Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (32 page)

Declining to flee anymore, they settled in the theater district. He sold her dearest embroideries for insulting wages until he gained the means to wash his face into complacent honesty. Then, having spied and loitered about as their travels had taught him to do, he commenced to fish for more gainful business. And presently through his mediation she became a dressmaker for singers and actresses, dwelling by day within the travelling-trunk of a dead tenor, her flesh oozing in mercurial drops, the floral wallpaper inside the box peeling like rotten papyrus. They hired a dressmaker's girl to take the clients' measurements. That got them talked about. Milena's work grew famous; everyone wished to know who she was. (My wife is not well, he frequently explained.) So resplendently did she fashion the curtains of light chain mail on the helmet of the baritone who sang the knight's role that everyone cried:
Madonna!
By then they were able to take better lodgings. He got her a coffin as pretty as a violin case. She clapped her hands. That night he threw the tenor's trunk into the canal.

So there he was, secure behind high walls with his faithful wife! He would have been satisfied to give up his life for her, or, better yet, to kill her enemies. In fact she was now the one to build up their wealth, his role
mostly being to provide her with the love she required to justify her emergence from the ground and all her subsequent actions. In a trice she uttered linen handkerchiefs with silver roses on them, or even golden wedding-cloth for Duchesses.

By now their sins were as numerous and lovely as the gilded volumes in Baron Revoltella's library, but they had begun to trust in the famous indulgence on the part of Italians to the imperfections of others. No one could blame them for adapting themselves to the world they found, and for seeking to prosper; even those who kill it forbear to criticize the scorpion for following its own nature. So Michael and Milena did adapt and prosper, so that their sins were indulged indeed.

A singer demanded to meet Milena. She thought it only right that Milena should personally take her measurements. And Milena came, just after dusk, muffling up her face against a toothache. The singer was charmed. So was Milena. Michael managed to seem so. As their fortunes ascended, they began to enter society, if only to peep in from the back of the hall, as befitted modest persons. Milena was veiled, and Michael looked, at least to himself, middlingly well-born in the green suit that his faithful wife had made him; his hands were rough, his face was red and his hair was grey. That night there was a rouged signora playing the pianoforte in such a way as to show off her white neck; there was a flower in her hair, and she wore one of Milena's gowns, whose needlework made blue diamonds from one angle and black crosses from another.—
Madonna!
they cried again.

The manager of a travelling troupe had a proposition. They decided to risk inviting him for dinner, together with his actors and actresses. The guests found good food, and Friulian wine, of course, so that they enjoyed themselves sincerely, while the host and hostess replied with a falsity so perfect that they might as well have been polite guests on their own account. And so even the actors and actresses, who were by profession practiced at fictions, supposed themselves to be at table with people like themselves, who slept by night and found contentment rather than peril in every crowd. It is true that on the next day one of the actresses asked another whether it is ever possible to discern traces of vampirism in a sick man's face; for their host, who must have been of rustic or ignorant birth, had appeared to be watching them with a cautious, considering grimness,
as if he might become unfriendly. As for his cat-eyed, sensuous dead wife, who kept smiling faintly, they pitied her for an imbecile. Anyhow she was harmless; so they stayed late, drank much, and then off they went, the midnight air shining with dangers which only she could see were merely cats' eyes.

To be sure, his wife's unhealthy look did sometimes attract attention, which in those times was a dangerous matter. Fearful and ashamed, Michael performed his utmost to make them forget her, growing so ingratiating that he practically would have performed conjuring tricks to please them—and when it didn't quite work he sometimes nearly blamed her for his troubles; but one marble-eyed glance from his faithful wife sufficed to blot out his rage, which became as a coin sinking down to the bottom of a mucky pond: settled, concealed.

She gazed upon every guest with a level smile. Once he asked: Weren't you afraid?—to which she replied: What were they going to do—kill me?

Just then she seemed even farther away than poor Doroteja, whose loneliness, had it been her lying there, would most certainly have sickened him with remorse.

