The Carp Castle

by MacDonald Harris

  Joan Esterel turns out the light and is left with her own thoughts, which are illuminated only by the glimmers from the street lamps outside that manage to struggle their way through the organdy window-curtains. She is quite prepared to believe that Eliza Burney eats pastries in a castle and discusses philosophy with a man who bites her neck; this is quite consistent with her own view of human nature and the way the world works, based on her own considerable experience. She has not had an easy life. No one appreciated her as a child. She didn’t get the proper nutrition, let alone any affection or love. She was consoled by a secret reverie that kept repeating itself in her imagination, as though she were unrolling a roll of wallpaper and discovering a gorgeous figure in it, only to find by more unrolling that this figure is repeated over and over. In place of the forget-me-nots, old-fashioned carriages, and apple blossoms of ordinary wallpaper, in this picture a tall golden-haired woman with green eyes stood beckoning to her in a hieratic way. This image was pressed into the shadowy region behind her eyeballs from the time when she was still an infant. As she grew older, the vision was sharpened and clarified until it became the most solid thing in the mélange of perceptions around her, more real than her family members or her own hand held before her face. Even in those days, as a little girl in a cotton dress standing in the glaring baked-clay backyard of the house in Madrid, watching moths shudder in the white-hot sun of the New Mexico summer (in later years she enjoyed telling people that she was born in Madrid, letting them suppose that it was the capital of Spain), she knew that she was not destined to spend her life in this tiny desert town, that it was to consist of a long and arduous search over the world for this phantom goddess, and that she might never find her. But if she found her, she would know what to do; she would fall down, sob, and be gathered to her bosom.

  The explanation that she was looking for a missing mother is too banal to be discussed. Her real mother was far from missing; she was continually and tormentingly present, and so inferior as to be the very antithesis of the Green Goddess of her dreams. The worst torment of Joan’s private thoughts was that she might grow up into another version of this tired, querulous, bossy, badly organized, unwashed, lazy, and sexually insatiable woman who bought flowered dresses by mail order and went barefoot every morning until she found her shoes, usually about noon. It was out of hostility to her mother that Joan never grew proper breasts, only the prepubescent playthings of a twelve-year-old. She had two brothers, both smaller (Teddy and Roosevelt), and her father was the town drunk. When asked sober what his trade was, he would say blacksmith, and indeed his dirty arms were flecked with the scars of sparks. The Esterels were all dark-complexioned and had slovenly habits. Joan’s two brothers were the darlings of their dazed and sleepy mother and never had to turn a hand at anything. Joan was the carrier of water and hewer of wood; she also wiped the noses and bottoms of her little brothers, cooked most of the meals and washed the dishes, and went to bring her father home from the Light of Glory Free Man’s Saloon at the end of Main Street.

  When Joan was twenty-one her mother tired of this situation, perhaps because it began to dawn on her that it might make things difficult for her own rich romantic life to have a grown daughter around the house, and told Joan that she should have been married long ago, that she was a nuisance and a bother and she was tired of tripping over her in the house, and that she had arranged a marriage for her to Juan Agustín, a loafer who sat all day on the railing in front of the general store drinking beer with his companions and watching the girls go by; actually, as everyone knew, he was one of her mother’s lovers.

  Joan waited until the next morning when her mother was asleep and her father safely drunk, then she took the family savings of ninety-seven dollars from the teapot on the mantel and, carrying a few clothes in a paper bag, went out on the highway to catch the bus to Albuquerque. There, in the Plaza in the Old Town, she bought a second-hand musette bag of the kind carried by soldiers in the War, with a strap to go over her shoulder, and transferred the things in the paper bag into it. Her next act was to visit the Church of San Felipe de Neri, not out of piety but because it seemed like a cool shady place to go into after the fatigue of the bus trip. Then she wandered around with her musette bag looking at the tourist shops on the Plaza. Most of them offered Indian blankets, kachina dolls, and silver-mounted turquoise jewelry. But one of them was a gold shop, or if the objects in the window were not gold they were convincing imitations of it.

