The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (69 page)

"Well—!"

They went around the corner, the Spaniard still shaking his head at moments. At a glance he looked as if he thought the place couldn't be any good, really.

Eugene led him to a big hotel. They entered the glitter and perfume of the lobby and through its entire maze before Eugene could discover the men's room, feeling the responsibility of the big black Spaniard like a parade he was leading.

As they stood in their caves with the echoing partition between, Eugene's head nodded and rolled once or twice, rhythmically....

Well, the music last night had not been what he had thought it would be. In prophesying that, Emma had known what she was talking about. It was not at all throbbing. It had not a great many chords, it was never loud. The Spaniard's songs were old—ancient, his program said; some of them were written for organs and for lutes; and yet, he, So-and-So, the guitarist, played them. Were the difficulties and challenges what he had sought for most? Vain old person. Yes, it is the
guitar
I am playing. Yes, I am a
guitar player.
What did you think I was?

He was in as overwhelming a degree as if he announced it from the stage—in English—an extremely careful old person, an extremely careful artist.

Eugene suddenly felt both impatient and offended with him. Not bothering to conceal his own absorption in what he was playing, the man took no notice or care that he pleased anyone else either.... No! And Eugene had not been carried away altogether by the Spaniard's music. Not by any means. Only when the man at last played very softly some unbearably rapid or subtle songs of his own country, so soft as to be almost without sound, only a beating on the air like a fast wing—then was Eugene moved. Sometimes the sounds seemed shaken out, not struck, with the unearthly faint crash of a tambourine.

In love songs as in the rest, the artist himself remained remote, as a conscientious black cloud from a summer day. He only loomed. He ended the recital with a formal bow—as though it had been taken for granted by then that passion was the thing he had in hand, love was his servant, and even despair was a little tamed animal trotting about in plain view. The bow had been consummate with grace, and when he lifted up, he was so big he looked very close to the eyes.

When Eugene came out, the Spaniard was weighing himself. The arrow trembled, the Spaniard gently regarding it, filling himself with a sigh to make it shake. Eugene frowned at the figure. Only 240. He had supposed the Spaniard would weigh more than that—250 or 255.

His guest looked at him as bright and fresh as a daisy. "Where shall we go now?" he meant, as plain as day.

Eugene ushered him to the street. On the step was a band of sunlight soft and level as little Fan's hair when she would go flying before him. The men began walking, the Spaniard with spirit—was this exercise? The square shone, and the façade of a steep street like a great gray accordion spread over a knee seemed about to stutter into the air.

They walked city squares in the sun until some meditative mood between them bound them like consenting speech. At a corner two old fellows, twins, absurdly dressed alike in plaid jackets, the same size and together still, were helping each other onto the crowded step of a streetcar. Eugene and the Spaniard noticed them at the same moment and casting each other amused glances, they stepped up too, as the car began moving, and rode off on the step. It was like surf-boarding on waves. Behind them, the cow-catcher was a big basketful of children.

A Negro, his fan of hair so coarse as to look grainy, immediately rammed his head between Eugene's and the Spaniard's. His pop-eyes watched. The streetcar climbed, rolled, and descended, rocking through warming and ever-crowding streets, and finally turned straight into the West. Eugene, with his head turned away from the Negro's, tried to close his ears against the cries of the children, and read the tattered street signs to himself as they passed.

The conductor was a big fat Negro woman who yelled out all the street names with joy. "Divisadero! I say Divisadero!" At The Bug Used Records and Shoe Massage Parlor, and from the steep, fancy-fronted, engraved-looking houses with all the paint worn away—like the solitary houses over railroad cuts seen once—the conductor's friends hollered at her as they went by. Swinging out of the car she often called back. "Off at two
A.M.
!" "See you at the Cat!"

The Negro head between Eugene and the Spaniard rolled its eyes. Once Eugene caught a glimpse of the Spaniard
smiling
as he traveled. Negroes would think he comprehended all their nigger-business—that he himself might be at the Cat at two. The basket of children swarmed over.

Eugene managed to reach the bell. He got the Spaniard off the streetcar, actually having to pull him by the waist to extricate him backwards.

It was too much. They continued their direction on foot, still into the sun and still up into the last rim of hills.

