The voice (A different ending to “Eveline” by James Joyce)

Paula Fernández Maseda

He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow. He was shouted at to go on, but he still called to her. She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.

Suddenly, her hands could not feel the iron. Her skin was asleep, almost dead, as heavy leather that caged her bones. It was not hers anymore.

The sky of Dublin began to burst into thousands of drops above her, but she did not feel the Irish rain tickling her arms, her hands or her cheeks. She felt nothing but numbness from her fingertips to the core of her very soul.

He had left. And there she stood, paralyzed for what felt like an eternity. Her insides felt oddly empty. She searched in her gut for some sadness, some anger, some guilt for not leaving with him…But all she could find was a turbulent apathy.

Her feet walked home. They knew the way by heart. When she arrived at the door with her rain-soaked hair, she reached for the keys in her bag. She had known from the beginning that she would not be able to leave. How could she? This was her only home, she was a part of it.

She burnt the letters she had written and for an instant, she thought she would know how to pretend that nothing had happened. Her body sat at the window again, but her mind was still in front of the cold, blue and gigantic ocean than led everywhere and nowhere. She had lost track of time and space and had the impression that her mind was rambling in nothingness, miles away from her body.

When had he left? It seemed like years ago. Gosh, how much she craved his hands around her waist, just like when he walked her home and they passed by the red brick houses. She wanted that tenderness and warmness so desperately that it hurt.

She could almost hear Frank’s voice calling her from the ship. Even from Argentina.

“Come, Evvy”.

Frank had sounded so sweet all those nights at the theatre, singing melodies that hugged her tightly and erased the loneliness from her tired eyes, yet Eveline could only remember how harsh his voice had blared at the harbour. How strongly it had beaten her, whipped her and crushed her. Frank’s eyes had looked at her with a terrifying lust and hunger that she did not want to fill. They looked like her dad’s.

 She imagined him now with all the lasses that loved him and she tried to guess how much he craved their bodies. Those girls would go on any vessel with him, wouldn’t they? He deserved someone that could do that for him. Someone that could break promises and swim entire oceans for him. He deserved much more than she was willing to give, didn’t he? But he had left. And she deserved someone that would have stayed.

For God knows how long, life went on without her realizing it. Her body worked at the Stores, cooked dinner and took care of the children. Her hands washed the dishes, her ears heard the poisoned words that came out of her father’s mouth and her nose smelled the beer in his breath night after night. Her eyes still gazed out of the window from time to time, but she was not there anymore. She was always looking vacant at the black mass that had left without her.

Eventually, her house became a black mass as well. Always dark, each day it seemed smaller, shabbier, sadder… The air was so stagnated that it became poisonous, like petroleum that choked her. The walls seemed to be coming closer together, stained with grey mould and mildew. And the dust that was once on the curtains piled up on her skin.

Her body was as sad, dark and small as the house. It often forgot how to eat, so Eveline began to starve herself. It forgot how to sleep. Some days, Eveline’s body could not even remember how to breathe.

At this point, her reality and her nightmares had blended. The priest in the yellowing photograph looked at her with disturbed eyes and whispered things that made her nauseous. He spied on her, following her everywhere she went. She knew it! Eveline tried to figure out what he wanted, but she was too scared to ask.

 After some days, she started to hear her mother’s voice behind the walls. What a beautiful voice had her mother had! She remembered how she used to sing in the kitchen while she was cooking dinner for the whole family. She would not taste a bit of it, leaving it all for the children that she had learnt to love so deeply. She must have been Eveline’s age when she gave birth for the first time. She was life. Then, her body and her mind began to break slowly. So did the family. Her mother’s voice now haunted her.

“I was just like you.”

Eveline cried when she heard that. She was breaking too. How long could she bear it? How more could she stay in this house before it swallowed her?

Her brain was filled with her mother’s loud, painful voice. It stabbed her like a sharp, cold knife. She tried to cry it away, but it would not leave. It was treading on her living rests.

“I was just like you.”

“I was just like you.”

“I was just like you.”

The house was falling down on her and she felt like part of the ruins. Was she a corpse already? She could not be. She still heard the voice. It felt like a fingernail scraping over a blackboard again and again. She shivered. The voice was so loud that she could not even hear herself. She was muted by her mother’s cry.

And then she realized. She could not remember the last time she had listened to her own voice. Every word she had uttered in her life had been someone else’s. She  filled her lungs with the eerie air of the house and with all the strength of her beaten body she shouted:

“But I won’t be like you!”

And she heard herself for the first time. She wanted to say every word she had swallowed deep down in her throat and grow fond of every vowel she had kept hidden. She wanted to hear herself. She wanted everyone to hear her.

 As she uttered her first words, Eveline opened the door and her mother’s voice vanished. She stepped outside and as she breathed in, she tasted the purest, freshest air in her mouth and knew something was healing. She was. It was the first time she had breathed after birthing her freedom.

She closed the door to never come back, for she had to find a room of her own, a house, a place to breathe, where she could be her own prophet.

December 2018