In the hands of another

The sallow withered skin of her forearm replaced the rosier tones of yesterday.

Her bloodshot eyes pierced the icy air as Paul looked blankly ahead. She was crying for Paul, but he was shedding the tears.

Cornelia had no fear, and

as her hand softly cupped his face he grabbed awkwardly at her cheek. His nails caught in her hair

struggling to capture a life that was spent.

Her nails were dull and lifeless, edged in mauve.

Paul and Cornelia knew the end was near,

but each left their world in the solace of knowing that their eyes had spoken.

A Dog’s Life

The R word

the dog and the cigarette

cuban cricket

Cornelia in Cuba

Cornelia lay snug and cosy, curved cocoon-like on her right side with the soft rays of her bedside light revealing the small words printed on the yellowed pages of Guy de Maupassant’s,  ‘A Woman’s Life’.   It was 11.50 pm and the day was 12 July 2010.

 As she lay there, drifting between sleep and reading about the traumas of French provincial life in the late 19^th century, the coloured image of a small, brown and white dog, lying curved in a similar position to the one in which she now lay, kept recurring.  The dog was sleeping, warm in the dirt and a cigarette lay beside its mouth.

Having just returned from the poor quarters of Havana, through Trinidad and Santiago de Cuba to Baracoa on the east coast of Cuba, Cornelia had begun the tedious task of sorting through her digital images. 

 Black and white street scenes of bare-footed children playing soccer on the pot-holed tarred surfaces they call roads, falling buildings housing  flaking signs of the ‘revolution’, old chevvies and cigar-mouthed older citizens waiting to have their photo taken, just for a few pesos, enough for a meal and another cigar.  She had quickly chosen these photos to upload on facebook, immediately, for instant self gratification.  There were similar coloured images to be printed and sent to her less technologically-savvy family.

 But she was plagued by the image of the dog that had popped onto her screen.   The dog was a murky chestnut colour, with dirty white patches.  Its eyes were closed, mostly, with sticky studs of yellow mucous in each corner.  The edges of the dog’s down-turned ears looked as if they had been pin-pricked or torn and were not completely covered in hair.    The dog was lying, solo, in a shallow grave of dirt beside a busy road.  No one was near the dog.  No one was playing with the dog.   The disgarded end of a cigarette, still burning, lay beside the dog’s motionless left hind paw.  There was the odour of death drifting into the air, but I did not feel as if the coffin had been nailed. 

 Cornelia thought, if only that dog could talk…

She remembered pulling away from her friends,  bending low to talk to the dog.   She did not touch the canine and did not want to scare it.   She spoke in gentle words and the dog lazily lifted its head in the direction of her voice.  The dog, not inanimate, slowly opened its eyes, but with difficulty as they were still held together by the sticky mucous.  Cornelia could not remember what she said to the dog, but knew her words were comforting.  The dog replied silently, in kind, by sinking back into its repose.  Escape from reality?  No choice?  No voice?

 Cornelia stayed kneeling beside the dog and was rewarded by the slight upward movement of the dog’s tail.  A silent but physical response, absolute and immediate communication, which made her wonder if a voice needed sound?

 Why did she take this photo?  Why was she worried about a dirty Cuban dog?  Did the position of the cigarette have any significance?  Why did she take a coloured image?  Was the dog sick?  Did the dog have an owner?  Did the dog have any friends or family, canine or human?  Why didn’t the dog talk to her?  Didn’t the dog have a voice?  Her brain screamed in frustration.

 Cornelia was having trouble sleeping as she tried to put the image of the dog out of her mind.  Too many questions,  too much torment.  She turned to the next page of Maupassant’s book and continued reading:

 “… the priest went up to the group of children to see what was interesting them so much.  It was the bitch Mirza, giving birth to a litter… five puppies were crawling round their mother who was licking them gently, lying on her side, still in great pain.  As the priest bent down to look, the mother in agony tensed her body and a sixth pup appeared.  All the children clapped at this innocent game, as they would at apples falling off a tree.

