Winter of artifice; three novelettes (9 page)

He moved like a cat. Great softness. Yet when he wanted to he could show powerful muscles. He believed in concealing one's strength.

They walked out into the sun, he looking like a Spanish grandee. He could look straight into the sun, and the tenseness of his will when he said, for instance, "I want," made him rigid from head to foot, like silex.

As she watched him bending over so tenderly to pick up an insect from the road in order to lay it safely on a leaf, addressing it in a soft, whimsical tone preaching to it about its recklessness in thus crossing a road on which so many automobiles passed, she asked herself why it was that as a child she could only remember him as a cruel person. Why could she remember no tenderness or care on his part.^ Nothing but fits of anger and severity, of annoyance when they were noisy, of beatings, of a cold reserved face at meals.

As she watched him playing with the concierge's dog she wondered why she could not remember him ever sitting down to play with them; she wondered whether this conception she had of her father's cruelty was not entirely imaginary. She could not piece together his gentleness with animals and his hardness towards his children. He lived in his world like a scientist occupied with the phenomena of nature. The ways of insects aroused his curiosity; he liked to experiment, but the phenomena which the lives of his children offered, their secrets, their perplexities, had no interest for him, or rather, they disturbed him.

It was really a myopia of the soul.

The day after he arrived he was unable to move from his bed. A special medicine had to be found. Samba, the elevator man, was sent out to hunt for it. The bus driver was dispatched to get a special brand of English crackers. Paris had to be phoned to make sure the musical magazines were being forwarded. Telegrams and letters, telephone calls, Samba perspiring, the bus man covered with dust, postpone the hairdresser, order a special menu for dinner, telephone the doctor, fetch a newspaper, Samba perspiring, the elevator running up and down.. ..

There were no other guests in the hotel—the place seemed to be run for them. Their meals were brought to the room. Mosquito nettings were installed, the furniture was changed around, his linen sheets with large initials were placed on the bed, his silver hairbrushes on the dresser, the plumber ordered to subdue a noisy water pipe, the rusty shutters were oiled, the proprietor was informed that all hotel rooms should have double doors. Noise was his greatest enemy. His nerves, as vibrant as the strings of a violin, had endowed or cursed him with uncanny hearing. A fly in the room could prevent him from sleeping. He had to put cotton in his ears in order to dull his oversensitive hearing.

He began talking about his childhood, so vividly that she thought they were back in Spain. She could feel again the noonday heat, could hear the beaded curtains parting, footsteps on the tiled floors, the cool green shadows of shuttered rooms, women in white negligees, the smell of carnations, the holy water, the dried palms at the head of the bed, the pictures of the Virgin in lace and satin, wicker armchairs, the servants singing in the courtyard

He used to read under his bed, by the light of a candle so that his father would not find him out. He was given only

one penny a week to spend. He had to make cigarettes out of straw. He was always hungry.

They laughed together.

He didn't have enough money for the Merry-go-Round. His mother used to sew at night so that he could afford to rent a bicycle the next day.

He looked out of the window from his bed and saw the birds sitting on the telegraph wires, one on each wire.

"Look," he said, "I'll sing you the melody they make sitting up there." And he sang it. "It's all in the key of humor."

"When I was a child I used to write stories in which I was always left an orphan and forced to face the world alone."

"Did you want to get rid of me?" asked her father.

"I don't think so. I think I only wanted to struggle with life alone. I was proud, and that also prevented me from coming to you until I felt ready...."

"What happened in all those stories?"

"I met with gigantic difficulties and obstacles. I overcame them. I was handed a bigger portion of suffering than is usual. Without father or mother I fought the world, angry seas, hunger, monstrous stepparents, and there were mysteries, pursuits, tortures, all kinds of danger. . .."

"Don't you think you are still seeking that?"

"Perhaps. Then there was another story, a story of a boat in a garden. Suddenly I was sailing down a river and I went round and round for twenty years without landing anywhere."

"Was that because you didn't have me?"

"I don't know. Perhaps I was waiting to become a woman. In all the fairy tales where the child is taken away she either returns when she is twenty, or the father returns to the daughter when she is twenty."

"He waits till she gets beyond the stage of having to have her nose blown. He waits for the interesting age." • • • •

Her father's jealousy began with the reading of her diary. Fie observed that after two years of obsessional yearning for him she had finally exhausted her suffering and obtained serenity. After serenity she had fallen in love with an Irish boy and then with a violinist. He was offended that she had not died completely, that she had not spent the rest of her life yearning for him. He did not understand that she had continued to love him better by living than by dying for him. She had loved him in life, lived for him and created for him. She had written the diary for him. She had loved him by falling in love at the age of eleven with the ship's captain who might have taken her back to Spain. She had loved him by taking his place at her mother's side and becoming logical and intellectual in imitation of him, not through any natural gifts for cither. She had loved him by playing the father to her brothers, the husband to her mother, by giving courage, strength, by denying her feminine, emotional self. She had loved him in life creatively by writing about him.

It is true that she did not die altogether—she lived in creations. Nor did she wear black nor turn her back on men and life.

But when she became aware of his jealousy she began immediately to give him what he desired. Understanding his jealousy she began to relate the incidents of her Hfe in a deprecatory manner, in a mocking tone, in such a way that he might feel she had not loved deeply anything or anyone but him. Understanding his desire to be exclusively loved, to be at the core of every life he touched, she could not bring herself to talk with fervor or admiration of all she loved or

enjoyed. To be so aware of his feelings forced her into a role. She gave a color to her past which could be interpreted as: nothing that happened before you came was of any importance. . . .

The result was that nothing appeared in its true light and that she deformed her true self.

Today her father, looking at her, holding her book in his hand, studying her costumes, exploring her home, studying her ideas, says: "You are an Amazon. Until you came I felt that I was dying. Now I feel renewed and strengthened."

