The Blood Oranges (18 page)

“Look what you’re doing. You’re kicking my pile of blues to pieces.”

“Sorry. Just gather them up again.”

Supine, I was lying partially supine and wondering whether it was Dolores or Eveline who had flopped belly down on my heavy thigh, Eveline or Dolores who was attempting to perch herself on my upraised knee. But of course one name was as good as the other, I told myself, and for a moment longer tolerated the inertness of the little stomach flat on my thigh and the slow persistent movements of the short legs against my massive calf. But at least there was no tugging on Cyril’s hair, no poking at spectacles, no bouncing. Only the polka dots, the two fat bodies, the two sets of large brown eyes brooding impossibly on mine. The little stomach was sighing, the fat legs were searching for a grip. All this I tolerated for the sake of the apparent depth of feeling with which they were clambering upon the bemused figure of the man who kissed their mother and knew the way to the glen.

“Now we’re going to help Meredith pick the flowers. I’ll show you how.”

They understood, they disengaged legs and stomach from my knee and thigh, they stepped aside and waited (plump, somber, square-faced, bright of eye), and without hesitation they followed my example as I descended to all fours and moved through the speckled sunlight and between the dusty trunks of the fig trees appraising, selecting, admiring, but picking (endlessly picking) the flowers that most caught my attention or most appealed to little Eveline or little Eveline’s twin.

“You like this one. Take it to Meredith.”

“Don’t bother. We’ve got plenty of those.”

“Never mind, Meredith. Eveline likes this kind.”

“God …”

Like my small white purely artificial sheep with its stifled cry and faint accusing expression on the small face that was neither human nor animal but something of each, they drifted about in the fig tree bower together, all three of them, clumsy industrious children engrossed in gathering armfuls of goatsbeard, ghostly asphodel, and the heavy lidded
Anemone coronaria
. I led the way. My industry, though of a different sort, matched theirs. Eveline, I noted, remained at my side while her twin preferred more independence and was given to nibbling certain prime specimens of the
Cistus salviaefolius
.

“She’s eating them. Make her stop.”

“Dolores is enjoying herself, Meredith. Let’s leave her alone.”

“She’s ruining everything. You want her to.”

“Not at all, Meredith. Not at all. But look, it’s easy to make the crowns. You simply take a few flowers from each pile and a few green leaves and bind them together with these slender stems until you get a chain long enough to fit around your head. Then you fasten the ends, of course, into a beautiful circlet of all kinds of flowers. These little milky stems are like string. Think you can do it?”

“God, what a question.”

“You and I will have to help your sisters. But I’m sure that you can make a beautiful crown without any help from Cyril.”

“Why don’t you just stop talking?”

“I don’t suppose your mother ever told you that Theophrastus was the father of botany. Well, Meredith, he was.”

She scowled. I cajoled the two smaller girls until they were finally seated in a row with Meredith facing what I thought of immediately as the feast of the flowers. Bent heads, sounds of dismay, hands tangling, tears of innocence stuck between chubby fingers or falling onto their little immobile legs. Their silence made mine the more melodious as I watched all of them struggling with tissued gems, their peaceful though unsuccessful employment heightened the serenity of my own involvement in what was, for me, an easy and, as it were, poetic task. I worked swiftly and my progress kept pace with their frustrations. Meredith was not as clever or dexterous as I had at first assumed, her sisters could do no more than mangle my prized flowers in helpless palms. Yes, I thought, their ineptitude was certainly my skill, their strain my relaxation, their dubious fun my pleasure.

“Having trouble?”

“No.”

“Some of those stems are a little short for weaving. But that looks pretty nice, Meredith. Good choice of colors.”

“It’s falling apart.”

The occasion was mine, and I was determined that each child should have her luxurious and perfectly executed crown. It was up to me, and so I wove all three of them, though not before I created a great thick yellow wreath of
Laurus nobilis
and
Genista cinerea
that was heavy, majestic, sweetly scented and much too large for the head of a child.

“Like it?”

“God, you’re selfish.”

“I simply knew it would take longer, Meredith, so I made it first. Now we’ll fix up yours and your little sisters’.”

