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Frieze

Wings Press

Slant the chisel just so, so that the hammer, tapping lightly on the shaft, lifts up the layers, flakes them off like skin. The workings are simple: everything depends on the angle, and the strike of the hammer blow; there are as many kinds as colors. Not so the stone. For in truth no matter what the angle and type of instrument, or the skill of the hammer blow, whether soft or hard, whether light or dark, the stone decides. For all depends how daylight first strikes and moves with the passing hours over the surface of the face, and neither the finishing plaster, nor the colors applied by the painters afterward can redeem a bad design.

Brahma, Siva, Vishnu
are three;
so chisel, hammer, and stone
are three.

I had forgotten this song, forgotten we sang it over and over until the words lost all meaning, in the shed of the master where we were given our first backgrounds to carve. Already the designs had been incised in the surface of the stone. To us fell the backgrounds, mine, the fig tree, heavy with fruit. Older apprentices would work the figures later.

Still now it is second nature: this ring of metal on stone, the clink, clink, the scatter of dust. Even now it tells me of the precision of the angle, how trued to the design.

There are limits. I have resigned myself to them: the great processions, the parallel forms of armies, hunters, suppliants, parasols, palm-leaf fans, royal standards, of fronds, of flowers, iridescent feathers, elephants propelled by the cruel hook thrusts of their mahouts; the palanquins, the gonfalons, the pavilions of pleasure, the dalliance of lovers under the awnings, the raising of the dead, the damned leaping in hellfire – all these I have renounced, abjured them as heresy.

Now there are only funerary ornaments, simple forms: finials, lanterns, pastimes fitting an old man. They suffer me, give my hands permission, gray my beard further with their dust. At least I am sheltered from the sun, from want. From where I sit by the roadside, I can smell the changing of weather, of season. When I pause to wipe my brow, I can hear the rumble of the oxcarts, or on still days, the beating of the threshers on the threshing floors, my harvest the fragments of stone that scatter in my lap.

"What are you thinking?"

I hear her sandals scrape the dust.

"Not thinking anything; hearing. Hearing, no more."

"Hearing? What do you hear?"

"Clink clink." (I always hear it, even on cloudy days, even at night. Must hear it when I dream.) "Clink, clink."

"I heard you working in the night," she says. A reproach? Merely an observation?

"I couldn't sleep," I say.

She hands me the bowl. The grainy smell of rice pervades my nostrils. Morning has made me hungry. "I brought you milk." I hear the bowl scrape the ground where she sets it down. I see it clearly, whether or not I fail to open my eyes. For my lids still function: close, open. I have learned to keep them shut. I will stretch my arm just so. Unerringly my fingers find the rim, my hand molds to the curve, lifts it to my lips. I never spill a drop. Everything around me has its place. The shed, the stone where I have left it to be dressed, the lanterns that line the roadway. I know exactly where, how many.

The stone stairs – three upward into the courtyard – the sleeping platform, the rolled mat, I sense them so keenly, I wonder have they come to roost in my head like hens clucking in the rafters. I trace my footfalls in the compound like dark lines etched upon a map. It is only when I leave the wall, negotiate the steps, crumbling now, at back, feel the unevenness of the ground slope downward, the grass blades cut my shins, searching out the ditch where I relieve myself – my certainties tremble on the verge of chaos.

A fart or two, I think, and all will come to rights.

For some time now I have been unable to sleep. In the early part of the night, my sleep is heavy, dull gray, as the smoky fur of moles or of night predators, devoid of dreams. I wake in darkness, start bolt upright. Perhaps I am on the edge of dreaming, unable to fall – to let myself fall – into a world of color, of light that waits for me beyond this door. It is as if my eyes, even sleeping, cling to their blindness.

Dread? I ask myself of what. The days here stretch endlessly from season to season, marked only by the chill and wet of each monsoon. Of such blandness, perhaps. For I prefer the times of change, the first lightening of the eastern sky, the phosphorescent glow of twilight. And now, still now it is the sound of morning come at last, the first timid cries of birds welcoming my wakefulness, dispelling the darkness of the night, even now, it is this sound which stays with me best. It is as if I could almost see it, yet to picture it in my inner eye, I cannot. My sight is at a loss.

It was not always so. Carving my first design, the fig tree, even then I could see the dentilation of the leaves, feel the fullness of the fruit, bristling with ripeness, the ghostly veining beneath the bloom. Finished, it was as if you could merely reach, and pluck. As if the stone itself promised sweetness to the tongue. Or the small lizard I cunningly concealed amidst the branches, sunning itself half hidden, at rest only for a moment before birdcry panicked its stone heart.

How had I done it? How was I to know? It came that way, perhaps because I saw it, smelled the summer air, breathed in the dust.

Brimming with fullness I see it still: the clear water, its surface rocking against the rim, where Maya, my first wife, she of my heart, set it down, see it clearly still now, through the glass, a bowl of light. Tell this in stone. See how you would trap it; make it shimmer with the play of sunlight. How? Then I never asked, my chisel led me to it. Enchanted, perhaps? I let it. Why should I quarrel? It showed the way. I simply followed.

