The Eye of the Heron

2

Rainclouds moved in long dim lines above Songe Bay. Rain pattered and pattered on the tile roof of the House of Falco. At the end of the house, in the kitchens, there was a far-off sound of life astir, of servants’ voices. No other sound, no other voice, only the rain.

Luz Marina Falco Cooper sat in the deep window seat, her knees drawn up to her chin. Sometimes she gazed out through the thick, greenish glass of the window at the sea and the rain and the clouds. Sometimes she looked down at the book that lay open beside her, and read a few lines. Then she sighed and looked out the window again. The book was not interesting.

It was too bad. She had had high hopes of it. She had never read a book before.

She had learned to read and write, of course, being the daughter of a Boss. Besides memorizing lessons aloud, she had copied out moral precepts, and could write a letter offering or declining an invitation, with a fancy scrollwork frame, and the salutation and signature written particularly large and stiff. But at school they used slates and the copybooks which the schoolmistresses wrote out by hand. She had never touched a book. Books were too precious to be used in school; there were only a few dozen of them in the world. They were kept in the Archives. But, coming into the hall this afternoon, she had seen lying on the low table a little brown box; she had lifted the lid to see what was in it, and it was full of words. Neat, tiny words, all the letters alike, what patience to make them all the same size like that! A book—a real book, from Earth. Her father must have left it there. She seized it, carried it to the window seat, opened the lid again carefully, and very slowly read all the different kinds of words on the first leaf of paper.

It did not seem to make much sense. “First aid” was all right, but the next line was a puzzle. It began with somebody’s name, A. Manuel, and then went on about injuries. Then came a lot of capital letters with dots after them. And what was a geneva, or a press, or a switzerland?

Equally puzzling were the red letters which slanted up the page as if they had been written over the others: DONATED BY THE WORLD RED CROSS FOR THE USE OF THE PENAL COLONY ON VICTORIA.

She turned the leaf of paper, admiring it. It was smoother to the touch than the finest cloth, crisp yet pliable like fresh thatch-leaf, and pure white.

She worked her way word by word to the bottom of the first page, and then began to turn several pages at once, since more than half the words meant nothing anyway. Gruesome pictures appeared: her interest revived with a shock. People supporting other people’s heads, breathing into their mouths; pictures of the bones inside a leg, of the veins inside an arm; colored pictures, on marvelous shiny paper like glass, of people with little red spots on their shoulders, with big red blotches on their cheeks, with horrible boils all over them, and mysterious words beneath the pictures: Allergic Rash. Measles. Chicken Box. Small Box. No, it was pox, not box. She studied all the pictures, sometimes making a foray into the words on the facing pages. She understood that it was a book of medicine, and that the doctor, not her father, must have left it on the table the night before. The doctor was a good man, but touchy; would he be angry if he knew she had looked at his book? It had his secrets in it. He never answered questions. He liked to keep his secrets to himself.

Luz sighed again and looked out at the ragged, rain-dropping clouds. She had looked at all the pictures, and the words were not interesting.

She got up, and was just setting the book down on the table exactly where it had lain, when her father entered the room.

His step was energetic, his back straight, his eyes clear and stern. He smiled when he saw Luz. A little startled, guilty, she swept him a fancy curtsy, her skirts hiding the table and the book. “Senhor! A thousand greetings!”

“There’s my little beauty. Michael! Hot water and a towel!—I feel dirty all over.” He sat down in one of the carved wooden armchairs and stretched out his legs, though his back stayed as straight as ever.

“Where have you been getting dirty, Papa?”

“Among the vermin.”

“Shanty Town?”

“Three kinds of creature came from Earth to Victoria: Men, lice, and Shanty-Towners. If I could get rid of only one kind, it would be the last.” He smiled again, pleased by his joke, then looked up at his daughter and said, “One of them presumed to answer me. I think you knew him.”

“I knew him?”

“At school. Vermin shouldn’t be allowed into the school. I forget his name. Their names are all nonsense, Sticktight, Holdfast, Howd’youdo, what have you … . A little black-haired stick of a boy.”

“Lev?”

“That’s the one. A troublemaker.”

“What did he say to you?”

“He said no to me.”

Falco’s man came hurrying in with a pottery basin and a jug of steaming water; a maid followed with towels. Falco scrubbed his face and hands, puffing and blowing and talking through the water and the towels. “He and some others just came back from an expedition up north, into the wilderness. He claims they found a fine town site. They want the whole lot to move there.”

“To leave Shanty Town? All of them?”

Falco snorted in assent, and stuck out his feet for Michael to take off his boots. “As if they’d last one winter without the City to look after them! Earth sent them here fifty years ago as unteachable imbeciles, which is what they are. It’s time they relearned their lesson.”

