The Dazzle of Day

by Molly Gloss

  She saw people she knew, especially in Mandala where she had lived twenty-eight years, before marrying Aŭgustino Mendoza and moving to his mother’s house in Pacema. But she kept walking steadily, just calling a word or lifting a hand to people who spoke to her, in a way that made it clear there was a place she needed to get to.

  It had been years since she had been in Linda Florencio’s house, she remembered poorly where it stood. At Esperplena she meant to ask the way, but there was a stiff yellow kite stuck on the roof of a house down in the maltejo, an old practice, and she knew it was Linda’s house flying it, announcing a death.

  People crowded the loĝio and all the apartments in that domaro, standing about in bunches or sitting on the floor, not many of them making themselves useful. Some young people were decorating a bier with flowers and the fronds of ferns, streamers of yarn and rag—they would put Al’s body on the decorated bier and his family would carry it once around the circle of the torus before he was burnt. Among the children tying ribbons to the cart was Juko’s son, Ĉejo Indergard, and a girl, a cousin by marriage of Kristina’s granddaughter’s husband. What was the girl’s name? Kristina couldn’t remember. She let both of them kiss her cheek, but she had come to visit the body, not to visit with her own relatives, she told them, and went off looking for the dead man. Alberto’s body had been laid out on a rug in one of the rooms of his mother’s apartment. The skin was blackish and taut—he had breached his exo, Kristina remembered. She looked at him critically, but the look he returned was pitiful, despairing, and she found after all she must forgive him. Bad judgment.

  She went among the people until she found Linda Florencio. Their friendship was remote, disused, she didn’t pretend otherwise. She looked in the woman’s face—it was a surprise to find she had gotten old—and said simply, “I’m sorry for what’s happened to your son,” and embraced her until they had both quit crying, and then left her among her relatives, her neighbors. She pulled up a short table in a corner of the loĝio, sat on the floor and began to make tortillas. She could do it without thinking about Linda’s son, or her own. The fast, rhythmic slip-slap, slip-slap, of the patties against the palms of her hands was a comfort, and it masked other sounds—she never had had much tolerance for the silly words that were spoken in sympathy at a mortafesto.

  “I hadn’t thought you were a friend with Alberto.” Juko squatted beside her at the low table. Her face was sallow; she liked to wear that yellow shirt that had been resewn from her mother’s old clothes after that woman was dead.

  “I was a friend with Linda Florencio, eh? and Al killed her son,” she said flatly. Then she said, “Did you go to Ina’s house?”

  Juko made a gesture with her head, not an answer. “People over there were coming over here.”

  “Did you see the body?”

  “Yes.”

  “Somebody should have let the blood out of him. He looks bad that way, not himself.”

  Juko looked in the sack with sapote in it. She spilled the fruits out on the table and made a start at paring them, halving them, without speaking about Alberto’s body. In a minute she got up and went to hunt for a plate. When she came back, Kristina said, “I had forgot you and Alberto Poreda were friends.”

  Juko shrugged, though her eyes became bright with tears that did not fall. Kristina kept patting the tortilla quietly, slip-slap, slip-slap. Juko laid the sapotes on the plate in a careful manner, spiraling the yellow fruit from the rim to the center.

  “Did you know? my nephew spent his green years with Alberto and Ina?” Juko said this without looking up.

  “Viĉente? Oh, I did know it. I’d forgot.” She had forgotten Ina, the wife, too, when she’d been stoking her anger toward Alberto. What were you thinking of? Selfish, selfish. “Which is Ina? I never did know her.”

  Juko looked about. “I don’t see her now.” She set the plate of sapotes away from her and shook some of Kristina’s ground breadnut into the shallow clay bowl, squeezed a lime into it, began to knead the dough and flatten it. “Alberto and Ina have a son born with only one hand,” she said in a low voice.

