Melodrome Page 8

  Then he hears her say: Which of you did I authorise to creep into my heart and ordain what I love more, what I like less, what gives me hope or frightens me, what I respect or doubt? But he can’t be sure that Munava, Asbante or the catlike boy have heard those words as clearly as he has, or with the same intensity, or at all: were the words even audible to any ears but his. He wonders if it might not have been love speaking specifically to him, but Lerena does not return his gaze because she is trying to reach a decision on her own.

  And what she decides to do is to leave the bitcards in the backpack.

  You think you’re doing a good thing, sweetheart, but when one person decides what it is, the good can be big and threatening. You don’t understand everyday goodness: a woman saving a knabble of bread for a prisoner, a soldier giving a wounded enemy a drink, a child taking pity on a frail old person; that simplemost goodness draws its strength from the silence of the heart.

  From what I’ve seen, says Suano, the good that you administer here has a pretty crushing effect.

  Please, Dona, pass your goodness on to me, Lerena pleads.

  Show me that you’re sentient creatures. For the moment you’re just swaying like the branches of a tree, so powerless. You’re powerless.

  Powerless and proud of it, Botilecue replies. Your way of being strong is to live in a dream; you let the dream enslave you because you can’t face your own weakness.

  But Munava is making something, mister, the Dona says; making with eyes wide open; when the moment comes, she closes her hand and crushes the real to a pulp; then she kneads and models it into a whole new shape.

  Something in the air suggests that Lerena is about to get down on her knees and beg to leave this place empty-handed. But no, her skin is turning bruise-blue, her cheeks are sinking, her lips are growing thinner.

  Dona, this business is superobscure, she says.

  So it seems, bibita. I have nothing more to add.

  Time can be annulled by the absence of novelty. But after the end of the lightning, as the diffuse half-light intensifies, a bell begins to ring in Suano’s soul. He has observed Lerena and Munava, and discovered the glory of the obvious. Now is the time to focus his therapeutic art. He bends down to pick up the backpack.

  He says: Let’s go, Lerena.

  Munava doesn’t laugh. No-one in the courtyard laughs. Suano takes Lerena by the hand, not gripping too hard: she might faint.

  He has the sense that Lerena is releasing herself from the need to decide. She will neither pay nor refuse to pay: she has found freedom in the indefinite. By the time he notices that Lerena is trying to alert him to something, it’s too late: he has been shoved; a leg is out to trip him; and he’s about to take a punch in the back of the neck that will knock him flat. When his chin hits the ground, he bites his tongue. Yelling would ease the pain, he knows, but he keeps quiet and spits. Blood from his cut-open eyebrow mixes with the blood from his mouth and oozes onto the ground, thicker, before the rain dilutes it, than the drool full of shards that Luraz spat out.

  Munava says: Hey, quat, can’t you see that this is between us and the young lady? Least you could show her a bit of respect.

  And who the bommel are you to go round labelling people and telling them what they want or doubt, what fear is, what…what counts as manners? Who gave you the right to poke around in another woman’s heart? Suano can’t say any more: a sole pressing down on one cheek crushes the other against the puddled ground.

  But his words have an effect. Lerena rushes to help him. She tries to get hold of the sandal that’s holding him down, but it kicks her away like a rat, and two hands grip her shoulders and shake her for ten, fifteen, thirty seconds. As Lerena recovers her balance, Munava says:

  Why have you come here to fuck up our days like this? Lerena stretches and looks at her hands as if trying to transform her shame into something more specific.

  Who are you, madam?

  I’m a dog; when people feed me, I bark; when they don’t, I make up to them; and when they think they’re good, I bite.

  That’s the opposite of what dogs do.

  I’m my own special kind of dog.

  So says the Dona, half closing her eyes. She has noticed that Lerena is starting to go red but doesn’t understand why. She ought to be worried: Lerena herself is aware that this blushing comes from somewhere deep inside. What Suano would say is that it comes from a hidden structure that largely shapes all subjects and all consciousness.

  Lerena is ashamed. Not because of the Dona’s judgements; because of the role she is playing.

