Goose of Hermogenes (7 page)

For more than a year now I have had on my throat the mark of a vampire’s tooth. Here at my Uncle’s mansion, a bat flew in at my bedroom window, fluttered about a little and went out. Another night, some creature burst from the wall to the left of my bed and escaped by the window. I sensed rather than saw it, being only half-awakened, but it seemed to have the wings of a bat with a span of several feet. It were not right ever to cease lamenting.

When the ghost begins to quicken, as the poet says, confusion of the death-bed over, is it sent—where? My mind refuses to follow. But some time before these strange and tragic happenings, I myself on the borderland of sleep, once became aware of trees encircling a glen, and of mist drooping from a roof of boughs. Beyond them a wall, lying like a belt thrown down, with a black door of oak for a buckle, girdled a fold of ground with live stones, each one overspread with lichen. The wood of the door was carved with a garland of five apples, and three stone steps led up to it; I mounted these and the door opened. Within was the sloping orchard of Eden, red earth disguised as green; and beyond a tangle of apple-branches, the flames of hell rose with serene clamour; for in this garden the worm does not die. Under a tree with broad leaves a figure was standing; her hair was like steel wire red-hot, and one contour of her face and the breast-folds of her garment glowed. She was alone, and in her single and never-ending gesture was the peace of despair. It were not right ever to cease lamenting.

Now a negro was dancing, and the faster he danced, the wilder grew the hidden music. Suddenly as it grew louder still, his limbs began to expand and he could touch the eight corners of the vast room with head, finger or toe. His white draperies, too, flowed out, unrolling from some compact centre within themselves. As he spun and somersaulted, his bones ceased to stiffen, his skin to bind, his muscles came untied; gravity was abated, space negated, volume grew fluid. But time danced on, to the tempo of the music without source; and when this music stopped, the negro shrank again to his usual size. In an underground cave, shining warmly from some hidden illumination, a line of swathed dancers began to move, springing up and down on the same spot with magnetic gesticulations. Their leader passed along the lines with an iron whip, lashing them like spinning-tops to make them dance more fiercely. Up and down the line he strode, more and more swiftly; and all at once, as his strokes grew more potent, the dancers began to glow. Then, as he reached each one in turn, they successively burst into flame. Leaping ever higher, these human torches filled the low-roofed cavern with their ardent rite; and finally left the floor, to circle, a chorus of serene fire-balloons, near the ceiling.

Only when my guttering candles had extinguished themselves one by one did I fall asleep.

‘S’entrassi’ndru paradisu, santu, santu,
E nun truvass’ a tia, mi n’esciria.’

–
Serenade of Zicava.

With the coming of the false dawn I awoke again, and lay pondering anew my dismal situation. I came at last to the conclusion that, while I could not immediately escape from my Uncle’s domain, I would at least thoroughly explore it. This would not only give me something definite with which to occupy my time, but might even discover to me some means of circumventing his plan of incarceration. I determined that I would first acquaint myself intimately with the lie of all my Uncle’s land, and subsequently disclose to myself even the most recondite crannies of his mansion.

That morning I accordingly set out to traverse that whole strip of the island which belonged to my Uncle; and towards its western extremity I came to a beautiful garden. The path that led up to it through straggling plantations of olives was steep, but when I reached the top a sense of peace rewarded me, a precious peace that must have withstood many invasions. This garden was well kept in all essentials, though it retained an air of going its own sweet way. On its approaches grew poinsettias with ragged flame-coloured quills; and the hedge bordering an avenue of dragon-trees was scattered over with the papery blue flowers of plumbago and with a few nameless trumpet-shaped blooms of tawny pink which had a surface like membrane. Further in, under some very dark leaves, I found one or two rare flowers shaped like a bell, and of so smooth a white that they looked like porcelain that had been painted with crimson and deep yellow within. There were bushes of hibiscus with flowers in all shades of pink, a shrub covered with scarlet cocks-combs, palms, cacti, the pads of a Bar-bary fig. There were oblong pools of water, full to the level of the lawn and spread over with dark blue water-lilies, jacarandas with silver bark and no leaves to disturb their mauve-blue sprays; a cactus in the rockery with a single yellow flower opening only by moonlight; the green-white hanging horns of the datura scenting the still and humid air. I wandered among banana plants, their leaves delicately green when first open, but afterwards easily torn, and tiny cream-coloured tubes laden with honey and almost hidden under huge fleshy bracts of purple and Indian-red; and by Bird-of-Paradise plants with the same leaves, but slender wings of white and blue, sprouting from a glistening purple sheath. All these were taking in peace from the peaceful atmosphere and breathing it out again, consuming and renewing this ‘soil of an Eden forgone.’

Against an ethereal sky the icy peak of the almost-extinct volcano was writing
Siempre, siempre,
again and again all day long in swiftly-fading steam above the garden.

Innocencio appeared between delicate stems and immense leaves; he was of that blond type which survives perhaps from some Gothic invasion: a skin that tans quickly because of an undercurrent of darkness, but eyes that reflect the sea, and hair that can’t resist the sun – ‘My hair is of three colours,’ he told me proudly; and so it was, darkish at the roots, dust-coloured in the middle, straw-pale on the outer layer. He had the figure of the dancing faun but with something uncouth in hands and feet, the face of a faun but without spite, commingling the Classic and the Barbarian with acute appeal.

He was a very poor boy; his shirts were varied with an irregular openwork where threads had run, his bathing-slip was so much darned that the original wool scarcely held together, and even his best shoes were patched. But he took no account of wealth or poverty, education or ignorance, the cultured or the rustic – such distinctions did not exist for him. He had no fervid convictions, I am sure, on politics or religion, for he lived in a pre social world, a world of the human primary. His strength was in a relation, simple and unabashed, to movement, light, sound and the elements, and in a dawning lyricism.

