Prodigies

by Angélica Gorodischer

  Madame Helena took a black velvet skirt from the closet and hesitated a moment, telling herself that soon, if not already, velvet was not right for the season, and perhaps a cameo, too, but then even more rightly soft flannel instead of velvet, a blouse with a plain neckline that would accommodate a necklace and ring set, the green enamel one with the silver drop and chain. She knew she could never buy pearls like the ones that Madame Nashiru had brought from Montijo Bay or Kiushu, ship by ship, from the lips of meleagrina clams to exhibitors standing on parquet flooring or to smooth white silk trays, pink pearls that seemed hardly touched in the glass display cases where careful hands had placed them. It was easier to imagine a thousand, a hundred thousand animals than one animal; hair, feathers, claws, spots, stripes, horns, udders, and muzzles had no need to be in place when there were a hundred thousand million animals dashing in a race to the bottom of the craters of the moon. A cloud of silvery dust, as moondust must be, was enough with thunder, clattering hoofs, chomping mouths, and who could crush whom and who flee from whom in the icy desolation, ashy as frost. From the end of the street, from the ravines of the moon the victorious bray of turtlets arose like a hurricane and stole into Madame Helena’s ears, who left the skirt on the back of a chair and forgot the pearls to her regret, diminutive pearls, perfect spheres of albescent irritation. Shouts that split the cold air like glass thorns, impertinent running around, the sheer stupidity of mothers and nursemaids who let little boys play in the street, and even, she had once seen and hardly believed, girls out so late. Meanwhile, behind Madame Helena’s back and with some haste because the afternoon was getting dangerously late and at any moment front doors would open and formidable figures would order them to put an end to that and come inside immediately, the turtlets insisted on another race fleeing from colossal feet and waving trunks, and then they had an idea for salvation, and not from the other side of the moon: no more battles, instead they could play Trapsnare so their shouts would not be heard inside the houses. Some children were against it, cautious souls already well versed in prudence: there was little light and for Trapsnare someone would have to go in to get chalk and would not be let back outside so one of the teams would be a player short and they would also need seeds as counters, or buttons or little stones, and the cooks and servants would raise a fuss if they tried to get them. Madame Helena put away the velvet skirt and, on the marble-topped table, put the rings and the cameo with the clover-shaped cross and the profile of a woman whose hair was swept up and held in place with an ivory ribbon for a headdress with three malachite birds and golden threads. She did not like children; she was grateful to fate for not having them, although at times this thanks was not only vain but unjust; perhaps her body had refused, wisely closed, renegade and resistant to the threat that it could have inexplicably and proudly become swollen by the Linz doctor. It seemed to her that her life was not a bright ribbon like the one that united the three birds on the ivory-crowned woman whose cameo profile matched the rings, not a series of events arranged on another ribbon that was time; instead it was an attempt, a test in thin air, a resolve so consistent, so certain that only by being quiet and hushed, unconnected and unheroic, without anger or haste, could she manage to discern its opaque whole. In another way, she could never know her part of the anxiety, meanness, exaltation, or vague ambition of other people, never relate to the hidden letters in the odor of the Linz tobacco factories, the poems by Asa Lundgren that her mother recited, the trip north, the objects that she had kept in her parents’ home and those she had gotten rid of, the walls she had marked to be removed to create another space, the ones she had erected to enclose another room, her selection of the guests for the house, the empty room, that strange girl, Madame Nashiru’s pearls and Madame Nashiru herself, the mysterious selection of the enemy and of black as the denial of all color for her clothing although permitting herself the whim of a bit of green or autumn yellow, rigorous limits otherwise acceptable within the rights she deserved.

  Sometimes, but not on this uncertain afternoon on Scheller Street, they played Take the Fort, War Between Nations, Prisoner’s Base, and Jump the Fire. For the animals on the moon, an ability to detect allies on one hand, and speed, strength, and slyness on the other, meant triumph for those lunar animals, letting them swagger on the way to school the next day. Children? Tender innocent creatures? Incomplete men, miniature adults filled with laughter and adorable traits? There were games more secret and suffocating but not in the street, arms held behind backs, breath held from fear and shame, other hands lowering pants, or wet mouths declaring the tests they would have to pass to become men. Men? Such fear, seriousness, distrust, silence, hidden trembling, cold indifference, and control of eyes and hands? In Madame Helena’s rooms there were two mirrors and she passed before the two each night after dressing as she walked toward the door. She entered the corridor, and as she neared the stairs, she looked out the window down at the street, now almost dark.

