Metro Winds (5 page)

In the taxi that brought them to the theatre, the aunt gave her three small, beautifully wrapped packages. The first contained an antique bible with a leather cover and a tiny metal lock, which must be ornamental, for why would one lock a bible? The second held a slender silver torch attached to a key ring which the aunt suggested she use to locate the keyhole in the front door at night, since there was no external light. The last parcel contained a set of exquisite pearl combs which the girl was persuaded to push into her dark locks. It occurred to the aunt that, clad thus, the girl looked like a bride.

It was very hot outside, the culmination of a string of hot days, and a record for the month. They arrived at the concert hall early and stood outside to wait, for there was no air-conditioning in the foyer. The facades opposite looked bleached, and the asphalt gave off a hot black smell. Women around them stood wilting in expensive gowns, while their escorts fanned florid faces. The leaves of a caged tree hung motionless as the sky grew ever more mercilessly and perfectly blue. God might have had eyes that colour when he expelled Adam and Eve from the garden, the aunt thought dizzily, feeling her blood vibrate under her skin and hoping she would not faint.

She decided they should walk a little to escape the press. Around the corner, they came unexpectedly to a church and the aunt led the girl inside. The coolness beyond the arched stone doorway was so profound that she could have wept for the relief of it. They sat in the very last pew until the glimmering stars that had begun to wink before the aunt's eyes had faded. Then she glanced sideways at the girl and wondered if she had not been drawn into the church for a reason. The girl had a dangerously potent look. The aunt uttered a silent prayer that she should be safe, while the girl sat immobile beside her. Of course she was a heathen, her sister having abandoned their religion, but in the eyes of the church it was better to be a heathen than a member of another church. The latter went to hell, while heathens and unbaptised babies went to the grey eternity of limbo.

The aunt didn't believe in limbo anymore. Not exactly. But she didn't disbelieve either. Her mind was not shaped for such decision-making. She had a nostalgic affection for the innocent rites of her childhood faith, and in old age would be able to draw her religion tightly back around her like a beloved shawl.

The girl liked the cold smell of the church, the cool tobacco-dark shadows striping pictures of dim, tortured saints and the faint humming of the stone under her feet. She liked the little banks of candles and the font of water and the smell of wood polish on the pews.

Finally the aunt touched her and motioned that they should go. If God existed, and the girl was in some sort of danger, perhaps He would see fit to intervene. The aunt could do no more.

The performance they had come to see was merely competent and afterwards the aunt said it was a shame but one could never be sure with violinists. Excellence was as likely as mediocrity. But it was a pity.

Neither had the girl enjoyed the performance, finding the music too consciously intricate. The violin had sounded to her like something begging to be free. She had a sudden profound longing to hear the disordered cadences of the waves and the yearning grew until it hurt the bones in her chest to keep it in. It was the first time in her life that she had consciously desired anything and she wondered if wanting was something that came with the bleeding.

Outside it was hotter than ever and the sun still shone, although it was now early evening.

The aunt wished she had arranged a taxi so they could go immediately and directly to her friend's apartment. With the crowd swelling around them, there was no chance of hailing one, so they walked, searching for a telephone. The aunt's eyes watered at the brightness of the sun and she flinched when sunlight flashed off an opening window and stabbed into her eyes.

The girl was thinking that the heat was a trapped beast prowling the streets with its great, wet, red tongue hanging out, gasping in the exhausted air. If someone did not let it out soon, it would go mad and tear everything to pieces.

At last they saw a passing taxi and the aunt hailed it gratefully. To her irritation, when they arrived at her friend's home, he announced that it was too hot to stay in. He had organised for them to eat in a nearby café, but at least they were borne there in a car with air-conditioning. The friend was very like the aunt in his plump pinkness, although he was somewhat sharper in mind and manner. His eyes were a beautiful transparent aqua that reminded the girl of the sea on certain days when an unexpected beam of light penetrated a dark sky, and they settled on her avidly.

‘You did not say she was beautiful,' he said.

The aunt was almost suffocated with all the replies she might have made, from the inappropriateness of giving impressionable young girls such notions, to the strangeness of the fact that she had not been beautiful until this morning. Fortunately a waiter chose that moment to lay a starched napkin in her lap, preventing any response.

‘This terrible heat,' she said, when he had departed with their orders.

But her friend ignored the warning tone. Or perhaps he did not notice it, for he was still studying the girl. ‘It is interesting to think that with lips a little less full and eyes a tiny bit closer together, you would not be beautiful at all,' he said. ‘Such a thin line between ugliness and beauty.'

‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,' the aunt said firmly. But her friend gave a laugh.

