In my capacity as a painter, I recently found myself absorbed in certain local subjects who seemed to me to crystallize visually something of what I wanted to express of the human condition. These were two old women and an old man, all of whom spent a great deal of time on the street, if they had homes at all. The second woman, I soon realised, was not a woman at all, but a man, and it was this that gave her visual presence much of it poignancy. I engaged the man in conversation on the hill one day by placing single sultanas on the full stops of his sentences. In the manner of some members of the older generation (as well as some of the younger) he spoke in an erratic flow that would not be channeled down the purely painterly paths with which I was preoccupied; but this was a relief from a calling that, at that time, weighed somewhat heavily on me. So I did not mind.
The woman had once been the possessor of dogs. 'Coyotes', the man explained, 'Just like household pets they were. They would sit on your lap. People used to run away from Molly in the street. That is why she kept coyotes. Once, when she was a student, Molly had a lover. A young man from the theological college. William. Flowers and rosary beads he would bring her and chips in the evening. He had this peculiarity about him, he could not help smiling all over his face. Like this. One day her Aunt Juliet came over and said she thought he might have another woman on the railway. The next time Molly saw him with another girl, she marked him with a tainted crystal and hexed the girl between her teeth. The girl went home to her bed and was assailed by fevers. In the morning, she had died. A novice she was. About to take the veil. Will was furious and would have nothing more to do with Molly. A week later the girl's mother lay down on the same bed to grieve and she also took sick and died.' Here the old man's tone became confidential: 'Only last week, another girl lay down on the same bed and it was thought that she had died too, but she has given them the slip. She is in the hospital now and they are working on her, all very embarrassed.' [end] |
