In an hour or two, the cicadas will begin interrupting the silence again.
Noon, Gare de Lyon. The young woman with brown hair, captivated by the sun, has walked onto the first train. She will pay for her ticket on board, too bad about the likely supplement.
There is almost no one in the compartment. Further down the aisle sits a man with steel-grey hair, but she can only see his straight neck. Closer to her are four men playing cards, already well into their game. One is black, very black. When she walked past them, she noticed they were playing with tarot cards, and the black man was about to throw down a fifteen: a photographer, head buried under the cloth of an old-fashioned camera, is shooting an undressed model, a pale-skinned woman with long blonde hair. At his feet, an effeminate young boy is sucking him off with studious application.
Black Lily
Thomas S. Roche
(For Paul Bowles)
The sun came up.
She might be asleep. It certainly seemed likely. If she wasn’t then perhaps she had been, recently. She had stopped walking. Whether she was sitting or standing, it was impossible to be sure. She was conscious only of the newborn sun and of the infinite world of sand dunes stretching all about her. Even the hunger and thirst were immaterial. There existed only the sky and the sand.
“Amelia,” she said, not knowing why she said it. It was a while later that she understood that it was her own name.
Her clothes hung destroyed on her body.
Things began to come back to her, in vague impressions, as if they were unimportant and without immediacy.
She could recall the shouts of the men at the fortress as she ran. There had been a few scattered shots. Half-heartedly, she wondered why no one had chased her, but it seemed that didn’t matter. They had taken Jean; he had been the one they wanted, anyway. She was just along for the ride, and she didn’t seem to make much difference in this world, where there was only the sky and the sand.
It seemed that the memories of the fortress dissolved into nothing and she was left without a past or a future. She supposed there were worse things.
Late in the morning, a caravan happened by. It took her a long time to become aware of it. By the time she noticed, the caravan was almost gone. There were many camels led by four or five men dressed in black. She leaped up and ran to the caravan, without knowing why she was doing it. The man was tall, swathed in garments of black, his face shrouded. He regarded her calmly.
“Is there room for me?” she asked in French, instinctively assuming the man would understand. She wasn’t sure where she had learned the language. It came to her as out of a dream. Perhaps, then, she was French.
He made a gesture to indicate he didn’t understand. She motioned at the caravan, trying to indicate movement. The man looked at her for a long time. Finally he shrugged and motioned towards one of the camels. She let him help her onto the animal. The foul smell of dung and animal sweat was somehow comforting. She felt the thick bundles behind her, covered by blankets. She was suddenly incredibly hungry. She reached beneath one of the blankets and found a bundled mass of twigs and flowers. A crumpled blossom came off in her hand. She brought it to her face to smell it.
The man was upon her, taking the flower away from her. He slapped her wrist and replaced the thing under the blanket. He shouted at her in a language she did not understand.
The woman looked down at him blankly. Perhaps the flower was valuable. The man seemed to be cursing at her again, and the woman looked down, sheepish.
“Amelia,” she said, looking up, still not sure why she said it.
The man gestured dismissively at her and began to lead the camel forward. The woman closed her eyes.
A great weight came over her. Slowly, she drifted into a trance, until she slumped in the saddle. There under the sun she fell into nothing.
When she awoke, the sun slanted across her from a high window. She had no idea how long she had slept, nor did she care. She looked around, dazed. She was in a small room, stretched on a thin mat on a clean floor. The walls were hung with rich cloth, and a houkah as high as her waist sat in the corner. She had been placed in black clothing identical to that the people in the caravan had worn. Slipping her hand under the robe, she felt that she was still wearing her clothes, the cotton slacks and shirt from Bloomingdales. Outside the shirt she had a cloth tied around her breasts, cinched tight. It was uncomfortable, and puzzled her. But she was wearing her Western clothes. Thank God. Then even her concern dissolved and she wondered to herself what would have happened if the man from the caravan had disrobed her. It all seemed so immaterial. Possession of her body seemed such a nebulous concept. She relaxed into the mat and faded in and out of consciousness.
After a time, there was a knock on the door. Disinterested, she lay there without answering for a long time while the knocking continued. She stared blankly at the door. Finally there was nothing.
She was achingly hungry. Her needs were such that she could hardly feel anything outside of her hunger. But she could not bring herself to move, and even the pain of her hunger seemed irrelevant.
Amelia. She was called Amelia, she suddenly remembered. Her father called her “Amy”, sometimes “A”, pronounced like “Ay”. For everyone else it was “Amelia”. That was all she remembered clearly. Occasionally things would surface, and then drop out of sight into her mind, deeper than ever. The taste of birthday cake. The smell of leather inside a new car. The sound of President Truman’s voice on the radio. Newsreels of the Bomb at Hiroshima. A harsh voice cursing her in French, foul breath in her face, sudden pain. Then it was all gone, and there was nothing that existed, except the sleep and the body she seemed to inhabit.
Once, when she reached under the black hood-and-mask to scratch the side of her head, something struck her as strange. Her hair had been cut. She felt sure it had been short before, but not this short. After the surge of panic, lasting half a second, she felt a vague curiosity. Why had she been shorn?
The knocking came again, and went. More time passed. Finally the door opened without a knock, and a girl came in bearing a tray of food. The girl was veiled, her eyes dark and intriguing. Amelia wondered if this was what the travel guides meant by “exotic”. The woman looked down submissively as she kneeled beside the cloth mat. She waited there while Amelia struggled to sit up, then reached for the food. The hunger, long unnoticed or denied, came upon her like an avalanche.
She had to yank the mask down to eat, which pulled it across her eyes. So great was her sudden hunger that she didn’t care or take time to readjust it. She ate blindly, stuffing her mouth full of the thick, heavy bread and then taking great handfuls of the smoky-tasting grey paste, and eating that with her fingers. She felt dizzy, sick. But she kept eating, and gulping down water from the metal cup. The water was foul and barely drinkable. There was also some tea, but she was unconcerned with that for now.
The girl kneeled, watching her through the whole thing. Amelia remembered suddenly that in her past life she had always been terrified to let people see her eat. That was one of the many reasons she was so skinny. The memory made no sense to her, as if it had happened to someone else, or she had seen it in a movie.
She finally lapsed, slipping back onto the mat, the mask still pulled down over her eyes. She lay, blinded, breathing hard from exhaustion. Her orgy of consumption had left her spent. The girl immediately took a cloth and wet it from the carafe of water. She took hold of Amelia’s hands and started wiping them, cleaning away the thick paste and the crumbs of bread. When Amelia’s hands were clean, the woman moved to her face. She began to wipe Amelia’s mouth, meticulously cleaning away the smears of food.