Savage Bride

Chapter Seven

The days were like successive pairs of handcuffs, each one composed of twenty-four separate links, holding them prisoner.

The sun would come up in a blaze of yellow, gaseous heat, fuming in at them through the slats of the blinds, searing livid tiger stripes across the walls of the room. Its ferocity too was tigerish, at six o’clock.

Her wan voice would sound through the mosquito netting. “Are you awake yet? So am I. Oh, it’s terrible, isn’t it?”

“I tried thinking of snow,” he said, eying the ceiling. “It works a little.”

“He’ll be here pretty soon. Here he is now, I can hear the water slapping onto the tiles as he carries the buckets along.”

There wasn’t any running water in the place. There was an artesian well, and the porter would trundle up bucketsful, two by two, on a crosspiece arrangement over his shoulders, and duly empty them into a slab-sided stone quadrangle that looked as though it were made of basalt. “The concrete mixer,” Jones had called it the first time he saw it. It had taken a good deal of hammering insistence in the beginning, but the porter now brought the water daily without being told, for these peculiar people who bathed not only on church holidays but every morning of the year.

And yet, for all its crudeness, this was one of the brief respites of the day, this plunge into coolness.

The rest, from then on for the remainder of the day, was simply the fatuousness of motion without purpose, without aim. A vacuum that was so much more empty even than boredom that to have called it that would have been flattery.

The hotel had a patio of sorts, but it was too hot and too impregnated with insect life and the steamy exhalations of plant life to sit in during the daytime. There remained only their room and the streets, some of them fortunately shaded over by portales, the tunnel-like arched passageways characteristic of Spanish architecture. Still, the monotony of seeing nothing but stone arch supports and stone building walls, the same supports and the same walls over and over, back and forth, palled soon enough, drove them back inside the hotel again in glassy-eyed surfeit.

The relief that nightfall brought was only an optical illusion; the glaring light that seemed to create the heat was gone, but the heat itself remained.

He would wake up each morning and say to himself, Thirty days more. Then, Twenty-nine days more. Then, Twenty-eight. And so on. Then presently he stopped doing it. For some curious reason, instead of making the time seem shorter, this system of subtractive reminder seemed to make it pass much more slowly. Each day was endless when you pasted a numeral onto it. If you left it blank, unidentified, it slipped by less conspicuously.

It was around the tenth day (twenty still to come) that the arm bangle appeared. He came into the room and found her standing there. As she turned toward him she was holding her arm in a peculiar way, tightly gripped close up toward the shoulder.

“What’d you do, hurt yourself?” he asked anxiously, casting his hat aside.

She let the sheltering hand drop to reveal what at first sight almost appeared to be some encrusted, gangrenous excrescence, encircling her smooth ivory-pale skin. Then at closer range, as he stepped quickly over, he saw to his vast relief that it was only a band of thick, crudely fashioned metal, some three inches wide. Traces of some rotary design were still faintly visible through its weather-beaten patina, studded at intervals with chips of turquoise.

“Where’d you come across that?”

“I saw it in one of the windows. I don’t know, something about it drew me. I’d start to go on past each time, and then I’d come back again and look at it some more. Finally I went in the door.”

“But what’d you put it on your arm for?” he asked with a grimace of repugnance.

“I don’t know — it just seemed to belong there. I didn’t even know I was doing it. I looked, and there it was on me already.” She traced it dreamily with her fingers, almost caressed it. “It just seemed to belong there,” she repeated. “And, I don’t know, once I had it on” — she gestured helplessly — “I just couldn’t seem to take it off again.”

“But you’re not going to keep it on?” he protested incredulously. “It’s claptrap. The sort of thing a Kaffir woman would wear. Look at it, it’s all green and tarnished, kind of—” He reached out to disengage it.

She drew back a step, shielded it protectively with her hand.

He shrugged. “Well, if you want to keep it, that’s up to you. But it looks freakish, fantastic.”

She drew it off very slowly, very reluctantly, and held it in her hands for a long time. At last she put it lingeringly away in a drawer.

The next day he saw her standing by the partly open drawer, looking down at it without taking it out. She closed the drawer softly when she became aware he had entered.

