A Spy in the House of Love (8 page)

It seemed to Sabina that she could have offered
her services or been of great value in that profession.

I am an international spy in the house of
love.

When the anxiety became absolutely intolerable
it was transmuted into playfulness. The excitement and risks appeared as a
highly flavored, highly humorous game. Then she shifted her position entirely
to that of a child escaping surveillance and being amused by her own ingenuity.
Then she passed from secrecy to a need of boasting openly of her maneuvers and
would describe them with such gaiety that it would shock her hearers. Both
anxiety and humor became interchangeable. The pretenses, escapades, trickeries
seemed to her in her humorous moods like gay and gallant efforts at protecting
everyone from the cruelties of existence for which she was not responsible.
Wits and good acting were employed for such justifiable ends: to protect human
beings from unbearable truths.

But no one who listened ever shared her sudden
gaiety: in their glances she read condemnations. Her laughter seemed a
desecration, a mockery of what should be considered tragic. She could see in
their eyes the wish that she should fall from this incandescent trapeze on
which she walked with the aid of delicate Japanese paper umbrellas, for no
guilty party has a right to such adroitness and to live only by its power to
balance over the rigidities of life which dictated a choice, according to its
taboos against multiple lives. No one would share with her this irony and
playfulness against the rigidities of life itself; no one would applaud when
she succeeded by her ingenuity in defeating life’s limitations.

These moments when she reached a humorous peak
above the morass of dangers, the smothering swamps of guilt, were the ones when
everyone left her alone,
unabsolved
; they seemed to
be awaiting her hour of punishment after living like a spy in the house of many
loves, for avoiding exposure, for defeating the sentinels watching definite
boundaries, for passing without passports and permits from one love to another.

Every spy’s life had ended in ignominious
death.

She stood waiting for the light to change at
the crossroad of the beach town.
What startled Sabina and made her examine the cyclist waiting beside her was
the extraordinary brilliance of his large eyes. They shone with a wet, silver
sparkle which was almost frightening because it highlighted the tumultuous
panic close to the surface. The molten silver was disquieting, like blinding
reflectors on the edge of annihilation by darkness. She was caught in the
contagion of this panic, the transparent film of precious stone trembling, about
to be sucked in by a hidden cyclone.

It was only later that she noticed the
delicately chiseled face, the small nose, the mouth modeled by gentleness,
unrelated to the deeper disturbance of the eyes, a very young man’s mouth, a
pure design on the face not yet enslaved by his feelings. These feelings not
yet known to him, had not yet acid-bitten through his body. His gestures were
free and nimble, the gestures of an adolescent, restless and light. The eyes
alone contained all the fever.

He had driven his bicycle like a racing car or
an airplane.

He had come down upon her as if he did not see
trees, cars, people, and almost overlooked the stop signal.

To free herself of the shock his eyes had given
her she sought to diminish their power by thinking: “They are just beautiful
eyes, they are just passionate eyes, young men rarely have such passionate
eyes, they are just more alive than other eyes.” But no sooner had she said
this to herself to exorcise his spell than a deeper instinct in her added: “He
has seen something other young men have not seen.”

The red light changed to green; he gave a wild
spurt to his pedaling, so swift that she had no time to step on the curb, then
just as wildly he stopped and asked her the way to the beach in a breathless
voice which seemed to miss a beat. The voice matched the eyes as his tan,
healthy, smooth skin did not.

The tone in which he asked directions was as if
the beach were a shelter to which he was speeding away from grave dangers.

He was no handsomer than the other young men
she had seen in the place, but his eyes left a memory and stirred in her a wild
rebellion against the place. With bitter irony she remembered ruins she had
seen in Guatemala, and an American visitor saying: “I hate ruins, I hate
dilapidation, tombs.” But this new town at the beach was infinitely more static
and more disintegrated than the ancient ruins. The clouds of monotony,
uniformity, which hung over the new, neat mansions, the impeccable lawns, the
dustless garden furniture. The men and women at the beach, all in one
dimension, without any magnetism to bring them together, zombies of
civilization, in elegant dress with dead eyes.

