“Sure,” said the younger writer. He stepped to the door, wearing only the trousers to his pyjamas.
“Oh,” he said. “It’s you!”
She stared at him without any idea of what she had come to say or had hoped to accomplish.
“Well?” he demanded brutally.
“I—I heard you!” she stammered.
“So?”
“1 don’t understand it!”
“What?”
“Cruelty! I never could understand it!”
“But you do understand spying, don’t you?”
“1 wasn’t spying!” she cried.
He muttered a shocking word and shoved past her onto the porch.
The older writer called his name: “Mike!” But he only repeated the shocking word more loudly and walked away from them. Miss Jelkes and the older writer faced each other. The violence just past had calmed Miss Jelkes a little. She found herself uncoiling inside and comforting tears beginning to moisten her eyes. Outside the night was changing. A wind had sprung up and the surf that broke on the other side of the landlocked bay called Coleta could now be heard.
“It’s going to storm,” said the writer.
“Is it? I’m glad!” said Miss Jelkes.
“Won’t you come in?”
“I’m not at all properly dressed.”
“I’m not either.”
“Oh, well-”
She came in. Under the naked light bulb and without the dark glasses his face looked older and the eyes, which she had not seen before, had a look that often goes with incurable illness.
She noticed that he was looking about for something.
“Tablets,” he muttered.
She caught sight of them first, among a litter of papers.
She handed them to him.
“Thank you. Will you have one?”
“I’ve had one already.”
“What kind are yours?”
“Seconal. Yours?”
“Barbital. Are yours good?”
“Wonderful.”
“How do they make you feel? Like a water-lily?”
“Yes, like a with real gaiety but the writer responded only with a faint smile. His attention was drifting away from her again. He stood at the screen door like a worried child awaiting the return of a parent.
“Perhaps I should—”
Her voice faltered. She did not want to leave. She wanted to stay there. She felt herself upon the verge of saying incommunicable things to this man whose singularity was so like her own in many essential respects, but his turned back did not invite her to stay. He shouted the name of his friend. There was no response. The writer turned back from the door with a worried muttering but his attention did not return to Miss Jelkes.
“Your friend—” she faltered.
“Mike?”
“Is he the—right person for you?”
“Mike is helpless and I am always attracted by helpless people.”
“But you,” she said awkwardly. “How about you? Don’t you need somebody’s help?”
“The help of God!” said the writer. “Failing that, I have to depend on myself.”
“But isn’t it possible that with somebody else, somebody with more understanding, more like yourself—!”
“You mean you?” he asked bluntly.
Miss Jelkes was spared the necessity of answering one way or another, for at that moment a great violence was unleashed outside the screen door. The storm that had hovered uncertainly on the horizon was now plunging toward them. Not continually but in sudden thrusts and withdrawals, like a giant bird lunging up and down on its terrestrial quarry, a bird with immense white wings and beak of godlike fury, the attack was delivered against the jut of rock on which the Costa Verde was planted. Time and again the whole night blanched and trembled, but there was something frustrate in the attack of the storm. It seemed to be one that came from a thwarted will. Otherwise surely the frame structure would have been smashed. But the giant white bird did not know where it was striking. Its beak of fury was blind, or perhaps the beak—
It may have been that Miss Jelkes was right on the verge of divining more about God than a mortal ought to—when suddenly the writer leaned forward and thrust his knees between hers. She noticed that he had removed the towel about him and now was quite naked. She did not have time to wonder nor even to feel much surprise for in the next few moments, and for the first time in her thirty years of preordained spinsterhood, she was enacting a fierce little comedy of defense. He thrust at her like the bird of blind white fury. His one hand attempted to draw up the skirt of her robe while his other tore at the flimsy goods at her bosom. The upper cloth tore. She cried out with pain as the predatory fingers dug into her flesh. But she did not give in. Not she herself resisted but some demon of virginity that occupied her flesh fought off the assailant more furiously than he attacked her. And her demon won, for all at once the man let go of her gown and his fingers released her bruised bosom. A sobbing sound in his throat, he collapsed against her. She felt a wing-like throbbing against her belly, and then a scalding wetness. Then he let go of her altogether. She sank back into her chair which had remained demurely upright throughout the struggle, as unsuitably, as ridiculously, as she herself had maintained her upright position. The man was sobbing. And then the screen door opened and the younger writer came in. Automatically Miss Jelkes freed herself from the damp embrace of her unsuccessful assailant.
“What is it?” asked the younger writer.
He repeated his question several times, senselessly but angrily, while he shook his older friend who could not stop crying.
I don’t belong here, thought Miss Jelkes, and suiting action to thought, she slipped quietly out the screen door. She did not turn back into the room immediately adjoining but ran down the verandah to the room she had occupied before. She threw herself onto the bed which was now as cool as if she had never lain on it. She was grateful for that and for the abrupt cessation of fury outside. The white bird had gone away and the Costa Verde had survived its assault. There was nothing but the rain now, pattering without much energy, and the far away sound of the ocean only a little more distinct than it had been before the giant bird struck. She remembered the Iguana.
