by Angelica J.
By the time the bus had dropped me off, it was late afternoon and the building had thrown an awkward shadow out over the square. The city had been transformed into a giant sundial with its buildings marking off the hours. I stood in the four o'clock shade and looked around me. The hospital had peeled in the heat and under the white paint you could see a previous layer of pink as if it were skin. As I stood there, a young girl of no more than thirteen or fourteen came over to me clutching an armful of half-dead flowers. She was very slight with large blue eyes, made all the larger somehow by her thinness.
‘Buy some?’ she said, thrusting a bunch of spider lilies up at me with a scrawny hand and smiling. She had a baby strapped to her back whose pale head lolled against her as though its spine had been snapped. Saliva dribbled from its mouth. I gave her some money and took the bunch of flowers and she walked away to where her friends stood in a huddle at the side of the square. From behind she looked like one of the bent old women who walk the streets begging for money.
Inside the hospital was momentarily cool and dark after the light of the city. I took instructions from a nurse at the front desk and then followed a series of signs that led me up a stone stairway to the second floor and afterwards along a near-deserted corridor. Coiled hose-pipes hung at regular intervals along the walls and beneath them stood large red buckets of sand with the word ‘Fire’ written on them. I wondered if the hospital incinerators were in operation and how many soiled sheets and bloodied towels they burnt each day. Doctors were like gods while the fires burnt below. Somewhere far away a fly buzzed frantically against the glass of a window.
Eventually I found the number of the room which was printed on my appointment card and entered through heavy swing doors.
I sat in the waiting-room alone and looked at the posters of pregnant women that were stuck to the walls. All of these women were at various stages of pregnancy, their bodies fermenting and swelling while they waited for the signal that they could move on. My sister had said by the time you had your second or third child you would let anyone put their hands inside you, but these women all looked so serene and intact, as though no one had so much as laid a finger on them.
‘You can go in now,’ a nurse said, popping her head round one of three doors that led off the waiting-room. ‘Through there,’ she pointed.
I undressed behind a white screen and then put on a thin green gown which hung over the back of a chair inside the cubicle. When I emerged from behind the curtain the doctor was washing his hands. He told me to get up on the examination table and then he pulled up my gown so that my lower half was naked. He walked to the far side of the room and picked up a tube that lay on the counter, unscrewed its cap and then squirted some clear gel into the palm of his hand.
‘I am going to put some of this on your stomach,’ he said, returning to my side and holding his hand out for me to look. ‘It will be rather cold.’
He laid the palm of his hand on my skin and smeared the gel with small circular movements. As he rubbed I could feel the size of my stomach under his touch. The reality of it rose like a huge dome in front of me. When I was alone and lying on my bed or standing in front of the mirror, I liked its shape and its size and the way my skin was smooth and taut like a white balloon. The child was forming me, and I the child, and this exchange was a secret between the two of us, but here in this room, with my stomach exposed and the doctor present, I felt it obscene. The child was my secret friend, the kind you read about in books, the kind that lonely children acquire, the kind who do not really exist.
‘Do we have to look at it?’ I asked.
‘It won't harm it.’
‘I don't really want us to look. It seems unfair,’ I said. ‘Like we're spying on it.’
‘I have to take a look. If you like you can keep your eyes closed. Now,’ he said in his mechanical voice, ‘I am going to place this disc on your stomach.’
Despite myself I propped myself up on my elbows so that I could see the monitor more clearly.
‘This machine,’ the doctor said, patting the metal box, ‘fishermen use something very similar to find shoals of fish and then they cast their nets and harvest them just like fruit.’ He flicked a switch and immediately I saw a whole series of shadowy silver dots flickering in the arc of my stomach. ‘Salmon or sole?’ the doctor joked weakly.
‘That's it? It doesn't look real.’
‘Look carefully. Can you see, this is its head and this is an arm and these are its feet?’
‘Yes,’ I said, reaching over and touching the warm glass with my fingers.
It was like looking at a picture someone has taken of a ghost which has to be explained.
‘It's really there, isn't it?’
‘Of course it's there. Look at your stomach.’
I deliberately chose the long route home so I could stop off at the cheese shop. I walked through the streets with their smells of early-evening cooking wafting through the opened shutters. The aroma of boiling meats and cooking fat mingled with that of cigarettes and coffee, and rested on the air along with all the other vapours breathed out by the city over the past few months, gathering layer upon layer. The sky was fading now from pale blue to a darker, more violet shade.
I came to the bridge over the stench-ridden river and began to cross it. The water was again at its lowest ebb and looked thick with an oily effluent mass. It was more like a stagnant pond or a sewer than a river that changed with time, and you could see great clouds of mosquitoes shimmering over it. A crowd had gathered near the middle and people were leaning over the edge, obviously watching something below. I drew nearer and as I did so a young woman walked towards me from the direction of the disturbance. She reminded me of photographs of my mother. She wore a scarf around her head just like my mother used to and had two young children with her who smiled at me as they grew close.
‘What's happening?’ I asked as she walked past me.
