Bernard Micallef

Apart from her age, everything became Maria. Yet her most conspicuous style remained visibly and permanently secured in her crumpled maturity. She lived at an interminable distance of twenty years from the death of her husband. But now, this early morning which had followed another dreamless night, loneliness forced her eyes open and compelled her to scribble on the room’s ceiling with indelible memories. She looked wide-eyed at the peeling paint just above the bed and went over the fatal traffic accident in which her husband had been involved. She had a faint suspicion that her memory had lost some of the details, and so recounted the episode for the sake of remembrance: "We were crossing the street in front of our house, looking carefully first at one end, then at the other. We made two cautious steps onto the street when it seemed empty, and, quite unexpectedly, there came upon us Xandru’s sixty-three years – a weight that would have overwhelmed a bull and that could not but crush my Xandru."

"There is only one fairness in this world," she had heard her husband murmur in agony seconds after the fatal accident, "the fairness of eternity." Maria, in bed, was startled because her husband had returned from such a distant realm and was in her bedroom to spy on her from the ceiling. She let her lower lip protrude, pulled the sheet onto her face, and reproached him. When she eventually removed the sheet, she saw him dangling from a cobweb in the chandelier, addressing her with the supple legs of a spider. He had a repulsive face with restless eyes. He also had a fly, which he stopped wrapping in his web only to hail her once more. Maria did not return the gesture and nervously poured some water from a bottle into a glass that she kept on a bedside cupboard. She had thought of frightening her husband away by throwing the water at him, but while the glass was in her hand she drank all the water on account of the fright he had given her; then she remembered the worst thing that she had suffered during those lonely twenty years after her husband’s unfortunate incident: she was the only person who had steadily grown older in the village where she lived. "Everyone has become younger, except I," she grumbled beneath a heavy sigh and the sheet with which she had veiled her frustration once more. "I shall be considered a freak of nature. I shall have to hide my folded face and hands whenever I go shopping. The butcher sends his daughter with meat for broth, and his daughter manages to get younger every time she comes by. Everyone makes believe he has more than one daughter, so that whenever she turns younger he could say that he has not sent the same girl. People add insult to injury by assuming I don’t have eyes in this head of mine, that I could not see their game in getting younger without me. And the chaplain has become a stunning man of forty after collapsing during the mass with which he celebrated his fifty-fifth year. Malignant tongues have spread it around that he has passed away, but this is another deceit. He doesn’t seem anything near dead, with that angelic face of his. Would I were only forty years old and he were not the chaplain, I would show them how dead he is then, Jesus forgive me. Look at our neighbour, Xandru. Look at her, how she appeared to be old and talkative a few months back, and now is an unrecognizable woman of twenty, a proud lady pretending she does not know me, with those two splendid legs that make any man’s hands sweat with desire. She has changed her name and the furniture to disguise herself, imagining this would fool me ..."

Maria kept producing one example after another of a village that was steadily becoming adolescent, while her husband gave an excited look from his web and began his voyage out of the house and to the neighbour’s, to see the extraordinary legs. "Tomorrow," she said at last, "I will make an effort and wake up at least a quarter of an hour before realizing who I am and all that I have passed through. It would be a happy quarter of an hour, without worry, and ... and ..." She had intended to say: it would be a timeless quarter of an hour, a state in which one rids oneself of memories wrapped in a passing, transparent sort of time. But she failed to utter these words through her very desire to say them all at once. Maria was a case of acute syntactical misbehaviour. She let her lower lip protrude even more on account of her linguistic misdemeanour until it touched the silken nightdress she had put on her crumpled age.

Then she mumbled indistinct sounds when she tried and failed to say: I could never understand why time passes by and fills everything with dust. She hated those moments in which she simply could not behave well in sentences, moments during which she had to depend on others’ expressing her intentions for her. However, despite berating herself for remaining a girl in spirit, and for skipping words as though they were a skipping rope, she still failed to walk one simple sequence of sense. With her fingers she touched the nearest flower design on the sheet, and with her chin out-thrust and moving more than her lips, she started to murmur: "Quiet, quiet, quiet – restless, naughty girl. Quiet, stop skipping."

