Marcom - A brief history of yes

OTHER WORKS BY

MICHELINE AHARONIAN MARCOM

Three Apples Fell from Heaven
The Daydreaming Boy
Draining the Sea
The Mirror in the Well

Do we really feel what we think we are feeling? Does this conversation, for example, have any semblance of reality?

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Love, that releases no beloved from loving took hold of me so strongly through his beauty that, as you see, it has not left me yet.

Dante Alighieri, Inferno

I dont sing fado, fado sings me. Fado is fate, it imposed this destiny on me.

Amlia Rodrigues, Interview

Copyright 2013 by Micheline Aharonian Marcom

First edition, 2013
All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Marcom, Micheline Aharonian, 1968

A brief history of yes / Micheline Aharonian Marcom. -- First Edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-56478-849-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Man-woman relationships--Fiction. I. Title.

PS3563.A63629B75 2013
813.54--dc23
2013003453

Partially funded by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency

www.dalkeyarchive.com

Cover: design and composition by Mikhail Iliatov

Printed on permanent/durable acid-free paper

a brief history of yes

Micheline Aharonian Marcom

DALKEY ARCHIVE PRESS

CHAMPAIGN / LONDON / DUBLIN

estou com saudades tuas

because yes was first of all the old gods

Contents

So that, yes, here are the two lovers again, and their love affair spans a calendar yearAugust to August, dry season to dry seasonand like the songbird who remains a short while in the hillside grove before he departs for the souththe lovers arrive and pass their season together and then pass on to other lovers and another season in the following summer, or autumn for the hermit thrush who returned to the girls hillside grove in October from the North two months after the end of the love affair, made his yearly urgent unstoppable migration, stays his three weeks, and the earth revolving around the sun, and the songbird singing his ingrained blood song and moving toward his final winter destination as the weather permits and decrees.

He is tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed. She is tall for a Portuguese, and dark-eyed, dark-haired. She is called Maria like so many of the women of her generation for the mother of God, and he bears a deformity across his chest where the bones and cartilage did not form properly across his heart when he was a childThere was the possibility of a surgery when I was a boy, he tells Maria after they have removed their clothes for one another for the first time, the naked body, and made love in August and she sees his concave chest area, the hollow, in the summer eve in the window light of his bedroom, a surgeon offered to break each rib bone in my chest and to place a steel rod through the cartilage below the sternum. He is a man with a concave chest, he is someone who needs love she thinks when she sees him naked on this first occasion; or: he is someone who has not had it, his heart tight and duly too hemmed in by the chest cartilage which holds closely to the muscle. My parents did not force me to have the surgery, and he says that he is grateful to them now, for there could have been complications, he tells her while they lie on the wide bed in his city apartment, the procedure has since been improved upon, and now to correct the deformity the surgeon will place an enormous magnet below the skin and one on the top of it also, here, and thereby make a force to pull the chest bones outward, he smiles, and Maria smiles also: her brown eyes, his blue, the colors magnetic, the invisible chords which draw this particular woman, a Portuguese, across the ocean from her city on the Tagus to this man in his city by a large salt-water bay in America. I made a journey to your country to find you, she doesnt tell him. It is also true that she has lived in his country for twenty-five years and there have been many lovers before him and a husband also, and an eight-year-old son from her marriage and Ill fix your heart, she thinks, a little arrogant in the way that she thinks it, as women sometimes are in their desire to fix and alter and abrogate the male (Ill wash your feet for you); my own muscle to pull yours hidden outward.

Twelve months later in August, the blue-eyed lover will tell the Portuguese girl that he would like to end their affair, I love you, Maria, but I am not in-love with you, he will say to her on the telephone. She cries into the black machine after he says the not-in-love-with-you words. But last week, she tells him, when you said and. And she will think at that moment on the telephone and their bodies separated by miles, by the bay waters, by the ineffable, not of him but of his ill-formed and moderately collapsed chest bones, the concavity of his body which unprotrudes below the satellites of his sternum, of love and propertyand of his conventional and moderate ideas (and hers always immoderate) of love and property, for it is a small fact like a small nuisance (a small corrosive fact) that her blue-eyed lover is a rich man and his monies sit in accounts where the numbers only move skyward, and many things rise up for her lover except for his breast bone and cartilage contused and dimly knitted and hunkered down over muscle, except for love. And like a boy alone on his childs bed, the boy who hit his head against a wooden headboard in his inability to sleep and find ease each night at bedtime, and so rocked and hit the body against wood for the rhythm it made the sleep it then brought, her lover not-thinks but learnt that succor is found in these lonely collisions. His mother told Maria of it once, I could hear him alone in his room when he was a boy. Hed hit his head against the black board of his bed and rocked himself thereby to sleep each night. I couldnt stop it, I could not help him, his mother did not say to Maria, but the quiet blue-eyed, anxious-failed-look of the mother said it to the Portuguese girl: the too tightly knit mother for whom all things must needed to be proper and in their place and observant of all of the codes of the moral Protestant upper classes and the codes placed thereby above the son (which needs which desires, his terrors) when he was a boy and the mother was filled with all of her strict and proper (not love) ideas of love.

The lovers take a walk on the beach in the third week of their affair, months before Maria met her lovers mother, months also before he mentioned to Maria on a walk in a dark wood how he used to put himself to sleep each night by rhythmically rocking and hitting his head against the wall of his headboard when he was a child. The lovers walk together on the long beach, although they do not walk hand in hand, for the blue-eyed lover does not like to hold the hand of his beloved, It makes me uncomfortable, he says. The lovers walk and the waves crash against the sand and the sea water is cold and they tell each other the stories that lovers will tell at the beginning of an affair, he of his family on the Eastern Seaboard, of his schooling (although he will not yet confide that he and his family are of the upper class, just as he does not confide for many months: eight: how many women he has fucked and the prostitutes and the casual encounters he makes via the dating services; I distinguish virgin and whore), My mother was a brat, he says. And Maria is surprised and taken aback at the casual and critical manner in which her lover speaks of his mother, and to someone whom he has only just met, and they are walking unhand in hand on the beach, her shoulder presses against his at certain intervals.