Collected Stories Page 34

  Kamrowski had grown to love her. Unfortunately, he was even less articulate in speaking about such things than he would have been in trying to write about them. He could not make the girl understand the tenderness he felt toward her. He was not a man who could even say, I love you. The words would not come off his tongue, not even in the intimacies of the night. He could only speak with his body and his hands. With her childlike mind, the girl must have found him altogether baffling. She could not have been able to believe that he loved her, but she must have been equally unable to fathom his reason for staying with her if he did not. Kamrowski would never know how she explained these things to herself or if she tried to explain them or if she was really as mindless as she had seemed—not looking for reasons for things but only accepting that which happens to be as simply being. No. He would never know how. The dark figure in the doorway of the hotel, even mistaken at first for that of a man, did not come into the light. It remained in shadow. Morena. She called him Rubio sometimes when she touched him. Rubio meant blond one. Sometimes he would answer Morena which means dark. Morena. That’s all she was. Something dark. Dark of skin, dark of hair, dark of eyes. But mystery can be loved as well as knowledge and there could be little doubt that Kamrowski loved her.

  Nevertheless, a change became evident after they had lived together for less than a year, which may not seem a long time but was actually a relationship of unprecedented duration in the life of Kamrowski. This change seemed to have several reasons, but perhaps the real one was none of those apparent. For one thing, the presence of women had ceased to disturb him so greatly. That nervous block described in the beginning was now so thoroughly dissolved by virtue of the effortless association with Amada, that his libido had now begun to ask for an extended field of play. The mind of a woman no longer emasculated him. The simple half-Indian girl had restored his male dominance. In his heart he knew this and was grateful, but one does not always return a gift with an outward show of devoir. He paid her back very badly. That winter season, which they spent in a southern city, he began to go out in society for the first time in his life, for he had lately become what is called a Name and received a good deal of attention. It was possible, now, to ignore the ornament at the throat of the woman and return, at least now and again, the look of her eyes without too much mortification. It was also possible to make amatory advances before she had gone to sleep.

  That winter Kamrowski began to form other attachments of more than a night’s duration, one in particular with a young woman who was also a writer and a member of the urban intelligentsia. She had, also, one defect. She wore contact lenses which she used to remove before going to bed and Kamrowski had to ask her not to put them on the table beside the bed but in the little drawer of the table. But this was an unimportant item in the affair which went along smoothly. He began to make love to this girl, Ida, more regularly than he made love to Amada. Now when Amada would turn to him on the bed, he would often avert himself from her and pretend to be sleeping. He would hear her beginning to cry beside him. Her hand would move inquiringly down his body, and once he seized her hand and slammed it roughly away from him. Then she got out of bed. He got up, too, and went into the kitchen and sat there with a pitcher of ice water. He heard her packing her things as she had done often before. Her trunk was a military locker. The bottom of it was filled with random keepsakes, such as restaurant menus, pictures of actors torn from movie magazines, postcards from all the places they had visited in their travels. Sometimes, while she was packing, she would stalk into the kitchen, holding up some article, such as a towel that she had filched from a hotel bathroom. Is this yours or mine? she would ask. He would shrug. She would make a terrible face at him and return to the bedroom to continue her packing. He knew that she would unpack everything in the morning. In the morning she would restore the souvenir menus and postcards to their places about the mirror and the mantel because without him there was no place for her to go and no one to go with. He did not want to feel sorry for her. He was enjoying himself too much to allow a shadow of contrition to weigh upon him too heavily, and so he would think to himself, for self-exoneration, during such scenes: She was only a whore in a third-class hotel where I found her. Why isn’t she happy? Well, I don’t give a damn!

  And yet he was very glad, when he had finished drinking the pitcher of ice water, to find that she was no longer packing but had gone back to bed. Then he would make love to her more tenderly than he had for many weeks past.

  It was a morning after an incident such as this that Kamrowski first discovered that the girl had begun to steal from him. Thereafter, whenever he put on his clothes in the morning, he would find his pockets lighter of money than they had been before. At first she took only silver, but as the earnings of his novel increased, she began to increase the amounts of her thefts, taking one dollar bills, then five and ten dollar bills. Finally, Kamrowski had to accuse her of it. She wailed miserably but she did not deny it. For about a week the practice was suspended. Then it started again, first with the silver, increasing again to bills of larger denomination. He tried to thwart her by taking the money out of his pockets and hiding it somewhere about the apartment. But when he did this, she would waken him in the night by her slow and systematic search for it. What are you looking for? he would ask the girl. I am looking for matches, she’d tell him. So at last he humored her in it. He only cashed small checks and let her steal what she wanted. It remained a mystery to him what she did with the money. She apparently bought nothing with it and yet it did not seem to linger in her possession. What did she want with it? She had everything that she needed or seemed to wish. Perhaps it was simply her way of paying him back for the infidelities which he was now practicing all the time.

