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Completion

Kofi Campbell

    The painting came alive under his thoughtful stare. Even she, Sarana, could only gaze in wonder at the new perspectives opening up before her. This was her painting, her master-work, yet she saw suddenly that she had never really seen it before. Not truly. Not through the eyes of another. It was a rite of passage for her. Each new piece completed beheld through the gaze of her lover. Or, in this case, her prospective lover. But this time it was different. The thought intruded, unbidden, that this time, it was for real.
    He moved a few paces to the right, and she, mirroring his every step, saw what had prompted the motion. In the upper right hand corner of the painting the sun had begun to rise, casting a blinding shadow upon certain features of the landscape. He had shifted to put the light at an oblique angle behind him. The streaks of fire were clearer from here, she saw, although the mountain ranges seemed smaller, less imposing when out of the direct sunlight. She wondered again what forces had contrived to shape them so much against her desire. She had imagined them to be harsher than the surrounding landscape, jutting brutally into the sea and sky, piercing each in turn with a regularity that shifted her thoughts again to him.
    When he turned suddenly and said, “I think I need to take a break,” she knew completion was near. The Indian landscape behind them could wait a little while longer. This lover-to-be, like all the lovers-who-were, must give his all before he could even dream of transcendence. Before he would be able to join the landscape and surrender wholly to her art. She smiled and shivered.
    “Of course.” She led him through the short hallway and into the living room of her apartment above Bloor Street. The rooms were as sparse as her art was dense, a few pieces of furniture scattered here and there, blank canvases hung at irregular intervals, and an odd collection of knives buried in ornate scabbards along many of the walls. “Can I offer you a drink?”
    He nodded absently, still lost in inner contemplation of her masterpiece. She watched him as she poured two finger of cognac, neat. He was handsome enough, not that that mattered to her. What mattered were the green in his eyes, and the heat in his blood. They were the completion she was so close to. That she needed so desperately. She’d known this as soon as she laid eyes on him, strolling easily through Kensington Market, stopping occasionally to sort through the stalls and spice racks. She approached him confidently and invited him to join her for coffee. She was an attractive woman, she knew. Her Indian features and long dark hair seemed to make her irresistible to men in this strange city. She’d discovered this almost as soon as she stepped off the plane five years past. It had been an easy matter to lead coffee into an invitation for wine the following night. And so here he was.
    She offered him the glass and waited expectantly. He did not disappoint her.
    “It certainly is beautiful,” he said finally, nodding towards the room they had just left. The painting, as she had known it would, had transfixed him. Her art always did that to the man for whom it was intended. Then the question she had been expecting. “But all of your other works seem so saturated with violence. They’re so intensely red, with such hidden anger, such a quiet rage. It permeates everything you do, except for this last piece. Why is that?”
    She smiled the smile she knew would melt him, confuse his thoughts and mix with the cognac. “Which ‘why’ are you asking? Why are my other works filled with violence, or why is this one not?”
    He shrugged uncertainly. The motion was so youthful that for a moment she forgot he was six years her senior. But the intensity of his gaze and the perceptiveness of his questions did not allow that illusion a long life. She knew, as always, that she must be careful. He could turn on her without a moment’s notice. Completion was so near. But he was, after all, only a man. Not yet the demon he must become. Not yet.
    He interrupted her thoughts as his own continued to flow. “I mean, look at this piece right here.” He laid his palm on one of the original three paintings she had discovered within herself during that brutal first year in Canada. A piece she had named, aptly enough, simply Julian’s Flower Bed. Julian had been her second Canadian lover.
    “It’s so grotesque in its depiction of death.” One long finger tapped the canvas. “Here, this mutilated body with its organs strewn all about the field. And this,” his voice deepening with introspection, “this must represent the circle of life, the beginning and the end of all things.” He was slowly stroking a convoluted figure eight symbol which winked and disappeared as it wound its way about the eviscerated corpse. The symbol seemed to support the body it entangled, at the same time holding it firmly in place. “Why all the blood, I mean? Your point could have been made more subtly, perhaps. And this one sculpted finger laid on top of the canvas! Realistic, mind you, but superfluous if you see what I mean.” He looked around the room, nodding at each painting in turn. “All I see is violence and more violence, as if that is all there is, all there ever was.”
    “You don’t like them?”