  She entered, turning slightly gold herself from the reflections of the things that filled the inside of the small plastered room. She felt strange, as though she were entering a faery place, or a cave of forbidden treasure. For a while she abandoned herself to these new sensations, this darkly glittering richness. Then the light at the end of the room was cut off, making the shop even more shadowy, dimly lit by the glow of the precious metal in the glass cases. A silhouette filled the doorway to the back room, tall and imposing, with a rim of bright hair.

  At first Joan was bewildered by the mixture of emotions that filled her and unable to account for them. But when Lou Etta Colby emerged into the light and Joan turned to look at her more closely, her heart gave a thump; there was no doubt that this was the golden-haired and green-eyed goddess of her undersoul. Mrs. Colby was only a little over normal height, but she seemed larger because of her dominion over this fabled precious substance that in previous times was guarded by elves, leprechauns, and ogres under bridges. Joan stared at her dumbly, then the two women smiled at the same instant; Joan’s heart clanged and her body swarmed with bliss. Mrs. Colby (as Joan continued to call her throughout their relationship, never daring to attempt a more familiar form of address) examined her for a leisurely moment, while the ceiling fan overhead stimulated the flies to rotate slowly around the room in a clockwise direction.

  “You are looking for something, my dear.”

  “Yes.”

  “And it isn’t gold, because you have no money,” staring at her shabby clothes and her dirt-colored knees.

  “I’m looking for a job and a place to sleep.”

  “You smell like a cheap haircut,” Mrs. Colby told her. She showed her the cot in the back room of the shop and gave her a five-dollar bill. (Joan still had most of the ninety-seven dollars she had taken from the teapot).

  And so her new life began. In the daytime she stood with Mrs. Colby behind the glass counters, or took care of the shop alone while Mrs. Colby went about certain mysterious errands, and in the night Mrs. Colby was her lover. Joan found nothing difficult about the mechanics of this; from the earliest stirrings of puberty she felt herself totally androgynous. To say she was bisexual would be to divide things up too clearly; she felt herself capable of copulating with a dog, a cloud, a zebra, with the idea of God. Mrs. Colby introduced her to certain refinements that were nothing new to her; she had already run through them in the rich museum of her reveries. Sometimes, after a particularly satisfactory episode of lovemaking, Mrs. Colby out of gratitude would present her with a tiny gold nugget the size of her fingernail, or a pin said to have come from a Babylonian tomb. Mrs. Colby explained to her that some of the so-called golden things in the shop were only gilded or plated, but that others were authentic and very valuable. She introduced her to the arcane mysteries of telling the true from the false, with a little kit containing vials of acid, tiny brushes, and tubes of bright-colored chemicals. And, just as there was real and false gold with a kit for telling between them, so there were in the shop a real testing kit and a false one, the latter for demonstrating to customers that the false gold they bought was real. For, as Mrs. Colby demonstrated, if a little waterglass (sodium silicate) and a grain of potassium permanganate are touched carefully to false gold with a brush, the surface bubbles slightly and becomes even brighter than before, without being harmed in the least.

  Joan felt a great triumph swelling in her heart as she learned these secrets of Mrs. Colby’s business. For Mrs. Colby was a goddess, her Goddess; this w
as proved by her stature, her golden hair and green eyes, her hieratic calm, and her instant recognition of Joan as her neophyte and catechumen. And, if the Goddess was also a cheater and a thief, this meant that cheating and thievery were attributes of the Divine, and that Joan’s own previous experiments in this direction received a kind of divine approval.

  She put away the nugget and the Babylonian pin in a secret pocket of her musette bag, and little by little, as Mrs. Colby dealt out the objects of her favor, she added to her collection: a row of buttons (one at a time; it took her five nights to win them), a ring, a somewhat larger nugget the size and shape of a half a pecan, and, after a particularly memorable night of erotic play that left them both exhausted, a pair of eighteenth-century spectacle-frames, pure gold even to the pins that held the hinges, which she wore thereafter without lenses, simply as a decoration; Mrs. Colby said they had belonged to Benjamin Franklin but Joan paid little attention to such exaggerations. And, on afternoons when Mrs. Colby left her alone in the shop, she swelled her collection with small objects of her own choice, testing when she was skeptical with the small brush and the acid in the bottle. Mrs. Colby kept poor records and had no accounting at all, she seemed never to have heard of the concept of inventory, and in her glass cases an infinite number of gold trinkets, true and false, were jumbled together cheek by jowl; no one could possibly know how many there were.

