Story of the Month: Two Women in a Tale

The narrator said:

In my friend Octavio's strange talk, on that Christmas Eve, there was a great deal of whiskey and a little truth.

And today, because it is Christmas Eve, and because I have met him again with a pale creature, colorless — indeed, like the dress she was wearing and like the scent she had perfumed herself with —

today the memory of Octavio comes back to me, and the memory of our drunkenness in that noisy bar; I remember his necktie, knotted in a way that gave him the look of a vagabond despite the fineness of his suit and the elegance of his movements.

In those days I was drowning the pain of a great love in the depths of the glass, trying to pour out my torments to my friends; and, faced with their indifference, I would choke down my grief and live alone with my misery.

And on that Christmas Eve I was glad of Octavio, for he came to my table with a glass of iced whiskey in his hand, and I burst out talking of my wretchedness over Albertina, my classmate at the university — of the smallness of her body and the narrowness of her mind, of her mannish movements and the enchantment of her mouth, of my calamity in that love whose roots were fixed fast in my heart, and of her intelligence, for were it not for that turbulent, agitated mind of hers she would have stood in the ranks of the asses! I was rambling and contradicting myself until my friend stopped me and took over the conversation.

At first I despaired at the opportunity slipping from my hand, but my friend's tale took hold of me. Yes — I lived a whole night inside that tale, and turned away from the pretty girls flitting among us, their bosoms hovering above our heads as they changed the glasses and wiped the tables; I turned away from the piano and guitar players and from the Christmas carols sung by a company of drunken Germans.

And he told me his story:

We married — as you know — a love match. Marusia and I were both twenty-three. She was a musician, and I practiced literature, and we settled in a lovely house in the suburbs. When my first book came out the critics hailed it, for the literature of the leftists stirred people in those days, and I was an extremist.

We lived happily on music and literature. I would forget myself and forget mealtimes over an article or a new chapter; and to open the art of music to me she would play and interpret for me what escaped me, and laugh at me. I still hear and see her laugh to this hour: it begins between the eyebrows, descends to her nose, to her chin, and at the last breaks open upon her mouth. No one in the world laughs as she did. Her hands — even her fingertips — laughed!

No, she had no like, and the force of life in her had no equal. And when I passed my hand over her full eyelids I would say, teasing:

Marusia — from your head to your feet you are truly a beating heart.

And she would say: I am only a small animal pulsing with life.

She was a gathering of harmonious colors: from the green of her eyes to the flame of her gilded hair, to those thick chestnut lashes, to that skin like a ripe, appetizing fruit.

We needed no one — not even children; and whenever we spoke of those small creatures and their problems, she would take refuge in gravity and then say:

— No one shall come between us. Never, never!!

I do not believe any two spouses were ever as happy as we were, through a stretch that lasted six years, during which I published two books and grew sure of myself, and Marusia became something fastened to me and completing me. I never saw a woman more feminine than she. She was in truth one of Adam's ribs: while she was afraid of a lizard, she would cross a desert to bring me a cup of water.

She was the woman who works her way, day by day, deeper into a man's heart, gathering in her body strength and weakness together — she was the female! She knew how to make herself small and to shrink, so as to win an ideal life inside our hearts.

And so Marusia took possession of my nerves and my blood and my bones; and when she went, after an illness that lasted a year, I became like a man maimed and amputated. She did not die the hour they lowered her into the earth. She died from the very onset of her illness, and that ghost which spent a year wandering the corners of the house, begging for love and calling out to longing, was nothing but a travesty of the woman I had loved...

My friend's hands trembled as he emptied a fresh glass into his mouth, and he said:

— I am drunk — I am in the deepest state of drunkenness — but even in this state I do not lose the power to sit in judgment on myself. I am in urgent need to empty what is in my breast.

Sometimes I feel that she is near me. Do you believe in spirits? What nonsense: she believed in nothing. She used to say, "My temple is my body."

She was like a little cat, her thinking at the tip of her nose. If she felt me looking at her she would strike a pose of allurement, or raise her arms coquettishly to set her hair to rights. When she hid her head in my chest she would make movements like the movements of sparrows; and with a refined sensibility she weighed words and gestures — so she knew when to speak, and when to take refuge in silence, and when to bring me a flower as I wrote, and when to smother the sound of her steps...

And all this ended in a single day. The house filled with kinswomen coming and going, whispering and entering her chamber with compresses in their hands, and ice bags, and hot rubber bottles.

I could not believe what was being said. This strong creature, her body pure as clean water — was she the very one moaning upon the bed?

One day the doctor turned the troop of women out of my house and brought me a nurse, and said:

You and she will take turns caring for the patient; there is no need for this army of women.