She stopped and turned for a moment. ‘Someone's seen a body. The river is being dragged.’
‘They're bringing it up?’
The woman nodded. ‘Probably a suicide. I saw them fish out a horse once. No legs,’ she said as she walked on hurriedly.
I watched as the little group disappeared, the children being pulled along by their mother like two miniature dogs. My curiosity aroused, I went and stood alongside the remaining onlookers.
Below us a police boat floated on the low tide of the river and I watched as two uniformed men released what looked like a long rope down into the water. The rope had a four-pronged hook on the end and I couldn't help thinking of the men who fished from the banks of the river under the chestnut trees. When it rained they would put up coloured umbrellas and some days the line stretched for miles. None of them talked to one another: they just sat and stared at the water. I never saw any of them catch a thing but they would return Sunday after Sunday to cast their lines and sit and wait.
Now I watched as the police pulled the rope up and then threw it out again. They could obviously see something down there in the water that we couldn't, but they couldn't secure it. They threw the rope out a number of times and then suddenly the man who was holding the rope shouted and we could all see that it had grown tight. The man signalled for his partner to start winding the rope in on a pulley that was rigged up on deck. More people had gathered on the bridge now and I could see several had walked down to the riverbank and were sitting on the edge like picnickers.
The light was fading and the water looked black and murky. It seemed to take for ever for the object at the end of the rope to be retrieved, as though the river were bottomless or the body too heavy to pull through the water, and all the time we stood and watched. I could hear murmurs round me, people conjecturing at what the body would look like, whether male or female, young or old. Then suddenly there was a cry and the body emerged, jerked out of the water by one foot, naked, blue and wrapped in weed. It hung in the air, a trophy for the uniformed fishermen, its arms and legs d
angling down, and we all stood and stared in silence. All one could tell was that it was a woman.
I walked further up the bridge and leant over as far as I could go. It was almost impossible to see her face but as I stood there one of the policemen pulled the rope and the body swung round almost ninety degrees. I wanted to see her more closely, I wanted to see her face, examine it, but from that distance and in the half-light of evening it was impossible. Now the police placed masks over their noses and mouths. They began to lower the body on to a stretcher on deck. One of them, who wore gloves, grabbed her by the shoulders and then she was laid out and covered with a white sheet. I could see the water seeping through the cotton, outlining her most basic features as if she were a half-finished clay sculpture being kept soft under a wet cloth. The boat started up. They would be taking her to the city morgue to label her and put her away in a cold dark place until the time for burial. I was still holding on to the bunch of flowers I had bought outside the hospital. I threw them now on to the water, then turned my back on the scene and left the small crowd behind me.
Though it was late the shop was still open. As I entered, the bell rang and the cool mossy smell immediately made my body tingle. I hoped to see the owner again. Since my first visit I had returned several times and we had talked on more than one of these occasions. His name was Monsieur Montasio. Each conversation we had, he would teach me something more about cheese.
This evening the shop appeared to be empty; no one was serving and I was the only customer. I walked around, breathing in the cool-sharp air, and then I heard the sound of voices. Several people were talking and laughing. Abruptly the noise stopped and there was silence. I walked over to the door, thinking I should probably leave, when suddenly the old man's head popped up from behind the counter.
‘I was downstairs,’ he said in apology. ‘We're making some cheese of our own. I'm sorry. We should have locked the door,’ and as he spoke he gradually grew taller.
‘You make cheese on the premises?’
‘In the cellar,’ he said, pointing to the floor behind the counter where I imagined a trap door to be. ‘Just a few. Most of the space is for storage purposes.’
‘Could I buy some?’
‘It's not ready yet. Maybe in a few weeks’ time. It has to mature.’
The old man allowed me to taste various cheeses and finally I settled on a Swiss Emmental which he recommended.
‘You see the holes?’ he asked, holding the cheese up for me to see. ‘When is a hole not a hole?’
‘When it's a half,’ I said.
‘Ah, you know the joke. Well, to most people a hole is a hole, but of course this is not true. Be a detective and know your quarry! Sniff out your cheese like a true cheesehound. An Emmentalian hole should be round and about the size of an eyeball or a large bullet. Know your holes and you'll find your cheese. Misread the signs and you'll take home an impostor,’ he said, putting the Emmental down and washing his hands under a tap. Afterwards he dried his hands, then carefully picked up the Emmental and placed it on a thick wooden board. He took a piece of wire and laid it over the cheese, measuring the cut precisely. ‘I'll let you know when our cheese is ready,’ he said.
When I returned home I went to the kitchen, unwrapped the Emmental and then looked it up in my book. Once again the book gave a fair-enough description of the cheese, but it was particular words that stuck in my mind and made me hungry as I read. Curdling, scalding, pressing, ripening. Words that wrapped round your tongue. And all the time I was reading I was consuming large chunks of Emmental. The salty taste filled my mouth and I rolled the cheese on my tongue and let its flavour spread through me.
