by Molly Gloss
Humberto said, “Be quick to hear and slow to speak, and let grace season the words,” which was an old Quaker maxim his grandmother had used to recite to him.
Andreo nodded. He had a long, fissured face, ears that sprang from his skull. When he gathered his mouth, the tips of his ears pulled nearer his head. “We’ve all been bringing quarrels to these Meetings and leaving grace at home,” he said.
Andreo seemed to mean the four of them as much as anybody, though none of them had spoken for the last several Meetings. Maybe Andreo thought they had all given something intangible to the temper, the atmosphere of dissension—none of them had stood up and spoken of love, of fusing differences, of a desire for unity. Humberto was pierced by a belated wish to tell his dream.
Edmo was still fixed on what he’d been thinking about the size of Meetings. “Maybe a big ŝiro Meeting could be held in two or three parts; minutes could be read one to the other, so people would know what the other parts were saying.”
Anejlisa grinned sourly. “Maybe you should tell that to Isaba, get her to put it on the agenda, next Meeting. But there’s a double-bind, eh? We’ll never have smaller Meetings because there’s too many of us to come to any unity about how to have smaller Meetings.”
They stood on the loĝio arguing and talking in this way without getting anywhere. Other people were standing around in little schools doing the same thing—assigning blame for the failure of the Meeting, and arguing about Isaba Aguto sitting herself above them. In the past, the time following a Meeting had been good for thinking and discussing and persuading—for people to move slowly toward agreement on a hard question. Increasingly, now, no one could agree on the question. Where was the foundation for agreeing upward?
Knuto Mursawa had been standing near them, seeming to listen to what they were saying. Knuto was an aeroponics engineer, a man somewhere in long middle age, with a flattened nose, moles on his face. He was as likely to say something scatterbrained as something that would open a way, but he hadn’t spoken while people were arguing about geothermal power, or while Edmo and Anejlisa quarreled over the size of Meetings.
Now he cleared his throat and said, addressing himself to Andreo, “We always have lived in this world, in its body as in the body of God. It’s a sufficient world and a blessed one, I would say, and I wonder why we ain’t been thinking how we can go on living inside—build something like the Miller down there and live inside it.” He may have wanted to say this momentous thing to the Monthly Meeting, and not been able to bring it out—it had a formal sound, rehearsed. Now he seemed relieved. He shifted, standing mostly on one foot, looking around vaguely without pinning his look on anyone.
None of them spoke. Then Andreo said, spreading his mouth down mournfully, “Well, Knuto, that’s a pretty big question to bring up when we thought this Meeting was over, eh?” No one else spoke. Humberto looked in the other faces for a sign of what he felt, himself—a kind of stunned realization. He had thought he had learned to admire the elegant complexity of the subarctic ecosystem not less than the lush intricacy of the one he lived in, but now he felt his heart clench with a sudden, inexpressible yearning to go on living under a roof, without vagaries of weather, eating cerimoj and mangoes.
Andreo went off and brought back Isaba Aguto who listened to Knuto repeat his little speech, the same words brought forward in the same order, as in the body of God. A small bunch of people had gathered around Knuto by now, and argument began about whether the chronic mechanical failures and deterioration of machinery, the ŝimanas and plagues of illness, the steady irrecoverable loss of plant and animal species, would be prohibitive problems for a planet-bound biosphere.
Isaba said, interrupting, “We can’t be talking this out today, do people agree? We had a long Meeting already, and some of us got to get on to other work. Maybe three or four people will meet with Knuto, and make a start at seeing if this idea is possible.” A few voices called out. Isaba nodded, gripping her chin. “All right then.” Knuto’s lugubrious face was flushed.
After Isaba walked away, people finally began drifting off, going on with the other things in their lives. Then Humberto, who had been hanging back, talked to Anejlisa about the possibility of her brother-in-law’s sister’s second cousin maybe someday making a marriage match for Alfhilda. It was something that was still years away, but arranging a marriage was an important responsibility, and people who loved Alfhilda were already thinking about it and looking around unhurriedly for someone compatible. His brother Pero had asked him to talk to Anejlisa about her relative. Did she think this boy might be suited to Alfhilda? Would she keep an eye on this boy as he grew older, watch him to see if he might make a successful partner for Pero’s daughter?
