The Hunger and Other Stories

by Charles Beaumont

  Fear came up in her chest, clutching.

  She tried to scream.

  She stood paralyzed, moveless, a pale terror drying into her throat and into her heart.

  Then, from far away, indistinctly, there came a sound. A sound like footsteps on gravel.

  Julia listened, and tried to pierce the darkness. The sounds grew louder. And louder. Someone was on the tracks. Coming closer.

  She waited. Years passed, slowly. Her breath turned into a ball of expanding ice in her lungs.

  Now she could see, just a bit.

  It was a man. A black man-form. Perhaps—the thought increased her fear—a hobo. It mustn’t be one of the hobos.

  No. It was a young man. Mick! Mick, come to tell her, “Well, we got the bastard!” and to ask, narrowly, “What the devil you doing out here, Julie?” Was it?

  She saw the sweater. The ball of ice in her lungs began to melt, a little. A sweater. And shoes that seemed almost white.

  Not a hobo. Not Mick. Not anyone she knew.

  She waited an instant longer. Then, at once, she knew without question who the young man was.

  And she knew that he had seen her.

  The fear went away. She moved to the center of the tracks.

  “I’ve been looking for you,” she said, soundlessly. “Every night I’ve thought of you. I have.” She walked toward the man. “Don’t be afraid, Mr. Oakes. Please don’t be afraid. I’m not.”

  The young man stopped. He seemed to freeze, like an animal, prepared for flight.

  He did not move, for several seconds.

  Then he began to walk toward Julia, lightly, hesitantly, rubbing his hands along his trousers.

  When Julia was close enough to see his eyes, she relaxed, and smiled.

  Perhaps, she thought, feeling the first drops of rain upon her face, perhaps if I don’t scream he’ll let me live.

  That would be nice.

  Tears of the Madonna

  The man in the American suit smiled and pressed the perspiration from his mustache. “It is much too hot,” he said, “for death. Even in the shade, too hot.” He unwrapped his handkerchief from a cold-beaded beer bottle and placed the handkerchief across his forehead. “The bulls will be sluggish,” he said.

  “Perhaps not,” Ramon said. The stranger was trying very hard to take his money away.

  “Believe me, young friend, it will be no contest. Did you travel these many miles to watch a slaughter?”

  Ramon frowned. Why had he permitted this stranger to sit at his table? Go away, he wanted to say: You are spoiling my pleasure; I have waited a long time for this and now you are spoiling it. Go away!

  “You must take the word of one who knows. I have gone to the fights and come away sick on just such days as this one. The bulls sweat out their strength before the first banderillo is placed: after that, it is butcher’s work.” The man wiped the handkerchief all over his wet brown face.

  “I will take the chance,” Ramon said.

  “Chance? There is none. Look: this is your first time, isn’t it?”

  Ramon nodded sorrowfully.

  “Then I beg you. On bended knee. Save your money or throw it away, but do not waste it like this. A good fight you will never forget: it will live with you and fill your heart with pride: it will show you better than any book that there are the animals and then, there is Man—”

  Yes, yes, Ramon thought, that is true!

  “—but this is a good fight that I speak of, sir. A bad fight—like what you would see today—is something else. It is the saddest thing in all the world! For the spirit is not there, and without the spirit this beauty is degraded. Courage is gone. Symbol is gone. Suddenly you are at a cheap show where you watch a dumb brute killed by a trained man. You leave ashamed. You never come back.”

  “All right. I’ll go tomorrow,” Ramon said.

  “Tomorrow? No. Not for two weeks is there another.”

  Ramon drank the rest of his beer without answering the stranger. You are lying, he thought: I know this. But what if you are right even so? What if the fight is not a good one? Certainly it was hot, hot enough to make even the mightiest of all bulls sweat. . . .

  “What is the name of this girl?” Ramon said.

  The man seemed to sigh. He hunched forward and extended his effeminate-fingered hand. “You are smart,” he said. “Any young fool from the country can see a bad bullfight, but Ramon de Castro! Not many are so fortunate as to enjoy the favors of the flower of all Mexico.”

