by Janet Frame
No guests were disturbed, however, by these ‘everyday’ aspects of living, for a thick lace curtain was fixed across the lower half of any window that was not frosted or facing the sea.
‘You will find the harbour view very beautiful, Mr Hislop,’ the proprietress said, as she took Joe’s five shillings and unhooked his room key from the wall. ‘You are number eleven. It doesn’t give directly on the water; but listen . . .’
The place was like the inside of a shell: when you walked the fragile, ancient staircase, it shuddered as with the tide; there was a secret swishing noise going round and round like blood in your head. Ah, Joe thought, not long now and off on the sea of blood I sail in my peagreen boat — and that, that sort of thinking is what comes from school teaching in cowmuck and cream. But how the old hotel rocked with the sea! You could hear the flood-wild and trapped murmur surging from the bar.
The proprietress, Mrs Possum, of all names, passed his room key to him. He took it, like a pledge. She placed his two half-crowns inside the mouth of the safe. It was an old and shiny safe, like a child’s outsized money box got up in worn uniform — it even had brass braid around the edges. Joe glanced at it, with down-to-earth and profitable thoughts of jemmies and gelignite and blowtorches; then he tried to remove his guilty thoughts by using the habitual and hated detergent, the guaranteed whitewash of respectability.
‘I’m a school teacher, you know.’
He thought, Now she’ll be proud to have me. I’ve got to trade on something, some secret handshake or badge or poppy on my lapel, to give myself some standing.
He repeated, ‘Yes, I’m a school teacher.’
The words had the same effect on Mrs Possum as a cushion and the plea, ‘There, put your feet up.’ She was tired. A school teacher. They were quiet and paid promptly. You didn’t find them in the bar, day in day out. They were on time for meals, too, with school finishing early, and that was important for keeping the staff satisfied. Surely there was no one quite so harmless and well mannered and considerate as a school teacher. Even to making his own bed and wiping out the bath after him.
She shut the door of the safe. Seven threes are twenty-one, carry two, seven thirteens are ninety-one.
‘So you’re teaching in the district?’
‘No, that is, not just yet. I’m on research.’
‘Oh. Research.’
He would want the utmost quiet then.
She led him to number eleven, apologised that in a small hotel like Harbourview the guests carried their own bags and were not provided with extras such as morning trays, suppers, afternoon teas; that it was better to be early for meals in case the staff wanted to get away. Then she reminded him that if he went onto the balcony at the front he would have a wonderful view of the sea.
‘Not a ship leaves for overseas without we know.’
She spoke possessively, as if she had rigged a secret bell under the threshold of ocean, to tell in a flash what ships trod the harbour, to help her to spy on them, perhaps prevent them from going. Joe felt a moment of panic in case she would try to stop him from Getting Out of the Country. He looked more closely at her. She was tired and grey and wore a mottled glinting dress of some grey material, he guessed it might be called oyster grey but he was not up in fashion lingo. How strange, standing inside a seashell with Mrs Possum who dressed herself like an oyster — but that, that sort of thinking is what comes from school teaching in flax and tussock.
With a final word about the wonderful view and a reminder of the hours for dinner, how the staff wanted to get away, she left him. He did not explore his room, fling open the wardrobe, shuffle out the drawers, for fear an ocean would flow out and over him; nor did he draw the lace and foam shroud of curtain that fitted so tightly, dirtily brown, across the lower pane of the window, but he pulled the light cord and lay down, shoes and all, on a coral hillock and paddock of eiderdown. So I am a schoolteacher, you know, dot and carry one, and I’ve leased a seashell for a couple of weeks, with an oyster to look after me, but the thing is a beer because I remember I am Getting Out of the Country.
He went downstairs to the bar, collected half a dozen bottles of bitter, upended the glass from the shelf above the washstand, and began drinking. He poured and drank beer till the shell suddenly echoed with the boom of an Eastern-sounding gong. The small unharemlike Harbourview shook. Dinner. Joe glanced at the card on the dressing table. It told him the mealtimes, the price of his room and how often he must pay the landlady. It told him how to get into the hotel if he were late coming home at night. There is a back entrance, it said, and revealed the secret of it. Joe felt very pleased. He finished his last beer, wished for more but no genie brought it to him, and not unsteadily drunk he went downstairs to find the dining room. He could hear an unleashed violent roar coming from each of the public bars. It must be close on six, panic-time, he thought. Kids at play hour. He groped at the foot of the stairs in the direction shown by a painted vermilion thumb labelled Dining Room. The same muffle of dirty foam covered the glass door of the dining room. He opened the door.
Where should he sit? A woman in white, who seemed to be peeping at intervals through the swing-door at the end of the room, hurried up to him.
‘Good evening. Your room number?’
He gave the password. ‘Eleven.’
She looked respectfully at him. He could not guess why, unless she knew he was a school teacher. Could she, so soon? And did it make all that much difference?
‘Oh, you’re Mr Hislop the school teacher. I’ll put you with Mr Blake at this table.’
He sat while she dangled a menu in front of him.
‘Soup,’ he said, ‘thick soup.’
‘Crème Julienne. And to follow?’
