The Surrendered

TWELVE

FIVE LONG DAYS IN THIS COUNTRY, and Hector could not say if she would last another week. They were on their way to Siena. Of course anyone could see June might be terminally ill but to look at her now, riding beside him in the car, her eyes steady and sparkling with the grassy light reflected off the Maremman hills, her skin warmed by the heat of the roadway, one could believe she was safe for another month, perhaps even a season, that she could last as long as she herself willed it, that she was still in control.

She certainly had been in control back in Rome, despite being utterly exhausted after the long flight from JFK, moving them through immigration and the terminal as if she were his guardian and he were the infirm one; at one point she may have literally led him by the hand. They arrived in the early morning and her plan, as she’d explained to him on the plane, was to rent a car and drive north immediately, but he was in no mood to do so, dazed and sullen as he was, completely silent, drinking nonstop on the flight, and she’d had the taxi driver take them to a nearby airport hotel so they could gather themselves before moving on.

They were forced to share a room because a laid-over Japanese tour group had overrun the small hotel, but he was sure she had somehow arranged it that way, so she could keep him close. She would not quite fall asleep even though she had medicated herself. He was with her out of necessity and desperation after what happened in Fort Lee and she was clearly afraid that he would soon abandon her, though where he could go or what he could possibly do was not obvious to him. She kept the passports in her handbag, then transferred them to the room safe, even though he had in fact used Clines’s passport to enter the country. She and Clines had planned for Hector to apply for his own, but because of events and June’s hurry to leave they had taken a chance at immigration: she’d folded five one-hundred-dollar bills into her own passport, saying to the officer that he’d get another five at customs if he allowed the man behind her entry. After they collected her single bag from the carousel (he had no luggage) the officer appeared and hooked June by the arm and walked them straight through to the receiving lobby, where she paid him the rest.

In the hotel room he had continued drinking, sitting on the floor in the corner with two bottles of cheap brandy bought from the tiny shop downstairs, while she lay on her side on the twin bed with her dark eyes open wide but not quite focused, fluttering shut every once in a while, the steady traffic from the street and the harsh noise of jet engines blaring loudly enough that there was little reason to talk. She was not hungry and neither was he. He didn’t want to look at her and tried to seal himself instead in the hermetic chamber of the liquor, which put him, as usual, in a state not of inebriation but of severance, though this time her presence was a steady encroachment and he ended up swigging from the bottle with an arm draping his face.

Once night fell, however, the streets grew quiet and the planes were approaching and landing on a different vector and it was then that she began to speak to him, in a voice that he suddenly remembered for its effortless, humming resonance, which was remarkable even back then because everything else about her was so abrasive and flinty. She could have been a singer, at least in another life.

“I’m sorry about your friend,” she said, still on her side, her knees drawn up to her chest beneath the thin covers. She periodically shivered. She had been chilled on the plane as well, asking for extra blankets, her body as drawn as when he’d first met her on the road more than thirty years before. “She was a good person, wasn’t she?”

When he didn’t answer, June said, “I know she would not have been out in the street but for me. As I tried to tell you on the plane, she was helping me to the car. I’m very sorry for what happened. But I think you should know she was helping me. She was being very kind.”

He ignored her but her expression didn’t change and he could see that she was relieved he wasn’t blaming her, at least not enough to make him reconsider his presence. He wanted to blame her; she had indeed shifted the course of events, and now Dora was gone. But he was lying to himself, for he knew that what had happened was the result of the more significant alteration of himself, having merged his grimy existence with the decent one she made pains to keep up, with her always pressed, dry-cleaned dresses and prettily manicured fingers and how neatly she was keeping his apartment. It may have appeared hers was prevailing, and yet from a wider viewpoint it was easy to see that his was the overriding condition; he was the cause, and the symptom, and the disease; he was the dooming factor for everyone but himself.

June said, “There was nothing you could do for her.”

