It was a monstrous mutilation; a disfigurement so calculated in its cruelty that I felt numbed by it and unable to respond. I noticed that there were no marks on or near his mouth. I wondered at the fortune that had left his sensuous and finely sculpted lips so perfect, so flawlessly unscarred. Then I remembered that Maurizio had gagged him when he'd tied him to the bed, only lifting the twisted cloth from time to time as he'd commanded him to speak. And it seemed to me, as I watched Modena puff at the cigarette, that his smooth, unblemished mouth was the worst and most terrible wound of them all. We smoked the beedies down to stubs in silence, and my eyes adjusted to the darkness. I became aware, gradually, of how small he was; how much smaller he'd become with the shrivelling effect of the wounds on his left side. I felt that I was towering over him. I stepped back a pace into the light, picked up my bag, and wagged my head encouragingly.
"Garam chai pio?" I asked. Shall we drink hot tea?
"Thik hain," he replied. Okay.
I led the way back through the converted lane and into a chai shop where workers from a local flourmill and bakery were resting between shifts. The men, several of them, shuffled along the wooden bench to make room for us. They were powdered with white flour in their hair and over the whole of their bodies. They looked like phantoms or so many stone statues come to life. Their eyes, no doubt irritated by the dusty flour, were as red as coals from the fiery pit beneath their ovens. Their wet lips, where they sipped the tea, were black leeches against the ghostly white of their skin. They stared at us with the usual frank, Indian curiosity, but looked away quickly when Modena raised his gaping eyes to them.
"I'm sorry for running away," he said quietly, his eyes fixed on his hands as they fidgeted in his lap.
I waited for him to say something more, but he locked his mouth in a tight little grimace and breathed loudly, evenly, through his wide, flaring nose.
"Are you... are you okay?" I asked, when the tea arrived.
"Jarur," he answered, with a little smile. Certainly. "Are you okay?"
I thought he was being facetious, and I didn't hide the irritation in my frown.
"I do not mean to offend you," he said, smiling again. It was a strange smile, so perfect in the curve of the mouth, and so deformed in the stiffened cheeks that dragged the lower lids of his eyes down into little wells of misery. "I am only offering my help, if you need it. I have money. I always carry ten thousand rupees with me."
"What?"
"I always carry-"
"Yes, yes, I heard you." He was speaking softly, but still I glanced up at the bakery men to see if they'd heard him as well.
"Why were you watching me today in the market?" "I watch you very often. Almost every day. I watch you and Karla and Lisa and Vikram."
"Why?"
"I must watch you. It is one of the ways I will know how to find her."
"To find who?"
"Ulla. When she returns. She won't know where I am. I don't go ... I don't go to Leopold's any more or any of the other places we used to be together. When she looks for me, she will come to you or to one of the others. And I will see her. And we will be together."
He made the little speech so calmly, and then sipped at his tea with such contented abstraction, that it exaggerated the weirdness of his delusion. How could he think that Ulla, who'd left him on the bloody bed to die, would return from Germany to be with him? And even if she were to return, how could she react to his face, deformed into that mourner's mask, with anything but horror?
"Ulla... went to Germany, Modena."
"I know," he smiled. "I am glad for her."
"She won't be coming back."
"Oh, yes," he said flatly. "She'll come back. She loves me.
She'll come back for me."
"Why-" I began, and then abandoned the thought. "How do you live?"
"I have a job. A good job. It pays good money. I work with a friend, Ramesh. I met him when... after I was hurt. He looked after me. At the houses of the rich, when a son is born, we go there, and I put on my special clothes. I put on my costume."
The dire emphasis he'd put on the last word, and the fractured little smile that accompanied it, sent a creeping unease along the skin of my arms. Some of that disquiet croaked into my voice as I repeated the word.
"Costume?"
"Yes. It has a long tail and sharp ears, and a chain of little skulls around the neck. I make it that I am a demon, an evil spirit. And Ramesh, he makes that he is a holy sadhu, looking like a holy man, and he beats me away from the house. And I come back, and I make it that I am trying to steal the baby. And the women scream when I come near the baby. And Ramesh, he beats me away again. Again I come back, and again he beats me until, at the very last, he beats me so badly that I make like I am dying, and I run away. The people pay us good money for the show." "I never heard of it before."
