Little, Big

  “I’ll do what you ask,” La Negra said in a low voice that didn’t sound like hers. “Whatever you ask.”

  Sylvie looked at her, a frisson of blue magic stealing up her spine. The old black woman sat in her chair as though enervated, her eyes not leaving Sylvie but not quite seeing her either. “Well,” Sylvie said doubtfully. “Like the time you came to our house, and put the evil spirits on a coconut, and rolled them out the door? And down the hall and out to the garbage?” She had told this story to Auberon, laughing uproariously over it with him, but here it didn’t seem funny. “Tití?” she said. But her aunt (though sitting in her plastic-covered armchair all the time) was no longer there.

  No, the Destiny could not be put on a coconut, it was too heavy; it could not be rubbed away with oils or washed off in herb-baths, it went too deep. La Negra, if she were to do what Sylvie commanded, if her old heart could bear it, would have to draw it from Sylvie and swallow it herself. Where was it, first of all? She approached Sylvie’s heart with careful steps. Most of these doors she knew: love, money, health, children. That portal there, ajar, she didn’t know. “Bueno, bueno,” she said, desperately afraid that when the Destiny she let out of Sylvie rushed upon her it would kill her, or so transform her that she might as well be dead. Her spirit guides, when she turned to look for them, had fled in terror. And yet she must do what Sylvie had commanded. She put her hand on the door, and began to open it, glimpsing a golden daylight beyond, a rush of wind, the murmur of many voices.

  “No!” Sylvie shouted. “No, no, no, I was wrong, don’t!”

  The portal slammed shut. La Negra, with heart-sickening vertigo, tumbled back into her armchair in her little apartment. Sylvie was shaking her.

  “I take it back, I take it back!” Sylvie cried. But it hadn’t ever left her.

  La Negra, recovering, patted her heaving breast with her hand. “Don’t ever do that again, child,” she said, weak with relief that Sylvie had done it this time. “You could kill a person.”

  “I’m sorry, sorry,” Sylvie said, “but this was all just a big mistake….”

  “Rest, rest,” La Negra said, still immobile in the chair, watching Sylvie scramble into her coat. “Rest.” But Sylvie wanted only to get out of this room, where strong currents of brujería seemed to play around her like lightning; she was desperately sorry she’d even thought of this move and hoping against hope that her foolishness hadn’t wounded her Destiny, or caused it to turn on her, or waked it at all, why hadn’t she just let it sleep where it lay, peaceful, not bothering anybody? Her invaded heart thudded reproachfully, she pulled out her purse with trembling fingers, looking for the wadded bills she had brought to pay for this crazy operation.

  La Negra drew away from the money Sylvie offered her as though it might sting her. If Sylvie had offered her gold coins, potent herbs, a medallion heavy with power, a book of secrets, she would have taken them, she had passed the test put to her and deserved something: but not dirty bills for buying groceries, not money passed through a thousand hands.

  Out on the street, hurrying away, Sylvie thought: I’m all right, I’m all right; and hoped that it was so. Sure she could have her Destiny removed; she could cut off her nose, too. No, it was with her for good, she was still burdened with it, and if not glad to be then glad anyway that it hadn’t been taken from her; and though she still knew little enough of it she had learned one thing when La Negra had tried to open her, one thing that made her hurry fast away, searching for a train station that would take her downtown: she had learned that whatever her Destiny was, Auberon was in it. And for sure she would not want it at all if he were not.

  La Negra rose heavily from her armchair, still baffled. Had that been she? It could not have been, not in the flesh, not unless all of La Negra’s calculations were wrong; yet there on the table lay the fruits she had brought, and the half-eaten dulces.

  But if that had been her who had been with La Negra just now, then who was it who had these many years helped La Negra in her prayers and spells? If she was still here, untransmogrified still in the same City La Negra inhabited, then how could she, at La Negra’s invocation, have cured, and told truths, and brought lovers together?

  She went to her bureau and drew off the scrap of black silk that covered the central image of her spirit altar. She half-expected it to be gone, but it was there: an old cracked photograph, an apartment much like the one La Negra stood in; a birthday party, and a dark, skinny, pigtailed girl seated (on a thick phone book no doubt) behind her cake, a paper crown on her head, her large eyes compelling and weirdly wise.