It was by rights a sleepy hour, for people who didn't have to work. The city was so ugly at close quarters and so beautiful down its long distances. The hills, hills after hills that they walked over, the increasing freshness of the air, the warmth of the nearer sun, all made Eugene feel as if he were falling asleep. Because the very silence between the men was—at last—replete and dreamlike, the hills were to Eugene increasingly like those stairs he climbed in dreams.

The hills with their uniform, unseparated houses repeated over and over again his hill on Jones Street; the houses occurred over and over—all built on the same day, all one age. There was all one destiny. Suppose another Fire were to rack San Francisco and topple it and he, Eugene MacLain out of Mississippi, had to put it all back together again. His eyes half closed upon the mountains of houses not wall-like, as houses were in other places, but swollen like bee-hives, and one hive succeeding another, mounting into tremendous steps of stairs—and alive inside, inwardly contriving. How could he put a watch back together?

Here came the old woman down the hill—there was always one. In tippets and tapping their canes they slowly came down to meet you. Sometimes it seemed to Eugene that all the women in San Francisco were walking those hills all their lives, with canes before they knew it, and when they got old, instead of dying they used two canes, or crutches. Emma's feet were dainty, but the round flesh came all the way down her legs like pantalettes. She said it had only been there since the birth of the child: she blamed little Fan with it. Out of the middle of her grief she could rise and put her unanswerable pink finger on Woman's Sacrifice.

"Your little girl," Eugene remarked aloud, "said, 'Mama, my throat hurts me,' and she was dead in three days. You expected her mother would watch a fever, while you were at the office, not go talk to Mrs. Herring. But you never spoke of it, did you. Never did."

Each rounded house contained a stair. Every form had its spiral or its tendril, outward or concealed. Outside were fire-escapes. He gazed up at the intricacies of those things; sea gulls were sitting at their heads. How could he make a fire-escape if he were required to? The laddered, tricky fire-escapes, the mesh of unguarded traffic, coiling springs, women's lace, the nests in their purses—he thought how the making and doing of daily life mazed a man about, eyes, legs, ladders, feet, fingers, like a vine. It twined a man in, the very doing and dying and daring of the world, the citified world. He could not set about making a fire-escape to his flat in Jones Street, given all the parts and the whole day off and the right instruments, if Mr. Bertsinger and Emma too told him to go ahead, and that his life depended on it. Should he be ashamed?

"Open the door, Richard.
Ouvrez la fenêtre, Paul ou Jacques,
" the demoniac voice of the comedian sang on the record, and Eugene waited to hear it again. He remembered away back: there was an old Negro and everybody in Morgana knew when he was in trouble at home; he walked into the store and asked them to play him a record—"Rocks in My Bed Number Two," by Blind Boy Fuller. Through a basement window he saw an upright piano and a big colored woman plying the keys. She looked like a long way from home. He could not hear her, and realized that there was much noise outside here, in the streets.

"
I
don't get the sun in
my
eyes," said a little boy, looking up at Eugene, who was holding one hand slanted before his face.

"You don't, sonnie?" said Eugene gently. With one hand he took away the other, as if the little boy had asked him to stop using it. The boy gave him a sweet, cocksure smile, which jumped with many suns in Eugene's vision.

They were on a numbered avenue not far, now, from the ocean. Seasoned with light like old invalids the young bungalows looked into the West. The Spaniard rather unexpectedly lunged forward, swung his big body around, and gazed for himself at the world behind and below where they had come. He tenderly swept an arm. The whole arena was alight with a fairness and blueness at this hour of afternoon; all the gray was blue and the white was blue—the laid-out city looked soft, brushed over with some sky-feather. Then he dropped his hand, as though the city might retire; and lifted it again, as though to bring it back for a second time. He was really wonderful, with his arm raised.

They walked on, until the sky ahead was brilliant enough to keep the eyes dazzled. On the next hill two nuns in a sea of wind looked destructible as smokestacks on a flaming roof.

"Chances are"—Eugene had begun speaking again—"you didn't know you had it in you—to strike a woman. Did you?"

