“That’s not true. I’m not a witch. I don’t want to harm you.”
His face was pale and covered with tiny drops of rain. “Before I met you,” he said, “I was fine.” He gulped more beer. “I had no money, but I had friends. I got by. You’ve ruined everything. You and your crazy family. Plein de merde.”
“Not here!” she cried. “Maybe in Paris, but not here. I’m changing,” she said, trying to hold back the thing inside her that wanted to scream. Her nerves were wearing down. He was wearing her down until she was raw.
She started to cry.
He stood over her, holding her head against his stomach, smoothing her hair.
“Ah but you are beautiful,” he murmured. “When I met you in Paris, you were nothing. Névrosée . . . badly groomed. You had no idea at all how to dress or how to be a woman. Now every man in Sausalito is after you . . . and women, too.” He turned her face up towards him. “You need a friend, a companion. You should have one, you know. I’m lousy company . . . I’m old. You need to make love every day. I’m jaded. Making love no longer interests me. It’s not your fault, Petite.”
A shudder ran through her.
“You must be sensually free,” he said, stroking her thick black hair. How sexual she was, and yet how cold. “You’re young. You’re so pretty . . . all the men look at you in such a way . . . you’ve never been so attractive. You’re at the height of your sexual curiosity . . .”
She stood up and buried her head againt his shoulder. “I only want to be with you,” she said. Nevertheless, Xavier flashed into her mind. The nightclub in New York. His embrace. His fleshiness.
He jerked away, “You’re lying!” he cried. He seemed to stare straight through her with his icy blue-grey eyes. He shook himself, as if to rid himself of something that was burdening him. Then he lit a cigarette. She noticed that his hands were always shaking a little whenever he lit a cigarette or did anything at all. He offered her one, but she shook her head.
He stared at the grimy yellowed wall with its bright red trim and then at her in her light aquamarine bathrobe. Although her features were irregular and her hair disheveled, she seemed in some undefinable way more feminine than all but one or two of the American women he knew in Sausalito. Feminine and yet like a young boy. Like the portraits he had hung over his wall for so many years in Santiago. She was frightened now, but she had a certain wildness, a way of vibrating energy that was intensely sexual, almost beyond her control.
“You must follow your impulses, Petite,” he murmured. “You must live out your fantasies or you’ll make everyone around you miserable. I’m miserable now with the weight of your desires that are unfulfilled.”
He inhaled on his cigarette and blew smoke into her face. She coughed. She sat down again and buried her face in her hands. He stroked her hair once more, trying to still the pressure in him. He missed Alma Iñez, who was in Chile. He thought of her soft roundness, her full breasts and hips. She had truly loved him. He thought then of Thérèse, Isabel, Anna, and especially Fanette, that incomparable fresh, soft, frail body, that unconscious charm of hers. He missed all the countless girls and women whom he had made love to. Helga with her long red hair and her quick laughter, her snowy white skin. Lotte, whom he had been with only once—a charming girl. He missed their collective charm that, like an undefinable fragrance, an immaterial caress, hovered over him.
American women had a metallic hardness about them all too often, a shell that repulsed. Except for Eleanor, who was fucked up by living with Aaron.
The room was spinning. He took a step towards her. Yellowed walls. Bright red lacquer. Dirty dishes in the sink. Green oilcloth on the table. Bright green.
“Your father is a salaud,” he murmured.
“Antonio, don’t talk like that about him.”
“He fucked you up. And you’ve fucked me up. Worse than that, he’s fucked up your mother. She is a grand soul . . . your mother . . . do you know she has the soul of a great artist?” He lifted his hands up. “Somehow she has reincarnated imperfectly. The rhythms are wrong. She and I should have run off together in Paris.”
Rosa stood very still. She looked him directly in the eyes.
“Did you make love to her?” Her heart pounded.
He took a step toward her. “Yes. I did make love with her several times. In Paris. In Plainville.”