  Kristina looked at her. Juko seldom would speak about such children. The fey ones, people called those kids, and were chary of them—babies born without hands, or with toeless feet, twins joined at the ribs. It was blamed on insufficient shielding, cosmic radiation in the interstellar space. Juko’s own fey child had lived four years? five? and Kristina had been harsh in her judgment of her own behavior, then. She had felt stiff and tactless and false-hearted, had believed that she was not a sufficient friend to Juko. This was something she and Juko never had spoken of—Juko was shrouded in her own guilt, in those days, brandishing a shield of anger. In the years since Vilef’s death, looking back through a lengthening lens, Kristina gradually had become more forgiving of herself; but Juko deliberately refused to speak to her of those years. She spoke as if she had no other child but Ĉejo.

  “I heard a man say, once, those children are touched by God’s finger, and that way of seeing it has stuck with me afterward,” Kristina said.

  Juko’s face became sour. “Is that a complaint against God? that God’s touch always brings these calamities?”

  Juko was someone who would not sit at a Meeting for Worship; if she once had followed a religious leading, she had turned away from it after the death of her son. She and Kristina often had argued about God, but they kept away from certain tender places, and this was one. Anyway, Kristina could see in Juko’s face that her daughter-in-law’s irritability had nothing much to do with her. Both of them went on working the tortillas, slip-slap, slip-slap.

  “Well, there is Ina,” Juko said.

  Kristina looked. The woman was forty or fifty, with fair hair, a tall body but her posture poor, her shoulders rounded over. Her face was anxious, tired, without grief. She hadn’t yet felt this death, Kristina thought. Kristina’s own husband had died young—she remembered standing among her friends and neighbors at that mortafesto, conscious of wearing sorrow like a garment, but feeling only confusion, and anger and fright. It was months before she had understood in her breast that Aŭgustino was dead.

  It may have been one of Ina’s children with her, a young man standing with his arm clasped about Ina’s waist, inclining his head to listen to something Ina spoke. There was a likeness about their wide mouths, and the younger one was built like the older, muscular and long-waisted. The young man’s face was blowsy from weeping, the tender skin around his eyes dark and swollen.

  “Is that her son, then? That boy standing with her—is he the son without a hand?”

  “Yes. Beto, his name is.” And at that moment the boy flourished one arm, gesturing to his mother, and Kristina saw the smooth rosy knob at the end of his wrist. “There’s a daughter, I don’t see her,” Juko said. “You wouldn’t know either of them for Al’s children, they’re fair, like their mother, neither of them took Al’s color.” She looked at Kristina. “Do you want to speak to Ina?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “Yes,” she said, and got up stiffly from the floor.

  The widow Ina pulled her mouth out in a joyless smile when she saw Juko. “Romeo was here, did you see him? And Orval Wyho. They said you were with Al, eh, when he was killed?”

  Juko made an uncharacteristic gesture, thrusting one of her hands back through the cap of her hair in a jerky movement as if she were fending off with an elbow the thing Ina was asking her. “Well, he was dead when I reached him, Ina.” Ina stood with her son’s arm around her waist again, the two of them leaning into one another, waiting, expectant. “He may have meant to cut a tangle in the halyard,” Juko said after a silence. “None of us was there to see. Who can know?” Ina went on looking at her unhappily. Finally Juko said, “Maybe if the sheet had held flat, eh? then he might not have been killed.”

  Kristina was embarrassed for Juko’s lie, but Ina leaned toward Juko with yearning and nostalgia, as if this lost opportunity were a gift she might still receive. The son lo
oked at his mother sorrowfully. “Well,” he said, and pushed the rounded heel of his wrist across his cheek, though there were no tears there.

  Juko said to Ina, touching Kristina’s sleeve, “Do you know my husband’s mother, Kristina Veberes?”

  Kristina had stood back, but she came up now, and stood alongside Juko. She had lately had to struggle with an old-woman’s compulsion: She often wanted to share her painfully gained wisdom with people who weren’t able to make use of it. You’ll get over being afraid, get used to being alone, she wanted to say. When my husband was forty-seven, he killed himself, so I know your feelings. Stupid. She looked in Ina’s stiff face. “I’m sorry for what’s happened to Alberto,” she said flatly. Ina’s eyes strayed away from her, dry, skittish. That was all right. She hadn’t cried much either, those first days.

