Primitive People

by Francine Prose

  Simone hesitated at the tree line, gazing in at the fog and trees: white gauze shot through with black stitches. She filled her lungs and walked in to see how the woods looked from inside. She could hardly see ahead of her and kept checking over her shoulder. Before she began to lose sight of the house, she would give up and go back.

  And so she was straining to see the house when she backed into something furry. First she registered its fuzziness, then its revolting, slippery wetness. Her skin and her nerves knew what it was before she turned her head and saw.

  A dead sheep, an enormous dead ram, hung upside down from a tree. Its curls were a nicotine yellow except where caked blood had dyed its pelt brown. The sheep’s mouth and eyes were wide open and its head flopped off to one side.

  A twig raked Simone’s forehead as she ran through the woods. She kept scraping her face on the branches, bleating with terror and rage. Her heart raced around in her chest as if it were trying to escape. She felt that someone was watching. She had felt watched when she found the body on the street in Port-au-Prince and looked down, absurdly, to check what she was wearing.

  At last she reached the edge of the woods and broke free into open space and ran up the lawn to the mansion. She ran upstairs to Rosemary’s studio, where she had never been, but found easily now by following the music from Rosemary’s stereo, the same four notes repeating an insistent, maddening rhythm.

  Several small rooms had been broken through and combined to make the studio. Bare patches of plaster where walls were knocked out reminded Simone of Haiti. Rosemary wore goggles, a long-snooted mask, white coveralls, and her fur coat.

  “Hit the floor,” Rosemary’s voice bubbled from inside her mask. “This is a toxic event.” She stepped back from a sculpture she had been spraying from a tank and scrutinized it so raptly that Simone had to look, too. It was a female torso with a pendulous belly and a dozen globular breasts that appeared to have been slathered on with a spatula dipped in rubber.

  “My Goddess Series,” Rosemary explained. “This one’s a Demeter figure, very Earth Goddess-Great Mother, with an edge of the Willendorf Venus. The irony is that it’s made out of the deadliest space-age fiberglass resin. I think I’ll have her holding a broken mirror or some kind of primitive votive object. This Philip Glass tape can just flip me right into a shamanistic trance state in which for minutes at a time I forget that the whole thing totally misses. Because there is no going back to the time when the art object was pure magic. Primitive people knew things about art that we have forgotten. They knew what images were so powerful you could hardly bear to behold them, what could make your heart stop and congeal on the spot. The Assyrians and the Mayas and the Kwakiutl people—one look at those idols and you just drop straight down to your knees.”

  Simone’s gaze had drifted to the paintings on the walls: prodigiously ugly canvases sharing a feather motif, muddy-colored peacock fans scrubbed into the canvas, as if the main artistic intent was to make a little paint go a long way. But if economy was the point, why was so much paint spilled on the floor?

  Joseph’s studio was monastically neat, with only an easel, brushes, rags. But there had been disturbing things in Joseph’s studio, also.

  One night, drunk, Joseph had razored a print of Manet’s Olympia out of one of his art books.

  “Regard,” he told Simone. “The smiling silent black mammy and the white bitch colonial whore.” Then he dipped a brush in red paint and with sudden violent strokes retouched Manet’s painting so that the naked woman looked like a recent victim of a sex-criminal slasher attack. Joseph was a good painter and the result was lifelike and frightening. When he was done he tacked it to his studio wall.

  “Two dimensions,” Rosemary was saying. “Such obvious limitations. Goodness, Simone! You look like death! Whatever is the matter?”

  Simone said, “I saw something in the woods. An animal hung from a tree.” She thought of the eyeless family portraits stacked up in the attic and then of all the frightening movies in which the person the heroine runs to is the last one she should trust. Could Rosemary’s coat have once been a relative of the creature Simone just saw?

  Rosemary put down her brushes. “Oh dear. What was it this time? Not another horse!”

  “It was a sheep,” Simone replied dully. A sheep seemed like nothing now.

