In the Suicide Mountains

Chapter Four

My dear girl, you mustn’t do it!” said Chudu the Goat’s Son, twitching and winking like a madman. Now, too late, he realized he’d made a mistake in turning back into himself. Armida was staring at him in righteous indignation, her fine eyebrows arched, her chin drawn inward and quivering, and to make matters worse her whole body was in confusion, torn between kicking him, as a farmer would kick a horse, and fainting dead away, eyes rolled upward, like a maiden shocked.

“You tricked me!” exclaimed Armida, her soft voice helpless, and she resolved the conflict toward the maidenly, and wept. “You’ve made me tell secrets I’d never told anyone!” Her hands, like orphans, clung tightly to one another, and her face, drained of blood, was as white as snow. “Oh, I wish I were dead!” she moaned, so sincerely that his heart almost stopped in its tracks. And now she wept in earnest.

The dwarf was so upset, so angry at himself and eager to atone, somehow be made use of — even if she should send him to point at pheasants, like a dog — that he tore off his hat without thinking and threw it on the ground and stomped on it. “Please, master, please!” cried the hat, but he went right on stomping it.

When he’d vented his emotion, or some of it, he plucked up the hat again and put it on his head — where it sat trembling and whimpering, swearing to itself — and he said: “Armida, let me tell you I understand how you feel. No one knows better than I what a terrible thing it is to—”

But he saw she wasn’t listening; she’d taken advantage of his tantrum to collect herself. Still weeping and sniffling and brushing tears from her cheeks, but shaking her yellow hair out, her breast heaving less now, she’d walked up onto the road and was prepared to stride on. He gave a little jump when he saw what she was doing, and hurried to catch up with her.

“I too have a double identity of sorts, Armida,” said the Goat’s Son, awkwardly running along beside her now, pitifully looking up at her, the top of his head not even level with her waist. There was nobody else in the world to whom he’d have confessed his secret. He threw a quick look around the dark, slanting woods to see if anyone had heard him. There were a couple of round, brown bears bumping shoulders, and a wide-racked deer standing absolutely still, and on every hand there were twittering songbirds, but so far as he could tell they were all authentic, not shape-shifters. He pressed on fervently: “As a matter of fact I came up here into the mountains myself, just like you, to kill myself.” He stretched out his arms, skipping sideways, imploring her to listen, and awaited her reaction.

“Beat it,” she said angrily — not with cruel hostility but like an older sister, as if the troubles she experienced were beyond his ken-beyond, ha! the emotional understanding of Chudu the Goat’s Son, who was two hundred and seven years old! Yet he saw himself accepting it: he would burble, grovel, do handsprings; he, Chudu, was her captive, he’d be anything she pleased.

Perhaps it was Armida’s intuition of that — the abject adoration of the ugly little dwarf with the great, black shark-mouth, the short arms extended in miserable entreaty, the crooked legs hurrying like the blades of a butterchurn — that made Armida once more burst out crying; for love is no small imposition, especially unrequited love; and though his experience was limited, even after two hundred years and more, since he was seldom even liked, Chudu the Goat’s Son understood pretty well all the ironies that enclosed her like the ribwork of a cage: here stood he for whose deformed and spiky love she had no faintest desire, and back in her village sat those foolish suitors. She had no one she respected who could love her for herself. It grieved and enraged him that he, Chudu, should be the cause of such distress — that his horrible adoration should awaken in her heart an idea of the kind of adoration she desired and, in all probability, would never never find in this whole vast universe.

She was rubbing the knuckles of both fists into her eyes, crying and striding on.

“What I told you is true,” he said. He danced out in front of her and ran backward. “I’m not tricking you, Armida. I’m not lying to you. I really did come here to commit suicide. I’m going to do it, too.” His cheeks twitched and jittered like a rabbit’s, and he hammered his square right fist into his square left palm.

Deep in her own grief, she didn’t even trouble to look down at him with distaste. “I’m not surprised,” she said.

Before he could answer, his left foot tripped over his right, and he fell. She went by him. He scrambled to his feet.

They’d come to a shoulderlike crest on the mountain, a respite. Beyond, the road dipped downward for a stone’s throw, then lifted again, much more steeply than before. Behind them lay the valley dotted with white villages, churchspires sticking toward the sky like little pins; ahead of them the mountaintop, vanishing into haze, ascended like God’s gray jaw. The trees all around them were luminous and wide-beamed and curiously still, as if grown against a plumbline, and the golden beams of light that settled slanting through the leaves, dappling the high-crowned curving road, gavotted like young swallows in Armida’s yellow hair. The beauty made Chudu the Goat’s Son heartsick. Like a baby, like a billygoat, he bawled out after her, forsaken and forlorn, standing there splay-foot, clench-fisted, humpbacked, drowning in woe: “Armida, don’t do it! Don’t kill yourself!” Chudu the Goat’s Son’s heart went light, plummeting like an elevator when the cable has snapped, and he began, in great whoops, to cry.

Armida slowed her pace. After a long moment she stopped completely, then veered around to face him. Her eyes were still wet, but she was in control now. “It’s my life,” she said. “Go away, dwarf. It’s none of your business.”

Chudu the Goat’s Son, however, was not in control by any means. He cried harder and harder, as he hadn’t cried since childhood, two hundred years ago, and his anger at crying like a baby, augering his fists into his eyes as if to blind himself, made him stamp first one foot then the other then both at once. “It is my business,” he bawled. “It’s very much my business!”

His eyes were too filled with tears for him to see that she was studying him, startled at last. But her voice was remote, withdrawn — she was thinking of herself, not of him — when she said, “I don’t care. I just don’t care.”

She was about to draw away from him. He snatched at her loose sleeve and held it.

“Think of the people who love you, Armida! Think of how they’ll feel!”

His eyes were blurry with tears but he caught, even so, her angry smile and knew what she was thinking. All those suitors.

“Please,” she said, and now her princesslike feebleness seemed unfeigned, her limpness of neckbone, wrist, and elbow: for sorrow of heart she could hardly have picked up a pencil. “I need to get it over with.”

“No!” he said, ferocious, and with sudden bold madness jumped his hold from her airy and insubstantial sleeve to her wrist, to which he clung like a lobster.

As if he’d caused it, there came a thunder of hooves.