  After a moment, Juko came forward and put her arms briefly around Ina—the widow looked like a long bent pole Juko had got her arms around. Kristina didn’t know this woman, but she knew what sort of loss she was living, so she also gave her an embrace. With her cheek against Ina’s she found she was compelled to murmur, “When my husband was forty-seven, he went mad and killed himself.”

  The woman made a slow sound, a lament, let her head fall on Kristina’s shoulder as a child will do, beginning to weep. Well hell, not so stupid then. She patted Ina’s back and kissed her hair and murmured, “Yes. Yes. Yes,” in a steady rhythm, the word empty, a mantra.

  She and Juko made pots of tea and put them out for people to find, and they sat with tea themselves, on the boards in the open center of Linda’s house, watching people, and talking with ones they knew, Sonja Landsrud and Virdela Rota, about the Ruby, and the little boat Lark that surely by now was set down on the world, and Kristina’s son, Juko’s husband, maybe by now walking under a sky, a sun’s light, in unmade weather.

  Later, Armando Poreda—who was dying, Juko said, and was Alberto’s father—came and spoke with Juko nostalgically of childhood things to do with Al. This man Armando would have been Linda’s husband during the years of their friendship, but his face was unfamiliar. She thought they had never met in those days, she had known him only through his wife’s words. Now none of that was in her memory; he was an old man with smooth dark skin pulled close over a fine skull, and she could see in his eyes that he’d found some secret about death, and hadn’t any need to grieve for the loss of his son.

  He had been a handsome man, still was handsome if you took into account he’d gotten old, and was dying, and she liked his equanimity, a quality she still waited for in herself. She wished, not quite seriously, that his marriage to Linda and his dying were not in the way of her enjoying sex with him. She was ashamed of herself for the irreverence in this thought—it was First Day! they were meeting at the wake of this man’s son!—but it had been a year since she’d copulated with anyone, and she wasn’t ready to be finished with that aspect of her life, just yet. In fact, she had been surprised to find that, in her old age, she was relieved to be unmarried. She liked having the scope to enjoy sex with different partners. Anyway, marriages had to be remade, once your children were no longer children, and she had seen in other people that it was difficult work, something she was glad to do without.

  The mortafesto went on being silly in the usual ways. People laughed and gossiped, children ran through, but every little while a self-conscious silence would fall in one of the rooms or a corner of the loĝio and then someone in the middle of it would be moved to stand and share some thought about Al, or about God, or death. Sometimes a person would fill one of these silences with foolish or pointless advice for Al’s relatives—“God’s will be done,” people liked to say, but drawing it out to some dreadful length. Kristina, squirming irritably, would comfort herself with a conceit: She had kept her own words to them short and private, and had offered no advice.

  She was impatient with melancholy music as with barren advice, and when a flute began to play a sad melody from the room where Al’s body lay, and two women’s voices joined it, a lyric about loss and truth, she took her clarinet from its case and spitefully toodled something amusing, a bit of a song. Let the sad people go and sit in that room with the body and the flute, she thought. Over here, we’ll have a festo. Eventually Roaldo Forman brought his horn to play with her, and then someone with a guitar, a woman she didn’t know; they settled into playing in earnest, variations on an old tune they all knew. A few people began to dance, and more instruments were brought out, and people who were sitting drummed the floor or their knees, or made timpani of the shoulders of the person sitting in front of them, and Kristina let go of her irritation.

  After a while she had to give up playing and unbend her legs—she had an old woman’s body, something she regarded as a betrayal. She stood up, flexing her knees ungracefully, putting her hands to kneading the small of her back, and when she was standing there she saw Linda Florencio and her dying husband dancing together, leaning into one another with the tenderness of children. When you move something, you discover new meanings in it, Kristina thought, watching them.

  Juko found her again and said quietly, “I have some wine I got from Leo Furuso. I’ve been hiding it from you. People are getting ready to carry Al around the world; are you going? or maybe do you want to go home and help me drink up that little wine now?”

  Kristina lifted her eyebrows. “You are damn selfish, eh? Didn’t bring it for sharing at this funeral.”