  Was she so old now, La Negra wondered, that she could no longer tell spirits from flesh, visitors from visitations? And if that were so, what might it portend for her practice?

  She lit a fresh candle, and pressed it down into the red glass before the picture.

  The Seventh Saint

  Long years before, George Mouse had showed the City to Auberon’s father, making him a City man; now Sylvie did the same for Auberon. But this was a changed town. The difficulties that everywhere had been cropping up in even the best laid plans of men, the inexplicable yet Somehow inevitable failure that seemed built into their manifold schemes, were sharpest in the City, and caused the greatest pain and anger there—the fixed anger Smoky hadn’t seen but which Auberon saw in nearly every City face he looked into.

  For the City, even more than the nation, lived on Change: rapid, ruthless, always for the better. Change was the life-blood of the City, the animator of all dreams there, the power that coursed in the veins of the men of the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club, the fire that boiled up wealth and bustle and satisfaction. The City Auberon came to, though, had slowed. The quick eddies of fashion had grown sluggish; the great waves of enterprise had become a still lagoon. The permanent depression that the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club struggled against but was unable to reverse began in this grinding-to-a-halt, this unwonted cumbersome loginess of the greatest City, and spread outward from it in slow ripples of weary exhaustion to benumb the republic. Except in small ways (and that as constantly and pointlessly as ever) the City had stopped changing: the City Smoky knew had changed utterly, had changed by ceasing to change.

  Sylvie assembled from the aged pile a city for Auberon’s mind’s eye that would anyway have been very different from the one George built for Smoky. A landlord, however odd, and an old, even a charter member (on his grandfather’s side) of the great changer families, George Mouse felt the decline in his beloved Apple, and was sometimes bitter, and sometimes indignant at it. But Sylvie had come from a different strain, from what had been in Smoky’s time the dark underside of a glamorous dream, and was now (though still raddled with violence and desperation) its least depressed enclave. The last cheerful streets of the City were the streets where the people lived who had always been at the changers’ mercy, and who now, in the midst of everyone else’s sense of decline into stagnancy and irremediable mess, lived much as they always had, only with a longer history and a surer tradition: hand-to-mouth, day to day, with a musical accompaniment.

  She took him to the clean, crowded apartments of her relatives, where he sat on the plastic coverings of outlandish furniture and was given glasses of iceless soda (not good to chill the blood, they thought) set in saucers, and inedible dukes, and listened to himself praised in Spanish: a good husband, they thought, for Sylvie, and though she objected to the honorific they went on using it for decency’s sake. He was confused by the many and, to his ear, similar-sounding diminutives used among them. Sylvie, for reasons she remembered but he could never keep straight, was called Tati by some members of the family, a branch that included the dark aunt not-really-an-aunt who had read Sylvie’s Destiny, the aunt called La Negra. Tati in some child’s mouth had become Tita, which had also stuck, and which in its turn became (a grand diminutive) Titania. Often enough Auberon didn’t know that the subject of anecdotes told him in hilarious Spanglish was his own beloved under another name.

/>   “They think you’re great,” Sylvie said to him after a visit, out on the street, her hand thrust deep into his overcoat pocket where he held it for warmth.

  “Well, they’re very nice too….”

  “But papo, I was so embarrassed when you put your feet up on that—esta thing—that coffee-table thing.” “Oh?”

  “That was very bad. Everybody noticed.”

  “Well, why the hell didn’t you say something?” he said, embarrassed. “I mean at home we lay all over the furniture, and it was …” He stopped himself from saying And it was real furniture, but she heard it anyway.

  “I tried to tell you. I was looking at you. I mean I couldn’t say, Hey take your feet off that. They’d think I treated you like Titi Juana treats Enrico.” Enrico was a henpecked husband, and a laughingstock. “You don’t know what they go through to get that ugly stuff,” she said. “It costs a lot, believe it or not, muebles like that.” They were silent a while, bent into a cruel wind. Muebles, he thought, “movables,” strange formal-sounding language for such a people. She said, “They’re all crazy. I mean some of them are crazy crazy. But they’re all crazy.”