Or her hand, the particular taper of the fingers, or the curve of her neck as she bent over the water jar.

What is it I feel, here, in my chest? A splinter of cold? Why now? I never think of her. Have you come back after so long, so far? Why now? Why here? Would I know you at all now — if you lived?

"Gopal,"she says, "come here. Come have a look."

She stands in the light of the doorway, turning slowly to show me. It is a new dress, the cloth filmy, threaded with gold. Her smile lights her eyes.

"Gopal, come look."

She stands in the sunlight of the doorway. Slowly she turns. The cloth, the threads of gold, her eyes: red, golden yellow, green. Slowly the cloth, the threads of gold, her eyes catch fire.

"Gopal, look!"

"What are you thinking?" She stands beside my work mat, her sandals grating in the dust. I start in surprise. I had not heard her coming.

"Something I was remembering. A dress."

"Maya's?"

Her question catches me unprepared. We never talk of Maya - not since that first time. I nod.

"It must have been my master's house, still then. With the first money he gave me. She had bought a dress. Red. No. It was red or orange. Yes. Golden – yellow with threads of gold ... green. ... I don't remember."

She says nothing. I wonder what she is thinking. I keep to my silence, waiting. She stands very quietly. Perhaps she is not thinking anything: even her sandals in the dust are still.

I want to whisper her name. But I find I cannot. Something holds me back. I reach my hand toward where she stands. But she gives no sign. There is no one there. She has gone quietly, making no sound. How is it possible? I think. In all this time, has she deliberately been scraping the dust to announce her presence, so as not to startle me?

My hands weigh heavy in my lap. The doorway is there again. Outside, in the courtyard, the sun beating against the powdery whiteness is blinding. But Maya is gone. The doorway is empty.

Curious. Why this apparition? Why now? after all these years. I feel a lassitude as if something had come to an end. Is it perhaps this dream that waited to visit me, and that, sleepless, I fled?

Dizzy with the heat, faint from the ride in the palanquin, the nausea rising with the smell of incense as I stumbled toward the welcome shade of the doorway to her father's house, I noticed neither the richness of the preparations nor the rice painting covering the floor in welcome. I remember only the dipper of cool water lifted to my parched lips in the shelter of the doorway. And she, veiled then, all but her eyes, and in her shy glance, the betrayal of that secret smile: Maya. In my mother tongue her name signifies illusion. But to me, still now, it means fresh water.

I came to her trembling, was it with desire?

More likely fear because she. ... Mute, something in the eyes, a fluttering like the myna bird that time, nearly dead of fright when I plucked it from the cat's claws.

"What is it?"

"I am afraid."

"Of what?"

"Afraid you will send me back."

"Back? Why send you back when only just now ...?"

"Because I don't know what brides are supposed to do!"

I offered the tail of my nightshirt to her timid sniffle. In a burst of courage, she gave a mighty blow. A tide of giggles overtook her. We rolled in the waves of that terrifying bed, drowning in a sea of laughter. And then, at last. ... She looked to me for guidance. I was six years her senior. I was nineteen.

We lived in Gupta's house as is the custom, for he was my master. Already then, with sixteen sons – all of them carvers or cutters of stone – he had room for one son more. We made our life in the small room which lay at the far end of the corridor, behind the kitchen. She brought her dresses with her in the cart and cooking vessels in a small carved chest. And as a special gift from her father's house – for she was his only daughter – a small chair painted in many colors and strung - as was our bed – with rope.

Not a breath of air to stir the nets. Sated, we dozed in the master's pavilion with no one to wake us but the monkeys overhead. Monkeys! The air was raucous with their chatter. Sometimes, as I raised myself on my elbow to watch her sleep, her face became the rosy sandstone, my hands hummed with imagining the bite of the chisel gently chipping, molding the faint hollows at the corners of her smile, allowing the soft stone to flake like skin until it all but breathed with my first wife's dreaming, lying there, fragile in her nakedness.

The reliefs I copied slavishly still then – for I was young and still apprenticed – those smiles which until then I copied became my own: her celestial smile, the smile of centuries ... and in the stone, I thought, it would last as long. People seeing it would remember for a thousand years.

Perhaps I imagined it, perhaps even now I am mistaken. But it seemed to me my carving took on new life, the forms took on a radiance of their own as if the stone itself held its breath before igniting, as if the stubborn dullness gave way to translucent eyes of light.

More and more she came to watch, her face veiled at first – all but the eyes, which saw everything. In no time she grew familiar: "Why not make the eyes like this, sly," and she would cast her eyes sideways above the veil, "as though they held a secret. People will never tire of looking then!" Or she would say: "Couldn't you give the figure a twist – here – like this – as if the dancer's body hadn't quite set, not quite yet, in the perfect pose? People will go mad to see her move! They will swear they hear the music play!" And her dark eyes danced with relish at her stratagems.

My apprentices, who were her age, would laugh. They came to await her visits, eager to hear her laugh, to watch her pose. It was as if she read my mind, gave my ideas voice, for already then these things were known to me – like knowledge that comes with the marrow you are born with, as Gupta, my master, used to say.

