I turned. A startled hen fluttered from under the hay. Flapping her wings and clucking, she picked her way through the half-open door into the barnyard. For a while the stillness was interrupted only by the buzzing of a solitary wasp.
As I was about to walk out, I heard the cry again, which seemed to come from the space under the roof. It was immediately followed by a piercing whine.
I stepped back and opened the door wider, then began to search the dim contour of the rafters. But the daylight did not penetrate. I returned to the car to fetch a flashlight. I entered the barn again.
I focused the flashlight toward the sound. A large cage was suspended from the rafters. Formed of metal grating, it hung down on a heavy rope which passed through a ring secured to the roof. The rope fed down the wall and was fastened to a large cleat.
The strange cry came again: my light beat against the cage. A white hand stretched toward me through the bars; behind it a head, dim but clearly framed in untidy tresses of fair hair, caught the light I stood undecided, one hand already reaching for the rope. For a second I considered going for help, but I was too curious. I paid out the rope, lowering the cage inch by inch until it swayed just above the floor. Then I secured the line. A naked woman sat behind the grating, babbling meaningless words, staring at me with wide watery eyes.
I approached her. The woman moved, but she did not seem frightened. She stared at me, then began crawling toward me, rubbing her body, scratching and spreading her legs. I noticed her pock-marked face, her gnawed fingernails, her emaciated thighs stippled with bluish bruises. It occurred to me that we were alone in the barn and that she was totally defenseless.
I looked at the woman again: she was obviously demented and now she gestured invitingly, showing her uneven teeth in a twisted smile. I thought there was something very tempting in this situation, where one could become completely oneself with another human being. What I required, however, was the other’s recognition of this: the woman in the cage could not acknowledge me.
I hoisted the cage as the woman gibbered through the bars, secured the rope, and left the bam. Outside, I decided not to talk to anyone in the village. An hour later I had reached the district police station.
A sergeant looked on suspiciously as another policeman recorded my account of the woman in the cage. Soon after three police officers drove with me to the village.
We arrived after Mass, just as the streets began to fill with people leaving church. They were dressed in their holiday clothes, the children walking obediently beside the adults. We halted in front of the barn where a tall farmer sat removing his tight boots. One of the policemen asked him some questions and then pushed him into the barn. Our small procession followed them. The festive crowd gathered in silence around our two cars. Then, as if suddenly realizing the purpose of our visit, they scattered to their houses.
Inside the barn, several flashlights converged on the cage, which was now clearly visible. The farmer, sweating and trembling, slowly let down the cage in front of the waiting police; the woman inside was clinging to the grating.
The sergeant snapped out orders to open the lock. The farmer’s fingers struggled with the key, but he dared not look at the woman, who cowered afraid in the corner.
The policemen seized her by the legs and arms and dragged her out of the cage. The woman resisted, but they bound her, carried her to the car, and pushed her down onto the rear seat. Then the farmer was handcuffed and thrown in next to his prisoner. I saw the farmer’s women staring motionlessly after our departing cars.
Months passed. Finally, after much thought, I decided to return to the village. I left the city at night, so as to arrive at daybreak. I drove slowly, guiding the car carefully over the ruts in the road that wound between the houses. A breeze plucked at the rising mist which covered and then exposed the outlines of the huts and barns. I stopped near the rectory, not entirely sure of my next move. The rectory door slammed and I saw the priest come out. He strode toward the cemetery gateway, disappearing into the heavy shadows cast by the yews which bordered the short path to the church porch. I left the car and hurried after him.
The priest had stopped and was bending over a tombstone, as if trying to trace the vestiges of some inscription eroded by wind and rain. His wrinkled robe was dirty, patched and darned in many places. He started as I came up.
“So you’ve come all this way just to speak with me . . . why me?” He brushed the wisps of brown moss off his soutane, continuing to look directly at me.
“Because I have something to discuss with you—something important,” I said.
“What is your profession?” he asked.
“I’m at the university.”
The priest shook some dust out of his sleeve and smoothed his robe. Carefully skirting the graves and stooping to avoid the wet branches, he led me toward the churchyard gate.
In the courtyard of the rectory we were separated by a flock of turkeys pompously crossing our path. The priest waited at the door of the house.
“Would you like a little wine?” he asked.
“Thank you.”
We went in. He loosened the sash of his robe and poured out two glasses. We faced each other across the table. “Well, young man, what brings you here?”
“I came because of the cage.”
I watched him intently; a flush slowly spread over his puffy face, over the moist folds of his mouth, the pitted cheeks, the eyes deeply set within his craeased brow.
“Because . . . ?” he asked.
“The cage,” I repeated. “The cage with the woman.”
“I can say nothing,” he answered. “I only know what you know, that is, as much as the papers have reported.” He filled my glass again. “But why are you so concerned?”
“At the moment I’m not. But at the time I was quite concerned. I was the one who found the woman. I was lost, and stopped by the bam.”
