Lucia's Masks (28 page)
Harry guesses that Chandelier is able to see this worshipful light spilling off his lips each morning in company with the rising sun. The boy is insightful, trustworthy and kind, all most uncommon virtues in this dark time.
He thinks of Lola, and how willingly she yielded up what life she had left for the young Bird Girl’s sake. Harry wonders if he is capable of such selflessness, if he would sacrifice himself to save Chandelier. He believes he would. But how can he say with certainty until the instant the demand was made? He hopes he would. Leave it at that. For he dearly loves the boy.
It is like the plot of an ancient drama, he thinks. The one dies that the other might live. And here am I, the old man of the piece, moving stiffly over a patch of ground, seeking a private place to piss. At last, he feels he has gone far enough. There is more fumbling, and more pain and some waiting which he could have done without. It does hurt him to urinate, but the relief is wonderful nonetheless. As wonderful as it had ever been.
Harry flexes his joints as best he can to ready himself for his journey back to their camp spot. With his bladder blessedly emptied, he is newly alert to the possibility that other dregs of humankind like the poison-archer might still be tracking them. Evil never comes singly, or such has been his experience. They must get out of this coniferous forest with its thickly swaying branches that wreck perspective. There were simply too many places a deranged individual could hide and launch an assault before you had time to clutch your most tender parts.
He yearns for a vista where the land is open to the sky and the view uninterrupted to the farthest point on the horizon. In Antarctica, the conduct of pure light through clear air allowed you to see extraordinarily far into the distance. You walked and you walked, but the object toward which you were headed seemed to get no closer. Many of his colleagues found this phenomenon frustrating and duplicitous. But for Harry, it was evidence of a benign infinity.
For a moment, he is immersed again in his memories. His young, solitary self whirls in an ecstatic dance upon a gleaming ice-field. Thus Harry fails to watch carefully where he is going, and trips on a clutch of tangled crawling vine. He pitches forward, only saving himself from falling headlong by grasping a stout overhead branch. But in that wrenching movement, his shinbone strikes a rock-hard obstruction. It is the unexpectedness of the accident, as much as the pain, that make him howl.
What he has hit is a box, he sees, a cursed box made of what looks like cedar. Harry lowers himself gingerly to the ground, and touches the tender spot on his leg, feeling for a fatal break or splinter. For what recourse would an old man with a broken leg have but to ask the Outpacer to strangle him quickly, with a length of Lucia’s rabbit snare perhaps? He could not lay the burden of his infirmity on them.
He is relieved to find that his bone seems intact, with the exception of a small lump rising on the taut skin, and a soreness that would spread into one of the blue-black bruises he had so often sported in his youth. So why do his eyes tear at the solicitude of the boy and Lucia and the Outpacer as they circle him with their urgent questions, and Lucia gently examines his injury? Is he surprised he is loved?
He stands on his good leg, assisted by Chandelier, and watches as Lucia and the Outpacer tug the offending box from out of the hollow where it lies, half obscured by the root and thick vine that sent him tumbling. Are they all hoping for a hoard of dried foods, he wonders: apricots, slices of apple and pear, wrinkled raisins whose goodness would enliven their blood?
The hasp closing the box swings back easily, as does the lid itself. Both Harry and Chandelier start as Lucia cries out in alarm.
For an instant, craning forward to peer into the box, Harry sees the same ghastly sight that has upset Lucia. Staring up at him from beneath a layer of gauzy fabric are three decapitated heads, the mouths stretched wide open as if in some last plea for mercy. He blinks and sees the truth: that these heads are in fact masks. The Outpacer picks one up from beneath its flimsy veiling. Harry now sees clearly its high glaze, the dark cavity of the gaping mouth, the black, elongated eyes and pronounced bulbous forehead.
This is not a face one warms to, he thinks. Yet he recognizes its power. He knows that the sounds issuing from that cavernous mouth with its reddened lips would likely transfigure a man’s life; or at the very least, make him twist away in fear.
“Papier mâché,” Lucia says. Her initial repulsion has apparently shifted to curiosity, as she touches one of the masks delicately on forehead, cheek, and chin. “How many are there?” she asks.
