Lucia's Masks Read online

  Candace was still curled like a ball, her arms protecting her head. “It’s all right now,” I said. I touched her shoulder as gently as I could.

  I helped her stand and tried to interpose my body between her and the dog. She insisted on looking at it. “Ugh!” she said.

  “The Outpacer stopped it...” I began.

  “Yes,” she said. “I appreciate that.”

  He made her a silent bow.

  “But we must still consider your offer,” she told him. “It was obviously a sick dog after all.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Surely she realized the hooded man had put himself at some risk?

  “We will speak with you again tomorrow.” She addressed him in her best regal manner. I wanted badly to chide her for being so ungrateful and arrogant with him. But I knew from experience how pointless my efforts would be.

  At the end of the day, we all sat together over a frugal meal of gruel mixed with the berries I had gathered along the way.

  “Have any of you considered,” Candace asked, “that the dog might have been his; that he set it upon me deliberately so that he could stage a rescue?”

  “For God’s sake!” Harry exclaimed.

  Bird Girl managed to say politely what the rest of us were thinking: “That’s really unlikely, don’t you think, Candace?”

  “Unlikely perhaps. But not impossible. However, I’ll go along with the rest of you,” she conceded. “But it is with misgivings. We may yet all live to rue the day we agreed to this.”

  I saw Harry roll his eyes. Then Bird Girl did the same in mimicry. I tried not to laugh.

  And so we became six.

  There is a great comfort in knowing you have an invisible protector and I found my night-watch and foraging missions the easier for it. Although I stayed as vigilantly alert as ever, I was not quite as tense as I had been. It lightened my own load to think that he was somewhere nearby keeping watch, and pacing out his invisible cordon in his sandals of rubber and rope.

  I recalled how well cared for and shapely his feet were. Not at all like mine with their many calluses and disfiguring bunions. I wondered then about the others, and whether our feet were as distinctive as our respective characters.

  Chapter Four

  Their Feet

  IN VENICE, HARRY HAD BEEN DRAWN each day to the window of a shop that specialized in exquisitely wrought terracotta mouldings and small-scale sculpture. His eye and soul delighted in the detail and imaginative span of the work. There were complete bestiaries, dominated by the Lion of Saint Mark, his admonishing human features shown full-face and in profile. He was painted the red sienna of his desert home, then outlined in indigo. Roman matrons, in headdresses rayed like a medieval sun, looked down on prospective purchasers with a bemused serenity. Children gambolled with lambs in recessed tablets that might have been openings to paradise.

  But it was one particular moulded frieze, small enough to fit in his pocket, that captured Harry’s full attention. Set against a background of sunburst yellow were two pairs of naked human feet, depicted in the act of walking. And what feet they were. Flawless, palest ivory, sturdy yet elegant. They were the feet of the young, as yet unblighted by corns or calluses, set upon some brisk and happy purpose.

  In part, it was the surprise of the subject that charmed him. Who would have chosen to make feet the subject of an artwork? A part of the body so often despised, except, he supposed, by fetishists. Harry could not understand fetishists. And there was nothing at all unsavoury about these feet. They held a promise, he thought, an assurance that the act of walking could still be an innocent and splendid undertaking, and not a desecration.

  He considered the word “footfall” and shuddered at its heaviness and the fateful shadows it cast. He was thinking, as always, of Antarctica, and of the damage tourists had done by their tread on her glistening floor. The perilous stuff they had brought in on the soles of their boots: bacteria, microbes, alien plant life. Thankfully, tourism anywhere in the continent had at last been banned by an international protocol. Harry had always made a point of purifying himself before he stepped out of his plane. The clothes he donned to step into the Antarctic air were sterilized, as was his footwear.

  To set foot down and do no harm. To make a pilgrimage. To bring humanity to a better pass by the simple act of walking, barefoot and sprightly. This was the testament Harry read in the pocket-sized tablet in the Venice shop window.

