Things Bright and Beautiful

by Anbara Salam

  While Max was spending more time at church, Bea recruited a foraging accomplice in Lorianne, Jinnes and Othniel’s five-year-old. Lorianne was a small, plain-looking child, with far-apart eyes and a sprinkling of black moles on the right side of her face. She knew only a few words of English, but hospitably guided Bea through the ‘shallow’ jungle around the village. She showed Bea where nangalat – the Devil’s nettle – grew, and where to find the fish-poison tree, the glue tree, and the tree that produced bright red flowers at Christmastime. She knew spots for collecting six types of bananas across a spectrum of starch and sweetness. She pointed out bush nuts, tiny, chalky apples and hog plums. Bea asked her to repeat the names of fruits, over and over, and laboriously repeated them back while Lorianne snickered. Sometimes Lorianne didn’t know the names, and shrugged, offering ‘kakae’ as a response, patting her belly.

  Once Bea realized the forest concealed a larder of sorts, she became considerably more interested in the jungle. Without a refrigerator, Bea couldn’t collect too much in any one harvest, since ripe quickly became putrid. It was a matter of careful selection and daily scavenging. Guavas were out, because they were so lousy with maggots that she had become accustomed to the sour tang of half-eaten grub. Pineapples brewed to such advanced fermentation in the sun that they gave off paint-thinner fumes when sliced. If Bea miscalculated the time between forest and plate by even a matter of hours, the disintegrating matter solicited carpets of ants into the house.

  Bea begged one of Max’s blank notebooks from him, and created a volume of sketchy maps for foraging. She pressed leaves in between the pages, and wrote cramped, gibberish notes to herself about what they were. Where Lorianne’s knowledge failed, Bea classified in her own made-up taxonomy – listing such delicacies as ‘mushy bean’ and ‘lumpy gourd’. She resorted to increasingly imaginative ways of supplementing their evening meals, adding flower petals and slices of ginger root to their customary piles of white rice. One night, she served supper to Max while he sat at his stool. After they had joined hands and Max led them in grace, Bea picked up her fork.

  ‘What’s this?’ Max asked, pulling out a small, lacy green leaf from his mound of rice.

  Bea glanced at it and looked back at her plate quickly, muttering, ‘Hedge,’ with her mouth full.

  Max rested on his elbow, twisting the leaf by its stalk in between his thumb and middle finger. ‘Hedge?’

  Bea nodded, raising her eyebrows. She continued eating, pressing her finger into a fallen grain of rice on the tabletop and slipping it under her tongue.

  ‘Why –’ began Max, as Bea sighed, suspecting an impending lecture. ‘Why do they call it “hedge”?’

  Bea looked at him, silently chewing. She cleared her throat and said in a slow voice, ‘Because, my dear, it’s our hedge.’

  Max stared at her blankly for a moment, then burst into a loud peal of laughter. ‘It’s a hedge! We’re eating a hedge!’

  ‘Yes,’ Bea said hesitantly, smiling, although she didn’t understand what was so funny. She was hungry, and it was a tasty salad. ‘I like it.’ She shrugged, trying in that shrug to express that he could keep his opinions to himself.

  He gaped at her in amazement. This woman, he thought. She has humbled herself to the point of eating from a hedge without complaining. When they first married, she had disdained lettuce as cattle food. But here she was, coolly enjoying a pitiful plate of tiny, damp little leaves.

  Bea, distracted by his silence, looked up at the warm expression on his face, his mouth open, his pupils dilated with a gentle awe.

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘You are a marvel,’ he said at last, his voice serious, but with a smile.

  Bea turned back to the hedge to cover her blush.

  5

  Inspecting her face in her compact mirror, Bea picked at a scab on her cheek, drawing a scale of skin and a speck of blood. She licked her finger and rubbed at the lump. She had never been beautiful, even as a girl. The misshapen line of her nose she had grown accustomed to, grown almost to like. But now she had to contend with dark scars from bug bites studded across her cheeks and neck. She rubbed a penny of cold cream into the new sore and sighed. Once, the scarring might have mattered to her. But the life of a missionary’s wife didn’t leave much room for vanity. And Max claimed not to care at all for her appearance, only if she had opened her heart to welcome Jesus.

