The Cult of Loving Kindness (16 page)

Always they had slept apart in the village, in different houses. But often when they were together she could feel his physical excitement. When she reached the age when she was curious about such things, and the first of her dreams started to bother her, she would embrace him sometimes, and she would wonder why he’d always pull away. In part she understood his reticence; in part she felt it too. They had needed nothing in the village in the trees. But now when she lay sweating in the night—alone with her fears, alone with dreams that left her empty and abused—she felt he owed her something, some small comfort or at least some part of his self-possession. She had lost everything, and she resented knowing that he held something back. She wanted something real, to give something and receive something in return that would replace their inadequate attempts at communication, would replace the lost enclosure of the village. And she was half asleep.

She shook his shoulder. “Rael,” she whispered. “Rael.” He didn’t move, but she could feel the tension in his flesh. She raised her head, and rubbed her fingers down the muscles of his back, pushing along the groove of his spine until she reached his tailbone underneath the drawstring of his pants. She stroked his tailbone for a long time, and yet he didn’t move. Then she undid the bodice of her dress and rubbed her naked breasts along his back—he too was sweating, and the night was hot, and there was no air in that windowless black building by the stream. The blanket was already damp with their sweat; earlier in the night they had been bothered by insects, but now she stripped it off. And with her left hand she was rubbing his tailbone, and working the drawstring of his pants loose with her wrist.

She raised her head. She could hear the muffled roaring of the stream, ominous to her, because of all the subtle stirrings of the animals that could be hidden by the sound; her head was roaring also. She bent down to kiss Rael on the shoulder. Still he hadn’t moved. He hadn’t turned his head. But now he shifted his legs slightly, and she slid her hand over his tailbone. She slid her hand underneath him to hold his stiff unwieldy sex. She rubbed her breasts along his back. She squeezed with all her strength, showing no mercy until finally he yielded and turned over. Then she moved over his body. She put her hands upon his shoulders, sliding down on him, possessing him, grunting in pain at first, because he was bigger than the dreams that had prepared his way.

But she had not even finished that first grunting descent when she regretted it. The pain seemed to clear her head. She supported herself upright, her elbows locked, her hands splayed on his chest, her knees suffering on the bare concrete on either side of his hips. Her head fell forward and her hair tumbled in her face; still, except to turn over, he had not moved and she sat there for a long moment, feeling not much of anything where he had penetrated her, feeling also with a kind of horror the muscles of his arms and neck and chest start to relax, to gather strength.

His legs stirred under her legs. Almost she wanted to jump up away from him, so insecure she felt, so meager in her control. Then it was too late, and he had reached up to touch her breasts with his heavy hands, gently, softly, but she felt as if he’d broken the breath out of her. Gasping, she fell down onto his chest. His arms closed around her and she felt his body come alive. She couldn’t see his face.

In time, he turned her over onto her back, so that he lay above her. In time also, he experimented in different ways, though she was scarcely aware of it. It was as if she had retreated deep inside herself, and even her sensations had pulled back from the surface of her skin. Her thoughts chased each other in a tumbled mental landscape, appearing and reappearing, sometimes dim, sometimes with fleeting starkness, like figures in a fog. Yet all the time, and as it seemed, far away, she was conscious of the movement of her body, conscious of Rael, conscious of the odor of his skin, his intermittent weight, even her own groaning, her own muted feelings of pleasure and pain, all against the background of a slow, rhythmic grinding, an unstoppable and distant engine. Because he rested for a while, and then entered her again, and again in the early morning when the first haze of light was gathering by the ruptured metal door.

In the morning he rolled away from her onto his back, his head turned away. She lay stupefied for a time. “Rael?” she said. And he answered nothing, even though she knew he was awake; she could feel the presence of his brooding consciousness beside her. Quietly she lay, listening to him breathe, until she could no longer tolerate the thought that his feelings might be as ambiguous, as resentful as her own. Then she stumbled to her feet.

Outside, as it happened, the morning was fresh and clear. A breeze had come up during the night. The sun was visible through the treetops. Because of their change in altitude, it seemed softer than she was used to, and the quality of light was different too. A bird sang as she stumbled to the stream, down through a copse of mimosa trees. The sound she had heard during the night was from a waterfall, a narrow chute of water perhaps ten feet high, splattering into a shallow pool.

