Good Bones (9 page)

Glorious scenes.
Glorious
scenes! Nobody made scenes like hers. Vulgar as all-get-out. Of course, she would always apologize afterwards. She needn’t have done. Not to me.

What I miss is what she’d say. What she would have said. That’s the difference: you have to put everything into the past
conditional.
Bereft
, you might call it. Not her word, though – too po-faced.
That
was her word.

I went over there, did a little weeding. It’s fading though, what she looked like exactly. I can remember her tone of voice, but not her voice. It’s funny the way you keep on talking to people. It’s as if they could hear.

T
HIS IS THE
landscape where he came to rest: the earth, ochre and rust, that has been used and re-used, passed through mouth and stomach and gut and bone, and out again into earth and then into stem and bud and ripe fruit, then harvested and bruised and fermented for a moment of warmth; the pruned vines like twisted fists, the unclipped ones with their long yellowish intertwined fingernails, like those of potatoes in the dark; and the light inside everything, oozing up from the furrows like juice from a cut peach, glistening along the leaves like the slippery backs of snails, like licked lips. When it rains, the dust of the Sahara falls from the south wind, spotting the white plastic patio chairs at the
tabac
with dried blood. Higher up are the limestone mountains, dry and covered with tough and pungent shrubs, the
maquis
they’re called, and gullied by time and sparse as aphorism. He liked the harshness of the sun here, or so he said.

In the restaurant he was known as Monsieur Terrasse, an alias to deceive the tourists while he ate his dinner. I almost said
terrorists
. Famous people don’t wish to be interrupted while chewing, or watched closely while they do it. Neither does anyone else, but there’s less likelihood. In English he was
Mr. Patio
. Many things are more romantic in French, the
word
odour
for instance.
Camus
translates as plain
flat
, but he wouldn’t have minded.

The books in the brick-and-board bookshelves, dismantled, reconstructed, dispersed, it must be thirty years ago, are turning yellow and then brown, crumbling at the edges like fallen leaves, consuming themselves from within. There’s the same odour, a slow acrid burning. Uncompromising, he wished to be; and clear, like the desert light.

On All Souls’ Day the dead are tended. Here it’s a duty. The graves are weeded, and huge bubbles of bright paint bloom beside them: chrysanthemums, purple and orange, yellow and red; and china dahlias too, the colour of last year’s lipstick, and brittle pansies chipped by hail. What he himself has been given is not ornate. Squareness and greyness, the elegance of plainsong, no mottoes. No gilded mementoes, no picture of him in a glassy oval, that quizzical face with its simian postwar brush-cut. What do I remember most clearly, from all those acrid pages? The scene in which a man spits on a woman’s naked body, because she has been unfaithful. What did he mean to convey, to me? Something about betrayal, or else about women’s bodies? He isn’t telling. An abrupt bush is what he has, with dark cryptic foliage, one of the mountain shrubs. No hope, no armfuls of petals.
This is what there is
, he says, or fails to say.
You are what you do. Don’t expect mercy
. Later, when I went back, someone had left six withering real roses in a kitchen jar.

W
HAT WE WANT
of course is the same old story. The trees pushing out their leaves, fluttering them, shucking them off, the water thrashing around in the oceans, the tweedling of the birds, the unfurling of the slugs, the worms vacuuming dirt. The zinnias and their pungent slow explosions. We want it all to go on and go on again, the same thing each year, monotonous and amazing, just as if we were still behaving ourselves, living in tents, raising sheep, slitting their throats for God’s benefit, refusing to invent plastics. For unbelief and bathrooms you pay a price. If apples were the Devil’s only bait we’d still be able to call our souls our own, but then the prick threw indoor plumbing into the bargain and we were doomed. Now we use up a lot of paper telling one another how to conserve paper, and the sea fills up with killer coffee cups, and we worry about the sun and its ambivalent rays.

