Lucia's Masks Read online

  LUCIA’S MASKS

  LUCIA’S MASKS

  WENDY MACINTYRE

  ©Wendy MacIntyre, 2013

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Thistledown Press Ltd.

  118 - 20th Street West

  Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, S7M 0W6

  www.thistledownpress.com

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  MacIntyre, Wendy, 1947-, author

  Lucia’s masks / Wendy MacIntyre.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-927068-44-1 (pbk.).– ISBN 978-1-927068-54-0 (html).

  ISBN 978-1-927068-78-6 (pdf)

  I. Title.

  PS8575.I68L92 2013 C813’.54 C2013-903935-X

  C2013-903936-8

  Cover photograph, The Masked Players, by Teresa Yeh Photography/Shutterstock

  Cover and book design by Jackie Forrie

  Printed and bound in Canada

  “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts” from THE PALM AT THE END OF THE MIND by Wallace Stevens, edited by Holly Stevens, copyright © 1967, 1969, 1971 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House, Inc. for permission.

  Thistledown Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Canada

  Council for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, and the Government of

  Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing program.

  For John Stairs

  Contents

  Chapter One: Lucia

  Chapter Two: The Boy

  Chapter Three: The Six

  Chapter Four: Their Feet

  Chapter Five: Lucia Finds a House

  Chapter Six: The Unveiling of Lola

  Chapter Seven: Which Circle of Hell?

  Chapter Eight: Bird Girl Spies a Rat

  Chapter Nine: The Cry

  Chapter Ten: Candace Sees a Bird Fall

  Chapter Eleven: Miracles

  Chapter Twelve: Chandelier Heeds Snake's Counsel Again

  Chapter Thirteen: Harry Finds a Theatre Box

  Chapter Fourteen: Cravings

  Chapter Fifteen: Lucia Consoles a Sinner

  Chapter Sixteen: The Outpacer's Confession

  Chapter Seventeen: Bird Girl Sees Eros at Work

  Chapter Eighteen: Candace Is Vanquished

  Chapter Nineteen: Chandelier Sees Snake's Tongue

  Chapter Twenty: Harry Meditates on the Ice

  Chapter Twenty-One: Bird Girl and the Dance

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Lucia

  MY DELIVERANCE CAME THE DAY THE vandals smashed my potter’s wheel. I arrived home just before dawn, the acrid stench of bleach still in my nostrils. The door to my room was hanging askew from its hinges. My fingers trembled as I drew out my knife and entered the small, sky-lit space that had once been my sanctuary but was now violated and fouled.

  I felt a sharp twist in my belly when I saw my wheel in pieces on the floor. It looked as if the interlopers had used a sledge hammer on it. I immediately knelt and groped under the bed, and cried out in relief to find the poet’s life mask still intact in its box where I return it each evening before leaving for work. I bowed my head and thanked the household spirits of my ancestors that the vandals had not discovered the box. Was it the Chemical Head Children who had broken in? Whoever the intruders were, they had also pissed and shat upon my bed, as if the destruction of my wheel was not outrage enough for them.

  For years now, it is only my beloved potter’s wheel that has kept me here. It was simply too heavy an object to carry away with me if I decided at last to flee the City and escape through the forest to the north.

  After my night’s labour, scouring urinals, toilet bowls, and sinks in the washrooms of bleak office towers, my reward was to return home to my moist clay and my wheel. In my box-like room with its cracked skylight I felt completely free and secure through the early hours of morning, communing with the clay. It is a quick and responsive medium, with a binding truth of its own. A potter’s hands and mind must be attentive — to the shaping powers of the imagination, and to the fluid form that thrives upon the wheel.

  “What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth,” Keats said. As I worked, I kept his life mask by me. I would glance up from my work and draw strength and calm from the noble forehead, the closed and dreaming eyes, the high cheekbones and the wide, tender mouth. If I wished, I could reach out and touch the shape of his features and the set of his expression, just as the young John Keats looked on a particular afternoon nearly three hundred years ago.

  Now all my dear sustaining refuge was gone. The vandals had defiled it.

  For some minutes I sat on the floor beside the shattered wheel, stunned and grieving. The realization came to me then that this desecration was my deliverance. I could have no surer sign. I had gone on too long, beset with anxiety that I would become like so many others in the City, either rancorous and sadistic like the worst of the street thugs, or numbed and dead of mind like the sky-screen addicts. I was becoming more and more terrified that the evil I witnessed each day would ultimately turn me into stone; that I would no longer understand or care what goodness is. Sometimes when I looked at the faces of the most depraved among us, I saw the head of Medusa — the one painted by Caravaggio, where her mouth yawns blackly. It is that hole of a mouth that transfixes you first. Only then do you see that her hair is a nest of writhing snakes.

  With my wheel smashed, there was nothing to hold me back. I could discover for myself if there really was a place a thousand and more miles to the north where the EYE’s surveillance did not reach, and where it was possible to practise a decent human kindness and serve one’s craft or art freely.

