The Cannibal Heart

2

Evelyn’s face was needled with dust and her brown hair blowing against her neck felt as dry and stiff as straw.

“Next time you should wear a hat,” Mr. Roma said. “Mrs. Wakefield always wore a hat when she drove into town, a straw hat with a brim. She had a very fair complexion.”

He turned out to avoid a hole in the road, and the boxes of groceries slid across the back seat and the milk cans, packed in ice, rattled and gurgled.

“On this road,” he said, “it is like the desert. You must keep covered up for protection.”

In spite of the heat he wore a heavy plaid wool jacket buttoned to the neck, and a grey fedora jammed well down on his head so that only a little of his white hair showed at the back of his neck. He had eyes like brown plush, and a full sensitive mouth that quivered when he was moved to emotion; but it was chiefly the prematurely white hair that gave Mr. Roma his air of distinction. To Evelyn he looked like an English colonel charred by a tropic sun. She was surprised when he told her he was a mulatto.

“Perhaps,” Mr. Roma said, “next Saturday I could go alone and do the shopping.”

“Oh, no. I really enjoy shopping.”

“It’s not much of a town to buy things in,” he said in a half-deprecating, half-hopeful tone. Marsalupe was the only town he knew very well, and while he realized its limitations, he wanted other people to approve of it, especially strangers from the East. “There are no delicacies.”

“I don’t like delicacies much,” Evelyn said with a faint smile.

“You can always order things from Los Angeles. Mrs. Wakefield did that sometimes. Once, hearts of palm in a can. Mr. Wakefield had a sudden craving for it. It’s a great delicacy. Compared to hearts of palm, caviar is as common as dirt.” After a time he added, “From this curve it’s only a mile and a half. Already you can smell the sea.”

Evelyn couldn’t smell the sea, though she sniffed hard to oblige Mr. Roma, who always spoke as if he had a controlling interest in the sea as well as in the house built on the cliff above it.

“Don’t you smell it, Mrs. Banner?”

“Well, not quite. It’s not like a smell, exactly. It’s more like a feeling against my skin.”

“I smell it very clearly.”

“There, I think I do now. Yes, I’m sure of it.”

Evelyn didn’t like anyone to be disappointed. It was this characteristic that led some of her friends into thinking she was weak-willed; and once Mark, in a fit of temper, had told her she was wispy, that she had a wispy personality and a wispy mind. Sometimes, especially when she first got up in the morning and wasn’t quite awake, she felt wispy, like a floating, detached piece of fog. But once she’d washed the sleep from her eyes she saw herself quite distinctly as a person of substance, and by the time she went into the adjoining bedroom to help Jessie dress, she felt as clear and sharp and hard as a diamond.

The fact remained that at thirty-two Evelyn was, as she always had been, a very practical creature. It was often practical to make people, like Mark or Mr. Roma, feel good; and so she smelled the sea and told Mr. Roma that she felt refreshed already.

Mr. Roma was very pleased to have the salubrious qualities of his ocean recognized, and he rounded the next curve with such sweeping grace that Evelyn clutched at the door with both hands to balance and the groceries and the milk cans and the books for Mark slid in noisy unison to the other side of the jeep.

For the past eight years Mr. Roma had been making his Saturday trips to Marsalupe for supplies. It was only a matter of nine miles, but few people used the road and it was left in bad repair. During the wet season Mrs. Wakefield’s heavy Lincoln used to sink to its hub caps in mud, and during the dry season the road was dusty and full of holes, and there was about a mile of slide area where unexpected boulders brushed the old Lincoln’s tires and tortured its ageing springs. After the war Mrs. Wakefield bought a second-hand jeep which raced along the road like a tireless and indestructible child. When Mrs. Wakefield departed suddenly, over a year ago, she left the jeep with Mr. Roma.

Every month Mr. Roma received a check from Mrs. Wakefield’s bank, to cover his salary and necessary repairs for the house. Together, he and Carmelita had kept the place ready for occupancy, expecting that at any time Mrs. Wakefield would send word that she and Billy were coming home. But the only news he had of her were two letters, the first from Billy’s nurse.

A week after the Banners had moved in, the second letter arrived. It was an abrupt little note from Mrs. Wakefield herself, telling Mr. Roma that he might expect her within a week or two, and that she wanted to “straighten out a few things.”

“One more hill,” Mr. Roma said, shifting into second. “Maybe you would care to stop and see the view?”

“For a minute.”

“Mrs. Wakefield’s been all over, in nearly all the countries, and she says right here is the most wonderful view in the world.”

Evelyn smiled again. She couldn’t help being amused by Mr. Roma’s soft intensity, his air of innocent earnestness. “Perhaps it’s because this is her home, she has a sentimental attachment.”

Mr. Roma gave her a sharp glance. “She has no such attachment.”

“She must be unusual then.”

“Unusual, oh, yes. She’s a real — a real gentlewoman.” He handled the word awkwardly, as if he was aware that it was obsolete but could find no newer word to take its place.

“Is she pretty?”

“Some people think so. It is a matter of opinion. She has fine eyes and hair — red hair, quite dark.”

He stopped the jeep at the top of the hill. The road curved down below them through a grove of giant eucalyptus trees. Beyond the trees the sea shone blue and silver, with the cliffs zigzagging along its shore. As far as the eye could see, the cliffs stretched, a wilderness of stone, with here and there part of a house visible, or a tendril of rising smoke that implied a house with people living in it. There were no people to be seen, though — no movement at all except the sea. From such a height even the sea looked sluggish, and the breakers crawled languidly along the beach.

