The Living Days by Ananda Devi
Author:Ananda Devi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
Published: 2019-12-16T16:00:00+00:00
White light folded, sheathed about her, folded.
The new years walk, restoring
Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring
With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem
The time. Redeem
The unread vision in the higher dream
—T. S. ELIOT, “Ash Wednesday”
Mary’s welcome was enough to persuade him to come down.
His eyes were exactly the same as those in her nonexistent memory. Green and black, with that cheerful chaos that indicated he had come from the other side of the day. Anything that might matter to the living was, for him, simply the childishness of being. At first, Mary was scared to look at him, to see the path decomposition had carved through his flesh, but Howard was nothing more than a beggar fraying around the edges, certainly unwashed, but hardly disgusting.
When Cub left during the day, he came down from the attic. They had so many things to tell each other. She brightened at the thought that she finally had a companion capable of understanding her. Just when she’d lost all hope. He didn’t actually talk, but he was there: present. Not a dream, not a nightmare or a hallucination. He was, specifically, beyond all that, because life took on forms that nobody could have ever expected.
One day, Howard took her by the hand. He wanted to lead her through the streets of London. He wanted to show her what he loved about this city that had killed him. He had lived his final years like an animal, in total destitution, he said, defecating under the bridges or on top of the roofs. He pointed out the gaps along the road and the absences among the people. She could see clearly the holes that the dead left in the lives of the living. She certainly was the only one able to distinguish these grayish, melancholy forms, but she told herself that knowing what they were was a sign of permanence, that nobody ever truly left. The beggar whistled, happy in her presence: I’ll show you something to make you change your mind.
Change my mind about what? she asked, intrigued. About the need to live? Here, especially, where old age isolates us from an incurious world, since it has nothing to do with us? I don’t recognize these roads where I lived so long ago. Now I see both the empty and the full. The emptiness, for example, of the woman selling fake jewelry, each one for two pounds, whose face caked in orange makeup gets more wrinkled every day and who has a smoker’s voice, warm and rough. There’s a gray rectangle on the ground where she usually sits, and the wind blows colder there.
And farther on, the man hawking christening gowns, lace dresses billowing around absent bodies, pink-white-creamy babies, so fine that they look like drops of milk curdled by honey and bees. He’s no more there than she is. And the babies who were once in these gowns? Where are they? What has become of them? Those rounded cheeks, those eyes gleaming with their discoveries had to have been lost to history.
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