“Water bluer than ever at the Cap. Tremendous fish!”
“Writing well. Stephan playing rugby. All my love to F!”
“Considering an animal. Berner Sennenhund? (Too Swiss?)”
In mother’s absence, Hetty gossips. “Did you know that Charlotte was saved from the Great War by submarine?” she asks. “They sent a nanny in a submarine. She’s very, very rich.”
When she tells me this, I imagine a uniformed woman standing at a boat’s prow, even though I know that in real life she would be underwater, that a submarine doesn’t have a prow. I try to imagine C. as a child, but I only see myself.
Miércoles
People are missing their appointments for their dream briefs, so Legrand is revising his Surrealist Manifesto, again.
“You try to pause creation, but every night we dream!” he exclaimed one night at dinner. (Fish.) “And so it is that we must work our bones to access dreams during the day! Discipline is the complement of a wild mind! The seeing mind is fire and the sleeping mind is hay!”
My father used to tell me that Antoine Legrand was an intolerable person and a gifted poet, as most poets are. “A pen in hand temps misery from its shadows,” was something Legrand wrote once. My father kept it on his desk. My father writes and writes but he hasn’t published yet.
The last time Legrand revised this document he called for the excommunication of all surrealists who didn’t believe in Collective Action. “Surrealism at the Service of the Revolution!” it was called. He wrote it in our home in Paris, mother even let him write key phrases on the wall, where they’d later hang the phrase about the “thrash” from the director of the Louvre. When he’d finished his revision, a great party was held and a list was made of the unfaithful. The faithful are all here.
“At heart, he’s just a child who has to buy his playmates,” I once heard father say.
. . .
Mother is back and has a headache, so Hetty plays Legrand’s secretary down at the pool.
“We no longer live under the reign of logic!” Legrand shouts.
“There is a hatred of the marvelous!”
“SURREALITY is the absolute reality, the only place to live!”
When I came down for breakfast, Maria was rolling dough underneath a banner. “ALL HAIL THE OMNIPOTENCE OF THE AWFUL DREAM!”
Sábado
Konrad did a dream brief that turned into a painting. I watched my mother and Legrand pluck it from the clothesline. And mother chirping her head about it. Look how fine a thing.
Blue sky. The wall of a house, Mexican pink, and two squares cut like windows without glass. A white hand stretching through one of the cut out windows, knuckle-less, long fingers crossed round a red ball. From the ball, a string that winds up and down the wall of the bright house. A stick insect is climbing. Two palm trees that look like asparagus growing beyond the wall. The hand’s fingers, more like legs.
Underneath this, lines:
The road is not impassable
When you say to,
it begins.
The grass is full of sparrows
the first youth is closed.
Legrand said that this one should not stay up on the clothesline. I watched them from the stairs, mother standing in front of the picture as if protecting a small child.
“He’s humiliating you,” said Legrand.
“He’s making beauty because of me. His world is filled with beauty.”
“I’m afraid you underestimate him.”
“And he’s underestimated me.”
And in my stomach, sickness. To understand not everything, but to understand enough. Mother is never going to turn my door into a door.
And so I took the smallest horse. “The first youth is closed.” How ridiculous to ask permission, even to escape. I could not saddle him myself. And the groom pointing to the sky, protesting, giving names to things. “Tormenta. Tormenta!” So much better than our “storm.”
Well, I felt right, there in that saddle. The groom—against his wishes—drew directions in the sand. He talked of the tormenta, but I did not descend. My mother, after all, is known by everybody here. As are her caprices.
On the road, I cried for the heroic men. All the ones I’ve heard of. Grandpapa in his black tuxedo, in the rising seas. The Austrians pushing newspapers underneath their children’s knees while they scrub the frozen streets. But no heroes have ever come for me. My brother didn’t yell when we were told that we’d live separately. Now father sends short letters and summers where there’s shrimp. And I really am a stupid child to have hoped for stupid Jack.
