The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [98]
Awa drew back, but he recognized the coquettishness of her movements, the playfulness of her retreat. Its hands were on her, leaving dark smears on the dress, and though he sometimes thought she was glancing at him for help, for mercy, he sat and he watched and slowly he began to return to himself.
“Stop,” the artist finally said to himself and Awa, and both woman and partner went as still as the dead man’s heart. The corpse’s right hand was drawing Awa’s curl-wreathed head toward his open mouth for another kiss, and his left was pressed up between her legs, her dress hiked almost to indecency, only her right hand on his wrist arresting his assault. Her dress fluttered between his legs in the cold breeze that picked up across the cemetery, and Manuel began to sketch.
“There,” Manuel said at last, the crown of the moon dipping behind the cemetery wall. “Come and have a look, Awa.”
She broke the embrace with the corpse, whispering an apology to it and walking to where Manuel stood. Looking at the picture, she could not express what she felt. The image captured her crime perfectly, but the woman in it, her, seemed the victim instead of the perpetrator.
“Awa,” Manuel finally said after the moon had sunk and they were enveloped in darkness. “I think with some time in the studio, this will be my finest work. I have never had a better model, and I thank you for your patience.”
“You’re welcome,” said Awa, her voice just as stilted and dead as his. She was not sure what his drawing her had done, save strip her of the little self-respect she had managed to knit for herself from the small compliments he, Monique, and Paracelsus had paid her—and, of course, the praise of the dead, who for so long had been her only friends. The nauseating urge to kill him unexpectedly flared in her, but then he took her shoulder tightly in his hand, his breath hot on her face.
“We do evil, Awa, that is what we are born for. We sin against one another and against ourselves, whether we mean to or not. We are born into this. There are none, none, who escape the fact that in our very nature is a compulsion to annihilate ourselves. And each other.”
“What I did—” she began, his clumsy attempt to make her feel better even more insulting than making her re-create the act for his voyeuristic pleasure.
“I know what you did,” said Manuel, those tiny voices inside him howling their displeasure at his calm, at his understanding. “You showed me. The first was not what happened, you didn’t lay into a dead body like a hungry beast, you, you, the second time … you resisted, it forced itself on you and—”
“No!” Awa said far too loudly, a chain of dogs linking themselves to the sound, and then Bern was rattling with barks. “No, I, I made her. I didn’t know it, I didn’t know she didn’t want to, I thought she did, but I was still doing it. I made her force herself on me, as you say, which is worse than—”
“No,” said Manuel. “I don’t understand the how of your, your ways, nor do I want to, but I heard you say, right now, that you didn’t know exactly what you were doing. Is that the truth, Awa?”
Awa nodded, suddenly unable to speak, but he somehow saw in the dark and nodded himself.
“Then I don’t want to hear any more. I knew what I was about when I went to war, when I cut open boys younger than Lydie to buy a little paint. I could have given up the art, I could have taken up nobler work, but I took money to kill boys far more innocent than myself. I knew, yet I did it. Tell me how your crime is worse, Awa, tell me how doing evil in ignorance is worse than doing it voluntarily, than doing it for a few fucking crowns instead of out of, out of love? That’s why, isn’t it? You loved this girl, and she died, and so you made a mistake? How is—”
Awa’s arms were around his neck, and as they held each other neither was sure whose tears were whose, and were happy for the ignorance. It was very dark in the cemetery.
“God loves you,” said Manuel as they tamped down the earth over the graves of