A Young Man's Heart Page 3

  Giraldy ruefully dabbed the side of his face with a handkerchief. No doubt intended as a burlesque gesture, it was accepted as such and caused laughter.

  A spasm of coughing followed on Blair’s part. Someone coming up behind him unexpectedly, pounded him between the shoulders with the flat of his hand. Blair whirled around enraged, and still occupied with strangling, kicked sketchily at the man’s shins. Close as they were to one another, he failed to reach him. A universal and, to Blair, inexplicable laugh accompanied this. Everyone in the room participated, including the man himself. Everyone but Blair, that is.

  “Go and drink some water,” Estelle said encouragingly.

  “And stay outside,” added Giraldy.

  Several hours later Estelle, on her way to her ablutions in a preposterous pink wrapper, encountered a tottering green-faced ghost emerging from the bathroom.

  “Blair,” she said, “aren’t you well?”

  “I learned how,” was all he answered, and shut himself in his room.

  Half an hour later there was a discreet tap at the door, and when he grudgingly opened it an inch or two, the old household crone stood there with a malicious grin on her warped face and a cup of steaming black coffee on the palm of her outstretched hand.

  “The young lady,” she lisped hoarsely, “ordered this for you,” and depositing it on the dresser, turned her back and pattered off on her naked coppery feet.

  This incident, although it was quickly forgotten, established a sort of bond of understanding between Blair and Estelle. It was as though they had once shared a secret together. It was as though, to use his own mental terminology, she had once been “on his side.”

  3

  The old woman who did their cooking had had an increase of family. Not personally, that is, but in the form of a nephew or niece, Blair was never sure which. With the baby came a girl of fourteen or fifteen, café-au-lait, stockingless, red corals in her ears, her oily black hair plaited down her back, whose task it was to manage it while the old woman was busy in the kitchen and the patio. Blair and this girl were thrown much together. It was evident that she admired the blueness of his eyes, a color she had never thought of before in connection with eyes. She told him as much. Devils, she then remarked, had red eyes.

  “There are no devils,” said Blair.

  This went on for days. Neither one of them would yield, until finally the topic had to lapse. However, whenever either of them quarreled after that or became irritated at anything, they immediately flew back to the subject as if by mutual agreement.

  “There are no devils.”

  “There are. The priest told me.”

  Her name, it seemed, was Maria. Certainly no great distinction among a class that numbered its Marias by thousands. And possibly because there were other, contemporary Marias in her immediate family circle, she was known as Mariquita (that is, little Maria), to distinguish her from the nebulous rest.

  “I’m going to draw your picture,” he said to her once. “You have very good teeth for a picture.”

  “Oh, yes, you,” she said, giving his shoulder a little push away.

  They were sitting on the doorstep, one on each side of the doorway, with the everlasting baby in the middle, streaking the warm sunny flagstones with little scars of dampness from time to time as its bandages brushed against them. He got up and ran in the house, and came back a minute later with a yellow pencil and a sheet of paper. He spread this flat on the ground, waved the baby vaguely aside, and leaning over until his forehead almost touched the paper, like a Mohammedan at prayer, began to trace Mariquita’s features. He never once looked up at her, apparently relying entirely upon his memory.

  Whether or not the completed effort bore any resemblance to its subject would have been a difficult matter for either one of them to determine, since Mariquita had no way of looking at herself and Blair was given no chance to compare the sketch with its original. As his pencil halted she snatched the paper from under it with a gleeful, half-shamed blare of mirth, folded it with furtive rapidity, and thrust it down her smock. It lay there for days after that. She would take it out at intervals and pretend to study it, flaunting it at him. Blair would rush at her to recapture it, but by the time the chase had ended, it had always disappeared again. Irremediably, it seemed. He twisted her hands about at times to force her to relinquish it, but made no more immediate attempt to extract it himself. Consequently he never got it. Her protégé the baby had sometimes been left yards behind during the course of these encounters, and they would return to it walking side by side but at a distance from one another, Blair sulking and she dancing triumphantly, ecstatic at having outwitted him.