  But holy salvation was not the first time Bea had opened her heart. She first fell in love just after her fifteenth birthday. Luis noticed that Bea had succumbed to long spells of sulky withdrawal. She spent hours sitting in her bedroom, glumly flicking the pages of American movie magazines. She lost weight, and wore a single frown-line cut into the centre of her forehead. She hunched her shoulders. She stopped combing her hair. She lay in bed for hours late into the morning, and yet still had purple marks under her eyes from tiredness. Luis and José Rafael conferred, with some worry. Misinterpreting her misery as boredom, Luis encouraged her to take pianoforte lessons. Maybe she could have her hair fixed, or take a boat trip with a school friend. At these suggestions, Bea did little more than bite her lip, and hug her father with unnecessary force. He was relieved to have solved her malaise so efficiently, but Bea was merely overwhelmed with pity. He had misunderstood so sweetly, and his offers of a child’s luxuries made her feel somehow protective of him.

  But the cause of Bea’s misery was not boredom, although equally mundane. She had met Jorge while buying ice cream during the Holy Thursday festival. He was ten months older than her, with thick, coarse brown hair and black eyebrows that arched to graze each other in the middle of his forehead. He was not especially handsome, but his skin was a copper brown and his lazy, heavy-lidded eyes a queer green in direct sunlight. When selling her a strawberry cone, he had been distracted by the suggestive gap between her middle teeth, and dropped a single pink drip on the corner of her gingham blouse. He spent his days between dozing in Cementerio del Este, catching fish for a meagre income, and trying to seduce every pretty girl who paused to return his smiles. And so, in 1945, Beatriz’s life became undone.

  Bea wanted him instantly, and with such ferocity, she suddenly understood the meaning of the word ‘covet’ she had heard so much in church. And in the simple equation of a spoiled child, she set her mind to owning him. Was this the same person who had sat at her lessons with her hands folded, talking to the nuns, only weeks before? They met after her lessons, and in the hours she invented in the company of imaginary school friends. Sitting on the rocks overlooking the river, they spent hours in delicious boredom while he set catfish traps, smoked, boasted of the money he’d won at cards, how much he drank, the pretty girls he had met. And Bea listened patiently, waiting for the moment when he would grow bored of bragging, and they could climb lower to a shallow cave obscured by a mossy rock. There, she would let him unbutton her pinafore with blunt fisherman’s hands, his face flushed with concentration. Lying prettily in confession about stealing a pin from her grandmother, failing to say grace, Bea discovered in herself a talent for sin she had not even considered. She was only surprised to realize how naturally it came to her.

  Bea had heard all about love. It meant God’s sacrifice of His only son. It meant a white dress, flowers in your hair on your wedding day. It was the gentle way José Rafael touched the arm of his wife, Isabella, on a Sunday morning outside church, when he thought no one was looking. Bea begged Elizabeth Vera to retell her stories about kings and serpents as she darned her underclothes in the evenings. With creeping distress, Bea realized perhaps she wasn’t the beloved bride in her nurse’s stories. Perhaps she was the foundling, abandoned in the forest to mate with the beasts. Perhaps her affair with Jorge was something ugly and unnatural. But when she watched Jorge pick threads of tobacco from his clothes, and look up at her suddenly – a flash of green – there was a disorientating seasick movement in her stomach. That feeling, Bea thought, it had to be love.

  As months went by, the fumblin
g behind the rocks by the river turned instead to something else in the furniture storeroom in the basement of her house, and the grassy parades of Cementerio del Este. At night, Bea waited fully clothed in her bed, with the sheet clenched between her teeth. Every now and again, she woke with an acute shock at the noise of a passing cart, the crow of a cockerel, terrified she had missed his signal. Though when Jorge whistled for her, it couldn’t be mistaken. Filled with nauseous joy, she shuffled down the sappy arms of the orange tree to meet him. At the bottom, he would grab her wrist with three fingers and they would stumble through the empty streets, her hair pulled up under one of his caps. He would push his hands under her shirt to feel the cold skin on her back. She ran her hands through the coarse hair on his head. They said nothing, there was nothing to say.

