Hunting Midnight sc-2

by Richard Zimler

  I lifted her hands to my lips. “I miss Graça too,” I whispered. “Every day when I paint my tiles, I think of you and her both, and how you changed my life.”

  Luna fingered the hem of Francisca’s dress. “My sister never had an opportunity to meet you, my child. She would have loved seeing you at this moment.” She traced her fingers across the butterfly pattern. “It’s so unfair that she never saw the two of you married. How relieved and happy she’d have been that you found such a clever girl, John. Youth is incomparably beautiful, is it not, Benjamin? And they have no notion of it.”

  Benjamin smiled knowingly.

  *

  The next morning, rising to the challenge I’d issued, Francisca summoned me from bed before I’d fully woken and measured me for my new waistcoat, whacking me on the head whenever I yawned.

  The following Saturday, I woke to discover my present on her pillow, with a note that read, For dearest John.

  It was fashioned from shimmering lavender damask. Across the front she had painstakingly sewn rows of tiny diamonds in yellow and pink.

  Thanks to Luna, who cherished a good game of cards, this marvelous creation became known locally as my “King of Diamonds” waistcoat, and for many years I never failed to wear it on my birthday, feeling rather like a present myself when I had it on.

  *

  From that day forward, Francisca and I were constantly on the lookout for unusual fabrics. We soon discovered a tumbledown shop at the back of a shipping office on the Rua dos Ingleses from which we could purchase woolens, cottons, and silks from India, Turkey, Persia, and even the west coast of Africa.

  I remember, in particular, the dress Francisca made for the Christmas ball at the Factory House, our British club, in 1816. I ought to add that she and I had refrained from attending such gatherings in previous years because of her pregnancies and the ceaseless labor involved in caring for infants. This was to be our debut, in a sense, as a couple — at least for the British community.

  As she had no desire to offend the more conservative guests, she insisted on a fabric that would not be too garish. In the end, she chose a soft cotton from Morocco emblazoned with black, olive green, and yellow twelve-pointed stars set against a background of lapis-lazuli blue.

  Francisca designed a low collar and long sleeves ending in ruffles for her gown, completing it with a long, extravagant train that I carried for her. The small buttons were also black and shaped into stars, carved from jet in the workshops of Bologna.

  When she put this dress on for the first time — her black hair pinned up, a pearl necklace around her neck — she naturally asked my opinion. The children were in their room sleeping, and I was reading the Edinburgh Review, wearing only my linen nightshirt and lamb’s wool sandals. When I swiveled in my seat to face her, my pipe dropped from my mouth, bounced off my leg, and tumbled to the floor. It wasn’t terribly amusing on a number of fronts, for aside from burning my inner thigh, I felt completely unworthy of her. There I was — absurdly dressed, almost naked — and before me stood a sphinx with a woman’s face and a peacock’s incomparable plumage. She wrinkled her nose and laughed, placing her hands on her hips in a very girlish gesture of impatience, and I realized in a reassuring instant that this radiant creature would always be my Francisca — and my dearest friend.

  *

  I wore my King of Diamonds waistcoat to the Christmas ball, of course, under a wide-lapeled coat of charcoal gray that Mama had made for me years earlier. Perhaps the two of us did look “fit for a lily pond,” as I overheard an elderly woman by the entrance remark to her gentleman companion, but I didn’t care; the disdain shown to myself and my mother after Papa’s death had freed me forever from worry over such spite. It is a glorious moment when we finally begin to enjoy our own individuality, and I now had the confidence to do so.

  We stood by ourselves for quite some time, drinking punch and feeling like discarded fish, but I soon insisted on dancing nonetheless. Thankfully, the few steps I knew were graceful and surefooted, owing to Mama’s patient instruction. Even though Francisca thought she might faint — indeed might have wished to as a means of escaping the sea of scrutinizing eyes — I led her through the dance without either of us putting a foot wrong.

