I turned my head to look out briefly, then back at my tea. “Sveva’s sketches, I suppose,” I answered. I wanted her to believe that the drawings were nothing to look at. I knew that this hope would be wasted. When Ofelia left the room, I trailed her to the veranda. I was nervous about her being outdoors and, I’ll admit, I was curious to see Sveva’s work. It was always striking.
Her mother stood in front of the sketches, three hung from a line with clothespins. I suppose this was to prevent them from smudging or blowing away, though it seemed like they were on display for us. Sveva had never been practical, but this gesture seemed like a taunt. Ofelia cupped her mouth with her hand as we both looked at a drawing of a chain of elephants, trunks wrapped around tails, lines of charcoal making their large, rounded hind ends appear to sway in the foreground. The curve and form of each elephant appeared to get more detailed the farther in the background it was. The drawing gave the impression of elephants marching endlessly.
In the middle of the next drawing was a circle of black men, their skin shaded so finely with graphite that I could see the angle of the sun on their skin. Around them, all was colour – red and white tents, green trees mottled with amber, sky vivid blue. The third drawing was the most unfinished, and I suspected Sveva stopped working on it just before she went for a nap. She should have taken it with her.
The sketch was crude, barely more than lines, but even so, the figures were clear in the set of their limbs, the tilt of their heads. It was Sveva and her father, walking somewhere, although there was no context but the blank page around them. Perched on each of their shoulders, with one leg on each of them and long arms wrapped around their foreheads, was a large monkey. The animal was in colour. It had a red fez cap, but instead of a vest or suit, it was wearing a red-and-gold gown. Gems hung from its round ears. It was a rudimentary sketch and yet, I could see something of Ofelia’s expression in the monkey. I might have been imagining that. Behind the figures was a rough sketch of a wolf, done so well that I could tell what it was even though it was only a few lines, a smudge of shadow.
“What are these?” Ofelia demanded. I didn’t think she expected a response from me. “They are ugly, lurid. What is she doing, making these and then leaving them out for me to see?”
“I don’t think that was intentional, Ofelia.”
“Everything,” she began, still looking at the drawings. “Everything, every act and gesture has an intention, Marie.” She rarely called me by my first name. Her voice was small and controlled, both angry and intimate at once, a tone I’d heard her use often with the duke. I watched her clench her hands, push her fingers into her palms and then open them. When she looked at me, her eyes were moist. “I can’t take this kind of stimulation. You know that, Miss Jüül.” Ofelia sniffed, cleared her throat. “Get rid of them, please.”
I knew what she wanted me to do, of course, but I asked, “How?”
She turned, held the railing. “In the fire would probably be best. The church encourages cleansing the home on Good Friday. Leone always thought heat was purifying.”
“Should I wait for evening?”
“It will be better now. Our Sveva is so hard to convince when she’s got her mind set, but it doesn’t take her long to accept things once they’ve happened. I sometimes wish I could move into acceptance as easily.”
* * *
I lit the first fire of the day. As well as wood kindling, I had a small chest near the fireplace full of my own personal papers. For everything of Sveva’s that I fed to the flames, I offered something of my own. I was moving backwards in time and most of my more recent correspondence was gone. I hadn’t gone back past 1930 and I didn’t yet know if I would. That would mean erasing all traces of him, of H. I didn’t think I could do it. Nevertheless, Sveva wasn’t the only one whose chronicles were being purged. I thought it could do us both some good to prune back a little. Our minds were too dull to confront the task, so I had the fire to spark the process instead. Once the fire was licking the kindling, flames wrapped around it, I lay the sketches on top, watched them curl and grow smaller.
I didn’t hear Sveva enter the room. My hearing was usually so acute – all my senses sharp, really. Perhaps it was the heat and crackle of the fire but, no, I didn’t hear her until she cleared her throat. I turned and there she was, looking at me from the doorway. Her stature and expression seemed to fill the entire space. Her height and the way she held her chin were her father’s. Sveva’s mother had given her the tone of her skin and the cast of her eyes. These women and their eyes.
