Other Voices, Other Rooms

by Truman Capote

Missouri emptied her coffee into a saucer, blew on it, dumped it back into the cup, sucked up a swallow, and smacked her lips. ‘ This here’s the Lord’s day,’ she announced. ‘You believe in Him? You got faith in His healin power?’ Joel said: ‘1 go to church.’ ‘Now that ain't what I'm speakin of. Take for instance, when you thinks bout the Lord, what is it passes in your mind?’ ‘Oh, stuff,’ he said, though actually, whenever he had occasion to remember that a God in heaven supposedly kept his record, one thing he thought of was money: quarters his mother had given him for each Bible stanza memorized, dimes diverted from the Sunday School collection plate to Gabaldoni’s Soda Fountain, the tinkling rain of coins as the cashiers of the church solicited among the congregation. But Joel didn’t much like God, for He had betrayed him too many times. ‘Just stuff like saying my prayers.’

But there was no prayer in Joel’s mind; rather, nothing a net of words could capture, for, with one exception, all his prayers of the past had been simple concrete requests: God, give me a bicycle, a knife with seven blades, a box of oil-paints. Only how, how, could you say something so indefinite, so meaningless as this: God, let me be loved.

But Little Sunshine stayed on : it was his rightful home, he said, for if he went away, as he had once upon a time, other voices, other rooms, voices lost and clouded, strummed his dreams.

‘They can romanticize us so, mirrors, and that is their secret: what a subtle torture it would be to destroy all the mirrors in the world: where then could we look for reassurance of our identities? I tell you, my dear, Narcissus was no egotist ... he was merely another of us who, in our unshatterable isolation, recognized, on seeing his reflection, the one beautiful comrade, the only inseparable love . . . poor Narcissus, possibly the only human who was ever honest on this point.’

‘Aside from all else there is some truth in that; clocks indeed must have their sacrifice : what is death but an offering to time and eternity?

The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love, having no geography, knows no boundaries: weight and sink it deep, no matter, it will rise and find the surface: and why not? any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person's nature; only hypocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves, emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their agitated concern, mistake so frequently tlic arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell.

‘But my dear, so few things are fulfilled: what are most lives but a series of incompleted episodes? “We work in the dark, we do what we can, we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task . . It is wanting to know the end that makes us believe in God, or witchcraft, believe, at least, in something.’

That night sleep was like an enemy ; dreams, a winged avenging fish, swam rising and diving until light, drawing towards daybreak, opened his eyes. Hurriedly butloning his breeches, he crept down through the quiet house and out the kitchen door. Above, the moon paled like a stone receding below water, tangled morning colour rushed up the sky, trembled there in pastel uncertainty.

Towards twelve they dismounted, and spread their picnic under a tree. Randolph had brought along a fruit-jar of scuppernong wine; he gargled it like mouthwash, and when there was no more, Joel made use of the empty jar to trap ants : The Pious Insect, Randolph called them, and said: ‘They fill me with oh so much admiration and ah so much gloom : such puritan spirit in their mindless march of Godly industry, but can so anti-individual a government admit the poetry of what is past understanding? Certainly the man who refused to carry his crumb would find assassins on his trail, and doom in every smile. As for me, I prefer the solitary mole: he is no rose dependent upon thorn and root, nor ant whose time of being is organized by the unalterable herd : sightless, he goes his separate way, knowing truth and freedom are attitudes of the spirit.’ He smoothed his hair, and laughed: at himself, it seemed. ‘ If 1 were as wise as the mole, if 1 were free and equal, then what an admirable whorehouse I should be the Madame of; more likely, though, I would end up just Mrs Nobody in Particular, a dumpy corsctlcss creature with a brickhead husband and stepladder brats and a pot of stew on the stove.’

A sound, as if the bell had suddenly tolled, and the shape of loneliness, greenly iridescent, whitely indefinite, seemed to rise from the garden, and Joel, as though following a kite, bent back his head: clouds were coming over the sun: he waited for them to pass, thinking that when they had, when he looked back, some magic would have taken place: perhaps he would find himself silting on the curb of St Deval Street, or studying next week’s attractions outside the Nemo : why not? it was possible, for everywhere the sky is the same and it is down that things are different. The clouds travelled slower than a clock’s hands, and, as he waited, became thunder-dark, became John Brown and horrid boys in panama hats and the Cloud Hotel and Idabel’s old hound, and when they were gone, Mr Sansom was the sun. He looked down. No magic had happened; yet something had happened; or was about to. And he sat numb with apprehension. Before him stood a rose stalk throwing shadow like a sundial: an hour traced itself, another, the line of dark dissolved, all the garden began to mingle, move.