He couldn’t answer, the unintended truth of the notion cutting inside his chest as if he’d swallowed the broken top of a bottle. Dora was lying there broken and unwhole in the street soaked with her blood, so frightened and confused right up to the last moments that he found himself shaking with horror and rage. Then in an instant she was gone. He tried to breathe life into her, tasting even the wine from her mouth. But she was turning cold, her face already honed into the marble-smooth mask. She had bled out. The swiftness of this final cruelty had driven him to want to hold Clines’s throat until his eyes shimmered and a racked sigh arose from his lips, but the man had expired on his own. Sirens had already gone up in the distance, and it was only because Dora was so instantly, irretrievably gone that he had approached the figure standing beside the parked car, this woman who was calling him by name. He recognized her immediately and instinctively wanted to run the other way but some people had come out from the apartments pointing at him and the sirens were wailing and she told him in a sure and measured voice that she would tell the police what had happened, that Clines was already dead, which is exactly what she did while the ambulances took away the bodies.

“Why don’t you rest now,” she said, gesturing to the twin bed that was pushed right up against hers due to the almost ridiculous narrowness of the hotel room. The plaster walls were bare and there was a single, small window set too high and if he didn’t know better he might have thought they were in a shared prison cell.

“Have you slept at all since we left New York?”

He shook his head.

“You should, because you’ll have to drive tomorrow, first thing. You know, you don’t look so good.”

“I’m okay.”

“I don’t think you are,” she told him. “Please, don’t drink any more. Come and lie down. I won’t bother you. I won’t talk.”

But she did keep talking, urging him to rest, and she held her hands out to him like some angel of mercy, though one who was strangely frail and wrecked, and as much as she appeared a wraith of sorry bones, her rich, plangent voice began to wash over him, envelop him as though it were the revival of Dora’s living, lush body. His eyes were burning. He was not weary so much as stripped of hope and volition, but the moment he lay on the mattress the previous thirty hours suddenly accrued on the crown of his head where his consciousness prevailed and compressed him to a near-perfect erasure; oddly, all he remembered dreaming was that only his feet remained of him, and when he awoke in the middle of the night his work shoes had been removed, his rank gray socks slung over the towel bar in the bathroom, airdrying after having been hand-washed.

June was deep in sleep, her kit opened, the miniature syringe carelessly dropped on the bed beside her. When he checked her neck for a pulse-her skin was blue-tinged and quite cool to the touch-she didn’t stir and he had to press hard to find it. He lay back down in the bed and tried to go back to sleep but he couldn’t and so had wandered the streets of the cruddy airport town, looking for another drink. It was a hard-surfaced, unadorned settlement of low-slung concrete slab buildings, the ground floors of shuttered storefronts topped by shuttered residences above. Nothing was open, not even the gas stations, and then nothing seemed alive besides, no lights or voices or sounds of any insects or birds. It was a gritty, modern place with electrical wires sprouting everywhere from the ugly, featureless façades and the sickliest trees he’d ever seen, and with its air laced with the stink of jet fuel he felt he was in a fitting place, the kind of forlorn hole where someone like him might choose to crawl in and cover himself with dirt.

Was this Nicholas like him? Was he truly nearby? June had shown him an old school picture on the plane, and though he merely glanced at it (he had folded himself against the window seat in the most miserable mourning, walling himself off with a dozen little liquor bottles), the momentary flash of the creased photograph was enough to convince him of his paternity: the boy featured the same squared line of jaw, the prominent, gently angled brow, even the mouth, which was not quite Hector’s but rather his father’s, those full, ever-risible lips of Jackie Brennan. He suddenly realized how obtuse he’d been, plain dumb to the fact that June wasn’t solely asking for his help but aiming to bring the two of them together before she was gone. Was it a final, sentimental gesture? The wish of a dying mother, of not leaving her son completely alone in the world? She was losing her grip for sure but even she couldn’t possibly believe that connecting them now would be beneficial to Nicholas in any way. With Hector she was just saddling the young man with an unnecessary drag on his psyche. Slowing him down.

If he had any fatherly instinct at all it was that he ought to warn the boy of his presence, scare him off for good as if he were some stray dog you couldn’t afford to feed. Of course he had never come close to wanting children of his own and had no feelings either way for Nicholas; but a curiosity was steadily gaining on him, too, even as he was trying to dispel it, a wonder about this elusive, apparently criminal person whose bloodlines were drawn from a most unfortunate pairing. Was he as diamond hard as June? Was he a misfit like Hector, some self-incarcerating soul? Or was he, like anybody else, desperately yearning to be discovered again, by any good stranger or beloved? It might be as simple as that. But of course a flat-out fear, too, was afflicting Hector as he turned down the dusty, unfamiliar side streets, the thought of actually facing Nicholas raising alarms in his heart, not simply for the awkward talk they would have to suffer through but the specter of something infinitely more disturbing: the prospect of his failing yet another person, even in the smallest way, someone else he should honor or protect or love better than he ever could.

