by Ananda Devi
He dragged her to the Thames. Her icy feet stumbled in the slippers she’d forgotten to change before heading out. She walked toward the edge of the water, following him down winding paths along the canals and beneath the bridges, paying no attention to the junk and refuse they came across, the boys and girls enveloped in musty odors or stippled with pinpricks, old people who might as well have been dead, young people who might as well have been old, rubbish thrown from the bridge and which testified to that horrible propensity to throw away, to keep on throwing away what could be used, clean sheets of paper, half-eaten food, outdated television screens, broken computers, everything had been thrown out, everything had been abandoned with absolute indifference in a landscape of ugliness, and it seemed almost intentional that nature should only offer brambles and thorns that bristled against all who would enter.
But when she finally reached the river’s edge, things changed. The clouds moved apart to let through a huge outpouring of sunlight. The water responded in kind, saying Hello, hello, dear to the sky. Mary was astonished by their mutual gleaming. She froze there, charmed and amazed at the same time. She had the impression that it was Howard who was making the daylight dance.
A barge came through with sharp ululations. Seagulls dive-bombed. The air was tumultuous. The water exuded an unusual warmth. A smile sloshed around her stomach, flipped around like a carp.
She looked straight at the sun, waiting for it to descend. The few people strolling nearby, all too aware of the river’s treacherous coldness, lingered in fascination. They, too, seemed captivated. They even smiled at Mary. Suddenly she was no longer invisible.
A waltz with Howard, the exalted beggar.
Thank you for this gift you’ve made, she said, looking straight at him. His eyes were like a greenish fog, like damp seaweed. The green of stalks that could be parted the better to see the lethargic water beneath. But no, nothing in Howard was lethargic. He was livelier than the living, newer than a newborn, he was ready to bound into the foam, to get drunk on the air, even if it was polluted, to go wild with everything that, in this old, old city, tired of all these charades, still had a child’s radiant smile.
In this old land of new evils, Mary, he finally said as he sat down, they learned how to cry for the death of a princess the same way they learned how to forget her after—this new civilization of shaky morals and fleeting tears—and two ten-year-old children could kill a three-year-old child for no reason, with no hatred, can you imagine that, we all thought killing for the fun of it was done only by grown-ups but no, children have always been doing it as well, it’s just that now they’ve switched from insects to people because there’s nobody around to tell them what they can or can’t do, in this land unpunished crimes are acceptable crimes, we can only judge those who have been caught, and these new evils, Mary, have embedded themselves in the scabs that had already formed over the wounds of the old city, and they will go on doing so. Call no man happy until he is dead.
Feel how light this dance is, and how bright this light that once had been so blinding—now turned by alcohol into the pinpricks of a headache, into bubbles of champagne with their heady, intoxicating fragrance; feel how we are wasting our life on this earth.
Mary listened to him, at once surprised and seduced. Wasting our life on this earth? Was this what she was doing as she slid inexorably toward her death? Was this what happened to people when they got old—the earth working to get rid of them and abandon them almost before they’d died, leaving them as lost as things that people no longer needed? Or were they the ones who were losing their sense of life?
Have we gone astray in this life? Nothing beckons me onward, nothing holds me back. If there were an eraser that could scrub me away … said Mary. Howard reached into his satchel and pulled out an artist’s eraser. Which part do you want me to erase first? he asked with a smile. Mary considered the question. Not her feet, since she still needed to walk and wander and discover all these new things she’d never even guessed existed. Not her hands, because she still needed to grasp, no matter how maladroitly, the materials of her visions. Not her eyes, because she still wanted to see, and see more of, Howard’s face and Cub’s face, Cub’s body.
Suddenly she knew.
Words, she said, erase my words, because I don’t have anything to say that’s worth hearing.
With you, I can talk without words.
