She came out of the rain like a rabbit of flotsam washed from the distant seas to the shore by uncertain tides. The wind blew from the east that night and as the door of the rusty shop opened westward, it slammed shut behind her with a sort of vicious cheated force when she hurried in. the whole place rocked with the impact and startled him as he sat on a stool mending a pair of brown shoes in the dim light of small, red lamp that hung from the blackened sawali ceiling. Outside the shop, the rain lashed down the narrow street with the fury of an aroused maniac, a steady flood from a sky of impenetrable darkness. The water streamed along the gutters, foaming at the heaps of fifth congested there, rejected scraps of food, bits of yellow paper, pieces of rags, and untidy dirt. In that weather, no lights shone along Barranco, the heart of the slums of the northern district, early as the hour still was. He stood up and eyed her uncertainly as she leaned heavily against the threshold, a slender, half-drowned wisp of a woman clutching a faded violet scarf tightly around her narrow chest. She looked around the small shop, it was shabby but it was clean and then at him as he stood under the red lamp, tall in his sleeveless undershirt and dark-blue trousers with white stripes. She coughed a dry, unnatural sound that shook her small body from head to foot. She turned to the door and opened it. The rain darted in and awoke him from his trance like immobility and silence. She looked up and a tired smile of gratitude lighted up her face for a moment. There were other things he wanted to know but the questions that surged to his lips were stilled by her reticence. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the rain stopped. From somewhere in the distance a church bell made itself heard and tooled the hour. He looked up. The woman had fallen asleep. She had dropped on the side, and one of her arms pillowed her head while the other was carelessly thrown across her breast. It was many days later when he learned how she came to him that night of wind and rain. She had been working in the house of a vaudeville star. She had been happy, she assured him, because the senorita was kind. But the younger brother, coming home only that night, had been nasty in his drunkenness. She had fled from the house, from evil eyes and evil lips and evil hands that had scared her flesh with their touch. She had wandered through unfamiliar streets from the boat she had gone straight to the senorita’s house, upon her arrival from the province only a few months before until the sudden rain had driven her to his door. He would marry her. He said that aloud, feeling he not only should but wanted to. So they were not only lovely but happy days as well. Yet she counted them, for it work became steady, they might save the money to marry on. Somehow nothing had been said about marriages since the night he had forbidden her to go back to the house of her former senorita. But how could he talk about it, she had learned his anger which was swift and silent and somehow terrible. She had incurred it once by making a friend of the wife of a neighbor and chatting for hours across the back fence for the sheer pleasure of hearing another woman’s voice. He had not said anything but she had cried because he had eaten his meal without her. She was sweeping the shop one morning the cobbler had left to deliver a pair of shoes to its owner when a small gray car made its way through the narrow street and a girl in a gaudy sweater came down, staring with bewildered eyes at the small protection. It was senorita. The new day brought his surprise it was carefully wrapped in fine white paper, and he had it in his pocket when he arrived home from the market. At first she did not want to unwrapped the small package. Truth hung by a hair and as long as it conscious of a sharp and indignant agony. It was pretty although inexpensive little thing, a square violet scarf of thin silk with a small tassels all around. But she wore the old faded one when, three days later, she told him she had found another job. She left late the next afternoon. He wanted to go with her but she asked him not to, promising to send him word and her address later. He gave her a bundle, the clothes of his dead mother which he had insisted on her taking with her. His face was pale in the late afternoon light; his hands were none too steady. She smiled compassionate divinity looking down on the puny sins of man. She was still smiling as the horse started. At the end of the street she turned her head and waved her hand to him as he stood by the gate in the falling darkness.
Posted on: Wed, 18 Sep 2013 01:47:23 +0000
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