  The first of nearly a dozen gentlemen to ask her for a dance came over and identified himself as the son of a visiting merchant from Manchester. Despite her resolute refusals, he would not relent. I found the enduring hope in his brown eyes so very touching that I agreed to intercede on his behalf, placing a series of coaxing kisses on her cheek. As much to prevent any further embarrassment for herself and me, she stood up and walked off with the young man, seeming to draw the light of the room in her wake. All of the other dancers seemed mere shadows alongside her. Not a single man or woman in the room could take their eyes off her, though it is also true to say that a good many of them held fast to their scorn.

  I cannot honestly say that Francisca was the most sought-after woman that evening, for we continued to be shunned by the majority of guests and we were never invited to the Factory House ball again. But I have no doubt whatsoever that it was plain to everyone in attendance that she had the most proud and admiring husband by far.

  XXVI

  Benjamin, when preparing me for marriage to Francisca, once told me that if affection is to last, one must love the person one knows in the present as well as the one he or she may become in the future. I was not sure of his meaning until the early summer of 1819.

  This was a most troubling time for me, for I’d begun to think constantly about the unfairness of death. Nights were the worst. Lying next to Francisca, the gratitude I felt at being with her led me to thoughts of dying before seeing her to old age and the children to adulthood. Trembling in the dark, afraid to embrace her lest I wake her, I was frequently unable to sleep.

  Perhaps due to the exhaustion caused by my insomnia, my feelings soon changed, however, and I began to believe that my obsession with death was a result of impositions being placed on me by my family: the need to earn a living, to care for the children, to encourage Francisca during her moments of doubt. I came to regard these as a threat to my very existence and the cause of my morbid state of mind. In my troubled state, I could not conceive of any way forward for the boy and man I used to be. They had vanished. Or so I thought. At times, I seemed to be looking through a window at all the things I would never get to do and see.

  I would frequently sit for hours in the Lookout Tower, watching the successive phases of the moon, allowing the glowing petals of red and yellow filtering through the restored colored glass of the skylight to fall across my body as though to camouflage me. Beneath all that beauty, however, I felt barren — that my life, just like the tinted moonlight, was nothing but a clever illusion. My shadow cast across the floor seemed that of a straw man.

  I tried to hide my feelings from Francisca — after all, no woman could react well to being cast as her husband’s jailer — which created distance between us. Despite the pain this caused her, she never mentioned my lack of enthusiasm. Pity the young husband who forgets that his wife may not be so different from him….

  One Sunday, after daydreaming all morning of a life with the Bushmen in the deserts of southern Africa, I decided we ought to journey to the beaches at the river mouth by donkey, as I had on occasion as a lad. By so doing, I hoped to compensate for my recent lack of attention to my wife and the girls.

  Just as I predicted, Francisca was skeptical from the very beginning. Making a sour face, she said, “Are you sure a two-hour ride atop a smelly beast is how you want to spend a day of blessed rest? Would you not prefer to sit in the garden and read?”

  “Your husband is game for adventure,” I declared.

  I can see now that a part of me wanted her to fail this test so as to have proof that she was holding me back. To my surprise, she agreed and slipped into the oldest dress she could find. Bedecked in black, she looked every inch the youthful widow, which did little to imp
rove my disposition.

  “Black will fail to show any stains,” she explained to me with a cheeky grin.

  *

  I hired the best beasts I could find, at a stables near Cordoaria Park. We started off without a hitch. The two girls rode on Lídia, a sable-colored donkey with large, almond-shaped eyes. Francisca gripped the reins of a brown one named Filipa.

  “I suppose you were right all along,” she told me. “It’s going to be a pleasant journey.”

  So I am not mad, after all, I wanted to shout at her.

  I would have considered it cruel at my weight to sit on one of the diminutive beasts, so instead I walked alongside Lídia, while Graça gripped the reins in her tiny hands. I also held the blue croquet ball of which the child had grown fond of late; she refused to go anywhere without it.