The Outpacer takes out the top three masks, two female and one male, all with shining black hair and lustrous eyes. Underneath, he finds a slatted shelf. This he lifts out to reveal three more masks also swathed in gauze. Two of these have male faces: one young with a sleek beard; the other grizzled, and with drooping eyelids. The third mask of this set is a woman with exceptionally wide cheekbones and a broad sculpted nose. Like the first three masks, this group all have the same wide-stretched mouths; the same bulging foreheads.
There is a third shelf in the box, and lifting it, the Outpacer uncovers two pairs of wings, made of white linen and wire. A fine hand, applying an iridescent blue paint, has created the illusion of profuse, overlapping feathers.
Lucia claps her hands as the Outpacer opens and folds the wings to mimic the progress of a butterfly.
“Will they divert Bird Girl, do you think?” The Outpacer folds the wings away and restores the masks to their original order. He hoists the chest to take back to their camp site, while Lucia and Chandelier help Harry whose leg is beginning to throb badly. Harry takes a paradoxical comfort from the fact he can still feel pain. He is far from dead yet.
When they get back, they see a pitiful sight. Bird Girl sits on the ground, hugging herself and rocking back and forth. She bites at her knuckles. She rocks and sobs and sometimes plucks at the flesh of her forearms.
“She will not be comforted,” says Candace, who sits opposite the distraught girl. “She must go through it,” Candace adds. “There is no other way.”
This strikes Harry as the wisest thing he has ever heard Candace say. Yet he wishes desperately he had something to offer the girl to help her through her grieving.
He recalls how his mother had always baked fruit pies for funeral gatherings. As a boy, he had often wondered about this strange urge to feed those who were mourning. Only now, in his eighty-eighth year, as he watches the stricken girl rocking herself upon the earth, does he comprehend at last the significance of his mother’s midnight labour, kneading and rolling out the pastry, and dabbing the flawless pie tops with milk. Finally, he understands that her baking had been an act of communion; that her gift of the tart and the sweet and the wheat-based crust was an affirmation of life’s goodness.
Oh taste and be!
He hears his mother’s voice.
If he were a conjuror, Harry knows just what he would produce out of thin air for Bird Girl: a tray of chocolates, both white and dark, in fantastical shapes to make her smile.
“Taste and be,” he would say, as he enticed her away from her agony with his solemn gift of sweetness. “Taste and be. And then gather up her spirit into your keeping.”
W
HEN WAS IT
, H
ARRY WONDERS, THAT
he lost his craving for fine food? Like his sexual urge, it seemed to have disappeared altogether. But he certainly feels no less human in consequence. These days he eats enough to keep going. It sometimes surprises him what meagre nourishment he requires. He sees this as a great advantage. Even with what the gifted forager brings in, food is scarce. The five others are young, with sharp physical needs and desires. His tiny daily repast barely cuts into their supply. So where exactly is he drawing his energy? Harry believes he feeds on his memories of the two places he loved most in his life. And on hope, as well.
Often, his hope centres on a bird. Harry is not particular. It need not be a bird with a melodious song, or indeed any song at all. A croak, a caw, a cacophonous blast from a stretched throat, he would rejoice at any such sound as long as its maker was a bird. This is his dearest wish: that before he dies, he might once again see and hear a bird. It is not just a selfish wish, for Harry is certain that the bird’s return will signal the world’s redemption.
This certainty is rooted in primeval awe. When he was a young boy, a heron passed so low over his head he was momentarily enveloped by its shadow. Was the initial chill in his blood an atavistic fear he might be preyed upon and eaten? But all his anxiety dissolved as soon as he looked up at the angular silvery grey form sailing over his head. The bird folded itself sideways and landed in the stream beside him, with such a slow and elegant stateliness it seemed it was lowered lovingly, by some unseen power, on wires beaten thin as gold. He watched the heron make its way through the water, mesmerized by its measured cross-wise step. He did not think he blinked, yet suddenly the bird disappeared, as if it had passed through a door imperceptible to any human eye.
