the singularity of things
Len rested his arm on the table and squeezed the scarred tip of his finger. It was Irena’s job to prick his skin, and poised with the lancet, she steadied it momentarily, as if aiming for his heart. The needle met its target and produced a dark bead that gleamed in the light through the trees. Irena took a small strip of paper, touched a corner to the blood, then delicately nudged the strip into the meter. Irena was the housekeeper and the only one who could do the pricking part. There was the cook, and though English-speaking, she seemed ill-suited for such work, with her meat chopping and cleaving of fish heads. Irena spoke no English, only Catalan, and what little Spanish Len knew was of no use. He knew some French, as did she, so they managed. Their exchange, like all the rest, amounted to the stark task—a favor, a service such as she did for him now—a pin prick, the paper strip, a number on the screen.
The meter blinked as it did its work and they waited in the warm air of the courtyard. Above them, sunlight flared through moving greenery, and from below came the dull persistance of waves on searock. They were high above the Mediterranean, a patch between Spain and North Africa, the sea ran blue and flat, anchored with towering pillars of rock, great monuments of stone that rose from the flat water to the sky. Len couldn’t make out speedboats navigating below, only the playful loops of white foam they made, like chalk lines on the water.
The breeze took a curl of Irena’s dark hair and unwound it across her eyes. She corralled it in the delicate crook of one finger, a girlish gesture for someone her age, something the girls on the beach might do. That was an observation Len couldn’t take credit for; it had been Gregor’s, back when they’d lived here together. Irena’s tendency for drama was as influenced by the resilient matriarchs she watched on television as her own priggishness—drinking in the details of Len and Gregor’s life while pretending not to notice.
Irena’s services, along with those of Dia the cook, came with the house, which was near the village called Na Xamena on the southern side of the island Ibiza. The five-room cottage stood at the end of a gritty mountain road surrounded by thorny brush, red dirt and parched scrub common to the Iberian Chain. A grove of olives planted by some optimist stood twisted on the hillside, like the palings Len recalled from the Calvary pictures of his childhood.
It had been Gregor who’d first brought Len to Na Xamena. They’d rented this same house from the office in town, though the old man who ran it was gone now. Back then, Irena came in mornings to clean, careful to avoid Gregor as he sat in bed smoking his first cigarette and running the electric razor on his chin. She did her housekeeping away from the friends they invited from Barcelona, and steered clear of the shells and bone Gregor strung from the arbor on the patio.
The house itself had changed little since then. It was small and simple, built with the same bleached rock littered everywhere. The rooms, with tile floors and low ceilings, were set with a few pieces of furniture, scrubbed until burnished as old bone. An open-air kitchen fitted with a brick oven faced into the trees. The only addition appeared to be a white refrigerator someone had rubbed with yellow, as if finger painting. In the bedroom, a small but rugged crucifix had been placed on the wall above the bed. Len had taken it down at first, but when he did, a ghostly afterimage remained. The pale outline on the wall distressed him more than its wooden counterpart, and reconsidering, he’d put it back up. The French doors there led to the patio, where he and Irena sat now, a place of shaded recesses that overlooked the ocean.
Dia was at work in the outdoor kitchen. Bowls rang against each other, a knife struck the wooden block once, then again. The rental office explained she was Turkish from Beirut, trained at a cooking school in Paris who spoke English, French, and Arabic. She a tall and sylphlike person with a long braid of silver hair, and her repertoire was interesting, if somewhat limited. She muttered to herself as she carried groceries in a string bag or washed vegetables under the spigot. Numerous times Len attempted conversation, but she would look away, saying things about him under her breath. At meals, she would set platters of bright steaming food before him and say, “Me, I don’t need much. A piece of bread, a little tea. I’m happy that way,” and leave him to feast alone under the billowing canopy.
Now, the meter in Irena’s hand chirped as the reading came up, and she aimed the screen toward him, as if to prove herself blameless for the numbers she was about to record.
