THE PERFECT BEGGAR
John Gamboa
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Published by:
Just Imagine It Ink
Copyright (c) 2011 by John Gamboa
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All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
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Chapter One: Floating Between Worlds
She sits almost perfectly still by the water’s edge, looking out at the lotus flowers floating in a lake. Her silk paisley blouse rises and falls just a little bit as she breathes, her eyes glide slowly from side to side. If you looked carefully you could see the inside of her wrist reveal a faint pulse. She is perhaps the most beautiful woman in the universe and it would be very difficult for anyone to look at her for long without turning away, crying with shame, guilt or simple ecstasy.
Behind her, some pretty females invite a young man to join their lush picnic. They pull him by the hand, they tease him, he is afraid for a moment, then he joins them. People are enjoying themselves immeasurably at this garden party, eating, speaking with each other, laughing, kissing each other. The party lasts forever and new people show up all the time.
Some of these people have been at this banquet for so long that they have finally grown bored with social entertainment and they are becoming distracted. They turn away from the crowd and walk a short distance, looking at the lake in the mist. They have noticed the stunning flowers floating there. Wide, heavy lotus blossoms. Anchored in the mud, floating on the green water, giving up a sweet smell, radiating pale glowing colors. People are wading out into the water, looking at each lotus blossom. The moment they see these flowers they are irresistibly drawn to them.
So the people who had enjoyed the party so much are now obsessed with the flowers. They wade and wander slowly in the water, looking curiously from one blossom to the next. These innocent people will each fall in love with a particular flower. They will each feel that the one they choose is theirs and theirs alone. They each want to touch their special flower, smell it, and get as close to it as possible. Then they actually climb into their own special lotus and they miraculously become little babies as they do this. Then the petals of the flowers gently close over the sweet little sleeping babies and the swollen blossoms disappear into forgetfulness forever. New buds instantly appear on the surface of the water and open to reveal entirely new and different flowers, just as new people arrive on the edge of the lake, having finally grown tired of so much pleasure. There is a lotus for each person who looks, and each person tries to choose the lotus that is most right for them.
Meanwhile, the lady sitting under the tree at the edge of the lake is not like any of these other people. She stays and watches longer than all the others so that she can be careful to chose the correct flower for her divine purpose. She takes her time. She spends lifetimes looking. Eternities. She looks from flower to flower. There are so many of them, coming and going, and she waits patiently for the sign.
Her technique is like this: She looks into the color of each flower and considers their vibrations; she perceives each distinct essence from afar, remembering things; she listens to the comments of the insects who harvest the nectar of the lotus blossoms and who have been within them all their lives. She allows her mind to rest and wander in her concentration. She is sensitive to everything but she is not focusing on any one thing. While many people have passed her on their way out to the water, she has remained perfectly still, except for her slow and measured pulse, her gentle breath and her beautiful eyes, which are ever watchful and vigilant. She does not even blink.
After a forever of quiet waiting, the watcher rises up to get a better view. She has noticed a particular blossom. She is sure; this is the flower she has been waiting for all this time. She walks across the grass, steps into the warm pond. She keeps her gaze trained on that particular flower. Now a handsome young man has chosen the very same lotus she is looking at. He begins to climb inside it. The watcher’s eyebrows contract. Behind her the tunes of a sitar and the singing of people enjoying sex ride the warm currents of air, but she ignores them. Her wet clothing swirls in her wake like the tail of a fish. As she approaches the special lotus, she can already see the little baby inside it, falling asleep as the flower’s petals begin to wrap shut.
The Watcher arrives and takes the lotus petals in her hands and carefully peels them away. The baby fidgets. She of mystical strength peels the petals back and pulls the flower open just as it begins to disappear. She reaches down into the lotus and scoops out the naked little boy. She kisses the baby and he begins crying. She holds the infant close to her for just a moment before she lowers the screaming and thrashing baby into a nearby lotus. The petals of that flower begin to fold over the baby, finally muffling the sound as the boy goes back to sleep and his flower silently vanishes, leaving not even a ripple on the water’s surface. Now the strange woman climbs into the lotus that she emptied, transforming herself into a little baby as she does so.
As the lotus petals fold over her the light around her turns from yellow to orange and then it becomes pink and finally it darkens into red. The lotus begins to squeeze her. She closes her eyes and prays: “Thank you, thank you, thank you…” repeating these words endlessly. The flower twists and wraps itself around her, getting tighter and tighter. She feels gravity pulling the flower down under the water. The pulsing flower gets warmer and warmer and inside it she begins to have trouble breathing. She begins to feel intensely claustrophobic and she is being slowly crushed. She wonders if she will die.
She is born.