Back at the hotel he had found June vomiting onto the floor between the twin beds, which they’d pushed apart as far as the room allowed, barely a foot. It was just watery mucus and he cleaned it up. When he wiped her mouth with a hand towel she batted at him from her medicated half-sleep and Hector had to calm her, though simply folding her arms seemed to cause her pain. Her feet were terribly swollen, distended into hideous, red-purplish bags. The flight had finally caught up with her. Yet despite her condition he kept seeing her differently, as the lean, angular child he once knew, the unflaggingly angry, aggressive, icily silent girl who wouldn’t let anyone touch her or get too close. Everybody at the orphanage was wary of her and kept their distance, even the toughest boys, not wanting to risk a hard shove or even a kick in the groin. One day she’d taken on two of the bigger boys at once, breaking the middle finger of one and nearly scratching out the eyes of the other; the memory of it was clear enough that Hector unconsciously reclined gingerly on his bed, so as not to make the springs creak and disturb her. And though he could have easily taken all her identifying papers and the large sum of money she’d given him and let her die there anonymously and be done with it he was amazed by her ceaseless, spearing will to persist, a life force that her physical distress was somehow sharpening rather than blunting. He was awed by the way she could push herself, ignore her obvious wretchedness, and apply herself like a tool.

The next morning she was miraculously improved, her cheeks no longer the light slate color, her movements as she quickly repacked her bag steady and efficient, like any woman leaving on a business trip. They had a breakfast of tea and stale rolls (June took only the tea) and flagged a taxi to the rental-car office and soon enough they were on the road, headed north, June reading the map for them. Hector was driving and they made it to Livorno by noon, but it proved to be a worthless trip. Directing them was a dossier of documents from Clines’s contact in Rome, but they were following a trail that seemed to Hector a pathetic, frayed yarn.

It turned out they’d gone to Livorno because someone with a name similar to one of Nicholas’s aliases had been was arraigned there recently on check-kiting charges, but when they got there nobody at the courthouse knew anything or could even find a file on the man. The court officer who was contracted to deal with them was on vacation. June put it down to the confusion of the aliases and the language difficulty, but Hector was not convinced; Clines’s contact in Rome, a talkative fish-mouthed fellow with an Australian accent to his English, struck him instantly as a crook and a liar, the sort who maybe specialized in swindling old people and women, and after June paid what he said he’d been promised, he offered up the name of a court officer in Livorno, assuring that a sizable bribe to him would erase the indictment.

There was little point in going back to Rome, for the contact there was probably gone, too. After staying a night in Livorno they went to the medieval town of Massa Marittima, a place where her son had briefly worked in a fancy antiques shop after leaving London. They found the shop, but it was no longer an antiques store; it had changed hands recently and was in the midst of being renovated as a tourist shop, and the Czech construction workers could tell her nothing. But they got lucky: it was only because June had suddenly craved something sweet, a gelato-the one thing she felt like eating anymore-that they stopped at the stand on the other side of the tiny cobbled street and struck up a conversation with the English-speaking counter girl. June asked if a young man had worked there and the girl said that an Asian-British man named Nicky Crump had indeed worked in the shop.

June gasped that this was sure proof; Crump Antiques had been the name of her shop early on, after the original owner, before she changed it to just Fine Antiques, Nicholas himself scraping off the old name and painting the new one on the glass panel of the door in matte gold and black lettering. When June showed her the old school picture the girl had at first hesitated, scrunching her nose, but when June pressed her she agreed that it was he. Apparently Nicky Crump had told her when he learned the shop was closed that he was heading to Siena, as there were a good number of antiques shops there. The girl was gentle and bookish and not unattractive and seemed to want to say something else, maybe that she had liked him, but before she could June had whisked them away, saying they should move on, move on.

