by Naomi Holoch
FINAL JUDGMENT
THE morning newspapers didn’t announce an eclipse, and the forecast promised good weather, clear skies, and little humidity; thus, in principle, there was no reasonable explanation for the presence of a large violet cloud advancing sluggishly toward the mountain like an unseemly presence, an unplanned indiscretion of the sky.
He wasn’t willing to hasten his step—no matter that the soft breeze of September might become a wind, as it seemed quite ready to do—because he was a man of solid principles, moderate political ideas, and strong convictions; anyway, those leaves that were now whirling around his head were a subversion of September’s order, and he decided not to pay them any attention. Nor was he willing to consider the purple color that the mountain had taken on, completely out of place if one takes into account the early hour of the day in which he was setting off, with measured pace, to his work in a bank office on one of the central streets of the city.
But this wasn’t all. When he got to the corner—a cross street full of store windows where his profile blurred like a sort of faraway mannequin—he felt a drop of rain on his nose, and he noted that a middle-aged lady who was going by in the opposite direction opened her umbrella like a medieval dome. It seemed humiliating to him.
And if this weren’t enough, the vendor at the newsstand where he always bought his paper greeted him hurriedly, unfolding over the newspapers and magazines a piece of plastic that fluttered in the wind like a trapped butterfly. “What strange weather!” he felt the obligation to say as he took money from his pocket to buy the newspaper.
He saw indistinct women’s forms under dark yellow raincoats. What he hated most about the brusque disappearance of the sun was that it altered, even confused conventional notions of time. In truth, the gray sky that was opening up now like a circus tent could be that of the early morning or midafternoon, and he detested uncertainties, confusions, vacillations.
He had to quicken his step against his will, which he considered a small personal indignity. It seemed that life was full of ordeals and disagreements impossible to repair.
The violet cloud spread out like an ink stain and covered the sky. The air had acquired a Prussian blue tone, and he was happy that this expression came into his head because in the uncertainty of this morning that seemed like an afternoon, it summoned up a sense of order even if it was a military order. But Prussia had gotten lost somewhere, sometime.
Then he heard the booming of thunder, hollow and charged with electricity, like an iceberg suddenly breaking up. He shuddered. Ever since he was a boy he couldn’t keep from trembling violently whenever he heard that trombone in the sky. He was going to send a letter to the Meteorological Center. It wasn’t acceptable for them to make this kind of error in the weather forecast. Didn’t he pay taxes regularly? Didn’t he go to work every day, arrive punctually, and never take time off?
The second roar of thunder, even more spectacular than the first, caught him just as he was quickening his step to cross the street, and it boomed like a large building falling to pieces. Then a crash that he couldn’t identify made him raise his head. It hadn’t begun to rain consistently yet, but red and yellow lightning drew winding rivers in the sky like lines on the maps one got in school. These lightning flashes divided the sky in two, and the dark clouds parted like curtains rising on a stage. Behind them the landscape just coming into view was more serene (he seemed to pick out a small blue area, pure and with amber-colored borders). The sky appeared to open up, submissive, to make way for another sky. And if everything was harsh, churned up, damp, and electric in the superficial sky (the one closer to his eyes), the other, the one that appeared behind, was tame, radiated a harmonious light, and, especially, was not a noisy, but rather a silent sky. It evoked the religious cards of his childhood, with their apocalyptic landscapes, lilac-colored clouds, and light beams that went through mountains. Everything that he had rejected as childish in his maturity returned in this naïve vision like a joke in bad taste: it was the exact place where the old man reconciles himself with the boy. And he couldn’t stop looking; for a period of time that he could never determine, he remained absolutely still, as if he had surprisingly lost the ability to move, and he thought that if anyone walked by at that moment (but now the street was strangely deserted; most probably the bad weather had cleared it out), he or she could have perfectly well taken him for a statue.
Then suddenly in the great opening in the sky, like a stage curtain going up, he saw God make his appearance. He didn’t come down or make any movement; He simply appeared among the clouds, only His head, and both looked at each other for a moment.
Everything was motionless around him: he observed that the trees on the street were floating, the cars lay immobile, a sepulchral silence reigned on the street (you could only hear the rhythmic sounds of the traffic lights changing), the passersby had disappeared, and the lilac light of the buildings made them seem to float like houses suddenly turned into boats, and he into Noah. Surprisingly, he wasn’t nervous; he felt comforted and at the same time vaguely disappointed. Comforted, because with everything resembling the religious cards of his childhood, a certain part of his uncertainty disappeared; and disappointed, because he couldn’t stop thinking that, whatever else it meant, this vision was naïve.
Finally they found themselves face to face. This seemed to be the most important moment in his life, and everything since his birth brought him to this instant, this revelation, this culmination.
He tried to move but felt as if something or someone, without effort, were restraining him.
