The Living Days

by Ananda Devi

  The air that Howard should have been breathing. The air that should have bathed Howard the day he was supposed to come back from France victorious, wounded, matured, ennobled, handsome, and rather than go to his house he should have come straight here, to her house, since she had given him her address before leaving (but why then had he never written to her?), and he would have knocked on her door, and the first thing she would have seen upon opening the door would have been this luminous air redolent of herbs and spices, this air of thyme and rosemary, as in that syncopated ballad two American boys would sing thirty years later, parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme—and without a word they would have kissed, she would have taken care not to clasp him too tightly because of the wound on his right side, and, just like this first time, he would have done everything exactly as she had dreamed he might.

  The only problem with Mary’s dreams was that she couldn’t put a specific face to Howard. She saw a uniform, a man a full head taller than her, a mass of black hair (but could she be sure it had been black? That night, the gleaming light seemed, the more she thought about it, to have had a reddish tinge), she saw fleeting, changing features that sometimes outlined the face of Errol Flynn as Robin Hood, stealing her heart, and sometimes to her astonishment that of Johnny Weissmuller, the swimmer who had played Tarzan. This ever-shifting face prevented her from refining and fine-tuning her dreams. The shadows hiding him had been a gloomy omen, deepening the physical distance between them, bluntly reminding her that it had only been one night, just one, not even that, half a night, a fragment of a night, and that she had never seen his face.

  After some months, when she started to forget the things he had told her during their only conversation, she set them down in a diary. She knew it would prove to be the most important event of her life. But the years went by and all that remained of that memory were these words, which, in this way, themselves became the memory—fleshless, insubstantial shapes. Howard, the real one, with those grease-stained fingers, his straightforward ambitions, the smile in his voice as he talked about cars, the fear in his voice when he contemplated an uncertain future, came to be replaced by Howard Howard, half Flynn, half Tarzan, swinging on a vine of passion to pull Mary from her town, from her family, from her countryside, and most of all from her Grimes.

  As she waited, she forced down spoonfuls of her mother’s plum custard on Sundays, she dreamed of those mirabelle tarts she had never learned to make, while lumpy custard stuck to the insides of her mouth, leaving behind a cold film, a trace of frustration; no, more than frustration, a blockage so complete that she almost felt like her own body was trying to expel some decomposing matter from her mouth, and something in her was boiling, foaming, threatening to break out even as on the outside she remained calm and impassive and she kept on eating her pudding to the rhythm of her father’s noisy swallowing.

  But maybe there was a god watching over Mary. A few years after the end of the war, her grandfather died, leaving her his small house in London on Portobello Road, famed for its antiques, its glorified flea market, thereby granting her an escape from Benton-on-Bent and its custard. Sweet Mary, rosy Mary, Mary the rose, rosemary and thyme, decided to go to London and see if she could find some trace of Howard. And even if she didn’t find him, she’d still have managed to escape her mother’s plum custard, her father’s smacking lips and the terrible monotony of those winter days.

  A house wedged into a row of ten completely identical homes bearing the charming name of a terraced house that itself was utterly uncharming, houses crammed together, each one equally dark and lackluster, cold, with dilapidated paneling, a skimpy cardboard house of three stories that would be hers for the rest of her life and that she would come to love with the long, unwavering devotion of those born with nothing to live for.

  This house, already decrepit by the time she came to live there, came to be her passport to London when she had already thrown her hopes into the overflowing emptiness of her parent’s rubbish bins.

  The day she arrived in London, she walked slowly down Portobello Road, echoing the rhythm of the street itself, borne by the springtime smiles as sunshine flowed into every corner of her body. She stumbled at moments, dazed by so much light as the world came out of its darkness and began to vibrate like the start of a jazz tune in her thoughts and like the swish of heavy skirts that almost felt extravagant after the wartime shortages.

  The first thing she had done was to buy a beret on Portobello Road, just because the woman selling it had called her my dear, not with the frown of pity people usually gave her but with genuine tenderness. They had looked each other right in the eyes and smiled as if they were both welcoming, in conspiracy, this new world. The woman had handed the beret to Mary as if it were already hers. That one and no other. Mary had never worn anything like it in her life. Back in the countryside, people did dust off their hats for special occasions, with flowers or fruits or birds placed on top, but this beret, which she took with a trembling hand and set on her head, transformed her completely. The woman leaned out of her stall and, with a steady hand, adjusted the angle. In the mirror, a young woman with a coquettish smile faced Mary. She paid, giving no thought to the cost, and started walking again, noticing how the beret changed the way she walked, the way she held her head, the idea she had of herself: she was no longer a terrified little mouse.

  What she now saw in London was an energy born out of so much death, a refusal to fold, a refusal to concede the scope of the massacre, a collective, steely, fiery determination to forget the air-raid sirens, the roars of the bomber planes, the whistling of artillery shells, to forget the rationing, to forget the young men who had sailed off and the old men now orphaned. A desire for a rebirth so complete that it would turn once and for all the page on which the end of days had been inscribed in red ink, so complete that it would result in a flood of new children to supplant all the fighters who had been lost, children who would bear the stigmata of the war and who would refuse to rush back into its logic and its blindness, children of peace, yes, these were the illusions that arose from the ruins of the city, everywhere, everywhere a rosy air like what remained of Regent’s Park in this springtime of its new life, an air perfumed with rosemary and thyme, this city is for you, Mary, it baptizes you with a red beret as a way of bidding farewell to the countryside.