The Spaniard threw him a dark glance. But it was as if Eugene had said, "You are a guitar player" or "This is Presidio Avenue." Calmly he set his steps over a sprawled old winehead sleeping up here far away from his kind. Quite unheeding of legs overhead, the sleeper was stretched out of a little garden with his head in the anemones and the gray beard shining like spittle on his face.

"You wouldn't mind finding yourself like that," Eugene said, walking in the Spaniard's exact steps over the fallen legs.

And Eugene felt all at once an emotion that visited him inexplicably at times—the overwhelming, secret tenderness toward his twin, Ran MacLain, whom he had not seen for half his life, that he might have felt toward a lover. Was all well with Ran? How little we know! For considering that he might have done some reprehensible thing, then he would need the gravest and tenderest handling. Eugene's eyes nearly closed and he half fainted upon the body of the city, the old veins, the mottled skin of pavement. Perhaps the soft grass in which little daisies opened would hold his temples and put its eyes to his. He heard the murmuring slit of the cable track.

The Spaniard was holding him by the arm. His large face overhead flowed over with commiseration and pleasure. As if he were saying, "Why, of course. This is what we came for!" Eugene was half-lifted across the street. Then the Spaniard, still with a look of interest, made a gesture of examining him, patted him and straightened him up, gave him a little finishing shake, a cuff.

And rain fell on them. In the air a fine, caressing "precipitation" was shining. An open-eyed baby in his cart extended his little hands and held his thumbs and forefingers tight-shut: a hold on the bright mist. On the hill a cable car slid to a perch on the crest and sat there, homelike as a lawn swing, gay with girls' and boys' legs. Above, over cleared ground where a tree-cutting and excavation went on in the old graveyard—the Spanish tombs—two home-made kites in the sky jumped at each other and nodded like gossips. A sea wind blew the scent of alyssum from all the waste spaces. It waved the wispy white beard of an old Chinese gentleman who was running with the abandon of a school child for the car, which waited on him. This hilltop wind passed over Eugene with the refreshment that sometimes comes of a gentle sloughing off of a daydream or desire which takes even its memory with it. He looked up at his Spaniard and drew an expansive breath, like a demonstration. The Spaniard drew a breath also, perhaps not really a sympathetic one, but he seemed to increase in size. Eugene watched his great fatherly barrel of chest move, and had a momentary glimpse of his suspenders, which were pink trimmed in silver with little bearded animal faces on the buckles.

His face with its expression that might be solicitude still—and at the same time, meditation, amusement, sleepiness, or implacability when the whole was seen at such close quarters with the black circles, the shell rims, around the eyes—was directed for a round moment on Eugene. Then his head swung and with the long black hair bobbing behind, nodded a fraction at something. It struck Eugene that he looked like that Doctor Caligari in the old silent movie days, ringing his bell on the sideshow platform.

For he had nodded up at the undestroyed part of the embankment, where some of the old graves, still to be ransacked by the shovels, stood here and there under the olive trees. In the foreground was a cat. In the deep grass she held a motionless and time-honored pose.

Her head was three-quarters turned toward them where they stood. It seemed to have womanly eyebrows. Her gaze came out of her face with the whole of animal comprehension; whether it was menace or alarm in the full-open eyes, her face made a burning-glass of looking. Her eyes seemed after so long a time to be holding her herself in their power. She crouched rigid with the devotion and intensity of her vision, and if she had caught fire there, still she could not, Eugene felt, have stirred out of the seizure. She would have been consumed twice over before she disregarded either what she was looking at or her own frenzy.

On the untidy embankment something else—the object of the gaze—presently showed itself by a motion in the grass. As if the sight pricked him to move, Eugene darted for a heavy pine twig with cones and threw it at the cat; it struck her side. She seemed not to feel it, since she did not waver.

He exclaimed. And all the while the Spaniard was standing there in a relaxed posture looking on—he might have been over in Paris, looking at the Seine! And yet that detachment, Eugene was not unaware, and it gave him some bitterness, had been the outer semblance of what passion in his music last night! Eugene watched stubbornly, and even felt his excitement grow as the whirring of a wing or the pulsing of a tongue, whatever it was, came at less frequent intervals. It was still too rapid for the eye to tell what made it. Which was happening: was the whirring spending itself out, or was the lure, on its side, becoming an old thing, taken for granted? This had a beginning and end.