  It was later that winter of their residence in the large southern city that the ill health of Amada became apparent. She did not speak of her suffering, but she would sometimes get up in the night and light a holy candle in a transparent red glass cup. She would crouch beside it mumbling Spanish prayers with a hand pressed to her side where some pain was located. It made her furious when he got up or questioned her about it. She behaved as if she were suffering from some disgraceful secret. Mind your own business, she would snarl back at him if he asked. What is it? Hours later she would waken him again, crawling back into bed with an exhausted sigh which told him that the attack of pain had subsided. Then, moved by pity, he would turn to her slowly and press her to him as gently as possible so that his pressure wouldn’t renew the pain. She would not go to a doctor. She said she had been to a doctor a long time ago and that he had told her she had a disease of the kidneys the same as her father had had and that there was nothing to do but try to forget it. It doesn’t matter, she said, I am going to forget it.

  She made an elaborate effort to conceal the attacks as they became more frequent and more severe, thinking perhaps that her illness would disgust him and he might forsake her completely. She would steal out of bed so cautiously that it would take her five or ten minutes to disengage herself from the covers and creep to the chair in the corner, and if she lit the prayer candle, she would crouch over it with cupped hands to conceal the flame. It was evident to Kamrowski that the infection in her body, whatever it was, was now passing from a chronic into an acute stage. He would have been more concerned if he had not just then started to work on another novel. The girl Amada began to exist for him on the other side of a center which was his writing. Everything outside of that existed in a penumbra as shadowy forms on the further side of a flame. Days and events were uncertain. The ringing of the doorbell and the telephone was ignored. Eating became irregular. He slept with his clothes on, sometimes in the chair where he worked. His hair grew long as a hermit’s. He grew a beard and mustache. A lunatic brightness appeared in his eyes while his ordinarily smooth face acquired hollows and promontories and his hands shook. He had fits of coughing and palpitations of the heart which sometimes made him think he was dying and greatly speeded up his alre
ady furious tempo of composition.

  Afterwards he could not remember clearly how things had been between himself and Amada during this feverish time. He ceased to make love to her, he ceased that altogether, and he was only dimly aware of her presence in the apartment. He gave her commands as if she were a servant and she obeyed them quickly and wordlessly with an air of fright. Get me coffee! he would suddenly yell at her. Play that record again, he would say, with a jerk of his thumb at the Victrola. But he was not conscious of her except as a creature to carry out such commissions.

  During this interval she had quit stealing his money. Most of the day she would sit at the opposite end of the wide front room in which he was working. As long as she stayed at that end of the room, her presence did not distract him from his work, but if she entered unbidden his half of the room or if she asked him some question, he would yell at her furiously or even hurl a book at her. She became very quiet. When she went to the kitchen or bathroom, she would move one foot at a time, slowly and stealthily, gazing back at him to make sure he had no objection. Her face had changed, too, in the same way that his had changed. The long equine face had become even bonier than before and dreadfully sallow and the eyes now glittered as if they looked into a room where a great light was. She moved about with an odd stateliness which must have come from the suffering caused by the movement. One hand was now always pressed to the side that hurt her and she moved with exaggerated uprightness in defiance of the temptation to ease her discomfort by crouching. These details of her appearance he could not have noticed at the time, not consciously, and yet they came to him vividly in recollection. It was only afterwards, too, that he troubled himself to wonder how she might have interpreted this disastrous change in their way of living together. She must have thought that all affectionate feeling for her was gone and that he was now enduring her company out of pity only. She stopped stealing his money at night. For a month she sat in the corner and watched him, watched him with the dumb, wanting look of an animal in pain. Occasionally she would dare to cross the room. When he seemed to be resting from his labor, she would come to his side and run her fingers inquiringly down his body to see if he desired her, and finding out that he didn’t, she would retire again speechlessly to her side of the room.

  Then all at once she left him. He had spent a night out with his new blond mistress and returned to find that Amada had packed her locker-trunk and removed it from the apartment, this time in grim earnest. He made no attempt to find her. He believed that she would necessarily return of her own accord, for he could not imagine her being able to do otherwise. But she did not return to him, as the days passed, nor did any word of her reach him. He was not certain how he felt about this. He thought for a while that he might even be somewhat relieved by the resulting simplification of his life and the absence of that faint odor of disease which had lately hung sadly over the bed they had slept in. There was still always the book, sometimes loosening its grip now that the first draft was finished, but still making him insensible as a paranoiac to everyday life. During the intervals when the work dropped off, when there was discouragement or a stop for reflection, Kamrowski would take to the streets and follow strange women. He glutted his appetite with a succession of women and continually widened the latitude of his experience, till, all at once, he was filled with disgust at himself and the circus-trapeze of longing on which he had kicked himself senselessly back and forth since the flight of the girl he had lived with. He didn’t want any more of that now or ever.

