Don DeLillo - The Angel Esmeralda

She waited for Edmund to ask, What did your mother used to say? Then they walked for the time that remained before afternoon classes. Edmund bought a ring of sesame bread and gave her half. He paid for things by opening his fist and letting the vendor sort among the coins. It proved to everyone that he was only passing through.

“You’ve heard the rumors,” she said.

“Rubbish.”

“The government is concealing seismic data.”

“There is absolutely no scientific evidence that a great quake is imminent. Read the papers.”

She took off the bulky jacket and swung it over her shoulder. She realized she wanted him to think she was slightly foolish, controlled by mass emotion. There was some comfort in believing the worst as long as this was the reigning persuasion. But she didn’t want to submit completely. She walked along wondering if she was appealing to Edmund for staunch pronouncements that she could use against herself.

“Do you have an inner life?”

“I sleep,” he said.

“That’s not what I mean.”

They ran across a stretch of avenue where cars accelerated to a racing clip. It felt good to shake out of her jittery skin. She kept running for half a block and then turned to watch him approach clutching his chest and moving on doddery legs, as if for the regalement of children. He could look a little bookish even capering.

They approached the school building.

“I wonder what your hair would be like if you let it grow out.”

“I can’t afford the extra shampoo,” she said.

“I can’t afford a haircut at regular intervals, quite seriously.”

“I live without a piano.”

“And this is a wretchedness to compare with no refrigerator?”

“You can ask that question because you don’t know me. I live without a bed.”

“Is this true?”

“I sleep on a secondhand sofa. It has the texture of a barnacled hull.”

“Then why stay?” he said.

“I can’t save enough to go anywhere else and I’m certainly not ready to go home. Besides I like it here. I’m sort of stranded but in a more or less willing way. At least until now. The trouble with now is that we could be anywhere. The only thing that matters is where we’re standing when it hits.”

He presented the gift then, lifting it out of his jacket pocket and unwrapping the sepia paper with a teasing show of suspense. It was a reproduction of an ivory figurine from Crete, a bull leaper, female, her body deftly extended with tapered feet nearing the topmost point of a somersaulting curve. Edmund explained that the young woman was in the act of vaulting over the horns of a charging bull. This was a familiar scene in Minoan art, found in frescoes, bronzes, clay seals, gold signet rings, ceremonial cups. Most often a young man, sometimes a woman gripping a bull’s horns and swinging up and over, propelled by the animal’s head jerk. He told her the original ivory figure was broken in half in 1926 and asked her if she wanted to know how this happened.

“Don’t tell me. I want to guess.”

“An earthquake. But the restoration was routine.”

Kyle took the figure in her hand.

“A bull coming at full gallop? Is this possible?”

“I’m not inclined to question what was possible thirty-six hundred years ago.”

“I don’t know the Minoans,” she said. “Were they that far back?”

“Yes, and farther than that, much farther.”

“Maybe if the bull was firmly tethered.”

“It’s never shown that way,” he said. “It’s shown big and fierce and running and bucking.”

“Do we have to believe something happened exactly the way it was shown by artists?”

“No. But I believe it. And even though this particular leaper isn’t accompanied by a bull, we know from her position that this is what she’s doing.”

“She’s bull-leaping.”

“Yes.”

“And she will live to tell it.”

“She has lived. She is living. That’s why I got this for you really. I want her to remind you of your hidden litheness.”

“But you’re the acrobat,” Kyle said. “You’re the loose-jointed one, performing in the streets.”

“To remind you of your fluent buoyant former self.”

“You’re the jumper and heel clicker.”

“My joints ache like hell actually.”

“Look at the veins in her hand and arm.”

“I got it cheap in the flea market.”

“That makes me feel much better.”

“It’s definitely you,” he said. “It must be you. Do we agree on this? Just look and feel. It’s your magical true self, mass-produced.”

Kyle laughed.

“Lean and supple and young,” he said. “Throbbing with inner life.”

She laughed. Then the school bell rang and they went inside.

She stood in the middle of the room, dressed except for shoes, slowly buttoning her blouse. She paused. She worked the button through the slit. Then she stood on the wood floor, listening.

They were now saying twenty-five dead, thousands homeless. Some people had abandoned undamaged buildings, preferring the ragged safety of life outdoors. Kyle could easily see how that might happen. She had the first passable night’s sleep but continued to stay off elevators and out of movie theaters. The wind knocked loose objects off the back balconies. She listened and waited. She visualized her exit from the room.

Sulfur fell from the factory skies, staining the pavement, and a teacher at the school said it was sand blown north from Libya on one of those lovely desert winds.

She sat on the sofa in pajamas and socks reading a book on local flora. A blanket covered her legs. A half-filled glass of water sat on the end table. Her eyes wandered from the page. It was two minutes before midnight. She paused, looking off toward the middle distance. Then she heard it coming, an earth roar, a power moving on the air. She sat for a long second, deeply thoughtful, before throwing off the blanket. The moment burst around her. She rushed to the door and opened it, half aware of rattling lampshades and something wet. She gripped the edges of the door frame and faced into the room. Things were jumping up and down. She formed the categorical thought, This one is the biggest yet. The room was more or less a blur. There was a sense that it was on the verge of splintering. She felt the effect in her legs this time, a kind of hollowing out, a soft surrender to some illness. It was hard to believe, hard to believe it was lasting so long. She pushed her hands against the door frame, searching for a calmness in herself. She could almost see a picture of her mind, a vague gray oval, floating over the room. The shaking would not stop. There was an anger in it, a hammering demand. Her face showed the crumpled effort of a heavy lifter. It wasn’t easy to know what was happening around her. She couldn’t see things in the normal way. She could only see herself, bright-skinned, waiting for the room to fold over her.

Then it ended and she pulled some clothes over her pajamas and took the stairway down. She moved fast. She ran across the small lobby, brushing past a man lighting a cigarette at the door. People were coming into the street. She went half a block and stopped at the edge of a large group. She was breathing hard and her arms hung limp. Her first clear thought was that she’d have to go back inside sooner or later. She listened to the voices fall around her. She wanted to hear someone say this very thing, that the cruelty existed in time, that they were all unprotected in the drive of time. She told a woman she thought a water pipe had broken in her flat and the woman closed her eyes and rocked her heavy head. When will it all end? She told the woman she’d forgotten to grab her tote bag on her way out the door despite days of careful planning and she tried to give the story a rueful nuance, make it funny and faintly self-mocking. There must be something funny we can cling to. They stood there rocking their heads.