The Cannibal Heart Read online

  The main rooms of the house faced the sea, but at the back there was a huge kitchen where Carmelita did the cooking and the Romas ate all their meals and spent most of their leisure time. To the north was the L-wing, two rooms and bath, now unoccupied. This wing was subtly different from the rest of the house, but it wasn’t until now, when Mr. Roma parked the jeep outside the kitchen door, that Evelyn realized why.

  “That’s funny,” she said. “I didn’t notice it before.”

  “What?”

  “The windows remind me of a jail.”

  Mr. Roma smiled and said they did, at that, though he volunteered no explanation of the fine wire mesh that unobtrusively covered the windows.

  Evelyn managed to look wispy but obstinate. “Why would anyone put windows like that in a house?”

  “Because of Billy. Mrs. Wakefield was afraid that Billy might break a window and hurt himself.”

  “She must be one of these over-protective mothers.”

  “Must be.” Mr. Roma honked the horn to summon Carmelita to help carry in the groceries.

  “I’ll take some of the things in,” Evelyn said.

  “Oh, no, thank you. Carmelita always helps. Carmelita is very strong.”

  In response to the horn, Carmelita came out onto the back porch. She was a fat stubborn woman with fierce dark eyes, like Luisa’s. She wore loose huaraches on her feet, and her head was wrapped in a red silk scarf. Luisa insisted that her mother be stylish, and she had taught her how to do her hair up in pin curls. Carmelita wanted to please, and so she did her hair up in bobby pins once a week and tied a scarf around it. There, for the rest of the week the scarf and the bobby pins remained intact. It was Camelita’s way of obliging Luisa without taking too much trouble about it. No one could say she was not stylish, with all her pin curls.

  In spite of her weight Carmelita had a proud willowy walk, and she carried her head high, in great disdain. The truth was that she was frightened of people who couldn’t speak her language; her neck got quite stiff with fright sometimes, but she never told anyone.

  “Carmelita is as strong as a horse,” Mr. Roma said with pride. “Aren’t you? Eh?”

  Carmelita flashed him a brief impatient smile, and, lifting two of the milk cans, strode back into the kitchen. Mr. Roma followed her in with the larger box of groceries. While Evelyn picked up the books from the back seat, she could hear the two of them talking in staccato Spanish. A minute later Mr. Roma came out again. He had put on his spectacles, the pair that Carmelita had chosen herself in the dollar store in Marsalupe.

  He looked at Evelyn over the top of the spectacles. “I have had a letter. Mrs. Wakefield is coming today or tomorrow.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “She will not bother you. She said to tell you that.”

  “We’ll be glad to have her,” Evelyn said truthfully. “Is she bringing her little boy with her?”

  “No”—Mr. Roma took off his hat and rubbed the deep red wound across his forehead where the hat had been squeezed down tight to foil the wind—“the little boy is dead.”

  Later, when everything was put away, the paper bags folded, and the pieces of string wound on a twist of paper to save for a rainy day, Mr. Roma settled down in the platform rocker beside the kitchen window and read the letter aloud, translating to Carmelita as he went along.

  It was dated Monday, June 14, three days earlier than the postmark, as if Mrs. Wakefield had hesitated about sending it once it was written.

  “Dear Mr. Roma: I thought I’d better enlarge on my previous note. When I returned and found Mr. Hawkins had rented the house, I was rather upset. But what’s done is done,

  and I guess it’s just as well to get some income out of it while I’m waiting to sell. It distresses me to think that so much of my stuff should be lying around the house in the way of these people who probably have their own pictures and drapes, etc., to use . . .”

  (“They haven’t,” Carmelita said shortly. “They’ve got nothing but books. Books and clothes.”

  “She doesn’t know that.”)

  “. . . I am driving up on Saturday or Sunday. Mr. Hawkins tells me I should make my own inventory of the contents of the house. It seems like an awful bother, but I must come, in any case, to pick up some of the very personal things I left behind, the trunk of toys and clothes in Billy’s room, and the camellia tree in the tub (if it’s still alive after this terrible year), and things like my records, and the music in the piano bench . . .”

