Carmen and the Whispers

FLORA LEASK ARIZPE

--She never has anyone round.

--And why should she? She behaves like one of her sex should.

--Damsels in your time never behaved like they should. Not a ten-feet-high tower could contain them – famously. Remember Zaida, Zoraida and Zorahaida.

--You manipulator of truth! Zaida stayed behind – or was it Zorhaida? In any case, I won’t have an infidel like you make such claims about the women of the Caliphate.

--Well, well. Shall we fight so that you can defend the honour of the women of the Caliphate?

--Would that we both had flesh and blood again; you wouldn’t last two minutes in your return to the mortal realm – I would slice you clean in half with one stroke!

-- Oh would you now, Amin? Because, remember, when it did come to blows between the Caliphate and the Castilians…!

-- …Our houseguest is a lady who knows better than to bring men to her quarters. She knows they will only cause trouble and molestation.

--But don’t you think that she looks unhappy?

--She certainly looks out of humour. And may that be the only time in a hundred more years that we agree on anything, by the grace of the most merciful and caring Allah.

*

It was only when the front door was closed – the latch firmly in its place; the key turned; her back against the door as another barrier – that Carmen felt safe enough to let go of the breath that had been building inside her the whole day. Her bags slid to the ground from each shoulder, crumpling and deflating even after they had hit the floor.

The flat consisted of one room. It was an attic, up three flights of dark stairs. The wood which met its sloping white walls was a rich brown, which created a cave-like effect that Carmen wasn’t sure she disliked. Opposite the bed were the original old window-shutters, now restored into cupboard doors, the landlady had described proudly on the phone. Tall and slim, the small windows were criss-crossed with metal bars. Too grand to be leading to a cupboard, Carmen thought.

Although the sun burned outside, the interior was shadow-cool. It was a street corner that never got the sun – sought after in the unforgiving summers of Carmen’s new home country. But to her it was unwelcomingly dark, and that darkness contained misgivings that she couldn’t yet express except in trite complaints about how dark it was, how low the ceiling was, how much like front doors the old window-shutters looked. And the big heavy iron bolts that held them together! She pressed herself more firmly into the front door and looked from one corner to the other. She saw no salvation in either of them.

A while passed before Carmen moved. She went from one wall to the other, inspecting their blankness. The stone was cool to the touch, painted white.

Her landlady had said the house was from the sixteenth century. How many people had touched this wall? Her hand jumped back from a faint shadow at eye level, then hovered over the shadow. Was it a shadow? Or was it a smudge? Or something else – a black mark revealing some unknown and shadowed past event? What was trapped in the walls?

*

--Skin as white as a dove in flight… Hair as dark as a- as a- crow in flight…

--Too many birds, Iñigo.

--It’s poetic. I’m trying to serenade our damsel; don’t you think she has such beautiful white skin?

--Don’t get attached to her, she won’t be staying long.

--How do you know? Maybe I can make myself known somehow. I’ll materialize in a mirror and she will see her handsome knight come to rescue her.

--The only thing she needs rescuing from is her own mind.

--Amin! How could you say so about such a perfect creature? Perfect indeed, and so delicate – see how she trembles at the window, afraid of the outside.

--Precisely! See how she trembles at the window! She is too old to be so sensitive. And as an unmarried woman of a certain age-

--Do not insult my lady! I will not hear of it, imbecile! Impotent spectre of an unbeliever!

--She is an unmarried woman, Iñigo, and she lives alone, with no chaperone, no children, no sister, no family to speak of. And she trembles, you’re right, she looks out of the windows and locks the doors as if afraid. That can only mean one thing.

--Filthy, unchristian, lecher! Dispassionate man! You have no soul – you –

--Neither of us have souls, Iñigo.

--I am only soul.

--Perhaps. But you are a soul your God has most certainly forgotten to take.

*

Carmen’s meal times consisted of dread, mostly because she had them in complete darkness. She refused to turn on the lights at any time when there was still a hint of daylight, in order to keep them burning through the night.

