The Blood Oranges (2 page)

All this awareness, all this richness of feeling came back to me. As it does each week. And now the emotion that was clouding Catherine’s face was pain (I could see it like schools of microscopic black fish drifting just beneath the skin), and now my precious cigarette was nothing more than the taste of black ashes and a small livid blister on my lower lip, while the last of the smoke was already dissolving in the sunlit peppery-looking leaves of the nearest tree. The blue tiles appeared to be white with frost.

And smiling, touching my burned lip with my tongue, slowing still further the cadences of my rich appeal: “I might have prevented our—what shall I call it? Idyl? Yes,
I might have prevented our idyl. Maybe I could have stuck my hands in my pockets instead of using them to remove my golden eyeglasses. I didn’t have to climb into my dressing gown and silk pajamas and cross from our villa to yours and turn down the pink percale sheets on your bed. After all, I could have walked down to our pebbly beach and thrown pebbles into the phosphorous wash for a couple of hours. But a steady, methodical, undesigning lover like me really has no choice, Catherine. The eyeglasses come off in my hands, the skirts of the dressing gown fall open, I fold the wings of the glasses. No choice. And don’t forget you were waiting for me. You wanted my slow walk, my strong dark shadow, my full pack of cigarettes, the sound of my soft humming as I approached your villa. We both knew you were waiting, Catherine. Neither one of us had any choice that first night. It was inevitable.”

I shifted my position so that I was sitting sidesaddle, so to speak, on the low wall. I licked the small painful spot on my burned lip. And now a different bell was ringing. I listened to it, recognizing it, between its strokes I heard the silence that fell between Catherine and me like a festering marsh whenever I stopped talking.

Pain is saddest, I thought, on plain features. The dark swiftly floating schools of grief and bitterness were far more visible on Catherine’s round face, for instance, than they would have been on the proud and youthful face of my Fiona. Fiona had the face of a faun, an experienced faun, and its elegance would have obscured or leavened or enriched her pain. Catherine’s broad cheeks and heavy lids merely gave pain room to play—alone, unadorned. Pain, beneath Fiona’s eyes or in the corners of her mouth, would
simply have become a kind of spice to her beauty. But when the shades of pain were drifting across Catherine’s face, as they were drifting now, there was nothing else to see, to marvel at, to desire. Catherine’s pain was her beauty.

The bell I listened for each week was ringing. From far below the sanctuary, from the top of the squat and crumbling tower in the center of the smashed shards of the little coastal town, it called to us faintly, tonelessly, not in firm even strokes as if the ringer meant to announce the hour or send forth a summons, but with an irregularity that to me sounded like the soft dispirited voices of all those who were dead. I listened and heard the ringing of Catherine’s soul, the toneless calling of Hugh’s voice. It continued to ring, to vibrate down there through empty windows and black olive branches, the faintly metallic sound so distant and pointless in this bright sun that it made me smile deeply, seriously, in the midst of these meditations with my big-limbed and heavy-hearted Catherine. Then softly: “Remember how Hugh’s coffin made that poor wreck of a hearse sag in the rear? I guess I like endings. I like flat bells, don’t you?”

And at that moment I stood up, as I do each week, and stretched, glanced away from Catherine where she lay at my feet, glanced swiftly at the blue tiles, the dark clumps of peppery leaves, the blue of the sky, and then breathed in an enormous amount of that sweet air and abruptly leaned down with my two hands spread on the wall and my two eyes once again cradling Catherine in their brown benevolence. The vest was tight around my heavy ribs, the black jacket was hot and heavy on my shoulders. Would
she ever open her eyes and look at me, say my name, ever again hang around my neck in graceless confusion?

“Arise, arise, Catherine,”I whispered then, leaning on the wall and staring at her through golden eyeglasses, “climb to your feet, and let’s comfort each other.”

But she could not arise, or look at me, or say my name. It was in her power to help me speak for the past, to help me see the future. Her voice might have reinforced my voice, her eyes might have met mine. And yet I knew it was not to be. She still preferred to remain only the inert supine center of my life, the sun that neither sets nor rises. The bell had stopped ringing. I sighed, again I pushed off from the wall and smiled down at her in a way that said I had endless strength and patience to give her in small doses once each week. She could not have mistaken the sound of my breath or the meaning of that distant smile. I dug the toe of my left shoe into the orange sand, shoved both hands into my torn pockets. Nearby a finch was covering itself with pale dust.