“I thought we were making them just for us.”

“Who’s being selfish now?”

“You don’t need one. Why do you have to have one too? They’re only for children.”

“If you want me to make you a flower crown as nice as mine, how about a little politeness? Shall we finish the game or stop right here?”

“It has to be as good as yours. Promise?”

“Promise.”

Yes, all three children wanted wreaths like mine, and so I wove them—tossing aside my splendid yellow concoction, adjusting the spectacles, smiling into those three little expectant faces. Meredith put an arm around Eveline’s shoulder, through their eyes I saw the familiar and freshly turned-out man become the flower god at play. Why not?
Sentimentality was hardly a problem, my estimation of the circumference of each of those three small heads was more accurate, say, than Hugh’s. And if despite this good judgment of mine I erred somewhat in the size of Meredith’s little queenly crown so that it sat low on her slender brow and obscured her eyes? And if the other two were hastily made and were identically composed of nothing more than leftovers from the bed of
Odontospermum maritimum? 
Could such trivialities detract from the eagerness of those cross-legged children or from my own composure? Not at all. The satisfaction of adjusting each delicate crown on each little bowed waiting head was mine. The satisfaction of seeing their self-consciousness was mine. The transference was actual, the flowers of the glen leapt from their hair, drooped over their ears, with a few good natural strokes I paid my debt to Iris and to all the other imaginary nudes of a more distant time.

“On your feet,” I murmured, “they’re coming.”

The three girls in a silent row, I leaning back against the bare trunk of the tallest fig tree—thus they found us, Fiona and Hugh and Catherine, when I called out, directing them to the passage through the pines. They veered our way, laughing, Hugh pursuing his dark unrhythmical shadow, our two wives carrying between them the wicker-bound demijohn of white wine, and found the passage and entered our fig tree bower.

“Hugh, look what he’s done!”

“Catherine, what do you think of what Cyril’s done to our little girls?”

“They’re sweet, baby. They really are. But what about
yourself? I want to see you wearing a great big floppy crown of flowers.”

“I’ve got one.”

“Well, put it on, baby. Let’s see.”

I shrugged, reached down and slowly retrieved the wreath at my feet. The children watched, Hugh laughed. Cathernie’s eyes met mine. With both hands I settled that outspoken yellow mass into the heavy texture of my blond hair. I felt the tree at my back and slowly glanced up through the speckled light toward the clear sky that accompanied all our days of idyling.

“God, boy, what a sight.”

“Don’t ever take it off, baby. Ever.”

I
HAVE MADE IT PLAIN TO CATHERINE THAT IT IS A GOOD
idea for the two of us to poke around, as I put it, in the remains of my tapestry. She agrees. She now understands my reasoning. My moody psychic organization is becoming hers, together we have been touring this landscape of old deaths and fresh possibilities. The lovers have become companions. We are equally inclined, at last, to share the pleasure of turning up the occasional familiar relic or of visiting one of the crevices or hollow enclosures once known to our foursome or perhaps threesome, or even to Catherine alone or to me alone. What else is my tapestry if not the map of Love? I know well its contours, its monuments, its abandoned
gardens, its narrow streets, and Catherine is beginning to know them too. In an atmosphere of peaceful investigation we are traveling together from sign to sign, from empty stage to empty stage. We turn a blind corner, we hear a distant bell, we discuss a handprint on a fragment of stone wall, suddenly we recognize the featureless head of a small child sculpted in white stone. What we both know, we share. What Catherine does not know, I tell her. The monuments, the places to visit, are inexhaustible.

