The Machineries of Joy Page 11

  Raimundo felt the sugar skull jolt from his fingers. The funeral on the wooden slat was tom from his other wide-flung hand.

  Bang! The bull hit, rebounded from the barrera wall as the horses vanished, jangling, screaming, in the tunnel.

  A man ran to the barrera of Señor Villalta, poking upward the banderillas, their sharp prongs choked with bull blood and flesh. “Gracias!” Villalta threw down a peso and took the banderillas proudly, the little orange and blue crepe papers fluttering, to hand about like musical instruments to his wife, to cigar-smoking friends.

  Christ moved.

  The crowd looked up at the swaying cross on the cathedral.

  Christ balanced on two hands, legs up in the sky!

  The small boy ran through the crowd. “You see my brother? Pay! My brother! Pay!”

  Christ now hung by one hand on the swaying cross. Below him was all the city of Guadalajara, very sweet and very quiet with Sunday. I will make much money today, he thought.

  The cross jolted. His hand slipped. The crowd screamed.

  Christ fell.

  Christ dies each hour. You see him in carven postures in ten thousand agonized places, eyes lifted to high dusty heavens of ten thousand small churches, and always there is much blood, ah, much blood.

  “See!” said Señor Villalta. “See!” He wagged the banderillas in the face of his friends, red and wet.

  With children chasing, snatching at him, laughing, the matador circles the ring again to the ever-increasing shower of hats, running and not stopping.

  And now the tourist boats cross the dawn-pale lake of Pátzcuaro, leaving Janitzio behind, the candles snuffed, the graveyard deserted, the torn flowers strewn and shriveling. The boats pull up and the tourists step out in the new light, and in the hotel on the mainland shore a great silver urn waits, bubbling with fresh coffee; a little whisper of steam, like the last part of the fog from the lake, goes up into the warm air of the hotel dining room, and there is a good sound of chattered plates and tining forks and low converse, and a gentle lidding of eyes and a mouthing of coffee in dreams already begun before the pillow. Doors close. The tourists sleep on fog-damp pillows, in fog-damp sheets, like earth-spittled winding clothes. The coffee smell is as rich as the skin of a Tarascan.

  In Guanajuato the gates close, the rigid nightmares are turned from. The spiral stair is taken up in hot November light. A dog barks. A wind stirs the dead morning-glories on the pastry-cake monuments. The big door whams down on the catacomb opening. The withered people are hidden.

  The band hoots out its last triumphant hooting and the barreras are empty. Outside, the people walk away between ranks of phlegm-eyed beggers who sing high high songs, and the blood spoor of the last bull is raked and wiped and raked and wiped by the men with the rakes down in the wide shadowed ring. In the shower, the matador is slapped upon his wet buttocks by a man who has won money because of him this day.

  Raimundo fell, Christ fell, in glaring light. A bull rushed, a car rushed, opening a great vault of blackness in the air which slammed, thundered shut and said nothing but sleep. Raimundo touched the earth, Christ touched the earth but did not know.

  The cardboard funeral was shattered to bits. The sugar skull broke in the far gutter in three dozen fragments of blind snow.

  The boy, the Christ, lay quiet.

  The night bull went away to give other people darkness, to teach other people sleep.

  Ah, said the crowd.

  RAIMUNDO, said the bits of the sugar skull strewn on the earth.

  People ran to surround the silence. They looked at the sleep.

  And the sugar skull with the letters R and A and I and M and U and N and D and O was snatched up and eaten by children who fought over the name.

  The Illustrated Woman

  When a new patient wanders into the office and stretches out to stutter forth a compendious ticker tape of free association, it is up to the psychiatrist immediately beyond, behind and above to decide at just which points of the anatomy the client is in touch with the couch.

  In other words, where does the patient make contact with reality?

  Some people seem to float half an inch above any surface whatsoever. They have not seen earth in so long, they have become somewhat airsick.

  Still others so firmly weight themselves down, clutch, thrust, heave their bodies toward reality, that long after they are gone you find their tiger shapes and claw marks in the upholstery.

  In the case of Emma Fleet, Dr. George C. George was a long time deciding which was furniture and which was woman and where what touched which.