  The children were already running after each other through the rubble. The youngsters were already embracing the city. And the old people came there both to sigh and to remind themselves that the war was over, that they could look up and see not the bulging shadows of the plane bays releasing bombs but a sky scrubbed of all threats. They were fortunate not to know how impermanent that peace would be. The children believed in their good luck, because they had survived. In their memories they could still hear the farewell songs of the dead soldiers, as well as the reedy, triumphant chant of the lucky ones. Secretly, they were happy, they started to believe that they had survived, that they were still here, that they could pick up the bricks at their feet and rebuild the world. Soon, Peggy Lee would sing you give me fever, and that fever would seize them at the dances, in the ballrooms, in the bedrooms, with a seductive snap of the fingers.

  Oh, this spring day, Mary Grimes refused to believe in those terrible stories people told about the capital. The industrial era had entered a glorious phase in which it was still drowning the city in its pea-soup fog but also heralding a once-forgotten prosperity. How could she not believe, not throw herself body and soul into all these hopes and dreams, not sing and dance in the wake of this monster’s downfall and in the knowledge that she had been on the winning side? They had every right to be proud. The future lay at her feet, hidden beneath her red beret; she took a brazen step forward and tried to avoid the ruts, she didn’t know that it rained here as if the city was trying to flush all its sins out of the ground and that the chill, when it seeped into the city, would be nothing like the chill of the countryside that reddened cheeks and burned the lungs, as the
old folks like to say; rather, it made everyone so sad they could just melt. She was young, she had been caught by London fever, she kept the memory of a man between her legs, she too was rising out of these ashes, and, as she held out her hand and received a raindrop as thick as a tuberculosis patient’s phlegm, she saw a good omen but nothing more.

  She had seen the house inherited from her grandfather and had immediately decided to leave her parents’ village forever, that English countryside more moribund than the cratered and ravaged city, the city ruined in a different way, ruined by people suddenly become outmoded, escapees from the war who still hadn’t realized that the world now did things differently, that nothing was as it had once been, that the downward spiral had been overcome, that the changes of this second half of the century would petrify the earth and terrify nature, that tomorrow this little country would no longer be the master of the universe but would return to its normal dimensions, its isolation making it even smaller and reinforcing its boundaries.

  Of course, none of this was known to Mary, but she, in her rustic simplicity, was convinced by the red beret or by the sun on Portobello Road, or by those craters that hadn’t kept life from going on here, to move in and spread her wings. In all the shop windows along the street she saw the proof of a kind of crazy vitality. Here, people survived by selling antiques or simulacra of antiques or motley objects or anything at all, and in this way they had all, she presumed, overcome the madness of this war, and certainly here, only here, on this street strangely detached from time, death had carved out some space for the seeds of the future.

  She, too, had been energized by this new faith and now decided to make objects. Like all these people—men and women, young and old, maimed and whole—unsure of what to do with their hands, she registered for arts and crafts courses. Every student there was different but their eyes all shared the same golden gleam. In shaping plaster and clay, she had discovered a joy so unexpected, so distinct from her being that she could almost believe that she was still asleep in her natal landscape and that the strange shapes being made by her fingers had come from the pink of her dreams.

  Statuettes, egg cups, bowls, teacups and candlesticks: these made up the collection of objects that were not just the charming evidence of her earliest attempts and her lack of talent but were in fact so visibly handcrafted that they caught the eye of enough buyers to enable her to survive. In this way, she learned that on Portobello Road everything could be sold, as long as it had heart in it.

  That people bought things she had made never stopped surprising her. The connoisseurs who often stopped by the market invariably glanced quickly at the stall in front of the house with the blue door and immediately kept on walking. But the passersby and idlers always lingered, as if attracted despite themselves, despite the lumps and bumps, or perhaps because of those, because these rough-hewn things touched them, because they suggested survival and defiance.

  Mary took her inspiration from Portobello Road itself and reproduced her street in miniature, the lady selling knickknacks who brewed beer in her cellar by fermenting strange concoctions that reeked so strongly of yeast and sugar that it drove her neighbors insane; the old beggar man who sold his family’s antiques but more often simply gave them to passersby because he had no idea how to hawk his wares; the young man who everybody on the street suspected of being a fence but who they all refused to report to the police; the war veteran who sold collectible objects: postage stamps, metal cigarette cases adorned with voluptuous, scantily clad women, dainty sewing kits, key rings, replicas of flags, butterflies, insects, dried flowers, stones, nails, bones, his shop with a narrow front window extending in a labyrinth that rose and fell and forked, and as visitors went from one collection to the next they realized just how a passion could turn into an obsession. Books, drawings, engravings, caricatures: everything could be found on Portobello Road. All it took was a stroll down the road to discover the world. And, over the years, this world was summed up, reproduced in miniature, in Mary’s window. The shopkeepers and the craftsmen, the cleaners and the owners, the veterans and the chimney sweeps, the women with red berets and with wild scarves, the faceless soldiers of a single night and the face-painted prostitutes of another night: Mary recreated them all. She managed, with a few often-awkward shapes, to capture a posture, a sadness, a cadence; expressions that often made onlookers smile because they were reminiscent of nothing so much as the caricatures of Honoré Daumier.