  “No. Oh hell no,” Juko said, and both of them looked sly, and smiling. They sat on the stoop of the domaro putting their sandals on, and then went up through the close-built houses. There was a wetland at the east edge of Revenana, the leaching field for that district’s wastes, and the footway went high up on the wall to skirt it. Kristina’s bones felt lighter up there close to the ceiling, and climbing up was a diminishing effort. It was the downhill that was hard, a thickening of weight on her old bones, her aged heart.

  On the path between fields of jackfruit and bananas, walking swiftly uphill to them, was someone they knew, Leo Furuso’s wife, Filisa Ilmen. Her face was pink—Kristina saw in it some bad news she was coming somewhere to give. She was a homely woman and not very bright but Kristina liked her; she was a good mother, and rightly had kept up a friendship with her husband’s family even though Leo had some old grudge against them. She expected Filisa’s bad news was for someone else, but then her round face, lifting, seeing them, darkened to red, and Kristina’s heart began to drum in her ears.

  “The Lark’s crashed,” Filisa told them, and her eyes filled swiftly with tears.

  Kristina hated the way her body felt when it was surprised by fear—light, breakable, shaken, like the rattles people made from gourds. She had not expected to find the attachment to one’s child so strong after fifty years. My son isn’t dead, she thought, but she couldn’t make her body believe it. Her body waited for Filisa to say that Bjoro was dead.

  Juko said, “Where does this come from? Who is saying it? Are people dead?” with her voice rising in a kind of anger. She didn’t speak Bjoro’s name, neither had Filisa.

  She looked at Juko with her brows raised in appeal. “Someone from the Radio Committee came and said it. You know how they never tell clear things, eh? the radio always will break up.” She shook her head, opened her hands out from fists. “They said there was a mechanical failure—something—and a short falling; there was water, they’ve come down in water, I guess.”

  Juko made a choking sound and Kristina was startled and frightened by that, more than by Filisa’s chill words. She took Juko’s arm, held it fiercely. “Now don’t, don’t,” she commanded. Then she let go her hold and they all three stood without looking at one another, without speaking or touching. After a while Juko said, “I’ve got that wine,” with her anger back again, and went on down through the fields toward the houses of Revenana, walking stiffly erect, swinging her arms. Kristina arranged her mouth. She said to Filisa, “The radio people believe they are killed, eh?”


  Filisa lifted her brow again, childlike, sorrowing. “I don’t know, Kristina.” She put one of her arms across Kristina’s shoulders. Kristina wanted not to be touched; she felt breakable, cracked, but didn’t want to hurt the poor woman’s feelings. She reached up and patted Filisa’s hand on her shoulder. “Well,” she said meaninglessly. “Well.”

  5

  Humberto

  A song of the rolling earth, and of words according,

  Were you thinking that those were the words, those upright lines? those curves, angles, dots?

  No, those are not the words, the substantial words are in the ground and sea,

  They are in the air, they are in you.

  BECAUSE IT WAS May, farming was a work that wouldn’t wait for grief or fear to be spent. In May there was rain every night, and long days of bright light, and the rain-washed air was charged with fertility. The rice was delicate, not as swift or as coarse as maize; if it wasn’t to be overgrown it had to be kept weeded, and weeded again. It stood knee-high in straight rows of vivid green, and Humberto went between the rows, scraping the ground with a broad maĉeta curved like a scimitar.

  Asian people had grown a rice that thrived in flooded fields, but it was the upland Costa Rican rice that had been brought onto the Miller, a kind of rice that sprang from well-drained ground, and yielded well on poor soil where heavy-feeding crops would sulk. For the latter virtue, Sven Fuĵino and Humberto had planted it to this field, the Shepherd’s Crook, which was always impoverished by the old trees standing at the east edge of the ŝiro, the remnant of a woodland that once had separated them from Esperplena. Humberto had gone along, jabbing holes in the earth with a pointed stick, while Sven followed him with the rice seed in the hollow shell of a calabash gourd. Humberto’s lines were straight as if he’d followed a cord strung across the field. It was something you had an eye for, or not; Sven always laid crooked rows.