“So you were the one. Of course, the newspaper report did not name you. Now I remember: the villagers mentioned a stranger who had brought the police.” He sipped his wine. “A tragic story. The farmer and his family did not want to pay for hospital care, and so they kept this mad woman in a cage.”
“There were some other villagers who knew of the woman—and her prison, Father.”
The priest ignored me. “Or for an asylum—the poor creature was unaware of the world she lived in.” He set his glass down. “But why return to that affair? The case is closed. The guilty ones have been punished. She’s in a hospital now. Have you come here to write another scurrilous article about this scandal? Hasn’t enough been said?”
The wrinkled hands emerged from the hollows of his black sleeves; they looked like clusters of scorched weeds as they rested on the sunlit wooden table.
“I have no intention of writing an article, Father: I’m not a reporter. I came back only for the sake of my own conscience, only for myself”
“What do you want, then?”
“I wanted to see you, Father, and talk to you.”
“Well, you have seen me, and we have been talking. What else can I do for you?”
“I’m thinking of the years the woman spent in the cage, Father.”
“What can I tell you about it that you don’t know already?”
“One thing, Father, just one.”
“Ask it then and let’s be done with it!”
I sipped my wine, watching the broken sunbeams on the rounded bottom of my glass.
“You have lived in the village for over thirty years, Father, including these last five years when scores of men from the village have been doing business in the barn where the woman was. In spite of all their denials the police have proved the men raped and abused her many times. Who could believe all their lies: looking for tools, storing seed, repairing implements, and so on? And the farmer who owned the barn—did he make his money selling cabbages? Even some of the women from the parish knew that the wretched creature had been pregnant twice and that the herb-woman
had brought on her miscarriages. These things don’t remain a secret long, Father.”
“Why are you telling me about it? I read it all in the gazette.”
“I’m just thinking out loud, wondering about my own feelings about this matter. It disturbs my peace. Doesn’t it disturb yours too, Father?”
“My peace of mind is a matter for my own conscience.”
“If, in all these years, not one of the faithful who took part in the many gatherings in the barn has said anything about it to you in the secrecy of the confessional, then, Father, of what value has your stewardship been to this village? Of what value is the religion which you so commend to the people of this community?”
“You have no right, no right whatsoever, to speak of such matters!” His voice picked up an oratorical flourish, but quickly returned to its previous character. He repeated, “You have no right to talk to me about it.”
“I do have a right: I opened the cage; I freed that woman. How do you know, Father, that it was not God Himself who led me to the barn that Sunday morning? How well do we know God? I have a right to ask you this, Father, because I can’t believe you knew nothing about the caged woman and her tormentors. For thirty years you have been their beloved priest; they spoke of your stewardship with admiration and reverence: of the confessions, the Holy Communions, the absolutions and processions, the liturgy and those saints’ anniversaries and holy days so loved by all!
“During the trial I saw their faces, Father, and they were convinced that the woman in the cage was accursed because of her bastard birth, that she was demented and ill. They argued that she was outside the reach of the Church: after all, she had never even been baptized! Father, I believe that you knew of the cage long before I entered the bam. Why didn’t you open the cage and release the woman? This wouldn’t have involved revealing confessional secrets; you wouldn’t have had to call in the authorities. Why didn’t you go to the bam one night while your faithful sinners were asleep and take the woman away? Or were you afraid of the trouble she’d bring being free?”
The priest leaned forward threateningly. It seemed, as the veins of his neck swelled, that his sweat-streaked collar would burst.
“I won’t listen!” he shouted. “You understand nothing . . . nothing! You haven’t lived in this village for thirty years. What do you know of peasants? I know these people, every one of them. I know them well—they’re good fathers, good providers. Sometimes they’re weak and they stumble. Yes, I hear their confessions, they bring me their sins like sacrificial offerings; but I also hear them sob as they confess. They don’t ask for forgiveness, they implore me, as they would pray for a good harvest. They are my people, and here you come to attack and insult me with preposterous assumptions!”
The priest threw himself back into his chair, ripping off his collar. He was quivering and he tried to control himself. I filled a second glass with wine and slid it across the table to him, watching him as he stared at the enormous painting of a female saint She was sitting under a palm tree, holding a pair of shears; in front of her, on a platter, lay her severed breasts.
The priest swept his hand toward the wineglass in an awkward gesture of refusal. The glass fell onto the floor, bounced once, and rolled toward the wall. The deep red of the wine, spreading over the table, began to stain the grainy wood. He got up and lurched from the room.
An elderly woman came in. She greeted me shyly and began to wipe off the table with a rag.
I stopped in at the church and sat on one of the benches, where I was soon enveloped in the mossy coolness and the scent of moldering stones. Old women in black were standing and praying in the deeply shadowed nave near the confessional. Now one of them hobbled up to the stall and knelt down, applying first her mouth and then her ear to the wooden grill. When she rose at last, a bony hand thrust out of the darkness of the confessional. The woman leaned over and kissed it; the hand crossed the dank air and withdrew.
