In the Country of Last Things (7 page)

Their house was on Circus Lane, deep inside a network of small alleys and dirt paths that wound through the heart
of the second census zone. This was the oldest section of the city, and I had been there only once or twice before. Pickings for scavengers were slim in this neighborhood, and I had always been nervous about getting lost in its mazelike streets. Most of the houses were made of wood, and this made for a number of curious effects. Instead of eroding bricks and crumbling stones, with their jagged heaps and dusty residues, things here seemed to lean and sag, to buckle under their own weight, to be twisting themselves slowly into the ground. If the other buildings were somehow flaking to bits, these buildings were withering, like old men who had lost their strength, arthritics who could no longer stand up. Many of the roofs had caved in, shingles had rotted away to the texture of sponge, and here and there you could see entire houses leaning in two opposite directions, standing precariously like giant parallelograms—so nearly on their last legs that one touch of the finger, one tiny breath, would send them crashing to the ground.

The building that Isabel lived in was made of brick, however. There were six floors with four small apartments on each, a dark staircase with worn, wobbling steps, and peeling paint on the walls. Ants and cockroaches moved about unmolested, and the whole place stank of turned food, unwashed clothes, and dust. But the building itself seemed reasonably solid, and I could only think of how lucky I was. Note how quickly things change for us. If someone had told me before I came here that this was where I would wind up living, I would not have believed it. But now I felt blessed, as though some great gift had been bestowed on me. Squalor and comfort are relative terms, after all. Just three or four months after coming to
the city, I was willing to accept this new home of mine without the slightest shudder.

Ferdinand did not make much noise when Isabel announced that I would be moving in with them. Tactically, I think she went about it in the right way. She did not ask his permission for me to stay there, she simply informed him that there were three people in the household now instead of two. Since Ferdinand had relinquished all practical decisions to his wife long ago, it would have been difficult for him to assert his authority in this one area without tacitly conceding that he should assume more responsibility in others. Nor did Isabel bring the question of God into it, as she had done with me. She gave a deadpan account of the facts, telling him how I had saved her, adding the where and the when, but with no flourishes or commentary. Ferdinand listened to her in silence, pretending not to pay attention, shooting a furtive glance at me every now and then, but mostly just staring off toward the window, acting as though none of this concerned him. When Isabel had finished, he seemed to consider it for a moment, then shrugged. He looked at me directly for the first time and said, “It’s too bad you went to all that trouble. The old bone bag would be better off dead.” Then, without waiting for me to answer, he withdrew to his chair in the corner of the room and went back to work on his tiny model ship.

Ferdinand was not as bad as I thought he would be, however, at least not in the beginning. An uncooperative presence, to be sure, but with none of the outright malice I was expecting. His fits of bad temper came in short, fractious bursts, but most of the time he said nothing, stubbornly refusing to talk to anyone, brooding in his corner like some
aberrant creature of ill will. Ferdinand was an ugly man, and there was nothing about him that made you forget his ugliness—no charm, no generosity, no redeeming grace. He was bone-thin and hunched, with a large hook nose and a half-bald head. The little hair he had left was frizzy and unkempt, sticking out furiously on all sides, and his skin had a sick man’s pallor—an unearthly white, made to seem even whiter because of the black hair that grew all over him—on his arms, his legs, and chest. Perpetually unshaven, dressed in rags, and never once with a pair of shoes on his feet, he looked like someone’s cartoon version of a beachcomber. It was almost as though his obsession with ships had led him to play out the role of a man marooned on a desert island. Or else it was the opposite. Already stranded, perhaps he had begun building ships as a sign of inner distress—as a secret call for rescue. But that did not mean he thought the call would be answered. Ferdinand was never going anywhere again, and he knew it. In one of his more affable moods, he once confessed to me that he had not set foot outside the apartment in over four years. “It’s all death out there,” he said, gesturing toward the window. “There are sharks in those waters, and whales that can swallow you whole. Hug to the shore is my advice, hug to the shore and send up as many smoke signals as you can.”