Now, heading to Siena, they seemed to be lost again, stuck on a rutted two-lane road outside yet another unsigned town. The autostrada had been full of tourist traffic and delivery trucks and marred by construction sites and after inching along for several half-hour stretches June decided they ought to take the smaller roads that ran alongside the main highway. But then there were countless unmapped roundabouts and side-jogs and because it was hazy they couldn’t read the sun for direction. They’d doubled back several times already, even ending up twice at the same roundabout, as they were now, and June suddenly cried, “This can’t be where we are!” ripping the page from the map book and crumpling it with rage.

Hector kept quiet, but while he drove them he began to wonder about the reality of this all, how Clines’s contact had been able to get any of this information. He thought maybe Clines had been playing her, or been duped himself. Or perhaps he had been simply pulled along, just as Hector was being drawn along now, pulled forth in the wake of June’s intensity, her inhuman stamina. And yet the questions about her son kept accruing, if more to him than to her. She seemed to ignore the fact, documented in Clines’s folder, that the name of the person she’d wired money to in the last weeks-a Paul Ferro-was very different from the names Nicholas had used in the past, or that the sums requested had dramatically increased. She was simply aiming herself toward him as he kept moving and it didn’t matter that hers was a likely folly of a journey and destined to end in nothing at all.

But soon they found the right road, and she retrieved the balled-up paper from the car floor, wincing as she reached for it, and then opened the map book and carefully smoothed the page out to go back in its spot. Her mood would swing erratically like this, depending on the changing matrix of the pain, the drugs in her system, or the periodic attacks of vertigo that seemed to be gaining in strength and frequency, and with it would ebb her energy and ability to reason. In the space of thirty minutes she might change their routing, or break down, or even lash out at him for driving too slowly. Every so often June tapped him to pull over at the next shoulder so she could shut her eyes for a minute and regain her equilibrium, or else so she could retch, yet time after time she’d emerge from the restroom and don her sunglasses and walk quickly back to the car like she was ready for another hundred kilometers and open the spiral map book to the connecting page.

They had traveled up well past the foothills now and the road narrowed and began to curl severely about the hillsides. The roadway lacked guardrails and the exposed slopes fell away so steeply that June was shutting her eyes as Hector marked the hairpin loops. A local bus had closed in behind them and was riding their bumper; he was driving with her in mind and didn’t speed up, but soon enough June signaled him to stop. The road was too curvy and it was only after a few more switchbacks that he could turn off onto a gravel drive, pulling in a bit too fast. The driveway was even steeper than the road and the car bottomed out on the spine of the rutted path and he had to gun the throttle to get it moving. They slid perilously for a few feet, the front wheel stopping on the edge of the knee-deep rainwater ditch that was cut alongside. June promptly opened the door and leaned over and gagged, dry-heaving; the color in her face was wrong, perfectly metallic and dulled, and he simultaneously noticed through the trees the faded terra-cotta tiles of a roof and followed the road downward.

“What are you doing?” June said, wiping her mouth. “I just need a moment. Then we can move on.”

“We’re stopping for a while.”

“I’m okay. Turn around now. Hector…”

He didn’t reply, and for the first time in the few days they’d been together she didn’t overrule him. She had already closed her eyes, holding on to the door handle as they bumped fitfully down the hill, kicking up a trail of dust. The driveway suddenly ran out around the next turn, stopping mid-hill, two large boulders marking its end; the house sat another twenty or so meters farther down, at the end of a footpath.

He helped June out of the car. She had trouble with the loose footing and he steadied her as they descended. When they reached the steeper footpath she lost her balance but he caught her before she fell, lifting her in his arms. She held on to him tightly, her hands slung around his neck. It stunned him, how she was hardly there; she was as light as a box kite. He felt uneasy, touching her. While they were briefly married he never touched her, except that final night before their agreed-upon separation, when she had plied him with more liquor after he’d come home from a night’s drinking and then later startled him from his dead man’s sleep, straddling him as he spasmed awake. She left their flat right then, leaving him with the feeling that he’d been not so much used as robbed.

Now he carried her to the house, where she asked to be let down, but she didn’t make a move to stand and he realized she wished to recline. There was an old wooden bench tipped over in the high grass near the house and he righted it with his foot and laid her down. She was suffering, her knees tucked up into her chest. Her sandals had come off and her feet looked blanched and skeletal. The haze had dissipated and the late afternoon sunlight was still brilliant, if not hot, and Hector decided to check the house to see if she could rest where it was less bright.

