Marina

Eleven

A Gift from the Enemy

In bedside kneel she endures the sacred silence of her prayers disturbed by the snuffle and hiccough of Uncle Willie’s zamba in the next room. She is used to other sounds; she has learned, when Uncle is about, to stop her ears with pillow to mute their squeaking, oinking loveplay. But she will not stop her ears while praying, lest some divine reply be muffled.

The women here are so cruel, she thinks, it’s a wonder this one can weep. She recalls the jerking arms of the next-door woman as she tried to harry her boy inside and glared up at Marina with the red eyeshine of a bird at night.

She dismisses this woman and all others from her mind, for she is not yet to the point in her devotions of praying for anyone else. Now is the time to turn inward, ask for light by which to see her own sins. She has memorized the lines from the prayer book given by her mother, in whose voice the words now sound:

Consider your conscience, and consider where and in what company you have been this day. Call to mind the sins committed against God, your neighbor, yourself.

She scours her soul for sins but there’s been so little chance of late, locked up in this room save for the reprieve of a silent, cold dinner that her contrition is brief. The sobs grow louder and she squeezes her eyes tight, moving on to her resolutions.

May she live a pious life in this world and be rewarded in the one to come. May she keep a closer watch over herself (though she can’t keep a much closer watch than alone). May she attend more diligently to her duties (which are, it seems, to eat, sleep, and be silent). May she correct her evil habits (a withering memory of misused fingers). Accept O Lord, this her evening sacrifice and may it rise up as incense in thine sight.

She beseeches the protection of her guardian angel, who appears as Major Strong in shining silver breastplate and arching wings. He reaches out to her with a shimmering gauntlet, and the hair on his arms glows in holy light; his face shows none of the sadness with which he’d left her at the stinking Biloxi docks, when he’d dabbed a handkerchief to her eyes and even as the Mississippians jeered he’d kissed her cheek, the scratch of moustache suddenly recalling her father, but somehow also destroying him.

Now her prayers are entirely her own possessions. She has finished the acts of invocation and may communicate directly her desires: to go away, even if she can’t leave this city and return to Cuba, to live perhaps with Major Strong (the idea itself so sweet she mustn’t linger on it long, for that path is serpentine and lined with snares of scrofulous thought) or Mrs. Butler, for whose gift, her book of Shakespeare, she gives thanks.

In so doing Marina drifts in time, retreats to the days after she was plucked from the sands and her body kept covered in rags soaked from pitchers poured by nurses whose English sounded like someone plucking untuned strings of German; days thereafter sloughing off great sheets of skin, her back a pained constellation of boils; so ashamed of her stench that she at first refused the invitation to the tent of the commanding general’s wife.

Our own little Miranda, the lady called her, and before Marina could correct her mistake Mrs. Butler was enumerating her own ­children—Paul, who is passed God-rest-his-soul, and dear Blanche who is about your age, and the second Paul, who is alive—circling back again to Marina who now found the chance to say that her name was not Miranda, missus. Yes, yes, the lady knew that, but didn’t she, dear girl, know Shakespeare’s Miranda? Her story had jogged the character from the lady’s memory, and of course Mrs. Butler had played the part of Miranda herself, on the stage of course, and oh she simply must read it. She had it here somewhere . . .

So she’d taken the gift down to the beach, reading, awestruck, inventing her own meanings for the archaisms until one of the nurses dragged her back to the tent for fear of worsening her boils. And in the weeks that followed she would recruit officers for players (not needing to recruit Mrs. Butler who assumed what role she chose and seconded as stage director), passing the book each to each and inflecting their best, selecting from the bunch Major Strong for the part of Francisco, ­Miranda’s savior. The happy diversion went so far and eventually drew such a crowd that when, one day, General Butler stumbled on the proceedings, rather than dismiss the troupe he sent away only the lieutenant who was playing Prospero and took the part for himself. There on the beach at Ship Island they enacted the scenes as duty and weather would permit, these sunburnt Northern men become Milanese, draped in scraps and quilts for costume, bending so naturally and gallantly to address their diminutive Miranda that she forgot their difference in size as high-voiced Mrs. Butler declaimed and directed and her husband lurched and smoldered, relishing the role of master conjuror.

She is praying for their souls when a glass shatters against the wall in the next room. Marina, eyes now open, brushes out the folds in her nightclothes on her way to throw open the door, steps out into the half light, and is swept up by a slave who has come to see what ails the mistress.

Mlle Pichon sits at her dressing table, arms folded at the foot of a mostly empty carafe. Marina tries not to look at her, favoring other sights. A stained patch of wallpaper, twists of glass scattered on the floor.

The slave is brushing up the glass when Mademoiselle calls Marina close. The smell of brandy hangs between them; the zamba’s mouth fights to stay stern when it would obviously rather bow into a downcast curl and tremble.

“When I was a girl,” says Mlle Pichon to her dressing table, “my mother would talk to me through the wall. If she heard me crying she would say, just as if she were in the room with me, ‘Inés, you stop that squalling. A girl of seven years doesn’t cry.’” She laughs, the strange smile-spread of her lips contrasts the look of pain in her eyes. “I half expected to hear her when”—she indicates the stain, the glass shards—“instead, what I get is you.”

Marina, closer, asks, “Why were you crying?”

Mademoiselle misunderstands the question, directed not at now but her past, shudders as she produces from some hidden place on her person a slip of paper, which she begins to hand to Marina only to snatch it back, hold it to her eyes, and begin to read aloud as though to prove she can.

It is a message from Uncle Willie, who has, my dearest love, made the decision to stake his life for the honor and glory of his adopted country; he has taken the train, departing with the troops in continuance of this great cause of right; he hopes that she will understand, and she may contact his factor for the remittance of her monthly needs with the additional sum directed, and he begs her patience, for the care of his dear niece, who he hopes will be a comfort in his absence—here a mumbled loveprattle—Wilhelm.

She considers putting a hand to Mademoiselle’s shoulder, but the woman’s glare banishes the thought.

“So,” says Mlle Pichon. “We are forced on one another. How perfect.”

“I—I’m sorry.”

“I’ll bet you are. Trapped here with wicked me? And what does your uncle think we will do with this fairy-tale arrangement? Light votives and send him packages?” She gives her teeth a vicious suck. “Bastard useless man.”

Marina feels no need to mount a false familial defense. Uncle Willie has been little more than a bouncing knee when he would visit Cuba and afternoon appearances here when he was not bringing over his gray cohorts to prod her for information. If it didn’t mean that she was trapped in the care of this creature who now takes up the carafe and begins to fill a glass that isn’t there, she would be almost glad. And she is glad that she is relieved of the ungainly responsibility to reply when Mademoiselle slams down the carafe and waves her off:

“Back to your room and your book. Ah!”—a crooked smile—“now that your friends are here perhaps they’ll give you another!”

In the room she must now admit is hers, Marina resumes her prayers to the tune of the woman’s unabated sorrow. She has prayed for her friends, for the souls of her parents, for her uncle even, and (in a moment of what she feels must be saintly beneficence) Mlle Inés Pichon. Next is the Angelus Domini, but the boy, Joseph, comes climbing up the rungs of entreaty she is sending to Heaven. She prays for him.

With this accomplished she begins the Domini, a prayer said in memory of the moment in which the Savior became a man. And God is only partially fleshed; sacrificial blood does not yet flow in the veins of the Lamb, when she hears the gunshot.