful time. I hope there is plenty of dancing. You look like you are ready for dancing.”

  “I would love to dance,” she told Granger.

  “Promise me, Nicholas, that you will dance at least one dance with this beautiful young woman.”

  “I promise,” he said.

  Emma turned to him. “Do you?”

  “I promise,” he repeated.

  Granger clapped his little red hands together. “Then we are set,” he said.

  Nick nodded at the bell captain and, placing a hand against the small of Emma’s back, ushered his wife out into the turnabout driveway.

  “He is a sweet man,” she nearly whispered. “I can tell he likes you very much.”

  Nick did not say anything.

  As they passed by the dais, the Palauan raised a single black hand. “Friends,” he said.

  “Have a good evening,” Nick said back.

  “Friends,” the Palauan went on. “Buy a conch for the lady?”

  “They’re pretty,” Emma said.

  “A conch for the lady…”

  “No, thank you,” said Nick, hurrying Emma along the white flagstones.

  “Perhaps something for you, sir?” the Palauan continued. “Perhaps some hope? Perhaps some luck, good luck? Or perhaps some prayers for the dead?” Nick did not turn to look. “Prayers for the dead, sir! Prayers for the dead!”