Tenderly, Howard took her face between his hands, tilted it toward the light. The golden moisture of the air exhaled microscopic droplets on this fragile parchment. Just beneath her skin could be seen the latticework of veins, the bluish network that still traced the trajectory of Mary’s life. Howard knew the different phases of Mary, as a precise calendar would those of the moon. He applied the eraser to a mouth that was nothing more than a very pale dividing line, and he set to erasing the words hidden there, all the words of her sadness. Across Mary’s blue eyes there flitted a quick fear like the wing of a bird in the night. Then she was calm again as she gave up the words she no longer needed.
Now, said Howard, the only words you have are the happy ones.
When Cub saw Mary walk by, so unseeing that she didn’t even notice him, what struck him was the cold surrounding her. Her eyes were white. She was as faded as an old sheet. She had gone out in slippers and was stumbling on the wet sidewalk.
He followed her. Her white eyes made him think of those dolls his mother had given his sisters when they were little. Dolls missing their eyes, their hair, or some of their limbs, corpse-like remnants of that childlike war that kids wrought against their possessions before giving them away to poorer kids. That was what his mother brought back, not long after splitting from his father, when she had gone mad with fury and grief and had unearthed, who knows where, these gifts that made her children shudder.
To make her happy, his little sisters had to sleep next to these empty holes in the middle of the pink faces that never slept, that watched them in the night and haunted their dreams and told them we’re the cripples and that’s what you’ll be, too, by the time life’s had its way with you. Growing up far too quickly under their mother’s wild eye, they accepted their responsibility to their mother, they knew that any rebuke at all would send her flying to the other side, that she considered those dolls a way of telling them that she could take care of them, that she didn’t need a man or any official papers, that her fear of the police didn’t keep her from caring for her family even if the lightest knock at the door left her shaking like a little dog so that one of the children, standing on a chair to look through the peephole, would have to confirm that it wasn’t the police.
Mary was walking like the maimed, unseeing dolls of his nightmares. He followed her as if he were responsible for her; when she skidded in her slippers a sharp cry escaped her lips. Her hair was as unkempt as straw stalks in the wind. Nobody stopped her, people moved away from her rather than touch her, but they could hear the spongy squeak of her slippers, a delicate sound like porcelain, and they let her stumble toward nothingness.
Her footsteps seemed light, so light, as if she was walking on a cushion of air, on a cushion of laughter.
Her thoughts were still filled by Howard. The flecks of gold in the air around her, that wild sun—like nothing she’d ever seen in November—that the bundled-up passersby seemed not to notice. On the contrary, they watched her, astonished, as she walked without a coat. The way the light was flowing over her hands reminded her that when she was a teenager she had sweetened her tea with honey. She’d taken an overflowing spoonful from the honey pot and let it drip in a long, thin thread into the weak tea. Then her lips had eagerly closed around the rest of the honey still on the spoon, a paste that sealed her mouth shut.
This light is like honey on her lips: it flows and sticks at the same time.
Mary began to laugh. She was talking aimlessly and not a single sound was escaping her lips, she was talking to a space in the air that Cub thought he could maybe make out, she was waving he
r hands, but he couldn’t tell who she was responding to; the boy furrowed his brows, worried. Should he ignore her? Act like he didn’t know her, like she was just an elderly neighbor who didn’t matter? He still wasn’t sure whether it was chance or something more intentional that had brought him to Portobello Road that day. But in any case there he was. Life, their meetings, the road, his thoughts. Everything disappeared in its own time, at its own speed, but everything disappeared. Mary, too, had entered an intermediary space; soon, he knew, she would no longer be there.
He kept on following her with an inexplicable lump in his throat.
Angels. Our angels. Who are they? How do they come to us?
A light turning itself off, a door opening in winter, the shadows of branches crisscrossing on a wall despite there being no tree. If people believe in ghosts, and in signs, then why not in angels? And, on the flimsiest of pretexts, knowing that they’re not fooling anyone, least of all themselves, they decide to follow them anyway.
Isn’t that what people have always wanted to do?
Follow in an angel’s footsteps?
That’s not the hardest thing, Mary thought. The hardest thing is to do what it says.
What is it saying?
