Such was her recent distraction that she’d allowed three days of newspapers to accumulate on her sideboard, a dereliction only of what she owed herself, since no one remained whose conversation demanded a knowledge of the news. The Prussians were departed, and Nico. Her peers were dead. And the age of gripping public events was over. Once women had been allowed to exert their influence at the polls, the nation had been beset by eerie calm. Consider aeroplanes and the Great War and the influenza and the headlong rush to outlaw good times (booze, she meant) that had preceded this, the republic’s least interesting decade. And, as though to emphasize the point, Elephant Park, where until recently a variety of peoples had lived (mostly Germans, agreed, but they were literate, they spent some money now and then on a pretty object that had no use, didn’t they?), had been narcotized over the last ten years by an injection of the unwashed from her own home country. Consequently, the Germans, the Danes, the Croats, and the Magyars had been driven off. One-family houses were divided into threes and fours. The refuse in the streets, the crowds, the rickety children, and barnyard animals tied to mailboxes — she was not pleased. She was like a Jew who had transferred herself to an obscure island in the outer Venetian lagoon and found, to her amazement, once she had grown old, that all her coreligionists had been moved out of the city and into her garden.
The new people had no politics. When Plato had gone to Sicily, hoping to put his political ideas into practice, the locals had sold him into slavery. As far as the new people cared, the body politic included their blood relations and nobody else. Equally and oppositely depressing: The individual also included the blood relations. I was we. The notion that you might sacrifice the good of your sister for the good of the commune was absurd, likewise that you might eat a whole chicken by yourself. She used to be more like them, in her peasant days. But she used to be a wretch.
She was in the street wearing a scowl to keep would-be chatters at bay. Now, if she wanted solitude, why not stay at home? Because she did not want solitude, she wanted the life of the mind, which was best lived in the street. Politics, or the life of others as lived by oneself, was the mind’s natural subject. Conversation was its natural sport. And the dearth these days, which seemed permanent, of interlocutors made her want to spit on — on everybody, on her own shoes!
And the fog gradually thickened into a swarming drizzle under the gas lamps overhead and the girl could not be found.
Mrs. Marini had voted for the first time at age sixty, for Warren Gamaliel Harding and the rest of the Republican ballot, thank you, bearing dearly the memory of T.R., dead almost two years, we would not look upon his like again. Harding seemed okay. Being himself an Ohioan, it would have pressed her loyalty to reject him. Let’s leave Europe to its feckless wars, he implied. Let’s stay at home and grow our corn. “Hear! Hear!” she said. This from a man born in the tall-corn town of Corsica, Napoleonic in name only, between Mansfield and Columbus, so he must have had a sense of humor, too, to advocate such a platform. She pardoned his vote for the Vol stead Act, since he was one of tens of millions to have been swept away in the hysteria for temperance, the backward bacchanal, and she ignored Prohibition anyway. If she’d known they would be so boring, the twenties, she would have voted for Cox—
No, she wouldn’t have. What was she saying? She was determined to get to work finally, but her material was somewhere among the fruit carts, evading her.
“Or else Providence is hiding her from you,” said the voice of one of her dead who lived in the crevasse, “because she is a child.”
She didn’t understand why the Democratic party was allowed to exist; a war had been fought and half a million men killed to expose the Democrats, and still they were among us.
Finally she permitted herself a snoop down Eighteenth Street. But no light glowed in the Montaneros’ hut (formerly a stable), and she paced back up the hill.
That woman’s name was so common, the woman she’d smelled in the intersection, and her plight was so common, and the cut of her coat, and the syncopated bleating of her accent, that Mrs. Marini presumed insipidness in her every particular, which was always unfair, as Mrs. Marini’s profession never failed to remind her, checking her tendency to assume that no other houses enclosed so many mansions as hers did. The woman’s name was Giacoma. The file card had fallen into the bottom of the brain’s drawer, but, here, she’d found it: a syphilitic, from her husband’s dalliances; the last two children were stillborn and blind, respectively; from her adolescent years in Brazil, she had learned to sing sweetly mournful songs in Portuguese.
Where was her quarry, her lamb, her pot to put her gold in?
There she was.
See her? A girl flitting over a bridge of bowed planks that spanned the sewer trench. Lina waved wildly, as though she also had come into the street in search of someone and it was Mrs. Marini she hoped to find.
“Here I am!” Mrs. Marini called in an ecstasy of self-esteem.
“Narcissus,” said Nico’s voice. “Sun Queen.”
Not to be abject in concession to him, but a phrase was in order, something to redirect her feelings outward and focus her wits. She said aloud, but softly: “Make a fist and show me where your brains are.”
Lina waved again with her hat, vigorously, so that its pheasant feather was knocked askew.
Gray in her dowdy flannels. One misstep would send her ten feet down into the muck.
Here, kitty, kitty, beckoned the deep underneath, as the planks bounced.
Let her turn today to the happiness that all existing things share, dead or living. The chimney flues and the blinders on the dray horses, and the great pipes, wide enough to walk through, that were stacked in the avenue waiting to be buried, and she herself, a girl in the street, all shared the fate of existing in this time and place. She had waited at the door of the someone else she was sure to become for so long, like a dog under the porch while it snows. But this afternoon at last the past and the future coincided in the present moment. Her completion, which had lived behind this door from the beginning of beginnings, would at last, at last, impose itself, and the footfalls inside were audible and approached the door where she was waiting. The somebody else who she would become had eyes that would meet her eyes and claim Lina as her own and obliterate her at last. You, Lina would tell her once the door opened, have always been the only one — and now we have met: because Father has found someone to marry us.
Things were moving quickly now.
She was in the street, in search of Donna Costanza, who would help slow the things down and point to each one and explain it.
Along the sidewalk, the men talked closer to one another than the women because the brims of their hats didn’t get in the way, as hers did.
In the trench in the street, six men in coveralls were having their picture taken while they ate their working supper — though it was late and the light was poor; and the meat was stuck in their whiskers; and on the great timbers, which were like a parlor wall in the great trench where the pipes would go, they had tacked drawings of girls in the nude.
Boys in striped breeches showed their ribs through their thin shirts as they swung from the tree branches. It was too cold to go around without a coat, but the boys did as they pleased. They might swim in the creek bare-ass, daring her to watch. She didn’t watch anymore, openly from the bridge, with her legs dangling under the rail. Nowadays, she worked.