Then he spotted other people inside their houses, also motionless just as he was: speechless dark shadows, immobilized forever in the moment of lifting a fork to their mouths, opening a door, petting the cat, reading the paper, writing a letter. Like mechanical dolls suddenly halted by some flaw in the works or frozen by a child’s wish. Even more, he thought that from the beginning, in the clear dawn of time when things were first named, everything had led to this in some mysterious but steady, obscure, and inescapable way. Everything: Napoleon and the Seven Infantes of Lara, the Medicis and Charlemagne, Etruscan cemeteries, Teutonic orders and slips of the tongue, paintings by Murillo, Hesiod and films by Chaplin, women who die in childbirth, the swans on the Wansee and the drawings by Utamaro, the Second World War, the music of Wagner and the martyrdom of Ursula, the October Revolution, the student rebellion in Córdova and the opera Evita, haiku, the Beatles and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Everything led to this, through the enigmatic paths that the short span of human life could never grasp, but that now were revealed in all their inevitability.
He was a cautious man, and the last day couldn’t take him by surprise. He had remembered the biblical verse that told the just man to prepare himself for the great event; he didn’t have anything to lose because he hadn’t held on to anything, and the trumpets of Jericho, thunderclaps though they were, resounded in his ears like the echo of ancient music. He had awaited this day anxiously, but also humbly and with meekness, because no one should be so proud as to expect to be selected for the last day. He had prepared himself silently, without harboring any ideas about rights in the matter, and now he had his opportunity.
Finally they found themselves face to face. He dug around in his pockets. Time had stopped, frozen like water in a lake. While he was digging around in his pockets, he made a gesture to God, asking Him to wait. What could an instant mean when it comes to all eternity?
From the inner pocket of his jacket he took out some typewritten pages (he was a meticulous man), and putting on his glasses (he suffered from a slight farsightedness) he began to read God a list of charges that for fifty years had accumulated against Him, impartially, like an anonymous investigator who has followed a suspect without His ever knowing.
Translated by Mary Jane Treachy
SINGING IN THE DESERT
THE fact that she sings in the desert shouldn’t surprise anybody since many people have done so since the b
eginning of time, when everything was sand (and also sky) and the oceans were frozen over.
We know that they sang in the desert, but we didn’t listen to them, so we could say that up to a certain point they sang for themselves, although, in principle, this was not the purpose of their song.
Since we didn’t hear them, we could also doubt that they ever sang at all; nevertheless we are sure that their voices rise or rose above the desert sands with the same kind of certainty that allows us to affirm that the earth is round without our having seen its shape, or that it rotates around the sun without our having any proof that we are moving. It’s this kind of conviction that makes us suppose that they have sung in the desert even though we haven’t heard them. Because song is one of the things that people do, and deserts really do exist.
She sings in a low voice. The sands are white and the sky yellow. She is sitting on a small dune with her eyes closed, and the dust covers her neck, eyelashes, and lips, from which a wisp of voice escapes like a sweet liquor onto the parched land. She sings without anyone listening, in spite of which we are certain that she is singing or that she has sung at one time.
Surely the wisp of her voice gets lost almost immediately in the motionless yellow space that surrounds her. And the sun, voraciously sucking the few drops of water up from a nearby lake, furiously drinks up the notes of her song. She doesn’t stop singing nor does she sing louder; she keeps singing in the middle of the white sands and the pyramids of salt that arise like temples to a blind and dull-witted god. The sands, which have devoured more than one camel and its rider, hide the notes of her song. But the next day (or the next night, because although we can’t hear it we can imagine that she also sings under the dark sky in the solitude of the desert), she lifts up her voice once more. Such persistence shouldn’t surprise anybody for it seems somewhat intrinsic to song and sometimes intrinsic to the desert. So much so that it would be difficult for us to imagine a desert without a woman stationed on a sand dune, singing without being listened to.
We don’t know the nature of the song although we are convinced that the song exists. When she comes down to the city (because she’s not always in the desert; sometimes she participates in our city life and performs the conventional acts that we have been repeating ever since we were born), we accept her like just another inhabitant because, in truth, nothing distinguishes her from the rest of us except the fact that she sings in the desert, and we can forget this since nobody hears her. When she disappears again, we suppose that she has returned to the desert and that in the middle of the white sands and the sky like an ocean she lifts up her voice, elevating her song which like a drop of water dropped from space, is swallowed up by the dune.
Translated by Mary Jane Treachy
Shani Mootoo
Shani Mootoo, an Indo-Trinidadian-Canadian writer, portrays a sexual need that challenges the domestic confinement of women in her story “Lemon Scent” (1993). Enriched by the layers of her cultural legacies, Mootoo’s fiction makes possible new disclosures of women’s intimacies. Over fifty years ago, another Indian feminist, Ismat Chugtai, published a short story entitled “The Quilt” (1941) depicting a disturbing sexual encounter between an upper-class Indian wife and a young servant woman. As a result, she was charged with obscenity by the British authorities. In this contemporary story, Mootoo, who now lives in Vancouver, returns to the portrait of a wife who, without the protection of class privilege, pursues pleasure in the face of danger.