  For years afterwards, he had deeply regretted not buying the terracotta. He was not a man given to material possessions, and it would have grieved him sorely had he ever broken the tablet in his travels. But eventually, the fact he did not own the moulding of those innocent and blessed feet seemed to him both good and fitting. For in some deep and holy well of his mind, the sculpted feet became purer and more blessed. They were the feet of young gods, robust, primed by an energy that was boundless, fed by the very veins of the cosmos.

  Now, as he leans upon his stick, dismayed by the jangling of nerve pain that makes a devil dance in his spine, it is the image of those god-feet that drives him on. Toward sundown, he often has to grip the boy’s shoulder to steady himself. The boy is willing. The boy is habitually at his side. Harry speculates that beneath those bizarre windings of silk strips that serve Chandelier as shoes are feet innocent as young doves. Whereas his own are daily more cracked and brittle and grey, except for his toenails, which have the consistency of dense horn and have grown so long they are talon-like, tinged the brownish-yellow of bad teeth. As he struggles to stand erect each day-break, his joints resistant as rusted metal, he pictures himself as an aged heron, his first steps of the day tentative and rigid. He sees his own stick-thin figure superimposed against the sky: a hieroglyph of a heron-man, a silhouette as frail as hope making its way across the horizon.

  Harry is wrong about Chandelier’s feet. Underneath the windings of silk, the blood has begun to seep from blisters the size of pigeon eggs. It was Miriam who had wound the silk round his feet. But she had no leather or rubber with which to make him protective soles. Chandelier’s fragile footwear had started to tatter a little during his trials in the City. Like Candace, he yearns for sturdy, supple boots and soft cotton socks. It is one of the few wishes he and Candace have in common.

  There had once been a time — in her city life — when Candace took an unbridled pleasure in studying her feet’s shapely perfection. She put great store in a daily recitation of her own best qualities and physical attributes. The ego needed healthy food to flourish. So, in the cloistered safety of her bedroom, she would begin each day with a series of luxurious stretches that culminated in the right foot, and then the left, held aloft. The gauzy light of dawn was an ideal medium for viewing the rosy flesh of toes that had — she told herself — the pleasing plumpness of grapes newly plucked. And so indeed she envisioned herself, in her morning’s mental exercises. She was a plant, vigorous and fresh. She emerged from her morning shower and saw her own mirror image gleaming, as if just wetted by the freshest rain. She rejoiced in her own cleanliness. When she dried her feet, she patted a triangle of towelling between her toes. How soft and vulnerable were those little valleys of flesh. And how open to the inexorable creeping of dirt and fungal infections. Candace vowed she would never let such nastiness plague her.

  Yet now, after nearly two weeks’ solid march, in socks that have begun to whiff and laced boots just a little too tight and certainly too hot, Candace feels an infernal itch pricking at the balls of her feet and creeping up between her toes. So maddening is the itch that she longs to strip her feet and sit and scratch with animal abandon. Like a stinking baboon, she thinks, wrinkling her toes up and down, which brings no relief whatsoever. Then she banishes the baboon image, and raises up instead, stone by stone, the vision of a farmhouse they might find along their way, with inner whitewashed walls, and clothes drawers smelling of lavender, where paired socks snuggle, thick and comforting and clean.

  The Outpacer is cursed with
a high instep. Before his self-exile, it was a flaw he had easily accommodated with shoes of superlative leather moulded to his feet by a craftsman of Italian extraction. Antonio was that rarest of beings, an artisan who lived for his work. He studied a customer’s foot with the same grave and tender regard that a new mother gave her naked infant. The shoes he wrought were a perfect marriage of elegance and comfort. Never in shoes made by Antonio did the Outpacer suffer the crippling pain that would often fell him after a game of squash. For Antonio refused to work with unyielding rubber and flimsy canvas.