For instance, not far from the squat church (within sight of its little mordant cemetery, as a matter of fact) stands a small aboveground granite cistern built by the barbarians in the same era as the construction of the squat church itself. Its mouth is open, a few crude steps lead down to pestilent green water, the vaulted ceiling reflects the greasy surface of the irregular clay tiles, the small and crumbling protrusions carved on the columns suggest a spiraling array of curling leaves, as the original artisan must have intended. Yet more important, a pear tree grows in this unlikely place, has taken root in the mud that lies beneath the polluted water and has flourished, has burst the masonry of the vaulted ceiling so that now it flowers high above the large ragged hole its green head once forced through the blanket of hard tile. It is a curious spectacle, this fusion of pear tree and ancient cistern. And sitting side by side on one of the low steps, hips touching and shoulders touching, elbows on knees and chins on clasped hands, smelling the stench and staring into the darkness of the cistern and the light let down by the heroic tree—what better spot, I told her, for concealing the wooden arm which had been stolen by Fiona and Hugh and retrieved just in time, I thought, by me. After all, the arm could not have been returned to the church, and our villa was not the place for displaying a religious theft. And so it was into this very water that late one night I flung the heavy arm, risking Fiona’s petulance but satisfying the dictates of my own good sense. At the time of our visit, Catherine and I speculated on the possibility that it must still be there, sunk in the deep fetid water toward the rear of the cistern, and waterlogged, still gaudy, still unattached to human form. Perhaps it is, though no hand rose to the surface when, that day, I tossed a few smooth stones into the echoing darkness and, in a sentence or two, evoked the past. But at least the tree stands, the cistern stands, while the shadows of love, as I told Catherine, are still flickering.

Or, to take another example, not far from the church and the cistern and cemetery stands a perfectly simple and unadorned statue of a small nude figure which, at first glance, appears to be that of a young girl. The stone is disintegrating, the lower legs and feet have long since been destroyed, the slender arms are cracked, the head is gone. The figure is little more than a small torso standing somewhat higher than my waist and covered with a leprous pink skin of dust that is the residue of its own deteriorating stone. Unprepossessing? The very antithesis of voluptuous intention? A mere weed beside the fiery bloom of the conventional greater-than-life-size female nudes sculpted out of muscular marble or cast in bronze? Yes, at first glance the breasts are small and soft, nothing more than suggestions of latent womanhood, the hips are undistinguished, the belly seems to have been molded by the hand of a sexless creator. And at first passing glance the eye resists
and then dismisses the one blemish, a disproportionately large and perfectly round black hole drilled upward between those small helpless thighs.

Why then this decided sensation of erotic power? Why the implication of some secret design? What brilliant and, so to speak, ravaging guile could possibly be concealed inside that slender and merely partial form? Why did I smile immediately and Fiona cry out in happy recognition at the black hole driven so unaccountably into that small portion of the stone which, realistically, should have revealed no more than sexual silence?

Of course I knew the answers then as I know them now, knew them with as much warm pleasure as I knew them only weeks ago (or days?) when Catherine and I were standing alone in that same sun-filled abandoned place and talking together, contemplating the very same stone figure that had once so mystified my eager friend and aroused my wife. Observing Catherine’s hand on the little sloping stone shoulder and seeing Hugh’s bafflement in Catherine’s eyes and hearing Hugh’s questions in Catherine’s mouth, I could do no more than point out to Catherine that these two situations of discovery were dissimilar and yet similar, while no matter how many times the small pinkish torso gave up its little secret, the actual grace and power of this small figure remained undiminished. Because in the first situation, as I reconstructed it for Catherine, Fiona had verbalized the secret whereas I had relied on demonstration, Fiona putting her arm around Hugh’s waist and explaining in a lighthearted speech that the beautiful stone figure was really a little boy as well as a little girl, I searching about in the grass until I found the missing piece which, when inserted
into that large and perfectly round black hole, demonstrated the statue’s double nature already defined in Fiona’s words. And searching in the grass again, at first with no success and then with good luck, once more finding the handy length of polished stone where I had apparently dropped it so long ago, and repeating the demonstration for Catherine, softly I filled in a few more details, recalled a few more instances of forgotten speech, forgotten sensation, describing how Fiona had enjoyed this human toy, had swiftly taken over the demonstration from methodical Cyril and had exclaimed repeatedly that the figure was a girl for Hugh and me but was always a boy, a beautiful little boy, for her. Fiona had been right, as Catherine agreed, and Catherine admitted that she too preferred the missing piece in place and yet understood my sympathy for Hugh who had repeatedly attempted to seize it from Fiona’s hand and yank it out so long ago, so far in the past.