  Later he began to suspect that Mariquita enjoyed the sensation of being captured and having her hands twisted rather more than the actual chase itself. For he noticed that she was a much swifter runner than he and could easily have outdistanced him on her bare feet. Yet in the end she always slackened as though breathlessly exhausted or shrank back against a wall wailing with delight. Once she pretended to have stepped on a nail or piece of glass and halted abruptly, holding her foot in both hands and hopping about in distress, with a mask of pain on her face that would have done credit to a trained actress. Blair would have given no quarter. But as his outstretched hands were in reach of her, she dropped her supposedly injured foot to the ground and darted away like a flash, leaving him only insulting laughter.

  One time she taught him how to kiss. When Blair came out of the house she was leaning against a pink plaster wall, watching a small lizard that had halted on its way up and stood dubiously regarding her, its head cocked askew. The baby was there beside her chewing the leaves of a midget vine that had escaped over the top and down to the ground from a garden on the inside. It lay sprawling contentedly in clean, powdery, beige dust, a film of which had also coated the tops of Mariquita’s feet, turning them lighter than her skin as far as the ankles. The baby was undeniably happy. So was Mariquita. The long day was just beginning for them.

  Blair approached and, picking up a stick, poked at the lizard, which immediately galvanized itself into motion and disappeared against a cocoa-colored background of baked mud that showed through a rent in the plaster. The next moment Mariquita turned to him.

  “Kiss me,” she said quite simply.

  He looked at her uncomprehendingly. This was not part of their usual program.

  Suddenly she placed her lips on his for a second. A momentary scent of cinnamon caught fleetingly. Mariquita leaned her shoulders back against the sun-drenched wall once more and seemed to be thinking of other things. There was no reaction.

  Blair knew what a kiss was but had never seen any special merit in it. On one of his Sunday afternoon visits to the Parisiana, the Pearl White film had broken in the middle and they had to insert a French picture in its place. He could still recall how bitterly disappointing it had been. It had no hairbreadth escapes, no cowboys, no Indians, no Chinese smugglers, nothing at all of interest. Only some women who occupied themselves with smelling flowers with a most tragic mien, crying, laughing some, then crying again. And at the end, in place of that delicious, shivery, exquisitely regretful interruption that proclaimed “To be continued next week” just when excitement had become all but unendurable, there was nothing more than a banal embrace and kiss between a hero who had been no hero at all and one of the unworthy tear-drenched beauties who had not once been dropped into a well nor tied to a barrel of gunpowder (a thing Pearl White had never done in any picture was kiss or cry or smell flowers). A good deal of unruly stamping on the floor on the part of junior members of the audience accompanied this insipid finale.

  This was the first time Blair had seen a kiss. Utterly erased from his memory were any possible kisses from Sasha when he had been smaller. When he had grown bigger Sasha had not kissed him. And the thought of Sasha’s having been kissed at any time by Giraldy, had it occurred to him, would have seemed about as incongruous as the thought of a German soldier kissi
ng a French soldier (1916).

  Although the incident of the kiss was not repeated, a sentimental attachment gradually took its place along with their cavorting. The twisting of her hands by Blair had definitely stopped some time back. Even the baby had grown less repugnant to him, tottering on its own feet now and bleating when they left it too far behind. Once he even carried it for her when she had an armful of leaves for the scouring of kitchen utensils, but a suspicion of dampness on his sleeve caused him to return it to her in disgust. They were a little self-conscious now about phenomena like that. Mariquita chastely slapped the baby’s arm and made it cry. Blair relieved her of the leaves, which he at least knew were incapable of any treachery, and walked along with his chin thrust out above their inanimate heads.

