Caracole, page 4
He’d carry her off to the city, which he imagined to be as shadowy and various as the woods, though its spires were all peopled.
The moon had risen still higher. He came to a clearing that dimly shone in its cold light. Something … segmented … rustled as it emerged out of a distant ride of trees. Gabriel stood still beside a tree, downwind, and watched and watched.
It was a porcupine leading four of its pups in a straight line toward an apple tree. Slowly and methodically the creatures nosed the fallen apples into a small circle; they seemed so finicky about arranging them. The mother porcupine rolled over on the bed of fruit and wriggled from side to side. When she regained her feet she had speared a dozen apples on her quills. The four pups then took turns rolling in the apples. Now the whole caravan (he could smell the juice) slowly marched off under its ripe, bobbing baggage.
On and on he went, through broad fields, past an abandoned quarry, into a pine woods, its paths slippery with dry needles. He tried to memorize his route so that he could retrace it. Since that task seemed hopeless (turn right at the tall pine) he transformed fear into courage. “I’ll never go back,” he said out loud, but the words struck him as dangerous and he repeated a spell Angelica had taught him. In his room he had felt so full of energy and resolve that he’d known he could travel forever without tiring; but now he was already worn out and hungry. He was angry at Angelica, as though she were deliberately hiding herself.
Suddenly he came to a knoll from which he saw the camp. A rooster was already crowing, dawn couldn’t be far away. A log rolled off a smoking fire and left a trail of fading rubies behind it. In a sudden yellow flare of flames he could see the vague outlines of three huts. Once Angelica had told him that in the South her people lived on islands in a marsh they plied in skiffs. They had fashioned their houses from tall reeds, burnt the dried dung of water buffalo, fished with tridents and suffered the attacks of wild pigs, which could slash an arm off a body with a single swipe of a razor-sharp tusk. She’d also told him, without a trace of shame, that her relatives were skilled thieves; she’d demonstrated her own talent by picking Gabriel’s pocket of the things she had, like a magician, planted in them earlier. Here in the North they’d adapted to a new land and made their huts from birches they covered no longer with reed mats but with animal pelts. They ate the barnyard animals they could poach. One of the boys had stolen a rifle and ammunition and trained himself to shoot game.
Their real worry was something Angelica could scarcely explain nor Gabriel grasp—a religious scruple about which of the unfamiliar plants and animals they were eating might be taboo. Owls, for instance, they’d decided were forbidden since they were predators, which linked them to the unholy pelican; nor could her people eat or even touch shoats, related as they must be to their ancient foe, the wild pig; nor could they fish the streams—but Gabriel never learned why. The only other thing that perplexed them was how to orient their huts, since the stars here were new and they couldn’t be certain the sun behaved normally; their houses had to face a particular, distant shrine. In no other regard did her people appear to be religious in the least.
A hoarse, hissing whisper filled the air—could the sound be coming from that dog? Gabriel squinted and peered at a lean, murderous-looking animal straining at the taut end of a chain. Yes, the whisper coincided with the dog’s opening and closing jaws. The animal must have barked itself dumb. Another hiss and the rattle of another chain—a second dog, smaller and feebler, dragged a chain out of the middle hut. The dogs had picked up his scent. Gabriel had imagined he could slip into a tent, scoop up a sleeping Angelica and spirit her away. But now he remembered the men with gold teeth and the knife they’d tossed from hand to hand as they guarded the old queen.
A man emerged from the closest hut, stretched. He picked up a calabash on the end of a stick and gave it a shake; a soft glow filtered out of tiny holes pricked in the shell, a greenish glow pulsing irregularly. With his lantern in hand he came straight toward Gabriel and, just as the boy was preparing to make a dash for it, the man stopped, straddled, lowered his head as though listening to music, then began to urinate—a thick, steaming flow that poured on and on, even as the man yawned and stretched and the stream waggled from side to side, getting the man’s thigh wet. At last the water stopped, stopped again, spurted and stopped. The man then rattled the calabash and once again the faint glow brightened; from this distance Gabriel guessed that it had been stuffed with lightning bugs.
At last the man was back in his hut, the voiceless dogs had settled down, the fire seemed nearly extinct. The sky was dark, the brilliant stars confident that night would last forever. Gabriel decided to wait for dawn, when Angelica was bound to show herself, to go for a walk alone.
He slept. In his dream they boarded a flying bed with the old queen, who turned out to be as jolly as a sailor on shore leave except when it came to sharing her food, which she hoarded in a box along with bits of broken glass. Guards were trying to drag him off the bed until he explained it wasn’t a carpet—
He awoke to find himself being hauled to his feet by two men. It was day. They pulled him violently over the ground by the wrists; when he attempted to stand and walk between them, one of them twisted his arm behind his back until he thought it would snap. His knees melted in pain—and the men hurried on, dragging him behind them past one of the whispering dogs. The dog’s eyes were nearly slit shut by the grip of the restraining collar.