“But they can’t just go off into the wilderness,” said Luz, who had been listening to her thoughts as well as to her father’s words. “Who’d farm our fields?”

Her father ignored her question by repeating it, thus transforming a feminine expression of emotion into a masculine assessment of fact. “They can’t, of course, be allowed to start scattering like this. They provide necessary labor.”

“Why is it that Shanty-Towners do almost all the farming?”

“Because they’re good for nothing else. Get that slop out of the way, Michael.”

“Hardly any of our people know how to farm,” Luz observed. She was thinking. She had dark, strongly arched eyebrows, as her father did, and when she was thinking they lay in a straight line above her eyes. This straight line displeased her father. It did not suit the face of a pretty girl of twenty. It gave her a hard, unwomanly look. He had often told her this, but she had never broken the bad habit.

“My dear, we are City people, not peasants.”

“But who did the farming before the Shanty-Towners came? The Colony was sixty years old when they came.”

“The working people did the manual work, of course. But even our working people were never peasants. We are City people.”

“And we starved, didn’t we? There were the Famines.” Luz spoke dreamily, as if recalling an old history recitation, but her eyebrows were still down in that straight black line. “In the first ten years of the Colony, and other times … lots of people starved. They didn’t know how to cultivate bog-rice or raise sugar-root, until the Shanty-Towners came.”

Her father’s black brows were now a straight line too. He dismissed Michael, the maid, and the subject of conversation with one wave of the hand. “It’s a mistake,” he said in his dry voice, “to send peasants and women to school. The peasants become insolent, the women become boring.”

It would have made her cry, two or three years ago. She would have wilted, and crept off to her room to weep, and been miserable until her father said something kind to her. But these days he could not make her cry. She didn’t know why it was, and it seemed very strange to her. Certainly she feared and admired him as much as ever; but she always knew what he was going to say. It was never anything new. Nothing was ever new.

She turned and looked out through the thick, whorled glass again at Songe Bay, the farther curve of the shore veiled by unending rain. She stood straight, a vivid figure in the dull light, in her long red homespun skirt and ruffled shirt. She looked indifferent, and alone, standing there in the center of the high, long room; and she felt so. Also she felt her father’s gaze on her. And knew what he was going to say.

“It’s time you were married, Luz Marina.”

She waited for the next sentence.

“Since your mother died … .” And the sigh.

Enough, enough, enough!

She turned to face him. “I read that book,” she said.

“Book?”

“Doctor Martin must have left it. What does it mean, ‘penal colony’?”

“You had no business to touch that!”

He was surprised. That at least made things interesting.

“I thought it was a box of dried fruits,” she said, and laughed. “But what does it mean, ‘penal colony’? A colony of criminals, a prison?”

“That is nothing you need to know.”

“Our ancestors were sent here as prisoners, is that right? That’s what the Shanty-Towners in school said.” Falco’s face was getting white, but the danger exhilarated Luz; her mind raced, and she spoke her mind. “They said the First Generation were all criminals. The Earth Government used Victoria for a jail. The Shanty-Towners said they were sent because they believed in peace or something, but we were sent because we were all thieves and murderers. And most of them, the First Generation, were men, their women couldn’t come unless they were married to them, and that’s why there were so few women to start with. That always seemed stupid, not to send enough women for a colony. And it explains why the ships were made only to come, not to go back. And why the Earth people never come here. We’re locked out. It’s true, isn’t it? We call ourselves Victoria Colony. But we’re a jail.”

Falco had risen. He came forward; she stood still, poised on her feet. “No,” she said, lightly, as if indifferent. “No, don’t, Papa.”

Her voice stopped the man in his anger; he too stood still, and looked at her. For a moment he saw her. She saw in his eyes that he saw her, and that he was afraid. For a moment, only a moment.

He turned away. He went to the table and picked up the book Dr. Martin had left. “What does all that matter, Luz Marina?” he said at last.

“I’d like to know.”

“It was a hundred years ago. And Earth is lost. And we are what we are.”

She nodded. When he spoke that way, dry and quiet, she saw the strength she admired and loved in him.

“What angers me,” he said, but not with anger, “is that you listened to that talk from those vermin. They put everything backward. What do they know? You let them tell you that Luis Firmin Falco, my great-grandfather, the founder of our House, was a thief, a jailbird. What do they know about it! I know, and I can tell you, what our ancestors were. They were men. Men too strong for Earth. The Government on Earth sent them here because they were afraid of them. The best, the bravest, the strongest—all the thousands of little weak people on Earth were afraid of them, and trapped them, and sent them off in the one-way ships, so that they could do as they liked with Earth, you see. Well, when that was done, when the real men were gone, the Earth people were left so weak and womanish that they began to be afraid even of rabble like the Shanty-Towners. So they sent them here for us to keep in order. Which we have done. You see? That’s how it was.”