  All these things, love and gratitude, gifts and thievery, took place in the small white-plastered shop in the Old Town. According to the sign in gold leaf on the window, it was called the Cueva de Oro; Joan never knew whether this had been its name all along or whether these letters had appeared magically in response to her private vision of it as a secret faery grotto. Mrs. Colby never showed her her home, which was in the fashionable hills to the east of the city. After their lovemaking in the shop she went home at midnight. From anything that Joan could gather, she lived alone. Yet she was called Mrs. Colby.

  “Are you a widow then, Mrs. Colby?”

  “I am the widow of the world. I have known everything there is to know, and then it died.”

  Mrs. Colby dressed austerely, in a long white Indian gown with white-on-white embroidery and a pair of gold earrings the size of peas. Joan began little by little fastening pieces of her gold collection to her own costume: the five buttons on her blouse, the Babylonian pin at her neck, a brooch which she stuck in her hair like a bird in a tree. She made holes in her sandals and poked gold collar studs into them, and for her own earrings she chose a pair of tiny Inca gods with erect penises. All this in addition to the gold spectacle-frames, of course. The trouble was that she was no more an accountant than Mrs. Colby, and she lost control of her own inventory. After a while she failed to distinguish, in the ornaments she wore on her person, between the trinkets that Mrs. Colby had given her and those she had chosen for herself when she was alone in the shop.

  But, although Mrs. Colby was poorly organized and forgetful, she had an eidetic memory for certain objects in the shop, especially, for some reason, those that came in pairs. Perhaps she had once borne twins and they had died, or perhaps she was a twin herself and had lost her missing half. Her eye fell on the Inca earrings and she turned the grayish color of newspaper. In one fell swoop, she knew that she had been cheated of her wealth and that this magical love of her middle age had vanished into thin air.

  A shouting, screaming fight took place in the tiny shop, very uncharacteristic for both. People passing by stopped and looked in the door. Mrs. Colby got a hand on each earring and pulled, which was excruciatingly painful for Joan. She flung her knee abruptly into Mrs. Colby’s stomach. Mrs. Colby cried out and doubled up like a jackknife on the floor, taking one of the Inca gods with her, but Joan kicked her again in the coccyx and, when her body opened again, pried the earring from her hand.

  She fled out into the sunlight, fastening the earring as she went; ran down the street and out of the Plaza, turned down the alley behind, leaped over a low adobe wall, went through a gate, climbed over another wall with pieces of broken glass set into its cement, found herself in the courtyard at the rear of the shop, opened the door, and bolted into the back room like a gazelle. Snatching her musette bag from the table by the cot, she loped out through the shop past the still groaning figure of Mrs. Colby on the floor, fled out into the Plaza again, and ran on panting in the direction of the bus station.

  That night she was in El Paso. She stayed in a cheap hotel and the next day she set out to explore the city. It was larger than Albuquerque and larger than any city she had ever seen before. It was set between a mountain and a river and the better houses were in the hills on the north side of town. Along the main street, there were a number of short blunt skyscrapers of the kind that might have been built by children out of blocks. When she was a child, Joan liked to build skyscrapers out of blocks, but her brothers always knocked them down again. She wondered how the notion got started that it was men who built up civilization. Nobody was building anything in El Paso, but gangs of men with tractors were tearing down buildings. She imagined that perhaps strong and muscular women appeared to build them up again in the night.

  For a half a day she didn’t know what to do with herself and wandered aimlessly around in the hot treeless streets. She still had money in her musette bag, from the ninety-seven dollars she had taken from the teapot when she left home and the five dollars a week that Mrs. Colby had paid her. The idea occurred to her to pass the time by buying some gold trinket, just to prove to herself that Mrs. Colby was not necessary to the fulfillment of her status as a gold collector, as precious as she might have been to her spiritual and erotic life.