She remembered how once in Plainville she had seen Antonio drive off with her mother in the van. Her mother had a rigid expression. Antonio’s hair tumbled over his forehead. She suspected then that they were going to a motel but had driven away the thought because it was not rational.
She and Antonio looked for a moment at each other, and neither said anything.
Then he spoke again. “I was obsessed with thoughts of killing you and the baby. I had to make love with your mother.”
She did not understand.
Something wrenched inside her, and she thought suddenly that she did understand.
“You did it because you loved me!” she cried, shocked. (Her secret fears about him were not ungrounded. Sometimes she had feared he meant to kill them. She was not insane, nor had she misinterpreted what was going on when they drove off in the van, unaware she saw them.)
“You did it because you love me,” she repeated, grasping with desperation at a thin straw in a hurricane, in a wind that was blowing her down, knocking the life out of her, a straw far too frail to support her.
“Antonio has reasons for what he does.”
She thought of how he had been penniless, of how he needed to be assured of financial help from Eleanor, and she thought he had made love to gain power over her mother.
“You will see,” he said. “Eleanor will always love Isabel because of what she loves in me. It was not that way with you, pauvre Petite,” he said, stroking her hair. “Your mother never loved you in that way.”
Rosa could not breathe. The lights seemed too bright and were hurting her eyes.
“Difficulties . . . Petite . . . it was necessary that Eleanor fall in love with me, because later on when I’m not around . . . you’ll see . . . because she loved me, she will love our child. Antonio knows.”
“But you will be around!”
“Qui sait, Petite?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“Do you accept Jesus as your Saviour?” asked the slim black man from Marin City, Sausalito’s ghetto. Marin City consisted of prefabricated apartments built during World War II for shipyard workers from the South.
“I don’t know,” said Rosa. The young man stood at the threshold of their front door. His eyes beamed with sincerity. His dark skin gleamed. He wore a navy suit, a gold and blue striped tie, and a white shirt.
“It’s so easy to accept Him as your Saviour. He will ease your burdens. The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. Can you take Him into your heart?”
“I . . . I don’t know.”
He handed her a Watchtower leaflet.
“I can see you’re tired and that you have a heavy burden on your shoulders. Let the Lord lighten that burden. Take Him into your heart.”
Tears sprung into her eyes.
He took her hand in his, and he beamed at her as if he would kiss her or pray over her. “Do you read the Bible?”
“Occasionally.”
His hand was warm and comforting. His skin was so dark, so gleaming. “Read the first three chapters of I Corinthians.”
He went on his way and disappeared through the trees and along the narrow sidewalk towards the next house.
Rosa got a battered, thin, black-covered bible from the bedroom that she had carried around with her for years. Lying on the floor in the living room, she opened it to I Corinthians, as he suggested:
Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men . . . and things which are despised hath God chosen . . . That no flesh should glory in his presence. . . . But of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom. . . . He that gl
orieth, let him glory in the Lord.
The words confused her. Christ. Christ had been a Jew. In Christ’s name so many millions of Jews had been killed, persecuted. She was a Jew. Christ was a Jew. In His name so many atrocities had been committed, and the Jews were the most hated race in the world.
She did not understand the words. They melted in a blur inside her brain, and a brilliant light seemed to glow inside her head. There was some enormous power concentrated in the words, although she could not understand them.
The young man’s earnest face, his touch, the goodness that she felt from him hovered in her mind.
Her tears flowed. She could not stop crying. A whore. Her mother was a whore. She, Rosa, was too. Antonio seduced her mother, she was sure of that. Antonio had feared he would kill her and the baby. That explained the strange, horrible fear she suffered, without understanding why she was so afraid of him. Of course she sensed his craziness. Yet she had driven him into this tortured state of mind.
She sank down on the floor sobbing. The young man’s goodness. She longed more than anything to crawl into a church with simple people, to take the Lord into her heart, to accept His Word, to scream out that Jesus was her Saviour, to be cleansed of everything impure, to have the Holy spirit seize possession of her, to bellow out hymns at the top of her lungs.