It’s not the impetus of a blue sky that carries us but far less clement weather, with drizzle and fog. Following an angel’s footsteps means trudging through the despair it catches with its magnetic feet. It means having one’s only food be the bitterness that flows from its lips. Do you really believe we eat toast slathered with honey? Even if we do have sweet breath that gives all that we touch the freshest of flavors. What use is it to be an angel if we can’t make these silent paths welcoming? But our passage through the world is a harbinger of death. Do not forget that if you see an angel, your days are numbered.
Mary came back home, filled with light. Cub had followed her hesitantly. He had the impression that she was slipping beyond all hope, that little was left of the energy that had filled her body, and that, if he wasn’t there, nothing would hold on to it. As with his mother, as with his sisters and his brother, Cub had the impression he was holding Mary’s life in his hands.
Ever since they had returned, Mary had barely spoken. But she looked at him with so much delight in her eyes that he was worried. He didn’t understand this unfounded joy. She was trembling and smiling like a young girl. She looked at herself in the mirror and primped her hair like a diva. Cub felt lost. Who was she talking to? What had brought about this abrupt transformation?
Warmth, that was what mattered, he needed to make sure this reassuring, calm woman with a smooth forehead and a silent mouth stayed warm.
She had forgotten to eat. It was he who cooked and fed her like a child while she went on smiling so absentmindedly that it scared him.
She said only one sentence: “You’re my angel.” Then she choked, as if talking hurt her, although it was in fact a laugh caught in her throat.
Mary felt young, younger than she’d ever been. Howard had given her back her youth. She felt prettier than Mary Rose: not only was she not a virgin, but she was also sensual and desirable. She undid the straps of an imaginary dress, which wasn’t a flowery dress for a ball but a tight raw-silk dress from which her bare breasts peeked out like the orbs she had never had.
She looked adoringly at Cub, forgetting that she was in love with Howard (maybe they were one and the same). Her head was filled with a violet vertigo and her body with a slow waltz. Old age no longer had any hold on her.
She turned on the radio, and the lyrics that surged forth were promises to take her by the hand and walk her through London, to show her something that would change her mind. She smiled in recognition: it was a Ralph McTell song, Howard’s song.
She held her hand out to Cub. Despite his uncertainty he took it. She pulled him into a dance, unwittingly breaking both their hearts.
Through the window, he could see the clear outline of an airplane bisecting the sky. The passengers were in another world, between heaven and earth, between two spaces, suspended between life and the possibility of death. Did they know what would become of them between taking off and landing? The world had changed in the wake of those two fallen towers. He and Mary, too, were suspended between opposing possibilities.
This house was an airplane that held them in this uneasy balance. They shouldn’t leave it: they’d immediately fall into the prisonlike horror that was the real world, with its prison bars of prohibitions and its explosives.
And why would there be so many prohibitions? Mary wondered, dancing, dancing. She felt younger and younger. Howard watched her from the ceiling with a knowing smile. Go on, Mary, he said, don’t be afraid to live. None of us has lived. Fear has imprisoned us all. And for what? We’re passengers in a plane that might—or might not—crash. And between those two possibilities there’s the vast range of life.
In her arms, she felt Cub’s trembling body. She sensed, without understanding, the odor of the drugs in him that were immobilizing him. As if, at the same time, he both understood nothing and understood everything with a clarity so vivid that it paralyzed him.
Cub danced with her, feeling a deep shame. He saw a woman who wanted to be happy at all costs at the very end of her life, and he alone was able to offer her this happiness, even if his entire body rebelled against the very thought.
Night seeped into their waltz. The earth stopped momentarily, as if there were impossible facts to consider. Mary’s euphoria, which was outside time itself, was clear to Cub, who forgot who they were and only felt this sensation of a strange death-stricken youth, who forgot that this flesh was practically nonexistent, and who only saw the light filtering through her skin, and they spun until all Cub had in his hands was a glass figure at the heart of which burned a flame that he had never in his short life seen before.