    “What?” He was surprised. “My God, I love them! They’re brilliant, each in its own way. I’m only asking for my own understanding. Why are you so obsessed with gore and blood and violence?”
    “Only blood and violence, not gore. Gore is only a side-effect. It is what completion demands.”
    “Completion?”
    Sarana laid her glass gently on the table beside her. She walked over to him and, twining her arm through his, led him to a couch in the centre of the room. She pushed him down gently, unprotesting as she knew he would be, and straddled him, raising her sari and bundling it about her waist. She felt the need rising between his legs, her own growing to match it, but the time was not yet. She must fathom him, she knew, or he would escape her before she was done. If they were to make art together, to become art together, completion could only come in the fullness of expectation and time.
    She stroked his brow with one hand, holding both of his in her other. His face, smooth against her palm, was enticing. She laid her cheek against his and crushed her breasts onto his chest. From that position she whispered into his ear, “Would you really like to know why I am so obsessed with blood and violence?”
    She sensed his surprise at the timing of the question, then came his slow nod. She settled herself onto him so that she could feel the hardness of his sex against her own. Then, her arms about his neck and her legs around his waist, she took him back five years, to the beginning of her life as an artist.

************* ************ *************

    Fifteen year old Sarana Nanpoor heaved and shook as she struggled to hide her tears behind her perfectly brushed mane of ebony hair. Her back was turned so that her relatives might not see this shameful display of immaturity. She was a woman now, leaving on her own for the promised land that she knew as Canada. Ever since she could remember, her mother and father, uncles and aunts and cousins and friends had spoken of Canada, and the day they might take their pilgrimage there as so many had before them. Three years ago her uncle Ghandar had finally saved enough money for the move. That too, she remembered, had been a tearful farewell. But it had been one full of promises, too. Promises to send for the others as soon as money could be earned and saved. Promises that were now being fulfilled. Sarana was the first of the relations to be sent for. Her parents had received word from uncle Ghandar a scant fortnight ago, and now here she was. Preparing to leave everything she knew behind.
    “My dear Sari,” her mother whispered through her own tears, “today is a happy day for us. Another of us goes to freedom and opportunity now, and you must pave the way for the rest of us, ya. You are our shining star, our hopes, our dreams.” She wiped her eyes carelessly and said for the hundredth time that morning, “Our prayers go with you, little Sari. May your shanti always remain untroubled.”
    Her father was more philosophical. “You are a bright girl, my daughter,” he told her, his voice strong and unwavering as always. “I know you will have no problems there. My brother too is smart, and he has money to make sure you get a good start in life there. And we will be seeing you as soon as we can.” But even he could not hide the sorrow and trepidation that her leave-taking had buried in the breasts of her family and friends. Canada might be the promised land, but it was an unknown, and Indians had more than enough reason to fear the unknowns of the West.
    “Oh papa, mama!” She flung herself onto them and held them tight, making no effort now to hide her tears. Everyone who had come to see her off, which meant almost everyone who had ever known her, joined the circle, and soon the waiting room was filled with the sounds of wailing and sorrow and joy, lamentation mixing smoothly with shouted words of advice and the sounds of laughter.
    “Eh, remember, girl, it is very cold in Canada, but you must never light a fire in your igloo, ya, or it will melt.”
    “Girl, watch out for thieves in the airport before you find your uncle. They will try to take everything from you when they see you are a young girl traveling alone.”
    “You must remember to thank your uncle. He has been very kind to us, and to you. You must make the most of this opportunity.”
    “Sari, watch out for the men down there. They are not like our Indian men, they will try to take your virtue without even taking you out for dinner first.”
    This last was greeted with laughter, and a voice cried out, “Ya, Sari, at least at home they buy you some naan first to give you the energy.”
    Laughter rang out louder than before, and sorrow melted into a general quiet anticipation, until Sarana’s boarding call came. Then the wailing began again, and the tears, and the shouts of advice until Sarana, frightened and sad as she was, was glad to escape to the plane where she could experience the depth of her emotions in her own solitude. So withdrawn was she that she barely noticed the take-off and flight. She was mature and self-aware enough to know that she was in a state of shock, but beyond that she was aware of little else. She ate when they offered her food and spent the rest of the flight in a deep sleep, broken only by troubled dreams she would half-remember before sinking into slumber again against the deep rhythmic pulsing of the jet’s engines. She felt as if she was being rocked to sleep in the cavernous belly of some strange flying giant who had agreed to carry her, but cared little about her beyond that simple act of transportation. For the first time in a life surrounded always by a thousand people, she felt truly alone.