The cottage was perhaps a hundred years old, made of varied stones reset and remortared over the years, with a single square, shuttered-up window in the north wall speckled with dormant moss. The place was likely a hunter’s retreat, for there were ropes left hanging from a large tree nearby, for stringing up game. The short, scarred door was pad-locked but the screws played in the rotted wood of the jamb and with a few hard shakes he was able to free the rusted iron and push the door in. A faint smell of ash rose up from the darkness; someone had been there in the last few days. He opened the shutters of the windows and could now see the entirety of the space, a room roughly three meters by four meters: there was a hearth on the short wall and a rough-hewn table in the center with two stools, and a canvas cot topped with a sleeping bag. The plastered walls were hung with ancient threadbare tapestries that appeared they might crumble on touch. He unzipped the sleeping bag and it smelled of a person but not strongly and he went out and got June. He laid her down. She asked for her kit and he hiked back up to the car to retrieve it. But when he returned she was already asleep, her face pinched with hurt, mumbling like she was explaining something detailed and complicated and maybe unpleasant. Did she say the name Sylvie? He thought about giving her a shot anyway, to relieve her of course, but also in the hope of quieting her, so she wouldn’t make any such mention again, but he started a fire instead in the hearth, as the cottage was cool from being shuttered up.

Soon enough, however, she was awake. “Where’s the car?”

He nodded up the hill.

“What are you doing?”

“Making some food.”

He was filling a cast-iron pot with some ingredients he’d found. In a cabinet there was a stock of home-canned goods, jars of white beans and tomatoes and pickled meat and anchovies. There was also olive oil and bread crisps and several bottles of what looked like homemade wine, along with a canister of coarse salt.

“I don’t want to eat.”

“Well, I do.” He was hungry, not having had a real meal in days. He’d almost forgotten to eat, being with her.

“We need to go,” she said, trying to sit up. “It’s probably only an hour to Siena. You can eat when we get there.”

“You ought to rest.”

“I’ve rested enough.”

“You should rest more.”

“Please don’t tell me what to do.”

“Whatever you want. But I think you should stop for a while. Otherwise you’ll die. You’ll die before finding him.”

His words gave her pause, and then she lay back down and watched him. While she was sleeping he had also found a small terrace garden carved out of the hillside a few steps below the cottage. It was overgrown and mostly gone to seed but there were some onions and carrots and an immense zucchini, and he’d cut these up with a knife he’d also found in the cabinet. The pot had a swivel handle, which he affixed to the hook above the fire. In it he fried the vegetables and then added the jarred beans and tomatoes and a little water. There was no plumbing in the cottage or well that he could find outside, and so he used the bottled water they were carrying in the car.

Finally she said, “What are you making?”

“I guess a stew. Does the smell bother you?”

“It’s okay. Is it like what you used to make?”

He didn’t know what she meant, but then the sight of her face staring at him suddenly jogged his memory.

“Not really.”

When he was in the army he did a stint at the base mess before his general soldiering, and at the orphanage he would make dinner for the children whenever he was able to get foodstuffs from the PX, this once every couple of weeks. The aunties usually prepared rice and a soup made from wild greens and potatoes and whatever meat they could manage, sometimes dumplings filled with bean threads and chives, but after a particularly successful trading session with the PX sergeant he’d make a “camper’s stew” of everything he hauled back-canned corn, green beans, Campbell’s tomato soup, frozen beef patties or hot dogs or Spam, egg noodles, and Tabasco; the kids went crazy for it, they’d yell Campus-too! not knowing what they were saying, and crowd too closely around the stockpots on the blazing outdoor cooker.

The stew was much heavier and richer than what they were accustomed to and a handful of the kids would eat too much too quickly and vomit, but then come back for another bowl anyway. June would stay on the periphery and wait until the clamor died down, and he remembered now how she’d insist he fill her bowl to its brim, keep pushing her hands up to him and say in her disarmingly good English, I am very hungry today. I want more. She was the best English-speaker among the kids, but employed it sparingly, and for her own ends, rarely willing to be a translator or advocate for anyone else. Unlike most of the other children, she was short-tempered and difficult and in certain lights insufferable but you never knew what horrors any of them had survived or witnessed or had to commit, and there was no use in judging. He’d comply and give her what she wanted, and she’d go off on her own and despite what she’d said eat her food with cold method, careful spoon by spoon, as though she were counting them for the next time.

