Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (24 page)

Leonor, who loved a good quarrel, had been in a fine mood ever since she threw Silvia out. After drinking absinthe with two transvestite friends of hers she saw again the ghost of ancient Tanya Cirtovich in a light black veil, and painted that sad woman into the background of her latest oil autoportrait. The next time she visited the Madonna she found her weeping, and that was how she learned about Silvia's suicide. Here I wish to insert that of all the Madonnas in the world, Our Lady of the Flowers takes greatest local interest in the doings of sinners. I have it on authority that when Buddha abandoned his family to go drink enlightenment beneath a tree, his little daughter cried so much as to fall into danger of death, so in the end they sent her to Trieste to be cared for by Our Lady, who sang her madrigals by night and gave her suck from her fine stone breasts until she became a stone seagull, a happy enough outcome were
it not for the fact that after the fall of Mussolini they forgot who that seagull was and moved her into the Lapidarium. Our Lady wept twenty-four stone tears over that—the most she could have done for anybody so unchristian—and then, on a sultry autumn day when the
bora
blew the window open, transformed her into a real bird so that she could fly over the sea more or less as Silvia had wished to do. As for Silvia herself, how could Our Lady help such a bad girl? But was it Silvia's fault that she had been created incapable of Triestine happiness? Moreover, she had repented about killing her cat. So the Madonna wept a river of tears into the sewer and through the forgotten Roman catacombs under the street and then down all the way to hell, in order to extinguish the flames which wracked that poor dead girl, who thus grew sufficiently sane to pray for Lilith, which entitled both Silvia and Lilith to come back to life, a favor which Our Lady gladly accomplished; she even gave Silvia a painted basket in which to carry her pet, who presently forgot to distrust her.

Leonor was one of those women who never allow anything to keep them from their pleasures—and, if I might say so, we would all better enjoy one another's company if we lived and died like her. Being in a hurry, she stayed but a moment to hear the Madonna's news, then kissed that stone female, of whom she was truly fond, upon the lips—didn't they have cats in common? In their time they had both rescued myriads of felines, for, as Our Lady once remarked, a cat and a prayer are equally beloved in heaven, no matter how many songbirds the cat has done for.— You should really offer up a candle for Silvia,
cara,
even though she's alive. Do it for me, my girl!— Of course, of course! cried Leonor, to whom grudges were an inconvenience. She went straight to the Serbian Orthodox church to keep her promise; and that very afternoon, as Silvia stood by the starboard railing of the ferry to Opatija, cradling Lilith in her arms and craving the snow-white specks of houses and villages ahead along the beach-edge of the blue-green coast, both woman and cat began to smell a delicious scent compounded of incense and catnip, all thanks to Leonor Fini and the Madonna, and so they lived happily ever after, until, dissatisfied with Opatija, they removed to Rijeka, and looking straight down past the white cliff-rocks and through the water's wavering green
near-translucency, down to where the white ovoid rocks, many of whose centers were green, waxed and waned like moons on the bottom of the harbor, Silvia imagined that she could see the back door to hell, which made her remember how she had sinned against Lilith, followed by her own dying, burning and all the rest of it; so, half suffocated, she picked up Lilith in her basket and carried her to the market, where a man was wooing his daughter with shining cherries which were almost the scarlet-purple of a harlot's velvet dress; and first Silvia thought that cherries might save her; then she thought to trust in those neat bunches of chives, as yellow-green as summer, or in the pure white bulbs of leeks, never mind the lovely purple-black polka dots on glossy green fava beans; but the tiny old woman who sold them, turning her head like a bird—she had a brown-shawled, nut-colored face and eyes like small black round berries—gazed at Silvia and Lilith with such sweet half-comprehension (in other words, in so animal-like a fashion) that Silvia remembered Lilith's trusting gaze the moment before she hurled her out the window (she had been purring wide-eyed, with her belly-fur whiter than sea-clouds); so they fled to Vienna; indeed, they had voyaged all the way to Prague, where staring out at her from the dark narrow doorway of a photographer's shop Silvia saw a man whose face and hands were so white that she knew he must be dead; she might have recognized him from hell; his black eye-piercings aimed themselves at her, and his black gash of a mouth elongated; his black nostril-slits enlarged but of course did not pulse in the white flatness of his face. Just as Silvia began to wonder how her life would have been had she made love with Leonor Fini, the dead man said the words
Heloy Tau Varaf Panthon Homnorcum Elemiath . . .
at which Lilith, hissing, clawed at her basket, and then they both fell down dead, to the grief but not surprise of Our Lady of the Flowers.