  18. Only His Eyes

  It must have been a charm, a charm that had hung from a chain on a woman’s neck, or an earring, or almost certainly a talisman, a fish-man that conjured storms and attracted schools of fish to nets, in which case it would never have sparkled at a woman’s neckline; on the contrary, women would be banned from even looking at it because women and the sea, women and ships, women and fishing were a bad pair that brought endless misfortune, poverty, rot in the soul, and death in life. Perhaps in that case it would demand a tithe, how could it not if it could be avid and cruel but not always, if it could change with the light, time of day, season, and possessor; Mr. Pallud had known all that immediately in the store when it was nothing more than a little pile of promising metal, formless and waiting for only his eyes and touch; on the other hand it could be agreeable and generous in the morning, he suspected, but to see that he would have to wait until the next day, an entire night’s vigil with waterfowl, water to make dry land fertile, water currents that a ship left behind in its wake like his would, what fish breathe, and what its old silver, made from embers and scales, would reclaim. With his hand in his jacket pocket on the charm, he walked streets silent only for his ears, the light growing fainter, still not sure where he would put it. Would he know when he arrived, would he say here, would he feel the proper arrangement rising from his curved fingers up his wrist and arm to arrive in his brain? Or would doubt swirl like a whirlpool, truly waterlogged, mocked by uncertainty, not knowing what to do? It seemed to him, did it not, that true happiness was drowning him, that today he could, if he wished, sadly and quickly rid himself of all his treasures and keep only the fish-man no larger than one of his fingers, the ring finger, yet more gigantic than Cronus, able to fill all his shelves, cover the window, take over his rooms. He could enclose it, not really, he knew, but he could force his hand to close over it, and what was it his hand held, a shadowy tithe that he would pay possibly for his whole life or for just a few minutes; he could tie it up with string so nothing could escape, call Kati-Kati and tell her to throw it in the trash, without bothering to look at her as he spoke. Never had he had an unnameable presence so close: he often entered those vile little stores in which an old woman in rags warily croaked an impossible price for a bit of a shipwreck, and, although from time to time he would discover something worthwhile, he was accustomed to leaving those holes vexed and empty-handed. Inevitably mad, those old women pulled their dirty shawls tighter against the distant sea wind, loath to admit what they did and did not wish to sell, and this time behind that nasty woman from whom he had never bought anything, on the edge of a book that stuck out on a forgotten dust-covered heap, there was a little pile of metal that for him and only for him shone through long-gone water because otherwise how else could he have seen it? He stopped short, caught, staring, remembering that he would need to pay, not knowing if it would be for his whole life or just a few minutes, while he asked the old woman about the base of a lamp, the beads from a necklace in a broken cup, and the fish-man curled up on hi
s cornice, murky from abandonment, dirt, and waiting. He almost stopped, no, he did not, he walked as if he were troubled, especially in the store compared to now in the street, fabricating indifference again on his face and gaze as if he did not want to haggle, as if the talisman did not interest him, but it did, he could not part from it, move his hand, open it and leave it somewhere and turn and talk about something else, but the old woman, farther from him and it than anything, had declared the three prices and left him to pay what he wanted without looking at him or it. Yet he knew he was in the street, he knew he was not far from the boarding house of Madame Helena, he knew that he was going to arrive and the fish-man was going to slide down the corridor, blazing, immortal, and unique, but in a mood that made men dream, he was still just outside the doorway of the nasty little store, now with his hand wrapped around the charm. In spite of impending nightfall, he could already hear the shouts of children playing on Scheller Street, they told him where he was and pulled him from his stupor. A charm? When he was in his rooms he would put it under a light to study it and see if the oval head did or did not have marks of broken or ripped metal that would tell him if it had ever hung from a chain, and if they were there he would file them off until they disappeared to make it into what it had always been. While he did not want to think about the setting, the reign, the water that would bubble up wherever he put it, or think about the treasures he would have to displace, set aside, move, or put away, the violinist, the bear, the shepherdess, the gargoyle, the mill girl, the sorcerer, the farm animals, the smith, the reader, the ballerina, the fat man, he did want to think about the blank notebook page in which he would mark it down as if it were one more item but with different handwriting or a different color ink, and he would note it as something he knew not yet what. As he took another step toward the house he recalled the hanged man who well past death would grimace if he blew on him to make him spin. How could he know or not know if the fish-man was not the executioner who carried out irrefutable sentences, a malign toy that he should have left with the leather-faced old woman in the cave of a store darkened by filth. Heindesberg would not be much help because Heindesberg only considered what was possible; he thought for a moment, pausing near a wall because there were other people in the world and they were even walking down this street, about the possibility of going to the municipal library the way the General went to the museum library and looking, looking for what? A history of aquatic religions, an essay about anthropomorphic animals, men with dog heads, eagles with women’s breasts, giants with lion haunches, serpents with girl’s faces, sirens, vampires, toads that talk, tortoises with hands, birds with lips; a bestiary, the oldest one there was: a nightmare zoology. He would see them in the jungle world and not in books, he would recall them, whether for his whole life or just a few minutes he did not know, he dared to be sure of that, he would guess what they were as they climbed and hung head-down from the highest branches of the most colossal trees, swimming upstream in the iridescent rapids at land’s end where ships disappeared toward other horizons. What toothy faces, what feet divided into a thousand joints, what ostentatious headdresses, what other life, what inscriptions on what walls would be his when the fish-man decreed another destiny and Scheller Street was less than a memory lost in the thick dust of nasty little second-hand stores. He believed he was at the point of discovering an order not very secret yet truly eloquent about how to turn the future into an inevitable landscape, a familiar scene which had always been there and for that same reason was only seen during visits or when the dice had fallen in one of those atrocious games commonly called games of chance, or fate, or god, and even then, with all the rest deprived of its transitory sense, the color of curtains or the arrangement of chairs around a table could be viewed without understanding them; but the instant passed without having shown him even a yellow fig dripping sweet juice, and he soon found himself almost at the house of Madame Helena, wavering in the half-light, his head echoing with the shouts of a hundred, thousand, million children who played on the canvas of the street, shouts like horns, like a trap, like a difficult to escape flood, where he did not know whether he had been turning things over in his mind for his whole life or just a few minutes.

