She began to speak. All the fragments of memory and fear, event, threat, hallucination, gathered themselves up into a flood and poured through the little sluice gate beyond which the priest waited. She told him everything. She spoke of the border, of Dolores Marquez and Hunter and Angelo and Sister Gabriel, of the photograph and the Montreal address that had yielded up no meaning. She spoke of the dead weight of a responsibility that she did not want. She could feel the photograph like a lodestone in her wallet.
“It’s like a steel trap, Father. It has me by the ankle and by the throat. The faces of her children are more real to me than my father and mother.”
When Father O’Dowd spoke, she thought of shepherds murmuring to their sheep. She thought of her ayah and her grandparents and her aunts. She thought of a falconer, gentle but stern, calling the way home.
“There are borderline cases,” he told her. His voice was full of solace. “Where is the photograph?” he asked. It did not occur to her not to give it to him. “You have done all that could be asked of you,” he said. “Everything will be taken care of.”
Of course, he pointed out, the Church would have to weigh every aspect, and would proceed with extraordinary caution. Misguided compassion, he said solemnly, could be a form of heresy.
“Heresy?”
“You were wise to turn the matter over to me,” he said. “Go in peace, my child. Everything will be taken care of.”
She was free and shriven.
She could hardly believe the relief.
She walked out through the great west doors and was surprised she did not waft upwards from the steps like a helium balloon.
Central Square greeted her like a slap in the face. Two children fought over food scraps in a garbage can, shouting in Spanish. Dogs lifted their legs against fences. The sun shone as it had to. The asphalt glared back at the sun.
That night she dreamed Seymour was painting her black. Her body itself was the canvas, she could feel each brush stroke like a scourge, her skin choking and unable to breathe beneath the caked layers of pigment. Seymour daubed her navel with red. The altar lamp, he said. Father O’Dowd, like a wisp of genie, came smoking out of the red eye. He sheared off her breasts with pruning clippers. Beware of heresy, he said.
Felicity woke with a cry.
“Don’t go,” Seymour murmured in his sleep. “Don’t leave.”
She was grateful for his arms, though she knew they would not hold.
When she woke again, he was already at work, the easel beside the bed, paint tubes scattered on quilt and floor. He worked, lately, as though time was running out. He’s sixty-four, she remembered.
“All these years,” he said, “and I still haven’t got you properly. I want to fix you here before you slip away. You’re going to leave me again, I know. You’re not eating. I wish you’d eat.”
Felicity’s desk was covered with catalogues and 35mm transparencies. Gauguin was passing through her fingers, but also Rufino Tamayo — Tahiti and Mexico, the colours, the smells — when Sister Gabriel called.
“You were looking for me?” Sister Gabriel asked. “Word reached me.”
No salutation. No identification. It was like a voice from the black region of dreams, but Felicity recognized it immediately.
“Yes,” she said weakly. But I’ve finished with this, she wanted to say. I’ve been absolved. I’ve discharged my duty. She waited for her heartbeat to stop thundering in her own ears. Don’t ask anything more of me, she begged silently. “Father O’Dowd told you?”
“No,” Sister Gabriel said. “You were seen going into the church. You’re very conspicuous. You don’t look like a member of Our Lady of Sorrows’ parish.”
“I was trying to reach you,” Felicity said. “Or Angelo. One or other of you. I tried to deliver the photograph, but she didn’t seem to be there.”
Silence.
“I can’t help feeling …” Felicity stumbled on. “Has something more …? Why is Hunter following me again?”
Silence. For so long that Felicity thought the line had gone dead.
“Sister Gabriel?”
“Please. No names.”
“I need someone to tell me what’s happening,” Felicity pleaded. “Should I go back to the record shop? Should I meet with Angelo again?”
“Please.” There was a sigh. “It wasn’t you, then?”
“What wasn’t me?” Felicity asked.
“Who turned him in to Immigration?”
Felicity felt something like a feverish chill beginning at her fingertips and spreading. “Turned Angelo in?” she whispered.