Humberto spoke his brother’s request quickly and then struggled to get away from Anejlisa’s interested, insistent scrutiny of the idea. He never had been comfortable with questions like these since his own marriage had come undone; he had a vague conviction that his divorce made him unfit to involve himself in other people’s marriages. When his mother had talked to him about matching his son Ĉejo, he had felt a nameless fright, and had resisted having a hand in it. When she went on pressing him, bringing up names of girls, gossiping about this one or that one who might make Ĉejo a wife, he had finally, irritably, told her to bring her reports to Juko. Her face had flattened, as if he’d accused her of something—she hadn’t spoken to Juko in years—maybe she thought he was blaming her for arranging his own failed marriage. But afterward he had gained a little peace: Now she and his aunt Lavka and Heza Barfor were looking at possible matches for Ĉejo without telling him about it.
He got away finally from Anejlisa and the ŝiro meeting, but he didn’t go back to his own house. His mind was jumping helplessly from one thing to another, picking at odds and ends of worries; he wanted to go up into the altejo corn and be alone a while and turn things over systematically. He took the narrow path between the houses into the small terraced fields of pumpkins and beans, plantains, pepinos. A dead chicken lay on the dirt at the edge of the mezlando rice, and he squatted and turned the hen’s stiff body over, examining it. There was a puncture wound in the breast, the feathers surrounding it black and clotted with blood. Chickens frequently disappeared—at daybreak they came for corn, in the evening they simply failed to go to roost; tayras carried them off, or opossums. It was rare to find more than feathers, but this one had made a brief escape, maybe, and then died alone. He sighed unhappily and carried the dead hen back down to his domaro, went into the kitchenhouse and plucked it, eviscerated and washed the body carefully, wrapped it in a piece of linen and left it to cool in the refrigerator.
People came in the kitchen and went out again while he was working, and he was required to talk to each of them—to give a report of the ŝiro Meeting to people who hadn’t been there; to listen to opinions about geothermal power plants from people who had been shy of saying what they thought in front of sixty or a hundred people; to repeat what he had heard Knuto say about the body of God, to people who had already heard about it second- or third-hand. When he had finally, scrupulously, sorted the clean feathers from the bloody and left the clean ones in a basket in the sadaŭ for anyone who needed them and brought the offal out to the compost pile, then he went on with what he’d planned to do, going up into the altejo corn to be alone.
In the corn field he was hidden in the verdure, the maize rearing its powdery tassels an arm’s reach above his head. Weeds had given up trying to grow in the shade under the spreading, strappy leaves, and he went through the field easily, pinching earwigs between his thumbnails, smearing aphids with his fingertips.
He had thought he would spend this time looking for a clear way—grappling with images of grace and unity, or turning over ideas to do with the body of God, or geothermal machinery, or Meetings that were too crowded for consensus; but the smell of the dry heated ground and the must of the corn at this time of year began to be linked in his mind with the scent of sexual inte
rcourse, and helplessly he began to drift into the interstices of that connection.
People who wanted to keep their sexual relations private had to look for secret places or times, and when he was sixteen, seventeen, he had been embarrassed to bring a girl into his own bed with his family members and his neighbors listening on the other side of the wall. The corn field was a place of concealment, of seclusion—he used to lie down with girls on the stubbly dry earth among the stalks of the maize. That was so many years past, the memory of it so abraded, it might have happened to someone else. Now his mother teased Ĉejo about his failure to bring a girl home, and there were places in the altejo field where the stubble of weeds was pressed down flat under the corn in a shapely nest, and twice Humberto had glimpsed a flutter of movement, not an armadillo, not a sloth, someone scuttling away from him through the brake. He had begun to keep out of the maize when he saw a girl of a certain age walking up the path toward his son in the altejo corn.