LEMON SCENT
I. PAISLEYS IN THE SPACES BETWEEN
HER pale brown hands, skin fine and smooth like brushed silk, clutch an oval silver tray against her yellow sari in the area of her navel, indenting lightly. I look down at her offering—faintly wrinkled reddish-black prunes. Careful not to linger to contemplate the shape of the hands, the impeccably manicured shiny-shell-pink fingernails, I concentrate, instead, on spaces between the score of healthy-looking prunes slit slightly and stuffed plump with peanut butter, the slits sealed over with firm pink icing. The spaces between the prunes reveal a white, linen-textured paper doily embossed with low-relief paisleys.
The outer edge of her oval tray brushes against the area of my navel. Above the tray there is a heat growing, filling the space between her and me, and the smell of her cologne on fire thickens to fill up the space. I trace paisleys in the spaces between the prunes with my eyes.
I am careful not to imagine the warm smell of her skin, behind her ears, on the back of her neck. Grasping the tray tightly with her right hand, she obscures my paisleys with her left, fills my view with her hand. Between thumb and middle finger she picks up a prune. Her forefinger guides it from behind up toward my mouth.
I am careful not to look into her eyes.
A little shaft of light glimmers off the band of her gold wedding ring as it catches the light from another room. As her hand reaches my mouth I look over her shoulder to the other room. Her husband stands leaning against a wall sipping his drink, chatting with his friends. I barely open my mouth and her cologne rushes against the back of my throat. Her fingers touch my lips. My tongue flits against her forefinger. The heat and smell of her cologne, like a pounding surf, fill up my mind.
I am careful not to linger.
2. THE GESTURE OF DEEP CONCERN
He looks out the kitchen window with the phone pressed to his ear. Down the hill from that side of his house run miles and miles of undeveloped forested land—wild samaan, giant ferns, ginger lilies, bird-of-paradise bushes, and palm trees, all meshed in suffocating philodendron vines—meeting the sea in the distance.
He doesn’t really see what he is staring at. Level with his eyes is the horizon line where the faint sliver of white sea butts against the white sky.
His voice is distant, fading in and out of the bad telephone connection. His edges are softened with a gesture of deep concern.
“… has everything she could ever want but … I don’t understand … is sulking, her depression again, you know … I am going out for some drinks with the guys from work tonight, so please come over. Spend the evening with her…. I’ll be back late, very late. Spend the night. Lately she only ever laughs when she is with you…. I can count on you, can’t I….? I don’t want her to be unhappy….”
He pauses, breathing in faint traces of his wife’s lemon-scented cologne that linger around the mouthpiece of the phone. Reaching across meandering miles of rough country roads, the line’s crackling ceases long enough for him to utter a sacred masked warning: “I must not lose her.”
He hangs up the telephone, shoves his cold hands into the back pockets of his blue jeans, and absently looks out the window across the rolling green lawn, dotted here and there with lone hibiscus and croton that his wife conscientiously tends, to the wire and concrete fence that surrounds his property.
He stops at the door of their bedroom before entering and anxiously watches her, his prized exquisite accomplishment, envy of his men friends, huddled in a lifeless puddle on the bed. Standing in the doorway he is not fully at ease informing her that soon he will be leaving and that he has invited Anita over to keep her company for the evening.
An image of Anita and his wife talking intently and at length, almost shyly, at a party recently, comes to his mind. She seems to sizzle with life in Anita’s presence. He hopes that his gesture will charm her to him. He sees her chest flutter. Her breathing quickens noticeably.
She uncurls herself and slowly emerges from the bed. He walks over to her and reaches hopefully for her waist, but she glides in and out of his fingers before he can pull her toward him. Knots of fear are beginning to cramp his stomach. Gradually his eyes harden, redden with anger.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, pulling the heavy gray-and-red sports socks, twisting and shoving his feet into graying leather running shoes, he glances up at her every few seconds.
At her dresser she stands leaning in toward the mirror, brushing her long, wavy black hair until it fluffs out light and full around h
er face and down her back. He has the impression that she is brushing out her hair more thoroughly than usual. He watches her face in the mirror, hoping that she will look over at his pleading face. Without taking her eyes away from her face in the mirror, she offers him a cup of tea before he leaves, but he can feel that her intention to make it is weak and unwilling.
From his stillness in the room, she knows that he is watching her as she readies herself for Anita’s visit. Nervously she rambles, saying that if it rains the eaves on the roof will overflow because they need to be cleared of the leaves shedding from the poui tree in the backyard. He does not answer.
He watches her shake the bottle of lemon cologne into her hand. She rubs both hands together lightly, quickly dabs behind her ears and pats her neck, running her hands down onto her chest, the palms of her hands brushing her breasts. She pours more cologne into her hand and rubs it on the small mound of her stomach, massaging it. When she turns to walk over to her closet he gets up and crosses over to the dresser to brush his hair. Looking straight into the mirror at his own reflection, he says more loudly than is necessary, “I’m really glad that you have such a good friend in Anita.”
She pulls a dress so forcefully off its hanger that the hanger springs away, snapping off the metal rod and clanging to the wooden floor. He continues, “I wonder why she isn’t yet married. She is a bit of a tomboy … not exactly appealing to a man. Do you think she is attractive?”