We watched each other as we had so many times – Sveva unblinking, mouth and jaw set in that haughty, accusatory way, me looking back, trying to soften the same things that she held so tightly. If I let my eyes, my mouth, my posture loosen and yield, I would signal that I had accepted this. I had, hadn’t I?
Sveva turned and left the room. I heard her pause in the hall and imagined that she was deciding where to go, though her options were few. I heard her move back down the hall, her steps heavy on the stairs. I moved closer to the fire. The paper was all ash now, the kindling glowing coals as the larger pieces of wood cracked and hissed. How good the heat felt.
Forty-One
The few people who passed our threshold administered to either the body or the soul. Doctors made house visits and did what they could for Ofelia. The church sent its redeemers. Often, Monsignor Miles himself would come to take Ofelia’s confession without any cloak of anonymity for her, administer rosaries and prayers, the rolling timbre of his voice with the plaintive murmur of hers. When the monsignor was not able to attend to her himself, he sent others, deacons from the church or young acolytes who hadn’t yet received their own parish clutch.
I was not often near her room when she received her religious guidance. I would find reasons to busy myself below – there was always cleaning, always the kitchen, always the fires to tend. On a day when one of the young priests made a house call, I’d gone up to get the iron so I could smooth the table linens. I was in the hall, weight of the iron in my hand, when I heard the noise: a shuffling crackled with strips of sound, like static broken with sudden high notes in a minor key. A cry, the sound of broken air.
My rib cage tightened, heart ricocheted, jittered with fear. I wouldn’t stand here, iron in hand, couldn’t stand silent. I put the iron down and knocked. The sound stopped. For a moment, nothing. I knocked again – “Ofelia?” – and the young priest opened the door, lock of hair fallen across his forehead, cheeks bright. I looked around him to Ofelia, standing near the window, curtains pulled closed, light beside her bed casting half of her into shadow as I stepped into the room. “Ofelia, are you all right?”
She turned to me. “Of course, Miss Jüül, of course! The only pain inflicted is my own. God has granted me salve. He is my balm.” Her voice wavered, broke. Her face was wet with tears. She held her blouse against herself and I saw, reflected in the mirror behind her, that the buttons down the back were undone.
I heard the young priest murmur something to her. I saw then that she held a kind of whip, a handle rooted with cords of twined fabric. The priest had his hand on her forehead as he crossed himself and went into the hall without looking at me, his steps a web of creaks and small sounds. I backed out of the room and watched him pause at the top of the stairs, cross himself, lean toward the icon of the Virgin and kiss it, then descend. When I went back into the room, Ofelia held out the whip as though encouraging me to take it, so I did, felt its weight in my hand.
“The priest told you to do this?”
“It was monsignor who suggested it might help me express my faith, my subservience to God, my remorse.”
“Remorse for what?”
Ofelia ran a palm over each of her cheeks, seemingly still wet even though her eyes were now dry. “For everything, Miss Jüül.”
Pins and needles tore across my skin, my cheeks burned and a flush crept
up my neck. Fear or anger or both. “No one can tell you to do that to yourself, Ofelia.”
“He didn’t tell me. I asked if I could.”
“And he sent a priest right out of seminary, someone untested, to bring you a whip? A whip. Ofelia, this isn’t right.”
“You don’t understand, Miss Jüül. You’re not Catholic. It doesn’t feel bad – it hurts, yes, but it’s a purifying pain. It’s sanctioned – His Holiness Pope John approves, does it himself.”
It wasn’t the practice itself that I disagreed with (though this was part of it, true) so much as the young man. The priest. I’d seen how his skin was ruddy when I opened the door, saw the bright moisture in his eyes before he looked away, furtive. He was barely more than a boy and I knew that look. He’d been aroused. Spiritual arousal or otherwise, I wouldn’t let her open her blouse, bare her skin – for pleasure, pain or redemption. Whatever the reason, I wouldn’t allow it. But what could I do? What I allowed or didn’t allow made little difference.