She is born onto a pile of rags in the darkest corner of a rotting little shack somewhere in a filthy ghetto just outside a nameless village. Gaps in the walls admit dusty light and chilly air scented with the smells of burning garbage and filth. Dogs are barking outside. The shack has no furnishings but a small table and two chairs. There is no plumbing, there are no decorations, there are not even any windows. A single lantern burns in the rafters, coating the interior with a slimy gray light which neglects many places. The tilted, rotting shelter is built of scraps of wooden boxes, signs or planks removed from old buildings, doors, cardboard and sheets of canvas. The floor is greasy dirt which has been pounded smooth by the pacing occupants. There are tin cups, empty food cans, paper litter, bottles and other trash, the occupants are very poor, too poor to know that filth breeds chaos and living in chaos just makes life harder.
The sweaty, bleeding mother is exhausted and deep within her pain, she worries. The young woman winces and wonders how she could be worried at a moment like this. After all, she had survived delivering this damned baby! She reclines onto the dirty sheets and will not look at the baby. She does not want to nurse her own daughter. She inhales slowly and says: “Please take this thing away from me.”
The midwives don’t hear her because her voice is hoarse and thin. It sounds more like the blowing and panting she had been doing all night, but quiet. The mother tries to repeat her request but gives up and stares at her newborn daughter, blinking slowly. She shuts her eyes, but she knows that when she opens them the baby will still be there. By now a new mother has usually welcomed her baby with joy and is focusing on the new arrival, speaking to the child, ignoring her own situation. The midwives looked at their despondent patient, then at each other.
One of the midwives began to pet the broken mother’s greasy hair back from her face and she spoke with a soothing voice: “Congratulations. Women just like you have risked their lives from the beginning of time, just to keep this human race on this planet, and every live birth is a miracle!”
“And the survival of the mother is a miracle, as well.” Said the other.
“Is it?” Asked their patient. The midwives looked at each other.
The forlorn mother finally gathered the baby to her chest. The tiny child grappled for her mother’s breast and the instinct for survival was great in the little one. The new mother felt the baby pulling what strength she had left out of her and she resented the baby’s hunger. She lamented the loss of her own energy and nourishment for the unwanted child, and she wondered if there was another way. She waited and thought, then she began to cry.
The sleepy and uncomfortable mother had no idea where the child’s degenerate father was. She could not get his stupid face out of her mind. He was a slightly fat person with thin arms and legs who cared little for personal cleanliness or education. He had a face that looked like a wound, never smiling and usually tightened by suspicion. He became meaner when he drank, and smiled only at the prospect of another’s suffering. He had yelled at her for making too much noise during the delivery; he whined that she was “just trying to get attention” and he doubted his patrimony, scolding her in front of the midwifes, calling his woman derogatory names. Then he left. She hoped that he was out getting drunk. Then he might not come home soon, as the sun was just setting. She hoped that he might get drink and fall into a ditch and drown in the muck, perhaps he might get into a fight and end up in jail, maybe he would get robbed and killed by thieves, or maybe he would simply run away like some men do when a child is born to them. The young mother ignored the chattering midwifes as they gathered their bloody tools and left. Later on, when she tried to remember naming her child, the mother could not recall choosing the name. All she knew was that she was now stuck forever with that demon, the father of this screaming infant; and this wretched child was destined to be the cause of all her troubles. The woman decided right then that she hated the baby for all it represented. All her own failures and anger personified. A miniature and vulnerable version of the man that produced her. Proof of her stupidity and bad luck. A bad omen, a curse, a burden; a thing which threatened to make her think of someone else’s needs besides her own.
‘If only the baby were born dead.’ She thought over and over. ‘But it was what I hoped for, so of course it could not come to pass…’ Such was the mother’s resignation.
The child was named Claire. Her mother later told her that in her delirium, she might have chosen the name of a popular brand of soap, but the meddlesome midwife wrote the name Claire on the birth certificate instead. When her father returned the next morning he kicked the door open and stomped into the darkness complaining of a hangover. He looked at the mother and the baby and a brief look of confusion was replaced by acknowledgement.
“What did you have?”
“A daughter. ”
“Well, there it is. Proof that God hates me.”
Claire’s mother watched him move about, knocking things over, rummaging through the trash on the floor for an unopened box of crackers. He found a bottle of alcohol and drained the last of it down his throat. He gently placed the bottle on the table and looked at it as if it had a genie in it.
“So how long do you think you will just lay there? And where’s all the food? Have you eaten all of it again?”
His woman lay there staring at him with hatred. She rolled over and turned her back to him. He began to yell at her. “Do you think having a baby was a good idea? Do you think it will get you sympathy from me? Is this what you wanted? I was not…consulted! ”
Claire began to cry, and her mother ignored her. This was just the beginning.
And this is how these stupid people lived. Shouting, arguing, suspicious, jealous, unkind, boring, violent. Life wore on with a steady routine of misery for the couple and their child. The despicable sot beat the mother and the child and intimidated them verbally when he was too tired or drunk or bored to actually beat them. And of course, he would not buy clothing for the child or feed her. Claire grew up wearing rags such as flour bags and things the neighbors gave her mother so that her child could be clothed. But her mother never expressed gratitude, and the neighbors did not have much to share, or much desire to associate with the nasty woman.