Isabel had not exaggerated Ferdinand’s talents, however. His ships were remarkable little pieces of engineering, stunningly crafted, ingeniously designed and put together, and as long as he was furnished with enough materials—scraps of wood and paper, glue, string, and an occasional bottle—he was too absorbed by his work to stir up much trouble in the house. I learned that the best way to get along with him was to pretend he wasn’t there. In the beginning, I went out
of my way to prove my peaceful intentions, but Ferdinand was so embattled, so thoroughly disgusted with himself and the world, that no good came of it. Kind words meant nothing to him, and more often than not he would turn them into threats. Once, for example, I made the mistake of admiring his ships out loud and suggesting that they would fetch a lot of money if he ever chose to sell them. But Ferdinand was outraged. He jumped up from his chair and started lurching around the room, waving his penknife in my face. “Sell my fleet!” he shouted. “Are you crazy? You’ll have to kill me first. I won’t part with a single one—not ever! It’s a mutiny, that’s what it is. An insurrection! One more word out of you, and you’ll walk the plank!”

His only other passion seemed to be catching the mice that lived in the walls of the house. We could hear them scampering around in there at night, gnawing away at whatever minuscule pickings they had found. The racket got so loud at times that it disrupted our sleep, but these were clever mice and not readily prone to capture. Ferdinand rigged up a small trap with wire mesh and wood, and each night he would dutifully set it with a piece of bait. The trap did not kill the mice. When they wandered in for the food, the door would shut behind them, and they would be locked inside the cage. This happened only once or twice a month, but on those mornings when Ferdinand woke up and discovered a mouse in there, he nearly went mad with happiness—hopping around the cage and clapping his hands, snorting boisterously in an adenoidal rush of laughter. He would pick up the mouse by the tail, and then, very methodically, roast it over the flames of the stove. It was a terrible thing to watch, with the mouse wriggling and squeaking for dear life, but Ferdinand would
just stand there, entirely engrossed in what he was doing, mumbling and cackling to himself about the joys of meat. A breakfast banquet for the captain, he would announce when the singeing was done, and then, chomp, chomp, slobbering with a demonic grin on his face, devour the creature fur and all, carefully spitting out the bones as he chewed. He would put the bones on the window sill to dry, and eventually they would be used as pieces for one of his ships—as masts or flagpoles or harpoons. Once, I remember, he took apart a set of mouse’s ribs and used them as oars for a galley ship. Another time, he used a mouse’s skull as a figurehead and attached it to the prow of a pirate schooner. It was a bright little piece of work, I have to admit, even if it disgusted me to look at it.

On days when the weather was good, Ferdinand would position his chair in front of the open window, lay his pillow on the sill, and sit there for hours on end, crouched forward, his chin in his hands, looking out at the street below. It was impossible to know what he was thinking, since he never uttered a word, but every now and then, say an hour or two after one of these vigils had ended, he would begin babbling in a ferocious voice, spewing out streams of belligerent nonsense. “Grind ’em all up,” he would blurt out. “Grind ’em up and scatter the dust. Pigs, every last one of them! Wobble me down, my fine-feathered foe, you’ll never get me here. Huff and puff, I’m safe where I am.” One non sequitur after another, rushing out of him like some poison that had accumulated in his blood. He would rant and rave like this for fifteen or twenty minutes, and then, abruptly, without any warning at all, he would fall silent again, as though the storm inside him had suddenly been calmed.

During the months I lived there, Ferdinand’s ships gradually
became smaller and smaller. From whiskey bottles and beer bottles, he worked his way down to bottles of cough syrup and test tubes, then down to empty vials of perfume, until at last he was constructing ships of almost microscopic proportions. The labor was inconceivable to me, and yet Ferdinand never seemed to tire of it. And the smaller the ship, the more attached to it he became. Once or twice, waking up in the morning a little earlier than usual, I actually saw Ferdinand sitting by the window and holding a ship in the air, playing with it like a six-year-old, whooshing it around, steering it through an imaginary ocean, and muttering to himself in several voices, as though acting out the parts in a game he had invented. Poor, stupid Ferdinand. “The smaller the better,” he said to me one night, bragging about his accomplishments as an artist. “Some day I’ll make a ship so small that no one can see it. Then you’ll know who you’re dealing with, my smart-ass little tramp. A ship so small that no one can see it! They’ll write a book about me, I’ll be so famous. Then you’ll see what’s what, my vicious little slut. You’ll never know what hit you. Ha, ha! you won’t even have a clue!”

