February 13, 2025
Person in bed, Theo Nieuwenhuis. https://id.rijksmuseum.nl/200363883
There Was an Old Man
There was an old man who had no friends, whose days passed largely without event. Every morning upon waking up, he emptied his bowels, washed his undies, bathed, dressed, and fed himself, then sat to read or watch cricket. When he got tired, he went up for siesta. Always he dreamt, and sometimes his dreams were so warm with affection that he woke up aching with loneliness.
One day, he called his daughter. Newly married and awash in conjugal bliss, she said, “Daddy, you should take a wife.”
The old man laughed. He has such a good laugh, his daughter thought. And the old man did have a good laugh, a great laugh in fact, so what a pity it was that he had no friends to enjoy it.
During a stroll the following day, he emerged from his crescent onto the main road and saw a woman about his age sitting cross-legged on the side of the road, resting head on hands, chuckling. The old man, who had also been laughing to himself, about his daughter’s strange turns of phrase, thought how congenial the two of them were, both given to private amusements at the same moment. So he walked up to her and said hello.
She looked up, shading her eyes from the sun. “Would you like to join me? It’s very soothing.”
He nodded yes as she patted the ground beside her. He sat. “If you don’t mind my asking, what were you laughing about?”
“Oh, everything. Everything is funny, don’t you think? Okay, so I used to be a hairdresser, back in the day, and we always had these movies playing in the salon. Obviously we and our regulars, we’ve seen the movies many times so they are like background noise for us. But sometimes a new customer will come in, and I’ll be doing her hair, and all of a sudden, she’ll shout ‘Ye!’, and I’ll say ‘Sorry, sorry!’ thinking I have hurt her, and she’ll say ‘No no no, it’s the movie,’ and all of us in the salon will start laughing.”
And so the old man had a good chuckle, thanked her for the story, dusted his trousers, and continued his stroll.
The next day, she was there again, laughing.
“And may I ask what you are laughing about?” he asked, sitting down beside her.
“Oh, everything. Everything is funny, don’t you think? Okay, so I used to be a washerwoman. Every week I would go to my employer’s house and wash and iron their clothes. And one time…”
And there she was again the following day, the hairdresser/washerwoman, and the old man said, “Hold on, I need to get something,” and hurried back to his house. He came back carrying a light, long wooden bench, perched against his side.
“Is it okay if we sit on this? I don’t want to stain my trousers.”
She acquiesced.
Now this went on for many days. The old man brought his bench, and the old woman told him about her life. Because there was a bench and there was laughter, the two would sit together even after the old woman had shared some tidbit and mostly there was silence but sometimes one of them would remark, on seeing something or remembering something, “Oh, but the world can be cruel too,” or “Oh, what a nice car,” or “Did you ever hear the story of the tortoise and the dog?”
Like this they fell into a certain intimacy, and their aimless chatter turned into the sharing of confidences. He told her that his wife had left him after decades of shared unhappiness, and at first he had fought the separation but then was overtaken by relief, to be no longer condemned, no longer misaligned, and now he barely remembered the marriage; what it had felt like to live in it. She told him she had recently discovered that she spent her earliest childhood away from her mother, had been left and then returned to and lived for decades with no knowledge of this fact, only the sense that there was something crucial missing between her and her mother, something much more easily accessible with others in her family, who seemed to have a truer understanding of who she was. Images from that forgotten time now returned to her in flashes, the cursed blessing of old age, and when those flashes arrived, she felt what her infant self had felt; that she was waiting for someone, someone who was supposed to be there but wasn’t. She wondered if her lifelong refusal to love and be married was the reification of that absence.
He told her that his parents had spent his entire life grieving the four children they lost, in those days when it was taken for granted that some infants simply died. His parents never spoke about their grief, but they never spoke at all. He had lived in silence, then married into silence. She told him that she was now ready for the committed love that she had been avoiding her entire life.
They said all this while sat on the bench, either looking at each other or facing the street, their speech interrupted by the noises of traffic. It was easier to confess these things while oppressed by the sun’s brightness, its heat, the noise, the smells. Nothing that was said hung in the air as it would have, were they in a quiet, dimly lit room with only their words to reckon with. They could say whatever they wished, it was all swiftly carried away by smog.
Every day they sat closer and closer until one day there was no space between them, only the commingling of sweat.
On the phone the old man said, “I have found a love,” and his daughter was pleased.
