Señor El Galliñazo is intact, though balder than before, it is true, and rests now upstairs in the bedroom, on top of the chest of drawers, along with a snaggletoothed cayman that used to perch on the shelf above my mother’s bed in Bury Place. Her family gone, these corpses make Clotilde feel at home; she will not throw anything away. What does not fit inside the house is piled, still boxed, in the shed out back where Leopold struggles against the cold to make his studio in an ever-dwindling space, surrounded by curiosities.
Up to his neck in them.
But then the whole house is a collector’s cabinet without the collector, except as he is reflected in his accumulation. My mother, stroking El Galliñazo’s molting back, or thumbing through the Conchylien-Cabinet (from which Arthur Petrook has removed the best of the colored plates with the sharpest and subtlest of knives), or touching the leathery palm of the gorilla’s hand that she keeps hidden in a drawer among her stockings, or arranging the heads of six terra-cotta goddesses along the fireplace mantel in the room that serves the Birdcage as sitting and dining room both, feels the collector’s presence so vividly that she would not be surprised to hear him say: Ah, Tildy! Why must you tease and torment your poor Papa so?—
But she doesn’t.
She doesn’t hear him; yet his waistcoat, against which she sometimes rests her cheek, still smells like him, and his old watch in its silver case still bears the smooth spot where his thumb rubbed nervously against it, again and again, during the months he spent in her grandfather’s attic, writing Felix Girard’s Ghosts of Bain Dzak. If she holds the watch long enough in her palm, it grows warm, almost as if it has just emerged from his waistcoat pocket, warmed by his body, not hers.
Petite! Cannot you allow your poor Papa to write his book? Do not pull so on his whiskers! Let Papa work, my dear!
Inconsolable! Yes, that my mother is: inconsolable over the loss of he who returned from the deserts of Bain Dzak one day to stare at her in her cradle, a desert-stained stranger fingering the frizzy blond ringlets that had only lately exploded upon a blue-veined scalp as delicate as an eggshell. Ah, he had said, there you are, Tildy. There you are. I’ve been looking for you everywhere.
• • •
He with whom she had fallen in love, and searched for, in vain, ever since. He who was always leaving.
• • •
Gone now, again. She cannot bear to think where he might be. So she turns her back on the ocean, averts her eyes from windows where the blue is contained, in the sitting room, in the bedroom, in the turnings of the staircases both down and up. She catches a glimpse, sometimes, by mistake, in the mirror over the mantel, above the heads of the goddesses, and then she feels something inside herself tighten ominously; she imagines a spring inside her, something mechanical, not human, a vise in her chest that constricts her heart, her lungs, her stomach, until the margins of her vision darken and she must sit down; or else she flies down the stairs into the kitchen, shouting at the girl-of-all-work, You slattern, you slut, the beef was bad, the dishes were dirty, the bedbugs are back . . . thus releasing, for a moment, temporarily, the tension in the spring.
It is winter. The darkness, coming in midafternoon now, relieves her of the burden of vision. The black outside the windows presses close for a while, then Mary draws the shades, ignites the fire, sparking smoking anthracite. My mother sits, her face and breasts and thighs directed toward the dazzle of heat and light and flame. Behind her, shadows gather. Her back is cold. Outside, carts pulled by stolid ponies, their breaths hot upon the air, rumble over icy cobblestones, the lamplighter makes his progress up Bridge Street, gas jets flare in shopwindows, beneath the house the Esk rushes, the vibration is carried up, through the stone foundation, the walls, the floor . . . into my mother’s body, her chest, her spine, her heart.
In the distant steppe, the camels stride . . .
Holding her father’s book on her lap makes her feel better. But she does not read it; holds it, merely. It is her amulet, her talisman. Her hands are idle, her eyes half closed; she resides in a firelight dream. Suddenly a sharp, whirring buzz rouses her; jumping up, she urgently shoos the hummingbird, its gemlike feathers flashing, away from the flames. For this purpose, and this only, does she move.