Beyond the Doors of Death Read Online Free PDF Page B

Words I never thought to speak. When I left my body on a distant shore. Time for everything, everything in its due time.
    — You’re a very beautiful woman , Pablo had told her, not meaning to flatter.
    Yes. She had wanted to explain to them, that first morning, that she didn’t really care all that much about the appearance of her body, that her real priorities lay elsewhere, were “higher,” but there hadn’t been any need to tell them that. They understood. They understood everything. Besides, she did care about her body. Being beautiful was less important to her than it was to those women for whom physical beauty was their only natural advantage, but her appearance mattered to her; her body pleased her and she knew it was pleasing to others, it gave her access to people, it was a means of making connections, and she had always been grateful for that. In her other existence her delight in her body had been flawed by the awareness of the inevitability of its slow steady decay, the certainty of the loss of that accidental power that beauty gave her, but now she had been granted exemption from that: she would change with time but she would not have to feel, as warms must feel, that she was gradually falling apart. Her rekindled body would not betray her by turning ugly. No.
    — We are the new aristocracy —
    After her bath she stood a few minutes by the open window, naked to the humid breeze. Sounds came to her: distant bells, the bright chatter of tropical birds, the voices of children singing in a language she could not identify. Zanzibar! Sultans and spices, Livingstone and Stanley, Tippu Tib the slaver, Sir Richard Burton spending a night in this very hotel room, perhaps. There was a dryness in her throat, a throbbing in her chest: a little excitement coming alive in her after all. She felt anticipation, even eagerness. All Zanzibar lay before her. Very well. Get moving, Sybille, put some clothes on, let’s have lunch, a look at the town.
    She took a light blouse and shorts from her suitcase. Just then Zacharias returned to the room, and she said, not looking up, “Kent, do you think it’s all right for me to wear these shorts here? They’re—” A glance at his face and her voice trailed off. “What’s wrong?”
    “I’ve just been talking to your husband.”
    “He’s here ?”
    “He came up to me in the lobby. Knew my name. ‘You’re Zacharias,’ he said, with a Bogarty little edge to his voice, like a deceived movie husband confronting the Other Man. ‘Where is she? I have to see her.’”
    “Oh, no, Kent.”
    “I asked him what he wanted with you. ‘I’m her husband,’ he said, and I told him, ‘Maybe you were her husband once, but things have changed,’ and then—”
    “I can’t imagine Jorge talking tough. He’s such a gentle man, Kent! How did he look?”
    “Schizoid,” Zacharias said. “Glassy eyes, muscles bunching in his jaws, signs of terrific pressure all over him. He knows he’s not supposed to do things like this, doesn’t he?”
    “Jorge knows exactly how he’s supposed to behave. Oh, Kent, what a stupid mess! Where is he now?”
    “Still downstairs. Nerita and Laurence are talking to him. You don’t want to see him, do you?”
    “Of course not.”
    “Write him a note to that effect and I’ll take it down to him. Tell him to clear off.”
    Sybille shook her head. “I don’t want to hurt him.”
    “Hurt him? He’s followed you halfway around the world like a lovesick boy, he’s tried to violate your privacy, he’s disrupted an important trip, he’s refused to abide by the conventions that govern the relationships of warms and deads, and you—”
    “He loves me, Kent.”
    “He loved you. All right, I concede that. But the person he loved doesn’t exist any more. He has to be made to realize that.”
    Sybille closed her eyes. “I don’t want to hurt him. I don’t want you to hurt him either.”
    “I won’t hurt him. Are you going to see