  He knew that, for all the great affection she had for her complex family, she was trying desperately to extricate herself from the long, almost Jacobean tragicomedy of their common life, charged as it was with madness, farce, corrosive love, even murder, even ghosts. In the night she would often toss and turn, and cry out in anguish, imagining terrible things that might, or might have already, happened to one or another of that accident-prone crowd; and often, though Auberon dismissed them as night terrors (for nothing—not one thing he knew of—had ever happened in his family’s life that could be called terrible), her imaginings were not far from wrong. She hated it that they were in danger; she hated to be bound to them; her own Destiny shone like a flaring lamp amid their hopeless confusions, always just about to gutter, or be blown out, but still alight.

  “I need a coffee,” he said. “Something hot.”

  “I need a drink,” she said. “Something strong.”

  Like all lovers, they had soon assembled (as on a revolving stage) the places where the scenes of their drama alternately took place: a little Ukrainian diner whose windows were always occluded with steam, where the tea was black and so was the bread; the Folding Bedroom of course; a vast gloomy theater encrusted with Egyptian decoration, where the movies were cheap and changed often and played into the morning; the Nite Owl market; the Seventh Saint Bar & Grill.

  The great virtue of the Seventh Saint, besides the price of its drinks and its nearness to Old Law Farm, a train stop away, was its wide front windows, nearly floor to ceiling, in which as in a shadow-box or on a movie screen the life of the street outside passed. The Seventh Saint must once have been somewhat splendid, for this glass wall was tinted a rich, expensive brown, which added a further unreality to the scene, and which darkened the interior like dark glasses. It was like being in Plato’s cave, Auberon told Sylvie, who listened to him lecture on the subject; or rather watched him talk, fascinated by his strangeness and not paying inordinately close attention to the words. She loved to learn, but her mind wandered.

  “The spoons?” he said, lifting one up.

  “Girls,” she said.

  “And the knives and forks are boys,” he said, glimpsing a pattern.

  “No, the forks are girls too.”

  They had café-royale before them. Outside, hatted and scarved in the deathly cold, people hurried home from jobs, bent before the unseen wind as before an idol or a lofty personage. Sylvie was herself between jobs at the moment (a common dilemma for one with a Destiny as high as hers) and Auberon was living on his advances. They were poor but leisured.

  “The table?” he asked. He couldn’t imagine.

  “A girl.”

  It was no wonder, he thought, that she was so sexy, when all the world was boys and girls to her. In the language she had been born into there were no neuters. In the Latin Auberon had learned, or at least studied, with Smoky, the genders of nouns were an abstraction that he at any rate could never feel; but to Sylvie the world was a constant congress of male and female, boy and girl. The world: that was el mundo, a man; but la terra, the earth, was a woman. That seemed right to Auberon; the world of affairs and notions, the name of a newspaper, the Great World; but mother earth, the fructifying soil, Dame Kind. Such appropriated divisions didn’t extend very far, though: the lank-haired mop was a girl, but so was his bony typewriter.

  They played that game for a while, and then commented on the people passing by. Because of the tint of the glass, those passing by outside saw, not the cave’s interior, but themselves reflected; and, not knowing they were observed from inside, sometimes stopped to adjust their clothing, or admire themselves. Sylvie’s strictures on the common run of people were harsher than his; she had a great taste for all eccentricities and oddities, but stern standards of physical beauty and a finely-honed sense of the ridiculous. “Oh, papo, check this one out, check him out…. That’s what I meant by a soft-boiled egg, you see what I mean?” And he did see, and she dissolved in her sweet raucous laughter. Without ever knowing he did so, he adopted for life her standards of beauty, could even feel himself drawn to the lean, brown, soft-eyed, strong-wristed men she favored, like Leon the café-crème-colored waiter who had brought their drinks. It was a relief to him when she decided (after long thought) that their children would be beautiful.

  The Seventh Saint was preparing for the dinner hour. The bus-boys glanced at their messy table. “You ready?” Auberon said.

  “I’m ready,” she said. “Let’s blow this joint.” A phrase of George’s, full of aged double-entendres more reminiscent of wit than exactly funny. They bundled themselves up.

