A Spy in the House of Love (6 page)

Her eyes like the eyes of a spy.

Her habits like the habits of a spy. How she
lay all her clothes on one chair, as if she might be called away suddenly and
must not leave any traces of her presence.

She knew all the trickeries in this war of
love.

And her neutral zone, the moment when she
belonged to none, when she gathered her dispersed self together again. The
moment of non-loving, non-desiring. The moment when she took flight, if the man
had admired another woman passing by, or talked too long about an old love, the
little offenses, the small stabs, a mood of indifference, a small
unfaithfulness, a small treachery, all of them were warnings of possibly larger
ones, to be counter-acted by an equal or larger or total unfaithfulness, her
own, the most magnificent of counter-poisons, prepared in advance for the
ultimate emergencies. She was accumulating a supply of treacheries, so that
when the shock came, she would be prepared: “I was not taken unaware, the trap
was not sprung on my naivete, on my foolish
trustingness
.
I had already betrayed. To be always ahead, a little ahead of the expected
betrayals by life. To be there first and therefore prepared…”

When she returned to the room Philip was still
asleep. It was the end of the afternoon and the rain sent cooler winds over the
bed, but she felt no desire to cover or nestle him, or to give him warmth.

She had only been away five days but because of
all the emotions and experiences which had take place, all the inner expansions
and explorations, Sabina felt that she had been away for many years. Alan’s
image had receded far into the past, and a great fear of complete loss of him
assailed her. Five days containing so many changes within her body and feelings
lengthened the period of absence, added immeasurable mileage to her separation
from Alan.

Certain roads one took emotionally also
appeared on the map of the heart as traveling away from the center, and
ultimately leading to exile.

Driven by this mood, she appeared at his home.

“Sabina! I’m so happy. I didn’t expect you for
another week. What happened? Nothing went wrong?”

He was there. Five days had not altered his
voice, the all-enveloping expression of his eyes. The apartment had not
changed. The same book was still open by his bed, the same magazines had not
yet been thrown away. He had not finished some fruit she had bought the last
time she had been there. Her hands caressed the overfull ash trays, her fingers
designed rivers of meditation on the coats of dust on the table. Here living
was gradual, organic, without vertiginous descents or ascents.

As she stood there the rest of her life
appeared like a fantasy. She sought Alan’s hand and searched for the familiar
freckle on his wrist. She felt a great need to take a bath before he touched
her, to wash herself rigorously of other places, other hands, other odors.

Alan had obtained for her, as a surprise, some
records of drumming and singing from the Ile
Joyeuse
.
They listened to the drumming which began at first remotely as if playing in a
distant village smothered in jungle vines. At first like small children’s steps
running through dry rushes, and then heavier steps on hollow wood, and then
sharp powerful fingers on the drum skins, and suddenly a mass of crackling
stumpings
, animal skins slapped, and knuckled, stirred and
pecked so swiftly there was no time for echoes. Sabina saw the ebony and
cinnamon bodies through which the structure of the bones never showed,
glistening with the sea’s wild baths, leaping and dancing as quick as the
necklaces of drum beats, in emerald greens, indigo blue, tangerines in all the
colors of fruits and flowers, flaming eucalyptus of flesh.

There were places where only the beat of the
blood guided the body, where there was no separation from the speed of wind,
the tumult of waves, and the sun’s orgies. The voices rich with sap sang
joyously…
cascabel
…
guyabana
…
chinchinegrites
…

“I wish we could go there together,” said
Sabina.

Alan looked at her reproachfully as if it hurt
him to be obliged to remind her: “I can’t leave my work. Later this year
perhaps…”

Sabina’s eyes grew fixed. Alan interpreted it
as disappointment and added: “Please be patient, Sabina.”

But Sabina’s gaze was not transfixed by
disappointment. It was the fixation of the visionary. She was watching a mirage
take form, birds were being born with new names: “
cuchuchito
,”
“Pita real.” They perched on trees called “liquid-
ambar
,”
and over her head stretched a roof made of palm leaves tied with reeds.
Later
was always too late; later did not exist.
There was only great distance to
overcome to reach the inaccessible. The drums had come bearing the smell of
cinnamon skins in a dance of heartbeats. They would soon bring an invitation
which she would not refuse.

When Alan looked at her face again, her
eyelashes had dropped in a simulacrum of obedience. He felt the imminence of
departure had been averted by a sudden docility. He did not observe that her
quiescence was already in itself a form of absence. She was already inhabiting
the Ile
Joyeuse
.

Perhaps because of this, when she heard
drumming, as she walked along McDougall Street she found it natural to stop, to
climb down the steps into a cellar room of orange walls and sit on one of the
fur-covered drums.

The drummers were playing in complete
self-absorption intended for a ritual, seeking their own trances. A smell of
spices came from the kitchen and gold earrings danced over the steaming dishes.

The voices started an incantation to
Alalle
, became the call of birds, the call of animals,
rapids falling over rocks, reeds dipping their fingered roots into the lagoon
waters. The drums beat so fast the room turned into a forest of tap-dancing
foliage, wind chimes cajoling
Alalle
, the dispenser
of pleasure.

Among the dark faces there was one pale one. A
grandfather from France or Spain, and a stream of shell-white had been added to
the cauldron of ebony, leaving his hair as black but with a reflector depth
like that of a black mirror. His head was round, his brow wide, his cheeks
full, his eyes soft and brilliant. His fingers on the drum nimble yet fluid,
playing with a vehemence which rippled from his hips and shoulders.

Sabina could see him swimming, squatting over a
fire by the beach, leaping, climbing trees. No bones showing, only the
smoothness of the South Sea islander, muscles strong but invisible as in cats.