No doubt she heard my breathing long after my heavy footsteps had died away. Perhaps she expected to see me or at least hoped to see me standing there when the little fat women approached her wearing their blue aprons and carrying their terra-cotta bowls and stiff brushes. Perhaps for a moment she did in fact see me, though I was already gone. Perhaps after today she would think more about me and less about Hugh, perhaps now would begin to prepare herself more agreeably for my next appearance. When next I saw her, wouldn’t she be digging happily among the flowers that grew in the little stone pots along the front of her
balcony, or standing with her eyes open and her hands clasped together and a vague hopeful smile drawing the top lip from the bottom? I thought so. Soon I would move her back to the villa, soon she would be able to join me arm in arm beside Hugh’s grave.

And slowly riding back down the narrow path from Catherine’s sanctuary to the broken stones of the empty town, beyond which waited my silent villa and Rosella, squeezing the rusty hand brakes with my aching hands to keep the bike from tearing loose on the hill and pitching over the nearest shaggy precipice, squeezing the brakes and hearing the rusted spokes going around and the soft tires humming like inflated snakes, amused at the thought of the perfect beauty of my large formally attired self mounted on the rust-colored bike, and then thinking of Catherine, already planning my next visit to her balcony while my lip burned and while a mildly rancid breeze played about my face—suddenly in the midst of all this I went around a turn in the path and bumped through a cleft in the mossy rock and applied the brakes, put down both feet, held my breath, forgot all about Catherine and myself.

There on a low wall of small black stones that resembled the dark fossilized hearts of long-dead bulls with white hides and golden horns, there on the wall and silhouetted against the blue sky and black sea were two enormous game birds locked in love. They were a mass of dark blue feathers and silver claws, in the breeze they swayed together like some flying shield worthy of inclusion in the erotic dreams of the most discriminating of all sex-aestheticians. Together we were two incongruous pairs frozen in one feeling, I astride the old bike and hardly breathing, the larger bird
atop the smaller bird and already beginning to grow regal, and all the details of that perfect frieze came home to me. Exposed on the bare rock, lightly blown by the breeze, the smaller bird lay with her head to one side and eyes turning white, as if nesting, while above her the big bird clung with gently pillowed claws to the slight shoulders and kept himself aloft, in motion, kept himself from becoming a dead weight on the smooth back of the smaller bird by flying, by spreading his wings and beating them slowly and turning his entire shape into a great slowly hovering blue shield beneath which his sudden act of love was undeniable. Grace and chaos, control and helplessness, mastery and collapsc —it was all there, as if the wind was having its way with the rocks. There before my eyes was the infusion itself, and the birds remained true to nature and undisturbed by the infinite rusty sounds of my old bike until it was all done and the larger bird loosed his claws, made a bell-like sound, then rose slowly and vertically on the hot breeze. Some time later his small partner toppled off the wall and half fell, half flew down toward the burnt clay roofs of the village, while I rode off slowly on my now humbled bike.

Obviously the two birds mating on the horizon were for me a sign, an emblem, a mysterious medallion, a good omen. They augured well for the time I had spent with Catherine and for my own future in the electrified field of Love’s art. But as I pedaled once more between the funeral cypresses and approached the villa, I found myself wondering if in the brief twining of that dark blue feathery pair I had actually witnessed Catherine’s dead husband and my own wife clasping each to each the sweet mutual dream which only months before had been denied them by the
brief gust of catastrophe that had swept among us. Yes, Hugh and Fiona in the shape of birds and finding each other, so to speak, in final stationary flight. Could it have been? I smiled to realize that the pleasure and truth of the vision were worth pondering.

