Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

Benjamin is packing noisily, crashing drawers, clattering doors. Last night he drank too much alcol, the disgusting drink of the very poor, so strong that they use lighted matches to burn off some of the alcohol before they drink it, but Benjamin wanted to hurt himself, Benjamin wanted oblivion…

We were sitting outside with the night all round us. The air was close, soft as damp fur, and sweat ran down between my breasts. His face was beaded as if with tears, glittering in the lamplight. That cretinous maid had told him the campesinos drank alcol to drown their sorrows. I took one mouthful and spat it out but he pretended to like it, he was macho and stupid and drank all the more when I tried to stop him.

I confess I was impatient. Surely the grief and loss were mine?

‘I feel — as though we’ve lost our future,’ he said. ‘We would have looked after her together. I wanted her too, you know. You’re not the only one who wants a child.’ (Odd that that hadn’t occurred to me. I really thought he was just trying to please me.) ‘I loved my brother’s kids back in New York. If I had a chance, I could be a good father…’

His whining seemed an absurd intrusion. I’d have thought he’d have the decency to comfort me, but the young are very selfish… I wanted to get away from him.

‘I’m afraid I’m going to lose you, too.’ He was drinking steadily but not yet drunk. ‘I don’t want to lose you, whatever happens.’

‘I want a child.’ I evaded the issue.

‘Do you want me?’

I couldn’t answer. His honesty makes him seem so young. But he is so young, my beautiful Benjy, that’s why I came away with him… I said perhaps we needed space. We’d been cooped up together too long, the humid air was stifling me… I tried to be kind. I said how fond of him I was. I said perhaps he was just too young.

And so he got drunk and began to abuse me, thus sounding younger than ever, alas.

‘You only wanted me for a stud because that murderous bastard couldn’t put one in you. Ever since you resigned yourself to not getting pregnant —’

‘— You haven’t understood. I’m not resigned. All I want from life is a child —’

‘— Ever since you gave up on me making you pregnant you haven’t looked me in the eye.’

(True. I used to look into his eyes and see babies, a luminous future with fine twin babies, for older women are more likely to have twins, oh yes, don’t worry, I know the facts, there was a time when I read so many books, so obsessively, about having babies… Once upon a time I knew all the statistics, I read and dreamed for three or four years, I was positive Benjy would pull it off… For a year he made love to me every night, sometimes more, night after night.)

I still had eggs, but they never ripened.

So Benjamin was wrong for me. Or maybe my eggs were already dead…

— I know my eggs weren’t dead from the start. I did conceive all those decades ago, I refused an abortion, I had my daughter, but there was no father to support me, I had no life to offer her, I had her adopted for her own good… I was a child myself, what else could I do? I decided never to think about her. I decided never to think about children. I told Christopher I would never have children.

Then the mistake, the accident, what good does it do remembering… And we tried again and failed again. Blood on a flower in a Turkish wood.

Maybe my eggs all died from neglect. Maybe that’s why it only came too late, this piercing, tormenting wish for a child. Maybe it’s true, what he said last night, the thing I’ve been trying not to recall…

It was horrible, unforgettable. Something that shouldn’t be said to anyone. It sounds in my head again and again with the circular hum of a long-trapped wasp, maddened, dangerous… I could smell the poison as he leaned across to say it, too much booze and stinging green pepper, bitter alcohol and green regret.

‘Now you’ve given up on your fucking womb I’m no fucking use to you, am I? You’re a cold fucking bitch, you’re hard as nails, you’re so fucking — sterile —’

He meant something else, he didn’t mean that, but it will never be unsaid till I have a child.

We were alone on the verandah in the harsh light and dark from the brilliant insect-repellent lantern. I was stone-cold sober, drinking bottled water, I had stayed quite calm as he stormed at me, I knew the aggression was just hurt pride –

— I stared at the ugly cast-iron legs of the table under which his long legs would not fit, I concentrated on the vulgar iron, I examined the bruised black patches on our clothes where the sweat-soaked cotton clung to the skin, I thought of our cream-smeared arms and legs which gave the night its curious smell, something half-sweet, half-medical — I tried to hold on to these small hard facts in the enormous night that bore in on the lamplight –

— Then the jungle howled inside my head, it sobbed, it cried, I sat and wept, clutching the table, seeing nothing, deaf and blind, a thing of water, and all I wanted was to be dissolved, for the first time in a long life to be anyone but Alexandra, anything but a sterile woman.

(I still feel a little strange today, blurred at the edges, not myself. That curious, terrible wish not to be. Maybe I feel — but it seems so silly by sensible daylight with the brisk cross sounds of packing next door, and the squawking row going on in the kitchen — I feel as though I had waved to death, in that single moment of despair, and now it is still looking at me.

Rubbish, fuck off, get away! In future the rich will never die, the technology virtually exists already…)

After I wept he passed out in his chair, woke up in the early hours and crawled into bed, cold — I’d forgotten that flesh could feel cold — shivering, gloomy, begging my forgiveness, wanting to know that I still loved him.

I’ve heard it all before, alas. I’ve lived a long life, I’m not sentimental, and not at my best at two in the morning. I told him to go to sleep.

‘But I love you. I want to marry you.’

‘Two hours ago I was a fucking old bitch .’

‘I was drunk, I was mad, you’ll have to forgive me.’

‘I’ll have to go to sleep. We’re leaving tomorow.’

And so we’re leaving, still unreconciled. When he passes the doorway I can see his face, young and proud, divinely sulky, downcast eyes with that thick fringe of lash. He’s tall and slim but his cheeks are still round, smooth and faintly plump with youth, there was a sweetness about him I once loved, but he’s turned against me as all men do.

And then he calls from beyond the partition. ‘Shall I go down and ask them to send us up a snack? They might have some turtle eggs, if we’re lucky, a bit of charque, some beer…’

And here he is. He’s forgiven me for not forgiving him. Or else at all costs he wants to make friends. His mouth’s soft and timid, no longer sulky. His eyes drive mine down to the stained wooden floor, nameless stains and casual damage…

When I want something I want it all the time, just as long as I want it, which may not be for long, and I still have the passion for charque that I conceived when we first came to South America, although it’s on offer day in day out from the roughest vendors in the poorest mercado. They thrust the charque under my nose, hard black strips of sun-dried meat, salty and strong as bulls’ pizzles. I like to chew on those great dark thongs, but the hotel offers it already sliced up into delicate little appetisers.

‘Bring everything but the beer.’

‘I’ve done the packing. We can leave after lunch.’

— And I feel it tug at the corner of my heart, a small rush of hope at the thought of departure, an echo of all past hopefulness, all those leaps into the unlived future.