Luz nodded. She accepted her father’s evident intent to placate her, though she did not know why for the first time he had spoken to her placatingly, explaining something as if she were his equal. Whatever the reason, his explanation sounded well; and she was used to hearing what sounded well, and figuring out later what it might really mean. Indeed, until she had met Lev at school, it had not occurred to her that anyone might prefer to speak a plain fact rather than a lie that sounded well. People said what suited their purposes, when they were serious; and when they weren’t serious, they talked without meaning anything at all. Talking to girls, they were hardly ever serious. Ugly truths were to be kept from girls, so that their pure souls did not become coarse and soiled. And anyhow, she had asked about the penal colony mostly to get her father off the subject of her marriage; and the trick had worked.

But the trouble with such tricks, she thought when she was in her own room alone, is that they trick you too. She had tricked herself into arguing with her father, and winning the argument. He would not forgive her that.

All the girls of her age and class in the City had been married for two or three years now. She had evaded marriage only because Falco, whether he knew it or not, didn’t want to let her go from his house. He was used to having her there. They were alike, very much alike; they enjoyed each other’s company more, perhaps, than anyone else’s. But he had looked at her this evening as if seeing someone different, someone he wasn’t used to. If he began noticing her as a person different from himself, if she began winning battles with him, if she was no longer his little girl pet, he might begin thinking about what else she was—what use she was.

And what use was she, what was she good for? The continuation of the house of Falco, of course. And then what? Either Herman Marquez or Herman Macmilan. And nothing whatever she could do about it. She would be a wife. She would be a daughter-in-law. She would wear her hair in a bun, and scold the servants, and listen to the men carousing in the hall after supper, and have babies. One a year. Little Marquez Falcos. Little Macmilan Falcos. Eva, her old playmate, married at sixteen, had three babies and was expecting the fourth. Eva’s husband, the Councillor’s son Aldo Di Giulio Hertz, beat her; and she was proud of it. She showed the bruises and murmured, “Aldito has such a temper, he’s so wild, like a little boy in a tantrum.”

Luz made a face, and spat. She spat on the tiled floor of her room, and let the spittle lie. She stared at the small grayish blob and wished she could drown Herman Marquez in it, and then Herman Macmilan. She felt dirty. Her room was close, dirty: a prison cell. She fled the thought, and the room. She darted out into the hall, gathered up her skirts, and climbed the ladder to the place under the roof, where nobody else ever came. She sat on the dusty floor there—the roof, loud with rain, was too low to stand up under —and let her mind go free.

It went straight out, away from the house and the hour, back to a wider time.

On the playing field by the schoolhouse, an afternoon of spring, two boys were playing catch, Shanty-Towners, Lev and his friend Timmo. She stood on the porch of the schoolhouse watching them, wondering at what she saw, the reach and stretch of back and arm, the lithe swing of the body, the leap of the ball through light. It was as if they played a silent music, the music of moving. The light came under storm clouds, from the west, over Songe Bay, level and golden; the earth was brighter than the sky. The bank of raw earth behind the field was golden, the weeds above it burned. The earth burned. Lev stood waiting to catch a long throw, his head back, his hands poised, and she stood watching, amazed by beauty.

A group of City boys came around the schoolhouse to play football. They yelled at Lev to hand over the ball, just as he leaped, his arm at full stretch, to catch Timmo’s high throw. He caught it, and laughed, and tossed the ball over to the others.

As the two came by the porch, she ran down the steps. “Lev!”

The west blazed behind him, he stood black between her and the sun.

“Why did you give them the ball like that?”

She could not see his face against the light. Timmo, a tall, handsome boy, held back a little and did not look into her face.

“Why do you let them push you around?”

Lev answered at last. “I don’t,” he said. As she came closer to him she saw him looking straight at her.

“They say ‘Give it here!’ And you just give it—”

“They want to play a game; we were just fooling around. We had our turn.”

“But they don’t ask you for it, they order you. Don’t you have any pride?”

Lev’s eyes were dark, his face was dark and rough, unfinished; he smiled, a sweet, startled smile. “Pride? Sure. If I didn’t, I’d hang onto it when it’s their turn.”

“Why are you always so full of answers?”

“Because life’s so full of questions.”

He laughed, but he kept looking at her as if she were a question herself, a sudden question with no answer. And he was right, for she had no idea why she was challenging him like this.

Timmo stood by, a little uncomfortable. Some of the boys on the playing field were already looking at them: two Shanty-boys talking to a senhorita.

Without a word said, the three walked away from the schoolhouse, down to the street below it, where they could not be seen from the field.

“If any of them talked to each other like that, the way they yelled at you,” Luz said, “there’d have been a fight. Why don’t you fight?”

“For a football?”