He remembered without nostalgia the heated urgency of those years in his life, and wasn’t much interested in recapturing it. But he was sometimes surprised and obscurely worried when he realized he’d gone weeks without a real need for sexual contact. He missed the settledness of marriage, the casualness of its sexual relations. He knew people—his brother Pero and his wife—who had fallen into a methodical pattern of intercourse that didn’t much allow for appetite. Pero once had said to him, looking sly, “When Natĉja takes my penis into her hands, that’s when I’m hungry to have a little sex with her.”
This made him think of a woman he had coupled with once, while he was still married to Juko. This woman, Naoma, had had a husband dying slowly from a cancer, and Humberto’s younger son had only just died. Naoma had been a loud talker in those days, had a blotchy, coarse face, and she smelled of her husband’s slow death; he hadn’t thought of laying with her. But when she deliberately pushed her breast against his arm, put the tips of her fingers inside his trousers, he discovered after all a hunger for her, and they had copulated wordlessly on the floor of the tools shed. Afterward he had wondered if it was intercourse she had needed from him, and not something more generous. She had moved into her sister’s household, after her husband’s death, and become an ascetic—was this something he ought to be blamed for? he wondered. And his divorce from Juko must be blamed on other things, not on this adultery, but he had maybe stopped trying hard to find a clear way with his wife after he had had intercourse with Naoma Samuels.
When he cast around in his memory for the last time he had had sexual relations, he was only able to remember bringing the carpenter, Berta Ule, into his empty house while the members of his family danced at the christening of a neighbor’s newborn son. That had been months ago, the baby creeping now, or walking, so he realized with a start that he had become celibate without planning it.
He didn’t know why he had lain with Berta only the one time, and now that he was thinking of her he began to turn over the idea of seeing her again. He didn’t know many people over in Revenana where she lived, didn’t walk over there very often. Their meeting in the first place had been accidental; he’d gone to talk to someone who was on the Revenana Farms Committee, a man who was helping Berta Ule rebuild a shed. He thought suddenly of asking that farmer to ask Berta if she would welcome his company again; he didn’t know if she might by this time have someone else in mind to become married to.
If you were out of the seed years, had been divorced or been widowed and still were wishing to marry again, you could make a reliable match for yourself, most people thought. By that time you ought to be free of the well-known tendency to choose a lover as a mate—perhaps even through being ruled by your sexual organs. But Humberto missed the assurance, the absoluteness, of having other people organize his partnering—it wasn’t Leona’s fault his marriage to Juko had failed. It might be a healing gesture, after all, if he asked his mother to find him a second wife—if he asked his mother, rather than that Revenana farmer, to talk to Berta Ule about renewing their friendship.
For a moment he stood in the close swelter under the corn, deliberately recollecting Berta’s pendant breasts, the wide dark areoles, the nipples rising against the palms of his hands. He remembered her long freckled arms and a belly that rounded neatly above her pubic hair. Immediately his penis stiffened, suffusing with heat, reassuring him. The sound of a gamelan and of drums and people dancing at the christening had come rhythmically through the walls, and Berta had stood up playfully after copulating with him and had danced beside the bed, beating her feet against the floor, slapping her knees, her big teeth flashing.
Humberto swayed dizzily as if he were dancing himself, and the heat in his groin swept out to his limbs suddenly. His eyes watered, peering against a yellow blaze. He shut them, but the shimmer went on blinding and dizzying him. He felt himself absorbed in a kaleidoscope of fleeting movement, of impressions and shifting featureless patterns and colors, impermanence. For a moment, he wondered stupidly if he had become an infant again: He felt he hadn’t yet mastered the intricate skill of seeing fixed three-dimensional objects in the great rushes of movement and light. Wonderingly, slowly, as a person born blind and suddenly sighted, he realized what hung before his eyes: the delicate arched bones of the distant ceiling, the array of the daylight xenon lamps.