  Unfortunately, the animal kingdom soon turned against us. Flies attracted to the infinitely patient donkeys began to swarm around the girls when we reached the riverside, where it was especially filthy. Despite all my attempts to swat them away, Esther began to fuss and cry. Desperate, Francisca covered the girl’s face and chest with her mantilla. Graça, unwilling to ride alone, then voiced her disapproval with a volley of piercing shrieks that might have summoned hailstones and frogs had there been but a single cloud in the June sky.

  While Francisca comforted Esther, I lifted Graça into her mother’s saddle so the three of them could ride together. Poor Filipa began to labor under the strain. Lídia was staring intently ahead, afraid to turn round lest I change my mind and demand my rightful place on her back. On we journeyed, me swatting and cursing, Francisca growing angrier by the minute, a red-hot I told you so burning in her eyes.

  After ninety minutes of this march toward doom, we reached my favorite cove by the river mouth, where Francisca and I decamped like weary soldiers recovering from a lost battle.

  The girls were happy enough by now, as the ocean was magnificent and the breeze much cooler, but nothing I did could rouse a smile from Francisca. I built sand castles with Esther, whose chubby little hands poked and patted with glee, and even overcame my fear of the water for a few minutes to lead Graça giggling into the frigid foam at the edge of the surf. All this time, Francisca refused to talk to me. After we had eaten our picnic and had begun packing up our belongings, she finally said, “I refuse to ride those donkeys back. My bottom is black and blue.”

  “I can’t abandon them here.”

  She took off her bonnet and shook her long black hair loose. “John, you will please explain yourself to me,” she said impatiently.

  “Whatever do you mean?” I asked, feigning ignorance.

  My theatrical talents had apparently improved little since childhood. Frowning, she shoved me, so hard that I almost fell. “Tell me what is wrong with you!” she screamed.

  I was shocked to speechlessness, then shouted, “Me?! Nothing is wrong with me. It’s you — you’ve been acting as though your tongue were cut out. And now look at how you’re behaving!”

  I hated the way I was speaking to her, but I was powerless to stop myself.

  “You can be sure there is much more to this than any silence of mine,” she countered, a prosecutor’s certainty in her voice.

  “I thought we could have a pleasant day, an adventure, that is all. But apparently nothing is possible for us anymore. Nothing!”

  I had hardly wished to speak so frankly, but I suppose the truth has a mind of its own.

  “Nothing possible for us …?” Her great dark eyes flashed dangerously. “You, sir, have gone too far. I shall not move from this place until I know precisely what has caused your foul mood these past weeks.”

  I searched through my bag for my pipe to stall for time.

  “Do not fear me, John. I may be angry, but I am still your friend,” she said sharply. “And you will never find a more loyal friend — never. Of that, I can assure you.”

  “I am not questioning that,” I replied, insincerity making my voice sound hollow.

  “Then what is it?”

  Seeing her dressed in the widow’s black, I envisioned the future I most feared. I said, “It’s the weight … the weight of being a father, of having a family for which I am responsible. There are moments when I simply cannot breathe. I’m sorry. It’s terrible of me, but I imagine escaping — somewhere, anywhere …”

  I felt as though I’d been walking in the African desert of my daydreams for months — crossing miles of sand and bushland simply to get here, to this wee cove with Francisca and the children. I was so confused. I seemed to be in two places at once.

  When my wife finally looked back at me, her eyes were moist. “Is that all it is, John — the weight of having a family? Is that truly all that has been troubling you these past months?”

  “That’s enough, I should think — a father who doubts his capacity to care for his family, who does not know where he is or what he is doing, who fears that death may come for him at any moment. I feel as though I’ve lost my way.”

  “Nothing more, are you sure?”

  “What more could there be, Francisca? Isn’t that enough for you?”

  She ran her fingers through her hair and sighed with relief, tears rolling down her cheeks. “There could be much more, John. You could have given your heart to someone else.”