And I entered my wife's chamber — she had refused to let me see her before that day. She turned her face toward the wall and began to weep a strangled weeping. And strangely, I felt not the least emotion. It was proved to me with clarity that what had been between us was ended!! I looked at her. This ruined skeleton could not be my wife Marusia.

The nurse had dressed her in her nightclothes, and the room was filled with the smell of cologne struggling against the foul smell of sickness; and for the first time an unconquerable disgust took hold of me — a revulsion from a body that had been my paradise and my bliss.

You will say I am a scoundrel. It was life and youth crying out in me and driving me away from Marusia.

I lay down beside her, and she spoke to me in a wounded, soft voice that came as if from the depths of the night. She said:

— Go away, my life, go away. I want to keep you until the end.

One day the doctor came and examined her minutely, then laughed and joked with her, then asked the nurse, Leonie, to accompany him to my study in the next room.

I followed them. He said, taking my hand between his hands:

— My friend, the case is a grievous one. There is no hope of recovery, and I see no glimmer of hope. Perhaps you will want to consult other doctors than myself.

After I had seen the doctor to the door and returned to Marusia's chamber, I found her flung upon the floor in a deep faint.

And the days went by again, each like the last — I tending the patient and taking my meals with Leonie, that cold woman who never exchanged a word with me. As for my wife, she lived through hours of strangled weeping, broken by hours of anger or of long silence, and a shrinking into a listless selfishness that cared for nothing but the hours of the medicine, the injections, and the meals — craving them, then pushing them away in bitter despair.

And feeling awoke in her. She would cling to me in the nights of sleeplessness and fever and beg love of me in that poor wounded voice.

The faint blue light coming from the abat-jour cast a blue halo over a body that had become half carrion, and I felt on my face the breath of death when her arms encircled me in despair and terror.

The end drew near. She called me at dawn and asked for the medicine, and I tilted the bottle as usual and put a few drops of it into the glass. She took it and drank what was in it at one draught, and I looked at her greenish face — and she opened her eyes and burst into a wanton laugh and said:

— I saw everything. I want you to know that I saw everything!

She was, in the bed, a heap of terror; she had laid her hand on her breast, and her shoulder bone had slipped out of her nightgown. She went on:

— I want you to know that I saw you the moment you poured me, instead of the few drops, a fatal dose. I did not stop your hand, because I had come to long for release. I knew from the beginning that you love her. I heard the doctor's sentence upon me the day you found me in the faint. I heard, and I saw through the crack of the half-open door, the look of joy and deliverance you exchanged with Leonie. And I knew that she would take my place, and that you wanted me to go quickly.

And I clung to life, and in my ignorance I thought I could rekindle the extinguished ember of life within me. And I pressed close to you, hoping something of me might remain after me — in a being, in a feeling, in a cell! My raging feelings magnified my sense of the fleeing life a hundredfold, so that I reached the highest pitch of sensitivity: I could hear the hidden whispers and murmurings, and read the thoughts of that filthy woman on her brow, and perceive the disgust you were feeling. And it was a savage delight of mine to force you to embrace me and kiss me, that I might see your lying and your treachery. I took the medicine because I long for the end!

A fit of coughing overwhelmed her; froth came from her lips and she fell back upon the pillows. My hair stood on end at the horror of what I had heard, and I began staring at the empty medicine bottle beside the glass. The bottle had been nearly empty since the day before, with only a few drops left in it — and I am certain I had asked Leonie to fetch another that day. I began calling out to her that she was deluded, that she was mistaken in hurling this monstrous accusation.

And I saw her face, with its sunken features, above the pillows — smiling at me.

I went out to fetch the doctor, and when he came she was in her death agony. And the house filled once more with the kinswomen, and they washed her and dressed her in her clothes and laid her in the coffin and called me to see her. I lifted a veil that lay over her face and met her anew — I met the old Marusia. She had slipped free of her sick body and returned to it after death. I wept and wept; I found again the tears I had when I was a child.

And my companion went on talking until the bar emptied of people, and we went out into the street as the lights of dawn came rushing on, and Octavio saw me home.

The months passed. Tonight is a new Christmas Eve, and I remembered my friend's old tale in that bar. I remembered the tale because I saw beside him a pale companion with no color to her. He presented me to her and invited me to his table. I sat ill at ease, because the presence of this second wife kept me from the pleasure of talking about his first. We drank together, then rose; and when we reached Saint John's Avenue I heard her bid him turn up the collar of his coat lest the cold do him harm. And I felt as if iced water were running in my veins when I heard him say:

You are always fearing for me, Leonie!

Salma Sayegh