‘Yes, and inner beauty is more important than outer fairness. I know all of that and of course it's true, but my dear, the child is exquisite, and her life will be shaped by that because, regardless of what people say, humans revere beauty. Something in us is thrilled by it. Aren't you thrilled by her?'

The aunt glanced involuntarily at the girl and thought that she was more frightened by her impossible radiance, which surely had grown since the morning.

‘We who are not and never have been beautiful must be a little envious as well,' the friend went on. ‘Few are pure enough to simply worship at the altar of beauty. For the rest of us, there is some cruelty in our makeup that makes us want to shred and smash it even as we adore it. Which is why it is dangerous to be too beautiful.'

The aunt made a business of buttering a roll for herself and offered one to the girl, but her friend would not be diverted. ‘You were very pretty and your sister was what one would call handsome,' he said pensively. ‘But this girl surpasses all of those lesser forms. Is your father very beautiful?' he asked her directly.

The girl thought a little and then said composedly, ‘He is very clever and when he is thinking about his work, he is sometimes beautiful.'

He laughed aloud in delight. ‘What a sophisticate! My dear, you must be so pleased.'

This to the aunt who did not know what she was supposed to be pleased about. A certain vexation began to show in the wrinkles rimming her eyes. ‘How is your salad, dear?' she asked the girl determinedly.

Over dessert, the friend clutched at his chest and made a strangled noise. The aunt knew he had a heart condition and cried out for the waiter to summon the friend's driver. She did not call an ambulance, knowing that he thought them vulgar, and in any case they were notoriously slow. Waiting, she massaged her friend's wrists and temples and was sorry to have been angry with him. After all, it was true that the girl had by now become almost unbearably exquisite. She noticed that two storm clouds shaped like long-fingered hands were reaching out towards one another, closing the blue sky in a black grip. She had never seen such a thing and, fearing it was an ill omen for her friend, she thrust some notes into the girl's hand and bade her catch a taxi home.

‘I may be some time,' she said, climbing into the black car after the friend. Only as the car pulled away and she glanced back, did the aunt see that the dark hands were clasping directly behind the girl, as if the sky itself would pray for her, or crush her. It was too late to stop the car, and she would have been a fool to do so, for of course it was an absurd fancy.

She turned with relief to wipe the brow of her ailing friend.

The girl watched the car until it was out of sight, then she looked around for a taxi. There was none to be seen and the waiter had gone back into the restaurant. She decided to walk until she saw one, since there was no need for haste. No one was expecting her. She walked three blocks, then five. Thirsty, she stopped to have an orange pressé in an outdoor café. Nearby were two young men talking and smoking; one was half lying on his seat and the other was staring into the froth of his beer. An older woman in a red dress batted at the grey ribbons of their smoke winding around her.

The girl felt no desire to talk to anyone. She thought she could find her way back to her aunt's apartment if she only had the river to guide her. She enquired of the waiter, who pointed the way, and set off, trying to imagine how it would be to marry one of the young men in the restaurant and let him hold her. She found it impossible to contemplate. Yet if one did not join with a man, what else was there? The sort of life her aunt led, with its overstuffed cushions, restaurants, the theatre with friends. Neither appealed, but what else was there? Her body seemed to ache, as if it understood its purpose better than she did, and yet all the uses to which it might be put felt wrong. In that moment her longing for the sound and scent of the sea returned with such intensity she felt nauseous and she wished that one could be taken as easily into the arms of the sea as the arms of a man.

Thunder grumbled and she looked up to find the sky filled with surly cloud. A storm had been brewing overhead and she had not noticed. Oddly, the heat had grown more fierce, as though compressed by the dense cloud cover. Thunder rumbled again and even as she remembered the beggar woman's soup, soured by the storm, she saw the open mouth of a metro station at the end of a long narrow street. As she drew closer, she could smell the black skin of the river that glimmered darkly beyond it. There was no illumination at the entrance to the metro, but a light glowed from somewhere deeper down. She entered the station and heard the hum of the escalators. She used the sound to guide her to them and descended. The light increased until she could see the advertisements in their slanted billboards. There were no other people going down or up, and the girl supposed she had chanced on a still moment between the surges of the crowd, for it was still quite early. The aunt's warnings about going into the metro when there were too few people rose in her mind and then faded like one of the unintelligible posters.

The escalator was longer than those she had been on before and she wondered if this particular tunnel was some sort of natural fissure that had been incorporated into the metro web. She thought of Persephone, who had made a bargain to live six months of each year beneath the earth, and wondered how she had felt as she travelled downwards, knowing she would not see the sky or the sun for another six months, and that this was the price she paid for tasting forbidden fruit. Without warning, the metro wind blew and the girl breathed in the briny coolness of it, wondering if it were possible that a dark ocean lay at the heart of the world.