The father grew meaner as time went on, and the pressures of hunger and worry about everything made him focus a strange resentment towards his child. “I never wanted a child!” He would tell Claire over and over, “So keep you dresses down, or you’ll end up like your stupid mother, with an unwanted child, chained to some loser… like me!” He jabbed his own solar plexus with his own thumb as he said this, as if he were proud of himself for being just such a loser. He glared over the coarse table at Claire. “I wanted nothing to do with your mother. You were such a mistake!.” He stabbed at the crud on his plate while he stared at her. Claire’s mother pretended to ignore her husband when he said things like this about her, but she was sitting right there, so she wore the cold mask of a numb person, and her inability to feel emotional pain colored her skin with a wide brush that made all her features run together, like a stew.
At times Claire’s father attempted to increase his lot by committing small crimes. His nature was well suited to stealing purses from old ladies or grabbing objects that were placed down and ignored for a moment. He was an opportunistic coward, and his crimes seldom paid much, but they did provide a thrilling break from the monotony of his poverty. When he was successful he would be a bragging loudmouth, laughing at his victim’s poor luck, telling his woman over and over again how his skill got them ahead in the world, and he worked out plans for new crimes and places to prey. But then his fear of the police would keep him holed up in the shack for days on end, suspicious that his woman would turn him into the authorities, because he would not share evenly with her. His temper would grow as his liquor ran out, and he sat in the darkness, damning his bad luck, becoming more and more angry and unpredictable, afraid to go out and commit more crimes, anxious from his self-imposed incarceration.
Sometimes he would send his wife to another man’s house to spend the night. He would happily tell her that he had made an arrangement, as if it were good news. He would threaten to beat her if she refused to participate. He would remind her of all that he did for her, how much money he spent on her and her child, then he would evict her into the night, and drink while he waited for her to return. When his haggard partner did finally come home, he would bully her for the money she had brought, claiming that without him, she would not have had the opportunity to earn it at all.
“And don’t tell me you didn’t enjoy it! Hah! You certainly don’t get much pleasure from me, or you would not have gone to his house. You should consider yourself lucky!”
Claire’s mother would look at the man with hatred and the two of them would suddenly fight and Claire would attempt to hide under the table or in a corner, watching them scream at each other, covering her ears, crying.
Claire’s long-suffering and interminably complaining mother was able to gather food and other scant necessities for herself through her association with the creepy and petulant coward, but Claire had a much harder time surviving.
Despite the danger she lived in, Claire was most oppressed by boredom. She suffered pain and fear and hunger and confusion, but so much of her time was spent waiting for food, hiding from her parents, and simply having nothing in particular to do. She wished for some change in her life, any change at all.
At this time the mother bore another child, this time a boy named Edwin, who the man treated much the same as he treated everyone else, and who the mother as well was just as mean to. If it were possible, Claire had to survive on even less food. She also had to raise her tiny little brother herself because her mother found the job detestable. For some reason the birth of the little boy seemed to impel both the parents further down the forlorn road of the drunkard. But Claire shared her food with Edwin, attempted to clothe him with the rags available to her, she taught him how to walk, she tried to protect him from her parents and she loved him with all her heart.
So life wandered on for these poor shabby children. Claire had always liked looking out the door of their small house, especially at the sky. As soon as she was able she would go outside and wander around near the house, she began spending less time indoors. And day by day she wandered farther and farther away. Soon she was able to take Edwin out with her. They discovered the market in the center of their village, and they began to go there every day. It was a wide open place, usually sunny, and the people there were either kind to them or they ignored them completely. This was a huge improvement over their treatment at home. The market was a large open square in the center of the village, surrounded by large buildings, the largest of which was a church. There was a fountain in the center of the market area, and the kids could drink water for free, and wash their faces and hands and that was a wonderful feeling. When the sun became hot they could sit in the shade of the church. There were vendors of all sorts there every day, and there were strangers passing through who were interesting to watch. Claire loved being in the market, and she saw other children her age, sometimes poor and skinny like herself, sometimes happy, clean and well dressed. Claire and her brother tried to spend every moment they could in the market, and her mother found their absence a relief.
In the beginning, Claire would carry Edwin on her back to the market before dawn. They waited at the bakery. They quickly learned that the baker would only feed street children before dawn so that paying customers would not have to see him give away bread for free. Claire fed her brother on scraps and crumbs. She quickly realized that by using her infant brother as a prop, she could evoke sympathy from strangers and she began asking them for coins. She had seen other kids doing this and quickly learned the technique: hold your hand out, looking up at the passing people. At six years old, Claire became a regular market beggar. In those days there were many more unwanted children in the market, and Claire and Edwin had a very difficult time finding a place where they could beg. The larger kids who had been there the longest would always get there first and no one could get them to budge. Some kids slept on the street where they begged, and they never moved! Ironically, there were few fights between the beggars, because the police would quickly banish any kids who caused a disturbance and then they would starve, begging by the side of the road outside of town, like old people.
After a few more years Edwin grew big enough to beg as well and because there were two of them, they could maintain their presence in places other kids might have to abandon, even for a short time. This was just enough to give them the chance they needed to squeeze in and establish themselves permanently.