  For, to begin with, Emma Fleet resembled a couch.

  “Mrs. Emma Fleet, Doctor,” announced his receptionist.

  Dr. George C. George gasped.

  For it was a traumatic experience, seeing this woman shunt herself through the door without benefit of railroad switchman or the ground crews who rush about under Macy’s Easter ballons, heaving on lines, guiding the massive images to some eternal hangar off beyond.

  In came Emma Fleet, as quick as her name, the floor shifting like a huge scales under her weight.

  Dr. George must have gasped again, guessing her at four hundred on the hoof, for Emma Fleet smiled as if reading his mind.

  “Four hundred two and a half pounds, to be exact,” she said.

  He found himself staring at his furniture.

  “Oh, it’ll hold all right,” said Mrs. Fleet intuitively.

  She sat down.

  The couch yelped like a cur.

  Dr. George cleared his throat. “Before you make yourself comfortable,” he said. “I feel I should say immediately and honestly that we in the psychiatrical field have had little success in inhibiting appetites. The whole problem of weight and food has so far eluded our ability for coping. A strange admission, perhaps, but unless we put our frailties forth, we might be in danger of fooling ourselves and thus taking money under false pretenses. So, if you are here seeking help for your figure, I must list myself among the nonplussed.”

  “Thank you for your honesty, Doctor,” said Emma Fleet. “However, I don’t wish to lose. I’d prefer your helping me gain another one hundred or two hundred pounds.”

  “Oh, no!” Dr. George exclaimed.

  “Oh, yes. But my heart will not allow what my deep dear soul would most gladly endure. My physical heart might fail at what my loving heart and mind would ask of it.”

  She sighed. The couch sighed.

  “Well, let me brief you. I’m married to Willy Fleet. We work for the Dillbeck-Horsemann Traveling Shows. I’m known as Lady Bountiful. And Willy …”

  She swooned up out of the couch and glided or rather escorted her shadow across the floor. She opened the door.

  Beyond, in the waiting room, a cane in one hand, a straw hat in the other, seated rigidly, staring at the wall, was a tiny man with tiny feet and tiny hands and tiny bright-blue eyes in a tiny head. He was, at the most, one would guess, three feet high, and probably weighed sixty pounds in the rain. But there was a proud, gloomy, almost violent look of genius blazing in that small but craggy face.

  “That’s Willy Fleet,” said Emma lovingly, and shut the door.

  The couch, sat on, cried again.

  Emma beamed at the psychiatrist, who was still staring, in shock, at the door.

  “No children, of course,” he heard himself say.

  “No children.” Her smile lingered. “But that’s not my problem, either. Willy, in a way, is my child. And I, in a way, besides being his wife, am his mother. It all has to do with size, I imagine, and we’re happy with the way we’ve balanced things off.”

  “Well, if your problem isn’t children, or your size or his, or controlling weight, then what … ?”

  Emma Fleet laughed lightly, tolerantly. It was a nice laugh, like a girl’s somehow caught in that great body and throat.

  “Patience, Doctor. Mustn’t we go back down the road to where Willy and I first met?”

  The doctor
shrugged, laughed quietly himself and relaxed, nodding. “You must.”

  “During high school,” said Emma Fleet. “I weighed one-eighty and tipped the scales at two-fifty when I was twenty-one. Needless to say, I went on few summer excursions. Most of the time I was left in drydock. I had many girl friends, however, who liked to be seen with me. They weighed one-fifty, most of them, and I made them feel svelte. But that’s a long time ago. I don’t worry over it any more. Willy changed all that.”

  “Willy sounds like a remarkable man,” Dr. George found himself saying, against all the rules.

  “Oh, he is, he is! He smoulders—with ability, with talent as yet undiscovered, untapped!” she said, quickening warmly. “God bless him, he leaped into my life like summer lightning! Eight years ago I went with my girl friends to the visiting Labor Day carnival. By the end of the evening, the girls had all been seized away from me by the running boys who, rushing by, grabbed and took them off into the night. There I was alone with three Kewpie Dolls, a fake alligator handbag and nothing to do but make the Guess Your Weight man nervous by looking at him every time I went by and pretending like at any moment I might pay my money and dare him to guess.