‘Pork.’
The waitress looked less respectful. Pork. Just like him to have pork when it was a small roast, with few servings. Most likely they would all have pork. Nothing like being stubborn; still, it was the cook’s worry.
She withdrew the menu and walked quickly through the door to the pantry. Joe heard her cry out something like Help Help Help, it was some kind of urgent desperate cry. He chose the soup spoon and held it, waiting. He hoped he was not going to feel drunk after all. No doubt they could smell it on him. Furtively he cupped his hand over his mouth and breathed into the cupped hand, then sniffed his outgoing breath. It was beery all right; but he was in a pub wasn’t he, after all — no, no, a seashell, trapped there; and the door was opening and here was the oyster, the married oyster; and that, that sort of thinking is what comes from school teaching in sheep and cloud.
Mrs Possum and her husband looked worried and tired. She smiled at Joe, trying to convey to him that she was glad he was early for his meal, and surely, being a school teacher, he would understand how important it was always to come early so the staff could get away. Then she looked about the room for the rest of the guests, searching each place, anxiously, as if she had entrusted each guest with a pearl to be returned each meal, on time, so the staff could get away . . . As an incentive, Mrs Possum wore a string of pearls, and the same grey glinting dress.
Halfway through his meal Joe felt dizzy and sleepy and thought it best to retire to his room. The waitress, seeing him get up without even touching his pork, looked near to tears.
‘Did you find it overdone?’ she asked him.
‘No,’ he said in a loud voice. ‘I’ve got a bone in my throat.’
Indeed he felt as if he were about to choke.
‘But you’ve had no fish,’ the waitress protested.
‘It’s a bone, all the same.’ He leaned towards her. ‘What’ll I do for it?’
The waitress smiled down at him. ‘Eat something soft, a bit of bread will do, I’ll get a bit of bread, or some crumbs, but surely you know, you being a school teacher.’
She left the room to get him some bread, and he did not wait for her return. He felt sick. He got up, quickly, and went to his room. He found that his eiderdown had been removed, his p
yjamas taken, without permission, from his half-opened suitcase, and laid invitingly upon his bed which was turned back ready for the night. Evidently they wanted him to go to bed. So he went to bed. He lay there, feeling the bone in his throat and knowing it was useless to swallow anything that he hoped would stop it from hurting. He tried to think of the soft cosy things he had wrapped round the bone all the time he had been teaching. What had he used to soften or dissolve it? Cottonwool, lambswool, feathers, white bread, silver poplar seeds, tussock — he had swallowed them all, or given them to others to swallow to ease the bone in his throat. And what about white of egg and lemon juice? Words mixed with white of egg and bleached with lemon juice should have taken the pain away years and years ago; but the thing stuck — you couldn’t pad it or bleach it or dissolve it or neutralise it, so how about Getting Out, having a small interview with fish not piper, pakiti nor the dead fish of one island, the floating bone of the other island, but . . .
He fell asleep. Perhaps there was a storm outside; the sea was angry, spitting beer and salt in the darkness.
My Tailor is Not Rich
You will have to imagine that someone else is writing my story, for I can write only my signature as it is printed on my identity card. When I write my signature it must be done in secret, in my bedroom, where I perform all my most important and personal actions. Perhaps Fernando is writing my story? He is my smart friend who likes to show his browned skin to women, as proof of his health and his ability to march for days without food or wine; provided of course that the women march with him — the tourist women who are so impressed with his gallant ways and his white teeth and his tanned skin and the words of English which he learns from a set of gramophone records.
‘Goodnight,’ he says to you every morning. ‘Goodnight. My tailor is not rich. My tailor is not rich.’
Fernando is very clever, and may cross the frontier anytime by bus or private car or on foot, on the main roads. That is because he has a country and his identity card will last him forever, and no one will ever arrest him for pretending he is Fernando when he is Fernando.
No, I do not think he is writing my story. I do not know who is writing it.
As for me, I have received notice from the French Office and the Italian Office and the Spanish Office, that soon my identity card will be out of date, and I must prove that I am still myself, that I was born where I was born and when, that I am a dark-haired celibate of forty. They are not interested to know that I am a political refugee from my own country; that my mother, who was very fat — this wide, you can see by the way I hold up my arms — has been dead for many years; that my father still lives in Milan, near my sister and her family who are happy or unhappy; that in my life I have had no women but the street women who ask you to pay. Somehow I have not had good sense with women. On the days when the tourists are here, and it is full summertime with the English and American women wearing clothes to show their neck and the shape of their breasts, so that you want to reach out and touch, well, no matter how I dress myself up and promenade in the square, and smile and make soft whistlings after the tourists, they do not seem interested in me. I am poor; my tailor is not rich; I have no tailor.