  She went into a department store, the first one she had ever seen, and meandered around trying to use her intuitions to find where the jewelry department was. It wasn’t on the street floor so evidently she would have to go up on the escalator. It was clear enough how the thing worked. After some hesitation she set her foot on it; it jerked her violently upward and she almost lost her balance. At the top, the same thing in reverse; the machine flung her out onto the floor and she skipped like a child playing hopscotch until she managed to find her footing. Gathering what she could salvage of her aplomb, and already disliking El Paso, she set off in search of a department of small bright valuable objects, but came instead to a kind of dim alcove at one end of the store, thickly carpeted, lighted by indirect lighting (another thing she had never seen before), and heavy with the animalesque smell of leather; not the male leather of saddles and boots, but the softer and more subtle aroma of leather with an underscent of perfume, the leather of women, of handbags and gloves, which nevertheless owed its excitement, its faint suggestion of the forbidden, to the fact that leather was properly something from the world of men.

  As her eyes adjusted to the dimness she found that the manager of the Women’s Purses and Leather Goods Department was a woman not without a certain resemblance to Mrs. Colby, and to the powerful image from the hinterland of the soul that had brought Mrs. Colby into being. She was not as tall, not as green-eyed, and not as golden-haired as Mrs. Colby, in fact her hair was flaxen or straw-colored, but she was obviously her numinous sister, another version of the vision, as the hundreds of Blessed Virgin Marys in the churches of New Mexico, some wooden and some plaster, some ugly, some beautiful, some dark and some light, are projections into the world of the same invisible divinity.

  Joan felt again the ecstasy of the moment when she had first set eyes on Mrs. Colby, a feeling which came partly from the spirit and partly from the womb, or rather united the two, body and soul, in a single incandescent and pulsating organ. She felt her cheeks warming and her eyes glowing in the shadows. The two exchanged glances for a silent moment, exactly as Joan and Mrs. Colby had. For her part, Henriette Duvalier took in Joan’s gold rings and clinking bracelets, her furtive pipistrello face, her Franklin spectacles and the gold studs in her sandals, noted her complexion which was like the finest saddle-leather, with little marks an
d spots on it, blemishes from the cowhide to show that it is genuine, and immediately offered her a job in the stockroom.

  The two of them spent the entire afternoon together; if Henriette was not in the stockroom showing Joan where the stock was and how to do her job, then Joan was in the showroom while Henriette demonstrated the difference between cowhide and calfskin by fastening belts around her. She treated the few customers who ventured into the department with negligence or even with disdain. The instant the store closed at six o’clock she took Joan into the stockroom and locked the door. Then, in an imperious manner that brooked no disobedience, she ordered her to disrobe and clad her in an outfit which she got down from a box on the shelf.

  The garment if that was what it was, was all belts, straps, buckles, studs, and rivets, padded with felt on the inside surfaces to make it more comfortable. It ran around Joan’s small body like parallels of latitude, with an equator at the waist; it ringed her breasts in two leather circles, leaving them bare, and it plunged down between her legs and came up again in the rear. Henriette fastened her wrists together with the shackles provided, then she got a large studded belt from the shelf and began slapping her with it, not hard but enough so that it stung a little. Joan felt a mixture of sensations consisting of two parts pain, two parts embarrassment, and one part of a strange and mysterious pleasure that was purple-colored and seemed to stink of hell.

  But Henriette gave her little time to analyse these feelings, because she was recklessly stripping the apparatus from Joan, flinging off her own clothing, and hurrying at reckless speed to pull the system of straps onto herself; the thing was adjustable all the way from small Joan to large Henriette because of its system of buckles. She asked for Joan’s assistance only to fasten the wrists in the back. Joan set about slapping her tentatively with the belt, but this was not enough to satisfy her; she exhorted her to greater and greater efforts, and Joan set to and belabored her with the heavy studded strap until Henriette began writhing and fell to the floor. Then she began beseeching Joan, with many pleases and oh-my-gods, to do something to her that was so banal that Joan wondered why she hadn’t asked her to do it in the first place and get it over with.