  “That’s our neighbor up the Hudson. The Count. The man makes Geoffrey’s gene pool look like a clear mountain stream. You don’t want to know what goes on at the Count’s house. I gather that underage children are the least of it. Believe me, we have complained and complained. George and Maisie found the dead horse. But six hundred riverfront acres buys some privacy up here—as it does everywhere, I suppose, the Amazon included. And decadent Bavarian royalty gets cut a certain amount of slack.

  “Anyway, you weren’t walking in the woods? What a suicidal idea! The story of Little Red Ridinghood is hardly about nothing. Once hunting season starts here, they’ll bag you like a quail. Last fall I thought I heard the mail lady; I was walking down the driveway, smiling, still in my nightgown. But it wasn’t the mail lady, it was a Buick with Jersey plates and four guys in Rambo suits eyeballing me through the windshield, At first they looked a little glum, but when they saw me they sucked in their chests. Never have I had such a sense of what kind of morning the deer were having. I dressed and took the first train to the city. I thought: Crackheads may kill me but I’m sure they won’t tie me to the roof of their car. Well, pretty sure, is what I thought. It’s all so neolithic.”

  Though Simone still made daily trips to the market for groceries and magazines, she no longer liked passing the forests and fields she had lately found so pleasant. When George and Maisie were off at school, she mostly stayed inside. She got better acquainted with the house and knew where the sunlight struck when, so that on the pale chilly autumn days she could track it through the rooms. At two o’clock the sun hit halfway up the servants’ staircase, and it was as if Simone had a daily appointment to sit on the steps with her forehead against her knees, sun warming the top of her head.

  On the main floor of the mansion was an octagonal library, its leather couches marbled with cracks, its musty books emitting a moldy, botanical smell. Simone passed whole afternoons pulling volumes from the case, reading a page or a chapter, and replacing them somewhere else. Many of the books were ancient, far too fragile to touch; many were birthday or holiday gifts, inscribed from the dead to the dead. There were texts on Latin poetry, gardening, classical art—souvenirs of the interests various Porters had taken up and dropped.

  Simone liked the art books best, especially one about the Etruscans. Its photos seemed to know something they were resolved to keep secret. Large stone heads mushroomed out of dwarfish torsos, which in turn grew from the lids of shoebox-sized stone containers. These were funerary vessels to contain the deceased’s vital organs, just as the figure’s face was meant to hold some trace of the dead person’s soul. The figures carried souvenirs of their former occupations. The priestesses held fresh livers from which they used to foretell the future.

  Reading about the priestesses prophesying from entrails, Simone felt queasy with dread—as if, like a debt or an unwelcome friend with too much knowledge of her past, something had picked up the scent of her life and followed her here from Haiti. Simone had seen inside a man and a sheep, but who could prophesy from that? At most it said something about the past, but never about the future. And who would want a future visible in a piece of meat that you could buy and toss on a scale and fry with mushrooms and onions?

  Near the end of the Etruscan book its author went into a graphic digression on the history of human sacrifice from Abraham to the Aztecs, from the Amazon to the Philippines. An index listed the countries where child sacrifice had been practiced. The long list included Haiti, but not the United States.

  One afternoon Simone went into George’s room and watched the Eskimo tape. Perhaps with George not present she might understand what he saw. She r
ewound it to the scene that George most often replayed: a bowl of steaming seal blood being passed around in a circle. The Eskimos seemed lit from within as they took the bowl and drank, and in close-up smiled blissfully and wiped their mouths on their sleeves. It wasn’t the blood, Simone thought, but the gratitude, the order—it was what she’d once looked for and found as a girl in church. Wasn’t the Mass about flesh and blood? It was entirely different. Sweet grape wine was nothing like the hot blood of a seal.

  In the evenings Simone read magazines until she fell into a light sleep, from which she was often woken by the cries of the sleeping children. Frequently the children called out in dreams; once George yelled, “Maisie, stop it!” as if asleep he were having the fight he couldn’t risk awake.

