The Living Days

by Ananda Devi

  Beings like glass, filling in their cracks until the day came when they were told that they weren’t worth the cost to their country, and these nocturnal, almost inanimate lives came to believe that they would do best to slip through the gaps between cobblestones. Too expensive to go on living.

  London was filled with a nameless, homeless population that lived in its crevices and was no longer of any use.

  And so Mary convinced herself that in her attic there had been a homeless man who had died of illness or old age or hunger or any of those other things that killed the poor and didn’t have a name. She dreamed up a horrific scenario, but she wasn’t afraid. Because the dead man had taken on the face of Howard.

  As soon as this possibility occurred to her, the presence in the attic invaded her thoughts. It became as real as Cub, who disappeared for hours on end, leaving her alone with the cadaver. She was astonished to find herself holding her breath, listening to the silence. But what did she hear? A dead body did not make any noise. Should she ask Cub to go and see what was up there? She didn’t let herself contemplate the prospect: she didn’t want to frighten Cub because he might decide to leave for good. She would have to learn to live with it.

  She armed herself with a jar of Vicks and rubbed a bit of the ointment under her nostrils whenever the smell was too strong. But it wasn’t the same throughout the day. As if the dead body was only able to communicate through smells. Through a strange, illegible bouquet of stenches. She thought she could make out, in these variations, its sadness or its happiness, its memories and its regrets. She could also perceive something odd, akin to a laugh. Every so often, as if the corpse was expressing, with a little puff of methane, a sort of knowing sympathy. One day, she thought to herself, the process of decomposition will be done and there’ll be nothing left but dry bones. Time will do its work. What a shame there aren’t any vultures … She thought of Nari, and of the cleaned bodies joining the others in the towers, embracing one another for centuries. The offering we each make to the birds, but also to the sun and to the wind. Would Howard have wanted to be set down at the summit of a tower, in a fiery place that respected its dead?

  Mary pushed the thought away. She shouldn’t get used to this presence. Howard was dead.

  What mattered was that Cub did not leave. When she waited, Howard filled up her days. She built him a life, a past, a fall from grace. A fantasy that consoled her about her reality.

  One night, she looked up and she thought she saw, in the perfect circle of the hole, the gleam of an eye fixed on her. She wanted to jump out of the bed. But her arms and legs were paralyzed, as if this gaze had imprisoned her. She felt wholly naked. She told herself that he was ogling her with this green-and-black eye, perfectly fitted to the hole’s circumference. Only a dead man could watch an old woman with such lust, she thought angrily. For him, I must represent his desire for life.

  An unattainable, envious, jealous desire, even if what remains of me isn’t worth the dust that slips out of my nooks and crannies.

  Then, thinking that maybe it was Howard there and that he, after all, did have the right to watch her, she relaxed and let the eye invade her.

  To please it, so as not to anger it, she raised her hands with great effort and slipped off her nightdress. Her white, transparent body was exposed to the dead man’s eye, her lattice of blue veins, her network of varicose veins, her knobbly and painful tendons. Do you like that? she asked him, noticing how odd these words were for her, she who probably had never been liked by anybody. Do you like that? A body that neglected itself, but which summoned up a kind of energy, an unexpected swell. The eye did not respond, did not move, but gleamed all the more brightly.

  She ended up falling asleep, feeling as if she were not alone. She dreamed that the corpse melted so completely that it flowed through the hole and entered her without her being able to make the least move to defend herself, and that she was now wanly watching this wedding of old bodies.

  In the morning, the eye was gone. Mary barely recognized this body that hadn’t slept naked in so long. Around her there were traces of dampness: sweat, tears, oily discharge. The sheets were wet and warm. She saw herself from the outside, a pale ghost haunting her home, of unreal slenderness, with skin so thin that she could have easily dissolved into air.

  She was consoled by the thought that Cub hadn’t come back that night, then she was worried. Was it possible that he’d come back while she was asleep and, seeing her in that state, had fled in disgust?

  In the bathroom mirror, she seemed greenish. That color didn’t astonish her, though. It was her true complexion, the tint of all the years spreading from her armpits to cover her body. Like her clothes, her weariness, her perspiration, her urine. Like the cracks that opened up across her skin, here and there, and which did not bleed.

  She managed to get dressed without thinking too much about the dead homeless man upstairs—about Howard, whom she still desired, no matter whether he was dead or alive. She thought she could hear the sound of him crumpling newspaper to sleep on or cover himself with, and his voice which, in his sleep, rang out and resounded under the roof with a plaintive tone, and then the cracking of his joints when he got up, and then this way he had of scraping bits of bread that had fallen on the wooden planks to eat them, so as not to waste anything, and then the damp haze of his green eyes.

  She should remember that he was dead. She should stop thinking of him. She forbade herself from going up to feed him. If he was dead, he didn’t need anything. If he was dead, what she saw would be a vision of the devastation that awaited us all. She didn’t need that to know that she only had so much time.

