In the Suicide Mountains (3 page)

“Ah, mother, father, how unhappy I am,” she would sometimes whisper, lying in bed beside her sleeping step-sister, and a tear would trickle down her cheek. The more she was loved, the more she hated herself, and also the more she hated everyone around her. It began to be the case that, however soft her gestures, however unintelligible her murmured words, her blue eyes had moments of sparking like the eyes of an anarchist. Though admirers kept coming—she had never a free minute—she could see that they were jumpy, suspicious as cows on the train to the slaughterhouse, in the presence of her choked-in violence. The number of her admirers increased as the frightening sense of mystery increased, and she grew still more unhappy. Moreover, she could not help feeling sometimes, rightly or wrongly, that on rare occasions—but now increasingly often—the admirer sitting primly in the plush chair across from her, speaking lightly, amusingly (with slightly trembling fingers) of the bloodthirsty exploits of the “six-fingered man” (of whom she'd never heard and in whose bloodthirsty exploits she felt no slightest curiosity or interest)—or the admirer standing heavy-footed as a mule, pretending to listen as she played for him
Für Elise
—was glancing furtively past her in the direction of her step-sister. How much happier her admirers would have been with Clarella, had they only the sense to see it—Clarella whose femininity had been nurtured from her earliest childhood, so that by now it was as real, as whole and translucently unmysterious as a china dish or, say, a potato sprout.

The world rolled on, and things went from bad to worse for Armida, and she began to despair. A tragic realization had come to her by now: She hated her admirers for being fooled by her sham; and she hated and envied her step-sister Clarella, for whom the sham was second nature, as it would never be for poor Armida. She hated, in a word, everything. Lying in the wooden bed, irritably listening to her step-sister's snoring, Armida began to dream up schemes. Perhaps she would travel to some distant village and “cross over,” as they say—put on the trousers and jacket and heavy leather apron of a blacksmith, and start up a blacksmith's shop. But the thought at once sent cold shivers up her back. There'd been a time when the idea might have appealed to her, but the memory of her former, farmhorse ways was repulsive to her now. She thought then perhaps she would run off to Russia and become a bear tamer, with gleaming boots and a whip and fur hat—feminine but fierce, barbaric but not downright masculine. And maybe in the middle of a performance, a great, black bear would grow unexpectedly rebellious, would lash at her throat in his lightning-fast rage …

Tears brimmed up in Armida's eyes and she found herself thinking about suicide.

It might have ended there, for in the morning she felt better; but the following afternoon, young Gnoff the Miller's Son, her stepsister's only suitor, brought Armida a rosewood box and Clarella nothing. After supper she heard her step-mother and step-sister whispering, and on tiptoe she went over to listen, bending down beside the door.

“Mother,” said her step-sister, sobbing into her hankie, “I've had all I can stand. Armida imitates me day and night—she's like a walking mirror—and now she's stolen from me my one and only suitor!”

“Hush, dear, Mama knows,” the wicked step-mother said. “Buck up, my child. Do as I say and your troubles will all be over.” Then, whispering still more softly, covering her mouth with her two milky hands (peeking through the keyhole Armida saw it all), the stepmother said, “Tonight when Armida's fast asleep, you push her clear over to the edge of the bed, and then stay back out of the way, and I'll come and chop her head off.”

Armida listened in horror to these words, then hurried back to scrub the pots and pans.

That night she lay awake at the edge of the bed until she heard her step-sister's snoring, and then she got over on the side against the wall and pushed Clarella to the edge and lay perfectly still, waiting. Sure enough, in came her wicked step-mother carrying an ax. She groped about in the dark with her hand until she found Clarella's ear, and she felt for where the neck was, and then down she came with all her might with the ax and so chopped her own daughter's head off. Then she groped back to the stairs and went down to her bed.

“What a sinner I am,” thought Armida. It was as if she'd awakened from a witch's spell and could suddenly see things plainly. She sat bolt upright, then crawled out of the bed before the blood could get all over her, and she hunted till she found an old birthday candle, and with trembling hands lit it, and as she held it up to look into the staring, once lovely gray eyes of Clarella she thought, bursting into tears, “I might as well have murdered my poor step-sister myself! What's become of me? I must be mad!”