This time when I lay down I thought of the body lying in the morgue and its pale milky skin slowly decomposing, and then I thought of the cellars in the cheese shop and of the old man and his staff gathered in the mushroomy silence, mixing the milk, draining and stirring the vast liquid masses, creating their gold. I could almost hear the milk drip, dripping into the metal pails.
I found myself walking through what I perceived to be a fairground. I asked a woman passer-by where I was and she replied that we were in the water-gardens of the Third Empress. I wanted to talk to her further but she said she was searching for her children and then hurried away into the crowd.
I wandered through the throng of people, watching as they flowed to and fro like tides about me. Their reflections shimmered in the many pools lit by roaring torches and a smell of fire filled the air. I caught glimpses of faces I had known and in particular a man's face appeared in my vision. I began to walk cautiously towards him, but as I did so he began to walk in the opposite direction. I followed, trying to keep him within view, but as fast as I walked I could not catch up. At times I lost sight of him altogether and amidst the crowds thought I would never find him again, but, just when I least expected, he would reappear at some distance from me. I would see him playing with a child or talking with a stranger.
I watched as lovers walked hand in hand and gazed upwards at rockets which streaked the sky and filled it with a thousand stars. Old and young, all were nodding and smiling, and the huge milky moon shone down upon them from the distant mountains.
At length I came to a stall which was built like a small theatrical stage. Above was a sign in elaborate gold lettering which read ‘Lovely Flutes’ and beneath this, sitting on a low chair on top of the slightly raised platform, was a young Japanese girl.
The girl's face was tilted to one side and was clown-white with huge green fish eyes. Her top half was clothed in layers of silk which were pulled up over her knees to expose her legs and the small opening of her sex. I could see her white stockings and then the skin of her thighs and the small triangle of rich dark hair.
She leant back with her hands on the floor behind her and relaxed her legs, and it was as if a flower had unfolded for she had been tattooed in that region with the shape of a full-blown rose. I could see the two perfect pink folds of skin like bruised petals at the centre.
Before her stood a line of men and again I saw the man I had been following. I did not approach him but rather moved to one side to view the scene.
The first man in the queue stood directly before her and then picked up from the table a very fat, long hollow bamboo shoot amongst an array of differently sized ones. He put one end of the tube to his mouth whilst positioning the other as close as possible to the girl's open sex without quite touching it. The man then bent his legs slightly and blew and the girl began to sway her hips from side to side as though following the tickle of the breath being blown down the flute. I could see her thigh muscles move and I wanted to put my hands on them and feel each muscle as it pulled and contracted. I wanted to feel the pulse of her blood and of her body. The man blew harder and the girl's entire body swayed around the stream of air like a snake might sway to the sound of a flute. I could see that the opening of her sex was moist with desire and seemed to grow larger with each breath of air. She looked so warm inside. The man controlled her with the tip of the flute and the warmth of his breath and eventually the girl began to giggle at the tickle of this breath. The man's cock was hard and taut, his erection bulging from beneath his trousers, but once the girl had laughed he immediately passed the flute to the next in line and disappeared inside a small red tent which stood to one side of the stage.
In all, I watched eleven men choose a flute and attempt to make the girl laugh in this manner. Three succeeded and each of them passed into the red tent beyond, while the rest disappeared into the crowd. Then I felt someone tapping on my shoulder and when I turned around an old woman stood behind me.
‘You want to go inside?’
‘Yes,’ I said and she took me by the hand and led me to the back of the tent and drew me in.
A long line of girls were kneeling on the floor and a screen with round holes of differing size, each at waist level, stood before them. The girls were licking and sucking at cocks passed through the holes, some of which were
fat and stubby and some of which were long and thin.
‘The girls all have their preferences,’ the woman said. ‘I measure them when they enter.’ She pulled out a long tape from her pocket. ‘And you?’ she asked.
I motioned with my hands the size I desired and she led me to a hole about three-quarters of the way up the screen where I knelt down in the dirt to wait. Eventually I watched as the tip of a cock pushed itself through the hole, nervously at first as though it were trying to see what lay beyond. I touched its neat round tip with the end of my tongue and immediately felt it being pushed through harder. I placed my hands against the partition and now leant into the wall, running my tongue up the long shaft of the erection. I knew that the man I had been following was on the other side of the wall and it was him I was sucking on and taking into my mouth and I pushed hard against the wall as I plunged down over his cock, moving my tongue against the taut silky skin until finally the liquid spilled forth and I could hear a groan from the other side of the wall like death.
Outside men were still queuing at the stage and the girl who giggled sat quite still waiting for the next in line to pick up a flute. I stood to one side of the tent at the flap where I had seen the man enter and waited for the man I had been following to emerge. But he did not come. Instead a cripple hobbled out, his back deformed like that of a hunchback and his face twisted into a smile.
ROQUEFORT
A sheep's-milk cheese with a strong piquant flavour sometimes made with rennet from the lining of sheep's stomachs. The greeny-blue veining must have fanned throughout the velvety mass, lending the cheese a dark, throaty quality. You should not buy Roquefort that has a grey complexion or a watery mould.