After that, the job was simple. Get up before dawn and ask for bread, drink some water, secure a location, wait all day for people to give money or food, then leave when the market shuts down and goes empty.
When they brought the money they received home to their parents, Claire always prayed that the adults were drunk and asleep on their rag pile in the corner of the hut. Then she could leave the money on the table, sleep for a while, wake up and be gone before her parents awoke, and they would be safe for the day. But if the parents were awake when they returned, they were invariably flogged for stealing some of the money, and not being pathetic enough.
“A more pathetic beggar earns more money!” The moldy, polluted father screamed.
“What we need… is a perfect beggar!” The septic mother repeated over and over again. So the kids did everything they could.
But being skinny, dirty and clothed in rags,
there was not much they could do
to become more
pathetic.
Chapter Two: Music
Years dragged on in this way, then one day the worst possible thing happened. It all started when Edwin was begging. Like his sister, he had a pretty face with large clever eyes. He hoped for something better every day in spite of his crushing situation. On this particular morning he decided that singing a little song would help him get attention. So he set his mind to making up a song. He spent his time humming tunes to himself and thinking of a lyric. There really was no melody, because his immature and hungry voice made it impossible for him to hold a steady tune. Edwin had little experience of music, but he loved the sound of the drummers during the religious parade every year, and he had once heard a travelling vendor in the market singing a song and he enjoyed it immeasurably. He remembered as much as he could and improvised the rest. After much thought, he composed his song:
Can I have a coin?
Just one or two,
If you toss one at me
I will sing for you!
And he sang it over and over and soon those nearby didn’t even hear it any more.
So Claire was sitting nearby taking a break, basking in the sunlight and her little brother’s chirping voice. She decided to relax… she closed her eyes. She was tired. Claire did not notice when someone gave the boy a small golden coin. It was worth twenty-five of the silver coins they received on very rare occasions, and those were worth ten of the copper coins they usually received, and they usually only got two or three of those a day. Edwin had never seen a coin like it before. He stopped singing and looked at his sister. Claire was asleep on the steps of the church. He looked at the coin for a long time and forgot to thank the kind person who gave it to him. He thought about his sister and walked across the courtyard to the bakery. He purchased a sweet roll. The baker looked in shock at the golden coin Edwin offered him, and he looked all around him to see that other customers also saw the coin and were smiling at the little boy. The baker complained aloud about having to give the boy all his change for one little roll, and he would have given the child a short measure, but other customers had seen the coin, and were busy laughing and congratulating the boy on his fortune!
Edwin collected all his change. Most of it was in silver. He turned to share his bounty with Claire when he ran into his father. He literally bounced off his father’s fat belly. For a moment, he stood there in surprise, looking up at the man. The sun was over his father’s head and his father’s face was obscured by shadow, so Edwin had a difficult time recognizing him. He had never seen his father in the market in the middle of the day. The bully swatted his boy to the ground and unloaded a massive torrent of expletives and oaths, and began to kick at the rickety waif, screaming: “I knew you rats were stealing from me! You have been hoarding! HIDING! Thief! Thief! Thief!” The father was in a furious rage, and he stomped on the pastry, grinding it into the dirty pavement, which seemed to upset the child more than the beating he received.
“Someone gave me a gold coin! Someone gave me all of this!” Cried the boy. “I didn’t steal!”
“Are you kidding? Do you think I am stupid, Edwin? Do you really expect me to believe that? Of course you would steal, you are my son!” He yelled these things as he repeatedly slapped the child, stooping over him and preventing his escape.
By this time Claire arrived, terrorized and confused. She began to collect all the money which had scattered over the cobblestones. Some other kids had gathered as well, amused at the highly entertaining sight as the angry father punished his son for stealing from him. And the drunkard howled at his child: “I will a make a perfect beggar of you when I am through with you!”
Claire became very alarmed at these words, and she interceded: she wedged her skinny frame between the man and her brother.
“No! leave him alone! I did it! Punish me! Edwin is protecting me!”
This caused the man to pause and think. He rose up and stood there, rubbing his chin. For once and for just a moment, some sort of masculine pride took hold of the old man’s heart, and he quietly agreed. He looked at Claire with all his suspicions triumphantly confirmed.
“When you get home tonight…” He never finished the statement, but saying this greatly assuaged his anger, he looked at the shivering boy in the dirt. “After all, he will someday be a man, he actually might have a future on this cursed earth…and he will never steal from me again, will you Edwin?”
Claire handed her father the money and he walked away counting it, with a train of kids following and begging from him as he left.
The rest of the day Claire asked her brother over and over what had happened, and they tried to think of what to do, but all they could think of was to keep begging. When Claire and her little brother returned to their shack that night, the father and mother sat at the splintery table, eating a large spread of food. The bottle was mostly full and they were only slightly drunk. The father ignored the entrance, but the mother savored a leering smile at her daughter, shaking her head slowly. The girl entered the small area with the rest of the day’s proceeds. It was difficult for her to breathe. She held the coins up towards her father. He put down his fork and turned to look at her. He reached to her, took her tiny forearm in his hands and yanked at it. She opened her hand and there were two copper coins.