The diffusion of color on his face also gave
his gestures a nerveless firmness, quite different from the nervous staccato of
the other drummers. He came from the island of softness, of soft wind and warm
sea, where violence lay in abeyance and exploded only in cycles. The life too
sweet, too lulling, too drugging for continuous anger.

When they stopped playing they sat at a table
near hers, and talked in an elaborate, formal, sixteenth century colonial
Spanish, in the stilted language of old ballads. They practiced an elaborate
politeness which made Sabina smile. The stylization imposed by the conquerors
upon African depths was like a baroque ornamentation on a thatched palm leaf
hut. One of them, the darkest one, wore a stiff white collar and had a
long-stemmed umbrella by his chair. He held his hat with great care on his
knees, and in order not to disturb the well-ironed lines of his suit he drummed
almost entirely from the wrists and moved his head from left to right of the
starched collar, separate from his shoulders like that of a Balinese dancer.

She was tempted to disrupt their politeness, to
break the polished surface of their placidity with her extravagance. As she
shook her cigarette on her vanity case, the Hindu ring given to her by Philip
tinkled, and the pale-faced drummer turned his face towards her and smiled, as
if this fragile sound were an inadequate response to his drumming.

When he returned to his singing an invisible
web had already been spun between their eyes. She no longer watched his hands
on the
drumskin
but his mouth. His lips were full,
evenly so, rich but firmly designed, but the way he held them was like an offer
of fruit. They never closed tightly or withdrew by the slightest contraction,
but remained offered.

His singing was offered to her in this cup of
his mouth, and she drank it intently, without spilling a drop of this
incantation of desire. Each note was the brush of his mouth upon her. His
singing grew exalted and the drumming deeper and sharper and it showered upon
her heart and body. Drum - drum - drum - drum - drum - upon her heart, she was
the drum, her skin was taut under his hands, and the drumming vibrated through
the rest of her body. Wherever he rested his eyes, she felt the drumming of his
fingers upon her stomach, her breasts, her hips. His eyes rested on her naked
feet in sandals and they beat an answering rhythm. His eyes rested on the
indented waist where the hips began to swell out, and she felt possessed by his
song. When he stopped drumming he left his hands spread on the
drumskin
, as if he did not want to remove his hands from
her body, and they continued to look at each other and then away as if fearing
everyone had seen the desire flowing between them.

But when they danced he changed. The direct,
the inescapable way he placed his knees between hers, as if implanting the
rigidity of his desire. He held her firmly, so encompassed that every movement
they made was made as one body. He held her head against his, with a physical
finiteness, as if for eternity. His desire became a center of gravity, a final
welding. He was not much taller than she but held himself proudly, and when she
raised her eyes into his, his eyes thrust into her very being, so sensually
direct that she could not bear their radiance, their claim. Fever shone in his
face like moonlight. At the same time a strange wave of anger appeared which
she felt and could not understand.

When the dance ended, his bow was a farewell,
as finite as his desire had been.

She waited in anguish and bewilderment.

He went back to his singing and drumming but no
longer offered them to her.

Yet she knew he had desired her, and why was he
destroying it now? Why?

Her anxiety grew so violent she wanted to stop
the drumming, stop the others from dancing. But she checked this impulse,
sensing it would estrange him. There was his pride. There was this strange
mixture of passivity and aggression in him. In music he had been glowing and
soft and offered; in the dance, tyrannical. She must wait. She must respect the
ritual.

The music stopped, he came to her table, sat
down and gave her a smile mixed with a contraction of pain.

“I know,” he said. “I know…”

“You know?”

“I know, but it cannot be,” he said very
gently. And then suddenly the anger overflowed: “For me, it’s everything or
nothing. I’ve known this before…a woman like you. Desire. It’s desire, but not
for
me. You don’t know me.
It’s for my race, it’s for a sensual power we
have.”

He reached for her wrists and spoke close to
her face: “It destroys me. Everywhere desire, and in the ultimate giving,
withdrawal. Because I am African. What do you know of me? I sing and drum and
you desire me. But I’m not an entertainer. I’m a mathematician, a composer, a
writer.” He looked at her severely, the fullness of his mouth difficult to
compress in anger but his eyes lashing: “You wouldn’t come to Ile
Joyeuse
and be my wife and bear me black children and wait
patiently upon my Negro grandmother!”

Sabina answered him with equal vehemence,
throwing her hair away from her face, and lowering the pitch of her voice until
it sounded like an insult: “I’ll tell you one thing: if it were only what you
say, I’ve had that, and it didn’t hold me, it was not enough. It was
magnificent, but it didn’t hold me. You’re destroying everything, with your
bitterness. You’re angry, you’ve been hurt…”

“Yes, it’s true, I’ve been hurt, and by a woman
who resembled you. When you first came in, I thought it was she…”

“My name is Sabina.”

“I don’t trust you, I don’t trust you at all.”

But when she rose to dance with him, he opened
his arms and as she rested her head on his shoulder he looked down at her face
drained of all anger and bitterness.

Mambo’s studio was situated in
Patchen
Place, a street without issue. An iron railing half
blocked its entrance, like an entrance to a prison. The houses all being identical
added to this impression of an institution where all variations in the human
personality would be treated like eccentricities and symptoms of
disintegration.

Sabina hated this street. She always considered
it a trap. She was certain that the lie detector had seen her enter and would
wait at the gate to see her come out. How simple it would be for him to find
out who lived there, whom she visited, which house she came out of in the
morning.

She imagined him searching every house, reading
all the names on the letter boxes: E. E. Cummings, Djuna Barnes, Mambo of
Mambo’s Nightclub, known to everyone.