Now I ought to tell you of another Triestine cat-career, whose creeping abjection rendered Our Lady of the Flowers yet sadder and wearier. Rossetti's new sweetheart Lina, the one with the whip and the bulldog, loved cats nearly as much as did Leonor Fini, and currently kept a tiny mixed-breed specimen, named Giulia, who had in kittenhood been abandoned and so could never trust anybody. Lina tried sincerely to love
Giulia, who repaid her with fear. At first she suspected her bulldog, but even when Giulia was entirely alone with Lina she could not successfully love her. Often, it is true, Giulia approached her when she was reading or sewing in bed, and not only meowed until she was petted but purred thereafter. But there were times when Giulia, suddenly fearing a lock of the woman's hair or the loudness of her heartbeat, never mind the snoring of the bulldog down the hall, would scratch or even bite Lina, drawing blood. At the best of times it was not uncommon for Giulia to go on meowing even while she was being petted; she could never really be happy. If Lina sat up suddenly in bed, the cat rushed away in terror, sometimes continuing all the way down the hall until she crashed against the wall. At night she slept under the covers with her mistress, but not infrequently she would claw her way out from the bedspread and begin galloping up and down the corridor. Any stranger terrified her, as did anybody who stood erect, presumably because she had been tormented by boys when she lived on the street. Her instinct was therefore to hide. On certain mornings when her mistress stood before the wardrobe mirror, choosing a dress, Giulia would creep around her into the back of the closet, so quietly as to be unperceived, as a consequence of which she often got shut in. Upon being trapped in that dark place she never dared to meow, so that it sometimes took a day or more for Lina to find her. She likewise had a way of wriggling into chests of drawers, and her mistress feared that someday she would get crushed.

Lina disbelieved in God, on the grounds that there was so much evil in this world that should He exist He must be evil. When they discussed the matter, Rossetti said: I believe in the kingdom of heaven, but when I consider your cat, who seems mostly so, well, self-constricted and unhappy, I sometimes wonder whether God might be some horrible wooden thing Whose purpose is to constrict
us.
On the other hand . . .

He was allergic to cats, even though he was made of bronze. Whenever he visited, poor Giulia had to stay outside the bedroom (as for the bulldog, he slept downstairs). She then scuttered up and down the hallway for much of the night, so that finally, with Lina's permission, he closed the door against her in hopes of getting some sleep—for he never slept when he was standing on his plinth; only when pressing himself against a woman's body (preferably her backside) could he refresh himself with
that fleshly treat called oblivion. So Giulia had to go. Later he heard the poor creature thudding against the door, and felt guilty and sorry. Each morning he found her curled up on the carpet outside the bedroom, in a wretched little ball of greyness. She could have been dead.

When she did die, she became a timid ghost. Because most cats never become Christians, the best place to seek them after their lives end is Limbo, where they and the pagan philosophers entertain one another. Round the corner from Our Lady's statue was another way to hell, a well covered over with flowers, whose diverse beauties increased each time she brushed against them en route to helping another soul. Through those depths Our Lady now flew, her alabaster face downcast, her lips parted as if she might even breathe, and amidst shiny ebony snails and pale green night-leaves she found both Lilith, who had been stalking a child's nine-hundred-year-old beetle-sized ghost, and Giulia, who was cowering in a temporarily vacant vampire hole. Gathering them both up into her arms, so that they nearly warmed the still Christ child she also carried, the Madonna ascended three hundred and thirty-two flights of stairs, each step paler and less nitrous than the last, and thus reached the realm of mummies, where triangles, ankhs, scales and herbs are carved into the lintels of false doors; after one more flight she came into the marble-boned place beneath Leonor Fini's easel where the milk-nude women and pastel-tendoned grotesqueries dwell forever. Here there were also cats, and as many saucers of fish and of cream as they could well desire; but when Our Lady set down the two new arrivals, they hid. Knowing that they would come around in their own good time, she ascended through the easel to pay a visit on Leonor, who although she could never face the death of her own cats agreed to give Giulia and Lilith the most dazzling double funeral. By then Our Lady had even rescued Silvia, who was standing in the queue of terrified new souls to be burned forever, all of them as silent as the pigeons in the shady sandy piazza between the Museo Civico and the Instituto Nautico; plucking that lucky woman out of hell for the second time, Our Lady established her in a gilded cloud-boat on heaven's endless seas. Then she flew home, loving Trieste's long white descent from the karst to the pine trees behind it—so it seems when one approaches the city from the west, and it appears to underline a narrowing blue cape. She flew lower, and within an orange slit of light,
a woman extended her stockinged leg as she smoked a cigarette; she was the clerk of a lingerie store. Our Lady overflew her, overseeing everything like the white sun pouring warmth through the cloud-lace above the massive shuttered edifice-islands whose top stories were so often painted yellow or pink; and for a space she hovered over the milky blue of cigarette smoke below the egg-yolk-hued streetlights; Leonor Fini was down there with her man-woman friend Arturo Nathan; the Madonna blew them both a kiss, so that for a moment the breeze smelled like oranges.

