Vera laughed. She did not laugh often, usually only when she was startled. “No, you wouldn’t!”
“I would. I’d kill him.”
“Oh, no. No. You wouldn’t. Because if you were a man, you’d know you were as strong as he, or stronger, and so you wouldn’t have to prove it. The trouble is, being a woman, here, where they always tell you you’re weak, you believe them. That was funny, when he said the South Valleys are too far for a girl to walk! About twelve kilometers!”
“I’ve never walked that far. Probably not half that far.”
“Well, that’s what I mean. They tell you you’re weak and helpless. And if you believe it, you get mad and want to hurt people.”
“Yes, I do,” Luz said, facing around to Vera. “I want to hurt people. I want to and I probably will.”
Vera sat still, looking up at the girl. “Yes.” She spoke more gravely. “If you marry a man like that and live his life, then I agree. You may not really want to hurt people, but you will.”
Luz stared back at her. “That is hateful,” she said at last. “Hateful! To say it that way. That I haven’t any choice, that I have to hurt people, that it doesn’t even matter what I want.”
“Of course it matters, what you want.”
“It doesn’t. That’s the whole point.”
“It does. And that’s the whole point. You choose. You choose whether or not to make choices.”
Luz stood there a minute longer, still staring at her. Her cheeks were still burning red with temper, but her eyebrows were not drawn down level; they were raised as if in surprise or fright, as if something altogether unexpected had risen up before her.
She moved indecisively, then went out the open door into the garden that lay at the heart of the house.
The touch of the sparse rain on her face was gentle.
Raindrops falling into the little fountain basin in the center of the garden made delicate interlocking rings, each ring gone in an instant of urgent outward motion, a ceaseless tremor of clear fleeting circles on the surface of the water in the round basin of gray stone.
House walls and shuttered windows stood all round the garden, silent. The garden was like an inner room of the house, shut in, protected. But a room with the roof taken off. A room into which rain fell.
Luz’s arms were wet and cold. She shuddered. She returned to the door, the dim room where Vera sat.
She stood between Vera and the light and said in a rough, low voice, “What kind of man is my father?”
There was a pause. “Is it fair of you to ask me that? Or of me to answer? … Well, I suppose so. So what can I say? He’s strong. He’s a king, a real one.”
“It’s just a word, I don’t know what it means.”
“We have old stories—the king’s son who rode on the tiger … . Well, I mean he’s strong of soul, he has grandeur of heart. But when a man is shut up inside walls that he’s been building stronger and higher all his life, then maybe no strength is enough. He can’t get out.”
Luz crossed the room, stooped to pick up the baby bonnet she had flung under a chair, and stood with her face turned from Vera, smoothing out the little scrap of half-embroidered cloth.
“Neither can I,” she said.
“Oh, no, no,” the older woman said energetically. “You’re not inside the walls with him! He doesn’t protect you—you protect him. When the wind blows, it doesn’t blow on him, but on the roof and walls of this City that his fathers built as a fortress against the unknown, a protection. And you’re part of that City, part of his roofs and walls, his house, Casa Falco. So is his title, Senhor, Councillor, Boss. So are all his servants and his guards, all the men and women he can give orders to. They’re all part of his house, the walls to keep the wind off him. Do you see what I mean? I say it so foolishly. I don’t know how to say it. What I mean is, I think your father is a man who should be a great man, but he’s made a bad mistake. He has never come outside into the rain.”
Vera began to wind the thread she had spun off the spindle into a skein, peering at it in the dim light. “And so, because he won’t let himself be hurt, he does wrong to those he loves best. And then he sees that, and after all, it hurts him.”
“Hurts him?” the girl said fiercely.
“Oh, that’s the last thing we learn about our parents. The last thing, because after we learn it, they aren’t our parents any longer, but just other people like us … .”
Luz sat down on the wicker settee and put the baby bonnet on her knee, continuing to smoothe it out carefully with two fingers. After quite a while she said, “I’m glad you came here, Vera.”
Vera smiled and went on winding off the thread.
“I’ll help with that.”
On her knees, feeding the thread off the spindle so that Vera could wind it in even loops, she said, “It was stupid of me to say that. You want to go back to your family, you’re in jail here.”
“A very pleasant jail! And I have no family. Of course I want to go back. To come and go as I like.”
“You never married?”
“There was so much else to do,” Vera said, smiling and placid.
“So much else to do! There’s nothing else to do, for us.”
“No?”
“If you don’t marry, you’re an old maid. You make bonnets for other women’s babies. You order the cook to make fish soup. You get laughed at.”
“Are you afraid of that, being laughed at?”
“Yes. Very much.” Luz spent some while untangling a length of thread that had snagged on the shank of the spindle. “I don’t care if stupid people laugh,” she said more quietly. “But I don’t like to be scorned. And the scorn would be deserved. Because it takes courage to really be a woman, just as much as to be a man. It takes courage to really be married, and to bear children, and to bring them up.”
Vera watched her face. “Yes. It does. Great courage. But, again, is that your only choice—marriage and motherhood, or nothing?”
“What else is there, for a woman? What else that really counts?”
Vera turned a little to look out the open doors into the gray garden. She sighed, a deep involuntary drawing of breath.
“I wanted a child very much,” she said. “But you see, there were other things … that counted.” She smiled faintly. “Oh, yes, it’s a choice. But not the only one. One can be a mother and a great deal else besides. One can do more than one thing. With the will, and the luck … . My luck wasn’t good, or maybe I was wrongheaded, made the wrong choice. I don’t like compromise, you see. I set my heart on a man who … had his heart set on somebody else. That was Sasha—Alexander Shults, Lev’s father. Oh, a long long time ago, before you were born. So he married, and I went on with the work I was good at, because it always interested me, but there weren’t any other men who did. But even if I’d married did I have to sit in the back room all my life? You know, if we sit in the back room, with babies or without babies, and leave all the rest of the world to the men, then of course the men will do everything and be everything. Why should they? They’re only half the human race. It’s not fair to leave them all the work to do. Not fair to them or us. Besides,” and she smiled more broadly, “I like men very much, but sometimes … they’re so stupid, so stuffed with theories … . They go in straight lines only, and won’t stop. It’s dangerous to do that. It’s dangerous to leave everything up to the men, you know. That’s one reason why I’d like to go home, at least for a visit. To see what Elia with his theories, and my dear young Lev with his ideals, are up to. I get worried they’ll go too fast and too straight and get us into a place we can’t get out of, a trap. You see it seems to me that where men are weak and dangerous is in their vanity. A woman has a center, is a center. But a man isn’t, he’s a reaching out. So he reaches out and grabs things and piles them up around him and says, I’m this, I’m that, this is me, that’s me, I’ll prove that I am me! And he can wreck a lot of things, trying to prove it. That’s what I was trying to say about your father. If he’d only be Luis Falco. That is quite enough. But no, he has to be the Boss, the Councillor, the Father, and so on. What a waste! And Lev, he’s terribly vain too, maybe in the same way. A great heart, but not sure where the center is. Oh, I wish I could talk with him, just for ten minutes, and make sure … .” Vera had long since forgotten to wind her thread; she shook her head sadly and looked down at the skein with a faraway gaze.