His arms outflung, he was lying in a tangle of broken canes of corn. One of his eyes was shut, he realized, and when he opened it, the brilliance made his mind stop. The earth burned against the skin of his shoulder blades, his buttocks, his heels; the bowl of his skull held a searing fire. In a flutter of confusion, he wondered if it was the whole torus that had flashed to apocalypse in a dazzling moment of heat and light. But then he understood what his ears were hearing: the hum of bumblebees, blackflies, mosquitoes, going on with their lives. He became aware of children laughing. A woman shouted something and she or someone else banged on a pot. The world was going on living, and he with it, lying on the ground. He thought he should be afraid but felt only a kind of surprise, and a flattened, distant interest in what had made him fall.
He sat, and in a moment realized that he had only imagined sitting up, that he was still lying there, looking through the blades of leaves and overarching tassels of corn to the ceiling. He put his whole attention scrupulously on the task of sitting, but his mind seemingly had separated itself from his body, and the body ignored the mind’s decision, went on lying quietly on the ground, peering up at the glare of daylight. He shut his eyes; shut his one eye, because the other, disobeying him, went on looking into the sky. A mote swam into his field of vision, became a cowbird or a young starling flying against the distant girders. People once had examined the flights of birds for auguries of the future. He wondered what he should understand from this single cowbird flying across his single eye.
A wordless anxious shakiness moved into his chest. Do you know what this means? he thought desperately, but without knowing where this question came from or who it was meant for; it was nonsensical, unanswerable.
An involuntary tear scribed a slow arc down to the hinge of his jaw and into the nape of his hair. “Uh,” he said, not a word but a vague protest, and the sound vibrated dryly on his tongue. He was surprised by the small hoarse moaning and tried to say something more definite, a coherent complaint or an appeal, but couldn’t get anything more to come out of his mouth. And his mind, too, disobeyed him, becoming independent of his desires. He began helplessly, silently, to turn over and over the irrelevant repetitions of jumping-rope rhymes, of lullabies and work chants, ritual blessings for tools and crops, bless this, bless this, bless this seed. The center slowly gave way and he drifted into a jumble of unconnected words, a silent stream that flooded his brain with impression, with indecipherable meaning—when show don’t ever where next come call me come call heaven call to me don’t don’t, and from that unknown place he slid seamlessly down to fragments, syllables, and finally into a silence that poured into him and washed his brain clear, and h
e lay mindlessly, not thinking at all, simply feeling in his bones, his blood, the swift wheeling of the earth, the weight of his body against the ground, the clammy June heat against his skin.
The dirt sifted dryly, and a snake came up on the rise of his ribs. A measureless time had passed. He was startled, muddled, as when he would sleep in the daytime and wake without knowing if it was early morning or twilight. The snake was black, very long. Humberto wasn’t afraid of it—musaranaj ate other reptiles, even venomous snakes—but his skin shuddered involuntarily, a belated intent to move away, to let the snake get by him without touching. From the lower edge of his tearing eyes he watched the snake’s head and forepart resting delicately on air, centimeters above the buttons of his shirt. It tasted his smell silently with a thin, scissored tongue.
In the snake’s lidless eyes it was impossible to see its soul, and after a moment Humberto shifted his own eye away uneasily. What was this distance between human beings and snakes? He felt a closer kinship with ants and fish than with the utterly alien intelligence of snakes. There wasn’t anything in a snake’s life he was able to recognize: no family ties, sociability, playfulness, joy in living, no devotion to their young. It seemed to him, a snake was all predation, toothless jaws that took animals in whole. They were lengths of thick vine that had become unexpectedly muscular, fluent, blood-filled—who knew why?
If it ever had looked at him, the snake looked away now, the broad shovel-tip of the head turning indifferently as it gathered its thick limb to get over his obstruction. He was obscurely ashamed to be inanimate, to be taken for a warmed stone or a toppled tree lying between the rows of corn. The musarana insinuated itself languorously across his body but then settled into the triangular space between his outflung elbow and his ribs. The snake was heavy and sinewy, two meters long, but it coiled neatly into the small enclosure there, in the tented heat and darkness beneath a fold of his shirt.