Rossetti was at Lina's the next time that Leonor came promenading by. As it happened, she loved to take note of his absences, having caught him on several nightwalking errands, the last time being seven winters ago, when she, with her wolfskin cape over her shoulders and her fingernails painted dark, approached her rendezvous with a certain dilettantish Count, while as for Rossetti, a thespian female had lately attracted him by means of a dark cloak ribbed with decorations and a feathered beaver hat; she was smooth, lovely, opulent and plump; she was positively swanskinned; so he was just descending from his plinth when Leonor shrieked out, just to torment him: Police, police! Rossetti's deserted his post!

Please,
cara,
be discreet!

Leonor coldly informed him: I hate discretion. I hate hidden tricks.

Having heard about the time she screamed down Mussolini's mistress in Milan, he tried to brush past her in silence, so she spat in his face. After that he despised her, of course, whereas from Leonor's point of view it could have been over; not only did she forgive him but he interested her (if he but knew it) as a physical form—because Leonor, who during her self-apprenticeship used to visit the morgue ever so often, had long since lost interest in cadavers, admiring mummies for their sculptural qualities, and preferring above all the perfection of that relic which deteriorates the least: the skeleton. Who could be more bone-durable than a bronze man? Of course she never mentioned this to him, not wishing to turn his head.

This morning Giovanna occupied the master's place; having amassed confidence in the course of this last summer, she had slowly become the sort of apple-breasted woman who likes to stand nude on a plinth, with a
bronze apple in her hand. And perhaps the kindly Madonna made her appear especially enticing to Leonor on that morning. Right away she craved to paint her nude, maybe holding out a tray of sweets, and definitely doing something with that adorable palm leaf; on second thought, maybe the sweet creature ought to forgo the tray and raise the palm leaf over her head as if she were an Amazon with a sword.

Rossetti, she said, I like you much better as a woman.

I
am
a woman, said Giovanna shyly.

But you look so mannish! Don't lie to me or I'll spit on you again.

You see, I've studied under him. Usually I stand down there. I try to act as he does, because—

Listen, baby, why don't you run away from here and come to my cat funeral?

Oh, no, signora! I—

Is that
man
telling you what to do? Listen, precious. Come with me. If he says an unkind word to you, my friends and I will come here with blowtorches. Do you or don't you like cats?

I—

Then come. Right now, sweetheart.
I dislike the deference with which your Rossetti's been treated. Oh, what nice breasts you have. I'll make it worth your while.

Since Giovanna, like Silvia, could not say no, she let Leonor take her hand, and stepped shyly off the plinth, with her bronze heart clanging rapidly within her hollow bosom. Although in her time she had certainly seen things even more exciting than two white-wimpled farmwomen flirting with a young shepherd (for many things do happen in a park), she wondered what she might have missed. For instance, no one had ever held her hand before. Leonor, who knew how to pick up a cat such that even though its hind legs dangled it took no fright, led Giovanna with kindred gentleness into the stinging white sun, which had been doubled and half-melted amidst the oily brown rainbows of the Canal Grande. It seemed as if the curtain of water had already begun to part, and the white clouds crawling beside this splendid gash could have been the cigarette smoke of spectators at an orgy. Giovanna began to feel warm and limber. Now they turned down apartment-shaded stairs and through an arch where Leonor had once met a sweet Bohemian vampire named
Milena; and presently Leonor unlocked a door in the wall, led her upstairs and unlocked another door. They were greeted by a wide-eyed, high-eared cat, who kept bristling out his whiskers. Then came three more cats, all coffee-colored like the reflections on the dark reddish-brown floor of the Caffè San Marco. Leonor was already kissing a kitten as sleek as the longhaired thespian who played Salome a century ago.