Anna Godbersen - Splendor

“Oh!” she gasped in surprise, looking up at the sudden precipitation. Then they both broke into a run, hurrying across the wraparound terrace, which was quickly becoming slick, and down the stairs. But their instinct to run from the rain, Henry soon saw, had been a foolish one. By the time they had dashed across the field, the large drops were fast becoming an onslaught. Henry’s shirt would have been soaked through, had they not so quickly reached the shelter of a garden shed with a thankfully broad metal awning. He tried the door, and found it secured from within, although by then all the fear and surprise had left Diana’s face, and she was gazing out at the sheets of falling water, which were forming rivulets down the hill, in delight.

“We’ll drown if we try to make it back to the city now….” Henry dried his face with his hand. From where they stood, he could see all the way down to the bay, where children were no doubt running for the shelter of arcades and the sewers would soon flood.

“Yes,” Diana agreed. “But how grand!”

“How grand,” he repeated, realizing she was right. He had a sudden sense of the lushness around him, of the colors being unusually vivid, of each inhaled breath being impossibly full. Everything petty and extraneous in the world was about to be washed away. “And look — how lucky!”

A few feet to his left was a little round white iron table, and two chairs covered with the same chipped paint. Diana’s pearl-like teeth emerged between her small, full lips as they stretched upward in pleasure. She undid her hat, and then they both moved to the chairs. Henry opened the covered wicker basket he had been carrying. Neither was hungry, so he pried open the two bottles of cola that Diana had packed for them that morning, when it had still been dry and sunny, and lit them each a cigarette.

“Isn’t it amazing how the sun gets through, even in all this?”

Diana had settled into her chair. Her pink skin glistened with the moisture, and her hair clung, damp and dark, around her soft ears. Though he didn’t want to take his eyes off her, he did, eventually, turn to catch the golden rays that were indeed visible despite heavy rainfall, despite the blacks and grays trying to outdo each other in the sky. The smell of earth rose up, mingling with drops fresh from heaven; water against the metal awning up above made for cacophonous music. He took a sip of the sweet soda, and a drag from his cigarette. His breath had slowed already, and after the long walk and the quick dash, his body was beginning to feel calm. Even though he was a volunteer soldier in the United States Army, he had perhaps never been so far from the comforts that had characterized every day of his twenty-one years. They were a good way from town, and yet he felt he had everything he needed. He turned his dark eyes on the girl whom he had dreamed of so often over the previous months. Beside him, at that very moment of existence, at the heart of a torrential downpour, she was exquisitely real, and she, too, seemed content to go on sitting there forever. She exhaled cigarette smoke into the humidity and reached out for his hand.

Consciousness came pleasantly over Henry. Faintly, beyond the door, he could hear boots, the distant voices of men, reveille. He was back in the barracks — it had been the nearest place for them to run to, the night before, when the rain let up. Though some part of him had longed, irrationally, to sit on that spot forever, drinking cola and smoking cigarettes and watching all the different ways that rain could sweep across a green acre, they had agreed they should try to get back to the city before darkness fell. But he liked being with Diana this way, too: sleepy and pliant, her face partially obscured by ill-behaved curls, the peachy arc of her shoulder just emerging from beneath a blanket. She murmured and stirred a little in her sleep, pushing against him in a way that brought to mind a newborn kitten.

When he’d first arrived in Havana, Henry had been at pains to prove that he was just like all the other troops stationed there, and he had risen early and run hard with the rest of them. But inevitably, as the colonel’s leniency had grown more persistent, he had begun to slip. He kept trying to be up early, but it was never as easy after a night of rum drinking. Now that he had Diana again, he had given up the notion entirely; that morning, listening to his fellow soldiers exerting themselves out there in the wet morning, he felt not even a twinge of guilt.

“Schoonmaker!”

The gruff voice was followed by a shaft of stark morning light falling across the floor of his barracks room, and then the face of Colonel Copper, smiling idiotically as it jutted into the doorframe. At the sight of his mustache, Henry grabbed at the blanket and pulled it protectively over Diana, waking her in the process. He could feel her fingers seize up against his chest, and tried silently to communicate that he wanted her to stay very still, very silent.

No matter how little he had liked Colonel Copper up until that moment, it was nothing compared to the hatred he now felt as he watched the contortions of the man’s face. His confusion over the second form under the blanket, and his subsequent surprise at finding Henry not alone, gave way — too slowly, and accompanied by a series of facial ticks — to lurid realization.

For the subsequent wink alone Henry could have killed him.

“Is something the matter?” he asked, after several moments in which the colonel stood mute, but apparently quite at ease, his eyes big as saucers.

“Ah — Schoonmaker!” The colonel boomed. The soft body beside him went tense at the sound. “I was worried because you’ve been absent since Friday, but now I see you were busy taking my advice!”

“Can I do something for you?” Henry prodded.

“You missed reveille,” the colonel replied, mock-sternly.

“I thought—”

“Ha! Don’t worry yourself, my boy….” The colonel leaned against the doorframe. The daylight behind him illu minated Henry’s twill jacket, which hung from a hook on the wall, as well as his second pair of trousers and shirt. Diana’s clothes, muddy and wet after their hurried trek away from the poet’s house, were in a heap on the wooden chair. “It has been lonely without you, though, with nobody but the uneducated classes to talk to. Of course, there will be no race this afternoon, owing to the storm, but I thought perhaps we could discuss…”

Henry watched him warily, and tried to make the face that would encourage the colonel to go away with maximum expediency. He seemed to have succeeded, for the colonel winked, muttered good-bye, and dragged his boot against the floor. If Henry had hoped that the man would disappear before really glimpsing Diana, however, he was soon disappointed, because she emerged slightly from his embrace then — showing, in the process, more of her naked back than he really felt comfortable with.

“Hola,” said the colonel, his pronunciation stilted.

“Hello,” went Diana’s dry reply.

“You’re…an American girl.” The obnoxious cheer had disappeared suddenly, and whatever replaced it sent Henry spiraling to new depths of dislike.

“And if I were?” Diana ducked under the covers and pressed herself into Henry’s chest again. Both of his arms covered her instinctively, but this gesture did nothing to head off Colonel Copper, whose brown leather boots — adorned with utterly superfluous silver spurs — were now striding noisily across the floor. He carried himself more sharply now, more like a military man than ever before, and when he reached the narrow, metal-frame bed in the far corner of the room, he stuck out his chest as though he had just taken part in a twenty-one-gun salute.