  Then Simone would get out of bed and go and stand by the children. By then they would have grown quiet but for the pulses fluttering under their skin and the delicate whistles of air escaping their pearly mouths. Simone knew what Joseph would say: They were spoiled American children. But she couldn’t blame George and Maisie, they hadn’t chosen their lives and asked only the freedom to follow their sad little preoccupations. Simone’s mother was a piano teacher and had tried to teach Simone; how she’d felt when her mother gave up on her was how she imagined George felt always. He and Maisie were unhappy children whose father had just left home, and at moments their faces reminded her of the faces of Haitian children. They, too, seemed connected to some historic sorrow, staring out at you from a collective pool of misery and grief.

  Simone knew it was foolish of her to so want to make the children happy. She was asking to have her heart broken, putting such stake in their moods and affections. Any ties that bound her to them could be severed in a minute, but the power of their mother and father would last their entire lives. Sometimes in Haiti embassy people semi-adopted streetchildren, whom they gently returned to the street at the end of their tours of duty. For the first time Simone understood how this love could have been a real love. How gratifying, how heady it was to hold a child’s interest and attention, how confusingly it resembled attention from a man.

  It was frightening to watch breath rattle in the children’s tender throats. In Haiti those sharp intakes of air meant the loup-garou was near. So many children died there, they were assumed to be at special risk and people believed in evil spirits with a special taste for children. The loup-garou was the werewolf crouched under children’s windows, silently watching their darkened rooms for a chance to suck their blood.

  Simone had never believed in the loup-garou, but nonetheless she felt now as if something was waiting in the crisp autumn dark for a chance to hurt Maisie and George. Nor was this simply some voodoo fantasy Simone had imported from Haiti, a stowaway that had hitched a ride like some disease-bearing mosquito. The sheep in the woods seemed like evidence: something thirsty had come near.

  FOR SEVERAL EVENINGS ROSEMARY took the kitchen phone and shut herself in the broom closet, from which she could be heard weeping and screaming and pounding her fist on the door. Finally she emerged one night and cracked the receiver against the wall and lost an entire working day buying a new phone at Sears. In that way it was decided that the children’s schedule would change. From now on they would spend weekends in Hudson Landing with their father.

  Once these facts were established, Rosemary found them comforting. “It’s always better to know,” she said. “Things improved considerably when I knew Geoffrey was really leaving. When it finally happens, it’s always a great relief. You know what you’re up against, it becomes like a wall in your house. You get used to having it there, you even begin to lean on it. If only it weren’t for the sadistic pleasure Geoffrey’s taking in all this. And the putting of the children at additional risk for spiritual contamination.”

  It must be so satisfying, Simone thought, to punish the telephone, to whack it against the door frame until the earpiece came flying off. What a lovely, brief distraction from one’s own troubles and fears. Simone herself was worried that, with the children gone weekends, her duties would be so diminished that Rosemary might let her go. Not a day went by when Rosemary didn’t fret about money and complain about Geoffrey indulging himself while she and the children starved. Though Simone hadn’t yet cashed Rosemary’s checks, Rosemary’s lips turned white when she wrote them.

  She said, “What a ridiculous time to have hired household help! It must be one of those insane things people do in midbreakup. But the truth is that with this new system we need help more than ever. For some preposterous reason invented to make himself look busy, Geoffrey can no longer pick up the children at school. Simone, if you could drive George and Maisie back and forth between Geoffrey and me, it would spare me the psychic damage of ever having to see him again.”

  Simone should have been relieved that her job wasn’t in danger, but it depressed her to contemplate weekends without the children, the mansion silent but for the tapes Rosemary played while she worked, the ominous repetitious notes that made Simone feel paralyzed and hysterical.

  The children were good company. Simone, Maisie, and George could spend hours at Hudson Landing Pizza, ordering Coke and pizza by the slice, watching the other patrons and scratching sesame seeds off breadsticks. Occasionally George asked for a quarter and played a videogame which, as Simone and Maisie watched, he lost within a few seconds. Sometimes the children had school projects the three of them worked on together, maps and cardboard models requiring the use of Rosemary’s X-Acto knife, which was so sharp that Simone shivered, rescuing it from George’s grasp.