  “What is her name?” Ramon said, still holding his money. “What does she look like?”

  The man grinned. “Like nothing you have ever seen. She is not of this world.”

  “In that case,” Ramon said, “she will have no use for my money.”

  The man laughed loudly. “More to drink!” he called and paid the waiter. “Shall I describe her, lucky Ramon? Shall I describe with poor crippled words a perfection that goes beyond even dreams? Speak to you of her softness which is softer than—what? a swan? the petal of a white rose? a robin’s breast? Or say, look! her hair is more black and shining with diamond-light than the clearest, darkest night sky and her lips redder than this sky when the darkness is gone and—”

  “Show me a photograph,” Ramon said, “of this girl.”

  The man pulled a glossy snapshot from the pocket of his American suit. He held it in his palm for a moment.

  “What is the difference, young friend,” he said musically, “between love and a bullfight, when they are good, when the spirit is there? They involve courage equally, dear Ramon. Look at it this way: today you will enter an arena exactly as you had planned to do. But you will not merely watch. You will be the fine torero, and is this not better any time than watching, even from the shady side?” The man winked.

  Ramon finished the beer again. “But how do I know,” he asked, “that this bull will not also be tired and sweaty? How do I know that I won’t come away sick from this fight as from the other because it is hot and the spirit is not there?”

  “There are some bulls,” the man said, “who never lose the spirit. These are the finest bulls. They aren’t many; and they’re expensive.”

  “How expensive?” Ramon said.

  “Ah!” the man said.

  “First I must see the photograph.”

  The man placed it carefully in front of Ramon. “Her name is Dolores. You can meet her tonight, if you wish.”

  “How expensive?” Ramon said.

  “Little more than you would pay for a seat in the shade to watch the sticking of a pig.”

  Ramon looked at the picture. The woman was older than he by several years. Her long black hair was brushed over her shoulders, which seemed to Ramon the whitest shoulders he had ever looked at. Her mouth was large and painted and her breasts strained against the soft cloth of her blouse. Her eyes were closed. She was beautiful.

  “It is important,” the man was saying, “that you be as discriminating and thoughtful in entering one arena as the other. Especially when it is for the first time.”

  “It is not the first time!” Ramon lied. The confidence he had felt in his mustache and sideburns and pinstripe suit crumbled, because the stranger saw his seventeen years and laughed at them. The stranger shrugged, smiling.

  “Still,” he said, “you may count this as the first. Dolores will show you. It is one of her values: she shows a man that he is more of a man than he has ever thought. You will come away proud. Believe me.”

  “She has a large nose.”

  “The fault of the photographer. Her nose is perfect.”

  Ramon studied the picture. Oh, he had not dreamed of this . . . no; Ramon, lie to others, not to yourself; he had dreamed of it. Yes. Was that not why he had let the man sit down and was that not why he had listened, so carefully, to him?

  She was very beautiful, this Dolores. More beautiful than the bulls. More beautiful than any other woman on earth.

  “All right,” Ramon said, boredly. “Wh
ere? What time?”

  “I must have a deposit,” the man said, the poetry suddenly gone from his voice.

  Ramon began to count his money. The man laughed and reached over and took half. “The rest tonight,” he said. He gave Ramon directions. “Eleven o’clock. Be on time.”

  “Why so late?”

  “Dolores works elsewhere. She is not what you might think.” The man rose to leave. “I do this for you only because you are a nice boy, Ramon de Castro.”

  Ramon ordered tequila. For the first time. But it made him sick so he bought whiskey.

  —Ramon, did you have a good time?

  —Yes, my mother.

  —Was the city big? Did it frighten you alone? Were you afraid?

  —The city was big, my mother.

  —And did you go to the bullfights, Ramon?

  —Yes, my mother, I went to the bullfights.

  Ramon recounted his money and smiled because the pain of it was over and out of him and even if he wanted to he could not change his mind now and go instead to watch the running of the bulls.

