The Angel Esmeralda - By Don DeLillo Page 0,20
her jittery skin. She kept running for half a block and then turned to watch him approach clutching his chest and moving on doddery legs, as if for the regalement of children. He could look a little bookish even capering.
They approached the school building.
“I wonder what your hair would be like if you let it grow out.”
“I can’t afford the extra shampoo,” she said.
“I can’t afford a haircut at regular intervals, quite seriously.”
“I live without a piano.”
“And this is a wretchedness to compare with no refrigerator?”
“You can ask that question because you don’t know me. I live without a bed.”
“Is this true?”
“I sleep on a secondhand sofa. It has the texture of a barnacled hull.”
“Then why stay?” he said.
“I can’t save enough to go anywhere else and I’m certainly not ready to go home. Besides I like it here. I’m sort of stranded but in a more or less willing way. At least until now. The trouble with now is that we could be anywhere. The only thing that matters is where we’re standing when it hits.”
He presented the gift then, lifting it out of his jacket pocket and unwrapping the sepia paper with a teasing show of suspense. It was a reproduction of an ivory figurine from Crete, a bull leaper, female, her body deftly extended with tapered feet nearing the topmost point of a somersaulting curve. Edmund explained that the young woman was in the act of vaulting over the horns of a charging bull. This was a familiar scene in Minoan art, found in frescoes, bronzes, clay seals, gold signet rings, ceremonial cups. Most often a young man, sometimes a woman gripping a bull’s horns and swinging up and over, propelled by the animal’s head jerk. He told her the original ivory figure was broken in half in 1926 and asked her if she wanted to know how this happened.
“Don’t tell me. I want to guess.”
“An earthquake. But the restoration was routine.”
Kyle took the figure in her hand.
“A bull coming at full gallop? Is this possible?”
“I’m not inclined to question what was possible thirty-six hundred years ago.”
“I don’t know the Minoans,” she said. “Were they that far back?”
“Yes, and farther than that, much farther.”
“Maybe if the bull was firmly tethered.”
“It’s never shown that way,” he said. “It’s shown big and fierce and running and bucking.”
“Do we have to believe something happened exactly the way it was shown by artists?”
“No. But I believe it. And even though this particular leaper isn’t accompanied by a bull, we know from her position that this is what she’s doing.”
“She’s bull-leaping.”
“Yes.”
“And she will live to tell it.”
“She has lived. She is living. That’s why I got this for you really. I want her to remind you of your hidden litheness.”
“But you’re the acrobat,” Kyle said. “You’re the loose-jointed one, performing in the streets.”
“To remind you of your fluent buoyant former self.”
“You’re the jumper and heel clicker.”
“My joints ache like hell actually.”
“Look at the veins in her hand and arm.”
“I got it cheap in the flea market.”
“That makes me feel much better.”
“It’s definitely you,” he said. “It must be you. Do we agree on this? Just look and feel. It’s your magical true self, mass-produced.”
Kyle laughed.
“Lean and supple and young,” he said. “Throbbing with inner life.”
She laughed. Then the school bell rang and they went inside.
She stood in the middle of the room, dressed except for shoes, slowly buttoning her blouse. She paused. She worked the button through the slit. Then she stood on the wood floor, listening.
They were now saying twenty-five dead, thousands homeless. Some people had abandoned undamaged buildings, preferring the ragged safety of life outdoors. Kyle could easily see how that might happen. She had the first passable night’s sleep but continued to stay off elevators and out of movie theaters. The wind knocked loose objects off the back balconies. She listened and waited. She visualized her exit from the room.
Sulfur fell from the factory skies, staining the pavement, and a teacher at the school said it was sand blown north from Libya on one of those lovely desert winds.
She sat on the sofa in pajamas and socks reading a book on local flora. A blanket covered her legs. A half-filled glass of water sat on the end table. Her eyes wandered from the page. It was two minutes before midnight. She paused, looking off toward the middle distance. Then she heard it coming, an earth roar, a power moving on the air. She sat for a long second, deeply