  To alleviate any cramp in his arches, the Outpacer had been able to call on the services of an expert and wickedly imaginative masseuse. She would oil his aching insteps, smoothing and kneading the flesh much as he imagined some primitive woman might knead bread. And if she happened to arouse, as she often did, his slumbering desire, then he would raise his finger in that silent signal the two of them had come to understand. In silence, she unbuttoned her blouse. Her breasts were miraculous globes. They were golden and flawless, like the magical fruit that adorned trees in some long-submerged tale read to him in childhood. There was the added wonder that the round, soft breasts fit perfectly the concavity of his insteps, as if his foot had served as their original mould. She would raise his feet and, holding his ankles in her firm grip, initiate a contact he could only describe as sublime. For she did not merely hold his naked feet against her naked chest. She shook, or rather, she vibrated. He was not certain exactly what she did. For at that point in the session, his eyes were shut in a bliss nothing could compromise.

  The friction of her erect nipples against that vulnerable stretch of his sole caused him a spasm — and then another and another — that slid deliciously between pleasure and pain. He wanted to gorge himself on the sensation, and at the same time, retreat. “Leave off,” a small child’s voice called inside him. What memory was it the masseuse stirred? Of being tickled by a loving hand, of being led to the very edge of torment? And yet trusting. The innocent trust which renders the sensual pure.

  There is no ready ease now for the Outpacer’s aching arches. In preparation for his flight from the City, he had taken from his wardrobe the crudest footwear he possessed. These are rudimentary sandals, made of strips of discarded rubber tires. He had bought them in his other life in one of the small states that make up the world’s Pleasure Zone. For those who could afford tourist jaunts to the Zone, the sex was cheap and of infinite variety, the beaches relatively unpolluted and the sun safe, provided one took extreme caution. He had purchased the sandals from a beach vendor who wandered the strand with his wares strung on a rope looped around his neck. The vendor, the Outpacer recalled, had very few teeth and those he did possess were quite black. The man’s gums looked sore and inflamed. Was that why he had bought the sandals? Did he feel pity in those days, he wondered. Most likely he had bought them because he saw them as an oddity. They are undoubtedly ugly. But they are serviceable and will endure. As he himself will endure until somehow he has carried out his penance. Of what that penance consists, other than laborious walking and his protective service offered up to this motley band, the Outpacer is unsure. He is counting on a revelation. Is that not what they call such conclusions? When he has paid in full for his sin, he will surely have the revelation.

  Like the Outpacer, Bird Girl has an unusually high instep. During one of her least wholesome assignments, she had twisted her ankle severely, posing in the ludicrous platform shoes once favoured by Venetian prostitutes. “Turn a little to your left,” the photographer had said, “and thrust your pelvis forward.” He had meant her bush, but he was uncharacteristically modest compared with most of the creeps in that line of business. Which was why, perhaps, she had later lain down behind the tacky props with him. Gratis. But the awkward position in the cruelly heavy shoes, coupled with his weight on her (for he was not a small man) had wrenched her ankle so badly she could not walk for a week. Odd how she had not noticed until she was out of the studio. It was as if those sessions anaesthetized her.

  Her ankle had never entirely healed. Towards the end of a day’s march, she notices its weakness, despite the solid support of her high-top lace-ups. What she yearns for when she imagines their finding an abandoned house on their way north is a medicine cabinet stocked with the basics — most especially a bottle of liniment, reeking, hot as mustard, good for humans and for horses. Had she not after all, felt like a Clydesdale in those foolish platforms?

  Lucia’s problem is bunions. They were a family curse. Her mother and her mother’s sisters had all suffered from this deformity. Like them, Lucia had been afflicted when she was still quite young. She blamed ill-fitting shoes (she never had the money needed for good footwear) and the fact she spent hours labouring as a cleaner on her feet, or for variation, on her knees. Apartment blocks and industrial towers were her nemesis. She had a fear of elevators, based not so much on claustrophobia as on who or what might lurk in them. A favourite sport of the embittered and deranged was to spring out of the dark and jab passersby with infected hypodermic needles. Lucia knew of one woman who had died after such an attack in an elevator.