  I realized with knife-edged clarity what a silent monster I’d been. I’d thought nothing of her welfare. “Oh, God, where have I been?” I kissed my apologies over her brow and cheeks. “Francisca, I’m sorry. It’s just that I do not understand how a man can be both in love and still feel the things I feel. I never expected it. Can you forgive me for being such a fool? There are still so many things I do not understand — about myself most of all.”

  I wiped away her tears with my thumbs, a gesture that triggered a memory of Midnight doing the same for me. I felt his strength inside me, deep down, drumming in my gut.

  Neither of us spoke for a time. Francisca studied me closely, then said, “We saw you from afar and we are dying of hunger.”

  “What … what was that?” I stammered in astonishment.

  “We saw you from afar, John, and we are dying of hunger.”

  “Why do you say that? How did you know I was thinking of him?”

  “John,” she explained, “there is a certain look you get when you are remembering Midnight, as if you are gazing far off toward a darkening horizon. When you spot him there, your eyes open wide, perhaps in response to the great light in him that you have always told me about. I thought that hearing his greeting now might reassure you that I mean you no harm. I wanted to remind you that I am not so different from him. Our affection for you makes us almost brother and sister, in a sense.”

  I saw that she and I were growing closer than ever before. It seemed to me now that it was precisely this closeness of spirit that I had been resisting of late, perhaps fearing it as a betrayal of Midnight, Daniel, and Violeta — of all my past.

  “John,” she said, “I understand you better than you think. You see, I share some of the same feelings. Can a woman’s spirit not suffer from strain? Can a mother not wonder about the worth of how she passes her days? Am I so different from you, John Stewart?” She laughed at my surprise. “There are times when I cannot breathe either, you know, as though you and they” — she gestured toward the girls, who were drawing with sticks in the sand — “were a corset being pulled tighter and tighter around me.”

  “You feel such things?”

  She sighed, plainly irritated that the thought had never occurred to me. “John, I have two tiny children who need me all the time, and a husband for whom my fondness knows no bounds but who might have been finding consolation in the arms of another. And I could say nothing, for fear of driving him away from me. Think of the hunger in that.”

  I took her in my arms again and kissed her with a desperate intensity. In our renewed ardor I recognized all I had been withholding from her, all I had failed to do for her.

  “Forgive
me,” I said. “I am not so strong as I thought, and I worry that I may fail you when you most need me.”

  This fear was one I’d never contemplated before, but I now realized it had existed in me ever since my father’s death. I have reflected on this period of my life at length in recent years and have concluded that the legacy of my parents’ unhappiness had just caught up with me — and terrified me.

  I explained everything to Francisca, searching desperately for the right words, suggesting hesitantly that we might very well suffer the same fate as my father and mother. They had loved each other once like playful children, after all, and had ended as strangers. They were surely no different from Francisca and myself, and yet their friendship had shattered into recriminations and regrets. “What is to prevent us from becoming like them?” I asked her.

  “John, I do not know if love will stay with us throughout our lives, though I hope and pray it will. So all I can expect of you, and you of me, is honesty. From what you told me of your dear parents, that seems to be the one quality that was missing at times from their marriage. Forgive me if it hurts you to hear that.”

  “Francisca,” I sighed, “it’s not as simple as that. Anything might happen to us, even if we are honest with each other. We cannot know what plans the world has for us.”

  “Yes, that’s true, John. But since we cannot know those plans, we have only our faith in each other to rely on. John, what I think you need to know is this….” She scooped up some sand in her hand. “I shall go with you wherever you wish. And I shall help you accomplish whatever you choose. Or …” She paused. “Or stay behind.” As she sprinkled the warm sand on my toes, she repeated something I had once written to her in a letter: “Just do not soar so high that I cannot catch sight of you. That is not so much to ask, is it?”

  “No, it is more than fair,” I agreed, smiling as best I could to hide how moved I was; by now, the children, sensing something was wrong, were watching us suspiciously. When I saw Graça’s worried face, I covered my eyes with my hands, so that neither of the girls would see my tears.