“Maybe I’ll try some,” she said. “It almost smells good. To me. You know what I mean.”

“It’ll be ready soon.”

“May I have some of that water?”

There were no cups in the cottage, so he just gave her the glass bottle, but it was a full liter and a half and a bit too heavy for her and he had to help hold it up; she had some trouble drinking straight from the bottle and some went down her airway and she had a brief coughing fit before she could lie back down. When he was finished cooking he asked if she still wanted some and she nodded. He bore the hot pot over and placed it on a stool between them, pulling up the other for himself. There were no plates or bowls and only the one wooden spoon, and he offered it to her.

“You eat,” she said. She was sitting up now, her narrow shoulders pinched forward, making her seem slighter still, folded in, like she was an image in the crease of a book. “I just want a taste anyway.”

“You ought to go first, then.”

He handed her a scant spoonful of it, its consistency more like a soup than a stew. She took it, chewing tentatively, and then had another, two large full spoons. She rapped the spoon on the edge of the pot and offered it to him.

“You keep going,” he said.

“We can share.”

“You better eat while you want to,” he said. Then he added, “While you can.”

She nodded, and had two more spoonfuls, though the final one seemed to stick in her throat. He had opened a bottle of the homemade wine, leaving the equivalent of fifty dollars in lire for it and the rest of the things he had opened, from the money she had had him change in Livorno. In fact she’d given him her bankroll to hold, twelve thousand dollars or so in traveler’s checks and cash, vastly more money than he’d ever seen at once. But he’d never cared about money and he would have likely traded a good deal of it for a corkscrew, if the cottage hadn’t had one. (Though he’d smashed open the tops of bottles before.) He found one, though, and his hands were calmed by the familiar heft of the bottle, and in one smooth continuous action he pulled the cork and brought it to his lips. The wine wasn’t wine at all but a very strong, clear brandy, harsh and chemical, like dry-cleaning fluid might taste, but it was right enough; he drank nearly a third of it in one slug. He sensed her watching him with hooded eyes, undoubtedly wondering whether he was that much better off than she.

“You didn’t drink so much back then,” she said.

“You wouldn’t have seen me.”

“I did,” she said. “I sometimes followed you. You didn’t know, but I spied on you.”

He took another long slug and tried not to think of what she might have witnessed, though not because it wouldn’t have been right for a young girl; he was simply shielding himself, for as much as the memory of Sylvie Tanner charged hotly through him, the picture of her milkhued throat only made him more wary, and then thirstier. He hadn’t drunk in more than a day, and if anything the craving in his body was the opposite of June’s: he wasn’t moving quite fast enough, he couldn’t feel any of that phantom speed, the easy gearing that the drink let him slip into, allowing him to gain a merciful distance from himself, which was the pathetic excuse of a creature he had come to be: loser-for-eternity, world-class self-pitier, tireless batterer of men and embodied doom of women, this now wholly bereft last man standing.

June said, “I remember, just before the end, when Reverend Tanner was letting her have it. Telling her what a disgrace she had become.”

“Where was I?”

“You were gone for the day,” she said. “Maybe you had gone to the base, for supplies. It was morning and she was sitting in the patch of grass behind their cottage. She had missed breakfast again, and I had come to sweep and clean. Her eyes were bloodshot and her hair was messy and he was standing over her, so tall and high. He didn’t shout. But for some reason I was sure he was going to strike her. I had his glass paperweight in my hand and I was ready to hit him, if I had to. Of course he didn’t.”

“He wasn’t like that,” Hector said.

“No, he wasn’t,” June answered. “But he kept telling her how ashamed he was. How she was an embarrassment to herself, and to him. She just sat there, taking it. I was so angry.”