  Which isolates her, and the combination of shame and solitude makes her bold.

  She throws herself again at the foot that is crushing Suano’s cheek. The foot pulls away. She falls onto Suano’s shoulders and, as if she were alone with him, strokes his hair for a moment, then snaps out of it, stands up, steps back. Suano massages his neck. He sits. He isn’t dazed. Darkness is falling but the world is getting simpler.

  Suano and Lerena are beginning to suspect that the misunderstanding between them and the Dona is so resistant and so vast that overcoming it would require a mental operation for which they don’t yet have the tools. Munava, who sensed this some time ago, resorts to a different kind of weapon.

  She says that she has to go; it’s imperative; her presence is required elsewhere. She lulls them with a narcotic gaze, then flips their visual fields. Suano and Lerena, who are standing in front of the Dona, suddenly see not the half of the courtyard behind her, with its damp-stained wall, but the other half, behind them, with the acolytes keeping watch, a climbing stem of ivy, and a door. In that symmetrical image, there is no trace of them or the Dona. Only the rain is the same. They touch each other as if to check that they haven’t disappeared, and when they turn around they find the half of the courtyard that should have been in front of them.

  Minus Munava, who has vanished. Even her smell is gone. Stunned by fear, Lerena and Suano feel as if they have been replaced, atom for atom, by a pair of zombie surrogates. Threatened with knives, they would try to flee; offered cups of cafito, they would sip; but they would feel nothing at all. Munava’s triumph is definitive, like a total face transplant.

  But her faculties are too great, even for the Dona herself. A petty, ordinary vice brings her back to the courtyard for a moment. She pretends to be saying goodbye, but in fact she wants to make it clear just what she is capable of doing.

  There’s a gap between her prodigious natural powers and the vanity of her intelligence.

  Failure, however, has restored Lerena’s spontaneity. She doesn’t even have to think about it. Before the Dona can evaporate again, she leans down, reaches into the backpack, and takes a bitcard from the bundle.

  She puts it into her mouth. Holding it with one hand, she tears it in two with her teeth, then, with a grave indifference that freezes every other process in the courtyard, repeats the operation, laboriously ripping up the card. She spits the pieces into her palm, and when they have built up to a good handful, puts them back in her mouth. With a mincing sound she begins to chew, which is more difficult still.

  No, cries Suano, you’ll hurt yourself. And when she ignores him, he tries another tack: It’s money, Lerena!

  Lerena doesn’t listen. She doesn’t hear. She’s embalmed. She doesn’t even notice that Munava is finally showing some interest, wondering what nutrients the body of this smiggit might extract from a money card, perhaps.

  A bitcard is made from a rectangle of fine papyrtron, serving as a strong but brittle support for a layer impregnated with numerous granules of ferromagnetic daruene, which encode information according to a system that is difficult to counterfeit. As if toughened by the Dona’s sensorial flipping trick, Lerena processes the bitcard just like a carrot. Gradually, she swallows it down. Suano has a brief but marvellous vision of a woman’s brain producing unknown virtues for the soul. But then he cringes, because he can hear crunching, ronching, snorts, chewy gloops, hard-to-name
sounds, and he has another vision, of saliva struggling to make a paste with the shreds of papyrtron; he sees the wounded gums, the tongue contracting in spasms of pain, the barely swallowable bolus passing through the œsophageal sphincter, the repressed retching, the stomach’s hydrochloric acid breaking the daruene molecules down to produce chyme, the toxic action of the ferromagnetic particles; he sees the chyme passing through the pylorus, the pancreas and the liver, and the gall bladder dispatching the enzymes that winnow out the useful compounds; he sees all that, and the battle between Lerena’s spirit of sacrifice and her spirit of self-affirmation, and finally he sees the mass passing through six metres of small intestine and its residue moving through the large intestine to reach the rectum, eventually. He is devastated by this horror show. But along with the shock there is something else: the presentiment that flowers of fire could spring now from a love that has been years in hibernation.