When will it all cave in? The sky, I mean; our networks; our intricate pretensions. We were too good at what we did, at being fruitful, at multiplying, and now there’s too much breathing. We eat dangerous foods, our shit glows in the dark, the cells of our bodies turn on us like sharks. Every system is self-limiting. Will we solve ourselves as the rats do? With war,
with plagues, with mass starvation? These thoughts come with breakfast, like the juice from murdered fruits. Your depression, my friend, is the revenge of the oranges.

But we still find the world astounding, we can’t get enough of it; even as it shrivels, even as its many lights flicker and are extinguished (the tigers, the leopard frogs, the plunging dolphin flukes), flicker and are extinguished, by us, by us, we gaze and gaze. Where do you draw the line, between love and greed? We never did know, we always wanted more. We want to take it all in, for one last time, we want to eat the world with our eyes.

Better than the mouth, my darling. Better than the mouth.

W
HO KNOWS
whether there could be such a thing? Possibly lepers do not dance, or are unable to. On the other hand, possibly they do. Somebody must know.

In the Dance of the Lepers, the lepers were not real. That is, they did not have leprosy. On the contrary. These lepers were healthy, able-bodied and young. They were dancers. But they were pretending to be lepers, and since I always believe in surfaces, I believed that they were real.

The pretended, real dance of the lepers took place on a stage. It was Christmas up there. The music was quick, with nasal horns and light-fingered drums. People in mediæval costumes whirled about. Muscular beggars were there, slender maidens in pointed caps with trailing veils, a stately prince, a voluptuous Gypsy, a witty fool. Everything you might require. Daydream ingredients. Take-out romance.

Then the lights dimmed and the music slowed, and the lepers entered. There were five of them; they held onto one another, to various parts of their various bodies, because they could not see. They were dressed in white strips of cloth wound round and around them, around their bodies and also around their hands and heads. They had no faces, only this blunt cloth.

They looked like animated mummies from an old horror film. They looked like living bed-sheets. They looked like war casualties. They looked like cocoons. They looked like people you once knew very well, whose names you’ve forgotten. They looked like your own face in the steam-covered mirror after a bath, your own face temporarily nameless. They looked like aphasia. They looked like an ad for bandages. They looked like a bondage photo. They looked erotic. They looked obliterated. They looked like a sad early death.

The music they danced to was filled with the ringing of bells. In fact they carried little bells, little iron bells, or so I seem to remember. That was to warn people: stay away from the lepers. Or: stay away from the dance. Dancing can be dangerous.

What about their dance? There is very little I can tell you about that. One thing is certain: it was not a tap-dance. Also: no pirouettes.

It was a dance of supplication, a numb dance, a dance of hopelessness and resignation. Also: a dance of continuation, a dance of going on despite everything, a stubborn dance. An awkward, hampered dance. A fluid, graceful dance. A clumsy, left-footed, infinitely skilful dance. A cynical and disgusted dance, a dance of worship, naïve and joyful. A dance.

Ah lepers. If you can dance, even you, why not the rest of us?

Y
OU HAVE
good bones
, they used to say, and I paid no attention. What did I care about good bones, then? I was more concerned with what was covering them. I was more concerned with lust, and pimples. The bones were backdrop.

Now they are growing into their own, those bones. Flesh diminishes, giving way to bedrock. Structural principles. What you need is the right light, to blot out the wrinkles, the incidentals. The right shade, the right amount of sun, and see, out come the bones, the good bones, the bones come out like flowers.

Them bones, them bones, them dry bones, them and their good connections; we sang them over once around the campfire, those gleeful strutters to the Word of the Lord, or to our own hands clapping. Behind each face, each lovely body in its plaid shirt, soft bum on hard granite, I could guess the Hallowe’en skeleton, white and one-dimensional, a chalk bonehead drawn on a blackboard; a zombie, a brief
memento mori
, dragged out for burning, like a heretic, flanked by the torches of the incandescent marshmallows.

Our voices made short work of them, them bones. Tossed on the bonfire they flared up like butter, and went out and were dismissed.
You are my sunshine
, we sang, though not to them. We nestled closer, jellifying each other, some of us boneless.

