Who Are You? (12 page)

His appetite and his rage sated for the moment, the husband goes off for a drink, leaving her alone. She gets her clothes on somehow and rushes out, across the centre room, down the stairs, the slight sound of her steps drowned by the storm. In her panic, she has only one thought : to get out of the house, and away from the man who's half nightmare. Thunder goes on all the time. The lightning keeps stabbing at the windows, as if trying to reach her. A blinding flash stops her as she gets to the door, ripping the sky apart, followed by a tremendous thunderclap, shaking the house.

But now she abruptly returns to normal. Panic leaves her as soon as she opens the door and sees the way open before her. No longer under such desperate pressure of need to be gone, she pauses in the porch, noticing, with amazement, that what Suede Boots said is quite true - all she has to do is to walk out of the place, exactly as he always told her. How simple it seems. The thing she's thought almost impossible, when it comes to the point, is really perfectly easy.

But she still doesn't move, though nothing to do with the storm keeps her standing there: perhaps it's her belief in her own unchangeable bad luck; or perhaps a constitutional fear of any decisive step. Holding on to the door so that it shan't slam shut in the wind, she turns her head and looks towards the stairs behind her, as though she might decide to go back to her room after all.

Then she turns again, and another flash zigzags down the sky, illuminating the compound with white incandescence, showing the palm tree bent over in a thin impossible arc, its topmost leaves sweeping the ground. It looks like a hallucination. Everything out there has the same fantastic, improbable aspect, as if it were part of a fever-dream. The well-known landmarks are hardly recognizable.

Her eyes, dazzled by the livid glare of the lightning, suddenly start to search the weird scene with a new, acute urgency. On the spur of the moment, she's made up her mind that chance shall decide her fate. She will go if she succeeds in seeing the scarf before the lurid light expires. Otherwise she'll stay.

In his room, Dog Head drinks steadily for some time. A lizard drops its tail near his glass, and he jumps up indignantly to pursue it. It has disappeared. But now that he's interrupted his drinking he feels in need of an outlet for the violence drink always builds up in him.

He takes his racquet into the next room, where the combination of lightning and the weak electricity greatly increases the difficulties of the rat game. Moreover, he himself is not completely steady on his feet, and is apt to misjudge distances. He lashes out wildly at each rat that shows itself, missing more often than not.

The stifling heat seems to be inside him, rather than out. Everything is dark in his mind, which is filled with furious resentment against his wife. He's really hitting out at her, not the rats, as he slashes the racquet at them with all his strength. He shouts to her to come and watch him playing, but of course she doesn't reply. He would go and drag her out of her room, if he were
not fully occupied here. Playing in this extravagant, imprecise way, he soon exhausts himself; sweat is running off him like water.

Though he won't admit it, he's really had more than enough of the game, when an unusually large rat comes on the scene, and eludes him persistently, almost driving him crazy. At last he corners it, and, with a yell of triumph, brings the racquet down in a vicious drive. But once again he miscalculates. Lunging forward, he staggers, losing his balance, starting to fall, and, to save himself, clutches at some piece of furniture, which tilts over on top of him, bearing him to the ground with it.

It is not the ponderous, blood-red wardrobe made in the jail, but a light affair constructed of laths. Nevertheless, he cries out in a loud and agonized voice for someone to help him. No one answers. Nobody comes. The servants don't hear, or don't want to hear.

His wife must have heard surely she's bound to come to the rescue. His rage dissolves in self-pity, he whimpers drunkenly to himself, lying under the cupboard, because she doesn't appear either. For a time, he can think of nothing but his own pathetic position. Nobody cares that he's crushed under an oppressive weight, in darkness and misery.

As soon as he makes the effort, of course, he dislodges the cupboard quite easily. Immediately then his anger revives, flaring up again, as he gets to his feet, bruised and shaken, and makes for the girl's room. It's absolutely intolerable that she should have left him lying there helpless all that time without lifting a finger, and he means to take some violent revenge. He will do something terrible to her — perhaps kill her.

All at once, just
as
he gets to the door, his strength
and his furious anger desert him together; he seems to fall in on himself, to disintegrate almost, and slowly subsides to the floor, overcome by profound exhaustion.

The night is almost over, though he has lost all sense of time. The thunder recedes into the distance and slowly dies out. He listens intently in the new stillness, but there's no sound or sign of life on the other side of the door.

This is the point when the clouds start to break up, leaving a gap in the east, where soon the sun will appear. The electricity expired in the house long ago. But now the black window squares are growing brighter. A vague huddled shape, indicated by the pallor of his shorts and his naked flesh, the man half lies on the floor, his head and shoulders propped against the wall, between the wardrobe and the door of his wife's room. He is motionless, except when his chin intermittently drops on his chest as he falls into a brief doze, or wakes with a sudden start.

He does not move from this spot, and, whenever he remembers to do so, goes on listening. The door flaps constitute no sort of a barrier against noise; yet all this time there has been no sound on the other side loud enough to reach him. The occupant of the room must be keeping quiet deliberately; or else sleeping soundly. It is also possible that she is not there at all and that the room is empty.

At length Dog Head leaves his place at the door without investigating the room beyond. Too tired to care about the girl now, he falls on his own bed, and is asleep instantly, with his mouth slightly open.

The light intensifies outside the windows, which are already luminous. Suddenly the sun leaps into the sky,
gilding the tops of the tamarinds and the highest point of the roof. At once the brain-fever birds fill the air with their monotonous cries, as if they had never stopped mechanically calling out the eternal question no one will ever answer.

In their quarters, the servants are still sleeping off the excitements of the night. The dilapidated house stands silent, as if deserted, in the almost cool air of daybreak; as though it were already an abandoned ruin, empty, and fallen into decay. The rooms appear as so many black holes through the unshuttered, wide open windows.