Turning Back the Sun(56)
She said, “I don”t understand why the savages can”t be organized better. It”s dreadful just to leave them out there killing farmers. Can”t you round them up?”
“If you try to round them up, they evaporate.”
“Well, I don”t see why.” She went silent.
He remembered this too: the combative streak which surfaced when there was something she did not understand. He said, “The savages go their own way. I once took two into my house, so I know.”
“Took two in? Was that any fun?” She was laughing again. She seemed to have upholstered the whole hard world. “I”d have dreaded coming down in the morning and finding they”d emptied the place!”
She still seemed to find him attractive. Her eyes sparkled over him and she laughed flirtatiously. She must gradually have leaned toward him too, because in the mirrors her teeming heads, raked by a long, dimming cross fire of sunbeams, had sunk lower than his.
In the end she glanced at her watch and said, “I have to collect my daughter in a minute. When are we going to meet again?”
“I”m going back tomorrow.”
“You”re going back tomorrow! You old killjoy! Oh how sad.” She looked genuinely disappointed, a little. “I”d see you off if I could.”
Rayner started to laugh with a trace, still, of bitterness. “I expected that before and you never came!”
She looked at him uncomprehending.
He said, “Fifteen years ago. When I left.”
She clapped her cheek. “Yes, oh yes! I remember! I felt awful about that. I really did. It was somebody”s twenty-first birthday and I couldn”t come. I do remember.” She smiled weakly. “I do.” Then, “Why are you laughing?”
She got up to say goodbye. He kissed her hand with a slightly cynical courtliness, which made her slap his head. He had always been a great tease, she said. As she embraced him, he glimpsed in the looking glass, as if down the avenues of his memory, a hundred Miriams kissing in his arms, until the uttermost rooms held only two insects saying farewell in amber. Then they disengaged, and she said, “Hope to see you before another fifteen years!”
After she had gone he was chagrined to find tears pricking up behind his eyes. But they were not exactly for her.
In the long-drawn evening, when the sun had dropped behind the terraces but not yet set, Rayner ambled down the unlit street toward the church. He did not go in, but wandered round the outside for a while and laid some flowers by his parents” grave. Then he sat on a bench under the carob trees, while beside him all the wrought-iron verandahs and balconies became baskets of curtained light.
Later he went indoors, expecting to eat supper with his aunt; instead he found that she had weakened and that the nurse had put her to bed. This sometimes happened, the nurse said: the old lady went up and down. But Rayner was leaving early in the morning, and he waited by her bedside. She seemed only intermittently to grasp who he was, addressing him in a different, more familiar tone, as if he were a contemporary, and once she called him by his father”s name.
After she had fallen asleep, he went away to pack; but his suitcase was too full to close—he had bought gifts for Zo?, Leszek and several other friends—and he entered the shower room to wash off the sweat which filmed him even here. He felt suddenly tired. The water covered his back in tepid bursts. He soaped it idly. Then, as he glanced down at his body, he saw the blemish slapped on it like a leech. It dribbled blackly from one nipple almost to his groin. It had erupted without warning, overnight.
He froze, waiting. Yet he was not struck by disgust, or fear, or even surprise. He touched it tentatively with his fingertips, in recognition. Its chocolate snake gleamed between the runnels of soap. It smeared his ribs like the dirt of reality. It seemed less like a recent eruption than an awesome birthmark. He let the water trickle over it, skirting sometimes its raised roughness, and remembered it on Zo?”s body, and on a hundred others.
CHAPTER
24
There was nobody to say goodbye this time, and it was still dark when the train pulled out of the station. But Rayner”s carriage was full. He was flanked by a bewildered army conscript and a winder operator assigned to the mines. Opposite, a young financier and his wife were decrying the airy inexpertise of the capital”s bourse, but were nervous of the rumored cutthroat practices in the town. Beside them sat a gaunt schoolmistress, weeping.
For several minutes, as the capital drifted away from them in a blaze of elusive lights, they all craned from the windows into the soft night, then one by one returned to their seats in silence, while it sank into dark.
Rayner sat through the vacuum of the next hours half asleep and watching the plains ruffle into hills. The carriage air thickened with cigarette smoke and the reek of half-eaten mangoes and salami. He drew down the blinds against the sun. The conscript, who had not travelled before, was sick out of the window, and the desultory talk among the passengers faded out. By late afternoon they had entered the mountains, and the clank of the carriages over bridges and the blurred pulse of their wheels in the tunnels, kept everyone intermittently awake. In four hours they saw no life but wheeling kestrels and a village of native goatherds. It was a land of shale and treeless valleys. Huge boulders had snapped off the mountain tops and rolled down into the streams. Their scree scored the valleysides in unconcluded drifts, and looked still in motion. It was impossible to tell if they had fallen an epoch or a minute before.