The Lizard and the Harpsichord

Story

by Sinead Daly

You sit, at the party, in a mansion on Mallorca, owned by a landed aristocrat from Ireland called Pablo, after a Mexican forebear. You are about fifty: soft makeup, soft, slightly flabby features. You seem fatter than you are, quiet and gracious, high-piled blond hair, a blissful smile. But when you speak, your voice is like a harpsichord; laughter scatters like dew around the room, causing the just-visible point of the livid scar on your chest to shake with mirth.

"If a bird shits on my head, nobody thinks it's weird," you announce to the handsome gay boy next to you who remembers Amsterdam as the place where it's hard to find a hotel; he had to spend the night in a sauna, which to judge from his sly smile was a sleepless one. "But if I shit on a bird's head…" Peals of laughter.

When pressed, you admit to having worked at some point in your life, though now you just drift from place to place and read "All quiet on the Western Front" to remind you of how fortunate you are. In the eighties you worked in Human Rights, with a bucket and soapy water, in the wake of America's dirty wars. Did a Masters in Arabic studies, worked for a newspaper in Beirut, and couldn't abandon your friends when the war broke out. So you lived in a refugee camp for two years, where you survived on tins of olives and stale bread. "And wine," you said, "it was usually easier to get wine than untainted water." You married a refugee to save his life, and his family's, with American passports, though his mother was later slaughtered.

"The camp we lived in was a warren and the soldiers could come in unnoticed. The children would warn us by banging tin pots. But one day I was sitting with my husband and mother-in-law outside our hut and I saw a lizard I had never seen before. Since then I have seen bigger lizards, but to me back then it was huge. I pointed it out to my mother-in-law and she stared in horror.

"I have never seen that lizard here before! Run!" She shouted, and my husband ran from the hut and vanished into the maze of galvanised shacks and tents behind ours. Five minutes later a group of soldiers burst in with their rifle butts in our faces, looking for him. It was the first time the children hadn't warned us of a raid."

Our host is very erudite and very rational, and wears a blue and pink striped shirt under his brown cardigan. He raises an aristocratic eyebrow and remarks, "Pure coincidence, prophetic lizards. Tina please!"

You sit in a flower-tiled kitchen with a bottle of wine in your shaky hand, pouring it again and again, your laughter like the tinsel streaming from the ceiling. I wonder how you washed up here on this island free of refugees, and unjust wars, without a reason to make amends for being American. And yet the wine still goes down easier than water.
All of your friends in El Salvador were murdered, but some of the Nicaraguans you worked with survived.

I watch you feed your dog tapas snacks under the table when the cook isn't looking, and I wonder if the lizard that saved your ex-husband still haunts your dreams.

We leave the party together; the gossamer threads of your voice bind me to your stories a little longer.

"Home is where my dog is," you slur merrily, petting your bulldog, who looks up at you expectantly. Distant fireworks explode in a salvo to welcome the New Year and all the new wars in the world.

"I loved being married," you say, "but my real marriage happened much later," you murmur as we pass the sandstone cathedral with the leaking roof. Even outside you can hear the sound of rain plopping into myriad buckets--but not now--the rain has stopped at last.

"I lived for two years with him in Sweden and that was the longest I lived in one place in my entire life."

Your voice is exquisite. Harpsichord and heather, champagne bubbles and childhood flow into your sentences.

Your dog looks up, interested.

"It was just the wrong man, and the wrong country. But being married itself was wonderful."

We both laugh, leaning into each other like Amsterdam houses. I am leaving tomorrow.

I want to tell you your voice will stay with me my whole life, like your lizard has stayed with you.

Your cardigan falls open as we turn a corner, revealing the long, ugly scar on your chest, your reminder of the 'wrong man.'

"I moved here from Malta where I went searching for Caravaggio. Hope I don't end up in Mali next!" You laugh.

You like living in places that begin with "Ma."

Your laughter mingles with the fireworks and you open the door to your Jugenstiel apartment. When I refuse your invitation to come in and get totally wasted with you, you bid me a gracious goodnight. The door closes softly as velvet, and I walk back to my hotel through cobblestone streets in a rich town where they won't repair the roof of their church. I imagine a lizard leaping off of some awning to stare balefully at me for a single instant, only to vanish eternally into someone else's story.