    Sarana screamed as an impact jolted her awake, and looked over into the smiling face of the man beside her. “We’re here.” He nodded out the window, and she saw that they were on solid ground once more. She breathed deeply to calm herself, gathering her things to hide her confusion and embarrassment. She followed the others off the plane and went where they went. Fear still remained, but it was tempered now by an overwhelming excitement. Her new life was about to begin.
    Then it was her turn at the immigration desk. She stepped forward and extended her passport to the man seated behind the counter. He took it without looking up and laid it on the table beside him.
    “Name?” he asked, fingers poised above the keyboard on his desk.
    “Sarana Nanpoor, sir.”
    He looked up at the sound of her voice. This was perhaps the third time in her life that Sarana had been face to face with a white man. Deep green eyes fixed on her own.
    “Age?” he demanded, not unkindly.
    “Fifteen, sir.”
    He looked up again, seemed surprised. His gaze left her eyes this time and traveled the length of her body before returning to his computer screen.
    “Aren’t you a little young to travel all this distance by yourself?”
    His conversational tone put her at ease and she smiled at him as she said, “My uncle is waiting for me.”
    “Uncle? What about your parents?”
    “They are in India, sir. They sent me to live with my uncle.”
    His hands moved away from his keyboard as he regarded her thoughtfully. “And your uncle is your only relative in Canada?” His tongue flicked across his lips, once.
    “Yes, sir.”
    A strange excitement flared in his dark eyes, a thing for which she had no word or concept. He shook his head suddenly and became business-like again. “Very well, shall we examine your bags? Place them here, please.”
    She put her bags on the counter before her. As he opened the zipper, the customs officer asked, “And have you ever been to Canada before?”
    “No sir.”
    “Have you ever even left India before?”
    “No sir.”
    He stopped suddenly and held up a package. “What’s this?”
    She pointed to the words written plainly on the packet in both Hindi and English. “It is Madras Curry, sir, from home, for my uncle.”
    He frowned and dropped the package back into her bag. “Surely,” he said, “you know it is illegal to bring certain substances into this country. This is one of them.”
    “But. . .”
    “Bring your bags and come with me.” He turned and moved off without another word. Confused, she did as ordered. She knew very well that her relatives and friends often traveled with curry from home. She must have forgotten to package it properly. Or perhaps there was a form to fill out somewhere. They came to a door at the end of a series of hallways. A female customs agent approached them and waved at the man.
    “Hey there, buddy, what’s up? You need a female agent present for a search?”
    Sari’s confusion grew as he grinned back at her and shook his head. “Naw, this is an old friend of mine. We’re just going to have a little talk, that’s all. Are Brad and Jimmy around, though? They’ll be happy to see old Sarana here again.” He nodded to the room. “Can you send them in if you find them?”
    “Sure thing, buddy.” She smiled, shook hands with Sarana, said, “Nice to meet you, dear,” and walked away. The man held the door open for her. Sarana was relaxed now, though. She’d done something wrong, and this man had lied to help her. He had even pretended that she was a friend of his, to help smooth the way. She turned to him as the door closed behind them.
    “My thanks, sir,” she smiled timidly up at him.
    He arched one eyebrow. “Whatever for?”
    “For helping me, sir. With the curry powder.”
    “Oh, that!” He smiled a cryptic smile and waved her thanks aside. “That’s nothing, don’t even worry about it.” He paused, then said, softly, “however, there is something you can do to thank me.”
    “Anything, sir.”
    His smile grew. “I hope you mean that, Sarana, I really do.” He took her hand and led her to a table and chair in one corner of the room. She started to sit on the chair, but he guided her on to the table instead. “Now, about that favour.”
    “Yes sir?”
    He turned his back to her and did something at his waist. When he turned to face her again she beheld something she had never seen on an adult. “Do you know what this is?”
    “I. . . I. . “ Sari, uncomprehending, could only stare and stutter dumbly.
    His smile slipped a little. “I understand that women are very sheltered in your country. Have you never seen one of these before?”