“Where is the rest of it?” barked the man.
“This is all there was!” pleaded Claire.
“I caught you with a huge pile of money today! You have been hoarding it! You try to keep from sharing with your own parents! How dare you?” He hit her, but he did not let go of her arm. Claire fell down and scrambled back up, pulling on her arm to keep away from the drunkard.
“I’m telling you the truth! We got a gold coin today, that is how we got all the money, it has never happened before!”
Claire’s mother began to laugh. “LIAR!” she hissed, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand. “If you got a gold coin where is it?”
Before she knew what was happening, her father had hit her again, and as she fell, a terrific strain was sent through her arm and it cracked with an audible snap. Her father dropped her wrist, and Claire ended up on the floor holding her broken arm to her chest. The girl began to cough up tears of shock and pain. Her father lifted her up, stood her in front of him. He grabbed her face by the cheeks, looked into her eyes and insisted: “Shut up. You fell in the well. Do you understand?”
She nodded spastically. “I fell in the well… and… you pulled me out!”
He told her to go out and find a stick and a rag or some string to tie the arm straight with. Claire’s mother burped. Edwin huddled in the corner crying. His father told him to shut up.
Claire stumbled through the village whining involuntarily, and windows closed as she walked past the shacks. Dogs barked from behind fences and walls. Claire found some string in a ditch. She eventually found a stick as well, a bent branch that she broke off of a dead tree. She returned to the hovel, and her parents tied her arm in such a way that it healed incorrectly, giving her the look of someone with an extra elbow in her broken arm.
But Claire was a fabulous beggar after that! Her pain got so much attention! She took more money home every night and her mother scolded her regularly, saying: “See? Aren’t you glad that you are a perfect beggar now? Look at all this money!” All Claire could do was agree. Her arm slowly healed and the pain went away and she got used to having a bent arm.
When she was begging, Claire would sit by the corner and hold out her basket with her broken arm. She was really good at waving the basket around in a strange way, as if her broken arm caused it to behave like a cobra’s head, strange and hypnotic. In actuality, she could hold the basket quite still if she cared to but Claire was capable of generating an acute sympathy among pedestrians using her drifting misshapen arm as an advertisement.
She sometimes asked Edwin to sing his little song again, but of course he would not.
So people would approach Claire slowly, looking at her deformed arm, then at her face, then at her arm again. Many people seemed to feel that by giving Claire a coin they had purchased the right to see the freak arm up close, but they also invariably took one last look into Claire’s eyes, right before they left. This is because most people do feel some small scrap of shame, even in the presence of an utterly worthless person. Claire always smiled, but as if she were in some pain. A little wince, and the passers-by never failed to look and pay and get their thrill and go away believing that they had done a charitable thing, giving money to support that poor crippled child!
Years went by, and poor little Claire’s parents actually became relatively well to do. They had a plan. Starting with some of the silver they had earned the day Claire became a perfect beggar, they saved almost every scrap of copper their frightened kids brought home to them. First they paid to have the front wall of their flimsy hut replaced with bricks and a stout door was purchased from a junk dealer and fitted to the frame. It looked great from the rutted, swill soaked street. Eventually they replaced the other walls with brick, added two windows, with panes of glass even, and then finally, a solid, flat roof. They eventually had one of the finest houses in the whole shanty town. They had a perfect beggar! They used the material from the old walls as flooring and this raised them up off the dirt. They painted the house white, the door red, and the window frames light blue. There was a low railing wall around the roof, and they put a box full of straw and some chickens up there and used a ladder to get up to them. They lived a life which they considered to be one of comfort and ease.
One day the adults told Claire and her brother to beg all the harder. They had decided that because they were so old, they needed a proper bed to sleep in. “So hurry up!” Said their mother.
They especially delighted in warning Claire’s brother
that if he did not bring home enough money
they would make a perfect beggar
out of him as well.
Chapter Three: Beggars
So every day before dawn, Claire and Edwin went to the market to pester strangers for a few coins. As mentioned earlier, there were other kids there begging, but Claire and her brother did not spend a lot of time dealing with them. They did not have many problems with other beggars, but they did learn over time that they all seemed to have the same type of parents, or perhaps none at all, so they did not get any sympathy from each other. No one taught any of them how to socialize. Those without parents at all behaved like feral cats and those with parents were raised to be suspicious. They were sometimes jealous of each other’s luck at begging, so they tried not to beg within sight of each other. They also worried that the sight of too many beggars would cause the shop owners to drive them all away. So Claire and her little brother usually ignored the other beggars and felt neither sorrow for them, nor animosity. To Claire like everyone else, other beggars were practically invisible. But there were no other perfect beggars in their market at all, of any kind. Claire was the only one. So she did develop a strange sort of pride regarding her status, and she and her brother did bring home more money than the other kids.