The pony neighed and whimpered on the path out through the jungle. It was close to his evening meal and I was a fool to take him with the sky like that, but what of it? I’ve spent my whole life agreeing that I’m delicate, and what has come of that?
There really is a cement bowl here, built by the Americans as an offering for giants, rolled, I don’t know how, onto a cliff above Teopa. I climbed it last time with Papa and with Stephan (mother’s ankles too weak for the wooden stairs). There is an opening at the top of it to get into the bowl. Stephan squeezed through it and then Papa and I followed, and we were in the bowl then, and there wasn’t any sound. I couldn’t hear the ocean even though it was right there. It was like the bowl was holding me, like nothing bad could come. I remember Stephan ruining the quiet. Singing songs from boys’ school, saying there wasn’t any echo. Did we? Did we hear?
Well what girl doesn’t dream of running free next to the ocean, but I didn’t even have the courage to make the small horse gallop. The sand was harder than usual, and I thought if he started I might not be able to get the horse to stop, so we just plodded along on the beach toward the massive copa, the waves making my horse nervous, the wind making him nervous, and no birds in the sky.
If anyone was on the terraces of Occidente, they would have seen me on Teopa, right before a storm. Perhaps if the wind blew hard enough, the giant bowl would topple. Can you imagine the bowl floating across the ocean, passing all the people fleeing Europe, passing Mumma’s boat?
I imagined it rolling over them, pressing all the artists down into the reefs, the paintings and our piano sinking past the eyeless fish. That is what I dream of. Eyeless things that drown.
Dear Stephan, I thought, as the hooves sunk into sand, it’s been too long since we’ve laughed.
At the first roll of thunder, the horse’s ears pinned. Black clouds moving behind the ocean like enormous curtains. At the first slash of lightning, he reared, and I lost my stirrup. At the second one, he ran.
Sábado
I came to on one of the roadways, the strips of sand and dirt that look like all the other paths here, no difference between right or left or black. The stars were overhead and the air was filled with winged things on boughs. If I hadn’t been so hurt I would have been more frightened. The long and clinging serpents. Insects hung on flesh.
I will admit something here that I’ll never tell to anyone. I did see our house. How could I not, Occidente blazing at all hours, like something being filmed? I saw the blue house on the hilltop and I walked the other way. Even though it hurt most terribly to walk.
The pain was lessened by my imagining the groom’s panic when the horse came back without a rider. He would call on my mother, try to get someone to understand that it hadn’t been his fault. That I had insisted. My mother would finally cry for me, probably in public. Maria, maybe, too.
At the same time, I was embarrassed to imagine the horse running by himself. Charlotte would never let herself be thrown from a small horse! And in the jungle, of all places! I listened to the screeching insects and waited for the sound of the seeds that would explode. One of the exploding fruits could come for me, could come right for my head. The dark was even ghastlier when you weren’t on horseback. And of course, the silent snakes.
I’ll admit another thing. Even for the scratches on my back and knees, which at times throbbed or burned, I wasn’t actua
lly frightened until the rain started. I figured I could face anything if I wasn’t cold—
Dear Stephan,
How many letters have I tried here? And I still can’t write my way to brave!
Dear Elisabeth,
Did you want to be a daughter? Who gives you the choice?
Dear Elisabeth,
What way is there, really, for you to stay my friend.
The truth is worse than what I’ve tried to make it: I was thrown onto the beach. I was thrown and I hadn’t even been riding half the hour. As I lay on my back with the pain thudding all through me, I remembered what an instructor had said when I was small, that I had to hold the mane if a horse reared. Of course this information came to me when it was too late to use it.