  He looked at the picture and began to be afraid.

  He was not afraid when it was dark and the sun had stopped baking the smooth streets. He was not even worried, for had he not been to a barber? and had he not bathed carefully and perfumed under his arms? and did he not look fine and grown now tonight, more fine and grown than ever Manuel or Jesus with their filthy lying mouths!

  —Little Ramon, tend to your cows and don’t bother us; come around again when you’ve seen more than the flesh of your sister in the morning; then we’ll talk. . . .

  He looked at himself, tall in the store window. Was this Señor de Castro’s best son who saved his pesos and begged and was permitted to go to the city to see the fights?

  He giggled and looked at his watch. Only nine-thirty.

  He went into the bar with the big paintings of beautiful big women and sat down.

  “Whiskey.”

  He belched hotly and took out the now crumpled and sticky photograph. A white webwork of cracks ran across the face of the flower of Mexico, soft and light as the moon, and old enough to teach you and kind enough to understand. . . .

  Ramon felt something heavy thump against his back. “Ha! my friend,” a voice said, “and I was wondering if the fine young fellow was old enough to drink!”

  An old man leaned across and tapped the snapshot.

  “I should not worry so much, eh? You are old enough. See, isn’t she lovely!”

  The man had long yellow teeth that crept down over his lip. He looked greenish in the bar light. His eyes were deep holes like the holes you make in dirty clay with a round stick.

  “Don’t look at me with your mouth open, my little. We are brothers.”

  “You know the lady?” Ramon thought of what the man in the American suit had told him.

  “Know her? Dolores? I?” The man laughed until the whiskey made him choke. “I have . . . spoken to her, eh, Carmen? Haven’t I spoken with Dolores?”

  The man called Carmen nodded sadly.

  “I am to be with her tonight,” Ramon said, his chest swelling with pride.

  “No! You? With the flower of our land? How lucky you are. You must drink the next with me—I am Garcia; remember me to the mother, will you?”

  “I will,” Ramon said. He sat straight on the stool and drank the whiskey and then more and presently he did not sit so straight any more and this annoyed him. He started to leave.

  “Wait,” the man Garcia called. “When do you see her?”

  “Eleven.”

  “Then you must watch her act. She is last, so there is time.”

  Ramon stopped.

  “What, what? Don Alvarado didn’t tell you about her act?”

  “No. What do you speak of?”

  Some of the men turned. The bartender smiled pensively.

  Garcia walked over and put his arm about Ramon. He whispered in a low smelly voice. “You have seen nothing until you see this. Some say it is better than what follows: I say so myself, and I have had both. Say, you’ve seen these shows where the women dance and take off their clothes, eh, my little?”

  Ramon nodded quickly.

  “Dolores is to them what a blooded mare is to a burro: worse, beside her they are all pigs. What, my friends? Do I lie?”

  “No.” The men grumbled and snickered.

  “Nowhere else on earth can one see such a sight, my brother, my little. To watch Dolores perform and know that afterwards, ah, afterwards . . .”

  “Where is this place,” Ramon said, “where she is at?”

  “The corner where you are to meet—one block and then another to the right. It is a theatre, do you understand? It costs little. They do not have pictures on the outside and it is small, almost as small as this place. But it is a theatre. You will see the lights.”

  The man talked on and Ramon’s head danced.

  “Watch yourself, my brother, or your blood will boil over on the floor!”

  Ramon hurried out into the coolness and breathed the air and walked away fast.

  He did not hear the laughter.

  The theatre was small, as the man Garcia had said: a cube of heat-bulged boards painted with colors which had once been bright. The sign was solemnly lettered: Teatro de la Alegoria.

  Ramon paid. He went in wondering about the sign. Alegoria: a strange word, one you did not find in the country—otherwise he would have found it and learned its meaning.

  There were mostly very old people and very young. Few the age of Ramon. They were a thick crowd; the smell of breath and sweat was heavy in the closeness; it was enough to make you sick at the stomach.