He said he was a sailor, showing me a document which I could not understand, but which may have been some kind of certificate. He had made several voyages, he even said he was a captain; sometimes he spoke of travel and of his desire to see Lisbon, London and New York, and Rio where one of his brothers lived. Would he ever see them? To him these places were legendary names, cities built again in the life of his phantasy.

He was the son of the gardener; he had three brothers and two sisters living – others were ‘under the earth.’ He could read, though not easily; but when he suggested that we went to bathe from a distant beach, I noticed that he took with him a translation of the Bible. After a plunge in the turbulent surf, he rushed out and threw himself on the blue shingle; then, his ears echoing with Atlantic thunder, lay poring over the calamitous visions of Isaiah. I turned to the Song of Songs and read a few verses aloud: Innocencio seemed delighted. Then each in turn we buried one another up to the neck in the dark volcanic grains of the shore, Innocencio telling me that they contained healing properties and would do me good.

‘I want to marry you,’ he said. ‘We will live for ever in a little house by the sea.’

‘I want a big house,’ I said.

‘I will give it you,’ he cried.

How can one answer such promises? Innocencio’s words were dreams.

‘We will have some children with fair hair,’ he went on. ‘It would be lovely if you had some children.’

At the time I did not know what to say, but have often remembered Innocencio’s dialect version of the song;

Palomita blanca reluciente estrella
Mas chula y mas bella
Qu’un bianco jasmin
–

I asked Innocencio about the crater I had seen from the mainland, and the snowy peak I could even now see.

‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘Right in the middle of the island is a huge volcano, a real volcano, quite as active as Vesuvius or Stromboli. It is called the Bed of Empedocles, and the name is true of this mountain, and of no other. We try to keep its activities hidden; we don’t often admit even its existence to anyone from the mainland or even the other islands. When you see a glow in the night sky and ask us what it is, we tell you it’s a fire in the scrub. So it may be, and very likely the olive trees are burning too; but what has started the conflagration? We won’t tell you anything about those seething underground cauldrons that threaten to break through at any moment, and occasionally do so!’

‘What does the pharos say, out there at the end of the jetty?’ I asked.

‘It flashes a message all night through, long after every other lamp is out, but not a message of comfort. Keep away, it says, I am alight, but so is the mountain! Keep away from these dangerous shores. And from above the inland ranges, I shall be turned into blood, cries the moon; and the stars wide-eyed with terror sink back into their cavernous abyss.

‘Last eruption the mountain burst like a Bank and flung millions of pieces of money high into the air. They were scattered over a wide area of the surrounding hills, and were eagerly searched for and gathered up by people from the villages. Many a mattress and stocking now bulges with that extraordinary gold. Such was the explosive force that a few coins fell even as far away as England.

‘But one never knows what a volcano will do next, so it is best to say nothing about it.’

Innocencio wandered away, his forehead clouded, as so often his native peak, by the dark legends of his race. In the afternoon I went out again, hoping to see him, but could not find the peaceful garden. I was not far from it, though, for there was sea below me, and I knew that the garden lay near that part of the estate which included a strip of coastline edged with precipitous cliffs.

I was looking down on the beach; was it a festival, that so many people were about? It must be the day of the sea-sports; my eyes search the holiday crowd for Innocencio. Shall I recognize him in this dazzling light? There he is! No, it is someone a little like him. I look in other directions and then suddenly I see him; he is walking with one of his companions, and talking of the contest to come. He is ready for it, wearing his bathing-slip and bonnet. He does not see me.

I am on the cliff-tops of my Uncle’s domain; it is getting towards evening, the wind has risen but there are no clouds, huge waves are crashing on the rocks below. Spectators are gathered on the opposite cliff, cut off from me by a chasm, and waiting for the chief event of the sports. Here are townspeople and their visitors, with a few rustics from the mountains inland. All at once a commotion stirs them: Innocencio comes in sight round the headland, pulling a boat with all his strength against the heavy sea. Will he ever reach the bay? Time after time a powerful undertow sweeps him outward. Then putting forth a supreme effort he rides inshore on the back of a ninth wave and is flung beyond the drag of the out-rushing water. He cannot be seen for spray, but a scream of triumph goes up from the watchers.

‘It has never been done before!’ someone shouts in excitement, ‘No one else has finished the course. He has pulled all the way from Galva – how many miles? – and in the teeth of a north-east gale!’

‘Innocencio! Innocencio!’

The cries of the people soar higher than the stormy tumult; he has put them above Galva of the Grasshoppers, their rival port; Innocencio is their hero for ever, and even the people of Galva will praise him.

I look down into his boat, rocking now in a sheltered inlet; he has brought from Galva where his sister lives a trophy without price. In the distance and through tears it looks like two little brown dolls, one bigger than the other and lighter in colour; then I see that they are shoes from the feet of his sister’s children, his elder sister whose name is future and present and past. Are they made from walnut-shells and the skin of mouse and mole? They prove that his boat has been to Galva; they will always be his greatest treasure.

I look now into the heart of Innocencio; below the proud surf lie images of the perpetual terror of earth and sea; first the twelve men he saw frozen stiff in the stranded lifeboat; then more recently the brothers from Lumio drowned in each other’s clasp, the one trying to save the other – dragged from translucent depths, so fast were they locked that no one could separate their last embrace and they were buried in the same grave; and finally the corpse he had seen half-eaten by worms at the cemetery. His ribs still echo with the horror of their tawny hue.