“Secret” and “mysterious” were the words that came to him. Years later, shaken to the marrow by his first sight of the monumental albatross, he had added the word “holy.” Harry was certain — absolutely certain — that the spirit of creation moved in birds. Which was all the more reason to mourn the species after species he had seen disappear in his own lifetime.
So the hope of their return lives on in Harry, nourishing him as he nourishes it. What better food could there be, he often asks himself, for an ancient man in a cursed world? He realizes this hope that now flourishes in him is a force reborn. For many years, he had thought his capacity for hope was just as extinct as the many species he mourned. Harry knew it was Chandelier who had wrought this change. He looks at the boy and is amazed by the vigour of the child’s selfless love. He does sometimes worry that he is undeserving of the devotion of such a rare and luminous boy. But what Chandelier gives, he gives freely, and Harry daily rejoices that fate has brought them together in his final frail years.
Since leaving the ruins of the Egg, Chandelier has himself discovered just how fluid is love’s power. With Harry, his deep affection is sometimes a son’s, sometimes a father’s, and sometimes an acolyte’s. With Bird Girl, he is becoming both brother and dear companion. With Miriam he had been son and lover in one, a bond that he nevertheless knew to be faultless. But at the core of their passion he sensed an unsettling power, like the live, quivering energy that jolts him if he mistakenly touches Snake when his guide is deep in thought. Chandelier understands this dangerous facet of the bond he had with Miriam through his nerves, rather than his mind. It was somehow a love too intense to endure, or be endured.
There is not a day when he does not think of Miriam, often with a sharp-toothed desire that perturbs him. Because he has not yet learned to masturbate, he is sometimes in pain. He has found a way to turn his thoughts from the demands of his sore need, and this is to focus on how Miriam mothered him. In particular, he concentrates on recalling the foods she prepared for him, with all the wonderful tastes he had not known existed. For like Harry’s restricted fare in Antarctica, Chandelier’s diet in the Egg had relied heavily on products freeze-dried and frozen. His father was uneasy about foods that might be genetically corrupted, and chose the nutritional elements of his family’s diet carefully. On the other hand, their meals were strictly functional, with little to distinguish one substance on their plates from another. Food was fuel, Chandelier’s father maintained. He had long ago turned his back on anything resembling Epicureanism.
Miriam could not have been more opposite. All her life, she had derived the greatest pleasure from sampling the diverse foods and cuisines that were still available in a badly fractured world. During her life in the City, she had spent many happy hours preparing meals to make her friends smile and believe again in innocent pleasures. This was why one of her chief delights in living with the Silk People was their pair of goats. She rejoiced in these animals’ robust health, their sprightliness and silkiness, their natural hauteur and their lustrous eyes. Miriam learned, through much trial and error, to make rounds of creamy cheese from their milk. This delicacy was shared among the Silk People, and the sharing itself had become ritualized, with a chant of thanks to Miriam for her patient labour, and to the goats for being what they were.
Miriam had fed Chandelier morsels of her precious cheese in her efforts to reclaim him from the trauma that made him freeze, burn, and shake by turns. She drew on the full range of her sensuous store to save him: the heat of her body, the warmth of her voice and breath, the prodding touch of her tongue, and the enticing tastes of as many different foods as she could conjure up. And at last, it was the sliver of ripe goat’s cheese on his tongue that brought him back from the brink. He opened his eyes in surprise and Miriam’s hand flew to her heart for she saw that he was saved.
Chandelier remembers still the delicious shiver along his spine, the way the buds on his tongue contracted, and how his mouth — or was it his entire body? — yielded to the creaminess, tartness, and sweetness. He heard a wild cry in his blood. Here was a whole realm of human experience of which he had been ignorant. And at that instant, inside Miriam’s tent of parachute silk, he thought he glimpsed his father’s shadow.
Chandelier had an inkling then of the boundless, dazzling and various world of which he had been deprived — a world that made his soul dance with joy. He did understand that his father had kept him apart from this world in order to protect him. It had been a deprivation founded in love. Just as it was love that prompted Miriam to feed him a morsel of goat’s cheese, an enticement that showed him the way out of his wretchedness and near-madness. Love had saved him, and the taste of love had saved him, and never afterward could he separate the two.