  He sat down, not looking yet at the lighted stage. The woman he sat next to was fat. She was staring with big white chicken eyes and mumbling softly to herself as Mama de Castro did when her blood was up.

  He put away the snapshot. He would think only about tonight. Tonight, in an hour; in less time, even!

  Ramon tasted the whiskey inside him and was suddenly afraid all over again. His knees were water, he could feel his heart beating too swiftly. The city was very big and he was very young and this woman—

  The stage was small, lit by spotlights that came from somewhere in the back. There was a crude burlap curtain sewn and resewn so many times you could see the fists of stitching from any seat. The curtain had been dropped. And now there was applause from the old and young people.

  Ramon settled. He was tall, so he did not need to squint as the fat woman did.

  Soon the curtain pulled up slowly and Ramon trembled in his dream of naked women. He had lied to Garcia. He had seen only skinny hags who had embarrassed him. Never had he seen beautiful women unclothed. Never had he seen anything.

  The stage was empty now. The earth floor had been combed and tamped; but there was nothing, only the tense waiting of the people.

  Then a figure walked out upon the floor. A figure clad in the heaviest white robe Ramon had ever seen: its folds trailed in the dirt. The face was hidden.

  A voice from a microphone, high-pitched and hurtful to the ears: “Ladies, Gentlemen, Number Twelve: She looks upon her children and is grieved!”

  The figure walked to the center of the stage and then turned and walked to the black curtain and then turned again.

  Ramon blinked his eyes.

  The figure parted the hood that had covered the face.

  Ramon got to his feet.

  It was the most beautiful face he had ever seen; but that was not what tore him from the chair. It was that this face, so white against even the snow-white cloth, was exactly like the painted pictures of the Madonna that hung in his bedroom.

  Slowly the face lifted and the closed eyes opened and the eyes of the woman looked into the rays of the spotlights, the hot white spotlights filled with smoke and dust and the stink of the room, the brightnesses that stung Ramon’s eyes even when he did not look at them. The robed woman, whose hands were crossed upon her bosom,
looked directly into the light.

  Ramon felt the sickness start to come up. The yellow face of Garcia floated in front of him. Then, as hands pulled him down again, he looked and there was movement on the stage.

  A man covered in bandages and in the uniform of the Mexican army. White bandages red with blood over his forehead and over his heart. The man had no legs, or seemed to have none.

  “My God, my God, they have made it so real!” the fat woman whispered.

  The man lay in a crude field wheelbarrow crusted with tan dirt and the wheelbarrow was pushed slowly—slowly—by another man without bandages but on crutches, and blind.

  “It represents war,” someone said.

  “No: just suffering,” someone else said.

  The figures moved across the stage like the people of a dream, so slowly. There was only the music of the iron wheel turning.

  “Simple: War is bad!”

  The figures moved on in the path of the robed Madonna, and then Ramon looked at this face he had been afraid to look at, and he saw the shining tears that coursed down the pale cheeks slowly and into the cloth of the robes.

  Never had he seen such pain in the eyes of a human, such pain and pity and kindness and—

  Ramon stiffened. He shook his head and felt his heart stop.

  It was the girl in the snapshot! The White Madonna, the Mother of Pain who wept now for all the evil and wrong in her children’s hearts—Dolores.

  She works elsewhere . . . She is not what you might think . . . I do this for you only because you are a nice boy, Ramon de Castro. . . .

  The curtain had not yet begun to fall. Ramon bit his underlip and turned and pushed the old and young people aside.

  “She looks and she is grieved!”

  He ran into the night air and stopped and let the sickness run out of him and into the street.

  “Ha, Ramon! Too much to drink. Now you will feel better.”

  The man in the American suit lit a cigarette and blew the smoke away. He looked at Ramon, then in the direction of the theatre. People were coming out. The man smiled.

  “You have been to see her?” He laughed. “Well, did I lie to you then? Is she of this world? And do you wonder she is called the Flower of Mexico?”