“He was deported. Dead now, of course.” Sister Gabriel’s voice was expressionless. She might have been a recording. “Twentythree machine-gun holes in his body.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Arrested the day after he met you, and flown back. Never reached home from the airport. We thought it must have been you.”
Felicity leaned against her desk, all her body fluids seasick. The tavern laughter of Angelo was deafening. Echoes, echoes, echoes. “No,” she said. “I swear to you. What possible reason would I have? As it is, I have nightmares, I can’t drive my car, I can’t eat. The photograph was burning a hole in my wallet. But Father O’Dowd said that everything —”
“Father O’Dowd?” Sister Gabriel’s voice was very faint. She sounded impossibly weary. “How much did you tell him?”
“Well I … everything, I guess. I gave him the photograph.”
“But no addresses, I hope.”
Felicity swallowed. “There was one on the back of the photograph. The Montreal restaurant, though she wasn’t —”
“It’s all over, then,” Sister Gabriel sighed. “His duty to report, he believes. He hasn’t lived there, you see, so it’s all black and white.”
Felicity said weakly: “But surely he wouldn’t …?”
“Yes, he would. He has. For him, they’re all tainted with the wrong ideology, they’re all part of an Absolute Evil. What else can he do?” Felicity pictured the voice as a rubber band gone slack, stretched beyond its limits. “I hardly think she’ll mind,” the voice went on, “she’s so tired. We’re all so tired, we’ve all lost hope.”
Felicity was appalled. “I always thought the confessional —”
“Oh, in confession! You didn’t say! Thank God. He’s bound then.”
“Well, more or less in confession. I’m not a Catholic.”
“Oh. Who knows then? I’ll try to get word to her, but all our links are smashed. Anyway, there isn’t anywhere left to hide except maybe New York. Not a big enough legal Spanish community in Montreal.”
“Is it possible that she …” Felicity faltered. “I mean, all the rumours … You don’t think she might have been the one who … regarding Angelo, I mean?”
“One never knows anything for certain,” Sister Gabriel said. “I go by intuition. The people I work with … survival’s their only ideology, their only possible one.” She laughed suddenly, a harsh, macabre sound. “A misguided perspective, of course, as the bishop has told me. Though not quite heretical, he says.”
“I’m afraid of Hunter,” Felicity said. “Why does he keep following me?”
“It’s proof they haven’t found her yet.”
“But does he think I’m in touch with her? Does he think I know something?”
“Do you?”
Felicity felt a skid of fear. “Even you don’t trust me? But I tried to deliver the photograph. Isn’t there anything —”
“Yes, there always is,” Sister Gabriel said. “There are the children, there are thousands of homeless and hungry children. I want a lay worker to go back, but it’s so difficult since the murder of the nuns to find —”
In a panic, Felicity hung up.
35
His canvas was very large; sometimes he stood on a chair, sometimes on a stepladder. He argued with it, cajoled it, made love to it. He often talked to himself. He was painting a radiance: it fi
lled the room with a smoky phosphorescent gold. It throbbed. It swallowed him up. Somewhere behind this glow, like a shadow or the nub of the numen itself, were two eyes, one slightly higher than the other.
“If you’d seen her,” Felicity said, “you’d know what I mean.” Her mind, like fire on an oil slick, went licking along a new idea. “Suppose I could find her? Suppose I could get her to New York? You could paint her, you could do a Magdalen.”
Seymour paused. It was as though the inner golden vision of light, whose spokesman he was, had passed into the grey of an eclipse. He got down off the chair and came over to the window seat where she was sitting. “Why are you doing this to me?”
“Doing what?”
(And how would the Old Volcano know how to explain what he meant? He spoke in colours and textures, not words. He meant: You are easing out again, I can sense it. He meant: I am used to tears and suicide threats and abject devotion; they are a bore, but I consider them my due. When you get that look in your eyes, when you forget I’m here, you drive me to a frenzy of possessive desire. You make me determined to have you, to pin you down. But it’s like trying to catch light in a net.