  I was seven years old when the EYE staged its coup. It happened on the cusp of night’s stillest hour, a rupture that divided their time from everything we had known before. I was hurled from my bed and watched in panic the jagged light that pierced the curtains in time with the vast booming outside. My childish mind pictured a phalanx of one-eyed giants advancing, the entrails of their prey still hot and steaming in their mouths. The drums they beat in that ceaseless booming were made of the skins of all the lovely animals of the world. Soon these ogres would tear open our building and strip me of my skin and my sister and my parents of theirs. The giants would not care that we were still alive while they flayed us.

  I saw the walls of my bedroom tremble in that ghastly light. Something was pummelling the soft tissue inside my head and chest. I had the urge to pee and vomit all at once, like a baby. That was how the EYE first imprinted fear in our bodies. They set a taper to our nerves to teach us what an unexcelled governance tool terror is. When the taper flared red-hot in our arms and legs, in our bellies and brains, we saw by its lurid light the crack the EYE had opened in all that once seemed solid and secure. We saw the mailed fist, without a face behind it, and how that fist could seize you by the neck and snap it and then toss your head to the dogs or worse.

  It has taken me years to be able to articulate what happened that night when they burned their fear-brand deep into my core. These thoughts I keep within the confines of my skull. Concealment is
self-preservation because the EYE’s surveillance cameras are everywhere, and most of them cunningly hidden. Were I even to let the words “EYE equals terror” play upon my lips, they would spy me out. I would likely have my eyes and organs removed while I was still alive and semi-conscious and they were in optimum condition for sale. The remnants would be ground for fertilizer. The EYE is above all a “functional regime,” as they never tire of telling us.

  Do I exaggerate the regime’s dedication to the “economic imperative?” Certainly, one hears rumours of such punishments, probably spread by the regime’s own propaganda department. The EYE likes to keep our fear fresh.

  I learned that first night a simple, decent way to make my terror smaller. In a splinter of silence between the explosions, I heard my sister wail. She was crouching on her bed and her tiny fingers plucked at her hair. Her rosebud lips had disappeared. In that part of her face there was only a little pink and white cavity from which issued the dreadful sound that roused me from myself. I ran to comfort her and gathered her in my arms as best I could to take her to our parents’ bedroom. Thus my own fear dwindled by some small degree. Mama and Papa flew in at that instant, still pulling on their dressing gowns. They looked so unlike themselves, with their white faces and wild eyes, that for an instant I was afraid of this strange man and woman who snatched us up bodily. We fled down the two flights to the building’s basement, Papa carrying me and Mama clutching Sophia to her breast. Under us the wooden stairs buckled. Papa gripped me in his arms so hard that it hurt. I focused on his familiar heat and the smell of his sweat and tried not to whimper.

  In the cellar I recognized other families from our building. They sat holding hands, with their backs braced against the grey concrete wall. Papa guided us into a corner behind the big antique machine with its tubular tentacles that reached into snug holes in the wall. He had told me this machine was an “archaism” that belonged to a time when the world had a season called winter. I sat between my parents, clutching Papa’s hand in my right and Mama’s in my left. Mama had tucked Sophia’s head inside the folds of her dressing gown so that my sister’s eyes and ears were covered. I could see she was sucking her thumb. I strove to be brave. I wanted to ask for reassurance that it would soon be over; that everything would be all right. But it was impossible for anyone to hear me in any case.

  When the silence fell upon us at last, I felt like someone had slapped my ears and made them tingle. Then came a great rush of relief and almost a joy, but undercut by wariness. I thought that if I had a mirror, I would see my ears had taken on the sharp triangular shape of a cat’s when it is put on high alert. It was as well I stayed wary, because a siren lacerated the quiet. Sophia wailed. Then silence again. We sat waiting and on edge. Every face I could see looked wearied and strained. Among the adults were those who plugged their ears with their fingers.

  “Is it the all-clear signal?” someone asked.

  “We should wait,” Papa said. “Let us wait five minutes.” But already he was on his feet.

  The voice we heard next was a man’s, hugely amplified, with a buzz of static.

  “The EYE is triumphant,” the voice proclaimed, a statement that made no sense to me whatsoever.

  “We have made our country safe for our citizens,” the voice declared. “Come out of your homes and look up at the night-sky.”

  All the adults were standing now, but no one moved.

  “What if it is a trick?” asked Mrs. McPhilmey, who was a nurse and a particular friend of Mama’s.

  “Come out, citizens, and look up at the night sky.” I heard the insistence in the command.

  “I will go first,” Papa said, “and come back to you with a report.”

  “No, Enzo,” Mama told him. “Not alone.”

  And so we went up the stairs together as a family to meet whatever this new world had to offer. When we got outside, I was amazed to see every building intact. Through all those explosions, not a single stone was dislodged or window broken. The street was lined with people, all in their nightwear, so that a strange intimacy was forced upon us.

  “Look up, citizens,” the voice commanded. The blast of sound came from behind me. I turned to see a black loudspeaker the size of my face, covered in a dense mesh and mounted on the light standard. It was right outside our apartment building. Why had I never seen it before? I spotted several more at regular intervals down the length of the street. At a distance they looked nasty, like a smear of mould you wanted to clean away if only you could reach that high.

  “Look up.”