  19. Youth, the Reddened Warrior

  So often compared to vineyards or deer, upon closer inspection youthful bodies better resemble something invisible and dangerous, streams of energy it is inadvisable to approach like edges, parapets, and fire, ready to burst or to cushion heavy falling objects, unfortunate people, withheld affection, or whatever is hidden in incompletely clear intentions or even dreams, nostalgic for the Golden Age; young Gangulf, for example, thin and fast yet with a confiscated rage that he tried to control and felt sorrowful if he failed, more than satisfied if he could save it for random moments in the darkness of a park, behind a carefully closed door, or in a church before the flaming eyes of the images of saints in torment. He was not studying, because the letters in his books lay there like ants, like distant tropical ants with potbellied lustrous queens leading armies, like the blackest fastest ants or white ones tunneling through wood with lighting-fast metallic mandibula gnashing in the light before his eyes, malignant things, nightmares on dry mornings, mirrors that deformed small-town afternoons with their half-open windows; they stretched madly and were useless, so useless he could slam the covers shut, throw them hastily on the table, yet bear in mind Of the Power of Souls because he had been defeated: more than senses exist to place man in contact with a world where he had been born defeated to a life that surrounded and crushed him, but, for all that they deny the existence of an invisible force and tell him if it exists, its presence is perhaps not necessary, he had always liked to believe in it; he had been born to lose and this exonerated him, and even if they denied this presence of a hidden force, it made him throw his books on the table one against the other, jump up, look for his hat gloves cape, gestures that were just that, gestures assaying excuses for certain acts perhaps rightly called mad if taken in their totality, empty orders that must be complied with the way empty soup tureens and secret compartments in rings for poison must be filled, inscribed in the hidden being that responds to omnipresent nature, the immanent vision arising preformed entirely from the Highest; with three books under his arm, his hat brim tipped over his eyes, gloved hands to hold the cape against his deerlike body, hiking against the boxed-in wind down the university street asking what might allow an imperfect creature to perceive another reality, that of the Spirit undoubtedly, taking too-slow obligatory steps in search of ants: the true moral color of actions, the unmentionable hue of decisions, the breadth of talents, the other perspective of sin, the savannas of Africa, the green plains of the Americas where brittle desert ants dine on the marrow of yellow-tufted animals spread and cooked on embers, and thus the blind have to see more than those whose eyes are sound there where they domesticate boas and race mounted on jaguars with necks longer than giraffes’, mutes who make their voice heard to the ends of the earth, the deaf who hear the fall of a strand of cotton amid thunderous machines, and yet one dies slowly in nitrate mines devoured by the sun and worms emerging from beneath the white crust which has become one’s skin and where monsters sit on tree trunks, angels in huts and fools in palaces, the highest and lowest of the arc created by the impulse of Power. So at night, returning on the route to the black open windows, remembering, careful and ready to escape if necessary: he knew what he would find in the eyes of Miss Esther if he could look her in the face, make her look at him in the face and thanks to that awaken, shed the obstinately worded text composed with utmost patience, hurry and meet her again in the doorway. She might flee, which comforted him. Perhaps Madame Helena did not totally trust him despite the circumspect letters from his father, but then, had not the silly Esther fallen in love with him, the sweet miss in sweet blue and gray behind her sweet sugar counter? He would not arrive in time and this would bother him the way everything incomplete did at night, it would be awful like the s
avannas of Africa next to the pulpit for the almighty five senses and as a result the body was now dangerously empty, the walls worn out, the tapestry of daydreams still unconfessed, and he launched himself ahead, toward the deer park like an incendiary arrow burning everything it passed, and the air came to a stop and made lustrous ants explode between the teeth of the distant and ever-patient horses.