We lived in one medium-sized room, about fifteen feet by twenty. There was a sink, a small camp stove, a table, two chairs—later a third—and a chamber pot in one corner, separated from the rest of the room by a flimsy sheet. Ferdinand and Isabel slept apart, each in a different corner, and I slept in a third. There were no beds, but with a blanket folded under me to cushion the floor, I was not uncomfortable. Compared to the months I had spent in the open, I was very comfortable.

My presence made things easier for Isabel, and for a time she seemed to regain some of her strength. She had been doing all the work herself—object hunting in the streets, trips to the Resurrection Agents, buying food at the municipal market, cooking dinner at home, emptying the slops in the morning—and at least now there was someone to share the burden with her. For the first few weeks, we did everything together. Looking back on it now, I would say those were the best days we had: the two of us out in the street before the sun was up, roaming through the quiet dawns, the deserted alleyways, the broad boulevards all around. It was spring then, the latter part of April, I think, and the weather was deceptively good, so good that you felt it would never rain again, that the cold and the wind had vanished forever. We would take only one cart with us, leaving the other one back at the house, and I would push it along slowly, moving at Isabel’s pace, waiting for her to get her bearings, to size up the prospects around us. Everything she had said about herself was true. She had an extraordinary talent for this kind of work, and even in her weakened state she was as good as anyone I had ever watched. At times I felt she was a demon, an out and out witch who found things by magic. I kept asking her to explain how she did it, but she was never able to say much. She would pause, think seriously for several moments, and then make some general comment about sticking to it or not giving up hope—in terms so vague that they were of no help to me at all. Whatever I finally learned from her came from watching, not listening, and I absorbed it by a kind of osmosis, in the same way you learn a new language. We would take off blindly, wandering more or less at random until Isabel had an intuition about where we should
look, and then I would go trotting off to the spot, leaving her behind to protect the cart. Considering the shortages in the streets at the time, our hauls were quite good, enough to keep us going in any case, and there was no question that we worked well together. We didn’t do much talking in the streets, however. That was a danger Isabel warned me against many times. Never think about anything, she said. Just melt into the street and pretend your body doesn’t exist. No musings; no sadness or happiness; no anything but the street, all empty inside, concentrating only on the next step you are about to take. Of all the advice she gave me, it was the one thing I ever understood.

Even with my help, however, and the many fewer miles she had to walk every day, Isabel’s strength began to fail her. Bit by bit, it came harder for her to manage the outdoors, to negotiate the long hours spent on her feet, and one morning, inevitably, she just couldn’t get up anymore, the pains in her legs were so bad, and I went out alone. And from that day on, I did all the work myself.

These are the facts, and one by one I am telling them to you. I took over the day-to-day affairs of the household. I was the one in charge, the one who did everything. I’m sure that will make you laugh. You remember how it used to be for me at home: the cook, the maid, the clean laundry folded and put in my bureau drawers every Friday. I never had to lift a finger. The whole world was given to me, and I never even questioned it: piano lessons, art lessons, summers by the lake in the country, trips abroad with my friends. Now I had become a drudge, the sole support of two people I would never even have met in my old life. Isabel, with her lunatic purity and goodness; Ferdinand, adrift in his coarse, demented angers. It was all so strange,
so improbable. But the fact was that Isabel had saved my life just as surely as I had saved hers, and it never occurred to me not to do what I could. From being a little waif they dragged in off the street, I became the exact measure that stood between them and total ruin. Without me, they would not have lasted ten days. I don’t mean to boast about what I did, but for the first time in my life there were people who depended on me, and I did not let them down.