After that, Michael and Milena had nearly enough money, and so there were other dinners. They even had a nighttime servingmaid to carry out the platters. And there, playing the hostess, sat his faithful wife, wise enough not to hang long glistening earrings from her dead face! Of course it was still dreadfully risky. When Milena was still alive, she sometimes used to preen herself before a little mirror that her mother had given her; when she was pregnant she used to stand before it, combing back her hair with her lovely breasts thrusting out; nowadays, of course, she cast no mirror-image. So it was difficult to get ready for company; she had to rely on her husband to tell her how she looked. But he was careful; nobody caught her out. People remarked on the woman's lucent green stare, but not to her, and certainly not to her husband, who had a ruffianly look about him.

Of course they would have preferred to open their hearts to others, to accept true friendship as opposed to eternally giving it (favors can be done with kindness and even sincerity, without revealing oneself; consider the rich man in his hooded cloak who drops a coin into the
half-naked beggar's hand). But why complain? Their household in Trieste became nearly respectable, their evenings gilded by Friulian wine, which indeed also served to propitiate their neighbors: after a bottle or two of that stuff, every guest thought Michael and Milena to be the best couple they ever knew; and this even went for the new priest, who had been curious, I suspect, to meet someone to whom uncanny facts actually applied; at first he kept baring his teeth at them like a corpse, but once they opened the third bottle he began singing. The guests departed by midnight; in the small hours Milena was uttering
bordi
of gold and silver thread, her needles ducking in and out to make flowers, ivy-enclosing caskets, wheels and suns all of precious metals, triple-stemmed artichokes, slender rolls of feminine chain mail. Her odor could make a stray dog howl.

Thanks to her, his daylight hours no longer burdened him with labor. All he had to do was take orders and deliver them. How he loved those opera singers, sweet mountains of flesh, sweating in their velvet dresses, their wide pink foreheads, exuding the salty juice of life!

When she slept, he sometimes liked to sit on his doorstep and watch the children who wrapped their arms around their teachers' waists, the teachers who at the first stroke of the bell formed them into a double line, the little boys who held hands or swished their raincoats at each other, the little girls who sang songs. But he was always tired in the daytime nowadays; on account of his appearance it happened that certain clients declined to receive him directly when he delivered the garments they had ordered; they feared he might bear some contagious disease. Sometimes he grew lonely and irritable, but then he reminded himself of his dear quiet wife whose hands worked unceasingly for them both.

He would have liked to have children again, but, as thirteen learned doctors have already proved, after a woman's womb dies once, it lacks the twin elements of fire and water most needed for propagation, being corrupted by a surplus of earth. Besides, who would care to have children with a vampire?— Well, Michael did; he certainly tried. Lying beside her just before dawn, he whispered his wish for more daughters; but the pressure of the oncoming light was already causing her to twitch and grimace; it was time for her to go away again.— That cantata singer's dress
is finished, but ask her if she'd like more ruffles at the sleeves. Because she . . . oh, Michael, I don't feel well; hide me away quickly; I'm ashamed to die in front of you—

It was July, and he gasped in the summer air. It seemed that he couldn't breathe enough. Although Trieste is no more humid than Lyon, and far less so than New Orleans, his lungs felt malnourished. All that year he craved more and more of that perfumed oxygen, even when it was drizzling, even when the freezing
bora
finally blew again; needing fresh air, he revolted against the muddy charnel odor of his wife. But it wasn't that he didn't desire her.

In Bohemia people had regarded her with horror, while here they merely felt spiteful disgust. Her eyes did perhaps look a little sunken in, and her flesh might have been yellow; but to her husband, who had lived with her since she was young, she remained much the same. (It might have been that his pleasure in her was tinctured with a secret sense of superiority, because she was dead.) He bought her a plaid corset which helped keep her flesh together. Now came September, and his faithful wife was stirring porridge with a long wooden spoon—nearly time for his breakfast and her sleep. How he longed to live out one more day! Had she learned to see his thoughts? For what a cold pale gaze she was turning on him!—although hadn't she done the same when she was alive? No, he must not suspect her of anything; their most precious jewel was trust. (
Some say that vampires have two hearts; by all the saints, Milena had but one!) The
bora
whistled, and the nights lengthened, thank God; now it was easier to renounce the sunlight, for Milena's sake. But in due time he found himself tormented again by spring; and in June, when the cities begin to stifle their inhabitants, who cling to the shadowed sides of the streets, and in all the many-windowed palaces, curtains close themselves against sunlight, concealing sweating insomniacs in much the same way that a lake smooths itself out above a sinking stone, both Michael and Milena grew restless, because they found it more difficult to breathe. He attended more than before to the sweating chests of the young city women, and each morning that she withdrew into her allotted world, he felt lonelier than before.