The wedding was small, attended by the old woman’s family and close friends and the old man’s daughter and the daughter’s wife. At the end, all the adults were drunk from palm wine and the children drunk from sugary soft drinks. The couple sat huddled together in the glow of new love and alcohol while all around them children ran around screaming and their parents danced and joked. For weeks afterward, everyone who had been there would think back to the party and be filled with warmth. Sometimes, the old woman’s philosophical cousin would, while sitting on the veranda and supping, point to the front yard and say, “Just here, not too long ago, not long ago at all, we drank and were merry.” But soon the event was too long ago for him to say that.
And by then, things in the marriage had started to turn.
After the wedding, the couple had moved their dealings inside, into the old man’s old house. In the kitchen, the old man cooked elaborate meals and the old woman leaned on the deep freezer and watched him. In the sitting room, she mended and embroidered clothes, and he sat nearby and watched her. When one used the toilet, the other shouted through the doors.
They spent all day together except for a few hours in the afternoon, when the old woman went to the roadside. The first day of their cohabitation, she had invited the old man to join her, so that they could continue their practice. But he thought it a bit silly to sit together under the beating sun when they could just as well lie together in conditioned air. He had accepted the vagaries of the outdoors when it was the only option presented to him, otherwise it made no sense. So from then on they separated after lunch—she to sit by the road, he to sleep upstairs.
After a few weeks of this, their afternoon separations began to gnaw at the old man. He did not understand why she would rather be outside alone than inside with him. Whenever he woke up and she was not there, he felt those same old feelings from before they met, the ache for another body. He was most vulnerable in these late afternoons, and his wife was missing, out there somewhere, doing who knew what.
He tried to imagine her in their usual junction, sitting alone, but the image felt false, like he had dreamed it. He tried to imagine her thinking of him, missing him, but all he saw was her face when she returned the previous day, flush as if she had been kissed, and the freedom in her bearing. She carried herself like the woman she had been before him, like her body had not yet registered that she was married. There was no reservation in it. When he held her and she yielded, it was not a specific yielding, but a general one, not particular to him. He was only open with her, only free with her, but she was open with everyone. He saw it when they went to the market, when she smiled at strangers the way she smiled at him. He was hers alone, but she was not his.
When she returned, the old man said, “Why do you leave me? I give you so much and you give me so little.”
“What are you talking about? I am here with you all day. We play and talk and rub each other’s backs. Why can’t I have a few hours to myself? There is a world outside this house, you know.”
“Yes, I’m aware. But you know as well as I do that everybody out there is searching for this thing that we have so miraculously found in our old age: a companion. Besides, you are my wife and I don’t want people thinking that my wife is a mad woman, sitting on the ground for no good reason. It’s embarrassing.”
“When you came to me, unasked, did I seem to you a mad woman?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. You know I didn’t mean that. I just get a little paranoid about you out there. There are bandits, rogues, evildoers. Now that we are married, we have to move differently, lay low, keep ourselves for each other. I love you, I don’t want to lose you.”
In bed later that night, the old woman was distant, pensive. The old man kissed her cheeks wetly and said, “I have been dreaming of you all my life and here you are now. To remain here, for years and years, a stack of years, unmoving, together, is all I wish now. Your constancy, my sweet, is my desire. My constancy is my promise.”
The following day, to ask forgiveness, he made a special curry-gravy dish that was so good the old woman ate multiple servings. Soon after, she fell asleep. She remained asleep all afternoon and when the old man woke from his siesta there she was beside him, sedated from the heavy lunch. He rejoiced to find her there and, feeling exultant, embraced her. When she awoke and regained her bearings, he continued holding her, kissing her. As dusk fell, they had gentle, slow sex and stroked each other’s heads until it was time to sleep again.
And so the old man began making similar dishes for the old woman almost every afternoon—rich stews, sauces, curries, that sent her into bed and into his arms where she snored lightly, her breath blowing onto the back of his hands and he was so filled with love and grateful for this gift of heavy food, food that made his beautiful wife drowsy.
One afternoon, the old woman woke very shortly after she had fallen asleep, shocked out of sleep by a feeling that she was falling. Outside, the rain had stopped and left in its wake a breeze, the incredible kind that blew their city every so often but felt imagined in times of great humidity, when one wondered if a breeze had ever blown, and then a breeze like this one showed up, and confirmed that pleasure was indeed possible. She decided to go for a walk. It was still daytime, so the city had a blue tint, not blinding white like on cloudless days and not dark either, like just before the rain. The light, like the breeze, was incredible. The old woman felt more awake than she had felt in many weeks. She thought, I’ve missed the world. It offers itself to me now, at its most welcoming, but I miss even its harshness, even the sweat that pooled on my forehead and underneath my breasts, even, let’s say, the days that it made me ill.