The young man was so earnest, so simple, so good. She sobbed and sobbed. Her face rubbed against the cold wooden planks of the floor. Her khaki pants were thin.
Beside her in the living room were her telephone soliciting materials. She made thirty dollars a week calling people for Quality Contract Furnishers, a fly-by-night outfit that paid her last check only after she waited inside their shabby San Francisco office for an hour.
Through her blur of tears, she looked at the Marin County telephone book and at her printed speech. “Hello . . . this is Quality Contract Furnishers . . . I have an offer that will interest you. . . . Would you like to have your home refurnished at wholesale prices? . . .” Words like marbles rolling off her tongue. Her soft voice. Hang on. Listen to me. Let me get my commission.
She felt like cutting the telephone wires, burning the telephone book as well as the printed speech, and running immediately inside the sanctuary of a church.
If only she were simple and could accept the Word of the Lord.
But it was not easy to forget her rational training, to accept virgin births, to accept Christ as the only Messiah, forgetting Buddha, Confucius, Mohammed, as well as the entire Judaic tradition, as well as the Inquisition and German concentration camps.
How the Word of the Lord had been perverted through the centuries. Was it so terrible if Antonio had made love to Eleanor? If they loved each other? She knew they did. She could not judge them by ordinary morality, which was as full of holes as a fishnet, as full of merde as a sewer.
She slammed the telephone receiver against its cradle. Enough calls for today. She would not be able to keep from crying, because tears kept streaming down her face.
The baby awakened from her sleep at this moment and began to cry. She was teething. Rosa got the bottle of red teething lotion from the bathroom and put it on Isabel’s gums, then gave her a clean diaper to chew on. Isabel was so soft, so firm and healthy with her strong pink and white face. She held the child in her arms, not wanting to let her go. Finally, she put Isabel into her stroller, all bundled up in warm clothing.
Then quickly she bundled the laundry together, flinging towels, sheets, his clothes, hers, and Isabel’s diapers in a separate plastic bag into piles on the floor. She separated the dark from the light things and put them inside two sheets, which she tied at the corners.
These she placed on top of the stroller. She walked with Isabel to the laundromat. It was cold. Isabel wore a heavy, red quilted jacket and matching cap. She was still chewing on the diaper, and occasionally she made gurgling sounds that were like words.
Rosa wore Antonio’s thick white sweater over her thinner one. They went along the street that ran behind Bridgeway, past a hardware store, a quiet bar, several antique stores, a grocery store, and a thrift shop.
In the laundromat she watched the laundry go around in sudsy circles inside two giant washers. Isabel sucked on her bottle, still in her stroller. Next to Rosa was a tattered woman’s magazine. She picked it up and began to leaf through it to escape the heavy churning feeling inside, as if she were about to suffocate. Glancing up, she saw suds come out of the washers and spill onto the floor.
A lanky man with curly dark hair in an army jacket, levis, and heavy, paint-splattered shoes said, “You put too much soap in.”
“What do I do now?”
He grinned, then shrugged his shoulders.
They both laughed. The suffocating band around her chest grew less tight. She blinked back tears.
He went to one end of the room where an old mop stood and began mopping up the sudsy water that crept over the grey and black linoleum, wringing out the mop repeatedly into a metal sink. There were only a few people in the laundromat—three women of varying ages, an old man, and a plump boy of about seven who kept popping pink bubbles of gum.
The man who had spoken to her and who was mopping had extraordinarily large hands with long fingers. His face was sensitive.
“I’m not used to laundromats,” she said, when he finished with his task. He moved aside the book he was reading—it was Hermann Hesse’s Beneath the Wheel—and sat next to her.
Outside it started to drizzle.
He said his name was Clyde. They talked while they waited for their laundry and put it into dryers. She kept swallowing back tears, laughing hard whenever Clyde said anything funny. He seemed kind. He sent out magnetic energy. He told her he lived on a houseboat, gave her detailed directions as to how to get there, and asked her to visit him.