From the beach, though, I saw lanterns going at a hut, swinging from the wind, probably; I was too far away to see. It was the turtle man’s. Mum let me and Stephan come out to see his hatchlings, the last time we were here. And even though no one is here who was here then, I guess the turtles are, and they need the man to watch them. We got to help them, the little turtles, scatter across the beach. It’s very simple, horribly: they are born and they either make it or do not make it to the sea. The turtle man told us that the sea is not the predator, that we must watch the sky. That it’s the birds who are most dangerous. We waved our arms and shouted so that they couldn’t land.
So it was the turtle man who found me, with the English that he had. I had pain, but I insisted that I didn’t because I felt so foolish. When he asked me what had happened, where I’d come from, I heard my voice say, “Señor Jack.”
My horse hadn’t run far, he said. There was grass behind his shack. The turtle man said he’d ride home with me. I said home was Señor Jack’s.
Steph
Steph-Steph
The disappearing man
I could have asked whether he remembered the first jam. Or that it had been from the tomatoes, the tomatoes we had grown.
Do you remember how we helped Papa tie the tomato branches back and the smell like basil and bright sun? We used Mum’s old stockings to do it and a stake. How Mum said that nothing would grow in England, but those tomatoes did.
How the jam didn’t turn out right. The smell wasn’t right either. That mother doesn’t like waste so we had to eat it with our breakfasts and our dinners for a while. The color was a festive one but I didn’t like the seeds. They looked like small blond animals looking down their nose.
I don’t know if it was the taste of it, or the fact that a lot of the tomatoes did end up having blight, probably that was it, probably it was because Mum had been right about the growing, but real father rubbed jam into her hair that night and she thought it a joke. It became a test, later. She would sit for it, you know, just sit for it, even when other people told Papa to stop.
“L’nora!” he would shout, quoting from his favorite poet while he rubbed. “They catch the shrieks in cups of gold!”
Sábado
Everything was a little blurry with my head hurt and the storm, but I remember (I know that I remember this!) that Jack didn’t startle when he found us at his gate. They spoke in Spanish, he and the turtle man. I like to imagine that Jack asked if I was hurt. They looked back and forth at me as if coming to a decision. They must have decided, not.
The thunder was still thundering and the heat lightning flashed. There was a fence running from the property: thick branches erected vertically and crossrails white as ghosts. The leaves tossing up and the branches also, ready for the quench.
I think Jack invited the turtle man to stay, but I don’t think the turtle man had time to think about it. With Jack’s help, which I needed, I had already dismounted, and the turtle man was working hard to keep his own frightened horse in place. Behind Jack’s cabin, his own horses were stampeding, causing ours to rear. Things were getting out of hand for the poor man who had helped me; his horse was semicircling desperately, eyeing where to bolt. The turtle man gave in to him with a shout, galloping away from us so quickly, the horse’s hooves barely touched the road.
“Let’s get your horse settled, first off,” Jack said, speaking to my mount, who he was holding, hard. Jack nodded behind him to the cabin. “You wait inside.”
I looked guiltily toward the house.
“Just go inside,” he said.
Jack’s place isn’t done in the Costalegre style. Most of the houses here are pastel-colored; Jack’s is white with a tin roof. And small. But lots of land beyond it, mostly scrub, I think, or savannah’s what it’s called.
I could hear his cattle braying, the sound like something scraping back and forth across an empty floor. And the horses’ hooves, an army. I’d heard that horses scream, but I’d never heard it happen. The sound was very female. I can’t describe that sound. I could barely open the front door, my hands were shaking so.
Feeling the impostor, I stood for Jack’s return. The door shut behind me because the wind had started up. As I hadn’t been invited, it didn’t feel right to notice how he had or hadn’t fixed things, so I stared at the packed floor of the entrance and tried to think of nothing. But that didn’t work because without something to fix my eyes on, I started feeling through the various humiliations that had brought me to Jack’s house, so the only distraction from my loathing was to look at what he had.
There was a queer table against the wall in front of me, made out of what must have once been a log. It was a strange shape; maybe it was a sculpture, you certainly couldn’t put anything on that table without it sliding off. Even the lanterns were placed next to it, unlit, on the floor. Jack held the only one with light.