One day Edwin noticed that there was a boy watching his sister. Neither Claire or Edwin had ever seen the boy before, either he was new in the village or he visited from somewhere else. The stranger looked at Claire with intense curiosity. He showed up almost every day. He was not a beggar. He was well dressed and older by a few years. He usually lurked in some angle of the market, casting disinterested glances at Claire. He often engaged in animated conversations with other shoppers just out of earshot, but always managed to be able to see her. Or he would just walk by as if he were going somewhere and he would give her arm a long look. This went on for weeks, months even, and he did not ever give Claire a single copper coin!
One day Claire could not ignore him any longer. She looked right at him across the market stalls. She maintained a steady gaze at him to see if he would turn away like a coward. He stuck out his tongue, turned away, and ran like the wind!
He showed up the next day. He stared until Claire noticed, then he crossed his eyes and made his arm wiggle in an exaggerated imitation of her own arm. He kept this up this kind of disrespectful activity for a few more weeks. Claire attempted to cover her arm, but it caused a drop in the rate of coins she collected. So she was forced to let her arm be visible because the decrease in wages made her parents very angry.
Finally after a few more months of this silliness, Claire decided that she was going to do something about it. One day when the rude boy stared at her- Claire simply tilted her head back, raised her eyebrows and sent him a very long and direct look that could only be interpreted to mean: “I am better than you.” That made the very rude young fellow laugh! But he ran away again, never looking over his shoulder. Claire was still glaring at the back of his head as he ran. He did not return the next day, in fact they never saw him in the market again. Claire asked some of the vendors in the market about him. Some people said he became a student in the city, but no one knew what he was studying. Others said that he became a soldier far away, but no one knew exactly where he was fighting.
But everyone agreed that he was of a high social status, well dressed, educated. This is why he was able to stare at Claire so rudely, and leave without telling her where he was going or why. But she did wonder. Yes, he might have been rude- but he had paid attention to her. She did not know his name, but he had come to see her almost every day for almost a year.
He might have hurt her feelings
but she… missed him!
Chapter Four: Freedom
About half a year after the rude stranger was gone, a sad thing happened. Claire’s mother told Edwin to climb the ladder to the roof and collect any eggs the chickens had laid. This was never an easy job for him, but his sister certainly could not do it because of her bad arm, so he always tried to be brave for her sake.
On this forlorn day he made it up there just fine. Edwin was always afraid while he was climbing the ladder, but he loved being on the roof of the tiny shack. Once he was up there he reached his arms out with his palms up and turned around a few times looking up at the sky, pink and blue, with clouds here and there. He could imagine that he was all alone and far away, and when he lowered his arms he turned again to see the whole village spread out before him. He sat on the grassy spot in the middle of the roof and began to talk to the chickens, saying important things to them like “Don’t jump off the roof!” and “Hey! You be nice to her!”
Edwin heard his mother below him shouting: “Hurry up!”
He went to the box and collected the eggs. There were more than usual and this made the job tricky. He placed them into his shirt, which he held up with his hand. He returned to the ladder, but it was difficult for him to step over the low wall around the edge of the roof. He had to get back onto the ladder and climb down carefully, but he could only use one hand. His mother screamed up at him: “Edwin! Stop wasting my time or I’ll make a perfect beggar out of you!” He was just getting on the ladder when he had an idea: he could hold his shirt up in his teeth so he could use both hands. He paused to stuff the front of his shirt into his mouth, but he slipped during this delicate operation. Edwin dropped an egg. It landed on the dirt next to his mother. She watched in horror as it descended and instant anger as it cracked on the ground and spilled it’s golden contents into the dust. In that long stretched out moment in time that occurs when important things happen, the boy on the ladder was thinking that maybe he could scoop up the broken egg in a cup and put water in it and…
“That one was yours! It was going to be your dinner! I hope you enjoy it now!” his mother screamed at him. She kicked dirt onto the broken egg and stepped in the muddy spot it made, then she kicked the ladder.
It was not really a ladder; or if it ever had been a ladder before, it was not really a ladder any more. It was missing pieces and it had been broken and repaired; it was really just a rickety rig of sticks that were tied together with rope and wire, and someone had sawn notches into it as if they would help the climber.
Now the boy pulled the ladder back to try and balance himself, but he fell over backwards and down onto the brick hard dirt with the ladder on top of him. His mother stepped aside to avoid injury. The air was knocked out of Edwin’s chest with the fall, and he could not inhale another breath. His head hit the ground with terrific force and he could not move. The mother quickly looked around. The clatter of the fall was quickly absorbed by the humid dust in the air. After looking about, it appeared to the mother that there were no witnesses. She collected the two eggs that did not break and went inside to cook them.
Edwin waited in the dirt, wondering what would happen next. The pain he experienced sent him into a delicate twilight of awareness. He had seen the halo of light surrounding the shadow that his mother cast over him as she rummaged about his clothing for unbroken eggs. He had tried to look at her as he slipped across the edge of our terrestrial experience, but she avoided his gaze. She assuaged her concerns by telling herself that he was no longer breathing. When she took the eggs.
