Маргарет Миллар: The Listening Walls

Amy crossed the room and opened the grilled door of the balcony. The sound from the avenida was deafening, as if everyone in the city, fresh and rested after a siesta, had suddenly erupted with excitement and noise. It had rained, briefly but heavily, during the late afternoon. The streets were still glistening and the air was thin and crisp and pure. It seemed to Amy like very healthful air, until she remembered Wilma’s high blood pressure. Then she closed the door again quickly, as if she half believed that the room was pressurized and she could shut out the altitude with a pane of glass and some iron grilling.

“Poor Wilma,” she said aloud, but the sound didn’t emerge the way she intended it to. It came out, tight and small, from between clenched teeth.

She heard her own voice betraying her friendship, and she walked away from it with guilty haste, toward the bedroom.

Wilma was asleep, still wearing her red silk suit, and her bracelets, and her golden eyelids. She looked dead enough to bury.

Amy switched off the lamp and went back to the living room. It was eight o’clock. Across the avenida a church bell began to toll, striving to be heard above the clang of trolley cars and the horns of taxis. Back home it was only six o’clock, Amy thought. Rupert would still be working in the garden, with Mack nearby stalking butterflies and Jerusalem crickets, and letting them go, of course, if he caught any, because Scotties were very civilized dogs. Or, if the fog had moved in from the bay, the two of them would be inside, Rupert reading the Sunday papers in the den, with Mack perched on the back of his chair looking gloomily over Rupert’s shoulder as if he took a very dim view of what was going on in the world.

The big man and the little dog seemed so vivid, so close, that when the knock came on the door she jumped in shock at the intrusion on her private world.

She opened the door, expecting only the girl with the towels again. But it was an elderly Mexican man carrying an object loosely wrapped in newspaper.

“Here is the box the señora ordered this afternoon.”

“I didn’t order any box.”

“The other señora. She wished it initialed. I bring it in person, not trusting my no-good son-in-law.” He removed the newspaper carefully as if he were unveiling a statue. “It is a beautiful box. Everyone agrees?”

“It’s lovely,” Amy said.

“The purest silver. None purer. Feel how heavy.”

He handed her the hammered silver box. She almost dropped it, its weight was so unexpected in spite of his warning.

He grinned with delight. “You see? The purest of silver. The señora said it looks like the sea. I have never see the sea. I make a box that looks like the sea and I have never see the sea. How is it possible?”

“Mrs. Wyatt — the señora is asleep right now. I’ll give it to her when she wakes up.” Amy hesitated. “The box is paid for?”

“The box, yes. My services, no. I am an old man. I run like lightning through the streets, not trusting my no- good son-in-law. I run all the way here so the señora would have her beautiful box tonight. She said, ‘Señor, this box is of such beauty I cannot bear to be without it for one night.’ ”

It was practically the last thing on earth Wilma would have said but Amy was in no mood to argue.

“For the señoras,” he added righteously, “I run anywhere. Even though I am an old man I run.”

“Would four pes—”

“A very old man. With much family trouble and a bad kidney.”

In spite of his age and infirmity and running through the streets he seemed ready to talk at considerable length. She gave him six pesos, knowing it was too much, just to get rid of him.

She put the box on the coffee table, wondering why Wilma, who always made such a fuss about being charged for extraweight baggage on planes, should have bought so heavy an object, and for whom it was intended. Probably for herself, Amy thought. Wilma rarely squandered money on other people unless she was in an elated mood, and God knew there was no evidence of that on this trip.

She opened the box. The initials were on the inside of the lid, engraved so elaborately that she had difficulty deciphering them. R.J.K.

“R.J.K.” She repeated the letters aloud as if to clarify them and to conjure up an image to match them. But the only R.J.K. she could think of was Rupert, and it didn’t seem likely that Wilma would buy so expensive a gift for Rupert. Most of the time Amy’s husband and her best friend were barely civil to each other.

It was Sunday afternoon when Wilma awoke from her long sleep. She felt weak and hungry, but her mind was extraordinarily clear, as if a storm had passed through her during the night leaving the inner air fresh and clean.

As she showered and dressed, it seemed to her for the first time in many years that life was very simple and logical. She wished there were somebody around to whom she could communicate this sudden revelation. But Amy had gone, leaving a note that she would be back at four, and the young waiter who brought her breakfast tray only grinned nervously when she tried to tell him how simple life was.

“When you’re tired, you sleep.”

“Si, señora.”

“When you’re hungry, you eat. Simple, logical, basic.”“Si, señora, but I’m not hungry.”

“Oh, what the hell,” Wilma said. “Go away.”

The waiter had almost ruined her revelation, but not quite. She opened the balcony doors and addressed the warm, sunny afternoon: “I shall be absolutely basic all day. No fuss, no frills, no getting upset. I must concentrate only on the essentials.”

The first essential was, obviously, food. She was hungry, she would eat.

She removed the cover from the ham and eggs. They were black with pepper, and the tomato juice tasted strongly of limes. Why in God’s name did they have to put lime juice on everything? It was difficult enough to be basic, without fools and incompetents thwarting you at every corner.

I am hungry, I will eat turned into I am hungry, I must eat and finally I’ll eat if it kills me. By that time she was no longer hungry. The revelation joined its many predecessors in oblivion and life once more became, as it always had been for Wilma, complex and bewildering.

Later in the afternoon Amy returned with an armload of packages. She found Wilma in the sitting room reading a copy of the Mexico City News and drinking a Scotch and soda.

Wilma peered over the top of her spectacles. “Buy anything interesting?”

“Just a few little things for Gill’s children. The stores were jammed. It seems funny, everyone shopping on Sunday.” She put her packages on the coffee table beside the silver box. “How are you feeling?”

“All right. I must have passed out like a light after the doctor gave me that junk.”

“Yes.”

“What did you do all evening?”

“Nothing.”

Wilma looked faintly exasperated. “You can’t have done nothing. Nobody does nothing.”

“I do. I did.”

“What about dinner?”

“I didn’t have any.”

“Why not?”

“I was — upset.” Amy sat down stiffly on the edge of a green leather chair. “The box came.”

“So I see.”

“It looks very expensive.”

“It was,” Wilma said. “The least they could have done was wrap it. My purchases are my own private business.”

“Not this one.”

“Obviously not.” Wilma tossed the newspaper on the floor and took off her spectacles. She couldn’t read without the spectacles, since she was far-sighted, but she could see across the room better without them. Amy’s face looked pale and numb. “I gather you noticed the initials?”