Free A Separate Country by Robert Hicks Page A

their jump roping, delivery boys gave wide. I was the blushing, buxom figurehead of a cutter parting the sea of mortals. I trembled. So much power.
    This is what I remember. The truth is lost, and unimportant anyway. This is what I remember: I was walking to meet a man who had promised that no one would ever know my name, that he would be discreet. I looked classical and Greek, he said, and I felt it. I had power bestowed on me in curves and color and angles. I had little idea of what to do with it, what I was expected to do with it, what others did with it. The only idea I had, a dream really, was of soft, dark tapestries encircling me and a man, some man powerful and deep-eyed. We fell and fell without end in sweet air. I knew nothing of such things, of course, and so I found myself skipping along the banquette to a rendezvous with a failed painter. Posing for him seemed obvious.
    The little man was pocked and the corners of his mouth were wet. He wore black, his legs were bowed and thin. Bent and charred twigs. I lay on his chaise while he fiddled with the stove, cursing it until it warmed. He made tea. I heard the cups nervously twittering on their plates when he came back into the room. I took pleasure in saying I was not thirsty. I was cruel. I had draped my clothes over his washbasin, as there were no chairs. The yellow satin drape fit me perfectly, and I arranged it as I’d seen in sculpture. Modestly at first. He stood behind his easel and unknotted his cravat. There were no other paintings in his room, a third-floor garret around the corner from the Opera with a view of the muddy river. I smelled fish and burning sugar, wonderful scents to me now. He scratched at the canvas with a brush he held like a pen. He asked me to pull the drape down and I pulled it down to my waist. I gathered my hair behind my head and leaned on one hand. The other traced my hip. He came over to adjust the drape, and when I felt his hand sliding across me, I bit him. He yelled and I screamed theatrically. He begged me to silence. I put on my clothes while he stood in the corner, staring. There was no paint on the canvas. He asked me to have mercy on a forgotten man.
    I am not cruel, but I was very cruel that day. How could I know what I possessed without seeing it reflected in someone else’s face, in the way they walked toward me, in the way they cowered? I was rapt during my walk home. It had been a joy, a secret had been revealed. I was mindless of anything but the fast-expanding boundary of my world, so much so that I neglected the mud and the nails in the boxes piled along my way. When I arrived home, disheveled and dirty, trailing threads of my dress like a ruined train, my mother thought I’d been attacked.
I fell,
I told her, and giggled.
    Silly little girl. Had I been an ape with a bosom the old man might have still invited me up to his studio. The intoxicated mind sees what it desires everywhere. And how long did I think I could play the coquette? Not forever. I write this now while listening to one of my ten, soon to be eleven, children pulling another’s hair. Perhaps that child is you, Lydia.
    My city: Fat men in vests trading cotton and rice straight from the quay. The horses in their stalls at the fairgrounds. Smoke on the streetcar, watermelon cast into the water of the St. John by playful boatmen. Drunk men, men with monkeys, men without shoes, men without sense, men in tall hats and thick beards. Mandolins on the galleries. Beautiful boys, deformed boys, strong boys. Christ in every possible pose and dress, in every church, on every street, above every rambling of headstones.
Corpus. Iesus nazarenus rex iudaeorum.
King of the Creoles. King of the Spanish. King of the Irish, the Germans, the English, the
américain
. King of the Negroes. Christ everywhere. Christ above me, Christ below me, Christ at my right hand, Christ at my left hand. The Creoles had their cathedral, and then the Irish. Even the Germans built their