From where I was standing, the cabin seemed one room, although I saw a curtain in a corner, blowing inward, an indication of something else behind. A window must be open, but I wasn’t going to do anything about shutting it, wasn’t going to do anything unless I was told to.
Because of the wall in the entranceway, I couldn’t see around it to the rest of the small room, and I didn’t dare to try. Alone and waiting in his house, with Jack having to settle a horse I’d nearly lost, I felt every inch of the burden I had caused. The shock of my fall, too, which had my body cold.
Jack came in and shook his coat off, water slicking from him. In his absence, the rain had shifted to something frightening, hard as apples, new ones, crashing to the roof. I couldn’t hear the horses and I couldn’t hear the cows. Behind me, I could feel the tilted table lilting to the side.
Jack hung his hat on a peg above me.
“Don’t stand by the door,” he said, picking up his lantern by the odd-shaped table. He walked into the main room and I heard him force the shutters closed. These sounds, at least, were things that I had lived with. Up at Occidente, I’d seen Mumma push against them with her shoulder to get her shutters closed.
“Care to help?” he called. I couldn’t see him for the darkness. I followed him by sound, and then my eyes adjusted. A cookstove in the corner, wood piled to the right of it, a narrow bed against a wall. The sound, and then the smell, of Jack lighting another lantern.
“Just yank them closed, and bolt them. You’ve closed windows before?”
My cheeks burned as I tried to pull the pair closest to me shut with the little I could see. They were heavy and the wood was swollen, I couldn’t get them sealed. Even with the bolt in place, the rain bounced and sputtered, puckling the sill with bulging drops. The rain was so noisy Jack had to yell his questions, and I didn’t like his yells.
With the windows as closed up as they could be, the cabin was immersed in a new and stiller kind of darkness save for the yellow of the candles Jack had lit. There was an iron chandelier above a little table, and the table was positioned in the oddest manner. Or rather, the chandelier was. But once Jack had lit up all the candles sticking from the fixture, I understood the placement. All across the tables were scrapbooks, no, sketchbooks, with lovely leather covers. Huge ones, oversized, pages open, some hanging on top of other ones, like
they were sleeping things. I tried not to look down, of course, but I could make out landscapes, modern landscapes, the way the artists do them, more feeling than the facts of what you see. Reds and whites and trees without any leaves left on their branches. They were unhappy images, and I felt even worse about them because I wasn’t meant to see them. There was the smell of something wet and malted hanging in the air.
“We’ll need a fire. It’s all there.” Jack nodded behind him. “You know how to start one?”
No use in lying, now. “No.”
“I don’t have staff, you know.”
“I know that.”
Jack looked at me for the first time. In the eyes, I mean.
“You hurt?”
I shook my head. But I also bit my lip. Because I did hurt, quite a lot.
“Wind knocked out of you? Lucky you were on the beach. Would have been a hell of a lot worse on the road. You know what you do if you don’t ride?” he asked.
I shook my head, again.
“You don’t.” Jack walked to the stove. Kneeled down, grabbed a handful of straw and wood bits for the fire. “Even a child of Leonora’s has to know not to ride into a storm. I’m surprised you made it as far as the beach. You put Señor Teyo in danger, you know.” He shook his head and stuffed more kindling in the fire. “You struck me as someone who spends at least a fraction of her time thinking of people other than herself. Did I get you wrong?”
“No, sir,” I said. “No.”
“You’ve eaten? Of course you haven’t. Don’t answer that. You wouldn’t have gone out on a full stomach. Only someone hungry would have done something so foolish. Rabbit stew is all I got.” He put a heavy casserole on the stove. “And some tortillas. Barely drinkable wine. That’s the thing I miss the most. Everything here arrives vinegared from the heat. Have some water,” he said, dipping a ladle into a pot next to the cookstove. “For your scare.”
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