And now in a rush all the nice things Clarella had ever done for her came leaping—once, for instance, Clarella had shared her sandwich with Armida, after someone had stolen Armida's lunch. Armida stepped away from the body, sickened, the back of one pale hand pressed against her forehead, tears streaming down her nose and cheeks. As she was stepping back another step, and after that another, she caught a glimpse of her frail white reflection in the mirror, and the image made her skin crawl. It seemed not the image of herself at all, but the image of feeble, nigh-transparent Clarella, all gossamer shimmies and expiring fibrillations, all rolled-up eyes and drooping sighs, but with manly shoulders and powerful thighs.

“Horrible!” she thought again. “I've become neither of us—nothing!

That moment the door opened at the bottom of the stairs, and Armida's step-mother called up sweetly, “Is that you, dear?”

“Yes, Mama,” Armida called down in Clarella's voice. But Armida's step-mother wasn't fooled for one minute and came flying up the stairs like a hawk after a chicken, and she was waving the ax and rolling her eyes around, and would have killed Armida for sure this time, had not Clarella done Armida one last favor. The old woman in her haste stepped on Clarella's severed head, which rolled so that her feet went flying out from under her, and the ax went flying from the old woman's fingers and came smack down on her own forehead, which it split in two pieces like a pumpkin.

“Horrible and more horrible!” thought Armida, and wrung her fingers. By morning she felt so guilty she made it definite: she would go up in the mountains, and the first good place she saw, she would kill herself.

“And that,” said Armida, rising with a sigh from the bank where she'd been sitting, “is the reason I'm up here, traveling through the mountains, full of remorse and, sometimes, rage.”

“But my dear
girl
,” cried the sparrow. Every feather stood on end and he was fluttering and fussing, distressed by Armida's story and alarmed by her intention. He cocked his head, winked one black eye, and suddenly he was Chudu the Goat's Son, leathery cheeks twitching.

Chapter Four

M
y dear girl, you mustn't do it!” said Chudu the Goat's Son, twitching and winking like a madman. Now, too late, he realized he'd made a mistake in turning back into himself. Armida was staring at him in righteous indignation, her fine eyebrows arched, her chin drawn inward and quivering, and to make matters worse her whole body was in confusion, torn between kicking him, as a farmer would kick a horse, and fainting dead away, eyes rolled upward, like a maiden shocked.

“You tricked me!” exclaimed Armida, her soft voice helpless, and she resolved the conflict toward the maidenly, and wept. “You've made me tell secrets I'd never told anyone!” Her hands, like orphans, clung tightly to one another, and her face, drained of blood, was as white as snow. “Oh, I wish I were dead!” she moaned, so sincerely that his heart almost stopped in its tracks. And now she wept in earnest.

The dwarf was so upset, so angry at himself and eager to atone, somehow be made use of—even if she should send him to point at pheasants, like a dog—that he tore off his hat without thinking and threw it on the ground and stomped on it. “Please, master,
please!
” cried the hat, but he went right on stomping it.

When he'd vented his emotion, or some of it, he plucked up the hat again and put it on his head—where it sat trembling and whimpering, swearing to itself—and he said: “Armida, let me tell you I understand how you feel. No one knows better than I what a terrible thing it is to—”

But he saw she wasn't listening; she'd taken advantage of his tantrum to collect herself. Still weeping and sniffling and brushing tears from her cheeks, but shaking her yellow hair out, her breast heaving less now, she'd walked up onto the road and was prepared to stride on. He gave a little jump when he saw what she was doing, and hurried to catch up with her.

“I too have a double identity of sorts, Armida,” said the Goat's Son, awkwardly running along beside her now, pitifully looking up at her, the top of his head not even level with her waist. There was nobody else in the world to whom he'd have confessed his secret. He threw a quick look around the dark, slanting woods to see if anyone had heard him. There were a couple of round, brown bears bumping shoulders, and a wide-racked deer standing absolutely still, and on every hand there were twittering songbirds, but so far as he could tell they were all authentic, not shape-shifters. He pressed on fervently: “As a matter of fact I came up here into the mountains myself, just like you, to kill myself.” He stretched out his arms, skipping sideways, imploring her to listen, and awaited her reaction.