  “Train or walk?” he asked. “Train.”

  “Hell yes,” she said.

  Whispering Gallery

  In their rush to the warmth they leapt by mistake onto the express, which (full of sheeplike, sheep-smelling riders bound for the Bronx) didn’t stop before it reached the old Terminus, mixing it up there with twenty other trains bound in all directions.

  “Oh hey wait a sec,” she said as they were changing trains. “There’s something here I want to show you. Oh yeah! You gotta see this. Come on!”

  They went down along passages and up ramps, the same complex Fred Savage had first threaded him through, though whether in the same direction he had no idea. “What,” he said.

  “You’ll love it,” she said. She paused at a turning. “Now if I can only find it … There!”

  What she pointed to was an empty space: a vaulted intersection where four corridors met in a cross. “What,” he said.

  “C’mere.” She took him by the shoulders and steered him into a corner of the place, where the ribbed vaulting descended to the floor, making what seemed to be a slot or narrow opening but which was only joined bricks. She faced him into this joint. “Just stand there,” she said, and she went away. He waited, obediently facing into the corner.

  Then, startling him profoundly, her voice, distinct yet hollow and ghostly, sounded from directly in front of him: “Hi there.”

  “What,” he said, “where …”

  “Sh,” her voice said. “Don’t turn around. Talk real soft: whisper.”

  “What is it?” he whispered.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But if I stand over here in this corner, and whisper, you can hear me over there. Don’t ask me how.”

  Weird! It sounded as though Sylvie were speaking to him from some realm within the corner, through a crack in an impossibly narrow door. A whispering gallery: hadn’t there been some speculation about whispering galleries in the Architecture? Probably. There wasn’t much that book didn’t speculate about.

  “Now,” she said. “Tell me a secret.”

  He paused a moment. There was a privacy about the corner, the disembodied whispering, that tempted confidences. He felt bared, or barable, though he could see nothin
g: the opposite of a voyeur. He said: “I love you.”

  “Aw,” she said, touched. “But that’s not a secret.”

  A new fierce heat flew up his spine and erected his hair as a notion came to him. “Okay,” he said, and told her of a secret desire he’d had but hadn’t dared express to her before.

  “Oh, hey, wow,” she said. “You devil.”

  He said it again, adding a few details. It was just as though he were whispering the words into her ear in the darkest privacy of bed, but more abstract, more perfectly intimate even than that: right into her mind’s ear. Someone walked past between them; Auberon could hear the footsteps. But the someone couldn’t hear his words: he felt a shiver of glee. He said more.

  “Mm,” she said, as at the prospect of great comfort or satisfaction, a small sound that he couldn’t help answering with a sound of his own. “Hey, what are you doing over there,” her whisper said, insinuatingly. “Bad boy.”

  “Sylvie,” he whispered. “Let’s go home.”

  “Yah.”

  They turned away from their corners (each appearing to the other very small and bright and far away after the dark intimacy of their whispers) and came to meet in the center, laughing now, pressing into each other as much as their heavy coats allowed them to, and with many smiles and looks (God, he thought, her eyes are so bright, flashing, deep, full of promise, all those things eyes are in books but never are in life, and she was his) they caught the right train and rode home amid self-absorbed strangers who didn’t notice the two of them, or if they noticed (Auberon thought) knew nothing, nothing of what he knew.

  Right Side Up

  Sex, he had found out, was really terrific. A terrific thing. Anyway the way Sylvie managed it. In him there had always been a split between the deep desires enchained within him and the cool circumspection which seemed to him required in the adult world he had come to inhabit (he felt, sometimes, by mistake). Strong desire seemed to him childish; childhood (his own, anyway, as far back as he could remember almost, and he could tell stories of others’) was darkly aflame, burdened with heavy passions; adults had passed beyond all that, into affections, into the calmer enjoyments of companionability, into a childlike innocence. Weirdly backward he knew this to be, but it’s how he had felt it. That adult desire, its exigency, its greatness, had been kept a secret from him like all the rest, he didn’t wonder at; he didn’t even bother to feel cheated or enraged at the long deception, since with Sylvie he had learned otherwise, broken the code, turned the thing inside-out so that it was right-side-up, and caught fire.