“We have no car.”
“I’ll pick you up.”
She fiddled with her brass wedding ring. Antonio had not touched her in a loving way in bed in over nine days. At night she would ache for him to touch her. Last night when he was asleep, she even tried to arouse him sexually. He grew hard, awakened, and pushed her angrily away from him.
Antonio had made love to her mother.
Antonio had made love to God knows how many women, while she waited for him to come home.
She imagined Clyde’s large, strong hands on her, imagined kissing his lips and his chest covered with dark hairs.
“Let me think about it.” She was flushed and hot.
“Please do.” He pressed her hands in his large ones. “I could take you to my place now.”
“No, no, I have to get home and make dinner.” Her voice was panicky. Although Antonio had been out since noon and was usually not home until late, if he came home early this once, he would be furious. He would divine exactly what was happening.
“What about tomorrow night? Around eight? If you show me where you live, I’ll wait outside . . .” he said, glancing at her wedding ring. “Your old man doesn’t need to know.”
He folded his small pile of clothing and towels with deft motions, and he waited until her own was done. Then he gave her a ride back in his car, which was very old and filled with junk. The upholstery leather was shredded, so that bits of cotton showed through. She squeezed into the front seat with Isabel on her lap and the stroller and laundry in back. Outside it was raining hard by now.
“I’m going for a walk,” she told Antonio. It was one of the rare nights he stayed at home. He had not drunk anything alcoholic all day, and he was still unshaven. He was reading at the kitchen table, and he had a studious, intelligent, kind demeanor with his reading glasses on. Remorse flooded her for what she was about to do.
But she put on her poncho. Outdoors it was dark. Clouds hid the moon and stars. Trees blew in the wind. Nearby Clyde was waiting for her. They got into his car and drove off to his houseboat.
There they would make love night after night. When everything was quiet, she could hear waves lapping aga
inst the sides of the boat. Often he played Indian music on the stereo. He held all the lure of the forbidden; his body was exciting, full of an energy she had not tapped. They would make love for hours. All the rage she felt against Antonio was concentrated in her lovemaking with Clyde.
Antonio and Rosa bought a 1958 Buick for two hundred dollars with the last of their money. It was a huge blue and white sedan with four doors and lots of chrome. The Ford pick-up was towed off to a junkyard.
Rosa rarely drove the car. Antonio used it to look for work and to frequent the bars.
One night as Clyde dropped her off, Antonio stood there in a drizzling rain beside the Buick. He had evidently just come home. “Who is your friend?” he asked. Clyde had not yet started up the motor. Antonio walked around to Clyde’s side and said, “Ah . . . I know you . . . you and I have drunk together, yes? Come inside and have a drink.”
“I’ve got to go.”
“No, no I insist.” Antonio opened the door and grabbed Clyde’s arm. “Come.”
Clyde wrenched his arm away and slammed the door.
“Rosa’s friends are my friends. You no need to be afraid,” said Antonio in a frightening voice. He stood unsteadily; he stank of beer.
Clyde had locked the door. Through the half-open window he said, “I just gave Rosa a lift.”
“No, you are her lover. Is all right. Is we need to talk.”
Clyde started up the motor and drove off. Antonio, leaning against Clyde’s car, nearly fell. Mud spattered them both.
Once inside their house, Antonio said to Rosa in French, “It’s all right for you to have a lover. You don’t need to hide him from me.” He looked white, drained of blood. His words seemed automatic, separated from his feelings by a barrier of invisible steel. What lay beneath the barrier aroused in her real terror.
“This is very good,” he continued in that same automatic voice. “You’re living out your fantasies instead of inflicting them on me and sickening me with your repressions.” They were in the kitchen.
Dirty dishes stood in the sink and on the counter along with jar lids filled with cigarette butts, empty, half-squashed beer cans, and clean baby bottles in the sterilizer. The baby cried out fitfully in her sleep from the hallway.
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