  The rain eases off. Possessed by the ritual challenge that she has devised and the spell that she might be working, Lerena eats another card. And another. Expectant furrows mark her brow. She’s not doing it to rebel, or as a last resort. She’s simply doing it.

  She takes another bitcard and puts it in her mouth. She chews. But before she can swallow it, the Dona has handed down her verdict:

  This woman is still looking for the path

  which is why she will not find it;

  and there are some I cannot guide.

  That said, she is gone.

  There is no-one left in the courtyard except Lerena and Suano, with the kegs that they were using as seats, a bucket and a backpack.

  Lerena is shaking but doesn’t quite know what force is making her shake.

  Suano rushes to the bucket and scoops up rainwater for her to drink. Mouthful after mouthful. More. Okay, okay, Suano, I think I’ll be able to digest them, she says, exhausted but also, in a way, euphoric. Something’s about to take hold of me, I can tell: an end-of-the-world sort of feeling.

  Faced with the old Lerena (for the new Lerena has not been able to sacrifice her entirely), in the damp dimness of the courtyard with its smell of moss and polenta, it all seems very simple to Suano. The backpack is there with almost all of the money in it still: proof that these people don’t understand. They can’t understand why he and Lerena have come, nor would they understand why they came together, the two of them, and not just Lerena with him as a valet. These people, Suano thinks now, can’t even imagine that Lerena is very close to understanding but needs a little time to get there, more time than he does. Neither the Dona nor the Clearseers are crazy. Although perhaps they do lack courage. Lerena has eaten evil. No more harm can be done to them now; the worst the Clearseers could do is waste their time, but it seems the new Lerena couldn’t care less about that.

  They are emerging from the tangle. First, Suano realises that they can leave if they want to. And then he sees that they have to leave, urgently, and as soon as he slings the backpack over his shoulder and takes Lerena by the elbow, all the superfluous details of the situation simply vanish, and the significant details group themselves by kind: love, resentment, obsession, money, agapythium, streets…and a straightforward visibility stretches away into the night. There’s a path, with its dangers and obstacles, but nothing impassable for a story in search of an ending.

  Suano grips Lerena’s elbow more tightly. She doesn’t move. He takes her by the shoulders and shakes her a little, then a little more. She is dazed with revulsion, crushed, and noticing that the colour is draining from part of her face while the rest is inflamed, Suano shakes her more forcefully still. Her only reaction is to shed a few tears, so he begins to tap at her cheeks. Lerena, LERENA, he shouts in her face and, carried away by the tapping, ends up giving her a slap.

  She shoves him away. What are you doing, you idiot? You’re the idiot, he says, we have to go. She leaps at him and hammers his chest; he grabs her by the neck; they stagger, flailing; she bites him; he squashes her nose with the palm of his hand; both yell and bellow, and when they pull apart, take a few steps back, and each sees the other panting with fury, their hands drop as if to release what possessed them, and even if they know it’s not that simple, because whatever possessed them was already a part of what they are, the shock of it calms them down, and Lerena begins to cry.

  She steps forward to embrace him, but he steps back, preventively. That way he can see her better. No-one, not even Lerena herself, can predict what she will do now. She is crying. She neither covers her face nor hangs her head. The tears roll down to her chin and fall onto her workshirt, like drops from thawing ice; the deep levels of her body have stirred and softened; they are churning. Vomit surges into her mouth; she barely has time to bend over and dispatch it into a puddle.

  Suano holds her forehead. There is blood in her vomit.

  An epilogue of dry retching follows. That’s all. But Suano is sure that she hasn’t thrown up all the toxins from the daruene. Not even half of them.

  Nor the other toxins. Because she has eaten evil. The evil of the situation in which they were enclosed.

  He washes her face. She rinses her mouth. She goes on crying for a while. Then she sniffs, dries her eyes, tries in vain to smile, and her hand goes out to caress Suano, but drops before it reaches him.

  He says: We won. We beat them.

  You’re such a doojun.

  Let’s go.