  George and Maisie no longer resembled children on the run or in hiding, little refugees prematurely skilled at not attracting attention, aware that any spontaneous noise might mean capture and death. Still, they were appallingly cooperative, rarely argued, and never fought. When they spoke to their father on the phone they mumbled into the receiver. Once, Maisie stretched the phone cord so far that it separated from the new phone; Rosemary gritted her teeth and made little moans while Simone replaced it.

  For a week or so the children had been letting Simone tuck them into bed at night. Ironically, these tender moments made Simone dread the children’s absence more and feel as if they were leaving for much longer than overnight. George pretended not to need tucking in, yet allowed Simone to do it and chattered out of embarrassment, high-pitched and nonstop.

  One night he said, “My dad bought a new Land Rover? For the days when we’ll be with him?”

  “How nice of him,” Simone said, attempting a neutral tone.

  Later, when Simone went downstairs, Shelly and Rosemary were, coincidentally, discussing Geoffrey’s sleazy attempts to buy the children’s love and devotion.

  Rosemary said, “Simone, I promise, you will understand tomorrow. The instant you meet the man everything will become clear. The man thinks everything is for sale and available for a price, including those most precious commodities, his own amusement and pleasure. Luckily he has the wealth to satisfy every infantile male whim, including the million bucks of electronic toys his imaginary advertising business requires. It’s an indication, isn’t it, of the passionate interest he takes in his children—Simone has been here for what seems like our whole lives and Geoffrey has never met her.”

  Rosemary poured wine into glasses and brought one to Shelly. “Thank you,” said Shelly, and went back to staring out the window. “What are those piles of branches? Burning a friend at the stake? That has always been my secret fear. Joan of Arc made a lasting impression.”

  Rosemary said, “Simone found a dead sheep in the woods. The Count is up to his old tricks.”

  “Count Dracula,” said Shelly. “It must be hell on property values. But Simone should be used to it—coming from Haiti and all.”

  “Ridiculous,” said Rosemary. “What do they do in Haiti, kill chickens? That’s qualitatively different from rites involving dead sheep and underage boys.”

  “Come off it, Rosemary,” Shelly said. “They’re killing mor
e than chickens in Haiti, aren’t they, Simone? I read that the tonton macoute employed a stable of insane dwarfs hired exclusively to bite off the testicles of Duvalier’s torture victims.”

  Simone was startled to hear Shelly repeat this old story, which embassy people regularly dusted off to entertain guests and new arrivals. Maybe rumors about the travel bureau had gotten this far as well.

  “Shelly!” Rosemary wrung her hands. “Look at poor Simone! Haiti is Simone’s country!”

  “So what?” Shelly shrugged lightly. “All the more reason to bring it out into the light of day. There are certain truths one has to face, especially about one’s own country. I for one wouldn’t be a bit surprised to learn those dwarfs were on the CIA payroll.”

  After a silence Rosemary said, “I wish you were staying for dinner.”

  “I wish I were, too,” said Shelly. “But that dreary photographer in Clintonville is giving a ghastly party.”

  “Oh, parties.” Rosemary sighed dreamily. “I can’t do parties anymore. Going to parties with Geoffrey was like party aversion therapy. Always looking around to see who he was flirting with. And when I saw, I’d get a shock—party behavior modification.”

  “Parties are like everything else,” Shelly said. “You have to stay in practice.”

  “Maybe now,” Rosemary said. “If I ever got invited anywhere again …”

  “What you’ve got to remember,” Shelly said, “is how much Geoffrey stage-managed. It was in his interest to prevent you from trying to have a good time. As with everyone, of course, the roots are all in his childhood. Simone, imagine: the man’s anal-sadistic British mother used to give tea parties for his friends, twelve-year-old boys invited in for scones and marmite sandwiches. No wonder he grew up using social occasions to make his loved ones squirm.”

  “Mothers!” Rosemary threw up her hands. “It’s a miracle we survive them. My problem is, I have no memory. I get lonely and forget how it was—and think Geoffrey was better than nothing. I need my friends to remind me that in fact it was worse. I only wish you’d been around, Simone, though we couldn’t have been friends. But after tomorrow you’ll see what I mean. You’ll understand what I’ve suffered.”