No one knows Felicity and the Old Volcano the way I do. No one has seen them from such close range. And this is the secret of Felicity’s hold on him: that she doesn’t want to be held. She has always been addicted to loneliness, which is freedom; and to freedom, which is loneliness.
(And there is also this: anyone who looks at Felicity for long thinks “otherness”, or “untouched”, or “essence” — depending on verbal and metaphysical capability. Hunter thinks it. The Old Volcano thinks it. I think it. Men want to put their mark on her. For Hunter and his ilk, simple violation is enough, the cruder the better — like breaking a wild horse. But the Old Volcano is hungry for salvation, all of life is bread and wine to him, sacred; he wants to devour us all. Especially, and religiously, he wants to devour Felicity.
And I? Oh yes, even I have an interest. I want to save her from the Old Volcano’s misappropriation. I want to be the official biographer, the final authority. I am recording and preserving as faithfully as bias and loss and grief and capricious memory will allow.
Of course, the Old Volcano could articulate none of this. He could not even formulate what he was feeling. It takes a truly blind man to be a great painter.)
So he merely asked fretfully, “Why are you doing this to me?”
“Doing what?”
“You’re so like your father,” he said. Accusing them both, vaguely, of not revolving around him. Or perhaps it was the way the light fell on her. A physical resemblance. An old memory.
Felicity puckered her eyebrows, reading his face, trying to locate the reason for his distress. “Is it because you don’t think she has a chance? Or because it would be illegal and dangerous? Are you afraid this’ll interfere with your work?”
“What? Who?” He had been thinking in colours. He had forgotten what lay behind the sense that she was moving away from him. He was thinking of fragments of asteroid that slip beyond the sun’s reach, the light dying, leaking away into the void like water into sand. Distressed, he grumbled, “Why do you want to go away?”
“I don’t,” she said passionately. “I don’t.” She trailed off into thought. Then she said, “Perhaps it’s true what you’re always saying in interviews. That I’m a figment of your imagination. You’ve dictated the way I see things. Everything comes filtered through you. At the border that day, I thought first of Perugino, and second, of how you’d paint her. And now the only way I can visualize her is as one of your paintings taking on life. It’s weird. You’ve stolen my eyes.”
“Hah!” He was back on his chair, in vehement confrontation with his canvas. “It’s the other way round. You and your damn father, you won’t leave me alone. You’re hounding me, both of you. You’re after my soul.”
“My father and you,” she said, “In the war. You hardly ever speak of it.”
“There’s quite enough darkness ahead of me. I don’t reach back for more. I’m for the light these days.”
“Were you ever afraid? In the war, I mean?”
“Hah. I was always afraid.”
“And my father?”
“A maniac of a medic!” Seymour fumed. “He never seemed to be afraid of anything, the bastard. Always out there bringing back bodies, giving death the finger. I don’t know. Maybe he was scared too. I was certainly scared shitless, helping him.”
“Oh Seymour, you were really afraid.” She slid off the window seat and coiled herself around him. An aphrodisiac, his fear. Or his admission of it. But she had an urgent question, her arms were around his neck, her eyes close to his. “How do you make yourself do something you’re terrified of doing?” she asked.
He was transfixed by the closeness of her eyes. “Damn you,” he murmured. “His eyes too, damn it.” He reached for her hands and undid the noose around his neck. He picked her up. He carried her to their bed. “I won’t answer,” he shouted, as they wrestled in a desperate love. “Felicity,” he whispered in her ear. “Whatever it is, you don’t have to do it. I should be enough for you to work on, a full-blooded and foul-mouthed heathen. Don’t go. Don’t leave me. I’m too old and I’m afraid of the dark.”
She kissed him. She kissed his lips. She kissed him all the way down his body to his crotch, she took his prick in her mouth; she lavished on him her lips and her tongue and her love. She kissed him all the way back up to his lips again, and as she lay over him, riding him, she whispered, “But of course the reason I love you, and the reason you loved my father, was because you did things you were terrified of doing.”