They entered a hut and Gabriel was thrown on the hard mud floor. One of his guides planted something—his foot—between the boy’s shoulder blades and pushed his face into the earth. His heart beat against the ground and his lungs pressed up against the foot in his back. His wrists burned as though they were still being held. The moist ground soaked his clothes. He tried to will his breath into evening out so that he might hear something above its roar. At last his gasps did subside, and the foot on his spine lifted. A woman was speaking, an old woman. She talked on and on. Gabriel wished he understood her, though he suspected she might not be uttering words but rather one long, million-syllable complaint.
At last he was brought to his knees and saw the queen sitting cross-legged on a velvet cushion, her arm draped around Angelica’s shoulder, the girl half-reclining on a horse-skin—ah! he recognized the hide of his beloved mount, Heart’s Delight. He hated Angelica, as though she had personally flayed the animal alive.
Her eyes passed over him dully and returned to her lap. A single spot of sunlight, leaking through a chink in the curved roof, concentrated on her hand, which looked thinner and paler.
The old lady was sniffing tobacco she tapped out of a tin can painted with red and black hex signs. She balanced the tobacco on the long, stained nail of her little finger, then sniffed. A look of delicious pain infused her face, her eyes closed to meditate on the itch, finally she tucked her head under her wing to sneeze into her padded sleeve. A moment later she was chattering again. Gabriel glanced over his shoulder at one of his captors, a big naked man whose head was bent in respect. He studied the old woman’s mouth, with its single black tooth and white whiskers and the dark lines in the skin that radiated away from it. At some unexpected moment it smiled and a knowing laugh was shaken out of it. Angelica had lowered her eyes.
“Crawl forward,” Angelica said.
“What?”
“Do as I say,” the girl insisted. “She wants to touch you. She’s never touched one of your people before.”
Gabriel obeyed. The old woman picked up an ivory fly whisk, and waved its horse hairs around her face and then shook them over her right shoulder, as though to ward off evil, but jovially, casually. He could smell the cherry-scented tobacco on her breath. He saw she was no bigger than a child, a tiny thing he could easily lift and carry away. It struck him as absurd that the guards, big young animals, should obey this wizened prattler. Why doesn’t each person go his own way, hunt his own food, pitch his own tent?
The queen touched his face with her dry, papery palm. She patted him. She laughed, as though he were a funny pet. She ran a hand down his neck and over his shoulder and back to his face. As she stroked him words, somewhat fainter but no less complacent than before, worked their way out of her mouth; he could feel them humming in the bones of her fingers.
“She asked what torture or disease has ruined your face.”
Gabriel sometimes hoped that his broken-out skin wasn’t really noticeable after all. He had thought he might have exaggerated it beyond all bounds—out of existence, in fact. But no, the horror he felt in front of the mirror this old woman felt looking at him. He couldn’t leave home, after all. In the city people would run away from him. Angelica was not the first of many women in his life but the first and last. She had been inexplicably kind to him.
“Tell her it’s something that happens to men of my people when they’re young. Tell her it’ll go away.”
Angelica translated and, after another sniff of tobacco, the woman’s sneeze ended in a nod of assent and five more minutes of unbroken baby talk. As she talked she half stood, sounded now urgent, now angry. Pointed with her ringed hand, pointed elsewhere with the ivory whisk. Behind him Gabriel could hear steps, grunts, leather creaking. At last a line of small enamel boxes had been placed on the faded carpet before her—a carpet whose rose and thistle pattern he recognized: filched from the green room, where its bulk, rolled up for decades, had sometimes served as a rampart when he and his brothers and sisters had played war. He wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the children themselves had walked the rug here in exchange for a morsel of food, a lewd pat or a few grains of tobacco.
“She will cure your skin,” Angelica announced.
A silver dish—a finger bowl from some country house or other, judging from the crest that could be seen sliding under the water—was carried in; the queen dipped her hand in it and trickled water over his face. Not water at all. Something odorless and tasteless that burned and evaporated. The old hands were working expertly, mixing ingredients from the boxes into a grey-green mud that smelled of the earth, camomile, rosehips and centaury. As she concocted the medicine she sighed and chanted in another voice. At last the medicine was ready. Gabriel was led to a deeper, darker corner of the hut, where Angelica ordered him to lie down on his back. He could see fleas jumping in the dirty blanket.
As the old hands gently massaged his face and worked the mud into his skin he sensed they were opening cabinets of his feelings, springing open secret panels. Tears spurted out from under his closed lids. The old woman chuckled; she didn’t seem surprised.
She left. For an hour he lay under the hardening cool mud. Second by second he felt it tightening over his skin. Although he needed to urinate he didn’t dare move. Outside, a dog’s chain snapped and clanked. A mother was talking to her baby. Something savory—cooking meat and something else—perfumed the air, though he couldn’t hear it sizzling. As he idly attended the mother’s words, it came to him this was the secret language he sometimes heard his brothers and sisters speaking, something he had assumed was a pig Latin they’d invented. Now he guessed he knew where they went at night and sometimes stayed for a day or more, why they frequently showed no signs of hunger—even how one of the boys had been able to pick his pocket of some new white string. The younger children had melted into this tribe; he had to admit that their own name had become a sieve, the world ran through it, it couldn’t retain a thing.