  (“All marches,” Carmelita said. “All fast quick marches.”)

  Mr. Roma nodded. He knew by heart all the marches that Mrs. Wakefield had played on the piano. She always played them good and loud, while Billy sat on the floor beside her, moving head and arms in a queer helpless way as if he wanted to keep time.

  “. . . This inventory business may take me a few days, or perhaps a week. If these people don’t mind me sleeping in Billy’s old room, I can eat my meals with you and Carmelita. It will be good to see you both again, though painful, too. We’ve been through so much together. Perhaps all deep friendships have been watered by tears, ours more than most—John’s and yours and Carmelita’s—Billy was the only one of us who never cried . . .”

  (Carmelita’s lower lip began to tremble and she turned and wiped her eyes with the hem of her apron.)

  “. . . I didn’t intend to tell you this in my letter, but I suppose it makes no difference how I tell it. Billy is dead. He died three weeks ago quite suddenly. He was nine years and twenty-eight days old. I know he is in better hands than mine.

  Janet Wakefield”

  For a long time Mr. Roma sat with the letter in his hand staring out of the window, while Carmelita wept into her apron and shuffled back and forth across the kitchen, up and down its length.

  “I had to burn the camellia, there was nothing left of it but sticks,” Mr. Roma said at last. “She will be disappointed.”

  The camellia had died, not suddenly, but with a slow sure finality. The tired buds dropped, shriveled before they opened, and the leaves turned black and fell, one by one.

  3

  It was one of Jessie’s new characteristics that when she was frightened she no longer

  ran to her mother or father to be comforted, she comforted herself. If she was badly frightened she shut herself up in her room and sobbed into her pillow. If she was only half-frightened she went into her mother’s room and dressed up in her mother’s clothes. Traces of tears were covered up with rouge, and over her own small mouth she painted a voluptuous and sophisticated pair of lips.

  When Evelyn went upstairs she found her parading in the hall, wearing a pink satin nightgown and green high-heeled sandals.

  “That’s my best nightgown,” Evelyn said.

  “I’m not hurting it.”

  “It’s dragging on the floor. The hem is dirty already. See?”

  “It’s good clean dirt,” Jessie protested. “Not like tar or paint or anything.”

  “Well, I think you’d better change anyway, and wash your face while you’re at it.”

  “But I haven’t even had time to see myself yet. I want to see if I look eighteen.”

  “Well, come on then. We’ll both see.”

  She led the way into Jessie’s room, with Jessie, voluntarily crippled by the high heels, flopping and shuffling along behind her.

  In the door of Jessie’s closet was a full-length mirror.

  “Do I look eighteen?”

  “Not quite.”

  “Seventeen?”

  “Just about seventeen, I guess.”

  “Older than Luisa anyway,” Jessie said in bitter triumph.

  She held up her arms while Evelyn pulled off the satin nightgown, revealing the soiled cotton playsuit underneath.

  Jessie began to brush the twigs out of her hair. All her movements w
ere quick and vigorous, like Mark’s, and she was beginning to look more like Mark every day. In the past year her face had lost its round babyish contours and her nose seemed larger. It was no longer an indeterminate button, it had a definite shape and character, like Mark’s nose in miniature.

  “When I grow up,” Jessie said thoughtfully, “I’m going to boss Luisa around and tell her lies.”

  “We won’t be here when you’re grown up.”

  “I can always come back. I’ll get married and make my husband bring me back.”

  Evelyn smiled, a little anxiously. “Why should you want to tell lies to anyone?”

  “Because.”

  Jessie put down the brush and began to rub off her lipstick with a piece of tissue. She didn’t rub very hard. There was always the faint chance that her mother would let her leave a trace of it on. Jessie didn’t know why this large mature mouth was important to her, but it was. She felt better with it on, more capable of dealing with Luisa and the secrets in the woods.

  “Do you believe in devils?”

  Evelyn shook her head briskly. “Of course not.”

