Ursula Le Guin - The Eye of the Heron

Luz nodded. She accepted her father’s evident intent to placate her, though she did not know why for the first time he had spoken to her placatingly, explaining something as if she were his equal. Whatever the reason, his explanation sounded well; and she was used to hearing what sounded well, and figuring out later what it might really mean. Indeed, until she had met Lev at school, it had not occurred to her that anyone might prefer to speak a plain fact rather than a lie that sounded well. People said what suited their purposes, when they were serious; and when they weren’t serious, they talked without meaning anything at all. Talking to girls, they were hardly ever serious. Ugly truths were to be kept from girls, so that their pure souls did not become coarse and soiled. And anyhow, she had asked about the penal colony mostly to get her father off the subject of her marriage; and the trick had worked.

But the trouble with such tricks, she thought when she was in her own room alone, is that they trick you too. She had tricked herself into arguing with her father, and winning the argument. He would not forgive her that.

All the girls of her age and class in the City had been married for two or three years now. She had evaded marriage only because Falco, whether he knew it or not, didn’t want to let her go from his house. He was used to having her there. They were alike, very much alike; they enjoyed each other’s company more, perhaps, than anyone else’s. But he had looked at her this evening as if seeing someone different, someone he wasn’t used to. If he began noticing her as a person different from himself, if she began winning battles with him, if she was no longer his little girl pet, he might begin thinking about what else she was—what use she was.

And what use was she, what was she good for? The continuation of the house of Falco, of course. And then what? Either Herman Marquez or Herman Macmilan. And nothing whatever she could do about it. She would be a wife. She would be a daughter-in-law. She would wear her hair in a bun, and scold the servants, and listen to the men carousing in the hall after supper, and have babies. One a year. Little Marquez Falcos. Little Macmilan Falcos. Eva, her old playmate, married at sixteen, had three babies and was expecting the fourth. Eva’s husband, the Councillor’s son Aldo Di Giulio Hertz, beat her; and she was proud of it. She showed the bruises and murmured, “Aldito has such a temper, he’s so wild, like a little boy in a tantrum.”

Luz made a face, and spat. She spat on the tiled floor of her room, and let the spittle lie. She stared at the small grayish blob and wished she could drown Herman Marquez in it, and then Herman Macmilan. She felt dirty. Her room was close, dirty: a prison cell. She fled the thought, and the room. She darted out into the hall, gathered up her skirts, and climbed the ladder to the place under the roof, where nobody else ever came. She sat on the dusty floor there—the roof, loud with rain, was too low to stand up under —and let her mind go free.

It went straight out, away from the house and the hour, back to a wider time.

On the playing field by the schoolhouse, an afternoon of spring, two boys were playing catch, Shanty-Towners, Lev and his friend Timmo. She stood on the porch of the schoolhouse watching them, wondering at what she saw, the reach and stretch of back and arm, the lithe swing of the body, the leap of the ball through light. It was as if they played a silent music, the music of moving. The light came under storm clouds, from the west, over Songe Bay, level and golden; the earth was brighter than the sky. The bank of raw earth behind the field was golden, the weeds above it burned. The earth burned. Lev stood waiting to catch a long throw, his head back, his hands poised, and she stood watching, amazed by beauty.

A group of City boys came around the schoolhouse to play football. They yelled at Lev to hand over the ball, just as he leaped, his arm at full stretch, to catch Timmo’s high throw. He caught it, and laughed, and tossed the ball over to the others.

As the two came by the porch, she ran down the steps. “Lev!”

The west blazed behind him, he stood black between her and the sun.

“Why did you give them the ball like that?”

She could not see his face against the light. Timmo, a tall, handsome boy, held back a little and did not look into her face.

“Why do you let them push you around?”

Lev answered at last. “I don’t,” he said. As she came closer to him she saw him looking straight at her.

“They say ‘Give it here!’ And you just give it—”

“They want to play a game; we were just fooling around. We had our turn.”

“But they don’t ask you for it, they order you. Don’t you have any pride?”

Lev’s eyes were dark, his face was dark and rough, unfinished; he smiled, a sweet, startled smile. “Pride? Sure. If I didn’t, I’d hang onto it when it’s their turn.”

“Why are you always so full of answers?”

“Because life’s so full of questions.”

He laughed, but he kept looking at her as if she were a question herself, a sudden question with no answer. And he was right, for she had no idea why she was challenging him like this.

Timmo stood by, a little uncomfortable. Some of the boys on the playing field were already looking at them: two Shanty-boys talking to a senhorita.

Without a word said, the three walked away from the schoolhouse, down to the street below it, where they could not be seen from the field.

“If any of them talked to each other like that, the way they yelled at you,” Luz said, “there’d have been a fight. Why don’t you fight?”

“For a football?”

“For anything!”

“We do.”

“When? How? You just walk away.”

“We walk into the City, to school, every day,” Ley said. He was not looking at her now as they walked along side by side, and his face looked as usual, an ordinary boy’s face, stubborn, sullen. She did not understand what he meant at first, and when she did, she did not know what to say.

“Fists and knives are the least of it,” he said, and perhaps heard pomposity in his own voice, a certain boastfulness, for he turned to Luz with a laugh and shrug—“and words aren’t much good either!”

They came out from the shadow of a house into the level golden light. The sun lay, a molten blur, between the dark sea and the dark clouds, and the roofs of the City burned with unearthly fire. The three young people stopped, looking into that tremendous brightness and darkness of the west. The sea wind, smelling of salt and space and wood smoke, blew cold in their faces. “Don’t you see,” Lev said, “you can see it—you can see what it should be, what it is.”

She saw it, with his eyes, she saw the glory, the City that should be, and was.

The moment broke. The haze of glory still burned between sea and storm, the City still stood golden and endangered on the eternal shore; but people came down the street behind them, talking and calling. They were Shanty-girls, who had stayed in school to help the mistresses clean up the classrooms. They joined Timmo and Lev, greeting Luz gently but, like Timmo, warily. Her way home lay to the left, down into the City; theirs to the right, up over the bluffs and onto the Town Road.

As she went down the steep street she glanced back at them going up it. The girls wore work suits of bright, soft colors. City girls sneered at Shanty girls for wearing trousers; but they made their own skirts of Shanty cloth if they could get it, for it was finer and better dyed than any the City made. The boys’ trousers and long-sleeved, high-necked jackets were the creamy white of the natural silkweed fiber. Lev’s head of thick, soft hair looked very black above that whiteness. He was walking behind the others, with Southwind, a beautiful, low-voiced girl. Luz could tell from the way his head was turned that he was listening to that low voice, and smiling.