Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

But Chris was the one who went to prison, and Consuela Harbert was the one who died. I got off scot free, except for the voices, what have I done, what have I done …

Maybe Anna Maria was my punishment. Loving her so much was my punishment.

Chris is out there somewhere. He’s still alive. Someone would have told me if he had died. Mary would have told me, good old Mary, Mary Brown would have found me, somehow, Mary would never let me down, though we haven’t written for nearly five years…

When I think of it like that… that he’s living somewhere, the same man, Christopher, my lover; my friend, my brother, who I slept beside, who slept so close to me for twenty-six years, we heard each other snore and sleep-talk and snuffle, we knew each other’s bodies as if they were our own — the little hairs on my arms bristle, I stare at the horizon with such stupid longing, because somewhere behind it he’s still there, and until people die, everything is possible — he’s never divorced me, has he? He’s never tried to find me, but he’s never divorced me –

And yet it’s not possible. I know it’s not. I shall never be calm until I accept it.

But sometimes things seem so simple. I just want to hold him in my arms. I want to stroke his hair, and tell him I’m sorry. After the shooting I never said sorry.

I think I just have to shelve it all, put off the reckoning into the future. There’s plenty of time. I’m only fifty-seven.

— But Christopher is seventy-two. People can die at seventy-two.

It’s been a day of rare, headachey heat, one of those days when the sky screws down like a lid on a jarful of captured insects and the whole city longs for rain. I’ve had all the windows open, despite the fumes, but not a breath of air has come to me — it’s the weather, you see. That’s why I brood so much. Manuel is on holiday in Acapulco. I could have gone with him but I’m tired of holidays. Twenty years of holidays is quite enough. And Juanita’s gone away to see her daughter. I’ll watch night come; that always calms me.

Tomorrow there’s a fair in the Alameda. There are so many feast days I lose count, but tomorrow I’ll go and enjoy myself. Be with people. That’s the answer. I’m all right really. I’m fine in myself. I watch my garden, morning and evening, holding the sun at the end of the day, and I think I’m surviving, I’m doing well.

And another little voice thinks, something will happen. There’s unfinished business. Something will happen.

— And something has happened. It can’t be undone. Now the rest of my life will be measured from that.

The day of the fiesta was two weeks ago. I’ve lived that two weeks hour by hour. I’m so afraid. So alone.

Hard to re-create how I felt that morning. I’d slept soundly; my headache was gone; I woke up excited about the fair. It had rained in the night and the air felt fresher. My depression had lifted; I felt optimistic.

But everything’s not in the mind. I thought I was resting, but my body had been busy. The housework wasn’t enough for it. That day I stretched in the bedroom mirror as I often did, like a figurehead, stretching the stiffness from my bones, pulling my thin arms back like wings, when I thought one breast moved a little differently.

Imagine my indignation and surprise when I found a tiny lump, no bigger than a seed, a buried seed-pearl or a birth control pill, on the edge of my breast. It was very small. Perhaps I was imagining it. All morning I kept testing, my fingers compelled to creep back to my breast again and again, sure that this time it would have gone away, or transformed itself into a wart, or a pimple. One time I couldn’t find it, and broke into a sweat, a wonderful sweat of joy and relief, but I’d simply looked in the wrong place. The little stone was hiding half-an-inch away.

So then I wasn’t quite so sure there was time. The horizon seemed to have moved a little closer, the sirens sounded sharper, nearer. I was only fifty-seven, too young for this. All my life I had been unimpeachably healthy. I had never breast-fed; surely that made me safer? Breast-feeding must put your breasts at risk. I’d read something about it, but I couldn’t remember, and when I did remember, I’d got it all wrong, because breast-feeding protected you, and I had never managed to feed a baby… Surely this was happening to somebody else.

But there was no one else. I was on my own. I knew what was happening, and to whom.

Out of the window, the gardens had vanished. The green had gone under a riot of stalls, and brightly-coloured bodies surged and retreated, looking from up here like a single life-form with complicated rhythms of its own. I didn’t want to be alone. Juanita wouldn’t be back for a week, Miguel should be back but wasn’t answering the phone, perhaps he was down there with all the others.

I had spent the morning sitting numbly in my night-dress, but I dragged on some clothes, and went down to the street.

I’ve always loved dancing. It’s a little like fucking, but people can admire you doing it… for the past two years, though, I’d hardly danced. Today everyone was dancing. As I neared the garden the music came to meet me, pulsing, vibrating salsa music, and just for a moment it lifted my heart, just for a moment my feet were twitching… but then I understood it was for the others, the painted crowd with their vivid life, the magic circle of the living, and I wouldn’t dance, because I’d stepped outside. Besides, I no longer had anyone to dance with.

The noise and movement were so violent that my solitary terror was blown away. There were orange and green dragons with gaping nostrils, red and purple cocks with flaming crests, all of them soaring up and down on poles with hysterical women on their backs, clinging on helpless, entirely happy. Two skeletons wandered arm in arm, almost genial when there were two of them and their ghastly grins were aimed at each other; perhaps they were going off duty for a bit. Children screamed on a big dipper which never seemed to stop, whirling for ever against the sky, faster than normal, was something wrong? They must be getting tired, I was getting tired… no one else but me was watching, no one else but me was tired, everyone was in perpetual motion, buying or selling, laughing, shouting, changing partners, disguising themselves, hiding from someone who was looking for them, hiding from something which was tracking them down… I stood for a while and watched the dancers, in bright satin skirts split to the crotch or trousers so tight that their genitals wagged, drunk with their bodies, with sex, with life… one couple, less flamboyantly dressed than the others, middle-aged, I saw, when I glimpsed their faces, danced in a style less extrovert than most but so meltingly sexual I could hardly watch; every inch of their bodies was turned to the other; they rubbed, they clung, they kissed, they pressed, only the barrier of skin stopped them flowing together, and their heads, as they kissed again, gently, seriously, expressed such hypnotised tenderness that they seemed to be miming a long lost love-story, they showed me what Christopher and I once had; I longed to be touched; I turned away.

Somebody touched me on the arm. I saw the hand first, a white-gloved hand. I turned to face whoever it was.

The skeleton had come back on duty. He was alone, and no longer looked genial, and I was alone, and I had to face him. ‘Give me something,’ he said, softly. ‘You have to give me something, now.’ I gave him money. ‘Not enough.’ I gave him more money, and ran away, but I knew I still hadn’t given enough, I hoped to lose him among all the dancers.

As I panted into the foyer of the flats I still had a feeling he was behind me. The lift rose noisily, familiar noises, stop this, you’re just imagining things…