    “I. . .” And then silence.
    “Are you a virgin?”
    She raised her eyes to his, vaguely beginning to comprehend what was about to happen, nothing in her experience having given her the words, the thoughts, the emotions to describe it. And suddenly he was at her side, pushing her down onto her back and climbing onto the table beside her. She could not scream, she did not know she was supposed to. She felt, from a distance, his hand raise her sari to her waist. His face loomed over hers, green eyes boring into her, forcing her to share this moment with him against her will, all against her will.
    Consciousness abandoned Sarana for an instant as he pushed her underwear aside, then returned with terrifying clarity as he slammed into her, thrusting through her virginity and filling her with the brutality of his manhood. He grunted as he moved. And she could only stare up at him blankly as he violated her, not really seeing him, or feeling him, or hearing him, only tasting the sweaty sourness of the air, and wondering from afar at the blankness of her own emotions. A thousand years later she heard, from a million miles away, the door open and then shut again, footsteps echoing in the small room. She didn’t see the two other men until he had lifted himself off her and, slapping her thigh once, got off the table. She didn’t start screaming until the second man entered her.
    The rest of the morning passed in a dream. The men watched as she mutely dressed herself, each moment an eternity of pain. The customs agent, the first person she had met coming off the plane to Canada, released her into the arms of her uncle, explaining that there had been a small irregularity in her passport, nothing to worry about, all taken care of now. Her uncle thanked him profusely, pressing some money into his palm in gratitude.
    “It’s okay, my dear,” he beamed, squeezing her hand tightly as they drove to his home. “You don’t have to speak. I was overwhelmed too, when I first arrived here. It’s so different, isn’t it? So much less crowded, and cleaner, and. . .” and so on and on he droned until they reached his house, she still not responding to his monologue, he not expecting a response, content with the knowledge that he had helped to ease the lot of his relatives, and that he would be praised forever for his generosity.
    It was only when she had not spoken for hours that he began to question her silence. She remained stoic as long as she could, but she was only human, only fifteen years old.
    “Nuncle,” she began, before the tears stopped her words and she collapsed in a heap onto the living-room floor. It took him another hour to get the full story from her, and when he had heard it he too sat in stunned silence, unable to credit what his brain told him his ears had heard. It was Sarana’s turn to become afraid of the silence, and of consequences. She could not bear to think what the news would do to her parents. Her parents who had pinned all their hopes on her, their dreams for a better life, a new beginning. She reached out to touch her uncle.
    “Nuncle, what shall we tell mama and papa? What will they. . .”
    And he flew into a rage. He struck her arm away with such vicious force that the blow numbed her to the shoulder.
    “Your mother and father?” he stormed, eyes wide with disbelief. “Tell my brother how you have dishonoured his name, how you allowed yourself to be soiled by the white devils of this land, how you have sold your most prized possession for a bag of curry?” He leapt across the room and wrapped his fist into her hair, yanking her to her feet.
    “Nuncle!” she screamed, clawing at her hair as he slapped her, hard, across the face. “Nuncle, it wasn’t my fault, I didn’t want to. . .”
    “Not your fault? Not your fault! Then whose fault is it, you little slut, you harlot, you goddamned fucking bitch.” He spat the words as he swung her around and flung her across the room. “I will never tell your father of this, do you understand? Never! I will tell him you were hit by a car, or killed by a robber, but never will he know how his only daughter has brought shame and dishonour upon such a noble name, such a well-regarded family.”
    “But what of me, nuncle?” She leaned against the wall where she had fallen, shocked, unbelieving, uncomprehending. “What is to become of me? What will I do?” Her voice grew hysterical and whimpering by turns. Already her face had begun to swell from the blow and she was dizzy as she tried to stand. “He forced me, nuncle, he made me, they all did, I. . .”
    “Shut up! No decent woman would allow this to happen! You are no longer a member of my family. You are a whore, a dirty stinking whore who deserves what she gets.” His anger almost choked him. His voice was hoarse as he screamed “Get out! Get out of my house, you dirty whore!”
    “Nuncle,” she whispered, “please, it was not my fault, I didn’t allow this to happen, I was forced, I was. . .”

