The Blood Oranges (3 page)

“My God, I’ve found the skeleton of a child. Head, ribs, hands, feet—the whole works. How could they do it?”

A moment before she had been sitting on her heels, with the open coat of yellow suede drawn tight across her widened buttocks, but now, never at rest, she was standing on tiptoe directly in front of that black and white altar, while with my usual pleasure I noted her straight legs, her
narrow calves stretching with a kind of girlish muscular determination, her hands spread wide and resting firmly on the black marble. Even stock still she was trembling, I thought, even motionless appeared already to be wheeling and running on naked white feet toward her next confrontation with bright light, old stones, new lovers.

“He’s beautiful, poor thing. I’m going to kiss him, Cyril. Shall I?”

Yellow was Fiona’s color, as in the case of the almost tissue-thin suede coat which, in her stretching efforts to reach the skull of the child, was now lifted high above the tight skin behind her knees. And for more than eighteen years she had been most obviously true to character and to her color yellow in the act of kissing, and had spent those years kissing each letter she wrote, each book she enjoyed, kissing flowers, shadows, dead birds, dogs, old ladies, attractive men, as if only by touching the world with her open lips could she make it real and bring herself to life. So even while I was grunting my approval and pleasure, which was the only way to reply to any of Fiona’s questions about kissing, she had already found the small white skull with her eager mouth, and I could only smile still more broadly at the sight of Fiona lavishing one of her brief floods of compassion on the tiny cold features of a grinning relic. It was like Fiona to leave her jasmine scent perfuming the mere skeleton of some unknown infant embedded along with thick-lettered unreadable injunctions against frivolity and sex in their unfrequented altar. To her, no expenditure of her own affection was ever wasted.

But I smelled wax, dust, flaking wood, rusting iron, all the effluvium of devotion and religious craftsmanship.
Taking my left hand from my pocket and between thumb and first finger rubbing half-consciously the hem of the tattered dress on the Virgin’s doll, at that moment I found myself looking not at Fiona, who had forgotten me in her brief moment of frenzy in front of the dark altar, but up at a small pulpit lacquered with circus colors of blue and gold and somehow fastened high on the stone wall opposite me. The sun, as on my altar, warmed the pulpit and struck with fire a life-sized wooden arm that protruded over the edge of the pulpit and was extended, as in some kind of benediction, in the wet air. Except for the arm, with its crack near the elbow and its flowing wooden sleeve and pasty yellow hand, and except for the two altars and little peculiar pulpit, I might have been standing in some gutted cellar of the ancient world, some pit giving onto secret viaducts packed with the old world’s excrement.

“Look, Fiona, a wooden arm!”

Barefooted, wearing only her bra and brief for the beach, as well as the yellow coat, of course, which was her concession to the disapproving village and intended to spare us both from muttered threats of
croak peonie,
and alert, unappeasable, quick-breathing, austere and supple, the only woman I have ever known who, as sex-aesthetician, was nearly my equivalent, woman whose aging body was nonetheless a young green tree—how like my wife, Fiona, to thrust her proud chin and hungry mouth into the crumpled face of the sightless dead and then to fly on, magnificent and quite oblivious to my own discoveries, my own passing sensual interest in a wooden arm. Perhaps the aesthetic pleasures of the wooden arm were subtle, even for Fiona. Because now she spoke again in her whisper that was firm
and clear, submissive and peremptory, and already her mind and eyes were elsewhere, had not comprehended the comic miracle of the arm in space, the wooden hand that no one would ever hold.

“Cyril, I want to light a candle. OK?”

She had turned, was facing me, the coat hung open, her stomach appeared to be unusually small and round above the wide hips and wonderfully frank pelvic area bound up in the tight spongy whiteness of her brief for the beach. So I drew the smoke back in through my heavy nose and took my time, once again admired myself for thinking to bring this woman into the humorless solemnity of empty nave and squat buttressed church, once again tried to follow the new course of her flight.

“Sure. But who on earth would we light it for?”

“Oh, Cyril, does it matter? I just want to light a candle, baby.”