I remember that one day I found an English woman and spoke to her. She was sitting at the next table in the café. She had been buying all the things that English women buy when they come here for the summer — prettily shaped glass bottles that break if you touch them too harshly; scarves painted with scenery from a hundred different countries; baskets, woodcarvings; recuerdos, recuerdos. Well, I do not speak English, but I smiled at this woman, and spoke, the first time for many months, in my own language — Italian. She looked unhappy and turned away. At first I thought it was because her lover had lately died and she was reminded of him, but tempted by my smile. Yet when I told Fernando, who is much more clever than I, what had happened, how I had nearly got myself a woman, Fernando explained that there was food sticking between my teeth, and that the space between my trouser-leg and my socks showed that my skin was white, with little sores on it. My face is tanned, certainly, and my arms have big muscles from pulling at the trees, but my legs have little sores on them, from the time I lived in the concentration camp, in France.
No doubt Fernando will marry a rich English woman: no, he will not marry her, he will take her sightseeing over his country, and have wonderful amusements with her, in the sun. Or perhaps he will go with a French woman, for the English are cold, and press their lips together, and stare straight ahead, and they do not wear beautiful talones on their shoes.
Ah, some day I will find a woman who is my type. I will take her walking in the mountains, and after we have drunk our wine and eaten our bread and sausage and cheese, I will give her this ring that I keep in my bedroom, and promise her that I will earn one thousand francs a day, to marry her. But where shall we live? I have no country. Whenever I cross the frontier into Spain or France I must go illegally, through the mountain passes, the shepherds’ way where they take the sheep before winter and the wild storms come. I must fill my wineskin, take my loaf of bread, and set out alone in my thin shoes, walking up and up, past the fields of dried tobacco sheaves, and the spilling foamy streams, and, if it is early spring, the full manured smell of the waiting cattle. On the way I pick the violets whose smell the snow has stolen, and the daisies; and I like to sit and rest under the terrible rocks that hurl themselves down, tomorrow and yesterday. I like to play with the lizards, throwing them crumbs which they dart after, their tongues flicking. They never learn that crumbs are not butterflies; they are never undeceived. What a fine day it is, I say. Soon full summer will be here and the cattle will blink from the dark barns into the floating blue sky. And the pine trees will crash, dead and bleeding, and I will reach my arms around them and strip them of branches, and trample the foot-high tiny ones with their fuzz of purple flowers.
But too soon winter comes. Then there is no work. In the house where I live with Juan and Maria and the two children and the lodger with the gold teeth, there is no room to breathe. In the winter time Juan also has no work; you cannot build houses in the snow; the children are hungry. Maria fills the big bowl with water and puts it on the stove, and sprinkles flour in it, to make it thick and seem like something to eat, and we sit around that table with our fine flour and water, or in the morning with our bread and milk, and because it is so dark outside each one of us must think: This is the last winter of all. Last winter it seemed as if it were the last, and the winter before that, but we were mistaken. There is no mistake this time. This is the last winter.
We have finished talking, and we quarrel. The cat stays inside and messes in the four corners, and his fur falls out, day after day, and his eyes water and are red. The children catch colds and must stay in bed with the shutters closed forever, and always the bowl of eucalyptus leaves burning, burning, on the box by the bed. The littlest child calls out, Mama, Mama, Juan is drinking cold water, Juan is drinking cold water. They have no toys that the tourist children have. They read in their school books over and over that Cain killed his brother Abel; that self-sacrifice is good for the soul; that if they are not good their mama will spank them hard. I hear them reading, and quarrelling, and crying. Maria shouts at them, Juan shouts at Maria, and I shout at the children, or hit them. The man with the gold teeth is silent. Then he coughs and shows his private joyeria of teeth.
But at night, in the quiet, with the snow slipping from the roof and the sound of water flowing and falling, I can hear, in the room next to me, Juan and Maria making love. Will the time come, I think, when I can find myself a woman?
Perhaps some day: I do not give up hope. The winter that was the last is not the last, and soon the shopkeepers begin to clean their windows and arrange their goods more carefully, and mark up the prices, and smile, being most polite to everyone. Then, when I know that the tourists are coming, I prepare my best suit for promenading in the square. Who knows? Ah, how well I am fitted out with mountains and snow
and amusing lizards and pine trees — and memories — there’s a rich tailor for you, in the sun and the wind and the sky, and in the long time ago when I played in the streets of Milan, and rode my blue bicycle in the races.
But now, without a country, and without a woman, I am poor. Don’t you think that I am poor?
The Big Money
The back of the van swung open, netted and hinged, like a huge meat safe. Two men, heaving and struggling through the front door of the house, carried an unprotesting silent piano up the path and through the gate, and into the back of the van. Other furniture followed: plumpy floral armchairs, their tiny circular oiled feet whizzing round and round with shock; polished one-legged and two-legged tables, scarred with cigarette ash and the marks of ashtrays; a crippled kitchen stool; sealed teachests edged with dark silver, inscribed with exotic names in blue chalk.
Two children, a boy and a girl, stood on the side of the road, watching. The boy stood nearest the house, up against the fence, possessively, for it was his place. He held a pocket-knife which he kept snipping open and shut; and the blades, three of them, kept pouncing back. He ran his finger along the largest of the blades, carefully, just near enough not to slice his skin. The girl watched him; she had long dark hair drawn together at the back and twisted through a rubberband.
The boy spoke, pointing to the knife.
‘It’s to keep me quiet,’ he said, ‘while we shift. It’s got three blades, a corkscrew, and a spear.’