I received the order to return on a windy day and set out at breakneck speed. But the wind that day seemed secretly determined to blow against time, making humans, trains, and everything else move with agonizing slowness. I was the only one to realize this as the trip dragged out endlessly. When I reached the flooded house it was Mary who was waiting for me at the pier. She would not let me row and said that on the very day I had left, before the water was let out, there had been two accidents. First the boatman’s wife, Dotty, had turned up, asking Miss Margaret to take her back. She had been fired not only for dumping bread in the water but because she had been caught trying to seduce Hector one of the times he had visited the house early in the summer. Without a word, Miss Margaret had pushed her away and she had fallen into the water. Crying and dripping wet, she had left for good, taking her husband with her. Later that same evening, pulling on the cord with which she drew the dresser up to her bed (the furniture in her bedroom floated on inner tubes like the ones children swim in at the beach), Miss Margaret had spilled a bottle of liquor on a heater she used for warming some cosmetics and the dresser had caught fire. She had called over the phone for water, “as if there weren’t enough of it in the room or it weren’t the same water as in the rest of the house,” Mary said.
The morning after my return was bright and clear, and fresh plants had been brought in. But I was jealous of the changes: they meant Miss Margaret and I would not find our words and thoughts as we had left them under the branches.
After a few days she returned to her story. That night, as on other occasions, a plank had been laid across the water of the entrance hall. When I reached the foot of the stairs Miss Margaret signaled me to stop — and then to follow her. We went all the way around the lake on the narrow walk. Meantime, she was telling me that she had left the town in Italy thinking that water was the same everywhere in the world, but that it had not turned out that way, and more than once she had been forced to shut her eyes and plug her ears with her fingers in order to be with her own water. After a stop in Spain, where an architect had sold her the plans for a flooded house — she gave me no details — she had taken a ship home. The ship was overcrowded, and as soon as she lost sight of land she had realized the water of the ocean was not her water, there were too many unknown beings lurking in its depths. She went on to say there were people on board who spoke of shipwrecks and seemed to dread the water when they gazed into its immensity — which did not prevent them from drawing small amounts of it to fill a bathtub and delivering their naked bodies to it. They also enjoyed going down into the boiler room, where torturing flames made the trapped water writhe furiously. On days of rough seas Miss Margaret lay in her cabin with newspapers and magazines, following rows of letters with her eyes as if they were ant trails or watching a bit of water swish in a jug with a narrow neck. Here she interrupted her story and I noticed she was rocking like a boat. Several times we had been out of step, our bodies swaying in different directions, and I’d had to strain to catch her words, which seemed to blow past in uneven gusts. When we got back to the entrance hall she stopped at the plank, as if afraid of crossing over it, and asked me to fetch the boat. I had to row her around for quite a while before she let out her hoarse sigh and spoke again. Finally she told me she’d had a moment with her soul on the high seas. It happened when she was leaning over the rail, gazing into the quiet deep, which was like an endless skin only faintly disturbed by rippling muscles: she began to have crazy ideas, the kind that come to you in dreams. She imagined that she could walk on the water but was afraid a porpoise would surface, and that she would trip on it and really sink this time. Suddenly she became aware of the drops of sweet water that had been falling on the salty ocean from the sky for the past few seconds. Many of the drops were bunching together and landing on deck in a heavy downpour, battering the ship as if it were under attack. In a moment the whole deck was awash. Miss Margaret looked out at the ocean again: it was taking in the rain and swallowing it as naturally as an animal swallowing another animal. She had only a vague sense of what was happening, when suddenly she shook with laughter. It racked her body before it reached her face, spreading like an earthquake with no known cause. As if to justify it in some way, she said to herself: “It must be some little girl making a mistake — instead of raining on land, she’s raining on water.” For a moment she sensed how sweet it must be for the ocean to receive the rain, but on her way back down to her cabin, balancing her huge body, she remembered her vision of water swallowing water and felt certain the girl was going toward her death. Then the sweetness became a heavy sadness and she went straight to bed for a long nap. At this point Miss Margaret ended her story for the night and ordered me back to my room.