  Each night the eye appeared in the hole. All it wanted to do was watch her; what else could it do, after all? She eventually got used to it, and even felt flattered by the attention.

  One day, as she got dressed, she came across some minuscule changes in her body. Her breasts, which for eons had only been empty pouches, now seemed a little firmer. Her belly, once concave, had rounded out slightly. She didn’t dare to turn around to see her bottom in the mirror, but something, her hand most likely, in its curiosity, told her that there was now a new swell there.

  She who had lost all her vanity long ago—if she had ever had any—was surprised to notice these changes with a sort of shameful pleasure.

  She had wallowed in the comfortable ugliness of this old age that had freed her from all need for disguise. Her body in its simple truth. She was now aware of this naked gaze that looked her over, of this trap right out of a film concealing a secret that no camera could capture. A pupil withdrawing into infinity, no longer contemplating reality but perceiving the layer of lies that covered every face, every word, every image, every feeling. The sharpness of this gaze punctured the elastic membrane between her past and her future—or what remained of it.

  Even though this gaze felt ruthless, she no longer felt as alone. And this presence was enough to give her budding body a sort of new, wispy life, of late, wintry, unlikely blossoming.

  Each night that she spent under his gaze brought a new sign of youth in the morning. The creased skin of her arms became newly elastic, and the colors of her face shifted from yellow to pink. Mary Rose would never be beautiful. But what she had learned to accept about herself was at odds with what she was now discovering each day. It was only when this old, faux youth arose in her that she could finally admit to herself that maybe she hadn’t been that ugly, or that ordinary. That the young girl Howard had chosen one festive night might not have been a last resort, but a deliberate choice.

  And that, precisely, was what persuaded her that the dead man in her attic had to be Howard.

  It was, after all, the year of miracles. First had been Cub, and then there was her body renewed by a mysterious presence that no longer seemed so nauseating to her. Why wouldn’t Howard be one of these miracles? Howard returned from out of time, from the other side of life, come back to hold out his hand and to be, in his last appearance,
the spouse that she had never had, and Cub would be the child the two of them shared, the child that her body would never be young enough to have conceived, the child who would give a direction to her crumbling days?

  Everything took on new meaning. In her house on Portobello Road, Mary welcomed these monstrous and marvelous gifts with an overflowing heart. She understood that she had shaped figurines in order to create another world, to open a door to the impossible. When she was no longer able to form them, it was this world that had come to her.

  White light folded, sheathed about her, folded.

  The new years walk, restoring

  Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring

  With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem

  The time. Redeem

  The unread vision in the higher dream

  —T. S. ELIOT, “Ash Wednesday”

  Mary’s welcome was enough to persuade him to come down.

  His eyes were exactly the same as those in her nonexistent memory. Green and black, with that cheerful chaos that indicated he had come from the other side of the day. Anything that might matter to the living was, for him, simply the childishness of being. At first, Mary was scared to look at him, to see the path decomposition had carved through his flesh, but Howard was nothing more than a beggar fraying around the edges, certainly unwashed, but hardly disgusting.

  When Cub left during the day, he came down from the attic. They had so many things to tell each other. She brightened at the thought that she finally had a companion capable of understanding her. Just when she’d lost all hope. He didn’t actually talk, but he was there: present. Not a dream, not a nightmare or a hallucination. He was, specifically, beyond all that, because life took on forms that nobody could have ever expected.

  One day, Howard took her by the hand. He wanted to lead her through the streets of London. He wanted to show her what he loved about this city that had killed him. He had lived his final years like an animal, in total destitution, he said, defecating under the bridges or on top of the roofs. He pointed out the gaps along the road and the absences among the people. She could see clearly the holes that the dead left in the lives of the living. She certainly was the only one able to distinguish these grayish, melancholy forms, but she told herself that knowing what they were was a sign of permanence, that nobody ever truly left. The beggar whistled, happy in her presence: I’ll show you something to make you change your mind.

  Change my mind about what? she asked, intrigued. About the need to live? Here, especially, where old age isolates us from an incurious world, since it has nothing to do with us? I don’t recognize these roads where I lived so long ago. Now I see both the empty and the full. The emptiness, for example, of the woman selling fake jewelry, each one for two pounds, whose face caked in orange makeup gets more wrinkled every day and who has a smoker’s voice, warm and rough. There’s a gray rectangle on the ground where she usually sits, and the wind blows colder there.

  And farther on, the man hawking christening gowns, lace dresses billowing around absent bodies, pink-white-creamy babies, so fine that they look like drops of milk curdled by honey and bees. He’s no more there than she is. And the babies who were once in these gowns? Where are they? What has become of them? Those rounded cheeks, those eyes gleaming with their discoveries had to have been lost to history. Unless they had been the features of people who did help change the world. Mary smiled at the thought that Marie Curie might have once worn a gown and some lace just like the ones here. And radium had been discovered even so!