No character should be denied a sentence with the inhuman accusation that he does not know how to express it. Maria was a good old woman with her words planted in another world, a woman loved by the entire village, for as she grew older she managed to keep her unfortunate destiny from damaging the brief prosperity of others. She was slightly sour in her look, and sometimes recognized people with whom she was not familiar and who remained astounded at all that had befallen them according to her past. But the village did not avoid her, in fact cared for her, answered her questions as best it could, and tolerated her with a pitying heart. Whenever approached, she would envelop you in a fantastic past that shared the virgin quality of a piece of blank paper upon which a lifetime could be summarized in a thousand ways. Although she failed to recognize the world she had been dragged into by the fugitive tactics of hours and years, neither did her tales harm the surrounding environment.

The thing that astounded Maria most was time going speedily by along the streets. Never before the death of her husband had she witnessed so many forms of time passing by in a village that refused to grow older. Before crossing the street, she would stare abstractedly at these strange clusters of minutes and hours, then be suddenly attracted by a feeling of energy and restlessness in her hand, and finally, upon looking at her hand, find there a lively girl who had come to help her get to the other side of the street safely. Sometimes other people would approach her as she lowered one foot onto the street, mumbling about time accidents, and she would tell them that there was no need of their help since she felt a lively girl holding her hand. "Dear soul," she would tell the girl, "which way did the last hour go? From which end is the next hour coming? Look carefully. Be careful now while you cross the street for me. Why has this minute stopped just in front of us? Don’t be careless, my girl; be careful because we might very well be hit. That is how my husband died." Sometimes she would stare at the extraordinary proportions of a bus, asking one of the front wheels whether it was a minute, or an hour, or even a year, only to hear the bus driver reply, "This is the first hour’s, my dear," or even, "You can use the next one; just another minute, it will be empty." "Today minutes are driving by," she would grumble to the girl, "do not laugh, my child. The ... that ... most, the ... that ... " The ones that carry most people, she would have said had she not started to omit words with her skipping habit.

Everyone said that all that Maria needed was some time to understand that time had passed, although that which she actually lacked was a lot of time passed in not reflecting about time. This morning she put out her hand from underneath the sheet and searched for the clock on the bedside cupboard. The clock had always quoted numbers before mass, before lunch, before news broadcasts, before bedtime, and before she took another first step from bed towards a brand new day. Her hand searched the ticking noise on the bedside cupboard until it found the machine that had always managed to make numbers smaller. She cursed the clock when she saw the fresh hour of six in the morning after she had left it at eleven in the night, "Damn my old age, while everything around me rejoices in getting younger." The clock ignored her and went on ticking.

She stood upright in bed and looked at her husband. He saluted her with a grin, which had retained more life than he had, from the black and white photo standing on the bedside cupboard. She smiled back. Then Maria moved towards the edge of the mattress and lowered her feet into a bedside slipper which took her to the kitchen where the cooking stove turned itself on since the agility of her hands had somehow accustomed the kitchen implements to work on their own. She glanced at the water tap and saw water coming down into the kettle which was already in her hand without revealing how it had got there. Then she tried and failed to wipe the teacup because it already had sugar and coffee in it, and was already accepting hot water poured from a very self-reliant kettle. This was the best part of the day for Maria, the part in which everything worked before even being handled, with her hands following the clever deeds the kitchen utensils carried out by themselves. Maria smiled at the implements around her and praised their readiness to come all in order and on their own into her hands. She gave a quick glance at the cooker, the only obstinate being in the kitchen, a saucy fellow who never yielded to her intentions; but she avoided a quarrel by simply saying nothing in front of its face.

When Maria had done with her kitchen work and had taken her coffee, she was already dressed in her best outfit, had already prepared her face in front of the mirror, had made the bed, and had said goodbye to Xandru for the second time while admonishing him, "I am going to the market, do not try anything funny with Rita next door; after all, she pretends not to know us anymore." Her husband laughed the issue off in his dark and light complexion in the photo, and gave her a heartfelt good-bye in an eternal grin between patches of mould that had grown on his cheeks. Whilst locking the door, Maria contemplated this grin without amusement and was not sure whether she should leave her husband by himself, but the temptation of an adolescent village waiting behind her back prevented her from re-entering the house. She turned towards the village and started to walk amidst people who grew younger. She saw Peppu the carpenter with a muscular body that had replaced the atrophied figure with which he had nearly died a few years back; she observed Mena transformed into a girl of fifteen with a skirt of fifteen inches – Mena whose solemn and ceremonial burial had almost taken place some months back; she witnessed Lippu scrubbing the threshold with a horse’s strength that replaced the death rattle which had put him in a deathbed weeks before. She stopped and stared at him for a while.