Faces peered from the huts as I drove through the village in a cloud of dust. Terrified hens scattered, dogs barked. Soon I reached the main road.
The defendant’s behavior prejudiced the jury. He never admitted or even seemed to realize that what he had done was a brutal crime; he never argued that he had lost control or had not known what he was doing or that he would never do anything like it again. He just described his encounter with the victim without exaggeration, and in the most ordinary terms.
Almost all of us on the jury were able to discuss and imagine how he had committed the crime and what had impelled him to it. To clarify certain aspects of his case, some of the jurors acted out the role of the accused in an attempt to make the rest of us understand his motives. After the trial, however, I realized that there was very little speculation in the jury room about the victim of the murder. Many of us could easily visualize ourselves in the act of killing, but few of us could project ourselves into the act of being killed in any manner. We did our best to understand the murder: the murderer was a part of our lives; not so the victim.
After work I used to rest for a while in a nearby square. Several times I noticed an elegantly dressed man sitting on a bench reading a newspaper. He must have been in his forties and was rather handsome; women often glanced at him, and he would talk with them easily and play with their children. He wore expensive clothes, and sometimes a chauffeur-driven car would arrive to collect him. One day when he was just about to discard an illustrated foreign magazine he had been reading, I approached him and asked if I might have it We began talking.
Thereafter we met several times, always in the square, where we sat in the shade and watched the passers-by. From the way he looked at and discussed women, it was obvious that he took a keen interest in them. He confided to me that he lived alone and particularly liked associating with show girls from the dance halls and night clubs. For the last twenty years his income was such, he said, that he was in a position to further at one and the same time their careers and his desires.
One day he asked me whether I would like to meet his friends. I instantly agreed. He suggested an intimate gathering of six people at his apartment We were to be the only men present; the other guests would be show girls. They were not young, he said, but they were willing and experienced. Of course, he added, they wouldn’t entertain us spontaneously; he noticed my surprise and quickly explained that nothing mattered as long as it helped bring about someone’s fulfillment This, he said, had been part of his philosophy for a very long time; he had always located the essential truth of his life in his wants and compulsions. He told me to come to his apartment in a week’s time.
When I visited him, he led me through a long corridor lined with closed doors. We sat down to a glass of whiskey in the quiet living room, furnished with valuable old-fashioned objects. He saw my curiosity and explained that his guests were already there, each in a separate room off the corridor. He described them briefly and advised me first to join the woman who occupied the room immediately to the left of the living room. After another glass of whiskey we rose; he disappeared without delay into a room on the right side of the corridor, while I stood apprehensively in front of the door he had indicated.
I knocked twice, but there was no answer. I opened the door: the bed covers were turned down; a brightly lit lamp on the night table showed the walls and the ceiling plastered with hundreds of photographs of the same woman, all apparently taken throughout her stage career. No chronology arranged their sequence: some photographs emphasized her young, smooth body, its nakedness exuding sensuality; in others she was heavy and wrinkled, her body, often half clad, spongy and gross. With a single glance I scanned her a hundred times: voluptuously poised on stage, now at ease in the privacy of her room, frozen in every conceivable gesture. Wherever I looked, I met her gaze. As I turned, my attention was attracted by the television set that stood on the table, its screen blank, as though strangely unable to endure an image.
I left the apartment without taking leave of my host. Somewhere in th
e building a violin was being played. As I walked slowly down the stairs, the music seemed to be chasing the specks of dust that floated in the grayish light
A few days later I saw the man again. He asked me whether I had enjoyed myself, and he pressed me to return soon to meet his other friends.
She never knew I was her lover although we had worked together for a long time in the same office. Our desks were in the same room, and often at lunchtime we sat beside one another in the cafeteria.
It was almost a year now since I had stopped inviting her to dinner or to the theater or to the other functions that she was never willing to attend. I tried to pry some information about her from our fellow workers, but they knew less than I. She had never been close to anyone at the office. One of the men told me he had heard she had been divorced a few years ago, and that her only child was living with its father somewhere in the south.
I began following her. Once I spent an entire Saturday skulking in a doorway across from the building in which she lived. That afternoon she left her apartment and returned at about seven. Before eight she went out again and strolled toward the main thoroughfare. I followed her until she reached the square, where she hailed a taxi. I walked back to my observation post.
Standing in the shallow doorway opposite her house, I waited as the drizzle turned into a persistent rain, drenching my coat. Past midnight a cab stopped in front of the door; she got out alone.
I brooded over my obsession and the absurd vigils it had led me to. Since I seemed to have no chance of becoming her lover, I decided to forge an indirect link through which I could learn more about her. I got hold of one of my friends who I supposed would be able to make contact with her, and confided in him. My friend was prepared for the undertaking, and we immediately began to devise a feasible plan.
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