She ate simply, sparingly, and barely enough to power her movements through the day – not that they were energetic. Occasionally some unknown force would seem to break through from her stomach to her brain, and there would be nights where the fridge was scoured clean of all food; even things such as raw spinach and fish from an oily jar would be consumed raw, methodically, and whole. The nights after these bursts of frenzied eating would be the ones she slept soundest, only waking two or three times in the night.

Normally it was a slow and painful process; in the dark she would bump into table corners and stifle muted yelps. She kept her voice controlled as she would occasionally frighten herself if she made too loud a noise. Occasionally, it's true, the silence did bring its own weighty and numbing fear, like the moment before a monster leapt out at one in a horror film. Or so Carmen imagined – she never watched horror films. The silence first provoked a fearful humming in her, an attempt to break the thin vellum silence with a human sound. But a few notes in she would always stop, as she realised how weak and ridiculous her voice sounded.

The fridge buzzed like a giant insect and then stopped intermittently, as if the insect had found purchase somewhere; the kettle cooled itself down with clicks after being boiled; the sound of cars on the street below came and went without regularity. And the whisper would arrive, too, every so often; that was the sound that Carmen hated the most. An undulating speech, softer than an exhale, more intimate than an inhale. Occasionally a single breeze, occasionally a dialogue, it was a polyphony of wind whistling past bare, pale branches; rattling, dry, a hollow child’s rattle made of wood with a wooden bell.

At these certain times, normally during a sleepless night, just on the zenith of dreaming, there was nothing Carmen felt more like doing than unlocking the door and running down the stairs into the old street, letting her body take her as far away from the noise as possible and the wind soothe her with its rushing past her ears. Unfortunately, she was almost as scared of the night as she was of the inside of her bedroom.

There was a young man watching – Carmen could see him. He stood on the corner of the old street and looked up at her. He hadn’t moved for half an hour, from what Carmen could tell. His gaze fixed her feet to the floor, pinned her in place. Her breathing came shallowly, and only her eyes flickered, from the window, to the clock, to the window again. When would he move? What did he want with her? Her thoughts raced: she was just a woman trying to live her life again, why did they always bother her, why did they always come for her, why were they always staring, she couldn’t understand why she couldn’t be at peace, ever, finally. This was why she had moved in the first place, to get away. She felt her eyes becoming hot, the back of her throat catching, wondered why this always happened to her. A tear slipped down the bridge of her nose. She blinked it away, and when she opened her eyes again the young man was nowhere in sight.

*

--Look, Iñigo, you made her cry.

--I was so transfixed, Amin, by her beauty. I – I didn’t expect -

--What did you not expect, Iñigo? Get a hold of yourself. You aren’t a man any longer. It's been three hundred years, three hundred, and you still haven’t accepted this of yourself.

--I – I can still be in love.

--From AFAR, Iñigo! Don’t involve the living, you know how we disturb them. Look! Look how upset she is.

--You’re right, she needs rescuing.

--By my beard, what is this woman doing now?

--Amin, what IS she doing?

--Allah have mercy on her soul.

--Someone, anyone, get her away from that window, dear God in Heaven, don’t let my damsel –!

--This is why you don’t meddle with the living, Iñigo. Allah have mercy on her soul.

--How could you talk to me in that way. How was I to know she would, could-

--How were you to know? You’d been watching me, I knew the whole time because I was watching you too. Surely you should have known.

--Amin? Was that you?

--Iñigo?

--Amin, who-

-- I knew they’d always been watching me, and I knew they would always be watching, so I decided I should just get one up on the whole lot. All of you.

--Is it – is that her, Amin?

--They were always watching and I never knew why I never wanted anything from anywhere but the men would be at the corner or at the window, behind the door, above the bed they were always there. Men and boys, men and boys, eyes on the lot of them. I never asked for it.

--Jesus Christ, she is completely out of her humours.

--Going through eternity with the insufferable rantings of one lost soul was enough, Iñigo, and now because of you I have two. Allah is testing my patience, but he, after all, is infinitely wise, so I must bear it.

--Your God and mine, Amin – do you think they even know we’re here?