“Beat it,” she said angrily—not with cruel hostility but like an older sister, as if the troubles she experienced were beyond his ken-beyond, ha!, the emotional understanding of Chudu the Goat's Son, who was two hundred and seven years old! Yet he saw himself accepting it: he would burble, grovel, do handsprings; he, Chudu, was her captive, he'd be anything she pleased.

Perhaps it was Armida's intuition of that—the abject adoration of the ugly little dwarf with the great, black shark-mouth, the short arms extended in miserable entreaty, the crooked legs hurrying like the blades of a butterchurn—that made Armida once more burst out crying; for love is no small imposition, especially unrequited love; and though his experience was limited, even after two hundred years and more, since he was seldom even liked, Chudu the Goat's Son understood pretty well all the ironies that enclosed her like the ribwork of a cage: here stood
he
for whose deformed and spiky love she had no faintest desire, and back in her village sat those foolish suitors. She had no one she respected who could love her for herself. It grieved and enraged him that he, Chudu, should be the cause of such distress—that his horrible adoration should awaken in her heart an idea of the kind of adoration she desired and, in all probability, would never never find in this whole vast universe.

She was rubbing the knuckles of both fists into her eyes, crying and striding on.

“What I told you is true,” he said. He danced out in front of her and ran backward. “I'm not tricking you, Armida. I'm not lying to you. I really did come here to commit suicide. I'm going to do it, too.” His cheeks twitched and jittered like a rabbit's, and he hammered his square right fist into his square left palm.

Deep in her own grief, she didn't even trouble to look down at him with distaste. “I'm not surprised,” she said.

Before he could answer, his left foot tripped over his right, and he fell. She went by him. He scrambled to his feet.

They'd come to a shoulderlike crest on the mountain, a respite. Beyond, the road dipped downward for a stone's throw, then lifted again, much more steeply than before. Behind them lay the valley dotted with white villages, churchspires sticking toward the sky like little pins; ahead of them the mountaintop, vanishing into haze, ascended like God's gray jaw. The trees all around them were luminous and wide-beamed and curiously still, as if grown against a plumbline, and the golden beams of light that settled slanting through the leaves, dappling the high-crowned curving road, gavotted like young swallows in Armida's yellow hair. The beauty made Chudu the Goat's Son heartsick. Like a baby, like a billygoat, he bawled out after her, forsaken and forlorn, standing there splay-foot, clench-fisted, humpbacked, drowning in woe: “
Armida, don't do it! Don't kill yourself!
” Chudu the Goat's Son's heart went light, plummeting like an elevator when the cable has snapped, and he began, in great whoops, to cry.

Armida slowed her pace. After a long moment she stopped completely, then veered around to face him. Her eyes were still wet, but she was in control now. “It's
my
life,” she said. “Go away, dwarf. It's none of your business.”

Chudu the Goat's Son, however, was not in control by any means. He cried harder and harder, as he hadn't cried since childhood, two hundred years ago, and his anger at crying like a baby, augering his fists into his eyes as if to blind himself, made him stamp first one foot then the other then both at once. “It
is
my business,” he bawled. “It's very much my business!”

His eyes were too filled with tears for him to see that she was studying him, startled at last. But her voice was remote, withdrawn—she was thinking of herself, not of him—when she said, “I don't care. I just don't care.”

She was about to draw away from him. He snatched at her loose sleeve and held it.

“Think of the people who love you, Armida! Think of how they'll feel!”

His eyes were blurry with tears but he caught, even so, her angry smile and knew what she was thinking. All those suitors.

“Please,” she said, and now her princesslike feebleness seemed unfeigned, her limpness of neckbone, wrist, and elbow: for sorrow of heart she could hardly have picked up a pencil. “I need to get it over with.”

“No!” he said, ferocious, and with sudden bold madness jumped his hold from her airy and insubstantial sleeve to her wrist, to which he clung like a lobster.