Her own picture of her life gave him the opportunity he loved of passing judgment, an ideal judgment upon the pattern of it.

But she was so happy to have found a father, a father with a strong will, a wisdom, an infallible judgment, that she forgot for the moment everything she knew, surrendered her own certainties. She forgot her own efforts, her own wisdom. It was so sweet to have a father, to beheve that there could exist someone who was in hfe so many years ahead of her, and who looked back upon hers and her errors, who could guide and save her, give her strength. She relinquished her convictions just to hear him say: "In that case you were too believing," or: "That was a wasted piece of sacrifice. Why save junk? Let the failures die. It is something in them that make them failures."

To have a father, the seer, the god. She found it hard to look him in the eyes. She never looked at the food he put in his mouth. It seemed to her that vegetarianism was the right diet for a divine being. She had such a need to worship, to relinquish her power. It made her feel more the woman.

She thought again of his remark: "You are an Amazon. You are a force." She looked at herself in the mirror with surprise. Certainly not the body of an Amazon. 80

What was it her father saw? She was underweight, so light on her feet that a caricaturist had once pictured her as having floated up to the ceihng Hke a balloon and everybody trying to catch her with brooms and ladders. Not the woman in the mirror, then, but her words, her writing, her work. Strength in creation, in life, ideas. She had proved capable of building a world for herself. Amazon! Capable of every audacity in life, but vulnerable in love ^_

She translated his remark to herself thus:(3^henever anyone says you are they mean / want you to ^^ He wanted her to be an Amazon. One breast cut off as in the myth, so as to be able to use the bow and arrow. The other breast far too tender, too vulnerable.

Why? Because an Amazon did not need a father. Nor a lover, nor a husband. An Amazon was a law and a world all to herself.

He was abdicating his father role. A woman-ruled world was no hardship to him, the artist, for in it he had a privileged place. He had all the sweetness of her one breast, together with all her strength. He could lie down on that breast and dream, for at his side was a woman who carried a bow and arrow to defend him. He, the writer, the musician, the sculptor, the painter, he could lie down and dream by the side of the Amazon who could give him nourishment and fight the world for him as well

She looked at him. He was her own height. He was a little bowed by fatigue and the thought of his own frailness. His nerves, his sensitiveness, his dependence on women. He looked slenderer and paler. He said: "I used to be afraid that my present wife might die. \\'hat would I do without a wife? I used to plan to die with her. But now I have you. I know you are strong."

Many men had said this to her before. She had not minded. 81

Protection was a rhythm. They could exchange roles. But this phrase from a father was different... A father.

All through the world . . . looking for a father . . . looking naively for a father . . . falling in love with gray hairs . . . the symbol . . . every symbol of the father ... all through the world ... an orphan ... in need of man the leader . . . to be made woman . . , and again to be asked ... to be the mother . . . always the mother . . . always to draw the strength she had, but never to know where to rest, where to lay down her head and find new strength . . . always to draw it out of herself . . . from herself . . . strength ... to pour out love . . . all through the world seeking a father . .. loving the father ... awaiting the father ... and finding the child. • • • •

His lumbago and the almost complete paralysis it brought about seemed to her Hke a stiffness in the joints of his soul, from acting and pretending. He had assumed so many roles, had disciplined himself to appear always gay, always immaculate, always shaved, always faultless; he played at love so often, that it was as if he suffered from a cramp due to the false positions too long sustained. He could never relax. The lumbago was like the stiffness and brittleness of emotions which he had constantly directed. It was something like pain for him to move about easily in the realm of impulses. He was now as incapable of an impulse as his body was incapable of moving, incapable of abandoning himself to the great uneven flow of life with its necessary disorder and ugliness. Every gesture of meticulous care taken to eat without vulgarity, to wash his teeth, to disinfect his hands, to behave ideally, to sustain the illusion of perfection, was like a rusted hinge, for when a pattern and a goal, when an aesthetic order penetrates so deeply into the motions of life, it eats into its spontaneity like rust, and this mental orientation, this forcing of 82

nature to follow a pattern, this constant defeat of nature and control of it, had become rust, the rust which had finally paralyzed his body. . . .

She wondered how far back she would have to trace the current of his life to find the moment at which he had thus become congealed into an attitude. At what moment had his will petrified his emotions? What shock, what incident had produced this mineralization such as took place under the earth, due to pressure?

When he talked about his childhood she could see a luminous child always dancing, always running, always alert, always responsive. I lis whole nature was on tiptoes with expectancy, hope and ardor. His nose sniffed the wind with high expectations of stomis, tragedies, adventures, beauty. The eyes did not retreat under the brow, but were opened wide like a clairvoyant's.

She could not trace the beginning of his disease, this cancer of jealousy. Perhaps far back in his childhood, in his jealousy of his delicate sister who was preferred by his father, in his jealousy of the man who took his fiancee away from him, in the betrayal of his fiancee, in the immense shock of pain which sent him out of Spain.

Today if he read a cHpping which did not give him the first place in the realm of music, he suffered. If a friend turned his admiration away. ... If in a room he was not the center of attention. . . . Wherever there was a rival, he felt the fever and the poison of self-doubt, the fear of defeat. In all his relations with man and woman there had to be a battle and a triumph.

He began by telling her first of all that she owed him nothing; then he began to look for all that there was in her of himself.

What he noted in her diary were only the passages which 83

revealed their sameness. She began naturally enough to think that he loved in her only what there was of himself, that beyond the realm of self-discovery, self-love, there was no curiosity.

Her father said: "Although I was prevented from training you, your blood obeyed me." As he said this his face shone with the luminosity of early portraits, this luminosity the one trait which had never faded from her memory. He glowed with a joyous Greek wisdom.