  As I was saying before, when people find themselves in a jam, in stories and in reality, it isn’t so unusual for a way out to present itself. It might be a lucky break, or a matter of attentiveness, or cunning. It happens. And although they still have to sweat it out, facing each risk in turn will be easier than unpicking their personal knots. After her shamanistic show, the Dona is probably too drained to ask herself why on earth she had to go back to the courtyard. Perhaps Lerena’s insolence made her feel sad or embarrassed, perhaps it brought on an access of lethargy or sleepiness. She is, after all, a proud woman.

  In the corridors of the agapythium, Asbante’s muscles and the steps of other Clearseers await Lerena and Suano, but in an indecisive way, like ghosts without instructions from the mind that imagined them. For whatever reason, the violet-hued voice of Dielsi Munava has fallen temporarily silent, no longer making the dry stick sprout, or barking, or balancing the good forces that educate a community with the bad forces that can step on a neck and pin it to the ground. In that silence, Botilecue and Lerena conclude that the Clearseers’ enigmatic violence is fundamentally a means of bonding: like any group that sees itself as a people, they are more a sect than a criminal gang. If they felt threatened it was because of a common insecurity.

  They return to the agapythium by the same paved street that they have followed so many afternoons. It’s the pleasure hour: laughter and moaning accompany them as they pack their few belongings. Since that stretch of street is all they know of the village, they go back to the theatron, descend into the dressing rooms, rummage through the overflowing store and take shirts, a pair of women’s trousers, two old overcoats and two blankets, then climb the ramp at the end of the corridor, fumble at loose bricks and light switches until they chance on the fake dead fly that opens the hidden door in the wall, and go up the stairs to the children’s clothing shop. It is no longer disguised as a gambling den; an old lady and a pregnant girl are choosing papetex baby clothes from the gam displayed by a bulky angular man dressed in beige leather, the one who took Lerena and Suano to Munava’s courtyard that first day. They walk straight through the shop. Seeing them go out into the street, the guy hurries after them, but then he stops on the pavement to watch. Unhesitatingly. Perhaps he’s thinking that this attempted escape is part of the Dona’s script.

  Or that the Dona is letting them go, content to have defeated them. Leaving them to their fate. Seems like she hasn’t taught them much, but off they go back to the capital city, with their money, they can shove it.

  Today there has been no market on the square in Cordilen. And in any case
, night has fallen. They don’t know what day it is; Lerena goes to ask a guy who’s packing up his melowater stall. Suano drags her away, but before he can tell her not to be so reckless, they have seen the Diminut, still where they left it, no doubt because of its colour: orange, considered trashy in this austere region. Lerena takes out the starter chip that she had the foresight to stow in her backpack, although they wouldn’t have it now if they’d left that pack in the courtyard. The roof of the mincar is streaked with osbis shit, the bonnet is scratched and dented, but there’s enough air in the tyres to get them to a petromel, though it could be a rough ride.

  The battery has gone flat. Some rascally kids come to give them a push, but as well as putting his own back into it, Suano has to kick at them when they try to keep pushing the mincar over the edge of a ravine. Then he tells Lerena to move over. She feels too wretched to say how glad she is that he’s taking the wheel, and soon, for want of words, that gratitude is gone.

  All the important questions are still to be resolved. But Suano trusts that what is coming will unfold rapidly, that reflexes and nature will take over. There’s a painful emptiness in his stomach. He’s hungry. But he’s wondering if Lerena might not need an enema.

  She opens the glove box and plays with an unlabelled bottle of pills, watched sidelong by Suano, then takes out a packet of mintoly pearls and puts a handful in her mouth. She chews them listlessly.

  It has stopped raining. An oval-shaped moon has risen in the south. A wind bearing omens of winter rips lichen clouds from the sky’s black bark.

  Lerena has covered herself with a small blanket. She’s ill, and not just because she swallowed three bitcards and didn’t throw up all the pulp. There’s another kind of affliction. With the situation shedding its details, she has shed complexity. Suano used to see this often with his clients: clarity simplifies, but simplifications reduce the spirit’s variety. It’s true that Lerena is suffering the after-effects of her effort. She’s exhausted.