The boy knew that his mother knew that he was still alive when she left him. And in that moment of heightened perception he was able to see in her all the things that had been done to her which warped her into the sort of mutant person she was and he could see her bewildered soul in the middle of the storm that was her rotten life. And he felt compassion for this lost, sad creature and that eased his departure.
Later on, some neighbors knocked on the red wooden door and led the confused mother to see her poor dead son beside the house. “Edwin! I thought he was out begging!” She moaned, as she shed a few tears. She knelt down on the street and waved her hands in the air, looking up dramatically, she begged: “Why was he stealing eggs from his own mother?” She clasped her hands together under her wiggling chin and begged God for the reason this misfortune had struck her. The crowd dispersed as she dragged the little corpse into her hut.
He was buried that night and her father whined to Claire: “Now we owe the grave digger money! You must beg for more hours every day to make up for the loss of his income.”
“Fortunately for you, Edwin did not bring in that much.” Was all her mother had to say.
Claire was very sad for a while but she eventually decided that at least the boy never had to become a perfect beggar. She also knew that her brother was in a better place, under the dirt and rocks and stray dogs on the edge of town. She decided that she would still talk to him when she was alone. She always knew exactly what he would say. She did beg more aggressively than ever and took more money to her parents every night. And she did not mind staying in the square for a few more hours into the night, even after everyone had left. She enjoyed the quiet more than ever, and she got to avoid her parents that much longer.
Now that the parents had a proper bed, Claire was allowed to sleep on their old pile of rags. She had washed them in the fountain and dried them in the sun while she begged. They were much better than the floor. She was warmer at night. She then compared the earlier sensation of sleeping on the boards with the new one of sleeping in the nest of cloth. She allowed herself to marvel at the increase in her level of comfort, and she wondered if it could possibly be improved upon. Thoughts formed in her mind. Cleaner rags, more of them, would be better. A regular bed would be even better still. But if she wondered how comfortable her parents were in their bed, then Claire lost her feeling of increased comfort, because thinking of what it might be like to sleep in a bed extinguished her newfound sense of improvement in her rags. She was beginning to allow her natural sense of optimism to dim; that sense of possibility that seems so obvious to children, was finally slipping away. She was older now, and learning how to replace gratitude for what she had with jealousy for what she wanted.
Chapter Five: Venus Conjunct Sun in Cancer
One day Claire was sitting on the steps of the church. Her hand was out, her basket was moving slowly from side to side, but her eyes were not focused. She was gazing out at the blend of colors before her, swirling unfocused shapes. She was not listening to anything, she was not even thinking of anything. She was just sitting there, and if a coin fell into her basket, she did not seem to notice. She was tired and she was not feeling sadness or happiness.
She was slowly becoming aware of a strange behavior of the people around her. The usual sounds of cater had dimmed a bit. People were all looking out across the square. Claire finally woke up out of her quiet boredom, tilting her head to see what everyone else was looking at. A small group of interesting strangers had wandered into the market. There was an older lady and two men who walked as a pair behind her. Any beggar could tell that the old lady had lots of money, so some of the kids followed the trio with their hands out. One of the men distributed coins and the kids drifted away. Anyone who had been in the market long could tell that these people had never been there before, but they certainly did not seem lost. They seemed to know exactly where they were. They were not shopping, but they seemed to be looking all around them as if they were shopping.
Like everyone else in the market, their novelty caught Claire’s attention. Everyone in the marketplace was watching the newcomers, and the whole place actually became a bit quieter as this strange trio passed among them. The lady who led her escort paused and spoke with a merchant. Claire could not hear the conversation but the merchant nodded, slowly turned and pointed in Claire’s direction. The strangers turned to look at directly at Claire and they began walking towards her.
Like everyone else, Claire had been watching these elegant strangers, but now that these people were approaching her she wanted to look behind her to see what they were looking at, but she did not. As they got closer and closer, she wanted to run away, but she did not. The newcomers seemed to pull everything in the entire village along behind them as they advanced. They finally stopped right in front of Claire and all three of them looked down at her. Claire was not used to attention but she did not mind the presence of these particular people. They seemed to approve of what they saw. Claire looked up at them carefully and wondered what to do; for some reason she could not bring herself to beg from them. She placed her basket beside her, scooping the coins out and dropping them into her pocket without looking.
The lady was dressed in an old-fashioned but wonderful gown and the hem had gotten dusty from a long walk. She had long hair that was rolled up into a bun and secured with long pins and a ribbon. She was frail and delicate looking but she had the gait of a woman who enjoyed walking, perhaps even dancing. She carried a small bag tied to her belt. She wore no jewelry although it looked like she might own wonderful jewels. She wore a little bit of makeup and managed to look neither pathetic or absurd. She had clearly been very beautiful in her youth and despite her age she had maintained a certain feminine gracefulness in her appearance. She looked like a person who never allowed a negative emotion to cloud her face for long.