His prick suddenly wilted inside her. He held her tightly. “Heroics,” he said, “are a miscalculation of youth, grossly overrated. Think of your father, think of the waste.” And when she said nothing: “Felicity, please don’t leave. I’m too old. I’ll confess it: I’m afraid of dying alone. And besides,” he whispered, “listen. Before it’s too late, we could have a child. Why not? It’s time we settled down.”
* *
Felicity leaned on the sill of her office window. A child, she thought, our own child. She felt like singing. Children drifted from the sky like music: their flawless faces, their curls, their laughter. Two of them had an old woman in tow and their dark hair brushed Felicity in passing.
She looked down at the sidewalk where people were waiting for buses. In the doorway of the bus shelter a man, shapeless in his light September coat, was whittling at something with a knife. A piece of wood? No. Something soft. A nectarine perhaps. Strange, this bird’s-eye view. The man had a bald spot in the middle of his head. He was cutting the nectarine into sections, which he swallowed whole, one by one. When he got down to the pit, he drop-kicked it into the gutter. He looked up at her window and saw her watching him. He saluted with the knife.
She was no longer sure if it was Trog or Hunter.
The chair was not high enough. Seymour was on a stepladder now. The canvas seemed to be growing skywards and he was ascending above a middle region of cloud, cirrus puffs only, a last barrier. He was working on an expanse of pure light in the mind of the sun. He was using acrylics: white, ochre, more white, a blended dove grey, clear yellow, white.
He did not notice when Felicity left.
She paused by her car in the street. Her crazy lapis lazuli car. Weird blue, Gus had said an eternity ago at the border. She sat behind the wheel and the memory of Trog and Hunter arriving in her office came back. They were palpable presences. Her hands were shaking on the wheel, she had to lick sweat from over her upper lip. An impounded car. A tampered-with car, the brakelines cut. Heroics, Seymour said, are a disastrous miscalculation.
She waited for the trembling to pass. She started the car. She tested the brakes. She drove to Central Square, parked, and went walking. The Watch Clinic was shut up, a sign hung over its doorknob: Closed. Liquidation Sale. She pressed her face against the grimy glass and peered in. It was like looking
into an aquarium tank that has never been cleaned: an aqueous light, the watches breeding like pearlescent fish.
At Scoop’s record shop there was no one she recognized. A girl with iridescent purple fingernail polish was in the cashier’s cage. She stared at Felicity with patent boredom.
Felicity walked to The Plough and Stars, and beyond it. And then back again. She put her hand on the doorknob. She could not go in. I am collecting ghosts, she thought. My head is crammed with the absent, an attic of memories, I know more dead people than living ones.
She walked as far as the Post Office, and then turned again. Back and forth, back and forth. On one turn, she stopped at the Post Office and called her aunts.
“Felicity,” Aunt Norwich said. “In the middle of the week! Is something wrong?”
“Yes,” Felicity said. “But I don’t know how to …”
“If it’s that dreadful man, my dear, you know we both think you’d be much better off —”
“No, it’s not that. You remember I told you about the woman at the border, the refugee truck?”
“Now, Felicity, you mustn’t start brooding about that sort of thing again. Why don’t you come over and have tea with us? We do miss you, dear, though I’m afraid I must ask you to come alone. We can’t quite … he’s such an awful man … but we would love to see you.”
“Yes, perhaps I will later, Aunt Norwich. Bye.”
She walked back to The Plough and Stars, This time, she told herself, I will go in. The ghost of Angelo was waiting at the same table, like Banquo at the feast. She ordered a beer. Angelo’s face was white, dead white. His eye sockets trickled blood. Twenty-three holes, he said, pointing them out. All the machine-gun holes laughed like twenty-three mouths, and the laughter hemmed her in. She drank her beer. The photograph, he said sadly. She needed it more than food. We all need an obsession to keep us going, and for her it’s the children. The children, the children, the echoes sang. She felt queasy from the smoke and the beer. As she left she could hear him behind her, setting the fake Tiffany lamps chiming like cheap bells: the children, children, children.
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