“Look around you,” the master had often said, and Mr. Sarnath often had repeated. Cassia was close to tears, yet still she took a breath. She stood on the bank of the pool and put her hand out to a flowered twig. She stripped off her dress and threw it on the bank, and then she stepped down into the cold water.

The stones on the bottom of the pool were sharp, and she moved carefully across them, until the water was around her shins. Dark, syrupy, fragrant water trickled down over a lip of moss and she stood underneath it, rinsing her hair, washing her arms and legs. Then, sputtering, she stepped away from it and, bending down, examined the insides of her thighs, combed her fingers through her pubic hair, poked gingerly at the lips of her vagina, for all that area felt bruised. As she did so, she heard a woman’s voice, a snort of laughter from the shore.

“You’ve got a pretty one, don’t you? I was listening to it all night, and it was music to my ears. Oh, yes, I remember that old music, though it’s been too long.”

She was small, wrinkled, and extremely thin, an albino specimen of a dark-skinned race, perhaps. She was sitting on some rocks under a mimosa bush, on the opposite side of the pool. Her pose suggested she’d been there a long while, though in fact the rocks had been unoccupied when Cassia had first come. Her skin was mottled, orange-colored mixed with white, her hair orange too, plaited in coarse, irregular braids which stuck out all over her head. She was not old; her teeth, few and widely spaced, were white and strong.

She wore a ragged but capacious red smock, unbuttoned down her chest, so that Cassia could see her wrinkled stomach and her ribs. Her eyes were bright and penetrating and blue.

Cassia had been so shocked to see her that she took all this in, staring evenly, her hand clasped over her sex. Cassia’s upbringing among the Treganu had been so sheltered that her instinct for modesty was not well developed. The posture was a reflex, and since it only seemed to invite ridicule, she soon abandoned it. Instead she turned her back. Splashing clumsily over the sharp rocks, she retrieved her dress and slipped it on.

“Ooh, and a pretty tail too! Lift it up and let me see what’s underneath. Sore this morning, aren’t you? I can see from here!”

Cassia was not modest. But she felt vulnerable as she splashed toward shore. Something in the events of the past night had scraped the inside of her heart, and it required the words of this strange, ugly woman to make her understand how raw she felt. And even though the morning was still fresh, and a red-throated, long-beaked bird still perched upon a twig above her head, Cassia broke into tears as she clambered from the pool and clambered up the bank.

But because she could hear the woman stir behind her, and because her cheeks were stinging and her eyes were full of tears, she mistook the way back to the garage, though it was only a few yards. Its roof was hidden in the trees. Confused, she continued past it, knowing she had gone too far, and yet not wanting to retrace her steps. She could hear the woman coming up behind her, scrabbling through the brush. And she had no wish to see Rael either at that moment: she just wanted to be alone among the rhododendrons and the frangipani bushes, someplace quiet where she could clean her face and sit down and recite a few choice precepts of the master. “Wanting is the thief of love,” perhaps.

Instead she stumbled up into a clearing near the path. There, a woman and two men sat by a fire. Cassia had smelled the smoke as she came up the last few feet, and heard also the sound of the guitar that one man was strumming. And yet the smell, the sound, had not suggested any thoughts to her; she smashed through the leaves into the clearing, and she was shocked to find it occupied.

But because emotion had so hampered her capacity for judgment, again, as they had been by the pool, her perceptions were unnaturally clear, unnaturally complete. It was as if her usual scrim of thinking and assessment had been torn—the drab, semitransparent curtain that is caught between ourselves and the bright world, and for a moment she was able to step through the rent. She looked around. Two men and a woman. She saw, before the note of the guitar had died away, the circle of bare earth ringed with smoldering logs to keep the bugs away. And in the middle a wide mat of palm next to the smoky fire, supporting several bundles of old rags and a row of playing cards. On the far side of the fire, stirring a tin bucket, crouched a squat muscular young woman with a wide face and enormous naked breasts, also big buttocks that were covered with black bark cloth from the pontu tree. Her skin glistened as if it had been oiled, and she was pregnant.