The two men gave the old lady plenty of space, but they casually eyed the people around them and appeared to be very protective of the old lady. One of these men was younger and very handsome, but upon close inspection he had smudges of dirt and grass on his pants and dirt under some of his fingernails. He wore muddy boots. He wore a battered straw hat but under it his face was tanned, and his hair was shaggy. His appearance gave Claire the impression of a friendly dog. Claire liked him immediately. The other man was much older but he did not seem to be the lady’s partner, because he walked behind her and not beside her. He had, of all things, a small white linen dishtowel draped over his shoulder. His clothing was simple and unadorned, a white shirt very neatly ironed and starched, and black pants. He kept his back straight and his nose up. He seemed marvelously distant, and Claire’s attention to him evaporated into a vacuum as soon as she looked at him.
The delightful little old woman stepped forward and bent down to study Claire’s face carefully. She looked into Claire’s eyes for a moment, smiled and asked: “Are you miss Claire?” Claire nodded and allowed a faint smile to return the woman’s. Claire could smell a very slight perfume and it made her very happy that the old lady was near her.
“Well Claire, my name is Millicent Godfrey. Is that your last name too?”
Claire nodded slowly.
“These gentlemen behind me are Leander, (here she indicated the younger one) and Mr. Edwards.” The men both nodded a greeting to Claire, and Leander even winked at her!
“I believe that you are my mother’s younger brother’s great-grand-child.” Claire absolutely loved the sound of her voice. Mr. Edwards was looking away. But Leander was watching Millicent as if she were his mother.
Claire smiled at the title the old lady had just given her. She gave the old lady a curious look produced by confusion and simple joy.
“I have come here to invite you to a wedding. I would like to know if you will be our flower-girl.”
Claire blinked her eyes. The old lady looked at Claire, from head to foot. Claire looked down at her own clothing, then up into the old lady’s eyes, and she did not say a word.
“If you would like to go, I will buy you a pretty new dress to wear to the wedding.”
Claire stared at the old lady, she wanted to say something, but she really did not know what to say. She looked down. She looked at her dirty feet.
“And some shoes.” The old lady added quietly.
Claire still did not know what to say, but then- she had not been speaking lately. Claire looked again at the old lady and tilted her head a bit. She slowly got up off the curb, turned and began to walk. She left her basket there on the steps of the church. The strangers followed her. Claire looked back a few times to check on her retinue as she proceeded.
Millicent, Leander and Mr. Edwards followed Clare away from the market and deep into the village. They followed Claire through narrow alleys into the worst part of town. People watched them coming and Claire knew that the strangers were still behind her because of the way people stared from their doorways and windows. The group walked all the way to the tiny hut with brick walls, dirty windows and chickens on the roof. Claire turned and looked at the old lady and her companions again, then she opened the door of her parent’s house and stepped inside. Presently everyone in the street could hear a woman screaming: “Why aren’t you in the market begging!” Her voice sounded like a rusty hinge.
After a brief pause the door opened wider and Claire emerged before the strangers with her mother behind her. Claire’s mother was holding the coins that Claire had taken from her pocket, rolling them between her fingers, then clutching them in her fist. Shielded her eyes from the sun and scowled at the inconvenience of having to leave her filthy residence. The elderly lady stepped forward, smiling.
“Hello, I am a distant relative of your husband’s, I am here to invite your family to a wedding!” She held her hand out, in it was a small envelope with names written on it in pretty cursive.
“A Wedding? Who the hell are you?” Moaned Claire’s mother, looking at the invitation as if it were a weapon.
The old lady withdrew her hand and gave the envelope to Mr. Edwards, who dropped it into a pocket. “Like I said, I am a relative from the city, I am the second aunt of your husband. My nephew is going to be married this summer and the bride needs a flower girl. But believe it or not, all the children of both families are all boys” The old lady smiled at Claire. “Every last one of them except for your little Claire!” Millicent turned and looked lovingly at Claire. Claire smiled at the old lady.
Millicent continued after smiling some more at Claire, “You see, I went to the temple, and the scholars looked through the birth records, and they finally located the only girl born into either family. It took them days of reading! And here she is now. I regret that we did not even know your family existed until this happened, so isn’t it just wonderful how weddings can bring people together?”
Claire’s mother had been shaking her head and gasping with shock and anger as she listened to the old lady with the dashing bodyguards.
“I don’t care who you are, Claire can’t go anywhere! She is our only source of income! She is a perfect beggar!” Her voice was a rattling gasp that rose sharply as she completed each phrase.
“Well I understand if you do not wish to attend the ceremony, but we really need Claire, and she wants to attend. I can easily reimburse you for the loss of your… ‘income’… while your child is away.”
Claire’s mother fumed and remained silent. She took this opportunity to examine the old lady carefully. After completing her staring she briefly worked her jaws together as if she were chewing a chunk of leather, but her opinion of Millicent was apparently inexpressible.
Millicent was not going to let the angry woman’s scorn dissuade her: “I think Claire would make such a lovely flower-girl, don’t you?” He voice twinkled with delight.
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