  “Neither do I,” Jessie said, without conviction.

  “You’d better use some soap. Who told you about devils?”

  “No one.”

  “Was it Luisa?”

  Mute and stubborn, Jessie fixed her gaze on a fly sitting on the mirror cleaning its legs.

  “You didn’t answer my question, Jessie.”

  “You ask so many questions. I can’t answer everything. I’m not a genius.”

  Evelyn let out a sigh of exasperation. “You don’t have to be a genius to answer yes or no.”

  Jessie moved her head so that the fly on the mirror seemed to be sitting interestingly on her left eye. Then she tried the fly on her nose and her right eye and the middle of her mouth.

  “You’re getting so obstinate,” Evelyn said. “I can’t understand it. If Luisa frightened you I want to know about it, so I can make her stop. After all, she’s only fifteen, she’s got very little more sense than you have.”

  Mark came in from the hall. He had been reading in the sun and he wore his khaki shorts and a towel around his shoulders where the skin was beginning to peel. He was a tall, decisive man, with handsome but slightly irregular features, and an air of controlled impatience. Though he was thirty-eight, he looked younger, partly because he wore a crew cut, a reminder of the days he’d spent in the Navy during the war.

  “What’s up now?” he said. “Are you two girls arguing again?”

  Jessie gave him a brief cold glance. She didn’t like her father to go around the house in shorts because he had hair on his chest which looked silky but felt like wire. To Jessie this hair was rather mysterious and secret and should be kept covered up, except when her father went in swimming. Luisa said that lots of men had hair on their chests, and that it was a sign. She wouldn’t tell Jessie what it was a sign of, but Jessie knew from Luisa’s sudden gust of giggling that it was something little girls weren’t supposed to discuss.

  “I wasn’t arguing,” she said with a scowl. “I was just keeping a secret.”

  “Lord, another one.” Mark rubbed his eyes and yawned. “Get the books, Evelyn?”

  “Some. Not the ones you asked for. Marsalupe is hardly the most literate me­tropolis west of the Mississippi. You’ll save time by wiring for them.”

  Still scowling, Jessie explored with her teeth the hangnail on her right thumb. She had been aware for some time now that as soon as her father came into the room there was a subtle shift of interest, away from herself. It seemed that this shift was Evelyn’s fault; when Mark was around Evelyn focused her eyes on him, steadily and intensely, as if he had just come back from a long journey and was leaving again at any moment. Jessie, left with mere sidelong glances, felt neglected. To draw Evelyn’s eyes back to herself again, she kicked the leg of the vanity, not too hard.

  “Stop that,” Evelyn said. “Honestly, angel, I’ve told you—the furniture isn’t ours.”

  “It’s Luisa’s, so I don’t care.”

  “No, it’s not Luisa’s, either. Mark, you tell her.”

  “Tell her what?”

  “Not to kick the furniture.”

  “Okay. Do not kick the furniture,” Mark said obligingly. “Kick Luisa, if you have to kick.”

  “Mark, for heaven’s sake, don’t say things like that to her.”

  “Damn it, I mean it. That girl’s driving me loco. She haunts me, she creeps out from behind trees, she . . .”

  “Maybe she has a crush on you.”

  “I’m as old as her father.”

  “Even so.”

  The shift of attention again; the invisible string that bound Mark and Evelyn, that Jessie could tangle but not break.

  “She’d kick me back,” Jessie said, feeling around for the string, tugging at it subtly. “Hard, too. Oh, I just hate Luisa!”

  “Why?” Mark asked.

  “I can’t tell. Luisa said not to tell.”

  “Come on, baby.”

  Jessie was silent a moment. “She said there were devils in the woods. Under the boards of the swimming pool.”

  Mark’s quick frown was in Evelyn’s direction. “That girl’s getting to be a damned nuisance. You’ll have to talk to her.”

  “I already have.”

  “Then you weren’t firm enough.”