  And as time went on, Jorge’s gleefulness turned to drunkenness, his drunkenness turned to temper, his temper to fists. He started to hide outside the walls of her school, to watch her walking home. He accused her of fucking other men, the son of her father’s friend he had seen driving to the house. He claimed not to care, since he was often with other women – better women than her. He described them to her with a connoisseur’s dictionary, and in such elaborate detail, that Bea’s initial needles of jealousy evolved into a strange form of solidarity with his entourage. She thought about them often, about Maria with the thick curly hair, Marian the waitress at Hotel Avila. She daydreamed about how they might pass each other one day on the street, and turn to recognize each other. Marian with the tiny waist would approach her, and put her hand on Beatriz’s. A benediction.

  His chief propagandist, Bea became skilled at interpreting his drunken gripping and pinching, the ugly words he used for her, his energetic caresses and his philandering as misdirected demonstrations of his love. Of course he loved her. Or else, how could he hate her so much? During the day, she reasoned with herself. He was right, of course. She was a whore – wasn’t she whoring herself with him? She was too ugly, too thin, too boring. How could she be so offended when he told her the truth for her own good? It was no wonder he didn’t want to spend any time talking to her any more. As long as he wanted her, she would wait for him. Perhaps, if she was good, tried not to talk too much, if she was patient, he would overlook her ugliness and how boring she was. Persistence, patience, she told herself, was the key to his love.

  They never met in the daylight any more. Once, in September, heart thumping, Bea came alone to Jorge’s room through his open window. She just wanted to see him in the sunshine. In a mad moment, she almost wanted to check he was real. But he wasn’t there. The room looked so different in the daytime. She could smell chicken fat frying on his neighbour’s stove, and the floor was sticky with spilt beer. Bea listlessly shuffled through his shelves looking for love tokens from his other girlfriends. A letter, a brassiere, a lock of Maria’s curly hair – anything. She pulled out from underneath his mattress a tattered photograph of her that had gone missing from her own house. Picking it up with shaking hands, Bea sat on the unsteady springs of the mattress and sobbed. She replaced it carefully, understanding Jorge well enough to know that if he suspected she had witnessed this token of vulnerability, their affair would be broken off for ever.

  Occasionally, Jorge would vanish, for weeks or even months at a time. During these interludes, Beatriz lay indoors, waiting with stoic patience for a stone at her window, a whistle from the hortensias. Terrified it might be the final time he left her, she was almost delirious with panic. She vomited up her food in heavy ropes. Her gums hurt. And when, inevitably, she chanced upon a sight of him in Plaza La Boyera, half smiling, with a rolled cigarette in his mouth, she wondered if it were possible to also vomit up her heart. And when, inevitably, he returned, the declarations of love, the drinking, philandering and endless, joyful bitter-sweet hours on the springs of his dirty mattress would begin all over again.

  Every time he took her hand in the dark, she was dizzy, thinking it could be the last time she might have a chance to touch his fingers. That she should make this time ‘count’ more than the other times. To remember it better, to be better. To be so good, so perfect, it would change something. Each reunion felt like a new scalding – his drunken mouth kisses, hot rain burning on her hot face. And each time they met to grip each other in the streets – the dark night-time shape of their love – she prayed he would see something new in her. See something new he could love.

  And from time to time, he would beg himself a different person. Holding his hand over his chest, ‘It’s different now, let’s run away – we’ll get married,’ he would say, biting her neck, leaving blue trails on her skin. He dazzled her with abstract compliments. ‘I am an electron next to you,’ he declared drunkenly to the sky, his arms wide, smashing his bottle of beer on to the rocks. Afterwards, she would crawl home, bruised and hollow. She would whisper to herself, ‘Never, never, again,’ in her room, holding her shoulders. She felt herself drowning, self-absorbed in the suffering of loving.

  Four years went by. Neither Bea nor Jorge really assumed their affair would ever end, until it did, abruptly, in 1949, when Bea was twenty. It was another dark night, and she had left her house with nothing. And after the terrible things that happened, she never went back home. And she never saw Jorge again.

