The Sacred Beasts

by Bev Jafek

  “I said I love you because I do, but this has nothing to do with love. Sylvie, if I were your age, nothing could stop me from going to Paris with you!” I am almost shouting now. “It would be one of the most important turning points of my life! When you do go back to Paris, it will be a little like dying for me. I’ll be haunted by you. I felt this when Katia died, too. But nothing can change the age difference between us.” Now she lets me take her hands, and her face is suddenly animated, as though she sees another direction to this.

  “No, you don’t understand. I never even think about your age. I love your body—it’s as slender and muscular as mine, and your face . . . you must know that I love nothing but character in a face. Young faces bore me. I do want you! I’ve been attracted to you since I was a girl. I remember watching you with Katia and thinking that she was very striking but dangerously moody. Even a girl could see it. You were the kind one, the gentle one she leaned on without knowing it. I always loved you. You don’t need to feel that you’re too old for me . . .”

  “I know that, Sylvie. I do understand,” though what she has said astonishes me. Still, I must persist. “But nothing can turn back the clock. We have a kind of perfection here. It’s magical. I do feel like a young woman here with you. But I’m not. You simply can’t have a long-term relationship with a woman of my age, even if you think you want it now.”

  She withdraws from me again. I can see nothing but her bent head and back. We are silent for much too long a time. I have failed: she still does not really understand. She picks up my camera and turns it about in her hands as though it were an enigma. Suddenly, she jumps to her feet and hurls it into the water. Then she turns on me like a mad animal. “A man would never do this to me! A man would have the nerve to live with me! So you might get hurt. I might, too. A man would take the risk!”

  There is now so much to explain that I hardly know where to begin. “A man probably would go to Paris with you. It is almost irresistible, and it is also the most painful thing in the world to know that you can only live once. But you have to understand what that would mean for you. A man of my age, who has been your lover as I have, would try to manipulate you into staying with him. He’d begin on your ego, do everything to make you question yourself and seek his approval, then make you dependent on him. He would do his best to destroy your self-worth, your freedom, and even your art might not survive. He would give you the most destructive relationship of your life. It goes without saying that he’d try to get you all-too-accustomed to spending his money and to hate living without it. Have I said enough? Do you see the pattern?”

  She yells, “Damn it to hell, yes!” She turns away from me and runs to the lake, takes off her clothes quickly and dives in. I intensely want to join her, but I am devastated by the thought that we first made love in a lake. I must leave her alone now. She will not let me comfort her. She will swim until she has regained control of herself or is exhausted. In a half-hour or so, the camera flies out of the water and crashes onto the shore. I pick it up and examine it. Of course, it is completely ruined, its secrets lost—not the first one, and I smile ruefully, to be destroyed by the wildlife.

  It is dark when she finally comes out of the water, dresses and sits by the campfire close beside me. I touch her carefully and then, finding her receptive, I hold her in my arms. “I’m sorry about the camera,” she says in a faint voice. I can only smile: she does not sound sorry at all. But, I now know something about her I would never have guessed: no one has ever rejected her before. Her beauty has protected her from that. Of course, I have not really rejected her, only acknowledged that she must leave me.

  Suddenly, she pins my arms behind my back and makes love to me very aggressively. At first, her passion is one that also wants to hurt me, like pornography, but it changes into very gentle love that begins the slow process of leave-taking. We will make love like this in Madrid and Barcelona until we can finally leave one another.

  Before we fall asleep, I say, “I never meant to imply that I would leave you. I do believe that you will need to leave me and it will happen very soon. But, if it hasn’t happened after Madrid and Barcelona, and you still want me to live with you in Paris, I will do that.” She closes her eyes slowly and smiles with the sweetness of a Cambodian Buddha, then holds my face in her hands, caressing and kissing all parts of my face again and again. How on earth will I ever give up this lovely girl?

  “If you think you’re old now, what an old bat you’ll be before I’m done with you,” she says. “I am going to surprise you.”

  “You have either surprised or shocked me on every day of this trip,” I say. We fall asleep immediately, exhausted by our emotions.

  IN THE BRILLIANT, telling sunlight of the following day, we are standing on opposite sides of the jeep, each watching the other. We have had breakfast and finished our packing, and all of our gear is piled in the back of the jeep. We are ready to leave Doñana, a moment I have feared but accepted. I know that ultimately she will not want to live with me in Paris, but she does not know it yet. Still, I am so astonished by the outrageousness, the pure wildness, even the insane magnificence of our love here that I know I will never regret it. “We broke every rule in the book,” I say.

  “That we did,” she says. “I can’t think of another one to break.”

  Suddenly we both reach over the hood of the jeep and hold hands. Tears are falling down my face and then hers as well. “You’re the only lover I haven’t terrified a bit,” she says.

  “I can certainly see how you would terrify your lovers,” I say and we laugh through our tears. I do not say: you will terrify them less and less as the years pass, and one day you will realize how much you miss terrifying them. Our faces are wet with tears. One of the many things I love about women is that you can cry together and still be strangely happy.

  “I love you. Helplessly,” she says.

  “I love you hopelessly,” I answer. Then we are beyond tears and laughter.

  “OK, let’s do it,” she says. “Barcelona, Madrid. Even Paris, if I can get you to believe it exists.” I am grateful that I don’t need to end this moment. We will begin to grow apart as soon as we enter this jeep, even before Doñana is behind us.

  Our hands break apart. We get into the jeep and drive away.

  Krasna život.