So much for death. So much for death, at that time, there.

This is the cemetery. The good bones are in here, the bad bones are out there, beyond the church wall, beyond the pale, unsanctified.

The bad bones behaved badly, perhaps because of bad blood, bad luck, bad childhoods. Anyway, they did not treat their bodies well. Walked them over cliff edges, jumped them off bell-towers. Tried to fly. Broke things.

The good bones lie snug under their tidy monuments. They have been given brooches to wear, signet rings, poems carved on stone, marble urns, citations. Circlets of bright hair. They have been worthy and dutiful, they deserve it. That’s what it says here: the last word.

The bad bones have been bad, so they are better left unsaid. They are better left unsaying. But they were never happy, they always wanted more, they were always hungry. They can smell the words, the words coming out of your mouth all warm and yeasty. They want some words of their own. They’ll be back.

This is my friend, these are her bones, these ashes we pour out under the tulips. When she fell down on the sidewalk her hipbone shattered. It was hollow in there, eaten away, like a tree with ants. Bone meal.

They put her in the hospital and I went to see her. I’m terrified, she said, but it’s sort of interesting. My turds are white, like bird turds. It’s calcium. I’m dissolving myself, I’m shitting bones. I guess you can do worse than be fertilizer. Other things can grow.

We are both fond of gardens.

Today I speak to my bones as I would speak to a dog. I want to go up the stairs, I tell them. Up, up, up, with one leg dragging. Is the ache deep in the bones, this elusive pain? Does that mean it will rain? Good bones,
good
bones, I coax, wondering how to reward them; if they will sit up for me, beg, roll over, do one more trick, once more.

There. We’re at the top.
Good
bones! Good
bones!
Keep on going.

Some of these pieces have appeared in:

CANADA

The Malahat Review, This Magazine, Saturday Night, Quarry, Le Sabord, Tesseracts 3
(Porcépic). Three also appeared in
Selected Poems II
(Oxford), which is out of print.

UNITED STATES

Harper’s, Ms., Antaeus, Translation, Critical Fictions
(Bay Press). “The Female Body” and “Alien Territory” appeared in
Michigan Quarterly Review
, in its Female Body and Male Body issues, respectively.

UNITED KINGDOM

Elle, Sunday Times, Soho Square
(Bloomsbury).

MEXICO

Earth Anthology
(Grupo de los Cien).

On the front cover of
Good Bones
, a strange creature, part sibyl, part harpy, perches on a naked female leg. Her tail feathers are composed of human eyes, her wings of lipsticked mouths with smiling teeth, her head feathers of grapes under a ruby hat, and her breastplate of sunglasses. She is the muse of this shrewd, often hilarious collection of stories. Margaret Atwood has designed the cover art for a number of her books. Here the reader has only to look at her collage to be forewarned: this muse packs a scorpion sting.

Atwood was living in France as work on
Good Bones
was nearing completion. Because of a French postal strike, the cover had to be sent by courier, and was initially lost, with the consequence that this exotic creature was trapped briefly in some French dead letter office. Clearly, someone did not want her wisdom loosed on the world.

In an unexpected way, it helps to think of France in connection with
Good Bones
, for in describing the form of the stories, the closest I can come is the
conte
, that curious French form that is midway between parable, fairy tale, and story. The French speak of
un vrai conte
for an improbable story and
un conte vrai
for a true story. And there is the
conte de bonne femme
, or
conte bleu
, the traditional old wives’ tale, which Atwood might be said to have reinvented as the wise woman’s tale.

There has always been something of the sibylline touch about Atwood. In
Good Bones
there are twenty-seven stories, written mostly between 1986 and 1992. As she sent letters across the Atlantic indicating revisions and precise directions for the arrangement of stories, Atwood remarked to her editor that she had “found” “Third Handed,” the last story to be added to the collection: “I knew there was a twenty-seventh piece – I hate even numbers and much prefer multiples of nine … it goes in between Homelanding and Death Scenes.” And one feels the pungent whiff of the white witch’s magic in the brew.