  “But the Guess Your Weight man wasn’t nervous! After I had passed three times I saw him staring at me. With awe, yes, with admiration! And who was this Guess Your Weight man? Willy Fleet, of course. The fourth time I passed he called to me and said I could get a prize free if only I’d let him guess my weight. He was all feverish and excited. He danced around. I’d never been made over so much in my life. I blushed. I felt good. So I sat in the scales chair. I heard the pointer whizz up around and I heard Willy whistle with honest delight.

  “‘Two hundred and eighty-nine pounds!’ he cried. ‘Oh boy oh boy, you’re lovely!’

  “‘I’m what?’ I said.

  “‘You’re the loveliest woman in the whole world,’ said Willy, looking me right in the eye.

  “I blushed again. I laughed. We both laughed. Then I must have cried, for the next thing, sitting there, I felt him touch my elbow with concern. He was gazing into my face, faintly alarmed.

  “‘I haven’t said the wrong thing?’ he asked.

  “‘No,’ I sobbed, and then grew quiet. ‘The right thing, only the right thing. It’s the first time anyone ever …’

  “‘What?’ he said.

  “‘Ever put up with my fat,’ I said.

  “‘You’re not fat,’ he said. ‘You’re large, you’re big, you’re wonderful. Michelangelo would have loved you. Titian would have loved you. Da Vinci would have loved you. They knew what they were doing in those days. Size. Size is everything. I should know. Look at me. I traveled with Singer’s Midgets for six seasons, known as Jack Thimble. And oh my God, dear lady, you’re right out of the most glorious part of the Renaissance. Bernini, who built those colonnades around the front of St. Peter’s and inside at the altar, would have lost his everlasting soul just to know someone like you.’

  “‘Don’t!’ I cried. ‘I wasn’t meant to feel this happy. It’ll hurt so much when you stop.’

  “‘I won’t stop, then,’ he said. ‘Miss … ?’

  “‘Emma Gertz.’

  “‘Emma,’ he said, ‘are you married?’

  “‘Are you kidding?’ I said.

  “‘Emma, do you like to travel?’

  “‘I’ve never traveled.’

  “‘Emma,’ he said, ‘this old carnival’s going to be in your town one more week. Come down every night, every day, why not? Talk to me, know me. At the end of the week, who can tell, maybe you’ll travel with me.’

  “‘What are you suggesting?’ I said, not really angry or irritated or anything, but fascinated and intrigued that anyone would offer anything to Moby Dick’s daughter.

  “‘I mean marriage!’ Willy Fleet looked at me, breathing hard, and I had the feeling that he was dressed in a mountaineer’s rig, alpine hat, climbing boots, spikes, and a rope slung over his baby shoulder. And if I should ask him, ‘Why are you saying this?’ he might well answer, ‘Because you’re there.’

  “But I didn’t ask, so he didn’t answer. We stood there in the night, at the center of the carnival, until at last I started off down the midway, swaying. ‘I’m drunk!’ I cried. ‘Oh, so very drunk, and I’ve had nothing to drink.’

  “‘Now that I’ve found you,’ called Willy Fleet after me, ‘you’ll never escape me, remember!’

  “Stunned and reeling, blinded by his large man’s words sung out in his soprano voice, I somehow blundered from the carnival grounds and trekked home.

  “The next week we were married.”

  Emma Fleet paused and looked at her hands.

  “Would it bother you if I told about the honeymoon?” she asked shyly.

  “No,” said the doctor, then lowered his voice, for he was responding all too quickly to the details. “Please do go on.”

  “The honeymoon.” Emma sounded her vox humana. The response from all the chambers of her body vibrated the couch, the room, the doctor, the dear bones within the doctor.

  “The honeymoon … was not usual.”

  The doctor’s eyebrows lifted the faintest touch. He looked from the woman to the door beyond which, in miniature, sat the image of Edmund Hillary, he of Everest.