And Fiona would have had her way, would have sailed in long quick strides to the other end of the nave, would have selected the perfect thin white candle and kissed it, impetuously kissed it, and then would have watched while I slowly took the candle from her firm hand and impaled this, Fiona’s candle, on one of the little upright spikes set in rows for that purpose, would have had me strike the match and light the wick for the benefit, perhaps, of the infant whose ancient and miniature skeleton she had already made her own—would have caused all this to happen, would have had us standing side by side and inhaling the long black strings of smoke and appreciating together the honeyed scent of the wax, had not the candle-lighting idea been destroyed the very instant Fiona was beginning to
move by a sudden ominous clamor in the cobbled alley just outside the church. We heard men running and grunting, heard the sound-of boots on the stones. Simultaneously the nave was filled with the sharp clanging of the bell in the squat tower above our heads, and with the ugly blasts of the obsolete mechanical horn always blown by some village official in times of crisis.

“Is it a fire, Cyril?”

“Button your coat and we’ll find out,”I said, smiling at the disappearance of the flame that was never lit.

In the next instant we fled fragile bones and rotting lace and wooden arm, fled the rows of little upright spikes that were spattered with dusty clots of melted wax and on one of which a single crooked candle was, as a matter of fact, already burning, hand in hand ran from the cold nave, appeared together briefly against the sagging and worm-eaten wooden church door that we pushed shut behind us, and then took up the chase after two squat men in rubber boots and crude black leather helmets. Fiona’s coat was closed, the black horn was blowing. From a short distance ahead came gruff intermittent shouts, commands of
croak peonie
and, oddly enough, the sound of laughter.

“What the hell,” I said, pacing my breath, holding Fiona’s hand and restraining somewhat her flight, “they’re laughing.”

“Come on, baby. Please. I want to see.”

One more booted and helmeted figure, short and fat and carrying some kind of boat hook, thundered up from behind and passed us, despite his clumsiness, and sped on after the other two and disappeared. Broken tiles, the familiar stone cups filled with poison and set out on empty window ledges
and in empty doorways, the closeness of the narrow walls that magnified every sound so that we could hear distinctly the choppy breathing of the three stunted men who were, I knew, members of the much-feared and openly hostile fire brigade—through this brief stretch of dismal labyrinth we ran, the elegant woman who dared show to all the village her hard naked feet and the spectacular man who, in actual sight of the church, had been seen to blow from his mouth disrespectful shapes in blue smoke.

But then we emerged from the hollow darkness of a low arch into full view of the black canal whose simple low cobbled embankment was wide enough to accommodate roving dogs, sullen families on foot and, one at a time, those rare engine-powered vehicles that appeared, now and again, from beyond the mountains. Here the crowd was gathered, we saw, not for fire or bicycle accident or fist fight between children with slack jaws and bloodshot eyes, but instead was pressing toward the edge of the canal in anger or with laughter because a large khaki-colored motorbus had somehow found its way off the sloping embankment and now sat, floated, right side up on the still water black with pollution.

“My God, Cyril, they’re going to drown!”

Her hand was long and white and cold in mine, gently I maneuvered myself so that Fiona could see—it was always essential that Fiona see the crudest accident, the smallest catastrophe, the gravest incident—but would not be able to pitch us without warning into the midst of the little factioned crowd or into the way of the rescuers. She pulled, I held her firmly, she leaned as far as she could toward the bus that was imperceptibly rocking now about ten feet
from the embankment where the nearest brute-shaped member of the fire brigade stood shouting out his furious commands.

“It’s going to sink, Cyril. Isn’t it?”

I frowned, waited, and with pressure on her hand and a movement of my shoulders and a soft thoughtful sound in my nose and throat tried to convey that it was a question no one could answer.

“But people commit suicide that way, baby. It has to sink.”