The change must have begun some time before I noticed it. She moved more slowly at first. She came to the site less and less. I remember my mother waving her finger – it must have been – after granny, the blind vegetable woman in the marketplace, had arranged the match.

"Gopal, Gopal, watch out. Even old granny makes mistakes. She is their only daughter. Her father let her do too much. As a child, he even taught her how to carve. Watch her carefully lest she grow restless."

The apprentices inquired after her at first. "Something has come over her," I would say by way of explanation. They would clap their sides laughing at something that escaped me utterly. I would catch their smiles behind my back.

I had begun to notice her more carefully. I would see her paused in a doorway, or sometimes when she stood up, a look would come over her face, a sort of bemusement.

Later I came to know how my choice of words had betrayed my ignorance.

"It's moving, isn't it?"

"Yes. I feel him stirring," she would say. "It will be a boy. I know it. It will be a boy."

I sat on the edge of the string bed where she lay on her side, propped on an elbow, her hand cradling the contours of her rounding form. The room was dark, sweltering.

"How is it, Gopal? Noon and already you are back?"

"I am puzzling something: the Lord Krishna is bathing in the stream. A river nymph pours water from a conch she holds tipped above his head. Small fry frollick at his feet. But the stream! The stream is what eludes me." I read to her from the silpasastra. "'Water is of two kinds. Still water and agitated water, such as is seen before a storm. Still water signifies calm or peace. The lines must be wavy. Agitated water shows impending conflict. The lines must be jagged like waves in a choppy sea.'"

"Does it say nothing else?"

I shook my head. She lay quietly, musing. A look came over her, the same look I had lately come to know. Quite suddenly she leaped from the bed where she reclined now more and more. I could see her awkwardness as she fumbled with her slippers, but big as she was, she moved with surprising swiftness. I heard her move along the passage toward the kitchen. She was not gone long.

"Gopal," she called.

I followed the sound of her voice. On the window ledge she had set it down, the bowl of glass. She had filled it to brimming with our precious drinking water. She knocked it brusquely, nearly tipping it.

"What are you doing!" I cried out in alarm.

I followed the movement of the water, now a pearl, now a mirror, now catching, now repelling the sunlight of the courtyard.

"There!" she whispered. "Tell this in stone!"

A restlessness visits me always at this time of year. The air is heavy with the smell of wet earth as if the deep itself had given up its moisture, and the sky, burdened with it, prepared to burst. And now I am without eyes, the smell is enough to remind my body. I tremble like an alley dog, succumb to shaking for no apparent reason.

And the dreams! All these visitors, these thoughts, colors where before there was gray ... these too, may be the signals of impending rain. I consider: the stillness of the air, this waiting for the sky to burst.

So it was then. On the string bed she lay gasping. The heat was more oppressive than ever I remember. The midwives stayed with her two days; the priest was summoned to make the offerings customary in such cases, and the sorceress, a wild woman of the countryside, who made her drink a tea of forest herbs. No matter where I fled, it seemed to me I could hear her moaning. For a long time after, her screams still echoed in my skull.

The child was born as the first rains came. Wind lashed the downpours, propelling them in its fury. The courtyard was quickly flooded. Squalls pocked the surface of the water.

It was a girl. When she saw it she turned her face to the wall and wept. "Take it away," she wailed to the midwife. "Take it away." And heedless of the tempest, sank into the deep and deathly slumber of exhaustion.

I would enter the darkened room. She said nothing. Not I, not the steady drumming in the thatch could rouse her.

"Maya, are you in pain?" Sometimes she would whimper softly. She never really answered me.

I opened the shutters a crack. In the flooded fields birds were returning, clinging precariously to the wisps of stubble. A steady drip fell from the rain-soaked thatch. I could see her, not moving, following the course of the raindrops with her eyes.

Even when the rains ceased, she stayed in the darkened room. In broad daylight, still she left the shutters closed. I would walk in on her sitting quite still on the low decorated stool she loved, her tiny hands folded listlessly in her lap. She stared straight before her. She sat like that for hours in the steamy darkness of the shuttered room. Gently I would try to lift her, carry her to bed, loose her clothing pin, unwrap the layer upon layer of filmy garments till she lay naked, passive, her dark eyes glazed, filmed over. I fed her with a golden spoon. Like a good child, she suffered it. Everything. Yet never was there sign she really noticed, acquiesced, or even recognized. It was as if her spirit fled, leaving the cocoon of her life hollow.

I caressed her, ran my hands fluttering over the spongy roundness of her young mother's belly, found the dark places of our joy. Patiently she suffered me. She gave no word, no cry. I made love to a broken doll, the strings loose, undone utterly. When I held her to me, only then she seemed to give a sign. Absently she would stroke my hair, cradle my head briefly before letting her arm drop listlessly at her side.

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Excerpted from Frieze by Cecile Pineda. Copyright © 2007 Cecile Pineda. Excerpted by permission of Wings Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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