Two Masks Follow

Two

My friend, this is true, used to pet bumblebees thinking they were cute, not knowing they could sting you, or that they could survive it, somehow survive it time after time and sore over sore. Probably, the people around my friend never even knew (and they certainly never told her if they did) that bumblebees have fur. This might not be a story about bumblebees. 

Lightning striking out of a tunnel insidiously curved--- a real minotaur horn--- a bright blue bus came. It resembled an inside-out nursery, complete with strange whitish stains for stars and the gnawing hum of sobbsolence. On that bus (you know this already, but not just how you appeared) were you, yes?

You left it with a shark-skin suitcase, astrally weightless and suspended around your wrist---- but I know I’m only painting you, I know, I know--- looking weightless around your wrist. Perhaps the sharkskin wasn’t real, also. Perhaps it was, and that, morally, is the lesser--- but besides that, your shoe was a golden spike in the ground. I longed to meet you there, even though the road was dirty, filthy, and even though my shoes were not (or perhaps they were) sharkskin.

It could not have been that late--- in the summer the last busses typically arrive before dusk. Don’t ask me why--- the roads are still lit by electric lamps, but they are made of dirt. Perhaps, when it is late, the drivers are more aware that the road is nothing--- that is, nothing but dirt and field grass shaking in its stretch. But it couldn’t have been too late; the bus was there; it couldn’t have been too late when I saw you.

Some days later after helping you with your bags, bringing them to the Grand Royal Hotel (if you remember, there were only three rooms apart from yours), I took you to the cafe Mosaica. It was and is the only place in town worthy of being called a cafe.

Like a factory (the town has one factory, which there is no reason to see,) smoke poured out of the Mosaica. The cafe was not famous, or at least was not embedded in anyone who hadn’t actually seen it, but it was famous for a certain kind of air: its style, as you expressed best, was half beautiful and half confused. Rather than any nightsoil, the cafe staff carefully manufactured an alpinglow of condensed milk cans. They stacked them instead of normal table dividers in the outside sitting.

Some would call the sight bewitching. Some… some might call seeing bewitching, some would call it bewitching to see us, yes to see us, sipping cafe au lait by the condensed milk cans, sometimes cracked open right at the table for us. The cans drip and drip. Beneath us the earth was stained yellow by dusky milk and smelled like a mix of sugars, new and decaying, one, then the other, becoming more perceptible, as if they were competing for a position in a race.

***

The labels were orange, the wrapping paper, that’s how, don’t you remember?

***

Mosaica? Because inside were some wonderful Turkish or Persian mosaics. They were not supposed to have them. They were supposed to be in museums in far away cities. Do you really not remember?

***

You do remember. You do remember. If you can’t remember, if you can’t see it at all… you already cannot hear this voice my voice.

***

Two Masks

He was. There’s always the better man in the worse position, isn’t that what the bourgeoisie like to say? They sip ciders, eat tea cakes, and they say... He came in from the distant fields, so slumped he looked like a stranger. Lines of grime had grown wild across his fate. His shirt, which he had likely unbuttoned and buttoned several times as the day and the work heated and cooled, had ended up patched, and so misbuttoned that the denim and the skin reminded one of a wave’s line between blue and the white flaking on the life-covered rocks like skin. Without fastidiosedulism. Unable to build up to words. He was a man that looked unready for town. His shoulder patches resembled bootprints, the color of bruises.

But I remember, as we strolled, that you saw him and kept looking. I know eyes. You might as well have announced it. But we proceeded. We went past the rotten manor, and even beyond the butcher shop--- the one outside of town. There are always dogs there, hungry for the next lean carcass thrown out. The path to the front door is girded by ornate ironwork fences, just paid for from the butcher’s own pocket. It keeps the dogs from one’s heels. The rumor is that the lions crowning each of the corner posts came from the manor’s bathtub. Even I do not know if it’s true or not. 

***

A few days later, I saw you looking at him again; you strolled on my arm as he trudged. Clearly you were unable to help yourself. His arms were bared. He was muscular. His hair was coarse and indelicate; he was inconcealably sweaty. He might have spoken a few words but they were lost too quickly. All the better, in his eyes his words would have infamed him. And whatever words they were, they could not have been much more than field words. Those words are never written down, never jotted down with a smile, taped beneath a windowsill with an entirely different, private smile: a collector’s smile; or if the words are not so freely given, like apologies or confessions, then a prison guard’s smile is grafted to the prison/collection.

***

I don’t know which, but I know there are many things you wanted to say to him that you want to hear. So be it. So be him. Be it not him.

***

I do not know where my shoes were made, the tailor is dead and had no son, but I can show you where my legs and arms,  like wheat stalks, and eyes like the stumps away from where the house was built, were grown.

Two Masks Fall

And finally the days ripened and bundled themselves, or were bundled in underarms, I’m afraid I’ve escaped the simile, regardless I’m far from it. There is a shed, in the village, full of scythes. Next to it, chickens gleam strangely and whitely in muddy coops, water on the hatch locks. Though the shoveling of the corn begins at dawn, aged-slowed arms can’t heap it in the coop fast enough for the gleam of dew on yellow corn-granules to be avoided. The sun rises and the dew shines it, a wrinkled hand crosses a face, slow, contented, my father’s hat does not fear his hands while my hands fear my father’s hat. 

But there’s some slyness to him in that by the time you wake he’s let me help him hide the face asking ‘is this her? is this her?’ (the face that scares hen-sellers to barter) with a shovel blade mirror. He lets his hands rest, unusually, on his fence posts, and waits for your feet to float-walk--- like a child planning a toy soldier’s battle before deployment--- down the dashboard. For them to find your shoes and spike the ground again, for the first time here. 