How easily Hector could see June, more than thirty years removed, wielding some sharp crystal. And then Sylvie, in a cloak of miserable penitence that she was all too ready to don. Tanner had returned from another overnight trip to nothing different except that she was obviously sluggish, exhausted, moving about as if she were the one who had been on the road for a week. She was sleeping late some days, something that she would never have done before. Tanner had asked Hector twice if anything odd had happened, whether she had seemed ill, but he simply shook his head, not wishing to have to lie outright. After that first week of their arrival, the man had been nothing but fair to him. He wouldn’t apologize, but he didn’t need to have Tanner know, either, that she had spent the previous four nights in Hector’s bed, neither of them sleeping at all, he drinking and she drugging herself in alternation with their lovemaking, which for Hector was a revelation, this woman whose sexual hunger was both a plea and a hazard, like someone floundering in waves far from shore.

“When you were spying on us. Were you in the storeroom?”

“Yes.”

His room was on the end of a long, low wood-framed building that was roofed with sheets of corrugated tin. It was a room much like this one, though half its size, with a single cot and a rusted metal shelf for his things but no window onto the dirt courtyard. It was never meant for habitation. Next to it was a general storeroom for the orphanage-study books and pencils, some canned foodstuffs, tools and rakes, Bibles, donated blankets and children’s clothes and shoes, square cans of kerosene. June described how she had crouched low against the shared wall, a wall that he himself had erected with materials on hand, salvaged studs and panels of pegboard that he covered with canvas. “There was a gap in the fabric on your side, down near the floor, and if I pressed my eye up I could see through the holes.”

“We never knew.”

“I was careful to be quiet.”

“How many times were you there?”

“I don’t know.”

He took a long drink, and then another. “Why are you telling me this?”

“I don’t know, exactly,” she said. But her eyes were enlivened, gleaming brightly against her sallow face, the last pools in a forsaken plain. “After she told me I couldn’t work in the house anymore, I wanted to hate her. But then she started seeing you and I could see a way, again.”

“A way to what?”

“To being with her always. Isn’t that what you wanted, too?”

He didn’t answer, because of course it was true. Yet at the time he didn’t quite know it-he was too brutal and stupid, just a rig of flesh that selfishly craved and rebelled. He didn’t understand then how deeply he needed her, that he loved not just her sharp wants and carnality but how tightly bound up those were with her decency and beauty and goodness; she was exalted and flawed, someone who required as much grace and succor as she herself readily offered, someone both he and June desperately needed, a mother and a lover and a kind of child, too. That first time they made love, when she opened the back door of the cottage for him, she had fallen upon him as if she’d thrown herself from a parapet, with the grave force of both will and surrender. She kissed him, bit him, wanted his fingers inside every part of her. She was more than thirty years gone now, though it could be a mere day, and he felt his heart suddenly unstitch, the wire twine instantly rusting, falling away, to reveal again the cold box, the great dark underworld of his guilt.

“I’m so tired,” June said. She had a hand on her belly, not quite holding it, the way a pregnant woman might unconsciously take her own measure. She lay back down and slowly closed her eyes. With a long swig Hector finished the first bottle, its liquor still burning his throat. He had just opened the other bottle when she said, “I’ll sleep a little now.”

“Okay.”

“Aren’t you going to eat?”

“No,” he said. He was already drinking deeply again, a broad, dry delta. “Maybe later.”

“Will you stay here with me?”

“Where else would I go?”

“Just stay.”

He nodded to her and waited until her breathing grew steady and more audible. He had become her sitter now. Like a child, she was acting as if his remaining within the scope of her reach and sight would somehow diminish his power or will to leave. And yet now her insistence seemed strangely valid, for he thought he needed to step outside the cottage to determine what he would do. In fact, in Livorno he had, at least temporarily, deserted her; for two hours he sat in the main station, waiting for the next train to Rome, until he finally returned to their room at the hotel and found her unable to get out of the tub. She’d been showering and had reached up to adjust the sprayer and lost her balance, slipping and falling hard on her side and back. Though she was in pain, nothing, miraculously, was broken-a folded towel on the tub edge had softened the impact-and the distress of the situation allowed them to avoid the question of where he had been. Her nakedness was unsettling, but only to Hector; she didn’t try at all to cover herself, either immediately or after he lifted her up, merely sitting on the bidet in a miserable daze. Her breasts were shrunken and lined and her scarred belly was partly distended to a shine, and the patch of hair between her legs, a thick, dark broom, was the sole indication that she was not even fifty years old. He had offered her the towel but she only held it in her hands, weakly wringing it, dabbing it against her face as if it were a precious furl of cloth.

