Tom La Farge, fabulist

"The Rooms," Chapter 1 of 2 Chameleons

They were two and came to live in rooms at the top of a house built at the edge of a city built on the coast of the country not theirs; they were strangers. The ocean was not theirs either. They could see it crawl in to shore, except when a squall threw it at their windows, and then all objects vanished in salty blur. Waking, they found water on the floor and pushed it out onto a terrace where it slid across red tiles to a hole. Leaning over the rail, they saw it spout from the house-wall (which was also the city ramparts), dropping in thick spray on a weedy lot.

The lot was crisscrossed by the foundations of an old barracks, dating from the time when the French had protected this country – but from what? Its own worst impulses, perhaps, it had no external enemies. The barracks had been razed after independence. The lot was called le jardin because there might once have been a public garden there, or the intention to make one. Even now there was talk of using a corner of it for a playground. Here on pleasant days women stooped to cull herbs, and men without proper homes slept in the sun or searched their bodies for lice, or they spread out to dry the clothes they had laundered in the public fountain. Or else gathered to drink alcohol and sing beneath a palm-tree, or smoked cigarettes, or undid their trousers and shat. The God had a house on one side of the Jardin, with a tall, weather-beaten tower to mark it, and from this tower His spokesman would chant the call to prayer, after first blowing into the microphone. Then some of the older men would prostrate themselves amid the weeds and herbs. In the mornings, before the people arrived, a white cattle egret pranced around the Jardin, stabbing at things to eat, or floated off into the air trailing legs. Some hawks, dusty and red-winged, who liked to perch on the tower of the God’s house, also took an interest in what moved through the stalks, as they wheeled overhead and sometimes suddenly dropped.

The rooms were light and airy, uncommonly so in a town famous for glooms and damps. Most houses were built around a courtyard with all rooms looking inward through colored panes. Round pillars supported galleries on the upper stories. But in this house the outer wall was the ramparts, and the house was built up above it on the other three sides to make a granary that had later been converted into rentable rooms. So their windows looked out to the Jardin and the ocean. When storms were not forcing the ocean in around the windows–and this was rare–the sun entered and warmed the dance of flies: bluebottles and greenbottles, silent fruitflies and red-eyed horseflies. The breeze entered, scented sometimes with woodsmoke from the fires that heated water for the public showers and the public oven one street away, or with the incense burnt to bring a reminder of paradise into squalor, or with the smell of the landlord’s cigarette from the next floor down. But usually it smelt simply of sea air and heat.

The rooms turned their back on the town. Sky, water, weeds, a half dozen palm trees, and a beachside restaurant out beyond the boulevard: these were what the two strangers saw. On the boulevard trucks and buses noiselessly scattered cyclists and mule-carts and emitted black exhaust that the offshore wind blew out to sea. The two liked to feel away from and even above people, for they were tired of people. The rooms were quiet with the quiet of the sea, the continuous roar of waves breaking around the curve of the bay, a sound more monotonous than lulling. But easy to forget; so that the rooms could be said, in postcards home, to be quiet, till the banging started in the house next door. It was such a concentrated banging that they thought it must soon cease, but it went on for two months. They would have liked to complain, but they learned that their neighbor, in whose house the banging was being perpetrated, was the president of the municipal council, celebrating his election by having his whole house done over by municipal workers at the public expense.

But where is there not banging? People like to bang. The two put up with it, and gradually the racket receded deeper and deeper into the President’s house.

But why, if they wanted to escape people and their banging, did they not go live in the country? There they could have found all the silence and all the removal they wanted and been in the middle of something they liked instead of on the edge of something they didn’t like.

They were Madnoos and Qasbur. Qasbur liked to shop in the market and prepare their meals in the narrow kitchen, a tiled sink and a counter where perched the camping stove that drew butane gas from a red iron bottle. He lit the burners with a spark-producing tool, threw foodstuffs into a large pot, and kept the two of them alive. Madnoos enjoyed the meals and knew when it was time to make changes. They were both writers.

Not long after they had moved into the rooms, they were given two chameleons. First one, then the other.