    With a snarl he sprang at her and slapped her again. It was as if the blow enraged him even further. She was no longer a woman in his eyes, no longer his brother’s daughter, but a piece of garbage, a whore, a thing he need no longer be at pains to respect, or to treat with humanity or compassion. He rained blow after blow upon her as she cowered against the corner of the wall, arms raised futilely to ward off his fists. He beat her until his breath came in gasps. Then he threw her out the door.

************* ************ *************

    “So, you see, violence is all I have known in my new life. Violence and blood. The blood of my virginity, the blood of my beating, and the blood which burns in me with such hidden anger, such quiet rage, as you put it. My art is a working through of that day, a day I have never put behind me even as I moved forward.”
    He held her tighter despite her obvious calm. “I think I understand.”
    She smiled secretly against his cheek and shifted. The bulge was still there. ‘These men,’ she thought, ‘violence is all they are. Here I have just told him the story of the rape of a fifteen year old girl, and all the way through his erection only grows bigger. Violence and blood, that is all they are, and all we are to them.’ Completion was nearing. She could feel it through his pants.
    “You are so strong,” he whispered. “So very strong, to have overcome that to become such a brilliant artist. Surely now that you have money and a degree of fame you’ve contacted your parents. Surely you’ve told them everything?”
    She leaned back to stare at him, surprised. “Told them? Of course not. Why?”
    Puzzlement transformed his features. “What do you mean, why? They think you’re dead. They don’t know what happened. Don’t you miss them? Don’t you want their support, their understanding?”
    “I would not have it,” she shook her head sadly. “My uncle, you see, was only doing what my father would have done if he was there. I didn’t understand that then, but I do now.”
    “But. . .”
    “Shhh.” Sarana silenced him with a soft kiss. “Don’t you understand? I don’t need them, or anyone else. I have my art, and that is all the revenge, all the understanding, that I will ever need.” She moved her hips in slow circles above him and felt his excitement rekindle. She moved off him and lay on the coffee table next to the couch, keeping her sari up at her waist. His eyes followed the curves of her body from head to toe, then he got up and lay beside her. She wrapped her arms around him as he moved her underwear to one side and thrust into her, unconsciously, perhaps, mirroring the actions of the customs officer five years ago to the day. The ecstasy took her then.
    It was always more intense this way for Sarana, with her sari around her waist on a hard wooden table, panties pushed aside in the driving heat of the moment and the relentless violent pounding of a relentlessly violent man. She had seen that violence moving beneath the surface all through the night, just as she had seen it in the others. Completion was near. She watched him move above her through the curtain of her own pleasure, hips matching and over-matching his thrusting manhood until, together, as she had known it would be, they howled their final bliss, and Sari, as she had known she would, bled.
    While he slept Sari returned to her finished masterpiece and stood before it, brush in hand. It was always this way. Her art was always about beauty, at first. It was only after the violence of her lovers that it could find its true meaning, an expression of a more terrible beauty. This man, she knew, was the final one, the perfect one. He had kept his erection through her entire telling. He had penetrated her with that same erection. Violence and blood, that was what filled his erection. That is what filled all erections. To be aroused by a story of rape was a masculine thing, just as her act of creation was a female thing. The two were meant to be together. She had discovered this nine months after the day she arrived in Canada, and little Shanti had been the culmination of her first work of art.
    But this time it was for real. This time, neither would survive the becoming of art, the transcendence that this harsh place demanded. She lifted her brush and worked surely and steadily and quickly, adding the final details. The sun, she realized suddenly, was almost at its zenith. The mountains, finally, achieved the harshness she had prayed for. The broken male body splayed awkwardly across the highest peak was almost the finishing touch. This was her final work, this piece of magic which she now knew, beyond a doubt, must be named Completion. She set her brushes down and washed her hands carefully in preparation for the final touches.
    She walked slowly down the hall back to where he lay sleeping the deepest sleep of his life. His dreams, she knew, would be untroubled. The soporific in the cognac had made sure of that. She walked by Julian’s Flower Bed, Chi Ping’s River of Life, Robert’s Incredible Softness. She touched a finger here, an earlobe there, a nose, a pair of nipples. Only Completion did not require another name, for it would be perfect in itself. Completion was near. All it required now were three things. A heart for the man on the mountain, a penis for the river of death, and the hot boiling blood of the fifteen year old virgin that yet dwelt within her. She selected several knives from the walls as she approached his sleeping body. Completion was near.

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