William Vollmann - The Atlas

She bound her hair around black threads of yarn until she was more impressive than the barefoot girls who walked with entire forests of leafy twigs on their heads; she strung her hair with the rain-strings that stretched down the sides of rocks into moss-lips and corn-hairs and tree-capillaries, drumming and splattering down; her hands became fernclaws bristling with rain. Seeing her, a brown man cinched his awning tighter against the rain. She took a shower and wrapped her wet hair into tight black licorice twists which she made sure of in her cracked mirror. She made it shine more brightly than the whites of her black eyes. She put her lover's hand on it; his fingers followed and loved her hair's soft raw studded coarseness. Now she was almost finished. Running into the rain for her hair's sake, he picked a red kana flower, a blue fasis berry, a red round coffee bean, a yellow blossom with a black center; and she took these things smiling and hunched over her mirror like a woman washing clothes in the river. Now once again she was ready to go dancing with him at the Discotheque Kali.

The taxi crawled across the pitted beige surface of the night which rattled teeth and windows; they went down dark meat- and diesel-smelling streets, and the light from bottles in a bar could not outdo her hair, and they passed the épicerie whose doors were open wide like a whore's legs, and dirty white walls and dirty white dresses glowed in the headlights. The strings of sausages silhouetted like amber beads compared not at all with the boldly twisted segments of her hair which ran suddenly like the rain down the dirty walls of his life behind which occasional lights burned weakly like failures. Men walked into the darkness of her hair like skinny spiders. She would not dance with them; she danced only with him. Her hair kissed him so that his eyes could, not be doomed anymore by the row of shirts like skulls where the big watchers sat. The blood-faced watcher stood behind the pillar. The fluorescent blue swirl of a white miniskirt as a girl danced among girls lured the blood-faced watcher for a time; his mouth was like the lighted aperture in the wall where they sold cigarettes. But then all the watchers at once saw the lover with his very dark girl who nodded her heavy head to the music, drinking beer. They had seen him and her already that night at the robber-infested restaurant whose greasy concrete floor and grease-streaked concrete walls enriched the flies on the tables while beneath bright bare bulbs the gangsters grinned and punched each other's wrists and fat whores laughed and went in and out of the bathroom; the whores sat at the corner table, smiling bright-toothed, their hair braided into darkness; but the hair of the one he danced with was as flowery ricefields under hot purple clouds. A man leaned against the wall by the bathroom, a cap low over his eyes, nodding, smiling to music. A fat whore in denim shouted ah yah yah , slapping her thighs. The belt around her was as big as a railroad track. The music got louder, and she clapped her hands, which were as big as hams, with a deafening booming sound, and then the gangsters came over and asked to be bought drinks. He was wise with her wisdom; he bought them drinks. A whore asked him to buy her dinner and he did, so as a favor she whispered to his braided-haired darling that the robbers planned to stab them that night. That was how it had been in the restaurant. In the Indra the darkness was better for the watchers. The blood-faced watcher came and asked the lover to give him money. As for her with the lovely hair, the others waited for that with their knives. Once they cut it off the rain would stop forever. In the village where everyone was sitting in trees, one last time a tiny waterfall would fill a brown pool that fed bright green ricefields, and then the waterfall would stop.

* In 1993, two thousand Malagasy francs was a little more than U.S. $1.

The train passed slowly away from flat white-sand-floored towns whose trees spread lushly pubic shadows, and then it whistled and began to accelerate, leaving a squat palm askew, slicing the pale blue sky a thousand times with the glittery slats of its blinds. The horizon was slate-blue like a thunderhead painted with dust. From those sandy towns men in tank tops and shorts stared out, sunglasses covering half their faces, and they absorbed the passing train darkly from behind baseball caps. At Caborca the men who stared wore cowboy hats. They leaned in the narrow strip of shade adjoining the wall (the wall was yellow on top, brown on the bottom). Just past the station, men in cowboy hats lay wearily in the space between offices. The train kept pace with another track, grown stale with wiry grass that writhed and whipped in that hot wind that came from the dry hills. The train passed a wall made of old tires. Then it went away.

There was laundry under a tree in a sunken place. On the far side of the road, which had accompanied the train across dry riverbeds, began a pale-green-grassed desert befogged by trees. Blue and red bush-pocked conehills lay ahead. Once those were reached, the road would end at last, like a wailing lover who'd run alongside as long as she could, until she collapsed breathless in the desperate sands. But for now the road went on, in panting little zigzags which never grazed the train's progress.

The train crossed a slanted plain which ended in gross knobs and knuckles. These were the hands of other dying roads, which went down into the earth; they went nowhere, but their hands refused to be buried; they clutched at distances they could never catch. The train left them all behind.

Inside, the music streamed on as reliably as propaganda. In the evening, when the shadows of the blinds curved around his arm like vertebrae, the songs seemed friendlier, perhaps as a result of simple contrast to the loneliness which existed between him and this woman who slumped in the seat with one leg up, eyes closed. Later, to his intense surprise, she leaned her silent head against his arm. He watched the veins on her tanned hands. Then it was night, and morning.

Years later he'd drive the freeway past the place where she used to live and the sadness of it screamed at him; he wanted to chop down her exit sign. Years later he'd look out his window into the rain (the maple tree was taller than before), and he'd watch the cars go planing by in their troughs of wet grayness, and he knew that no matter how long he looked out the window she'd never again come past the ivy tree to turn in at the streetlamp, slowly crossing his line of sight in her new red car (it must not be new anymore; she probably had another) as he leaped up and ran down the stairs so that he could open the door like thought as her finger approached the bell. He remembered the first day he'd met her when they went walking in wide horse-meadows and he climbed the fence first and then turned to her and she leaped into his arms, so shy and skinny and lovely but not shy after that.

She was still sleeping. Her head had been on his shoulder all night, but now she made a face in her sleep and turned to press her forehead to the window.

Continuing south to loud waltz music in the front and mariachi music in the back, they crossed a yellow-brown plain cut with deep sandy washes where cattle lurked like lost souls and the cement vaults of cemeteries were painted blue and orange. Gradually it became greener. That was probably his fault. Everything else was. There were still chollas and ocotillos, but there were also dark green mushroom-shaped trees.

Past rusty-pale railroad cars, they saw a half-naked brown boy on a bicycle, whitish houses plated with curvy orange tiles. Between the blinds of his window the list of monotonously strange entities went on, retreating down forsaken roads. The time was coming when he'd want to tell her so much because he wasn't with her anymore, but at the moment they continued together, so he had nothing to say. It was not a question of boredom; it was just that they were caught up on all each other's secrets so that the next moment would also die easily, leading to death the moment beyond it like that girl who was taking her little daughter for a walk along the railroad tracks. There was a watde fence, with great trees inside; then laundry drying under an aqueduct, a family bathing in a curvy river, prickly pears, long, whiplike fingers of cactus. . The gray-blue sea kept breaking white and clean against a coast of scrub and thorn and cactus, the cacti like mutilated hands planted at the wrist. They were so far away now. They'd gone almost to the end. Two vultures passed overhead. Long shady combers broke shallowly on the beach, the water getting lighter as the sun got higher.