In the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria, each of the tenfold emanations of Divinity comprises its own tenfold sphere; and every aspect of the marital
state may, indeed must, be comparably, multiply subdivided. I won't deny the complexity of their relations. Sometimes she wept:
My poor, poor children!
(He never brought them up, of course; she might have worried that his trust in her was falling off.) The closest they ever came to disagreeing was on an occasion when they were talking over the times when she and the children still lived; of course their memories of her mother and most of the others had soured, but when it came to her old rival, whom she might have been expected to hate, Milena said: That summer before I got sick, when the crop was bad and our girls needed shoes, I even begged a loan from Doroteja—

What! And did she oblige you?

She did.

And you repaid her?

No, because I died.

It was on the tip of his tongue then to blame her, but she struck first, saying: Tell me the truth. Was there ever anything between you?

I swear there wasn't.

Then Doroteja—

Wife, she's the vampire, not you.

Oh, sweet-tempered Milena was! On occasion he could not refrain from gazing upon her in her stupor and wondering, just as we all do about one another, which secrets colored her blood; and, to be less metaphysical, what evil she might do, and what good she might in time of desperation do or refrain from doing. But the instant that the lid closed upon her face, he invariably felt that he could have treated her more kindly. She, who had done everything for him, who must have passed (although they never spoke of it) through nightly agonies of temptation or even physiological compulsion without becoming the kind of evil thing which feeds on people, had made herself his innocuous lovebird; so that his anxiety had merely to do with how to live a lie with everyone but his faithful wife, while somehow reserving from her some moments of sunlight, contented social trivialities, roseate flesh and neighborly approval, not to mention the summer expanses of this great world. Bile foamed all the way up to his heart; he nearly vomited. Honoring her fidelity, he remained false to all others in order to be true to her; and she grew ever more beautiful in his sight, as certainly should have been the case, for
this was a pretty time, a musical time, when Schandl and Warbinek were making
pianoforte verticale
in Trieste.

Before she married him, and rolled up her hair in a wife's cap, she used to toss her head at him, and her long tresses licked her neck. Now she had grown rather stiff, as old people will. Between marriage and death she had kept her hair pulled up in a bun; but now she left it loose again, as if she were a newborn maiden; he liked that very much.

At times he was ambuscadoed by a longing to have married Doroteja, to see her standing in the kitchen in the morning with the sun illuminating the edge-strands of her golden hair as she set out the bowl of fresh milk whose cloud-clean whiteness for that one quarter-hour the sun would touch with purples, lilacs, yellows and many other colors, to see the play of sunlight on his wife's hands, my God, was that too much? But in the summer evenings, bathing Milena in his arms, as she floated with her long pale legs almost lilac-colored in the twilight, her slender arms barely grazing his shoulders—she had gained so much practice in lying still!—until, half-opening her eyes, she began to caress his hand, he was not at all troubled by the lack of Doroteja. There she was, his faithful wife, floating in a long tin bathtub with her gaze locked upon his; there she was every night, lying in her coffin, with her long legs pressed together, slowly raising her head, smiling at him before she had even opened her eyes, with her hands sprouting up toward him. Just as a baby turns its round head, opens its wide eyes wider, smiles and reaches toward its mother, as if somehow its arm can bridge any distance—which indeed it can, for she now bends down to take the child into her arms—so his dependent, adorable wife yearned unto him unfailingly, trusting him to care for her, hide her and love her.