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Alice, Rolling Down the Mountainside - Short Story

Literary Review, Spring, 2001 by Valerie Hurley

He thought of climbing up through the apricot orchards with Alice, the white egrets flying with them, monkeys nibbling rhododendron, blue sheep roaming, red pandas sleeping in clumps of bamboo. He heard flute music piped high in the air. He imagined her long hair, fragrant with jasmine. He smelled the smoke of green juniper wood.

Every morning, he went down the road where a blind woman dressed in a dirty camboy sold him an orchid from her garden. He bought a pouch of cinnamon bark for the nuns' tea. He loved going through the broken gate and standing with the woman in her garden. The air smelled of pineapple and gardenias. The hot sun was always beating in his head, but here in the garden, the shade was thick and sweet as he wandered through the jungle of orchids, imagining Alice, imagining God. Early morning was the time for cleansing and prayer. He smiled. He wanted nothing--only to give back to the world that had given so much to him.

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Lime trees and jak trees skimmed the woman's fine, dark hair as she rustled along, her arms outstretched, touching the creamy petals of pale pink and yellow hibiscus. He saw a lizard with tight yellow skin and a glass snake with pink eyelids. The woman believed that every living thing had been her mother in a previous incarnation. He stood in the back of the garden, listening to the sound of a twig broom sweeping the path. He felt a joy rising in him--God's name namelessly filling the garden, and he wandered there, thinking and not thinking as God quietly came near. A rooster crowed. Ladybugs crawled on glossy hibiscus leaves. The sky was warm and turquoise. The Sufi poet said, I sought him for thirty years, I thought it was I who desired him, but no, it was he who desired me.

Jacob listened to the clopping hooves of the bullock and wondered if the bullock's black eyes had rested on Alice as she walked in the marketplace. He thought of the first time he had seen her there in a rose-colored sari, holding two Sri Lankan children by the hand. The threads of saffron were a burnt red, the rice in the barrels a pale green. Under a yellow umbrella, she passed by the coconuts and oranges. She bought mangoes and ginger root and dropped them into a string bag that she held against her hip. The sun was beating white triangles of light into her hair.

The priest talked to him about the temptation of woman. The priests feared women, but Jacob knew that Jesus revered them and treated them with great love. The dusty afternoon light settled on the colored glass of the windows by the confessional, shining onto Jacob. The Portugese had been lured to Ceylon by spices and had sailed home with ships filled with saffron, cinnamon and twisting pepper vines, leaving their Catholicism behind--the Mass, the wine, the Eucharist. He thought of gems washing down out of the mountains, emeralds flashing in the streams. He wanted to dig rubies out of the earth for Alice. He wanted to show her the waterfalls and caves with ancient paintings of elephants on the walls, the cinnamon groves, the Buddhist Temple of the Tooth, to go pearl fishing in the Jaffna Lagoon and lie with her in forests of rhododendron.

When the screen slid open, he began to talk about her, his voice vaguely circling around her soft and dreamlike presence. The priest lectured him, but Jacob was listening to the temple bells, their sound echoing against the stone. A bullock cart was rolling through the street. The smell of fish drifted through the open window. Even in church, he heard Alice calling, a voice drifting softly through the oleanders.

The altar was heaped with lilies and vanilla orchids. All around him was dark, oiled wood. Christianity had its trinity--the father, the son and the holy ghost, and Hinduism too had its trinity: Brahma, the creator; Vishnu, the preserver; Siva, the destroyer. Alice was becoming a part of his days--the Mass before dawn, silver light spooling into the cool chapel, morning walks in the garden, tea and study with the nuns, a walk on the beach, his pockets jingling with moon snails and white slipper shells, meeting Alice at the market, then vespers and rest in his cell, prayers full of bells and storks and bee-eaters and purple-faced leaf monkeys and red pandas and musk deer, beautiful sleeps in which Alice and Jesus were one.

His friend Loti lived in the Himalayas, where, on Sundays, the donkeys were allowed to wander free. Jacob wanted to take Alice there, to walk with her on the bones between heaven and earth. He imagined the lavender mountains swallowing them, the prayer drums beating like birds' wings, women in head shawls and men with red lips passing them on the path fringed with blue poppies. The betel nuts would turn Alice's teeth red. They would smell snow in the air and old, glittering icebergs.

He wrote to Loti: "I imagine God as an animal, a snow leopard with yellow eyes and dark rosettes of fur, a being without language, its eyes thousands of shades of yellow and turquoise. But lately it isn't God I think about--it's Alice. She's a governess I met one day when I was buying tea leaves. She's twenty-two (older than me) and she comes from Britain. My confessor calls her a serpent, a false path. But is she? I'd love to bring her to visit you. I picture myself lying with her in a thatched hut with pumpkins ripening on the roof. I read that the Hindus believe that the love of parent and child, of friend and friend, of lover and lover, of servant and master, are all different forms of connection, and the human capacity for love requires that each form of love be mastered. One day, she said to me, `Some morning, you could come up to my room.' `What room?' I said. `Where I'm staying,' she said. `The house covered with oleanders on Polonnaruwa Street.' But then, there's the seminary ... I've wanted to become a priest since I sat up on Adam's Peak one day when I was fourteen, and I could feel God's breath in my hair. I love Jesus's words, `Only those who lose their life will find it.' I am so drawn to this love that embraces sinners and outcasts, enemies and friends, giving not in order to receive but because it is our nature to give. Alice just laughs at me. She can't understand anyone wanting to become a priest."

Alice, Rolling Down the Mountainside - Short Story

Literary Review, Spring, 2001 by Valerie Hurley

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