The following morning, gray and drizzly, with a touch of chill, he woke to find Magali at the window, which stood half-open. She had on her favorite green dress and was looking out onto the street. He sat up, groggy, rubbing his eyes. The bedsprings squeaked loudly, but she gave no sign of having heard.
“Magali?” he said.
She ignored him. The rain quickened, drumming on the tin roof. Feeling the bite of the cold, Hota swung his legs onto the floor, grabbed his shirt from among the rumpled bedclothes and began to pull it over his head.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
Without turning, she said glumly, “You’ve given me a child.”
He paused, the shirt tangled about his neck, and started to ask how she could know such a thing, then remembered that she had knowledge inaccessible to him.
“A son,” she said dully. “I’m going to have a son.”
The idea of fathering children no longer figured into Hota’s plans and his immediate reaction was uneasiness over having to shoulder such a responsibility. He tugged the shirt down to cover his belly. “You don’t seem happy. Is it you don’t want a child?”
“It isn’t what I want that’s of moment.” She paused and then said, “The birth will be painful.”
Her attitude, so contrary to what he would have expected, provoked an odd reaction in him—he wondered how it would feel to be a father. “It might not be so bad,” he said. “I’ve known women to have easy births. At the end we’ll have our son and perhaps that’ll give…”
“He’s not your son,” she said. “You fathered him, but he will be Griaule’s son.”
The rain came harder yet and, amplified by the tin, filled the room with a kind of roaring, a din that made it difficult for Hota to think, to hear his own voice. “That’s impossible.”
Magali turned from the window. “Haven’t you heard a thing I’ve told you?”
“What have you told me that would explain this?”
She stared at him without expression. “Griaule is the eldest of all who live. Over the centuries, his soul has expanded with the growth of his body. How far it extends, I can’t say. Far beyond the valley, though. I know that much. I was flying above the sea when he drew me to him.” She dropped into the chair beside the window and rested her hands on her knees. “His soul encloses him like a bubble. For all I know that bubble has grown to enclose the entire world. But I’m certain you live inside its reach. You’ve lived inside it your entire life. Now he’s drawn you to him as well. It’s possible he caused the events that drove you from Port Chantay. That would be in keeping with what I understand of his character. With the deviousness and complexity of his mind.”
Hota felt the need to offer a denial, but could find no logical framework to support one.
“Don’t you see?” she went on. “Griaule desired to father a son. Since he couldn’t participate in the act of conception, he contrived a means by which he could father the child of his will. And for this purpose he sought out a man who embodied certain of his own qualities. Someone with a stolid temperament. With great strength and endurance. And great anger. A human equivalent of his nature who fit the shape of his design. Then he chose me to endure the birth.”
Rain slanted in through the window. Hota crossed the room and closed it. As he returned to the bed, he said, “You must have known this all along? Why didn’t you tell me?”
She clicked her tongue in annoyance. “I didn’t know all of it. I still don’t know it all. And it’s as I’ve said—these things that have happened to us, they weren’t my wish. Even if they were, I’m not like you, Hota. My thoughts are not like yours. My motives are not yours. You asked why I wasn’t happy? I’m never happy. My emotions…you couldn’t grasp them”
“You should have told me,” he said sullenly.
“It would have only upset you. There’s nothing you could have done.”
“Nevertheless, you lied to me. I don’t deserve to be kept in the dark about what’s going on.”
“I haven’t lied!” she said. “Have I withheld things from you? Yes. I did what I was compelled to do. But all the things I know, the things I don’t know, they may or may not be good for you. And that’s what you truly want to know, isn’t it? What’s going to happen to you? In the end all your questions will be answered and you’ll be pleased with that. That’s what I think. But I can’t be certain. That’s the problem, you see? Any answer I can give you is essentially a lie, except for ‘I don’t know.’”
Her response had the same disorienting effect as the rain—he believed her, but it was like believing in nothing, knowing nothing. He sat with his head down, dull and listless, looking at his fingers, wiggling them for a distraction. “You and me. What about you and me?”
“We’ll travel the road together and learn what fate has in store. That’s all I can tell you.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“What don’t you believe?”
“About your feelings,” he said. “I know you were happy last night. For a time, at least.”
She leaned toward him and spoke slowly, with exaggerated emphasis, as though to a child. “I lived in the side of a cliff. A sea cave. I was alone, yet I wanted for nothing. I was content with the world I knew.” She resettled in her chair. “Last night, that was…strange. Now it’s done. We’re past that turn of the road.”
She appeared to lose interest in the conversation, her eyes traveling across the boards. In the rainy light, her beauty was subdued, diminished. “Are you happy?” she asked after a minute.
“Maybe I was, a little.” He spotted his pants lying on the floor and stepped into them. “Why would Griaule do this? For what reason does he want a son?”
“I’ve no idea. Perhaps it’s just a game he’s playing. You can’t know Griaule’s intent. Some of his schemes play out over thousands of years. He’s unique, as unlike me as I am unlike you. No one can fathom what he intends.”
Of a sudden the rain let up and a weak sun broke through the overcast; the wind gusted and a distorted shadow of the window, pale panes and darker divisions, canted out of true, trembled on floor.
“I need food,” Magali said.
Though Hota held out some hope that their night together would be the beginning of intimacy, he soon recognized it to have been their peak. Thereafter the relationship settled back into one of functional disengagement. He brought her food, whatever she needed, and kept watch over her with devotional intensity. Their conversations grew less frequent, less far-ranging, as her belly swelled…and it swelled much more rapidly than would a typical pregnancy. Four weeks and she had the shape of a woman in late-term. She stayed in bed most of the day. Never again did they visit the tavern or walk out together in the town. Hota sat in a chair, brooding, or stood at the window and did the same. He became familiar with the window much in the way he had become familiar with Magali, noting all its detaiclass="underline" patches of greenish mold on the sill; a splintery centerpiece; areas of wood especially stained and swollen by dampness; rotted inches eaten away by infestation. Its gray dilapidation was, he thought, emblematic not only of the room, but of his life, which was itself a gray, dilapidated region, a space that contained and limited his spirit, stunting its growth.