The Empire of Ice Cream Read Online Free PDF Page B

were reluctant to tell, a past heightened to mythos by the ingredients of time, distance, and the distorting forces of exquisite lassitude. We wandered the narrow alleyways, sat, smoking, in darkened doorways, leaned lazily on the rusting, floral-designed railings of second-story verandas, like spectral characters in the mind of an aged novelist impotent to envision what happens next.
    It is a certainty that nothing good ever transpired in the district, for that would be a contradiction to its idiosyncratic metaphysics of gravity, but nothing terribly dreadful happened either, until, of course, this. On a windy afternoon of dust devils and darkening skies, two days before the monsoon struck, the body was discovered by Maylee, the new prostitute recently in the employ of Mother Carushe. Mrs. Strellop had hired the young woman to fetch fresh fruit and vegetables each day from the barge that docked at the canal quay three streets up. When Maylee, carrying a basket of fresh carrots and white eggplant, pushed open the door to Thanatos, she was met by a ghastly sight. Eyes popping, blackened tongue lolling, Mrs. Strellop, draped in a plum wrap decorated with quartz chips in a design of the constellation of the goat, sat slumped back in her chair, one beautiful hand holding an empty vial that it was later determined had contained a draught of cyanide and the other clutching the doorstop skull in her lap.
    She was buried quickly, before the rains would have made the digging impossible, and the next day the entire district turned out at Munchter’s for a sort of informal wake of testimony and tearful besotment. We shared tales and descriptions of her, and, after my third Lime Plunge, I must have told everyone of her usual parting phrase to me, “Good days are ahead, Jonsi.” Mother Carushe had suggested that I compose a eulogy in the form of a poem in Mrs. Strellop’s honor and though it was begun, I could never find the words to finish it. Instead, the bargeman, Bill Hokel, played a dirge on his mouth organ. When the last mournful note had wavered away, there was a moment of silence before we heard the rain begin its patter on the corrugated tin of the roof. In that brief span, I wondered if Mrs. Strellop’s taking of her own life was an act of courage or cowardice.
    The rain was cold and unforgiving. For the first two days of the monthlong downpour, I simply sat on the veranda of my small apartment, drinking and smoking, and watched as the large, relentless droplets decimated the last white blossoms of the trailing vine that grew like a net over the facade of the abandoned fish market across the street. Mushrooms sprouted out of stucco, and great, gray seagoing birds huddled under the overhangs, heads beneath wings as if ashamed not to be flying. At times the wind was wild, lifting pieces of roof tile off the old buildings and buffeting off course anyone unlucky enough to be out on the street. On the second morning, Munchter trudged along the street beneath me and I called to him, but it was obvious he could not hear my voice above the howl of the wind.
    With the death of Mrs. Strellop, my usual feeling of blankness gave way to a kind of depressive loneliness. I knew others in the district much better, but she and her tea and our nightlong sessions had always centered me enough to keep that damnable sense of desire at bay. I wouldn’t have gone so far as to call it therapy, because as I understand it the therapist does the listening. It was she who always talked, telling me those long, intricate stories I would never remember. Somehow, they worked their way into my system invisibly, without a trace, and alleviated me of any judgment concerning the state of stasis that was my life.
    On the third day of the rain I was awakened by a knock upon my door. I knew it couldn’t be Meager come up from the shop below to share a cup of coffee and peruse my latest fragment of verse, since he always went west for the