Y
OUTH HAS NO MONOPOLY ON LOVE, THE SAP DOES NOT
flow solely in the young. In all my adventures and in all my diligent but unemotional study of sex literature I found nothing to justify the happy expressions of total self-confidence we generally read in the superficially attractive faces of so many younger men and still younger girls. Jaunty, spritely people with trim bodies and unclouded eyes are not necessarily the most capable of those thrust into the center of the pink tapestry. After all, at the height of our season Fiona and Hugh were almost forty, Catherine had passed that mark by several years, while I was already two or three long leaps beyond middle age. Furthermore, we were a quartet of tall and large-boned lovers aged in the wood. Too big for mere caprice, too old to waste time and yet old enough to appreciate immodesty, we were all four of us imposing in height, in weight, in blood pressure, in chest expansion. All except Hugh perhaps, who always said that his long thin legs were the legs of the Christ and whose spare fishy chest was actually day by day collapsing, though like me Hugh was nonetheless capable of carrying either Fiona or Catherine across one naked shoulder without
stumbling or shortness of breath. Body to body, arms about each other’s waists, our undergarments and bathing apparel dangling together on a line strung hastily between the two villas, or each standing separately and exhibiting his characteristic gesture—Catherine with her hands at her sides, Hugh clutching his impertinent camera, Fiona unconsciously holding her breasts in hands as bold and sensitive as Leonardo’s, I bare-chested and cigarette in mouth and staring with bland eyes at a full wineglass lifted high in my weathered fingers—at the height of our brief season and in the four fully matured figures of our quartet, anyone with an eye for sex would have recognized an experience, purpose and continuity only hinted at in the poignant stances of young girls with thumbs hooked in bikinis and brown legs stiffly apart. There were four of us then, not merely two, and in our quaternion the vintage sap flowed freely, flowed and bled and boiled as it may never again.

Can youth make such claims?

O
NCE AGAIN WE SEPARATED IN THE DARK EMPTY NAVE OF
the squat church, Fiona and I, once again went our separate ways, each to the altar of his choice. The windows were cut through those deep walls as if for the arrows, lances, pikes and small cannon of sturdy peasants who might still attempt to defend this church from the barbarians, and without glass, never intended for glass, exposed us, hidden though we were, to the smells and harsh light of the rocky
village around us. The windows, mere rude rectangular holes left high in the moist walls, were themselves barbaric, and made me smile. Yet I smiled not only because the windows were unsymmetrical and gave a feeling of ancient violence to altars, cross, shaky wooden seats for solemn populace, as if the dungeonlike church had been abandoned before they had even morticed the last volcanic stone in place, but smiled also at the symmetry of taste and feeling that pulled Fiona and me apart and drew us to altars so nearly opposite in color, mood, design. Hands in pockets, I could hear Fiona breathing quietly and could hear the sharp sounds of her footsteps as she bent all the energy of her tall and beautiful and impatient self toward finding still better angles from which to view the altar.

“Cyril, baby, why don’t you put out the cigarette? For God’s sake.”

And I smiled to hear Fiona’s voice clipped and imploring, harsh and sweet, a mere whisper filled with the richest possible sounds of assurance in the ear-ringing silence of the stone vault. It was like Fiona to talk without turning her head, to respect the sanctity of old stones in a whisper that ruffled the little moth-eaten dress of the infant in Mary’s arms, to comment on my cigarette in her distracted way while squatting all at once to examine a pair of short yellow bones crossed at the base of her favorite altar. Everywhere Fiona was in lovely character, yet nowhere was she more herself than here in the stone crypt where we joked about some day being buried together alive. Her graceful agitation, her girlish fixation on the altar of the dead, the absolute self-possession of a woman so large and yet so faunlike and hard—I could only smile to hear the soft silver of her
voice and to see my athletic angel merging her fluted flesh with those cold shadows.

“What’s the matter with my cigarette?” I whispered across the nave in a deep and gentle echo as rich in reverence as Fiona’s. “The little boys have been relieving themselves back there in the darkness. Smell it?”

“Cyril, you’ re making me nervous. OK?”

Then my own slow, bemused, vigorous whisper: “If the little boys can make water, I can smoke.”

How like the two of us to spend each day these long minutes together and yet apart in this little medieval church of cold passion, how like us to choose these different altars. Hands in pockets, brief cigarette still in my mouth, I lounged against my own small altar which was of white marble and was devoted to gold, to fresh flowers, to the wooden Virgin recently lacquered in bright blue paint and stiffly cradling the crude doll dressed in his rotting gown of real lace. The two crowns, the sightless eyes, the feeling of water sprinkled over the whole thing and the sunlight that warmed altar and shoulders alike—here I could lounge suspended in a childish array of cheerful artifacts quite appropriate to my luminous good nature, here laugh aloud and take my time watching Fiona trying to penetrate the secrets of that other altar so absurdly opposite from mine.