 The priest stood rooted to the spot;   then in a fit of wild rage he raised his great umbrella and brought it down on the heads of the children with all his force.  The children scattered and ran away as fast as they could, and he suddenly found himself facing the newly made mother, who tried to get up;  but he did not give her time to rise to her feet, before completely losing control he began to beat her.  Being on a chain she could not escape and groaned distressingly, as she struggled under the hail of blows.  His umbrella broke and with bare hands he threw himself on the dog and trampled on her madly, pounding and crushing her.  This made her give birth to a last pup, which was squeezed out of her by his grip.  With a furious stamp of his heel he finished off the bleeding disembowelled body, which was still quivering surrounded by the new-born puppies, whimpering and blind, which were crawling about already feeling for her teats…”

 Cornelia sat bolt upright and violently disgorged the contents of her dinner over Maupassant’s powerful and vivid description of human cruelty deluged on Mirza.  How could a person, let alone a person of the church, act like this?   Why couldn’t Mirza shout and call for help?  Why had the children run away and left Mirza silently yelling to save her life, and those of her new-born pups?

The Jagged Window

The Window

Trees through the window

Paul at the window

Grey skys above the window

Cornelia at her window

Spider on the window

Cornelia placed the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle into the jagged space – finally the shattered window became whole.   How many times had she played with those pieces, juggled them round, fudged the corners so they’d fit into place and give her declining years some certainty?   Sitting in a slouched huddle, she slowly closed her eyes, her shoulders drooped and her withered hands rested on her fawn tracksuit pants.

It was a Friday afternoon and the small window pane was covered in dust – the patterns resembling the lace shawl Cornelia used to wear on her frequent evening strolls through Central Park.  The clouds were a deep grey – slightly sinister in character, a reflection of figures from her past, casting their evil shadows through the speckled glass.

 “I wish the lower right hand corner was a little dirtier though, because then I couldn’t see the spider who goes for daily walks up out of his crack, along the sticky silky threads to the broken tangles of his web to sun himself and exercise on the pebbly railing.  Maybe that’s why the crows sit there?” she mused.

 Time was meaningless to Cornelia now, her life congealed into a small rectangular room.  The inmates at the Hostel were friendly enough, rarely hostile, yet how little she had in common with anyone living there.

 The chair was wooden, and the back thatched.  The nurse had curled a dirty old cream smelly towel behind her back, small respite for the lumbar ache that was now constant.   Cornelia sat glued to the chair, her misty eyes searching for memories of her former years. 

 Paul sat holding her vein-streaked hand, gently stroking the soft brown skin.  He held her translucent hand to his cheek, careful not to scratch the surface of her tissue-thin skin with the stubble of his beard.

 The vista through the glass was all grey – pale pasty grey cirrus clouds hanging mid way over the buildings on the southern fringe of Hyde Park, the buildings’ fading facades tinged by biscuit, champagne, pistachio, cream, cinnamon, mocca and chestnut window sills.  Other structural bits and pieces hung off the decrepit buildings, each one distinct but not separate.  A rusty crane, supported by a tilting iron tower, dropped its twisted lead line.  It is unmanned, unweighted and swings gently in the shifting breezes. The breezes change to gusts, as quickly as Cornelia used to flutter her eyelids.

 The trees shading the park are peaked in various shapes and sizes, geometric in outline – prisms, trapezoids, octagons and even a rhomboid bristles in the distance near the fountain.  The odd sphere and circle muscle their way over the acute angles.  Last year’s squares and rectangles have been pruned to funky modern models, priming themselves for the forthcoming summer Festival.

 Paul looked at Cornelia’s cold smoky eyes, balls of grey swimming in murky waters that were too dense to allow light to pass through.  With the corner of a handkerchief, he wiped them clear.   Cornelia smiled, but he did not know if this was a conscious act, or merely a muscular twitch, a complication triggered by a recent change in medication.

Unperturbed, Paul described the trees and plants he saw, shades of mint, apple, celery, zucchini, and even choko in the eastern corner of the park.  “The flower beds are parading multi cultural snippets of basil, oregano and coriander, remnants of the recent night markets.”  Paul wiped her eyes again.

 “There are a few pansies nestled between their leaves.  The dead grass is trying to rebirth after an overload of market stalls and deep fryers.  The red lanterns were torn from the branches during a typical October noodle market downpour.”

 Paul’s eyes now needed to be wiped, as Cornelia’s last gasps became his shattered window.