  “You have never seen such a rush as Willy spirited me off to his home, a lovely dollhouse, really, with one large normal-sized room that was to be mine, or, rather, ours. There, very politely, always the kind, the thoughtful, the quiet gentleman, he asked for my blouse, which I gave him, my skirt, which I gave him. Right down the list, I handed him the garments that he named, until at last … Can one blush from head to foot? One can. One did. I stood like a veritable hearthfire stoked by a blush of all-encompassing and ever-moving color that surged and resurged up and down my body in tints of pink and rose and then pink again.

  “‘My God!’ cried Willy, ‘you’re the loveliest grand camellia that ever did unfurl!’ Whereupon new tides of blush moved in hidden avalanches within, showing only to color the tent of my body, the outermost and, to Willy anyway, most precious skin.

  “What did Willy do then? Guess.”

  “I daren’t,” said the doctor, flustered himself.

  “He walked around and around me.”

  “Circled you?”

  “Around and around, like a sculptor gazing at a huge block of snow-white granite. He said so himself. Granite or marble from which he might shape images of beauty as yet unguessed. Around and around he walked, sighing and shaking his head happily at his fortune, his little hands clasped, his little eyes bright. Where to begin, he seemed to be thinking, where, where to begin!?

  “He spoke at last. ‘Emma,’ he asked, ‘why, why do you think I’ve worked for years as the Guess Your Weight man at the carnival? Why? Because I have been searching my lifetime through for such as you. Night after night, summer after summer, I’ve watched those scales jump and twitter! And now at last I’ve the means, the way, the wall, the canvas, whereby to express my genius!’

  “He stopped walking and looked at me, his eyes brimming over.

  “‘Emma,’ he said softly, ‘may I have permission to do anything absolutely whatsoever at all with you?’

  “‘Oh, Willy, Willy,’ I cried. ‘Anything!’”

  Emma Fleet paused.

  The doctor found himself out at the edge of his chair. “Yes, yes, And then?”

  “And then,” said Emma Fleet, “he brought out all his boxes and bottles of inks and stencils and his bright silver tattoo needles.”

  “Tattoo needles?”

  The doctor fell back in his chair. “He … tattooed you?”

  “He tattooed me.”

  “He was a tattoo artist?”

  “He was, he is, an artist. It only happens that the form his art takes happens to be the tattoo.”

  “And you,” said the doctor slowly, “were the canvas for which he had been searching much of his adult life?”

  “I was
the canvas for which he had searched all of his life.”

  She let it sink, and it did sink, and keep on sinking, into the doctor. Then when she saw it had struck bottom and stirred up vast quantities of mud, she went serenely on.

  “So our grand life began! I loved Willy and Willy loved me and we both loved this thing that was larger than ourselves that we were doing together. Nothing less than creating the greatest picture the world has ever seen! ‘Nothing less than perfection!’ cried Willy. ‘Nothing less than perfection!’ cried myself in response.

  “Oh, it was a happy time. Ten thousand cozy busy hours we spent together. You can’t imagine how proud it made me to be the vast shore along which the genius of Willy Fleet ebbed and flowed in a tide of colors.

  “One year alone we spent on my right arm and my left, half a year on my right leg, eight months on my left, in preparation for the grand explosion of bright detail which erupted out along my collarbone and shoulderblades, which fountained upward from my hips to meet in a glorious July celebration of pinwheels, Titian nudes, Giorgione landscapes and El Greco cross-indexes of lightning on my façade, prickling with vast electric fires up and down my spine.

  “Dear me, there never has been, there never will be, a love like ours again, a love where two people so sincerely dedicated themselves to one task, of giving beauty to the world in equal portions. We flew to each other day after day, and I ate more, grew larger, with the years, Willy approved, Willy applauded. Just that much more room, more space for his configurations to flower in. We could not bear to be apart, for we both felt, were certain, that once the Masterpiece was finished we could leave circus, carnival, or vaudeville forever. It was grandiose, yes, but we knew that once finished, I could be toured through the Art Institute in Chicago, the Kress Collection in Washington, the Tate Gallery in London, the Louvre, the Uffizi, the Vatican Museum! For the rest of our lives we would travel with the sun!