Why was she here? Waiting for Alan to end his
work, Alan who had promised to come. But the longing for other places kept her
awake.

She walked and collided against a sign which
read: “This is the site of the most costly church on Long Island.”

She walked. At midnight the town was deserted.
Everyone was at home with bottles from which they hoped to extract a gaiety bottled
elsewhere.

“It’s the kind of drinking one does at wakes,”
thought Sabina, looking into the bars, where limp figures clutched at bottles
containing oblivion.

At one o’clock she looked for a drug store to
buy sleeping pills. They were closed. She walked. At two o’clock she was worn
out but still tormented by a place which refused to have feasts on the street,
dances, fireworks, orgies of guitars, marimbas, shouts of delight, tournaments
of poetry and courtships.

At three o’clock she swung towards the beach to
ask the moon why she had allowed one of her night children to become so lost in
a place long ago deprived of human life.

A car stopped beside her, and a very tall,
white-haired Irish policeman addressed her courteously.

“Can I give you a lift home?”

“I couldn’t sleep,” said Sabina. “I was looking
for a drug store to buy sleeping pills, or aspirin. They’re all closed. I was
trying to walk until I felt sleepy…”

“Boy trouble?” he said, his white-haired head
very gallantly held with a suave rectitude which did not come from his
policeman’s training but from some deeper pride in rectitude itself as the
image of man’s erotic pride.

But the words so inadequate that they inhibited
whatever she would have liked to confide in him, for fear of another adolescent
stunted comment. His appearance of maturity was belied by the clumsy words. So
she said vaguely: “I’m homesick for all the beach towns I have known, Capri,
Mallorca, the south of France, Venice, the Italian Riviera, South America. “

“I understand that,” he said. “I was homesick
when I first came to this country from Ireland.”

“A year ago I was dancing on the beach under
palm trees. The music was wild, and the waves washed our feet while we danced.”

“Yes, I know. I was a bodyguard for a rich man.
Everybody sat in the port cafes at night. It was like the Fourth of July every
night. Come along, I’ll take you to my home. The wife and kids are asleep, but
I can give you some aspirin.”

She sat beside him. He continued to recall his
life as a bodyguard, when he had traveled all around the world. He controlled
the car without a dissonance.

“I hate this town,” she said vehemently.

He had driven smoothly beside a neat white
house. He said: “Wait here,” and went into the house.

When he returned he was carrying a glass of
water and two aspirin in the palm of his hand. Sabina’s nerves began to
untangle. She took the water and aspirin obediently.

He turned his powerful flashlight upon a bush
in his garden and said: “Look at this!”

In the night she saw flowers of velvet with
black hearts and gold eyes.

“What kind of a flower is that?” she asked, to
please him.

“Roses of Sharon,” he said reverently and with
the purest of Irish accents. “They only grow in Ireland and on Long Island.”

Sabina’s rebellion was subsiding. She felt a
tenderness for the roses of Sharon, for the policeman’s protectiveness, for his
effort to find a substitute for tropical flowers, a little beauty in the
present night.

“I’ll sleep now,” she said. “You can drop me
off at the Penny Cottage.”

“Oh no,” he said, sitting at the wheel. “We’ll
drive around by the sea until you’re so sleepy you can’t bear it anymore. You
can’t sleep, you know, until you find something to be grateful for, you can
never sleep when you’re angry.”

She could not hear very distinctly his long and
rambling stories about his life as a bodyguard, except when he said: “There’s
two of you giving me trouble with homesickness today. The other was a young
fellow in the English Air Corps. Aviator all through the war, seventeen when he
volunteered. He’s grounded now, and he can’t take it. He’s restless and keeps
speeding and breaking traffic laws. The red lights drive him crazy. When I saw
what it was, I stopped giving him tickets. He’s used to airplanes. Being grounded
is tough. I know how he feels.”