  That Mariquita’s feelings toward him already bordered on the mature was indicated plainly enough the day a stranger appeared on the horizon. A friend of Estelle’s, and one of the very few who had allowed child-bearing to be a complement to matrimony, came to the house one day for tea and brought her young Saxon daughter along with her. The latter, with hair the color and texture of corn-silk, was permitted a single tea wafer and then propelled gently but firmly out of the house. She emerged from the doorway shading her weak blue eyes from the glare of the sun. At the same time one of the tall French windows opened in the middle and revealed Estelle and her guest standing shoulder to shoulder. “There he is,” Estelle remarked. She raised her voice and added, “Blair, I have some company for you.” The newcomer stood waiting expectantly. Estelle and her friend withdrew as suddenly as they had appeared and shut the window.

  “Come over here,” Blair called. “I don’t want to go over there, it’s too hot.”

  She crossed the street slowly and a sudden bluish aura leaped up and enveloped her white dress as she passed into the realm of shade and coolness cast by the pink plaster wall. When she had joined them she gave Blair a single impartial glance and then studied Mariquita critically.

  “Come away from her,” she said, “she’s Indian.”

  Blair, still a tireless onlooker at the Parisiana Sunday serials, misunderstood her. His thoughts immediately took an entirely different trend from the one she had evidently meant to suggest. Instead of social superiority, snobbishness, and color-consciousness: feather headdresses, tomahawks, war dances and wigwams flashed through his mind.

  “No she isn’t,” he said, “I’m with her every day.”

  She was not to be so easily dissuaded from her purpose, however.

  “I want to whisper a secret in your ear,” she said, “come away where she can’t hear us.” And she pulled him by the arm, still young enough to do her own urging instead of making others give the appearance of urging her, as she would in a very few years’ time.

  He never stopped to reason that speaking in their own language was adequate enough safeguard for any secret where the unilingual Mariquita was concerned. He allowed her to lead him away. She had considerable strength of mind for one so young. What she evidently wanted was not so much his own presence as Mariquita’s complete ostracism. He failed to see it.

  When she had led him across the street, to the sunny side where originally he had not wanted to go, she cupped her lips to his ear with both hands and murmured silkily, “Pretend I’m telling you something.” Then followed a series of ear-tickling sibilances meant to imitate whispering, “Sish, wish, wish,” which sent a not-unpleasant shiver traveling down his back. When she had done this she turned and made a deliberately shocking face at Mariquita by stretching her mouth between two fingers and pushing up her nose with a third.

  Mariquita had remained squatting on the ground, watching them with dejected eyes. This last unmerited insult, however, kindled her to reply in kind with an even more barbarous grimace of her own immediate conception, by placing a coiled finger at each temple like a pair of horns, and she ended by spitting venomously on the ground in the direction of her haughty adversary. She then turned to the baby and forced an indulgent interest in it, talking to it, petting it, and adjusting sections of its apparel. She even took up a handful of colored pebbles and tossed them in the air and caught them in her hands for the baby’s amusement and her own. All very heart-rending, had there been anyone there to witness it with the proper amount of detachment.

  Finally, getting no consolation from the baby, she left it for a moment and ran into the house, and when she came out again and was about to rejoin it she called to him offhandedly, as though nothing had happened and as though no disloyalty had ever been shown on his part. “Blerr, the señora asks for you.”

  Blair quitted the side of the new satellite none too reluctantly, and left her standing there unrepentant and unprotected to go indoors in answer to the summons.

  Estelle and the satellite’s mother were sitting having what might otherwise have been termed tea but for the omission of that honorary beverage itself. A siphon of charged water took its place, and a dark green bottle with a collar of red tinfoil wrapped sleekly around its neck. There was also a dish of sugar wafers that had not diminished by one since the friend’s daughter had been permitted to indulge herself, judging by their unbrokenly matched arrangement on the plate.

  “Did you want me?” Blair said, materializing in the doorway. “Mariquita said you wanted me.”