She was pouring a cup of broth into the bucket and stirring manioc greens with a charred stick. A man stood next to her, dressed in a long yellow robe that was embroidered with white thread. His hair was knotted at the back of his neck. Each of his cheeks was decorated with a spiral of white paint. He held a small mirror in the palm of his left hand, and at the moment when Cassia burst through into the clearing, he was retouching one of them with a sharp splinter of wood.

And finally the guitarist, propped up against a Y-shaped stump. He had a gigantic chest, gigantic arms and shoulders, and his hands were callused, massive. The neck of the guitar was wide, the strings were far apart, so that he could curl his mighty fingers onto them.

By contrast, his legs were thin as reeds. He sat cross-legged, his ankles locked above his knees.

In that moment of clarity, all was still. The charred stick was quiet in the pot. The splinter of wood was immobile in the air. The note of the guitar, hovering above them, seemed to emphasize, rather than diminish, Cassia’s perception of silence. But then the strange, chaotic world rushed in again; Cassia could hear the orange woman in the red smock crashing up behind her, and she half turned. A bird was in the tree above her head, a big, featherless carrion bird, stretching its leather wings.

The cripple laid his instrument aside. Cassia’s tears were drying on her cheeks, and even though the woman in the red smock now stood behind her at the clearing’s edge, she couldn’t give her more than part of her attention. This was because the pregnant woman by the fire had taken from a pouch at her waist six silver pods—hot sweet peppers which were Cassia’s favorite food in all the world. In four days she had eaten nothing but cold nuts and a few durian, and the smell of the hot food was making her weak, was filling her mouth with a sweet liquid, so that she wasn’t even aware of the woman coming up behind her until she smelled her breath. Cassia was hungry and she barely noticed even when the woman put her hand out to touch her.

“There, sister,” she said. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I’ve got a dirty mouth. Everyone tells me so, but I don’t mean no harm.”

She spoke the traders’ lingua franca of the forest. Cassia moved forward out of reach, so that the woman’s hand fell awkwardly on nothing. “I told her she’s a pretty piece of tail,” she explained to the assembled group. “Though naturally the worse for wear—wasn’t I right?”

The pregnant woman grunted and then turned her head aside. The cripple was smiling; he had a fine strong face, with black brows and a short beard. The other man was holding one long-fingered hand out in fastidious disgust, which provoked more laughter from the woman in the red smock. “Don’t worry about him,” she said, as if to Cassia alone. “Or her either,” she continued, nodding toward the fire. “She’s as stupid as a lump. But the Prince told us to be kind to strangers, and besides, the food is hers.”

If the pregnant woman heard this, she gave no sign. With careful fingers she stripped the silver peppers and dropped them into the pot. And all the while she was looking to the clearing’s edge, where a stand of tall ferns filled up the space between the trees. Cassia could detect some movement there, and the heads of the ferns were twitching underneath the trees. Then closer, until the frontmost ferns were pushed aside, and two children trundled out. It was a little boy, carrying on his back his infant brother.

They were dark-skinned, like their mother. The younger child was naked, while the older one wore only a ripped T-shirt, which showed signs of having once been green. He had a fat little belly and a deeply serious face; he trudged along like an old man carrying a sack to market until he stood next to the fire. There he tried to loosen his brother’s choke hold on his neck, without success until the woman intervened. The baby started squalling; she took him onto her capacious lap.

In the meantime, with her other hand, she had lifted the stick out of the pot. The cripple, moving adroitly on his knuckles, had picked a wooden bowl up off the mat. Holding it in his teeth, he swung himself over to the woman’s other side. Balancing upon his withered knees, he tried to thrust the bowl into the pot of food. The woman poked her stick at him, and for a while she succeeded in keeping him away. But at a certain moment her attention was diverted by the baby on her lap; he was kicking at his mother’s mountainous breasts, and the cripple, seizing the instant, raising himself up upon one hand, dug the bowl down into the hot manioc greens. Then he was away, avoiding once again the poking stick; with the bowl clamped in his teeth he swung himself over the bare ground toward Cassia until he was beneath her, balancing again upon his knees. Then with a smile upon his handsome face, he held the bowl up toward her.