  20. Fountains

  He believed, shielded by years of waiting and fire, that there were beings fragile due to their intricacy, a tangle of little cells, honeycombs, labyrinths, knotted partitions, and beating vessels the width of a hair, hands so very tiny, impassive as white insects but soft, incapable of holding anything of wood or metal, incapable of holding themselves if they fell, holding on to something and staying there; fragile bodies, brittle, and indecisive, not fully finished, imperfect and vacillating like shrill music or the dying flame of a candle that no longer gives light; bodies that enclose a thread of awareness, a stirring of reason that calls to the storm and desire like obsession, like the need of some long-legged insects to pose blind on a despotic arm, their dead fragments blemished. Impossible to know or even suspect what was schemed behind those eyes where orders ought to rebound, echo, and be obeyed. He had seen these ill-endowed beings, like a defective hand of cards that should be returned, in the rows of faces that passed for review, eyes opaque and buttons shining, and knew that something had to be taken from them, knew that they were going to sob and break but in the end he was going to obtain what he wanted, the perfect men whom their fathers had dreamed of upon engendering them because who and where was the man who did not carry that dream and release it at that moment, the vision of purity and perfection, a single back for all to receive the designation like a lashing with a single look, a single leap for the hero. He had known how to manage them but not now, now it was impossible to reckon hidden solidity because the shudder at what had dawned now filled him with the ardor of the desert sun, the torrent, the cavalry he charged against full force to conquer those things that had been impossible in the splendor of campaigns. Not anymore, so he had abandoned any attempt and merely looked, blind before weakness, an attempt like a light that swung a delicate body back and forth. Nonetheless he had not been able to ponder pearls because only by chance he had never gotten near hellebores or wildflowers, and these links to something greater than chance were precisely what had to be eliminated for victory. But in fact, as strange as it might seem, he had learned to be in the presence of things he had never expected: fountains, for example. Outside of his room in the boarding house on Scheller Street, the only things that had interested him were cleanliness, the sheen of pottery, the polish of marble, untainted plates, the shine of bronze, barely visible glass, and waxed wood: he had not known nor had wanted to know anything else, but ever since Madame Nashiru arrived at the house, he had been given to imagining within the wall what until then had been mute, fountains of soft porous material, viscous even beneath fingertips, and the satin feeling that slides all along rounded moldings. He had sunk to the point of keeping his hands in his pockets to avoid bas-reliefs, the eyes of unknown flowers touched by someone who with almost all certainty was not him, and water splashing a naked body that he wanted to correct into soldierly excellence, not the admixture of a confused novice, instead ready for the cruelest test. He was able to recall that in those cases water, the most innocent thing in the world, could become a condemnation, like salt or wood, and all in silence so as not to lose what little the victim was allowed to keep. Only then was it certain that a man was not going to retreat; only then was he sure about the echo and could give himself orders. Magnificent bodies that he supposed were gilt; black in death, it was true, but golden or ivory below rough clothing, gems and tight belts on the hips, slipping and colliding with each step or stride, not with dance, not with the footstep barely audible in the corridor when he was waiting, having returned to his room after breakfast. And in the street harder than sands or salt pans or mountainsides, at an indecent speed in the street, came the wonder of hidden feet that upon being placed bare in fountains would cloud the melting water: men submerged, motionless, gilt in freezing water, made of dangerous ivory, up to the belt without a moan, without a grimace, conquered like a trophy. The General did not like to shout, he would never gallop down the hills of the moon howling after stampeding herds. He lost the sight of the pale silhouette between the afternoon shadows, he strove to shorten his step like an offering, with the same unspeakable weight in his chest, cold sweat on his temples, and in the repertoire of never considered scenes, he finally imposed, as in his worst nights, the mastery with which he would use his hands, belts, and the innocence of water to create fragile strength. He heard screams because he would invoke screams, he had heard the injured scream and better yet the prisoners: screamed until they could scream no more, he would oversee it, screaming like the screams he now heard, yet as he turned the corner to Scheller Street, no, it was the children as they played who screamed when someone opened a door, when someone arrived, when a lamp was lit, when a coach came racing from the craters of the moon, orange-yellow sparks from the hoofs of the horses on the round, swollen cobblestones, like the marble rosettes of the fountains.