The voice with which she summoned me over the phone the next morning sounded otherworldly. She said she was inviting me to a ceremony in honor of the water: it would take place that evening. Just before dark I heard the sound of pudding bowls and the quick patter of Mary’s steps and my fears were confirmed: I would have to attend Miss Margaret’s “wake.” She was waiting for me at the foot of the stairs. As the strokes of my oars backed us into the first room, I realized I had been hearing a murmur of water that now grew more intense. There was a sideboard in that room. The ripples spread by the boat made it bob up and down on its inner tubes, clinking glasses and rattling the chains that attached it to the wall. Across the room from it floated a sort of raft. It was rounded and held a table with chairs pulled up to it, inside a rail, like a gathering of deaf-mutes nodding slightly as the boat lapped by. My oars struck a doorframe on either side and we were in the bedroom. And there I saw it: water raining on water. All around the walls, except where there was furniture — the outsized wardrobe, the bed and the dresser — hung gushing showerheads of every shape and color, fed by thin rubber hoses that extended in garlands from a large glass container resembling a Turkish pipe suspended like a lamp from the ceiling. Through the grottolike atmosphere we pulled up to the bed, which stood fairly high out of the water on long glass legs. Miss Margaret took off her shoes and told me to do the same. She clambered up on the huge bed, facing the wall in back of it, where there was an equally huge picture of a bearded white goat standing on its hind legs. She grasped the picture, which swung open like a door, revealing a bathroom. Stepping on the mound of pillows, she hoisted herself through the opening, and returned a moment later carrying two round pudding bowls with candles stuck in them. She ordered me to set the bowls in the water and said there were more coming. As I got up on the bed next to her, I fell on my face. Although I straightened up at once, I had already smelled her perfume in the bedclothes. I was setting the bowls down over the edge of the bed as she handed them to me when suddenly she said: “Not like that, please — it reminds me of a wake” (and I realized Mary had been wrong). There were twenty-eight of them. She knelt on the bed, reached for the phone, which was on one of the night tables, and gave the order for the water to be cut off. In the tomblike silence that followed we began to light the candles, hanging over the foot of the bed, and I was careful not to get in her way. When we were nearly done she dropped the matchbox, which landed in one of the bowls. Leaving me where I was, she rolled over to strike the gong on the other night table. There was also a lamp on that table — the only source of light in the room. She had picked up the stick for sounding the gong when she changed her mind, left the stick by the lamp and half rose to shut the door that was a picture of a goat. Settling back down at the head of the bed, she began to rearrange the pillows, motioning me to strike the gong. Her legs took up so much space that I had to crawl on all fours around the edge of the bed to get to it, which wasn’t easy. I don’t know why, but I was afraid of falling into the water, although it was only two feet deep. I struck the gong once, and she indicated that this was enough. As I backed up along the bed — there was no room to turn around — I saw Miss Margaret lying face up under the picture of the goat, her eyes wide open, waiting. The pudding bowls also lay still in the water, like small boats resting at harbor before a storm. Almost as soon as the motors came on, the water started to roll and churn, and then Miss Margaret heaved herself off her pillows and plopped down on the foot of the bed next to me again. The current lashed by us, knocking the bowls together, rebounded off the far wall and came raging back at full speed to sweep the bowls away. One after another they overturned, the candles smoking a bit as they went out. I looked questioningly at Miss Margaret, but she was expecting my look and shielded her eyes from me with one hand. The bowls were sinking fast in the waves, swirling across the entrance hall and into the courtyard. As the candles fizzled out there were fewer reflections, and the spectacle lost its glow. When it seemed to be over, Miss Margaret, leaning on the elbow of the same arm that had provided the hand to shield her eyes, stuck out her other hand to release a last bowl caught under the bed. She watched it ride a swell for a second, but then it also went down. Slowly, she propped herself halfway up on her hands, as if to kneel or sit on her heels. With hanging head, her double chin sunk in the folds of her throat, she stared at the water like a little girl who has lost a doll. The motors were still running and she seemed more haggard and desolate every minute. Without waiting for instructions, I pulled in the boat, which was tied to a foot of the bed. I had barely climbed in and freed the rope when the current washed me away, a lot faster than I had anticipated. As it spun me around in the door to the entrance hall I looked back and saw Miss Margaret’s eyes riveted on me, as if I were one more pudding bowl still holding out the promise of some secret revelation. Now I was in the courtyard, going round and round the island. I sat in Miss Margaret’s armchair, letting the current take me where it pleased. I remembered the many times we had circled the island in the early days when Miss Margaret had seemed a different person to me, and fast as the current was, my thoughts began to drag me down into a bleak review of my life. I was fated to know only one side of people, and that only for a short time, like some absent-minded traveler passing through, with no idea of what he was seeing or where he was going. This time I had not even been able to figure out why I had been summoned by Miss Margaret to listen to her story without ever saying a word: all I knew for sure was that I would never really see into her. I went on circling the island with these thoughts spinning in my mind until the motors were turned off and Mary asked me for the boat so she could rescue the pudding bowls, which were going around in circles with me. I explained to her that there was no wake, that Miss Margaret simply liked to watch the bowls go down in flames. . and I didn’t know what else to say.