  In the alleys branching off the main road, the after-effects of the war were still visible: a Salvation Army soup kitchen where survivors went to eat without having to look anyone in the eye; a homeless shelter where men creeped like fleeting shadows, the former soldiers recognizing one another by the ugly yet sturdy coats that they had been given in the army—even in spring they wore them to cover their threadbare clothes or their missing arms; veterans turned drunkards sleeping in corners; others slightly less destitute poking their heads out of their rented basement rooms like moles peeking at the sun for the first time.

  When Mary walked around her London neighborhood, the mere sight of one of those coats or those limping gaits or those broad shoulders would make her jump. She watched each one carefully, hoping against hope that one of these silhouettes might prove to be Howard’s. Luck alone would be what reunited them. She had kept on believing in that small possibility and gone on, at the risk of seeming impudent or indecent, scrutinizing every face in which she was sure she had caught some feature that the blight of war had carved deeply or some thousand-yard stare that the sight of bombs had set permanently. Of course, she did not know what Howard’s face looked like. Maybe she hoped he would be the one to recognize her. She imagined herself meeting the gaze of one of those men and seeing that slow glimmer of recognition. A wary smile—Mary … Mary?—and her body would start to tremble.

  Filled with these sensations, she took her shaky hands and used them to shape loving figurines, sometimes daring to create, in the thick clay, bodies that were coupled, interlocked, melding into one another, with small members thrust into open vaginas, dueling tongues, jutting nipples; but before the statues hardened she mushed them between her hands, her face red, her breath short, and she kneaded them furiously as if, while erasing them, she could imprint them in her palm and, once night had fallen, read there the erotic lines of her dreams.

  In these times of starting afresh, she watched men and women playing out a dance of seduction beneath the just-flowering almond trees. Men and women saw each other, slowed down, turned to face each other and make sure that their eyes hadn’t deceived them and their hearts hadn’t fooled them. Was it the color of the leaves or the particular quality of the light that gave them this indecent beauty? Or was it the certainty that they had been saved from disaster and had thus been the beneficiaries of good fortune? They shifted trajectories, retraced their steps, approached one another; their gazes slid across each other’s bodies. Then, quite naturally, they started walking again, this time side by side, a little smile on their lips. At the end of the street, almost without thinking about it, their hands reached out at the same time and their fingertips brushed lightly, fleetingly. At the end of the street, a life had taken root. You give me fever… Mary watched them and held back her sighs.

  These newly formed couples contemplated Mary’s figurines and recognized the precise gleam of the white paint on their eyes and the hint of movement in their hands about to touch. They bought these figurines, because they knew that they had been made just for them.

  Love charms, death charms: these were what Mary was making, although she didn’t realize it, since she thought only of Howard, nor did she realize that the pornographic figurines that had only lived momentarily in her hands, just enough time for her forehead to redden, would survive for far longer in the more dignified figurines formed from the same clay that refused to forget its original shape. They stole the breath of those who held them in their hands and plunged them into a state of trembling desire that they could
n’t understand. Some lonely buyers would go to sleep with a statuette beneath their pillow, feeling shame at this childish act, and would wake up with Mary’s tears on their cheeks.

  Sometimes, just to rid herself of this memory that weighed her down as heavily as if she had been one of the single mothers of her village, she tried to imagine Howard’s death, tried to convince herself that it had come to pass, that there had been no alternative, the only man who had ever touched her, who had taken her virginity amid a loamy, peaty fragrance that could just as easily have been hers as it could have been from the damp grass she had lain upon, this man no doubt had died at Dunkirk, sliced in half by a shell just when he was supposed to be evacuated, and he hadn’t even had the time to send a thought that would be caught by the stars and read by those who loved him, his parents or a woman whose name he didn’t know—his death had been instantaneous, there had been no time for farewell notes or regrets. Or maybe while he’d been sunk to his calves in the mud of the trenches his leg had been wounded by a shell explosion as he kept on shooting at the enemy, and he hadn’t thought to examine it until the pain had finally snaked its way to his brain: what he finally did see was an unrecognizable mess of flesh and bone. He had been amputated: the idea of death had occurred to him. He stayed in hospital for weeks, aimless and wan. How could he come back home a cripple? He would be welcomed as a hero, of course, an object of admiration and flattery, but time would go by and interest would fade, patience would wear thin, disdain would be visible on everyone’s face, and he would become what he now was: an invalid unable to be the mechanic he’d dreamed of being, unable to drive a car, unable above all to be a man. His lips pale with exhaustion, he would eventually decide that the kindest way out of his situation was simply death.