Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

Besides, the grey is mine. Red and grey mixed is my colour now. I shall never grow younger, or be more beautiful. But I can survive. I’ve decided to survive. I can make friends. I can relax. I can sit and play cards with Juanita, I can linger over la comida with Manuel, I can teach English to Juanita’s grandchild, I can shop with Emilia, the caretaker’s wife, who stops them cheating me at the market — not that I buy much more than bread and beans.

I’ve learned there are many ways of being with people, that people can like me and like to be with me, that I don’t have to try and make all men want me and all women envy me — not that I could, even if I tried. I’m tired, you see. All that is over.

But I’m not over. I’m not finished. There’s a lot of unfinished business yet.

At night I don’t close the shutters. No one can see me, four floors up, and I like to look over the glittering city, diminishing into the far night sky with its ominously beautiful orange-lit clouds; down there every light means three or four people, in cafes and clubs maybe thirty, a hundred, and the lights themselves are innumerable, it would take the rest of my life to count them — I started so late, you see.

Every morning I see the people clearly. Down in the streets, in cars, on bikes, trudging along under dirty bundles, carrying flowers, briefcases, babies — so many of them carrying babies — running, walking, staggering, skipping, lying in the gutter with a bottle of mezcal, sitting on the pavements with giggling friends or pyramids of fruit or shoe-shine stands, miniature people with dust-blackened faces — fathers of families going to the office, mothers of families going to the factory, sleepy school children trotting to school, grandfathers going to buy tobacco, grandmothers going for milk and bread, whistling street-sweepers, swaggering policemen — and the poor, of course. The poor, going nowhere. So many of them. So unimaginably many.

They were always there, but I never saw them. Going down among them I am almost overwhelmed; now I am old I’m invisible; the people swarm along the shining streets, alive with the sum of all their separate energies, pouring forward, pouring outwards, gathering speed as I run down. They are so many, we are so many. So many people I had never seen, so many people I had never felt part of.

I thought we were different, special, golden. Alexandra and Christopher. I thought we were the golden ones. I wanted everyone to look at me; I never bothered to look at them, not unless they were beautiful or interesting. But we weren’t special, were we? We were just rich.

Inside the flat, when my friends aren’t there, the voices come for me.

— I can’t alter what I’ve been and done. Too late to change its littleness; I was clever, creative; I could have done more… I tried to do more, but nothing came. Instead I did damage. Quite a lot of damage. I missed opportunities, let things escape me, wrecked them because I didn’t know what they were…

It’s not so much that I had my daughter adopted — I was so very young, unrecognisably young, I can hardly remember what I was like, only that life was desperate, and she didn’t look like me, not a bit, she had a squashed head and never seemed to stop crying, her poor little head was squashed by the forceps, even her birth I couldn’t get right… It’s not the abortion, even, though I still sometimes cry when I think of it, inextricably entangled in my mind with the miscarriage two decades later, Christopher’s two miscarried children — it’s not so much those stupid messes as the two children I failed to see. The two who were there, who needed me.

— Isaac and Susy. They were still so young when they first began to live with me. I couldn’t see that they were children. I saw them as problems that went with Christopher, things that always got in the way and stopped the two of us enjoying ourselves. They were five and eight, but I fought them like adults. Susy at five was lovable, I can see that now, remembering her, but at twenty-four I had no love to give, and I wanted all Chris’s love for myself. She wanted to cuddle, she wanted to talk, she wanted her dolls when she missed her mother, she missed her dolls when I threw them away — she screamed at me without the power to hurt me. I was cool and adult; I was mad as a hatter, but no one dared to tell me so.

How could I have taken her dolls away?

Now I can see that they were all babies, I just couldn’t bear to think about babies, I’d lost two babies in the last four years, but Susy was too young to understand, I was too young to understand… only now do I begin to understand, but it’s a lifetime too late for Susy.

I suppose that nothing will go right for her. I suppose she’ll go on as she began, disliking herself, hurting herself, all because I disliked her and hurt her. I suppose she’s the one I’ve damaged the most, if I leave out Christopher. Susy and I haven’t spoken since the shooting. I’ve never dared to pick up the phone. I sent her a postcard about Anna Maria, when everything seemed so hopeful. Odd I should write to her about that. Or maybe not so odd, alas. In some shameful way I felt competitive with Susy; she looked so… fecund, so bursting with babies… so I wrote to tell her I was going to be a mother. She didn’t answer, naturally. And I never wrote to tell her that I failed. Like her, I failed to be a mother. If it was a competition, nobody won.

In the moments when I’m not reading or sleeping or spending time with Mexican friends, I think about them, my family, all the people who have touched my life, whether they’re related to me or not — the nearest thing I have to a family, God help me, since I lost my first family, I cut them off, they cut me off, I was amputated. Susy, Penelope, Benjamin. Mary and Matthew; they mattered once. Stuart, but I don’t like to think about Kirsty. Anna Maria. Oh Anna Maria. Isaac, yes. And Christopher.

All of them gone. What have I done?

The trial is endless, the verdicts shift.

— I forgive myself for what I did to Isaac, because he forgave me, in the end. I forgive myself for what happened to Penelope; I tell myself that one is Christopher’s fault, and anyway she was a sick woman. And Benjamin was young, he needed to suffer, he wanted to suffer, he was madly in love, and a painter needs a grand passion, he said so. One day I’ll probably appear in his paintings, a De Kooning harpy with scarlet hair…

But then I remember Susy, at the funeral, Susy’s eyes bear down on me, and the verdict is always Guilty, guilty …

It whispers on, accusations, denials, when the flat is empty, when my mind is empty, when I stare across the city at dusk, before the colours drain away, pinks and greys and the doveblue haze, as isolated lights start to pierce the evening, as the sirens start to wail, then die — as I stare across miles of crowded streets which know nothing at all about my ghosts. They are my ghosts, mind; I have to care for them. I hear the voices as I do my housework, all the small tasks that go with living, polishing, cleaning, cooking, washing, for I can look after myself, you see, I’m doing it to prove I can — I review the evidence, I sentence myself, I sentence myself to yet another trial.

Possibly the voices are getting quieter. I’ve been here two years; are they running down? — I always leave out Christopher, because his case is so fundamental. By Christopher I stand or fall… how can I extricate myself from him? How much was my fault, how much his? I suppose we’re in the dock together, except that we’re so far apart. We lived together. We should be together.

We lived together, we should die together.

But I’ll never make a move, of course. I’m afraid of rejection. I did betray him. I wanted to escape the sense of failure, I wanted fun and sex and passion and cigarettes with Benjy in the sunset light; I forgot I loved Chris, I managed to forget him, how could I forget all those years together? I saw something I wanted, and traded Chris in…