  So in her work she trudged up and down the metal stairs, bearing bucket, mop and broom, and a satchel filled with polishing cloths and cleaners. She definitely felt safer clanging her way up stairways but it did her feet no good. Peeling off her shoes and socks at the end of her night shift, she looked aghast at the absurd bulges that ruined her feet, at least superficially. Bunions were undoubtedly ugly but, since she could afford no remedy, Lucia determined to learn to appreciate her feet’s transformed shape.

  She began, as she often did, with a plaster cast. Once she had her mould she was able to create her own foot of clay. As an artifact, her foot seemed less repulsive. She could discern an energy, a resilience, a compelling asymmetry. For a time, she slept with the clay foot on her bedside table. When she woke she would sit up and study its form, until it came fully to inhabit her mind. In this way she learned to be comfortable with the change that time, work, and poverty had wrought in her body.

  The day the interlopers came and smashed her potter’s wheel, they had also used their heavy instrument on the clay foot, which lay in shards upon the floor. In her new life on the road, she reflected every morning on how lucky she was that in their frenzied haste, the vandals had not looked under the bed and discovered the box where she kept the poet’s life mask wrapped in a fine merino shawl that had once belonged to her Aunt Nidia.

  Lucia is not the first woman to fall in love with a long-dead English poet, nor will she be the last. When she grows weary, and her feet pain her badly, she envisions his dreaming mouth, recalls the holiness of his heart’s affections, and keeps on.

  Chapter Five

  Lucia Finds a House

  LAST NIGHT I HAD ANOTHER OF my Rat-Man dreams. I hope I didn’t cry out, disturbing the others. In the dream, the monster’s fanged jaw came so near my face I could feel its fetid breath on my cheek, and feared my skin would turn ulcerous. I was in caught in a frigid terror, waiting for the jab of the Rat-Man’s poisoned syringe and the agonizing cramps in my bowel, belly, and muscles that would follow. I woke with the smell of ripe sweat in my armpits. I was clutching my midriff, terrified I was hemorrhaging.

  Then I realized the dream-claw I had felt pressing on my throat was in fact thirst. That awareness shook me properly awake, back into my world of duty and service. Our water supply has dwindled to a few drops each in our personal flagons. If I do not find some soon we will all be in danger of muscle spasms and delirium. It distressed me how dizzy I felt when I stood up. If I was already affected by my body’s craving for water, how must the others be feeling?

  I decided to risk drinking the last of my personal supply, which was barely enough to wet my mouth and make my throat contract in longing for more.

  Everyone in the group is supposed to be constantly on the lookout for safe food and water. But the principal foraging duty has devolved on me. Despite m
y willingness to serve, there are times when this responsibility weighs upon me. The two demons who so often invade my mind are already buzzing. These are the ones who mock my laboured breathing when I have run for miles and found nothing. I picture them as blackened skeletons. Starvation and Thirst. In their most extreme form — when they have achieved their ultimate desire — they unite in a marriage that is Death.

  I do not tell any of the others about my demons. I know that silence and forbearance are prerequisites of the service I owe them. But I did not anticipate when I first set out from the City that the lives of five other people would depend on my ability to sniff out potable water.

  I heard Candace’s voice then and quietly spoke the wish I make every morning, “Gracious Maker of all forms, give me the strength to endure Candace.” I have given up trying to put an end to the perturbing images that take hold of me whenever Candace deliberately plies her cheery organizational skills. There are times I cannot help but envision cloying Candace trussed up in a tree and blessedly gagged. Or chirping Candace thrust down a well whose lid is then firmly secured.

  It is not that I wish the woman any real harm. I simply wish her silent.

  It still amazes me that Candace seems incapable of enjoying the profundity of silence. She must always be filling it with little verbal goads and the platitudes she has in such abundance. Each morning we are subjected to her tedious exuberance. “Another brand-new day,” she brays on waking. “Rise up, rise up, companions!” Her smile fills the bottom half of her face. Candace has a particularly large mouth, which I sometimes think must contain more than the usual number of teeth.