* * *
The nights when Ofelia would wail became better than the ones when she didn’t. I would wake to silence and it leached into everything, hollowed it out. I would creep down the stairs from my third-floor perch to the second floor to listen, make myself light enough that I could move without sound, then wait outside Ofelia’s door. Sometimes it would come, the swish of air with the switches of what I could only call a whip. Switches through air – swish, slap – her skin bared to herself, her guilt, her own penance, but it was too much for me. I would open the door, say her name again and again until she heard me and stopped. Part of Ofelia seemed to be asleep those late nights or early mornings. When I could get her to stop, she’d turn to me, her eyes glazed and colour heightened much like that young priest’s had been. She would stare at me through a haze of dream, remorse, incomprehension. I’d try to wrest the whip from her, bring her back.
One night, Sveva found us: the light from a small lamp weak in the room; Ofelia on the bed, her cotton nightgown unbuttoned, rolled down to her waist, nothing covering her breasts, flat and fallen by then, her back exposed, baring strips of red welts; me, having wrested the whip from her.
Sveva yelled, “Miss Jüül! What is going on?” She lunged at me, pulled the whip from my hand with such force that I felt my own skin tear along the handle.
Ofelia came to then, the glazed mask over her face falling away, her eyes sharp, mouth tight. “Sveva, put that down.”
“Me put this down? What has Miss Jüül been doing? This is absolute insanity, Mother! Why – what have you let go on?”
Ofelia looked from Sveva to me, back again, her eyes quick, her mouth loosening, hands reaching out for the post of her bed, for something, anything. I could see confusion in her movements, her expression, as she tried to gain bearings, shore herself up. I reached out for her other hand, wanted to communicate that it was okay. It would be okay. Once I made contact with her, felt the smooth skin of her hand in mine, Ofelia sighed and sat on the bed, pulled her nightgown up so that it was partially covering her torso. Head toward her own hands on her lap, she said, “Miss Jüül has nothing to do with this, Beo. She was just trying to stop me, as you’ll try to stop me. It’s a spiritual practice – a penance, purifying.”
“Try to stop you from self-flagellating? Of course we will!”
“Call it whatever you like, I won’t stop. It makes me feel better.” Ofelia then lowered herself slowly back onto her bed, lay on her side. I wanted to pull up her nightgown completely and cover her with bedding, but Sveva moved so that she was between the bed and me. I backed away and let her settle her mother. She brushed Ofelia’s hair off her forehead with her palm, murmured in Italian, and I went out of the room as quietly as I’d come in.
Later, Ofelia’s voice sliced down the hall: “Sveva, my Beo! Sveva, darling!” I started down the stairs from the third floor, heard the shift in floorboards as Sveva went to her, moan of the bed’s wood as Sveva got in.
I went back up to my room. Minutes later, I heard Sveva getting out of her mother’s bed and coming up the stairs. I was at my door before she knocked. “Mother,” she said as an explanation.
“She’s not able to sleep?” Obviously.
“She’s got all the windows and drapes open. The sheers are billowing around the room like so many ghosts.”
“Is she speaking?”
“Speaking, intoning, she won’t stop – keeps asking me what I remember most.”
“About?” I rubbed my hands up my arms.
“Father. Our life, before.”
“What do you tell her?” Not that this mattered. I was curious.
“I’ve told her that what I remember most about Daddy is his face, his hands, his voice – I suppose I feel like I remember everything, really. It doesn’t matter what I tell her. It will never be exactly what she wants to hear.”
True.
“I need to get some sleep, Jüül. So does Mother.”
“Of course. We all do.”
“Can you close the windows, try to calm her, even just a bit?”