  But even after that, even in her new life with Max, even in the New Hebrides, she couldn’t control the dreams. They sprouted in her everyday life like gorgeous, flame-coloured weeds. She felt the imprints of Jorge’s stubby fingers on her waist, the weight of his thigh muscles, and the coarse stubble on his jaw scratching against the underside of her neck. The gravity of her lust made her heart beat asymmetrically. In her dreams, she could not see his face, but she did not need to see it. Because it belonged to him, and she would love his face with its thick brows and flushed concentration if she was blind, and deaf, and dumb.

  Always the same, herself dreamt a teenager again, her profile straight, her skin smooth and soft. And him, strong and careful in his lust, calloused hands and hot open mouth. And filled with an overwhelming stab of love in her heart, she would wake with tears running sideways, salting the hollows of her ears. She would wake, and lie there wretched with longing, his name beating in her chest like a child’s drum.

  But Bea’s profile was no longer straight, and her skin no longer clear. On Advent Island, her body had become a constellation of insect meals. Her feet and ankles were swollen with ant bites; embossed pink circles, sunk here and there with festering craters of white pus. Her shins were peppered with puce-coloured bumps from New Dog’s fleas. The insides of her thighs were a destination for only the most enterprising and adventurous of mosquitoes that made furtive, dusk-light expeditions up her skirt. Her back and shoulders were ornamented with crimson pinpricks from bed mites.

  Bea was itching all the time. Itchiness, she felt, must surely be the fastest route to madness. Her skin crept constantly from bites, until she fancied she could sense the waves of poison rippling through the skin. The lining of her brassiere, the hems of her sleeves and the laces on her sandals were junctions of agony. Any accidental graze triggered the pimples into hot yearning, and she often woke in the night to find she had been scratching her limbs against the coarse thread of the mosquito net in her sleep. On those nights, Bea lay in the dark, dabbing at the needles of blood oozing from her newly open sores. It filled her with claustrophobic panic, to find herself flailing against her pitiful cheesecloth prison.

  Before Advent Island, Bea never would have believed that the countryside could be so cramped. She was strangled on all sides by either petty rural scrutiny or insectile mayhem. It was all right for Max; he had the luxury of walking about whenever he felt like it, going wherever he pleased. No one questioned his right to be out for a stroll in the middle of the day, or pestered him with mindless observations as he tried to claim a moment for himself. But even if it weren’t tabu to walk around alone, there was nowhere for her to go. There was only jungle.

  The jungle.
Its constant whirring noises, its fetid organic complexity, its restlessness. So many thousands of trees and bushes and leaves, each populated by slithering, crawling insects, all with tiny hearts pumping and pumping. Sometimes, during the hottest part of the day, Bea lay still in her bed, conscious of the constant movement of the jungle and a humid, ominous stillness of the air.

  The jungle was not quite as Max recalled it. He thought perhaps it had been a different sort of jungle on Santo; or perhaps there had just been less of it. On Advent Island, the jungle refused to stay outdoors, it lurked at the corners of the village and wormed its way into civilization. Pale weevils cavorted in the powdered milk, black orchids blossomed in the shower, heavy-breathing rats urinated over his sandals while he slept. It perpetuated itself with explosive fertility. Furry dark fungus bloomed over his vestry desk where none had been at breakfast time. Rotten green oranges dropped into the grass outside the church in an arrhythmia of dull thuds. Voluptuous soursop, sweating at their seams, fell softly into quiet explosions of mush outside his bedroom window, producing a seething mass of glistening, onion-white maggots revelling in its putrefaction.

  He began to have dreams that he was standing in line at a kiosk in Kendall Square, holding a jar of peanut butter in his hands. A jar that had been wrapped in plastic by a machine. Uncorrupted food, produced in a clean factory, where men and women wore thick safety goggles and starched white laboratory coats. Millions of jars of peanut butter, identical copies of each other, lined up in gleaming rows. Duplication instead of procreation. Not crawling and moving, not sex and suckling, living and dripping and crusting and bursting and hatching.