  And so one night, about five months after their separation, the image of Amada stalked with a sound of trumpets through the midnight walls of his apartment. She stood like some apparition of flame at the foot of his bed, all luminous from within as an X-ray picture. He saw the tall white bones of her standing there, and he sat bolt upright in the sweat-dampened covers and gave a loud cry; then he fell back on his face to weep uncontrollably till the coming of morning. When daylight was coming, even before the windows had turned really white, he rose to pack his valise and arrange for the trip to Laredo, to find the lost girl and bring her back into the empty room in his heart. He assumed without thinking that Laredo was where she would be, because it was where he had found her.

  He was not wrong about that. She had returned to Laredo five months ago but not to the Texas Star where he had found her. The manager of the hotel pretended to have no knowledge of the girl, but the Mexican porter told him that he would find her in the home of her family on the outskirts of town, in a house without number on a street without name, at the bottom of a steep hill on which stood an ice plant.

  When Kamrowski arrived at the door of the gray wooden house to which these directions took him—a building no more than a shack which leaned exhaustedly on the edge of a steep and irregular road of gray dust—all of the female family came to the door and talked excitedly among themselves, brushing him avidly up and down with their eyes, half smiling and half snarling at him like a pack of wild dogs. They seemed to be arguing almost hysterically among themselves as to whether or not this stranger should be admitted. He was so sick with longing to see the lost girl that he could not bring out the little Spanish he knew. All he could say was Amada, more and more loudly. And then all at once, from some recess of the building, a loud, hoarse voice was lifted like the crow of a cock. It had a ring of anger but the word called out was the affectionate name she used to call him. Rubio, which meant blond. He swept past the women, brushing them aside with both arms, and made for the direction from which the fierce call had come. He fairly hurled himself against the warped door and broke into a room which was all dark except for a vigil light in a red glass cup. He looked that way where the light in the glass cup was. There he saw her. She was lying upon a pallet arranged upon the bare floor.

  It was impossible to judge her appearance in the windowless room, a sort of storage closet, with that one candle burning, especially since he had just come in from the glare of a desert sunset. He made out, gradually, that she was wearing a man’s undershirt and he noticed how big her hands and her elbows were now that the arms were so emaciated, and her head seemed almost as big as the head of a horse and the familiar, coarse hair was hanging like a horse’s mane about her scrawny neck and shoulders. His first emotion was fury as well as pity. What does this mean, what are you doing in here? he cried out fiercely. Mind your own business, she yelled back at him, exactly as if they had never been separated. Then he swallowed his rage at her family, still going on with their high-pitched argument beyond the door he had slammed shut. He crouched on his haunches beside the pallet and took hold of her hand. She tugged away from his grasp but not quite strongly enough to break it. She seemed to be trying to seem more alive than she was. She did not let herself entirely back down on the pallet, although he could see it was an effort for her to remain propped up on her elbow. And she did not allow her voice to drop but kept it at the same loud and harsh pitch. She did not remove her eyes from his face which she seemed to be straining to examine, but she did not return his look directly. She seemed to be staring at his nose or his mouth. There was a great bewilderment in her look, a wonder at his being there, at his coming to see her. She asked him several times. What are you doing here in Laredo? And his answer, I came here to see you, did not seem to satisfy her. At last he leaned over and touched her shoulder and said. You ought to lie back. She glared at him fiercely. I am all right, she said. Her dark eyes were now immense. All of the light that came from the ruby glass cup was absorbed in those eyes and magnified into a beam that shot into his heart and deprived that moonlike organ of all its shadows, exposing in brutal relief the barrenness of it the way that the moon’s landscape, with the sun full on it, turns into a hard and flat disk whose light is borrowed. He could not endure it. He sprang from beside the pallet. He dug in his pocket and pulled out a handful of bills. Take these, he whispered hoarsely. He tried to stuff them into her hands. I don’t want your money, she answered. Then after a slight pause she muttere
d. Give it to them. She jerked her head toward the door beyond which the family were now preparing noisily for supper. He felt defeated altogether. He sighed and looked down at his hands. Her own hands lifted, then, and reached falteringly toward his head. Rubio, she whispered, the word for blond. Tiredly one of her hands dropped down his body to see if he desired her, and discovering that he did not, she smiled at him sadly and let her eyes fall shut. She seemed to be falling asleep; so then he leaned over and kissed her gently at the edge of her large mouth. Morena, he whispered, which was the word for dark one. Instantly the long bony arms flung about him an embrace which took his breath. She pressed their faces painfully together, her Indian cheekbones bruising his softer flesh. Scalding tears and the pressure of those gaunt arms broke finally all the way through the encrusted shell of his ego, which had never before been broken all the way through, and he was released. He was let out of the small but apparently rather light and comfortable room of his known self into a space that lacked the comfort of limits. He entered a space of bewildering dark and immensity, and yet not dark, of which light is really the darker side of the sphere. He was not at home in it. It gave him unbearable fright, and so he crawled back.