When I went into Ofelia’s room, a cloud of cold air hit me. She sat up in the bed, a silhouette against the weak light coming through the windows. She clutched at her neck as though she were choking, a sob caught in her throat and then torn out like a wail. I’d find a way to calm Ofelia, get her – all of us – to sleep. I took her hands from around her neck, prying them while trying to be gentle, gentle. She was so thin then, our Ofelia, and her hands didn’t feel quite real – too soft, too papery. Even so, I felt the steel of Ofelia’s resistance as she pushed back against me – the strength she still held, coiled tight, somewhere inside her. I pulled her hands, then arms, slowly, first away from herself and then toward me. When I placed each of her hands along my side and tightened my own arms over them to hold her steady, I felt her tension ease. Ofelia moved her hands until they were on my back and I felt her breath, held so tight in her lungs, her throat, leave her mouth in a long, smooth sigh.
Ofelia shook and I thought she would put her head on my shoulder, as she’d done so many times. I would stroke her hair, tell her to sleep. We had practice in these roles, her nocturnal disturbances, grief raging through her, my ability to calm her, to tuck the sloppiness of her melancholy in for the night, guide her back to something approaching sleep. That night, though, Ofelia’s hands moved swiftly from around my back until she was pressing down on each of my shoulders and she reared back, pushed against me. I thought that she might use me to launch herself to standing. I wasn’t prepared when, instead of standing, she brought her face directly in front of mine, looked at me, one eye to the other because we were too close to hold both in focus. Then Ofelia gripped my head in one of her hands, her fingers a vise around the back of my skull, and slammed her mouth into mine, splitting it open with her tongue, the heat and smoothness of it a shock. She pulled away as abruptly, looked toward the ceiling and released a short, sharp laugh before she closed her eyes, opened her mouth wide and let out a cry like a long howl. I backed out of the room, closing the door.
Sveva was in the hall, hands in the mess of her hair, and I could see the tension along her neck even in the low light. “It’s okay.” I reached for her.
Sveva backed away, flung out her arm as she turned from me, then back. “It’s not okay, Jüül!”
“You go back to bed. I’ll calm your mother.”
Sveva dragged her hands over her face, along her collarbones, around her own waist until she was hugging herself.
“Really, go back to bed. Listen.” There was no noise now from Ofelia’s room. “She’s already quieted.”
Sveva looked at me, her eyes black in the dark, then turned back to her room.
That night, I gave Ofelia a mild sedative, something the doctor had assured me was fine, harmless. She needed rest, not a night of ragged rumination as she questioned what kind of God would
pillage a family such as hers over and over again. Ofelia, for all she’d been through, didn’t question him. She was utterly devoted. As was I, in different ways. I took a sedative myself. When sleep came, it was swift and heavy.
* * *
The next morning when I checked on her, Ofelia was still asleep. She usually laid with her limbs held close, folded around her, her face pinched as though sleep pained her. That morning, her arms were flung over her head and I could see her legs spread under the duvet. Her hair was loose, mouth open, face soft and slack.
I placed the tea service on a small table and turned away to crack open the window. Sveva came into the room. “What is wrong with her?”
“Wrong? She’s sleeping. I gave her something to help last night.”
“Something? A sleeping pill? I’ve asked you, expressly, to not give her any Veronal. I cannot believe I need to ask you again.”
Yet this hadn’t come up the night before when I’d intimated I’d be giving her something. “And you know how she was last night. It won’t do her any harm, not so infrequently, and far less harm than she can work herself up into.”
“So, you ignored my wishes?”
“I chose to do what I believed was best for your mother.”
“However you term it.”
“It is your mother who employs me and I believe she will have appreciated the sleep. Once she wakes up, I believe she will respect my choice.”
“There’s no need to talk about employment, Jüül. You’re family, you know that.”
I wiped my hands on my apron. It was a habitual movement, the apron an adornment of habit as well. I wore one each morning as I rewashed the cups and spoons and prepared the tea service. It made me look like a maid, of course, but it was practical. Sveva wore one at times, as well, hid slips of sketched-on paper in the pockets. I’d laundered her aprons to remove the smudges of graphite that might have alerted her mother. I always replaced what I found hidden. After all these years together, part of her remained a mystery. I was glad. I hoped that part of me remained a mystery, always, even to those closest to me.
Little Fortress Page 23