  Those she met now were eyeing her like an alien, chewing gum and forcing her to see the grayish, glutinous paste in their mouths, rolling around their pink tongues. She was in a place where people walked in the haze of others, a place where they slipped in the oil slicks of other people’s gazes, where nothing was theirs—not even the air other people were breathing frenetically, not even the wafts of foreign spices, not even one’s own body which continued obstinately seizing on whatever life it could.

  Her back was hunched by guilt, knowing that every glance underscored the certainty of her uselessness, that as soon as she was gone, someone newer, truer, more deserving, would fill her shoes and this space with no fear of the total indifference she absorbed, she a blotter for the most precious inks of life, she a criminal for being so old yet enjoying forbidden happiness. She kept on walking beside Howard and realized why the city hated her so much. I’m an ever-growling belly that has to be fed, and fed, and fed, she said.

  Howard smiled. You’re wrong, he replied. We aren’t useless. My life smelled like newspaper ink and pulp because I slept on newsprint and used it to stay warm in the winter, but the latest news never haunted my dreams. What did words matter to me? I knew that every kind of paper, from the lowliest tabloid to the most prestigious, spread lies that buried their readers in a placid stupidity. None of them talked about this world of piss and filth that I lived in, about the underside of London. That’s where my true friends could be found, until hooch or drugs had wrecked their liver and guts. It was just one of many ways for them to die. Cancer or heart attack or car crash or cirrhosis of the liver: Is any sort of death easier than another?

  I came back from the war without a soul. My heart broke in the pits of Dunkirk. The trenches welcomed my dreams just as easily as they did my friends’ guts. They carried me out on a stretcher and, despite all the efforts of the nurses—no matter how angelic or surly they were—to fix my body, they weren’t able to fix my spirit. I went mad. They let me leave, but I was never able to make my way back to Benton-on-Bent, or to take up my trade as a mechanic, or to reconnect with my family and my friends. I landed on some other planet, and the only ones who could understand me were the veterans who, like me, had been trapped within the eternal night of war.

  Mary, I spent years on the streets. I discovered an England that nobody knew: fat women smiling giddily, thin girls sweating scornfully, men who became my brothers, brothers who had been my enemies. I saw the whole gamut, Mary. What all the men had in common was that they were different. There wasn’t any general trend. There were only personalities nobody could have guessed they’d had when they were born. I met them all. I lived unnoticed in attics where I heard people living their real lives. My God—what an impoverishment! Do you know how many days and weeks and months I spent listening to the same arguments, the same excuses, the same inanities? Was this what we fought for? Was this why we survived?

  One evening, after eating nothing for a whole week and hearing a girl whine about her boyfriend refusing to buy her the latest phone, a teenager shouting at her “clueless” parents, a husband telling his wife he was settling down with someone younger, and then the wallpaper and then the phone and then the old shoes and then and then so on so on so on and all this complaining about not having things that had nothing to do with the emptiness in my stomach, the dizziness in my head, the hopelessness in my mind, the sadness in my heart, I went out, and I climbed to the top of the Post Office Tower—I’d slipped through the barriers and the forbidden areas so many times that I had no trouble getting in this time. The elevator got me higher than the level of London’s rooftops, which might as well be the roof of the world. I saw London spread out at my feet, a beautiful city after all, such a beautiful city, built out of wartime stagnation to become a symphony of illumination and jubilation for those who claim this city as their own, but I was on the losing side and the city’s beauty didn’t console me, didn’t signify anything for me, the worst thing for us wasn’t the void so much as the surplus of other people: they had all decided that I was an outsider.

  That night, I jumped from the top of the Post Office Tower while spreading my wings of newsprint. As I fell, I thought I could see people eating in the restaurant that used to be at the top of the tower, eating food so expensive that it could have fed me for a year or even ten. It could have been wine worth three thousand quid or it could have been piss; I didn’t care. Their stomachs weren’t any more d
eserving than mine. Their stomachs weren’t digesting food any faster than mine was, and their shit wasn’t going to stink any less than mine. If they had just looked and seen me falling on the other side of the glass, they would have understood that their fall would have been every bit as deadly. And just like that, every dish they ordered would have started tasting completely flat, like it was just chewed-up money. The wind was rushing past the tower so hard they were sure it would fall. That’s the fate of all towers, after all, to fall. And so I was hurtling headlong, without making a sound. Which was fine, that was how I ended up in the local news with a couple of paragraphs about a bloody explosion. I hadn’t read a single word of those papers I had wrapped around myself every night, and there I was all the same: MAN JUMPS TO DEATH SPLATTERING THE GUTTER PRESS. A man in the gutter, that’s what I was.

  Now, come with me.

  Mary took a few more steps. They headed toward the river together. Mary’s sadness was immense, deep, territorial. But, as she watched Howard out of the corner of her eye, she was sure she saw colors slipping out of his hands, like the lights that hung around the top of the tower.