"Lippu, for goodness sake, how did you manage to regain your strength?"

"Do not worry, Maria. Today it is a lovely day." Lippu knew her weakness and tried to change the subject. Maria arranged her dress and cursed the adolescent village while giving Lippu a stern look. She took out a small mirror from the shopping bag and opened it to examine her face. The lines criss-crossing her cheeks entwined themselves around the mirror and closed it with the hostile tenacity of a green eye. "It is only I then, only I who am getting older." While a pitying Lippu tried to calm Maria, in vain, she arranged her clothes once again, and continued to stumble her way to the market on ancient heels.

Just outside the market Maria’s faltering pace was interrupted by an incredible sight. Resting against a wall, and talking nonchalantly to a neighbourhood sweetheart reputed to have seduced even garden flowers with a whiff of her perfume, there was Xandru, her husband. Maria stared at him and then turned her face away for a second. She looked at him once more to confirm that it was Xandru. She could hardly believe her own eyes when he began to feel the girl’s hair while assuming a devastating charm which he had never displayed while courting Maria. "So, you vile scoundrel, that is the reason behind this morning’s laugh. Damn you and your infidelity, Xandru." Xandru’s eyes lit with joy when the communal lover rested her head against his chest and, failing to see Maria’s militant advance, failing to realize that his laugh had instantaneously removed all the mould in a black and white photograph, he proceeded to hug the girl. This was followed by the graver offence of assuming a slightly younger, boyish aspect whilst talking to the red lips in front of him, showing off his muscles to the heavily painted eyes brushing their lashes against his face, getting his face lost in a density of tinted hair, and fooling around with the girl’s strong perfume, the extraordinary potential of which had invaded more streets than the girl could have occupied with her communal services. Sometimes he even looked at the whole girl and this was the worst thing he could have done in front of Maria’s faltering advance. When Maria’s bag was finally held inches above his head for a violent retaliation, he recognized her and rememebered the instance when she recounted his other youth, the one he had passed with her in alarming sexual restrictions. He held his hands above his head and received blows befitting his neglected responsibilites in his other life. He told Maria that what she saw was not what she thought she saw and she hit him even harder for renouncing both his honour and the courage to admit the truth. Then, when people came running from the market and held her back while suggesting that she go home and rest, and when she saw Xandru going away without her and the cup of tea that she promised him if he were to go back to her immediately, Maria realized that she had lost everything, that she would never grow as young as her husband’s appearance.

Whilst walking home, she said to the pavement that she would have accepted anything other than her husband’s infidelity. She gave an inquisitive look along the street. A minute was coming, belching fumes and bouncing people inside it with the unbroken regularity of bumps and potholes on the street. Maria lowered her head and pretended not to have noticed it. The minute happened to be one of those means of public transport which stop nowhere regardless of the waving of hands and swearing of people at futile bus stops. The minute’s driver had a cigar in his mouth, and, between one cigar chew and another, he did not feel like believing that tragedies could occur even in the most monotonous moments of his life. He grinned when he recognized Maria hobbling along the pedestrian walk, and was ready to tell her the bus hour as he went by her usual perplexity. Maria gave a sly look, pursed her lips with a determination that could no longer be subdued by memories and infidelities, wiped a tear just as she did whenever she met her black and white husband whilst dusting, made a quick sign of the cross, and hopped, as lightly as a grasshopper would, onto the street just in front of the approaching minute. The minute, screaming with the volume of a whole load of bus passengers, held itself back as much as it could to let Maria stand on her feet, but moved forward with the same velocity and the same cigar in an utterly ruined monotony.

Everything had taken place in and underneath a minute that bit and swallowed half the cigar with fright, and descended altogether, screaming and shouting, to see what was left of Maria. Naturally, Maria had already grown considerably younger and actually become the little girl who used to help her cross the street.