  “I tried to be,” Evelyn said, looking baffled. She hadn’t been firm, of course, but she had tried, several times and at several different levels, to make friends with Luisa. But the girl was unresponsive and Evelyn had found it impossible to talk to her. Sometimes, racing down to the beach behind Jessie to dig for clams at low tide, Luisa seemed to be a child, as wild and free as the cormorants that lived on the face of the cliff. But when she was doing her tasks, dusting or helping her mother in the kitchen, or collecting the eggs from the chicken pen, she looked as old and shrewd as Carmelita herself. Luisa’s life seemed to be a dance before mirrors, all of which were more or less distorted. No one could see the real Luisa through these mirrors, and Luisa herself could not see out.

  “You didn’t see any devils, did you?” Evelyn said.

  “I heard them.”

  “What nonsense! Come with Mark and me and we’ll show you what nonsense it is.”

  “I’d rather—stay here.” She saw that her mother had turned quite pale, so that the freckles on the bridge of her nose and across her cheekbones stood out like brown crumbs on a white tablecloth.

  “Now listen, Jessie. Do you want to know the real reason why the pool was boarded up? It was because the lady who used to live here was afraid her little boy might fall in. See, they couldn’t spare any water to put in the pool, and you can take a pretty bad tumble into a dry swimming pool.”

  “What was the little boy’s name?”

  “Billy. Billy Wakefield.”

  Jessie nodded. Now that the little boy had such a real-sounding name, it was very pos­sible that he was a real boy, not a once-there-was boy. This real boy was given to falling from places and into places, just like Jessie herself, so the story about the swimming pool sounded quite plausible.

  “I never believed there were devils,” she said contemptuously. “I ran away for fun to scare Luisa.”

  Mark raised his thick straight eyebrows in a half-amused way. “Even so, I think we’ll settle this business once and for all. Come on, Jess. We’ll go and get Luisa and investigate the pool.”

  “She won’t come.”

  “She’ll come if I have to drag her by the hair.”

  Jessie giggled at this delightful vision—Luisa being dragged through the woods by her long crackly hair, screaming piteously. Luisa bereft of her magic powers. Luisa unbewitched, cut down to girl-size again.

  Walking down the steps between her father and
her mother, Jessie felt wonderfully brave.

  “I forgot to tell you, Jess,” Mark said. “We’re having company today or tomorrow.”

  “Company with children?”

  “No children, no. It’s a grown-up lady called Mrs. Wakefield.”

  “That’s the little boy’s name. Why isn’t she going to bring him with her?”

  “I don’t know,” Mark said, after a slight hesitation.

  Jessie let out a squeal of anticipation.

  Company, even if it was only another grown-up lady, was always exciting. It meant someone new to talk to without interruption, and a new pair of eyes to marvel at her hoard of treasures—the doll igloo she was making out of abalone shells, her new friend, James the gander who could make fearful noises, the double swing Mr. Roma had hung from the pepper tree, and, best of all, the baby starfish she had found yesterday in a tide pool. The starfish was no bigger than a silver dollar, and Jessie kept it in a bowl of sea water in her room and fed it everything she could think of that a starfish might like.

  “When is she coming?”

  “We don’t know exactly.”

  “I’ll show her my starfish and I’ll take her down to see . . .”

  “Well, don’t make a nuisance of yourself,” Mark said, with a little warning glance. “And don’t talk her head off. She’s—not feeling very well.”

  “Has she got nerves like you?”

  “That’s right.”

  They found Luisa in a corner of the kitchen reading a movie magazine and sucking an orange. She kept her gaze fixed on the magazine, deliberately ignoring their presence, until Mark spoke:

  “We’re going to take a little walk in the wood. We’d like you to come along.”

  Luisa’s eyes narrowed with suspicion, and she shook her head, with the orange still fastened to her mouth like a huge leech.

  “I’d like to see these ghosts or devils of yours, Luisa.”

  Luisa opened her mouth and the orange dropped into her lap. “I didn’t do a thing to her,” she said, with a black look at Jessie. “I didn’t do a single thing.”

  “Come along, anyway.”