“Ninety-six,” he said. “Not bad before lunch.”
She wrote the number and the time of day into a small diary and nudged it back across the table. Irena had the authority that came with her post, a tendency to gravitate toward head of household, whether it was hers or not. The sole Ibizan among them, she was strong enough to help Len out of the bath, pushy enough to silence Dia if she complained.
Irena stood from her chair and tugged at the tight midsection of her dress. She’d be back with her lancet soon enough, Irena with her instructions and instruments from the doctor, as would Len with his insistence. The two of them negotiated the sugar and the insulin, the blood readings and the injections in some kind of fruitless power struggle which currently weighed in her favor. Ever more confident of her authority, she’d even begun pushing Len to bathe in the morning, so she could get him out in time to clean house while her soap operas aired.
Len rested back with his pricked finger curled skyward like a dry leaf, a stain of red smeared across the tip. He must have looked like an old man sitting there, cap pulled down over his eyes, limbs scrawny and reptilian. Not much hair left either, and a face marked with liver spots. His frame had always been small but fit, smooth-muscled with enough olive in his sallow skin to turn him deep brown—back when he could tolerate the sun. As it happened, those had been the easiest things to let go of, the clarity of his skin and thickness of his hair. Gregor had left him—that was perhaps the least surprising thing. At seventy, there didn’t seem many surprises left. The diabetes had worsened, while the years and other ailments simply accrued, bringing their consequent facts. The rest was more difficult.
Len had divested himself of a flat in San Francisco, a narrow gunmetal-colored building that in thirty years he’d never shared with anyone. The slender staircase leading to the front door accommodated visitors ascending in single file, never in pairs. Inside, the polished floors and Edwardian details had been carefully restored by him alone. The furniture was old, or not, depending on his whim, the books and photographs selected at auction or estate sales without answering to anyone else’s taste or pocketbook.
He’d always privately gloated in the singularity of vision throughout the house, the themes carried subtly from room to room, rising and falling in emphasis like a fugue. But after that season on Ibiza, Len had come to long for the occasion of entering a room and being surprised, for instance, by one of Gregor’s hanging sculptures, their shells and branches fluttering. Never mind that it was only a sea breeze making them shimmer. Len found himself drawn to whatever gave them their mystery. He’d been looking at his own static possessions for too long, jading his eye, certainly his heart. “Ibiza is good for you,” Gregor had told him. “It’s something you don’t know.”
So Len returned, hoping for the chance to see the world as Gregor had, all form and landscape, movement and light. He had no illusions of searching Gregor out, of recreating anything—or as some did, of installing a stand-in who was alike enough. In the end the most depressing thing was that the timing had been all wrong. He was older now, infirm or very close to it, dependent on people in ways he’d never imagined.
Dia brought out lunch, today a platter of salad. It looked to be marinated vegetables, some slices of meat, potatoes tossed with herbs. She rarely spoke, and when she did, it was in reponse to some nettling concern, some injustice or inequality, and he caught a Levantine inflection. Lebanon? Damascus? He wasn’t sure. But with her string bag of vegetables, she was a curious presence, and could imagine Gregor beside him, watching her move between the house and garden, full skirt eddying around her tanned legs.
In those days with Gregor, he had been the one to cook, paying more attention to what Len should eat than Len himself. It had been so much simpler then, riding the highs and lows in his blood sugar, even the injections had been easily managed. A matter remedied by carrying those small boxes of raisins, as his uncle and cousin had done before him—nothing but a hunger, with its demands and compensations. He understood now what a luxury it was, to be old and in the presence of a person who really knew you—knew you hated a bed made tightly or breakfast made too early—a person who knew what kind of music you liked and your preference for listening to it far into the night. It never occurred to him how inestimable a thing it was and that even on Ibiza he’d be prone to compromise, forced to do things when others felt like it, accommodate to fickle moods and inconsistent attitudes. That, beyond the fact of his health, was the worst of it.