The Mysteries of Soldiers Grove
Page 17
Louise was giggling. “I wonder if the bream are biting on the Kickapoo today?” she said as she patted my head to cool me off.
Batucada had grooved into another number, a familiar-sounding, slow tango, and everyone was dancing again. Louise and I were tired, we stepped back away from the movement, trying not to topple over, enjoyed the warm sounds, just moving our bodies slightly as we stood leaning and swaying against each other.
An elderly, very tall, Spanish-looking man, came onto the floor and went to the tiny gray woman with the stocking cap, who had been jumping up and down in front of the bandstand. He took hold of her firmly and suppressed her wriggling, made her focus directly on his face as he talked to her gently. He made her concentrate. He removed her hat, lovingly straightened her gray, tangled hair with his fingers. He took her hand in one of his, and with the other reached down to grasp her waist, and they began to tango, a remarkable high and low movement—pause and hold, swirl and stop—clasped hands holding and releasing as he reached down to dip her, turning beautifully, flowing and proud, the two of them, the man content, the woman transformed, amazing together and so opposite.
The man looked far out into the distance over her uncombed hair as they danced. I imagined he might be remembering things from his past—challenges, losses, disappointments, triumphs—looking back because he was old and had little in front of him now, perhaps recalling times when he was too young to even imagine death; perhaps moments of bravery and love long gone, but remembered quietly in this dance with the small woman on an outdoor ballroom floor in France where so many of us were far from our homes and almost finished with our lives.
CHAPTER 27
Louise
We have been back from France and in the home for some time now. Both of us have gotten very sick; then both of us got well again. We take many medicines, our pill boxes spill over. At times we feel strange, a mysterious medicinal, aged drifting, a vagueness which we do not welcome.
There is no need to describe in detail our final exhaustion. Eventually everyone comes to it, this permanent malaise, this denouement one cannot predict or cure when it finally appears. It is always out there, ready to swoop in on us in its time, and when it arrives, it is manifest.
Each part of us seems to be paying up at once: teeth, eyes, legs, ears, arms, mind, heart, spleen, stomach, and intestines go afoul, and lungs, bowels, hair, feet, fingers, tongue. Here is our dust, the age which makes us all smell like diapers and soiled washcloths, which sometimes causes us to slip and fall down like shabby overcoats from closet hangers and lay stunned in crumpled heaps.
It would be easy enough to constantly complain about these final events, but Cyril and I do not feel cheated. Somehow we were also given a charmed finale when we no longer thought such things were possible, experiencing more in the last year together than through all our previous years. It was like a thrilling short novel—mysteries, discovery, romance, adventure, challenge, fear, threat, chase, violence, triumph, travel, love, tenderness, devotion.
Above all, now we have memories of our endearment. Each night in Paris in the weeks before the end of our great trip, Cyril came into my bed and we had our quiet, happy love again, unclothed in the night of the City of Light, together just touching and holding each other until we slept.
I cannot imagine through what impossible mix of human existence these moments were given to us at our conclusion—and yet this bandaged man who knows all the lives, near the last moment for both of us, had sat down beside me in the Soldiers Grove Care Home dining hall and asked me if I had ever heard of Christine de Pisan.
And I had! By the grace of whichever or whatever God you wish to believe in, I had known who that obscure medieval woman was; so Cyril and I were given each other for this last bit of time together.
One evening, as he embraced me and I cradled him with my hand, a secretion, a small passage of love, came and completed his life, making him writhe with pleasure. Cyril tossed his battered head back, loudly rejoicing, waving his claws like a snowbird on the sheets, his strawberry nose bright in the soft glow of Paris streetlamps.
I was so happy for him. All his words, all those years—and now this punctuation.
After this happened, Cyril clung to me as if I were about to disappear. Yes, of course, I am about to disappear. But even approaching this final mystery—doesn’t one weep with joy on such occasions? At least we did. Cyril and I, we did, and we do.