Painted Eyes

Dusty and treeless, the street sloped beneath us. Somewhere a hammer made thunderclaps, forging the night-sky. Then the children, seeing us, dashed from the Moorish houses, vigorously shouting, vying for position, while the bravest, in worn underpants and plastic sandals, climbed a high crater-like wall and plunged, with murderous cries, into the Roman pool where blue-lipped fish waited. Ah, those glorious soaked heads, spiked like palm fronds! Seeing one in our group clutch her purse— repelled by the wet black princes who shivered in circles of yellow mud and begged from us— I felt ashamed. In the brief African twilight, a canary chirped something shrewdly about avarice. Far off, in the little neighborhood where I grew—with neat cement walkways and crab-apple blossoms— money ran through the fingers of our house, with nothing much to record its loss but unhappiness: one of us ironing servilely, one of us sobbing in a bedroom, one of us sleeping on a rifle, one of us seizing another by the hair, demanding the animal-like submission we thought was love. Sunday evening. Mother is wearing a big cotton shift and tweezing her eyebrows. Her head is a thicket of hairpins. In the round hand-mirror that parodies her face, the world looks greater than it is. I am next to bathe in the water of the poor earth, reused by each of us in order of birth. Gray with sodium and grit, it covers me like a black robe, and yet I feel exalted. Soon the violent rain, like wet Sahara sand, would fall, scrubbing the hot labyrinthine corridors of shuttered houses and aimless dogs, where the sparse life is purgative and inexhaustible, where little pilfering hands moved freely in and out of my trouser pockets, though there were no diamonds except those the eyes mined.