Oh, yes, the Iguana! She lay there with ears pricked for the painful sound of its scuffling, but there was no sound but the effortless flowing of water. Miss Jelkes could not contain her curiosity so at last she got out of bed and looked over the edge of the verandah. She saw the rope. She saw the whole length of the rope lying there in a relaxed coil, but not the Iguana. Somehow or other the creature tied by the rope had gotten away. Was it an act of God that effected this deliverance? Or was it not more reasonable to suppose that only Mike, the beautiful and helpless and cruel, had cut the Iguana loose? No matter. No matter who did it, the Iguana was gone, had scrambled back into its native bushes and, oh, how gratefully it must be breathing now! And she was grateful, too, for in some equally mysterious way the strangling rope of her loneliness had also been severed by what had happened tonight on this barren rock above the moaning waters.
Now she was sleepy. But just before falling asleep she remembered and felt again the spot of dampness, now turning cool but still adhering to the flesh of her belly as a light but persistent kiss. Her fingers approached it timidly. They expected to draw back with revulsion but were not so affected. They touched it curiously and even pityingly and did not draw back for a while. Ah, Life, she thought to herself and was about to smile at the originality of this thought when darkness lapped over the outward gaze of her mind.
1948 (Published 1948)
The Poet
The poet distilled his own liquor and had become so accomplished in this art that he could produce a fermented drink from almost any kind of organic matter. He carried it in a flask strapped about his waist, and whenever fatigue overtook him he would stop at some lonely point and raise the flask to his lips. Then the world would change color as a soap bubbl
e penetrated by a ray of light and a great vitality would surge and break as a limitless ocean through him. The usual superfluity of impressions would fall away so that his senses would combine in a single vast ray of perception which blinded him to lesser phenomena and experience as candles might be eclipsed in a chamber of glass exposed to a cloudless meridian of the sun.
His existence was one of benevolent anarchy, for no one of his time was more immune to the influence of states and organizations. In populated sections he might subsist as a scavenger on the refuse of others, but in the open country he lived as a ruminant beast on whatever green things were acceptable to his stomach.
A tall and angular man with eyes of turquoise and skin of clear amber, he had the cleanliness and beauty of sculpture. Such beauty is not allowed to pass unnoticed. He had never sought out any contact with people except the ideal one of audience and poet, but it sometimes happened that the sexual hunger of strangers would be visited on him. This would occur when bodily exhaustion had overtaken him after some great expansion of vision and when he had crept for refuge into an areaway. While he was resting there some anonymous passer-by, who prowled the alleys at night, might happen to notice the poet and enter beside him with hotly exploring fingers and ravenous lips. In daylight the poet would waken to find his clothing torn open and sometimes not only a dampness of mouths on his flesh but painful bruises, and sometimes also a coin or a ring or some other grateful token thrust in a pocket or in the palm of his hand, but he would straighten his clothes and continue upon his way without any shame or resentment, and the briefly lingering dampness of such embraces would outlast his memory of them.
Mercifully it so happened that scratching about for existence had grown to be automatic. It occupied none of his thought and did not intrude on the inner life of the man. His poems were not written down, for his was a genius of speech. An earlier period of his life had been spent in a singular kind of evangelism. Then he had gone into places of public resort and delivered speeches of exhortation. Hardly a day had gone by without some violence being used upon him. He was often imprisoned and still more often was beaten. But gradually rage was purified out of his nature. He saw the childishness of it. Then he fell into silence for a time. He entered the places and looked about him and left them, addressing no one. For several years this retreat into silence continued. When it was broken, the character of his speech had changed entirely. The moral anger had given place to the telling of marvelous stories which he told in the open. His audience, then, was found among adolescents, boys and girls who were poised for that brief and hesitant spell between the coming of wisdom and its willful rejection which is the condition on which the young are admitted to pockets of social states based on nothing pure in their natures. The poet had learned that his audience could only be found in this particular agegroup. Now wherever he went he would gather about him the young and beautiful listeners to stories. He would pick them up at the entrances to schools and parks and playgrounds. His very appearance would magnetize the young people. Instinctively they would know him as a man who had dared to resist the will of the organizations which they would be forced to succumb to. Adults would judge him to be a worthless crank of some kind, but the young were drawn to him with a mysterious yearning and hung on his syllables as bees cluster on the inexhaustible chalice of a flower.
Whoever loves the young loves also the sea. It was therefore natural that the latter phase of the poet’s life should be spent on the seacoast. For ten months, now, he had lived on a tropical coast whose tremendous scape of open water and sky provided his stories with an ideal mise en scène. He had occupied a little driftwood shack. He could not remember if he had built it himself or found it already erected. It was situated at a point where the beach curved gently and smoothly inland and rose in a fanlike sweep of golden dunes. In a large iron drum, cast up from a wreck at sea, he had distilled his liquor of fiery potency and he kept this reservoir buried in sand behind his driftwood lodging.
