John Hawkes - The Cannibal

Her mother, a long mound beneath the sheets, had lost all this, terribly aged with a cold pallor, strong and indolent, unhappy in the oppressive heat. The mother lay in bed day after day, the spring, summer, years dragging by, with only her head two hands long above the sheets, her eyes fastened together, motionless until some forgotten whim, surge of strength, drove her from the bed. And in that hour she would shop. When she shopped, she ventured on the streets in gowns from another date, walked in steady steps, and took Stella along. She never liked the world she saw and her old husband never knew she was out of the house.

A hundred strokes, a hundred and five, the hair quivered in the space of gold; she changed hands, her skin as soft as the back of a feather. Her brothers, a pair of twins, fifteen-year-old soldiers dressed in stiff academy blue and trimmed in brass, walked past her open door, eyes ahead, arms in parallel motion, and she heard their miniature spurs clanking down the wide stairs. The boys never saw their parents, since the old man and woman had been the age of deaf grandparents at the time of the brothers’ remarkable conception. The brothers ate and lived alone. The jingling sound hung in her ears, one of the birds had become audible, and she thought of a parakeet with long sharp nails bathing in a blue pond where the green grass swayed and the sun was orange. There was no shock in the day, but the same smothered joy crept up with the morning’s trade and old flags that were unfurling along the guarded streets.

“Breakfast, breakfast!” Gerta called, wearied and harassed, from the center of the first floor lobby, lips drawn down, clutching a fist of silver, calling to wake the whole house into an even greater activity. The shabby crowd was growing restless, howling with round faces scrubbed cheery and proud, while inside the high walls the elaborate process of serving the isolated meal began. Twenty thousand feet in the sky, a sheet of wind flashed over the city cold and thin, while below, warm air rolled over the lake in the park, and swans opened their necks and damp feathers, bumping softly together in stiff confusion.

The old man, always seated first at the table, held his head high and rigid so that it trembled, pure white eyes staring and blinking from a skull like a bird’s, the whole area behind the thin tissue eaten away and lost. Sometimes he ate his melon with the fork, or spoon, or knife, or pushed it with his pointed elbow so that it fell to the floor, pits and meat splashing over his black curled-up shoes. The moustache fell to his high collar in two soft sweeping strands of pale gold, his long legs were a mass of black veins. His face, narrow and long, was covered with bark and was deep scarlet, and clots of blood formed just under the glaze of fine hair; and he would fall, slipping and breaking in every part at least once a week. But each time the clots would dissolve and be churned away, down the grass-smelling passages, and he would recover.

The table was so short, with the twelve leaves piled out of sight in dust, that she could almost smell his breath, with scarcely a bare foot of candelabra, bowls, tongs, green stems and silver trays between them. When she sat down, his head, like a brittle piece of pastry, tried to swim over the breakfast things, searching as every morning, but was blocked by a twisted maze of fern in an azure vase and a pyramid of butter patties topped with dark cherries. “Stool,” he said in a high voice because he could no longer pronounce her name. They sat close together in the middle of the long dining room, the man with his ninety years and the young girl with her peaches, while overhead, set in one of the domes, a large clock struck eleven. Gerta hurried in and out pushing a little cart laden with napkins, rolls, knives, sauces of all kinds and pans of under-done, clear boiled eggs. “Poor man,” she said, dabbing at a long run of fresh egg water on his tunic, turning now and then a look of wrath on Stella as if the poor girl herself had shaken his freckled hand and made the long translucent string slide off onto his chest. Stella frowned back, scattering crumbs over the little table and knocking the goblet so that a mouthful of water sizzled on the coffee urn.

“Watch what you’re doing,” snapped Gerta, her slippers padding angrily on the rug.

This morning he was able to get the pink slices between his fingers, but, slipping through their own oily perfume, they constantly fell back to the tablecloth in irregular heaps of quivering jelly. Stella thought of Ernie and smiled across the floral table at her father, looked with delightful interest at his slippery hands.

The boy didn’t realize what he said, 1870, it would take many dead men to encircle Paris, and the responsibility, that’s what he didn’t understand or no one could speak in such a manner, pride on the heights . “War,” her father said, and there was a terrible fire in his eye through the ferns. “War,” and he leaned slightly forward as if to strike her, but his arm only raised part way, shivered, and dropped back on the plate. She stopped smiling.

“Where is the railroad station?” he asked.

Stella watched his questioning face for a moment then continued to eat. She was sorry.

“He only wants to go to the bathroom,” said Gerta, and throwing herself under his thin erect frame she led him out, the white lace duster fluttering on her head. The two boys clanked by in the hall, stepped in a single motion out of the way. The cook worked frantically to heat more rolls in the oven like a boiler, kept a flame under the pot of coffee, ran from cupboard to cupboard collecting more juices and spices, threw a large ham on the spit. Stella pulled the long brocaded sash and heard the bell jingle out amid the clatter of pans, the swirl of water. Gerta’s friend came in, still wearing her brown shawl and hat covered with violets, still clutching the paper bag with grease on her fingers.

“More toast,” said Stella.

“Ah, toast,” said the woman and disappeared.

Stella thought that her father suffered very much. Some parts of the day she would walk with him up and down the beautiful quiet hallways, his hand resting only lightly on her arm, a smile about his shriveled lips. Sometimes she suffered herself, though usually in the evening in the blue shadows of her room, never in the morning, for she knew that at dusk she would see him half-hidden and in full stately dress behind the tall lighted candles. The dining room walls darkened with nightfall, the silverware lighted by the flames, the immense shadows falling over him from white flowers instead of ferns, covered him with an illusory change that frightened her. In these evenings Stella remembered how, when she was a small girl, he had talked to her, before his voice disappeared, and she heard his voice talking of sieges and courtships, and emerald lands, and she wished him to be a father still. At night she could not tell. From a few long talks with her mother she knew that for five generations the men had been tall, handsome, discreet and honorable soldiers, all looking exactly alike as brother eagles, and all these men had died young. Her father had so outlived the features of those other men and his family that he no longer existed and could not even speak. The man hidden behind the candles made her wonder for all his years.

“You don’t have to tell me where he needs to go,” she murmured, and Gerta’s friend returning with the toast was confused by her words.

The hair nearest her neck was hazel, the rest lemon, and when she walked it was fitfully gliding as if she were already there — there in the mausoleum where he lay in plaster, where rose petals were swept under her prayer. For in the hottest part of the noon, the house was withered away and his white face was in a lasting repose, the idiot of breakfast, the marshal of dinner, become an old masked man in the heat of the sun wherever she walked. She would gladly cut the epitaph herself for just one glimpse before they latched the door — the noon heat made her feel the marble dust as if it were fresh. Never in the world could she know him, only scraps from her mother’s carefully guarded chest. Sometimes, when Stella looked most beautiful, she felt that she would collapse with the house around her when he finally left.