In the air a handful of slim white pigeons circled the scene, on the embankment half the crowd bent themselves into lewd positions and laughed at the occupants in the bus and at the bus itself, while the other half scowled darkly and pointed to ropes and boat hooks and flimsy ladders. Across the canal a woman in a shuttered window was calling for someone to come and look. And there on the water before us the old high-bodied motorbus still floated. Derelict, obviously painted and repaired endlessly by lazy unskilled workers, khaki-colored and smeared here and there with swatches of lurid purple and smoky black, heavily dented from its long life of collisions (with stone fountains, cornices, rocks in the road, unlucky animals) still it floated in a kind of majestic dementia, though steam was hissing up from its hood and an oil stain was rising from all its submerged gearboxes, tanks, iron pockets packed with grease. I could see air bubbles where the tin body met the water, a drifting orange bobbed against the side of the still floating old machine.

Here, I thought, were several different modes of incongruity. In a matter of minutes we might be left staring at
nothing more than the little orange drifting on the dark and apparently currentless flow of sewage. The pigeons, of course, were small and sweet and serene, while the helpless crowd and remnant of the fire brigade were clumsy, violent. But what of Fiona and me? In all their shock and fear, did those in the bus give a passing thought to Fiona and me? For one terrible instant did it occur to them, driver and passengers, that the tall man and woman on the edge of the crowd might be precisely strong enough and elegant enough to save them, since even the bulky members of the fire brigade were hopelessly entangled in the slick coils of their age-old brutal ignorance and despite all their activity could in fact do nothing? But what of the woman screaming behind the slatted shutter? And how did the motorbus arrive in its present state of danger and momentary suspension on waters more fetid than any waters I had ever smelled? A failure of brakes? Some physical or psychological failure in the stricken driver?

A single gasp went up then from the serious faction of the crowd, Fiona squeezed my hand and held her breath as if all her fear and courage and sweeping empathy were now mounted forever in still marble, across the canal the screaming woman burst open her shutter, glared out, and as quickly smashed it shut again, the brute-backed leader of the fire brigade fell to his knees, stuck out his arm, waited—because with a sucking sound the front of the old bus started down, dipped with sudden unalterable purpose toward the stinking depths of the timeless pestilential canal. Dipped, started down, but was then somehow relinquished by the deep intestinal tug of the canal and slowly, slowly, rose again to its original horizontal position
with nothing to mark the near disappearance of motorbus and occupants except a thin ripple spreading out from the front bumper, some agitation in the orange, and a sigh from those of us who did not suffer from the abnormal attitudes born of the bad blood carried to this warm coast centuries before from central Europe.

“Do something, Cyril,” she whispered then. “Please, baby.”

All those on the embankment were quiet. Several of the leather-garbed stumping firemen began, like lunging turtles, to tie together two slender ladders with strips of wire. Fiona put her lips to my cheek.

The occupants of the bus were unaware of Fiona’s efforts on their behalf, were apparently unaware of the will power she was now exerting. Yet might not the power of Fiona’s psyche have been as much responsible as anything else for the continued presence of the motorbus on the viscous surface of the historically significant canal? And, as far as I could see, they were unaware of the disaster which, a moment before, had all but concluded. Pigeons, ladders, Fiona’s white face and yellow coat, an old man with a stack of twigs on his back and determined to tell someone that they should tie a rope to the head of a pike—none of it meant anything to the pathetically small group of occupants inside the bus. The driver gripped his wheel, the man and woman were holding the edges of the seats in front of them, only the heads of the three female children and the black dog were visible, but those few faces were cold, expressionless, unusually small, and were, all seven of them, including the dog’s, forced rigidly to the front. As I bent down to get a better look through the windows it occurred
to me that driver and passengers did not in fact comprehend that they were afloat precariously in an ancient canal, but rather were expecting some more conventional catastrophe and were still looking ahead toward the as yet invisible landscape of the impending crash. It occurred to me also that beneath the water those six people and the small black animal would be lost, so to speak, in so large and so nearly empty a motorbus.

And then it sank. Again the crowd gasped, the old man threw down his twigs, Fiona with one round movement of her shoulders tore free of my hand. But of course I was familiar with all the bright severity and wildness of Fiona’s spirit and now was ready for one of her stronger displays of grace and determination. So in my left arm I caught her slender waist exactly as the motorbus went down.