The old woman had been the first person ever to look hard into his face and touch it. Angelica may have kissed him, but she’d closed her eyes. People preferred to avert their eyes rather than look into his face. And the pustules grew, reddened, broke, spread, became quilted on this disc of a face he was obliged to tilt up to every comer, push forward as if it were his finest wheel of cheese, ripe at last. This shame, this bleu, he went to inspect in the mirror every morning, each time detecting an improvement, a more normal color—which by noon he admitted was an illusion.
The fleas weren’t biting him; maybe they were drowsing too. Far away some older children were splashing in the stream. The mother with the baby had moved and begun to pound something, clothes on a rock, grain, he couldn’t tell. The breeze was winnowing the leaves, casting them out in generous arcs, the grain pattering to the stone, the chaff rising in dusty golden clouds, out of which his own face emerged, shining, smooth, the features eaten away.
“Now,” a voice from the radiance was saying, “she will—Gabriel! Wake up!—she’ll take off the mud.” Angelica held him in her arms as he felt his brittle mask being chipped away with a small but heavy hammer. The light hurt his eyes. He started to raise his hand to his face, but Angelica restrained him. The old woman spoke—terribly amused with herself—and Angelica translated: “You are safe now. But today and tonight you cannot look at your reflection or touch your face. If you obey these rules, you can study yourself every day after and your face will be perfect. But if you cheat once while you are here, your face will go back to the way it was.”
Gabriel searched their eyes. Was he as hideous as ever? He couldn’t find a trace of malice in them. Angelica, in fact, seemed to marvel rather stupidly as her gaze roamed over him. He shut one eye and then the other to squint at the faint curve of his nose, dim radiance of the moon by day. He couldn’t tell a thing.
There was nothing to do but thank the queen and rejoice. She held out her hand. Angelica told him to kiss it and he did. The audience was over; he and Angelica withdrew.
That night they were to be married, she told him. All that was required of him was compliance. He had always fretted over every little thing, and every chore, from dressing to breathing, could become momentous as he contemplated it out of the sustained shock of boredom. But now the solace of obedience to these people comforted him as he was led through the intricate turns of a dance by hands that swung him into place, promenaded him, drew him into a circle or flung him twirling outward.
All day and into the early evening Gabriel and Angelica were kept apart. Gabriel was put in the special care of a man who spoke the boy’s language with an agreeable flair. With ten other men (boys were kept out) they huddled in their hut, smoked tobacco in a pipe and joked and laughed. The jokes all turned on sexual innuendo, as his guide explained. The word for turtle sounded the same as the word for cuckold, boxes for testicles, fig for vagina, sparrow for penis, sweeping for intercourse. Marriage was expressed in a periphrasis that meant “to the multitude,” i.e., going to join the conjugal many; there was another simpler word for marriage, but it was unlucky to pronounce since the dead might hear it, envy the happy couple and cause them to fall ill.
A bullock’s lung, clammy and veined, went the rounds and the men drank strong drink from it. Each of them rose to mime a lewd story, many of the plots, inexplicably, involving priests buggered while at their prayers. Gabriel couldn’t understand exactly what was being done nor why it was funny.
The other men treated him with kindness; they kept thumping him on the back and feeding him chunks of lamb with their fingers (Gabriel’s guide told him to eat only with his right hand). He wondered at their notions of hygiene, since many of them stank, their breath foul from the pale leaves of fermented cabbage they were continually fishing out of a big jar. All of them were naked; only one young man his own age had a whole body. The rest were missing something—an eye or a hand or teeth. Or a foot was withered or a flank scarred (wild pig, no doubt). But the liquor made Gabriel overlook these deformities; it even made him stop wondering if his own face had been cured.
When darkness fell the men led him to the stream, where they undressed him and bathed him. The two who had captured him this morning stood on either side of him and chanted something in unison while an old man with a braided beard hauled water up in a brass receptacle (to Gabriel it looked like—it probably was—a stolen spittoon) and presented it to the four cardinal points, then reversed it over Gabriel’s head. He asked his guide what it all meant, but the guide just giggled and shrugged: “These ways … beautiful, no? I love the old ways. Very religious.” He kissed his bunched fingers with a loud smack: “Very folkloric!”
Drawing him into a quiet, scarcely moving pool (the sky above was the dull silver of weathered pine boards), the men immersed him up to the neck and bathed him all over. Gabriel closed his eyes and relaxed into the cool, sustaining water as hands, small and large, smooth and rough, rubbed his shoulders, his arms, his back, his buttocks. Three little boys had joined the party once the men had left the hut; they now took turns diving to the bottom of the pool and stroking Gabriel’s calves and thighs. Gabriel smiled and surrendered; they even patted his sex, which had contracted in the cold water. This was wisdom, he told himself. He who had slept alone, walked out into the world each morning alone, like an old man who’d outlived his family, this was wisdom to surrender to these foreign, possibly dangerous hands (white boy prepared for sacrifice), wisdom to become a lily floating on this motionless, running water, nosed by loving fish, the drowned man saved by his brothers, who were changed by a sorcerer into a school of sea trout. They bore him back to shore on cold, powerful tails—then left him there to revive, pale lad on white sand. His departing brothers plunged seaward, bodies arcing in turns above the water.