He said nothing.

The second day after that he was in time to see her thrust it back into the drawer, then close it. This time she had been holding it in her hands. Again he didn’t say anything to show he had noticed.

The third day, it was on her arm again. It stayed on her arm from then on.

Presently it became a little more lustrous, a little less encrusted, with the friction of her skin. Or perhaps he had grown more used to it. Either way, the sight of it became more bearable to him.

Thus the days of their isolation toiled by.

It was impossible for him to tell at what point he first noticed the absent-mindedness. Absent-mindedness was his own inappropriate mental description for it, discarded again almost as soon as he had become aware of anything at all intermittently present in her manner that required naming even to himself, but with no other designation at hand suitable to take its place.

First a vacant look. He said something to her and she did not hear him. He repeated it, and she heard him. That was all there was to it, that time. Its incipiency was that elusive. The incident was over. It was not even an incident. It was nothing.

Later, the vacant look came again. He remembered the time before. Now, therefore, he looked at the vacant look. Thus he became aware of the “absent-mindedness.” It was under way. But again, that was all there was to it. Oh, he said to himself, she’s just trying to get a little air out there on the balcony. She’s lost in thought.

He addressed her once more. “Are you going to freshen up, Mitty? We may as well go down and eat their Godawful rice and beans and get it over with.”

She got up at once and came into the room.

It was still nothing, less than an incident.

But it happened out on the street too.

They were strolling together and their way led past the mouth of another street that opened onto the one they were following. As they crossed before this gap, he heard her step beside him slacken, then failed to hear it resume, and turning, saw that she had fallen several paces behind him, had faltered to a halt, and was standing with her body still aligned in the same direction his was, but with her head turned aside the new way. He joined her in looking, as anyone would have, and there was nothing there. Nothing to see. Just the marginal lines of the street drawing together in perspective to a single point. There was not even anyone moving along its length. It led straight out to nowhere. Suspended beyond even that nowhere, as if to show that perspective itself had a limit, was the mountain, like a filmy blue backdrop.

“Why do you stand here like this in the middle of the road?” he asked her. “You haven’t reached the shade yet. What’s stopped you like that?”

“I don’t know. I suddenly looked down that way, and—”

“And what?” he said, looking again, and seeing again what he had seen the first time: nothing.

“I don’t know.” She blinked at him, as if seeking some sort of assistance. “I don’t know now. It’s gone again. But I felt something strange.”

He was obtuse at this stage. Not alert yet to the things he could not have grasped anyway. “A speck of dust fly in your eye?” He thought she meant something like that.

She shunted the remark aside unanswered. “Wait a minute, Larry,” she said.

She turned and retraced their last few steps. This carried her back past the street opening, to where the impeding side walls sprang up again. There he saw her turn and start forward again, as if seeking to test something. He would have even thought she was seeking to discover something she had lost on the ground, but the forward cast of her eyes showed she wasn’t. Her concern was with some impression within her mind; the blank yet expectant look in her eyes as she came toward him showed it to be that.

Once more the street mouth sprang open beside her. She turned and looked aside — as she must have the first time — then came on toward him the rest of the way. “It didn’t happen the second time,” she said.

“What didn’t happen? You haven’t even told me what it was the first time.”

“Something seemed to pull at the corner of my eye. And as I turned to look, but before I had turned to look, while I was still only going to, I knew I was going to see something that I’d seen before. Then when I did turn and look, there it was, just as I’d known it would be: that mountain ‘way off there.”

“Of course you thought you saw it before; why wouldn’t you? Maybe you came past this same crossing yesterday, or maybe the day before. The corner of your eye remembered it and—”

She moistened her lips. “It was a deeper before.”

She just looked at him, and he looked at her, as if there were a barrier between them; a vast, thick sheet of glass that didn’t block vision or the sound of their voices but cut off everything else.

Finally he grinned, to put an end to the situation. “You’re a funny girl,” he said patronizingly. He went on down the street beside her.

It was nothing. Just an incident, a stray moment’s exchange between them as they walked along a street together.

This was the beginning of what, for a short time, he designated as her absent-mindedness.