There Your Heart Lies by Mary Gordon

Author:Mary Gordon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-05-08T16:00:00+00:00

SPAIN, 1946

“WE’LL SPEAK ENGLISH,” the doctor says.

Strange, Marian thinks, strange to be spoken to in English. There is a dull pain in her leg, and she remembers now: her fall on the wet street, being carried somewhere on a stretcher, and she remembers thinking it odd that she is being carried on a stretcher, having carried so many herself. She’d been carried to the doctor’s office. This is the doctor, a woman, speaking English. With an accent she can’t quite place. Irish, maybe, but not like any Irish accent she has ever heard. Two odd things: a woman doctor speaking English, and here in this small town in Spain where she has been marooned, incapable of movement or decision, her brain a dirty frozen pool, or a bowl of filthy water left out somewhere and frozen through. Almost visible at the bottom: sediment, grit, the skeleton of dead leaves. For quite a while now, she has been someone she cannot recognize. There is no one whom she loves.

“Do you remember what happened?”

“The street was wet; I lost my footing. I believe I fell.”

“You fell and broke your leg. But the miracle is that nothing like this has happened before. How long have you been taking this drug?”

It’s happened to her before; it happens quite frequently. She puts it down to missing something in a language not her own. But the woman is speaking English, and her words still make no sense.

“I don’t take any drugs. My mother-in-law, who’s a pharmacist, as you know, gives me a tonic because she thinks I’m anemic. But that’s the only thing I take.”

“Your mother-in-law,” the doctor says, lighting a cigarette, the match striking the box with a contemptuous fury. “ ‘Head of bone, heart of stone.’ That’s what I called her when we were in school. I would say it in English behind her back. She didn’t know what I was saying. It drove her crazy. I suppose it was a little sadistic.”

“You know my mother-in-law?”

“Everyone in this town knows everyone. But especially, yes, I know your mother-in-law. She was not unintelligent, not uncourageous. Unusual for a middle-class girl to train as a pharmacist, although her father was a pharmacist. But then, my father was a doctor. But even as a girl, she was fanatical. Of course, in this country, to be fanatical is not unusual.”

The doctor laughs, and Marian notices her teeth: uneven, greyish, and yet not taking away from her attractiveness. This is a face you want to look at; you can’t help it. It has an aliveness that the faces she has known in Spain no longer have.

“What a relief it is, to be able to speak things aloud. I hardly know you. But I feel free to speak. Perhaps because, of course, I know something of your history. Perhaps because it has been so long since I could speak free of anxiety that what I said was being taken down, could be used against me somehow, by anyone, by someone I might least suspect.

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