The old woman was especially given to nostalgia on days like this, when all the images of herself walking through the neighborhood on other cool afternoons became superposed, creating a fresco of memories. She thought of the music that had been playing in her mind, the minor battles that were being waged in her family, the discoveries she had made along particular routes—the leaves of an avocado tree reaching out over a wall and bearing fruit close enough to pluck, houses that struck her as particularly beautiful and towards which she now felt a sort of familial affection, buildings that had been abandoned for decades and which were now thriving ecosystems, with moss and vines and bird nests, that one particularly beautiful abandoned house with a rusty red car in front of it.
She thought of the people she had been thinking about on those prior walks, her former lovers. As she called up their faces, one appeared in front of her. She blinked to find him there in the flesh, smiling. They hugged. He was gaunt and smelled medicated. His eyes were yellow, unfocused.
“How have you been?” he asked.
“Well. Married, finally, if you can believe it.” She registered the surprise on his face, then the pleasure. “How have you been?”
“Not bad. I’m dying, but I feel largely myself.”
“You’re dying? For how long?”
“For how long have I been dying? Or for how long will I be?”
“Both.”
“I suppose there was no need to specify. I don’t really know with either. It has been a while now. It could be any day now. Would you like to join me for some tea?”
“Yes.”
They walked in silence to his flat, and it struck the old woman that she had marked the last time they made this journey together, from the main road into and through his particular street. She had known she was about to end their relationship, had felt his desire to transform their affair into something more meaningful and decided to put a stop to it, sadly, assuredly.
His place was full of plants, bursting with an aliveness that felt cruel. They sat and talked until he became hoarse and needed to lie down. She kissed his forehead before she left. When she returned home, it was dark, and the old man had eaten.
He bombarded her with the usual questions—where did you go? what did you do? why didn’t you take your phone? On her journey home, she had been imagining how she would report to her husband the miracle of running into a former lover and being able to say goodbye to him before he died, but some of her excitement was dampened by his sour mood. Nevertheless, she gave the report, told him about the breeze and the quality of the light, about her old friend’s house, his strength, their conversation.
The old man was angry at her for having disappeared but he could not very well object to her saying goodbye to a dying ex. Or could he? He did not know, anyway, if she was telling the truth. He did not truly know anything about her. He had seen her randomly on the street one day and everything she had said since may well have been a fabulation. Had she actually been a hairdresser? A washerwoman? Had she actually never been in love? Who was she, really? He listened to her story, not saying much, hoping that his lack of response would communicate his disapproval. Because the basic summary of what she was telling him was that she had gone out while he was asleep, had left him no word, had arrived at her ex’s house, and stayed there for hours. Everything else—the breeze, the light, the imminent death—was immaterial.
He mumbled a few words in response and went up to bed while she fixed herself some dinner. Upstairs, he continued ruminating on the problem of his ignorance: he did not know and could not know what she had done before they met, and he did not know and could not know what she did when they were apart. She may very well have begun the same routine they’d shared with some other random man who also came up to her while she sat by the road, telling him the same silly stories. He may be one of many husbands she’d had, acquired in the same way each time, following the same script. He kept running over all the possible scenarios, even after the old woman came up to bed, and freshened up, and went to sleep. He found it galling that she slept the sound sleep of the innocent, while he could not sleep, haunted by his being in the dark about the true story of the evening. He woke her up.
“Was talking all you did with your old friend? Did you do anything else? Did you hug, kiss?”
“Yes, we hugged, I kissed his forehead when I was saying goodbye.”
“So you lied to me.”
“I did not lie. It didn’t even occur to me that I would need to mention that.”
The old man was verklempt. The old woman was confused. Had he really woken her up to accuse her of infidelity? She listened to him talk about his feeling that she was hiding something from him, that he could feel it, had felt it when he woke up to find her missing. She felt cornered, unsafe. He tired himself out and fell asleep eventually, but she could not go back to sleep. In the morning, he apologized. He said, I let my worry overtake me sometimes, I am trying to be better.