  I was holding Papa’s hand close as I tilted my chin upward, following his example. I saw how he had tightened his lips, so that his mouth looked like a crease in a sheet of white paper. I was frightened, but also excited. Because some of the people on the street wore clown-like pyjamas and fluffy slippers with pompoms on the toes, they looked like participants in a silly game whose rules were yet to be revealed. But it was fear that was the sharper of my two emotions, and as I stood beside my father, head thrown back and throat exposed, I pictured the rockets they might rain down on us or the liquid fire poured from great vats.

  In fact, it was fire, or the illusion of fire, that we saw pricked out against the sky. Because the night was starless, the form they cast above us had no competition. Doubtless, they had planned it so. What we saw was a massive eye, its outline composed of countless dots of scarlet light. The eye was lidless. The centre of the iris was studded with a multi-rayed star. Under the image, an invisible hand began to write in a fluid script. I caught my breath, waiting to see what would emerge, what words the unseen writer would spell out.

  At last, it was all there: a full sentence composed of reddest fire to match the outlined lidless eye. “The EYE will keep you safe.”

  We all stood staring up, children and adults both, caught by the crude power of the ugly, unsettling organ of vision arcing over us. It pinned us there, confused and small, and I shivered as I saw its scarlet darken.

  “The EYE will keep you safe,” the loudspeaker boomed. Then twice more: “The EYE will keep you safe.”

  When the amplified voice spoke again, we were instructed to return to our homes and watch the broadcast that would “explain the glorious liberation brought into effect on this historic night.” Full attention to this broadcast was mandatory for all citizens. Parents were to explain the essence of the new regime change to their children based on the guide the EYE would supply.

  “What is it, Papa?” I asked. “What is the EYE with capital letters?”

  “Hush, Lucia,” Mama told me. Papa did not carry me back upstairs. I wondered if he was angry with me. I had hoped I could sit with them to watch the broadcast that would tell us what had happened. Mama insisted I go to bed.

  I listened hard in case I could make out any of the words of the broadcast myself. But all I heard was Papa talking in an angry tone I had never heard him use before: “There were no terrorists,” he said. “They have staged this cataclysm themselves so that they could set themselves up as our saviours.”

  “But who are they, Enzo? Who is behind the EYE?”

  “I don’t know, Fiammetta. I don’t know.”

  How sad he sounded. I wanted to go to him, but worried they would be annoyed with me. So I lay still, pondering what he had said to Mama. Of all the words he had spoken, it was “cataclysm” that hooked in my brain. I dared myself to try its harsh syllables silently upon my tongue. Although I did not understand its meaning, I sensed the steeliness grinding beneath the skin of the word; a sound like something snapped in half in the dark that could never be made whole again. No matter how often I repeated the syllables, the word remained a coarse and misshapen thing in my mouth that would not be softened. It seemed to fit all that had happened that night: the terror set alight and branded deep within me, and the sight of the lidless eye scored into the sky.

  My body told me the EYE’s promise to keep us safe was a lie. When I pictured the grim red image, the soles of my feet
turned icy cold and the chill crept up my legs and lodged in my belly. I had felt this sick, numbed powerlessness once before — when Mama accidentally sliced through the base of her thumb with the sharpest of her kitchen knives and I saw the meaty texture of the flesh exposed and the white bone that lay beneath.

  In school that week we began to learn by rote the “truths” by which the triumphant EYE would govern us. Our political instructor was Corporal Sweetman. He was a stocky, sparse-haired man in tight-fitting black uniform. Spittle flew from his mouth in a wide arc as he talked. Repeat after me, he began: “Pursuit of the economic imperative — which we hold above all other values — is why the EYE has taken charge, and consolidated the machinery of government under one strong arm.” Eleven times we tried, our tongues encumbered and faltering, until at last he gave up and grimaced at us in disgust.

  He handed each of us a pamphlet with a khaki cover bearing the official insignia of the lidless eye. Inside, printed in bold black type, were the questions and answers that contained the precious revelations of the new regime. Corporal Sweetman warned us that unless we got these truths perfectly to heart, he would have no choice but to discipline us with his rod. He showed us this tool, which dangled from his belt alongside the heavy gleaming baton we were soon to recognize as a prime identifier of the EYE’s officials. The rod looked harmless enough, slim as a pen and with a pleasing silvery sheen.

  Corporal Sweetman then asked if anyone in the class had ever been hurt by an electric shock. The trusting victim who put up his hand was Charles McPhilmey, whose lavish cap of auburn curls and milk-white skin seemed a marvel to me. Charles had his mother’s good and giving nature and a rare beauty that made people like to look at him and smile.

  So we were frozen in disbelief when Corporal Sweetman bore down upon him, seizing him by his bright hair and jerking his head back. The corporal thrust the silvery stick at the boy’s chest. Charles’s cry hooked into my brain, just like the cutting “cataclysm.” This time though, the hook went deeper, tearing open a crevice into which a dreadful darkness rushed. For a moment it was as if I had gone blind. The interior of my skull went black except for two words, “Why?” and “Unfair” blazoned in an orange-red light. They ricocheted until I felt bruised inside by their battering.