I sat down at a table scattered with biscuit crumbs and salt grains. At the other end of this crowded room the Chinaman was arguing with his wife, a tiny, strained woman with a face of tendons and twisting muscles. Behind them was a boarded-up window and beyond the door was a pile of mattresses and blankets. A few feet from where I sat two male infants, naked but for yellowish vests, stood bowlegged and drooling, watching me, their elbows extended for balance. A girl of about twelve years watched over them. Her face was a creamier version of her mother’s, and her dress was her mother’s too, far too large, and gathered about the waist with a thin plastic belt. From a pot which simmered on a small wood fire came a thin, salty smell, mingling with the milk-and-urine smell of small children. I was uneasy, I regretted the lost privacy of my walk home in the dark, the contemplation of my plans, but an obscure sense of politeness prevented me from leaving.
I was developing my own version of the argument between man and wife. I knew of Chinese decorum. He was wanting to reward the guest for his help, it was a matter of honor. “That’s nonsense,” she was insisting. “Look at that thick coat he’s wearing. He has more than we do. It would be foolish and sentimental, when we have so little, to make gifts to such a man, however kind.”
“But he helped us,” her husband seemed to counter. “We can’t send him away with nothing. At least let’s give him some supper.”
“No, no. There isn’t enough.” The discussion was formal and restrained, barely rising above a whisper. Dissent was expressed by monologues which overlapped, the undulating tendons in the woman’s neck, the man’s left hand which clenched and unclenched. Silently I urged the woman on. I wished to be dismissed with gentle, courteous handshakes, never to return. I would walk southwards home and climb into bed. One of the infants, eyes fixed on mine, began to stagger towards me. I looked to the girl to intercept him. She complied, but sullenly, and I suspected she held back longer than was necessary.
The argument was over, the woman was bending over a pile of mattresses preparing a bed for the babies, and her husband was watching her from a chair next to mine. The girl leaned against the wall and made a melancholy examination of her fingers. I played with the crumbs and grains. The Chinaman turned and smiled faintly at me. Then he addressed to his daughter an unbroken sentence of apparent complexity, the final section of which rose steadily in pitch while the expression on his face remained fixed. The girl looked at me and said dully, “Dad says you gotta eat wiv us.” To clarify this her father pointed at my mouth and then to the pot. “You come,” he said with enthusiasm. In the corner the mother spoke sharply to her children who lay at either end of a small mattress crying sleepily. I looked steadily in her direction hoping to catch her eye and have her approbation. Bored, the girl resumed her position against the wall, her father sat with folded arms and filmy, vacant eyes. I said, “What does your mother think?” The girl shrugged and did not look up from her fingernails. Against hers my voice sounded hollow and cultivated, suggestive of laconic manipulation. “What were your parents talking about just now?” She looked at the black cupboard. “Mum says Dad paid too much for it.”
I decided to leave. To the Chinaman I pantomimed by making a sick face and pointed to my stomach that I was not hungry. My host seemed to take this to mean that I was too hungry to wait till suppertime. He spoke rapidly to his daughter, and when she answered he cut her off angrily. She shrugged and crossed to the fire. The room filled with a thin, hot, animal smell which resembled the taste of blood. I twisted around in my chair to speak to the girl. “I don’t want to offend your parents, but tell your dad I’m not hungry and I’ve got to go.”
“I told him that already,” she said, and ladled something into a large white bowl which she set before me. She seemed to relish my situation. “Neither of ‘em listen,” she said, and returned to her part of the wall.
In a large quantity of clear hot water several dun-colored globes, partially submerged, drifted and collided noiselessly. The Chinaman’s face puckered in encouragement. “You come.” I was aware of the woman watching me from her side of the room. “What is it?” I asked the girl.
“It’s muck,” she said vaguely. Then she changed her mind and hissed vehemently. “It’s piss.” With a low chuckle and small flourish of his dry hands the Chinaman appeared to celebrate his daughter’s mastery of a difficult language. Watched by all the family I picked up the spoon. The babies were quiet in their corner. I took two rapid sips and smiled up at the parents through the unswallowed liquid. “Good,” I said at last, and then to the girl. “Tell them it’s good.” Once again not looking up from her fingernails she said, “I’d leave it if I was you.” I maneuvered one of the globes onto my spoon, it was surprisingly heavy. I did not ask the girl what it was, for I knew what she would say.
I swallowed it and stood up. I offered my hand to the Chinaman in farewell, but he and his wife stared and did not move. “G’wan, just go,” the girl said with resignation. I moved slowly around the table, fearful of vomiting. As I reached the door something the girl said caused the mother to become suddenly angry. She was shouting at her husband and pointing at my bowl from which there still rose, as if in accusation, a fine white trace of steam. The Chinaman sat quietly, apparently indifferent. Now the furious woman lay into her daughter, who abruptly turned her back and would not listen. Father and daughter seemed to wait for silence, for a cord to snap in the tiny woman’s neck, and I too waited, half concealed by the cupboard, hoping to go forward and ease the situation and my conscience with friendly goodbyes. But the room and its people were an unmoving tableau. Only the shouting carried forward so I slipped away unnoticed down the stairs.
The lamp still burned above the doorway. Knowing the difficulty of finding paraffin I turned it out, then stepped into the black street.
Dead as They Come
I do not care for posturing women. But she struck me. I had to stop and look at her. The legs were well apart, the right foot boldly advanced, the left trailing with studied casualness. She held her right hand before her, almost touching the window, the fingers thrusting up like a beautiful flower. The left hand she held a little behind her and seemed to push down playful lapdogs. Head well back, a faint smile, eyes half closed with boredom or pleasure. I could not tell. Very artificial the whole thing, but then I am not a simple man. She was a beautiful woman. I saw her most days, sometimes two or three times. And of course she struck other postures as the mood took her. Sometimes as I hurried by (I am a man in a hurry) I allowed myself a quick glance and she seemed to beckon me, to welcome me out of the cold. Other days I remember seeing her in that tired, dejected passivity which fools mistake for femininity.
I began to take notice of the clothes she wore. She was a fashionable woman, naturally. In a sense it was her job. But she had none of the sexless, mincing stiffness of those barely animated clothes hangers who display haute couture in stuffy salons to the sound of execrable Musak. No, she was another class of being. She did not exist merely to present a style, a current mode. She was above that, she was beyond that. Her clothes were peripheral to her beauty. She would have looked good dressed in old paper bags. She disdained her clothes, she discarded them every day for others. Her beauty shone through those clothes… and yet they were beautiful clothes. It was autumn. She wore capes of deep russet browns, or twirling peasant skirts of orange and green, or harsh trouser suits of burnt ochre. It was spring. She wore skirts of passion-fruit gingham, white calico shirts or lavish dresses of cerulean green and blue. Yes, I noticed her clothes, for she understood, as only the great portrait painters of the eighteenth century understood, the sumptuous possibilities of fabric, the subtleties of folds, the nuance of crease and hem. Her body in its rippling changes of posture, adapted itself to the unique demands of each creation; with breathless grace the lines of her perfect body played tender counterpoint with the shifting arabesques of sartorial artifice.