For just a moment, the man with the shovel is an undertaker, not a farmer. The fields are sinister, and his look graver, but the emergency passes. He has his own truck, but as long as it is out of sight I remember it as a hearse and decide my father would pull-off a wintery black coat. That phrase must have been hidden in the glove compartment: “pull-off” is not an expression that can reach what we call villages, just like dinner gloves dissolve if they touch the morning wet of the locks or door handles.

The fences are birch. The first story my father tells you is about birchwood fences, not my mother. My father’s truck has no glove compartment, his house is small, three wooden steps lead to the door. It has not been long, yet there are three dahlias on the door to welcome you. I had picked them when you were asleep, just after we pulled up to the house. I had posted them to his door, and he allowed it, not pausing in his shoveling knowing he could never afford pausing less. That time, we did not doubt each other. My father has no spaces for mysteries to inhabit, no miscolored cluster of scenes lurking in the corner of the fireplace, where my mother patched his clothes, or the small window where she and her plants used to breathe at each other. It’s an old house, yet everything is still except the three of us, sitting at the dining room table passing salt and commenting on a vase of black glass.

My father’s eyes, as we approach noon say, ‘so he’s taken you here without translating a thing you see. You’re a brave one, or blind as a bat.’ My father’s eyes say ‘It’s no loss. He’s incomprehensible. Illegible.’ But my father’s eyes also say things like ‘I knew the butcher--- yes the butcher was a friend of the house, because he knew my chickens were the best chickens, and, well, but, anyway when we were boys we went to that house and I brought his father those silly little leons… lions, excuse me, and now the butcher, that is the butcher’s father, is dead like the old magnate but you know there’s still a butcher when there’s no… my moustache has gotten long and so has the butcher’s son (the butcher) and sometimes I sit on the porch and he drives by, not for my chickens anymore since there are cheaper chickens which his son goes across the country to buy, you know they have other shops and they’re no longer the only butchers, in fact… do they cut meat? I’m not sure their hands still open the animals I feed and feed… but our cows are gone… sold… I fed and fed... and you know I’m not an interesting man. The butcher stops and talks to me about his father and his son and says when he sees his leons, excuse me, his lions, then he thinks of me and when he thinks of me his eyes light up with the time he first saw his wife (around my arm, at the time,) heading back from the cinema, and he bet… well he had a car then and that was that… he was no farmer… and he thinks of the time we went shooting and chased a deer onto the runway of the airstrip outside town and shot it and obstructed it all and ran from… we didn’t want to kill… we weren’t hunters... his eyes glow like black… I am not sure… black something… like his boots but definitely not his beat-up old boots… black like… black like... I remember the color but not the image… not the image… sometimes I sit on the steps alone and… but my wife is dead, you know that, my dear, this whole house stinks of a dead wife, and is the color of a dead wife, and...’ at dusk my invites you to kill a chicken, you don’t know how and you are still wearing sharkskin shoes. They’re of no hope. You’re in a killer’s shoes but the dirt’s hard and dry as a nail without a spot of rust.. 

But at the dinner table, at lunch, your eyes were mostly inscrutable. Only the phrase ‘where you work… where you live… where you live…’ scratched like silver on bright white plates.

I know the house is small, the intimacy irritated by the coarseness of blankets: do not feel, do not listen, do not think. How much am I asking? Night’s fingers, in trying to caress us, I think, have passed through a pot of blue ink. Or, night’s thrown its hands forward, scattering droplets of blue half-textured, on bodies, our bodies, otherwise invisible folded under and above blanket upon blanket: my mother is beneath this house, was beneath this blanket, and she is also in the window. I don’t know, but I pretend to know. I can’t speak my way out of these stretching fields.

My own fingers are so rough.

I wish there was more than a single window in this room. 

I wish I had no more debts to pay for what I like to think I have.

I am under no illusions. I am under an endless, backbreaking harvest of illusions, but I know that since you have felt the hair on my arms, or the stubble on my lips, or, more importantly, the long thrumming singing ache of my body after doing its daily work, the painful refrain of my body trying to sustain itself to the next exertion… you know all this better than anything I tell you to know, to hold to your chest and keep close.

I know that in the day, when it is so easy for us to be shown through, or to only reflect without absorbing anything at all, like a haze of mirrors peeling from layers of skin, it’s easy to be gentileel. But it is too late at night for me to expect you to differentiate the two. If you ever did. I know the looks on your face when you see the strength of arms, the tatters that are most of my clothes.

Sometimes, sometimes I have been unable to sleep whole nights while you were in my bed; I feared that while I slept I would scratch out your ears, or claw out your eyes, or slice off your fingers with a great big butcher’s knife I could grab back down the road. Then I could be nothing but what I tell you I am, when my fingers flutter on your meaningless eyelids in Morse Code. But I don’t want that. I promise I don’t want that. I promise, I promise, go to sleep, go to sleep, yes I know you’re sorry, thank you for telling me, yes I know you’re not afraid of me, I know you’re sorry but not afraid of me, hush, I know you worry about… you are not so much a stranger as you think… so much more a stranger than you… than you… think?

Two Masks Follow

Is that why you don’t remember? That’s clever of you. I bet you do remember. I bet you want me thinking of you as someone who doesn’t remember, and that because you don’t remember you don’t speak. I bet you think the city is nicer than the town, and the boundary between the town and village, which is my own boundary… you have not seen it yet…  and you learned something there, far away. What could you have learned except to do what I do? When I tell you of ateliers and sharkskin shoes… the work is in the telling, my dear, but the seeing cannot be stopped.