Women in Their Beds: Thirty-Five Stories by Gina Berriault

Author:Gina Berriault [Berriault, Gina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Short Stories (Single Author), Literary
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 1996-09-30T23:00:00+00:00

At four the following afternoon, the hour of his appointment, Klipspringer, in high, anticipatory spirits, pulled the rope to the side of a small, carven door and set a large bell to clanging above his head. The street on which the taxi had left him was narrow, full of stones and ruts. A manservant, an Indian, admitted him, and Klipspringer entered a tiled hallway whose opposite end opened into a small courtyard struck with sunlight. On the straight-back chairs in the hallway several Indian women waited, wrapped in brown and black rebozos, barefoot, one with a child in her lap.

He waited for the doctora on a bench in the courtyard and was certain that the woman whose simple a d benevolent household this was would not fail to respond to his plea. He began a conversation with the manservant, and since the servant was attending to the luxuriant plants that edged the courtyard, watering them with a hose and picking off beetles, Klipspringer described for him the garden of the hotel. He knew the place, the servant said. The doctora’s husband, the servant went amiably on, had collected many plants on long trips up into the mountains and into the jungles, accompanied by the doctora who took care of sick Indians. Klipspringer, at this unfolding, was struck by the conjecture that the doctora’s husband was Kruper, whose avocation explained the man’s firsthand knowledge of the Indians and the country’s varied terrain. A great, unbounded desire to find Kruper was now in possession of Klipspringer. If his search had begun from curiosity alone, it had become a matter of immeasurably more than that, and at this point he was convinced that Kruper was in one of the rooms that faced the courtyard, perhaps even inspecting him from behind a curtain, and that this was the arcade, shading the windows, under which their picture was to be taken together.

Quick of step and apologetic for her delay, the doctora sat down beside him on the bench. She was once a comely woman; her large, dark eyes were evidence enough. He was confused by her, attracted by her remaining beauty and rebuffed by her own unconcern with it. She was untidy, her hair in a straggling knot and a spot or two of some tincture on her blouse.

“Your husband is a botanist?” he asked.

“He is dead,” she said.

“Was he Kruper?” he cried.

“No, he was not Kruper, he was an English botanist,” she assured him, and Klipspringer was both relieved and surprised at his error.

Over the phone the doctora had recognized his name; although she had read none of his novels, she subscribed, she had told him, to several periodicals from the States and had heard of him. But she did not, now, reveal anything about Kruper. Her answers were elusive of Klipspringer’s questions. He saw that she regarded him as she would a patient, both respectful of his person and ruthless with his ailment, and under her influence he was convinced that an ailment had brought him here.

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