She felt the mists of sleep rising from the
ground, bearing the perfume of roses of Sharon; in the sky shone the eyes of
the grounded aviator not yet accustomed to small scales, to shrunken spaces.
There were other human beings attempting vast flights, with a kind policeman as
tall as the crusaders watching over them with a glass of water and two
aspirins; she could sleep now, she could sleep, she could find her bed with his
flashlight shining on the keyhole, his car so smoothly so gently rolling away,
his white hair saying sleep…

Sabina in the telephone booth. Alan had just
said that he was unable to come that day. Sabina felt like sliding down on the
floor and sobbing out the loneliness. She wanted to return to New York but he
begged her to wait.

There were places which were like ancient tombs
in which a day was a century of non-existence. He had said: “Surely you can
wait another day. I’ll be there tomorrow. Don’t be unreasonable. “

She could not explain that perfect lawns,
costly churches, new cement and fresh paint can make a vast tomb without stone
gods to admire, without jewels, or urns full of food for the dead, without
hieroglyphs to decipher.

Telephone wires only carried literal messages,
never the subterranean cries of distress, of desperation. Like telegrams they
delivered only final and finite blows: arrivals, departures, births and deaths,
but no room for fantasies such as: Long Island is a tomb, and one more day in
it would bring on suffocation. Aspirin, Irish policemen, and roses of Sharon
were too gentle a cure for suffocation.

Grounded. Just before she slid down to the
floor, the bottom of the telephone cabin, the bottom of her loneliness, she saw
the grounded aviator waiting to use the telephone. When she came out of the
booth he looked distressed again as he seemed to be by everything that happened
in time of peace. But he smiled when he recognized her, saying: “You told me
the way to the beach.”

“You found it? You liked it?”

“A little flat for my taste. I like rocks and
palm trees. Got used to them in India, during the war.”

War as an abstraction had not yet penetrated
Sabina’s consciousness. She was like the communion seekers who received
religion only in the form of a wafer on the tongue. War as a wafer placed on
her tongue directly by the young aviator came suddenly very close to her, and
she saw that if he shared with her his contempt for the
placidities
of peace it was only to take her straight into the infernal core of war. That
was his world. When he said: “Get your bicycle then, and I’ll show you a better
beach further on…” it was not only to escape from fashionable reclining figures
on the beach, from golf players and human barnacles glued to damp bar flanks,
it was to bicycle into his inferno. As soon as they started to walk along the
beach, he began to talk:

“I’ve had five years of war as a rear gunner.
Been to India a couple of years, been to North Africa, slept in the desert,
crashed several times, made about one hundred missions, saw all kinds of
things… Men dying, men yelling when they’re trapped in burning planes. Their
arms charred, their hands like claws of animals. The first time I was sent to
the field after a crash…the smell of burning flesh. It’s sweet and sickening,
and it sticks to you for days. You can’t wash it off. You can’t get rid of it.
It haunts you. We had good laughs, though, laughs all the time. We laughed
plenty. We would steal prostitutes and push them into the beds of the men who
didn’t like women. We had drunks that lasted several days. I liked that life.
India. I’d like to go back. This life here, what people talk about, what they
do, think, bores me. I liked sleeping in the desert. I saw a black woman giving
birth… She worked on the fields carrying dirt for a new airfield. She stopped
carrying dirt to give birth under the wing of the plane, just like that, and
then bound the kid in some rags and went back to work. Funny to see the big
plane, so modern, and this half naked black woman giving birth and then continuing
to carry dirt in pails for an airfield. You know, only two of us came back
alive of the bunch I started with. We played pranks, though. My buddies always
warned me: ‘Don’t get grounded; once you’re grounded you’re done for.’ Well,
they grounded me too. Too many rear gunners in the service. I didn’t want to
come home. What’s civilian life? Good for old maids. It’s a rut. It’s drab.
Look at this: the young girls giggle, giggle at nothing. The boys are after me.
Nothing ever happens. They don’t laugh hard, and they don’t yell. They don’t
get hurt, and they don’t die, and they don’t laugh either.”