“There’s an island out there,” Mr. Roma said, pointing. “Twenty miles or so.”

“I can’t see it.”

“Not today — there is a slight haze — but on some days you can see it quite clearly.”

She thought instantly of Jessie, how eager she would be to see the island and explore.

“It would be fun to go over there some time, rent a cruiser in Marsalupe...”

“There’s no place to land.”

“How do people live there?”

“No one does. There are no people on the island because there is no water.”

“Water,” Evelyn repeated. She had never before in her life thought of water except as something that came obligingly, hot or cold, from a tap. But out here it was all she heard about, and everywhere she looked she saw reminders: the disconnected showers; the big tub under the kitchen sink where Carmelita saved the rinse water to use later on the vegetable garden, soap and all; the bricked-in flower beds, empty and baked into clay by the incessant sun, and the lawn that was so dry and crisp it crackled under one’s feet. When the rains start, people said, or, When the dry season is over. They measured time in cups and gallons.

When they passed the grove of eucalyptus trees the house itself came into view. It was a comfortable house, built sturdily and economically of adobe brick and native stone. But to Evelyn the place had a curious air of unreality, as if the people who had lived there had formed a small compact group independent of the outside world, the daily newspaper, the radio, the postman. In actual fact, the newspaper came (a day or two late), the mail was delivered, and there was a Capehart in the living room. But still the impression of isolation was so strong that Evelyn hesitated before turning on the radio, and once it was turned on she soon lost interest. “We’re becoming a couple of lotus eaters,” Mark had said, and it was true that, day by day, they were being absorbed by the house and the sea and the woods. Any other life seemed more and more remote.

The main rooms of the house faced the sea, but at the back there was a huge kitchen where Carmelita did the cooking and the Romas ate all their meals and spent most of their leisure time. To the north was the L-wing, two rooms and bath, now unoccupied. This wing was subtly different from the rest of the house, but it wasn’t until now, when Mr. Roma parked the jeep outside the kitchen door, that Evelyn realized why.

“That’s funny,” she said. “I didn’t notice it before.”

“What?”

“The windows remind me of a jail.”

Mr. Roma smiled and said they did, at that, though he volunteered no explanation of the fine wire mesh that unobtrusively covered the windows.

Evelyn managed to look wispy but obstinate. “Why would anyone put windows like that in a house?”

“Because of Billy. Mrs. Wakefield was afraid that Billy might break a window and hurt himself.”

“She must be one of these over-protective mothers.”

“Must be.” Mr. Roma honked the horn to summon Carmelita to help carry in the groceries.

“I’ll take some of the things in,” Evelyn said.

“Oh, no, thank you. Carmelita always helps. Carmelita is very strong.”

In response to the horn, Carmelita came out onto the back porch. She was a fat stubborn woman with fierce dark eyes, like Luisa’s. She wore loose huaraches on her feet, and her head was wrapped in a red silk scarf. Luisa insisted that her mother be stylish, and she had taught her how to do her hair up in pin curls. Carmelita wanted to please, and so she did her hair up in bobby pins once a week and tied a scarf around it. There, for the rest of the week the scarf and the bobby pins remained intact. It was Camelita’s way of obliging Luisa without taking too much trouble about it. No one could say she was not stylish, with all her pin curls.

In spite of her weight Carmelita had a proud willowy walk, and she carried her head high, in great disdain. The truth was that she was frightened of people who couldn’t speak her language; her neck got quite stiff with fright sometimes, but she never told anyone.

“Carmelita is as strong as a horse,” Mr. Roma said with pride. “Aren’t you? Eh?”

Carmelita flashed him a brief impatient smile, and, lifting two of the milk cans, strode back into the kitchen. Mr. Roma followed her in with the larger box of groceries. While Evelyn picked up the books from the back seat, she could hear the two of them talking in staccato Spanish. A minute later Mr. Roma came out again. He had put on his spectacles, the pair that Carmelita had chosen herself in the dollar store in Marsalupe.

He looked at Evelyn over the top of the spectacles. “I have had a letter. Mrs. Wakefield is coming today or tomorrow.”

“That’s fine.”

“She will not bother you. She said to tell you that.”

“We’ll be glad to have her,” Evelyn said truthfully. “Is she bringing her little boy with her?”

“No” — Mr. Roma took off his hat and rubbed the deep red wound across his forehead where the hat had been squeezed down tight to foil the wind — “the little boy is dead.”

Later, when everything was put away, the paper bags folded, and the pieces of string wound on a twist of paper to save for a rainy day, Mr. Roma settled down in the platform rocker beside the kitchen window and read the letter aloud, translating to Carmelita as he went along.

It was dated Monday, June 14, three days earlier than the postmark, as if Mrs. Wakefield had hesitated about sending it once it was written.

For a long time Mr. Roma sat with the letter in his hand staring out of the window, while Carmelita wept into her apron and shuffled back and forth across the kitchen, up and down its length.

“I had to burn the camellia, there was nothing left of it but sticks,” Mr. Roma said at last. “She will be disappointed.”

The camellia had died, not suddenly, but with a slow sure finality. The tired buds dropped, shriveled before they opened, and the leaves turned black and fell, one by one.