“For anything!”

“We do.”

“When? How? You just walk away.”

“We walk into the City, to school, every day,” Ley said. He was not looking at her now as they walked along side by side, and his face looked as usual, an ordinary boy’s face, stubborn, sullen. She did not understand what he meant at first, and when she did, she did not know what to say.

“Fists and knives are the least of it,” he said, and perhaps heard pomposity in his own voice, a certain boastfulness, for he turned to Luz with a laugh and shrug—“and words aren’t much good either!”

They came out from the shadow of a house into the level golden light. The sun lay, a molten blur, between the dark sea and the dark clouds, and the roofs of the City burned with unearthly fire. The three young people stopped, looking into that tremendous brightness and darkness of the west. The sea wind, smelling of salt and space and wood smoke, blew cold in their faces. “Don’t you see,” Lev said, “you can see it—you can see what it should be, what it is.”

She saw it, with his eyes, she saw the glory, the City that should be, and was.

The moment broke. The haze of glory still burned between sea and storm, the City still stood golden and endangered on the eternal shore; but people came down the street behind them, talking and calling. They were Shanty-girls, who had stayed in school to help the mistresses clean up the classrooms. They joined Timmo and Lev, greeting Luz gently but, like Timmo, warily. Her way home lay to the left, down into the City; theirs to the right, up over the bluffs and onto the Town Road.

As she went down the steep street she glanced back at them going up it. The girls wore work suits of bright, soft colors. City girls sneered at Shanty girls for wearing trousers; but they made their own skirts of Shanty cloth if they could get it, for it was finer and better dyed than any the City made. The boys’ trousers and long-sleeved, high-necked jackets were the creamy white of the natural silkweed fiber. Lev’s head of thick, soft hair looked very black above that whiteness. He was walking behind the others, with Southwind, a beautiful, low-voiced girl. Luz could tell from the way his head was turned that he was listening to that low voice, and smiling.

“Screw!” said Luz, and strode down the street, her long skirts whipping at her ankles. She had been too well brought up to know swearwords. She knew “Hell!” because her father said it, even in front of women, when he was annoyed. She never said “Hell!” —it was her father’s property. But Eva had told her, years ago, that “screw” was a very bad word, and so, when alone, she used it.

And there, materializing like a wotsit out of nothing, and like a wotsit humpbacked, beady-eyed, and vaguely feathery, there was her duenna, Cousin Lores, who she thought had given up and gone home half an hour ago. “Luz Marina! Luz Marina! Where were you? I waited and waited—I ran all the way to Casa Falco and back to the school—where were you? Why are you walking all by yourself? Slow down, Luz Marina, I’m dying, I’m dying.”

But Luz would not slow down for the poor squawking woman. She strode on, fighting tears that had come upon her unawares: tears of anger because she could never walk alone, never do anything by herself, never. Because the men ran everything. They had it all their way. And the older women were all on their side. So that a girl couldn’t walk in the streets of the City alone, because some drunken working man might insult her, and what if he did get put in jail or get his ears cut off for it afterward? A lot of good that would do. The girl’s reputation would be ruined. Because her reputation was what the men thought of her. The men thought everything, did everything, ran everything, made everything, made the laws, broke the laws, punished the lawbreakers; and there was no room left for the women, no City for the women. Nowhere, nowhere, but in their own rooms, alone.

Even a Shanty-Towner was freer than she was. Even Lev, who wouldn’t fight for a football, but who challenged the night as it came up over the edge of the world, and laughed at the laws. Even Southwind, who was so quiet and mild—Southwind could walk home with anyone she liked, hand in hand across the open fields in the wind of evening, running before the rain.

The rain drummed on the tile roof of the attic, where she had taken refuge that day three years ago when she got home at last, Cousin Lores puffing and squawking behind her all the way.

The rain drummed on the tile roof of the attic, where she had taken refuge today.

Three years, since that evening in the golden light. And nothing to show for it. Less now than there had been then. Three years ago she had still gone to school; she had believed that when school was over she would magically be free.

A prison. All Victoria was a prison, a jailhouse. And no way out. Nowhere else to go.

Only Lev had gone away, and found a new place somewhere far in the north, in the wilderness, a place to go … . And he had come back from it, and had stood up and said “No” to the Boss Falco.

But Lev was free, he had always been free. That was why there was no other time in her life, before or since, like the time when she had stood with him on the heights of her City in the golden light before the storm, and seen with him what freedom was. For one moment. A gust of the sea wind, a meeting of the eyes.

It was more than a year since she had even seen him. He was gone, back to Shanty Town, off to the new settlement, gone free, forgetting her. Why should he remember her? Why should she remember him? She had other things to think about. She was a grown woman. She had to face life. Even if all life had to show her was a locked door, and behind the locked door, no room.