Whenever he gave them a signal, his youthful audience would assemble about him and each time more would come and each time from villages which were further removed. For a long time, now, the poet had felt that his stories so far had been little more than preliminary exercises to some really great outpouring which might be more of a plastic than verbal creation. He felt that this culmination was now close at hand. The imminence grew in him with the warnings of fever. His body burned and thinned and his gold hair whitened. His heart had swollen. The arteries were distended. At times he would seem to be holding an incubus in his bosom, whose fierce little purplish knot of a head was butting against his ribs and whose limbs were kicking and squirming with convulsions. Now and again arterial blood would spurt from his mouth and nostrils. He noticed these warnings of death’s unspeakable outrage encroaching upon him, but felt he had power enough to hold it in check until the event that he lived for had come to pass. It came that summer, late in the crazed month of August. The night preceding its coming the poet had wandered along the beach in a state of delirium in which he seemed to be making a steep ascent without any effort of breathlessness of climbing and at the height of this progress he could see below him as a picture puzzle with all its pieces fitted precisely together the whole of his time on earth. He noted triumphantly that the scattered instances had closed in a design and that the design could be closed into a vision. When morning came, it dropped him down the whole way, but he knew for what purpose. It was to call the children. A signal fire must be lit to summon the children. He started immediately to prepare it. But for the first time the inflammable stuff was difficult to gather. The fragments of dried wood seemed to be miles separated. He probed for them in the dunes and among the scrubby bushes until his knuckles were bleeding and the incubus in his breast had all but broken through the crumbling cage of his ribs. When finally there was enough to light the signal, a wind sprang up and he had to oppose the wind. He had to crouch over the flames till they blackened the skin of his chest and he had to embrace the fiery sticks with his arms to hold them together. Then all at once the opposition was over. The ocean took back the wind. The air was motionless and the ocean appeared to be struck like a statue in a blaze of calm, and now the pillar of smoke rose thin and straight as a tree without any branches. The poet withdrew from the point of fiendish trial, dragging himself on hands and knees to the merciful restoration held in the drum. A single taste of it lifted him to his feet. Once more and for the last time, the limitless ocean surged and broke in his veins, that ocean of scarlet the butterfly boat rocks on, which is being alive.
The pillar of smoke soon caught the children’s attention. With faces barely washed for the early morning, they rose like birds from the villages to surge up the hillsides and tumble crazily down them, past the fenced in fields where their parents labored the soil, past doorways where old women crouched in dull astonishment at their windy passage, past everything stationary, incensed as they were by the demon of rushing forward, responding as only the ones of their age could respond to anything thin as smoke but promising vision.
A long way off the poet could hear their cries and knew they were coming. He rose from beside the drum and walked erect and powerful to the end of the beach where the children would appear. With clothing cast off along the course of their journey and nude bodies shining with wetness, the children swept over the last separating dune and enveloped the waiting figure of the poet.
In front of his driftwood lodging he brought them to rest. There he stood in their midst and began his story. The scaffolding of the heavens remained very high and he proceeded to build a stairs for the children. They let their playthings go. The puppets of painted wreckage which he had carved for the children fell from their clasp as they began to take part in the narrative’s action. They chased each other among the scarves of foam. Their leaps were prodigious, their shouts were everlasting, and always he called them back for another lesson, stretching his wasted arms like the crossbars of a ship on a drunken ocean. He co
mpelled them to understand the rapture of vision and how it could let a man break out of his body. Before the slanting wall of the driftwood house, his eyes shot arrows of pale blue lightning at them, he leaned and gestured and imitated the ocean. A huge blue rocking horse seemed to be loose among them whose plumes were smoky blue ones the sky could not hold and so let grandly go of.
The story continued till dusk, and at that time the children’s parents came for them. The men of the villages had become suspicious of the poet. They now surrounded his lodging and called him out. The poet came out and stood exhausted among them, peering almost blindly into their faces, now that the poetry had forsaken his body and left him old and wasted and shrunken gray. Without any explanation they told him to leave. The poet nodded agreement to their command, and frowned with sorrow, seeing the children far away on the beach and moving further among the shepherding mothers.
When all the dispersing crowd had gone from sight, the poet returned to his house. He wrapped in a piece of sailcloth his small collection of things, mementos of distances walked along the ocean. He said good-bye to the ocean. He waved to it gravely with one of his hands that were like the arrowy skeletons of birds. He turned back inland after his ten months’ stay on the shore of the ocean. When he had climbed with an effort that took his breath to the highest dune and had turned and looked behind him where his residence of driftwood appeared even smaller than it actually was as it huddled in growing night and in emptiness now at the edge of the plunging surf, he felt that finally all of his gold was spent and that what remained was only the clink of copper. Suddenly he resisted the thought of exile. He was bound to this place by more than ten months’ custom. This was the place where he had finally told his greatest story, and if he would be remembered at all, it could only be here, by the children of this coastal region.
Staggering with exhaustion the poet retraced his steps. Still for a moment as he approached the ocean his brain could hold it. His vision still contained it. Then it rocked and split and the dark showed through it, tremendous and rushing toward him. He fell on the beach. His body remained at that spot for a long, long time. The sun and the sand and the water washed it continually and swept away all but the bones and the stiff white garments.