He looked so harmless in that moment, freshly woken, with crust in his eyes, and her distress had waned, but she knew that their marriage was doomed. Sooner or later, she would tire of his need to possess her. She tired of it already, but when he was not defaming her character, she felt glad to be in his presence, to hold him and be held by him, to make him laugh and hear his laugh, to eat the food he cooked her, to be free of labor for the first time in her life. Would she really give that up? Would she say goodbye to love so quickly, after waiting nearly seventy years to have it?
She told him that she needed to reflect, that she would spend the day with her family. As she walked to her family home, the old woman contemplated her marriage. When she arrived, she sat on the veranda to continue contemplating her marriage.
There, she was joined by the child of her philosophical cousin who ran up and hugged her.
“Can you tell me a story?” said the child, who was fond of her stories.
She searched her mind for a short while, then began.
“One afternoon, an old man, let’s call him the inside man, saw an old woman, let’s call her the outside woman. She was sitting on the ground laughing. He sat beside her and asked the cause of her laughter. When she told him, he thanked her and left. He returned the next day, and the day after that he came with a bench, and on the fourth day he brought snacks, and on the fifth day there was a book, and his visits continued in this way for many weeks. Surely enough, they fell in love.
“After they married, the inside man became jealous over the outside woman’s time, and wanted her constant presence. He began to use treats and trickery to keep her in the house. Soon, the outside woman was overtaken by malaise.”
“What is malaise?” the child said.
“Malaise is when you don’t feel good, and it is more than simple sadness. You feel that there is something wrong with the world, that it is off-center. Do you understand?”
The child smiled and nodded.
“When the inside man saw that his wife was unhappy, he was distraught (distraught is when you are very upset). He knew that she would soon leave him but he could not give up the pleasure of their life together.
“He went to see a magician, and the magician gave him a stone in a pendant necklace to offer his wife. As long as it did not break and she kept it on her person or with her things, it would work to keep her devoted to him, forsaking all other people and pursuits.
“The outside woman was moved by the gift, and wore it immediately. The very day, she was changed. She relaxed into their world of two and forgot the rest. Being with him, looking at him, was its own bliss. When faced with a spread of food that he had prepared, she would sing his praises and sigh happily, “Oh my husband, what a husband.” She listened raptly to his stories and became so studied in his ways that whenever he struggled to explain his thoughts, she would perfectly distill what he was trying to say and he would startle at how well she saw him.
“Consumed by thoughts of him, she stopped sharing her own stories, and the inside man began to miss them. He asked her one day to retell an anecdote that she had shared before, and she replied that it made her sad now, to reminisce, because she did not know him then, and did not know the bliss of having a husband so wonderful as he. And perhaps one day soon he would die, and she would only have known him for a short time. She would only be mourning a short period of bliss, not a shared life. The thought made her genuinely sad then, and the feeling made her so dizzy that she had to lie down.”
The old woman paused, trying to imagine what happened next, to decide what she wanted.
“Continue, continue,” the child said.
“The inside man realized that he had made a terrible mistake. The following day, during their siesta, he took the necklace from her vanity and quietly left the house with it and a hammer. Outside, he smashed the stone to bits and then swept the chain and remaining particles into the street gutter. Afterwards, it occurred to him that when he walked back into the house, he would be faced again with an unhappy wife, who was now missing her necklace. He slid the hammer under his gate and went on a stroll to compose himself and begin his inevitable mourning (inevitable is when something is going to happen, no matter what).
“Not long into his walk, he arrived at the junction where he and the outside woman had shared their talks. He saw her there, sat, cross-legged, watching the cars and pedestrians go by. He was puzzled. It was impossible, she was asleep, she could not have walked so quickly to reach here before him. She waved him over.
“When he arrived, she said, ‘Hello my friend. No bench today?’
“Immediately he understood that breaking the stone had brought him here, to the time before their marriage.
“‘Hello my sweet,’ he said in return, ‘I thought it would be nice to commune again with the ground.’
“He was being given a second chance. He would do it better this time. He would not enchant her or seek her devotion. There, on the floor, he asked her to marry him.
“‘I don’t think we should,’ the outside woman said. ‘I see us married in another life, devoted and no longer ourselves. But this, now, is lovely just as it is.’
“‘Yes, that is true,’ the inside man said, saddened but also glad. ‘This is lovely.’”
The old woman closed her eyes, moved.
“And did they live happily until their death?” the child asked.
“Yes,” the old woman said. “They very much did.”
Back in their house, the old man was engaging in his own naive fantasies about the future of their relationship.