The sun was now low in the sky but still bright and he shut the door of the cottage behind him to keep the light from disturbing her. He was sitting on the creaky bench and drinking from the second bottle, feeling the day’s heat radiating from the stone walls behind him. This bottle seemed even stronger than the first, and he was reminded of how Dora began her evenings by downing three small glasses of her own brand in quick succession, as if to prime her needy motor before the drinking proper. So he took three swift shots in somber deference to her, and then three more, not caring that it was harsh on the tongue and throat and smelling of petrol; but the rite fell short, for he conjured up not Dora’s thirst sated, that first sip’s glee, nor the soft grainy apple-flesh of her bottom, nor the furious grip she’d exert on him during their passions, grappling his shoulders, pulling his hair, but rather the horrid bed of the blood-glazed street, and her pretty leg all in a mess, and her eyes beseeching him, not to save her so much as to explain the backward mercy of the world, why it was taking her just at the moment she had finally stopped wanting it to.

Had the eyes of the Chinese boy soldier made the same petition? And the others he had witnessed die during the war? Why was he to be the angel of ironical death? It was those last few seconds that were most horrifying for Hector; at least the mien of the long-dead he had collected doing graves registration was generally one of distinct unconcern, or perhaps the mildest bemusement, if they had faces left at all. He could take their expressions blackened with rot or dried blood or else blown away, cheekless or jawless or lacking a brow, all countless mutilations, the frightful carnage, but watching a living face fade and pale was to him the most grotesque of turns, the one thing he could no longer bear. The promise of being with June at her end made him want to crawl away, to run, and he knew he would indeed have to leave her, that it was inevitable, that he must desert her before the final hour.

He wandered down the steep, arid hillside with the bottle in his hand, drinking it down as he went. The homemade liquor was coursing through him more hotly than usual, almost painfully; he could feel it drawing out into his extremities, these lines of ants on the march. He was going to drink some more, maybe drink the rest. If it was poison, let it be. He found a deer path through the scraggly brush but instead of stepping mindfully he let the pitch take him and he dropped himself headlong in its leafy track, pumping his legs in a velocity of desperate escape; to view him from above was to see, paradoxically, a man running as fast as he could in order to keep from falling.

But even Hector could not sustain the necessary speed, create enough balancing momentum, and he flew down the hill, tumbling head over knee so violently that it appeared he was there to thrash clear the greenery, the rocks, the dusty earth itself. He came to rest in a dark glade of cork trees, their sinuous trunks stripped of bark to the height of eight feet. They were old trees but now naked and smooth, and he felt as exposed as they. He was cut and bruised about the face and knuckles; he was crying, but not from any physical distress. The bottle, emptied, was still in his hand. He’d just missed an exposed sharp spine of rock and he cursed his luck and smashed the bottle against it. He was going to fight himself, pugilist as onanist, because there was nobody else to fight, nobody left to take on. Here he is, your undying low-life champion. With the jagged neck of the bottle he slashed across each wrist and also his neck, and jabbed at his side and thighs. Then he got on his feet and bull-rushed the largest tree. He rammed it with his chest, and then his shoulder, and as he grew weary he pushed against it with his now bloody carmine hands, his carmine-stained forehead, grunting and pumping his legs as if he were a football lineman toiling against a practice sled.

After a stretch of time long enough to be embarrassing, even to a man alone, he relented, his punctures already congealed and crusting over in the unnatural manner they always did. This was the only pain he actually felt, which actually registered, the sear of the too-swift healing. His exhaustion was fed less by exertion than frustration, the closed loop of his thwarted rage, and he fell against the roots and lay staring up at the stilled canopy, the sky dimming to indigo behind the web of gnarled black limbs. The sight was vaguely Eastern in aspect, like a beautiful silk-screened panel, but then lovely for nothing, and he thought that this was the diseased tableau of his life: forever there to witness splendor, while death coolly drifted upon everything else. Up the hill only the chimney of the cottage loomed. If she cried out, if she called for him, would he stay silent? And if she didn’t see the morning, would he simply leave her in the bed for the huntsman to find, or else bury her, as he had buried so many others, dig the necessary hole, his best dark talent among all his dark talents?