  “Not in the least,” Estelle said, and a gayety which she seemed to share at the moment with her friend welled up in her eyes and turned the corners of her mouth into what might best be described as an inward, contemplative smile. “She’s jollying you. Never let the girls jolly you, Blair. Ask your father about that.”

  “I guess she made it up,” Blair remarked.

  Before he had quite gone again she suddenly exclaimed, “Oh, here, here! Of course you want them. Of course you do. How could I think of treating you that way!”

  He turned and she was offering him the plate of tea wafers.

  “I didn’t come in on account of them,” he protested virtuously.

  “No,” she said with mellowed cynicism, “but you got them.”

  Just as he reached the patio his—technically, at any rate—guest put in appearance, rumpled, dusty, and in a paroxysm of mingled tears and fright.

  “That dirty old thing out there,” she gasped, red-faced with shattered self-complacency, “threw sticks and dirt at me and stamped on my feet.”

  “But she hasn’t got shoes on,” Blair argued encouragingly.

  “But her feet are hard,” she wailed, and proceeded stormily on the way to her mother.

  Blair stood listening, eating wafers with a clear conscience. He heard Estelle call the old woman in from the kitchen and say in her patched Spanish, “Clean this child.” Her tone was majestically languid, as though expressing annoyance more at the child herself than at the old woman or the absent Mariquita. After that there was a lengthy séance in the bathroom to the accompaniment of flowing water from the taps, and then the stricken one and her mother took their departure with a tempered cordiality. Estelle’s only remark as she unleashed a bolt of hissing soda-water into her glass from the siphon was, “It served her right for bringing her brat here in the first place.” A comment which Blair took to imply an acquittal of Mariquita. Accordingly, he set out in search of her.

  But upon emerging to the street, now tan and gold in the rapidly ebbing sunlight, he discovered that both she and the baby had vanished. A preliminary survey, which took in both Bruselas and the street that walled it off at the upper end, Calle de los Pajaros, the Street of Birds, showed him that she and her charge had disappeared as completely as though the earth had swallowed them whole. In this exigency, he now paused to consider, with an arm extended against one of the pastel plaster-walls, azure in this case, that abounded so in the quarter. It was twilight, and since supper was almost upon them, supper in the kitchen as well as in the Giraldy dining-room, there were only a limited number of places she could possibly have selected to retire to, and all of them were bound to be near at hand. The artifici
al cascades (very real and imposing to both of them in spite of the intentional candor of the designation they bore) were too far away for her to have gone to at this hour. And she had once told him that spirits came there to bathe and drink the water after the sun went down. He knew her well enough to have no doubts as to her preference in a matter of choosing between spirits and a mere scolding by the old woman.

  He would most likely find her either in one of the cool cavernous doorways of the older houses, two stories high and wide enough to admit a carriage but that they usually opened on alleys and street-lanes too narrow to let one pass, or in the tiled summer-kiosk on the half-moon of parkland facing the Argentine Legation. They had eaten bananas together there one day.

  As he approached the place there was no sign of her, but a flirt of something green just inside the kiosk, glimpsed for only an instant and then quickly withdrawn as though into hiding, told him he had found her. It was not the darker green of the leaves but a yellowed sun-bleached green, of something washed too often at the river’s edge and pounded on flat stones. It was the baby’s garment.

  They were both in there. The baby quiet as though by restraint and exhortation, Mariquita anxious yet aloof in manner.

  “I was looking for you,” Blair said.

  “Well then, you have found me,” she answered ungraciously, “what more?”

  She turned her face sharply to one side and left him with only a rose-tan profile of the high Indian cheekbone, and the wing of satin hair that effaced the upper rim of her ear. A bar of light, fuming with dust specks, that forced its way in through a crevice between two tiles, struck a glassy highlight from it, hair that was never combed and yet never at any time in disorder.

  When she felt, apparently, that the deprivation of her full countenance had lasted long enough, she turned around again.