The Blood Oranges (29 page)

Together we knelt at either shoulder, Fiona and I, together and in silence did all we could. But Fiona’s fingers, not mine, broke the spell of the noose, though I raised Hugh’s head so that Fiona was able to remove forever the hairy loop of that rope which was thicker than my two thumbs. And Fiona, not me, attempted without respite to blow life into that strangled man. Her face was low, her left hand was pillowing the back of Hugh’s head, her right hand was lightly braced against his chest, she was trying to breathe both for herself and Hugh. But here? Now? This confined space? These thick walls? This cell so bleak and at the same time so lurid? This broken light? This wreckage? This white body stretching as if from one end of the room to the other and welted with thin tendons that would never again relax? Was it possible? Was this the same Hugh who had danced one night for his children and taken his pictures and smiled at Fiona and carried Catherine into Illyria and thanked me solemnly for the song of the nightingale? Could even Hugh have made this miscalculation and closed all our doors? Fiona was not a woman to waste herself, or to expect senseless occurrences to make sense, or to blind herself to what she did not wish to know or punish herself for what she could not have. She was hardly a woman to display grief or to attempt to restore what had already been destroyed. But for once Fiona, still kneeling at
what she knew full well was not even a final kiss, was behaving out of character, and I was glad. Until she spoke, which in the next instant she did, and even when she spoke, obviously Fiona was grieving, remembering, flying once more down the whole long road of eccentricity with Hugh. Before she pulled her mouth from his, before she sat back on her heels and looked at me, before she could notice what I was doing, quickly I plucked that cracked and shiny photograph from Hugh’s rigid grasp and thrust it from sight.

“It’s no good, baby. He’s dead.”

“At least it was an accident. At least he wasn’t trying to kill himself …”

“For God’s sake, I understand.”

“It was bound to happen. If not now then later.”

“Listen, baby, I’m going to Catherine. You can do the rest.”

“A
ND VIRGINITY ? THE ADOLESCENCE OF THE VIRGIN? THE
 stiff pictographic story of downcast eyes, clear water, empty hands, light the color of cut wheat? Is all this mere chaff in the wind of the practical lover? Mere fading sickness of men like Hugh? Unreal? Perhaps. But sex-singing is hardly possible without the presence of the frail yet indestructible little two- or three-note theme of innocence, and though I am anything but insensitive to boring technicalities and dangerous by-products (religious inventions, martyrs amputating
their own breasts with stolen swords, and so forth), nonetheless I have always defended the idea if not the fact of purity and have always felt warmly inclined toward the sight of narrow beds and young girls carrying clay pots to massive fountains. Fiona understood what I meant Did Catherine? Does she now? After all, there was a time when all our days were only memories of hours that had not yet passed and each one of us was in some way virginal. Lounging on all that remains of Fiona’s old settee, I wonder if I could put the adolescence of the Virgin into words for Catherine. In the twilight should I lead her back again to the chapel of the wooden arm and let her look for herself? Tomorrow, I tell myself, smiling through my own thick smoke, or the day after.

But virginal? Four large virginal human beings? The suggestion is not that I myself ever experienced the slightest preference for virginal over nonvirginal girls or women. The suggestion is not that my wife or Hugh’s could ever suffer significantly by comparison with the young and half-naked shepherdess chasing across the sunburnt field after her shaggy goats. No, one body does not diminish beneath another, there is no amorous oil to lose, the woman bathing in her blue pool renews not her flesh but her readiness.

Yet even now I see once more the adolescence of the Virgin herself, those few still scenes discovered only toward the end of our idyl and in that very chapel where Catherine collapsed in grief on those cold stones.

Look up there, Fiona. Proof enough?

Sketches. Only a half dozen or so crude sketches of innocence joining the thick wall to the vaulted darkness, small panels of hazy paint invisible except when, once a day and
thanks to some cosmic situation and the faulty construction of the squat church, the sun at last becomes a thin blade that slips beneath each of my brief glimpses of the Virgin and for a moment illuminates the three hooded attendants and their rigid and yet somehow submissive charge.

At first glance the wordless story is simply barren, undecipherable, says nothing. And yet to the patient viewer the colors begin to speak, the plaster glows. That yellow stroke? Her gown. And the purple pear? A vessel filled to the lip with water undoubtedly. As for the large dark object held with apparent effort by the attendant bound and hooded in the ocher-colored robe, it is a hairbrush, obviously, though the yellow figure of our young Virgin has no hair while the brush itself resembles nothing so much as a crude, gigantic iron key for a medieval lock. But the color is the important thing, the yellow that dominates each scene— now blond, now sandalwood, now gold, now the yellow that flows in cream, now the color carried in the furry sacs of unmoving bees. The skin of the tree is yellow, the stiff gown is yellow, the bare feet, one of which is missing in the third frame, are pale variants of the small female lemons that once hung from a white branch but now hang from nothing. Is it the color of truth and adolescence? The color of youth removed from the context of age? Simply the color of innocence? The Virgin hue? I suppose it is. And so one figure supports the shoulders and one holds the feet while the yellow but now horizontal girl remains as stiff as ever: she is rising. But the third attendant, ocher-colored, robed and hooded, is sitting on the end of the bed with his wide back to the day’s first event. Or the Virgin
stands upright and faceless in a large receptacle of ancient wood: she bathes. But nonetheless she is still clothed in the yellow gown, no water flows from what must have once been a bucket tilted above her head. Or among leafless trees she walks with hands held as if for some illuminated book: she prays. Yet trees, book, attendants are now invisible. And in this frame our yellow Virgin has suffered the same decay as the surrounding plaster and is all but gone.

Yellow was Fiona’s favorite color. I have seen Hugh’s narrow eyes downcast in the midst of his craving. Catherine’s face did not betray her longing. Even at night the four of us walked in that light the color of cut wheat.

T
HE SUN CASTS ORANGE DISCS ON THE SEA, OUR NIGHTS ARE
cool. From three adjacent wooden pegs on my white wall hang a dried-out flower crown, a large and sagging pair of shorts, the iron belt—and is it any coincidence that all my relics are circular? Who can tell? Everything coheres, moves forward. I listen for footsteps.

In Illyria there are no seasons.

The Beetle Leg The Cannibal

Death, Sleep & the Traveler

Humors of Blood & Skin: A John Hawkes Reader

The Lime Twig

The Passion Artist

Second Skin

Travesty

Virginie: Her Two Lives

COPYRIGHT © 1970, 1971 BY JOHN HAWKES

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 74-152516
(ISBN: 0-8112-0061-2)

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

Portions of this book first appeared in
The Dutton Review, The Harvard Advocate, Tri-Quarterly
and
Works in Progress
, to whose editors grateful acknowledgment is made.

The author is grateful for generous help given him by
The Rockefeller Foundation.

ISBN: 978-0-811-22255-6 (e-book)

First published clothbound in 1971.

First published as New Directions Paperbook 338 in 1972,

Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada Limited

Designed by Gertrude Huston.

New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin,

by New Directions Publishing Corporation,

80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011