Late in the night, exhausted, they climbed up to the bedroom beneath Howard’s wings. The angel guided Mary, who guided Cub. She had uttered only a few words the whole night. Her eyes, however, had never been so communicative, nor her hands so effusive. And hers weren’t the faded eyes and the worn-out hands of the old woman whose house and bed he had been sleeping in all this time. In the decrepit house, he saw Mary undergoing a rebirth and the sight stirred up an unexpected tumult within him.
In the bedroom, she pointed to the hole in the ceiling and held her finger to her lips, her eyes sparkling. She could hear Howard’s shivering laugh (accompanied by the smell of methane: maybe it was some discreet gas?). Cub looked at the hole, then at Mary. He was stupefied to see her undoing the belt of her dress, pulling down its zipper, and letting it fall to the floor. Feeling nauseated, he shut his eyes.
When Mary’s hands touched his face, he forced his eyes open again. Mary made him look at her. Her smile hinted that beyond the thin, angular body with blue creases, the flattened breasts where light pink nipples were visible, the flabby belly that no longer covered a soft layer of fat but rather showed organs nearing failure, the thighs streaked by veins, the face carved by wrinkles but which had retained its triangular shape and the fluidity of her gaze, the thinning hair, beyond this wholesale erosion of every attractive feature, of every appealing trait, of every charm, there was another presence: the gleaming illusion of a woman. She still existed, she had never left. She was visible now, casting aside all the ravages of time. She waved her fingers momentarily freed from their arthritis and shaped her own flesh to give it forms that had long since gone. She became a sculptor again: her medium now was herself.
Why hadn’t she been able to mold herself until now? he wondered with a devastated heart. Why had she been forbidden from living?
As he sank into Mary’s gaze and smile, Cub stopped seeing her as she had been and saw her as she was revealing herself to be. He forgot everything. She ran her fingers over his face and his neck, she took off his jumper and his cap, and gently undressed him, both like a child and like a man. The feeling of this fragile skin filled Cub with astonishment, because it was a
s beautiful as a nighttime breeze over his hot forehead. He let himself relax.
Now, there was nothing left in Cub but the thought of Mary, this old dream of Mary Rose that Howard had instilled from the hole in the ceiling, and which Mary intensified with the force of her own desire. Angels are capable of miracles, she said to herself, and we’re angels, we can become angels, and so great was her conviction that, as the earth momentarily stopped, she literally transformed in front of Cub’s eyes, became pink and white, became dark blond and turquoise blue, became an embracing lover, thrumming with life.
She lay Cub on her bed, relishing the beauty of this unmoving body, of these heavy-lidded eyes, and, nude as well, she taught him things that he had not yet experienced and that she had thought she’d never known. She was no longer seventy-five years old, nor was he thirteen. Even as the world looked away, nothing marred the beauty of her outstretched body, no gaze defiled her.
Cub’s body reacted while his spirit was seized by a surge of pleasure. He didn’t think of anyone. Not his mother, not his sisters, not his friends. What happened seemed no more impossible than the fact that he had been standing in front of the house that day when she was walking out. Everything had brought them here, to this moment beyond time and beyond limits.
Mary kneeled, her legs on each side of Cub. Her body exuded an aroma of old waxed marble, but also of greenery, of rosemary and thyme. On the inside of her thigh there was a teardrop, a pearl, a single silvery drop. She lowered herself slowly upon Cub’s stiff member, overjoyed that he was still watching her, that he hadn’t shut his eyes. She looked up and saw Howard’s eye peering through the hole. All three of them were united here, united like Mary’s interlocked statuettes, like the new lovers of that new era had been when they decided to rebuild the city. Her hands caressed Cub’s too-soft skin, her fingers paused momentarily on the odd battle scars, then touched his moist lips. She leaned forward and pressed her lips to his, tasting their spongy firmness, then slipped down to his small, flat torso, wholly male with its purple tips pointing upward in the darkness. She felt herself becoming the white angel that would absorb Cub and feed on his flesh, his energy, his life.