Don DeLillo - The Angel Esmeralda

“Very good,” she said.

“Then it hit.”

“It hit.”

“Bang. I leaped out of bed like a madman.”

“Did the lights go out?”

“No.”

“What about the first time?”

“I’m not sure actually.”

“Good. Neither am I. Was there a glow in the sky at any point?”

“Not that I noticed.”

“We could be dealing with a myth here.”

“The newspapers said a power station may have failed, causing a flash. There’s confusion on this point.”

“But we experienced similar things.”

“It would appear,” he said.

“Good. I’m glad.”

She thought of him as the English Boy although he was thirty-six, divorced, apparently arthritic and not even English. But he felt the English rapture over Greek light, where all Kyle saw was chemical smoke lapping at the ruins. And he had the prim outdated face of a schoolboy in a formal portrait, wire-haired and pensive.

“Where was the epicenter?” she said.

“About forty miles west of here.”

“The dead?”

“Thirteen and counting.”

“What will we do?”

“About what?” he said.

“Everything. All the aftershocks.”

“We’ve had two hundred already. It’s expected to last many weeks. Read the papers. Months perhaps.”

“Look, Edmund. I don’t want to be alone tonight. Okay?”

She lived inside a pause. She was always pausing, alone in her flat, to listen. Her hearing developed a cleanness, a discriminating rigor. She sat at the small table where she ate her meals, listening. The room had a dozen sounds, mainly disturbances of tone, pressures releasing in the walls, and she followed them and waited. There was a second and safer level she reserved for street noises, the elevator rising. All the danger was inside.

A rustle. A soft sway. She crouched in the open doorway like an atomic child.

The tremors entered her bloodstream. She listened and waited. She couldn’t sleep at night and caught odd moments in daytime, dozing in an unused room at the school. She dreaded going home. She watched the food in her plate and sometimes stood, carefully listening, ready to go, to get outside. There must be something funny in this somewhere, a person standing motionless over her food, leaning ever so slightly toward the door, fingertips at the table edge.

Is it true that before a major quake the dogs and cats run away? She thought she’d read somewhere that people in California habitually check the personal columns in newspapers to see if the number of lost dogs has increased noticeably. Or are we dealing with a myth here?

The wind made the shutters swing and bang. She listened to the edges of the room, the interfaces. She heard everything. She put a tote bag near the door for hasty exits — money, books, passport, letters from home. She heard the sound of the knife sharpener’s bell.

She didn’t read the papers but gathered that the tremors numbered in the eight hundreds by latest count and the dead added up to twenty now, with hotel rubble and tent cities near the epicenter and people living in open areas in parts of Athens, their buildings judged unsafe.

The cardplayers wore their coats indoors. She walked past the cut-back mulberry trees and through the street market and looked at the woman selling eggs and wondered what she could say to her that might make them both feel better, in her fairly decent Greek, shopping for bargains. A man held the elevator door but she waved him off politely and took the stairs. She walked into her flat, listening. The terrace canopies humped out in the wind, snapping hard. She wanted her life to be episodic again, unpremeditated. A foreigner anonymous — soft-footed, self-informed, content to occupy herself in random observation. She wanted to talk unimportantly to grandmothers and children in the streets of her working-class district.

She rehearsed her exit mentally. So many steps from the table to the door. So many stairs to the street. She thought if she pictured it beforehand, it might go more smoothly.

The lottery man cried, “Today, today.”

She tried to read through the edgy nights, the times of dull-witted terror. There were rumors that these were not aftershocks at all but warnings of some deep disquiet in the continental trench, the massing of a force that would roll across the marble-hearted city and bring it to dust. She sat up and turned the pages, trying to disguise herself as someone who routinely reads for fifteen minutes before dropping into easy sleep.

It was not so bad in school, where she was ready to protect the young, to cover their bodies with her own.

The tremors lived in her skin and were part of every breath she took. She paused over her food. A rustle. An easing reedy tilt. She stood and listened, alone with the shaking earth.

Edmund told her he’d bought a gift to replace the terra-cotta roof ornament she’d had propped against the wall above the bookcase, acanthus leaves radiating from the head of a sleepy-eyed Hermes, shattered in the first tremor.

“You won’t miss your Hermes all that much. I mean it’s everywhere, isn’t it?”

“That’s what I liked about it.”

“You can easily get another. They’re piled up for sale.”

“It’ll only get broken,” she said, “when the next one hits.”

“Let’s change the subject.”

“There’s only one subject. That’s the trouble. I used to have a personality. What am I now?”

“Try to understand it’s over.”

“I’m down to pure dumb canine instinct.”

“Life is going on. People are going about their business.”

“No, they’re not. Not the same way. Just because they don’t walk around moaning.”

“There’s nothing to moan about. It’s finished.”

“Doesn’t mean they’re not preoccupied. It’s been less than a week. There are tremors all the time.”

“Growing ever smaller,” he said.

“Some are not so small. Some are definite attention-getters.”

“Change the subject please.”

They were standing just outside the school entrance and Kyle was watching a group of children climb aboard a bus for a trip to a museum outside the city. She knew she could count on the English Boy to be exasperated with her. He was dependable that way. She always knew the position he would take and could often anticipate the actual words, practically moving her lips in unison with his. He brought some stability to dire times.

“You used to be lithe.”

“Look at me now,” she said.

“Lumbering.”

“I wear layers of clothing. I wear clothes and change-of-clothes simultaneously. Just to be ready.”

“I can’t afford a change of clothes,” he said.

“I can’t afford the dry cleaning.”

“I often wonder how this happened to me.”

“I live without a refrigerator and telephone and radio and shower curtain and what else. I keep butter and milk on the balcony.”

“You’re very quiet,” he said then. “Everyone says so.”

“Am I? Who?”

“How old are you by the way?”

“Now that we’ve spent a night together, you mean?”

“Spent a night. Exactly. One night used up in huddled conversation.”

“Well it helped me. It made a difference really. It was the crucial night. Not that the others have been so cozy.”

“You’re welcome to return, you know. I sit there thinking. A lithe young woman flying across the city into my arms.”

The children waved at them from the windows and Edmund did a wild-eyed mime of a bus driver caught in agitated traffic. She watched the lightsome faces glide away.

“You have nice color,” she said.

“What does that mean?”

“Your cheeks are pink and healthy. My father used to say if I ate my vegetables I’d have rosy cheeks.”