  III

  The Middle

  Secrets and Symmetry

  IT’S THAT LIGHT, Ruth was thinking as she drove, the soft white light of southern Spain that seems to exist as waves, oceans of white washing over you. The heat is part of it—we’re just past the first of June. It must be over a hundred degrees. The inevitable sense of being overwhelmed, becoming white wave-like ephemera, the world scaled almost to zero. I remember the bright white light of San Francisco: what a contrast. It was sparkling, cool and brisk, a perfect city to work in, to create durable, utilitarian things used for good purposes. Eternal Spring, it roused you to change your life like a musical refrain. This light is the reverse, utter passivity, pure being. How we need both. White will be the last color I see when I die.

  You could not paint it other than in broad white strokes; Sylvie was thinking, an entire canvas of red and black and those thick white strokes across the center. If any landscape or human figure is necessary, it must be no more than an outline, a fast brush stroke over the canvas in a single thin line of gray paint. As a conceptual painting of Spain—here, now—this idea intrigues me.

  They passed two riders on horseback followed by a faint, tiny foal with glassy eyes. They smiled in pleasure at the foal’s diminutive sweetness. “One of the horses must be a mare, its mother,” Ruth said. “It looks no more than a week old. It will follow its mother anywhere.”

  “It’s adorable,” said Sylvie. How I would love to kiss that funny, rumpled new fur, she thought.

  They had just decided to drive to Barcelona before Madrid, visit a few cities along the way—Seville, Granada, Ronda and whatever else took them—then head up the Cost
a del Sol. They were in agreement that they needed a rest and nothing should hurry them. “Are we tourists yet?” Sylvie asked.

  “Not yet,” said Ruth with a smile. “We’re still in the thrall of art. Your head must be completely empty. We may never be tourists again as long as we live.” A red tractor with a huge shovel and a laughing young man at the wheel passed them. The shovel held a laughing young woman. I wonder how that happened, they thought with a smile.

  “I haven’t told you yet where we’re staying in Barcelona,” Ruth said with sudden energy. “We’ll be at the home of one of Katia’s feminist friends, an internationally known artist named Monserrat Mistral. She is of my generation, though you might know her work. Katia said it was an amazing house, one of those early twentieth century Modernist mansions that so distinguish Barcelona from other Spanish cities. The architect was not Gaudi, but someone else in the Modernist movement. Monserrat’s family was solidly placed in the wealthy industrialist class of Spain for decades: her father made his fortune in construction and development. Katia said that the family fractured politically during the Spanish Civil War. The father was pro-Franco, of course, but her brother and two sisters joined the anarchist and socialist movements and fought in the resistance. They were killed when Franco’s forces took Barcelona.

  “Monserrat was born as a late, last child after the war, a tragic attempt by her parents to regain a family. She was finally the sole heir to the estate and business, which is still generating a fortune in construction on the Costa del Sol. So, she decided to devote the greater part of the family fortune to Spain’s still-nascent feminist movement. The house provides a meeting place for women in every profession, afternoon and evening, every day. Women professors, journalists, media professionals—you name it—all meet there. A bunch of artists have their studios there. Mujeres Libres, a contemporary version of the old Spanish Civil War anarchist group, meets there, too. Even the Spanish prostitutes union meets there. It will probably turn into a fiesta atmosphere this month leading up to Gay Pride Day. Monserrat is a gay woman, though her partner of forty years died recently. I’ve never met her, but she wrote a very sensitive, heartfelt condolence letter to me after Katia’s death and invited me to stay with her when I traveled to Europe again. It must be a very exciting place, to say the least.”

  Aha, thought Sylvie. That’s why you think I’ll leave you so soon. We’ll be surrounded by so many fascinating women that I’ll throw you over the first night, and you will have your consolation with Monserrat beside you. But what if I surprise you? Maybe I’ll just fuck you to death there instead. Imagine how happily you’ll expire: in that famous, one-of-a kind feminist mansion. What a noble end and what a scandal, too. Surely some woman should die during orgasm in such a place. Sylvie laughed aloud, reached over and squeezed Ruth’s thigh.

  Even the idea of the place excites her, Ruth thought. She’ll want to paint every woman there. And in a short time, she’ll meet a woman she can’t resist. I’d love to see her drop all her brushes and paint tubes on the floor when that moment comes. Now Ruth was laughing, too.

  I wonder if she’s thinking about dumping me right now, Sylvie thought. Bet she is. Plunk Sylvie down in the living room and she’ll go a-whoring on the spot. They looked at one another with broad smiles on their faces as though each knew a secret about the other, a curious new habit that had come over them since leaving Doñana.

  We’re so far apart, I may never have another serious conversation with her, Ruth thought.

  You dear old fucker, Sylvie thought. What are you really up to, anyway?

  Then each relinquished the other and gave in completely to the heat and light. All around them were dark green olive groves ripening in the heat. The heat and light seemed to quiver in the air, as though invisible phantoms were rushing past them. Moisture glinted from the dark green leaves of the olive trees and above them, the umber shadows of the Sierra Nevada mountains rose up, pale as a watercolor sketch.

  But then, Sylvie thought, it is all recreated in a single alchemical moment of the mind: it is the complete stillness of delight; it is a tincture of magic and musk; it’s the Spanish cytinus flower’s yellow petals opening into a spray of suns; it’s a woman loosely wrapped in green and blue with earthen streaks who can devastate you with her simple presence. Never mistake her power. Any or all of these may comprise my next painting—here, now—of Spain.

  Why didn’t I love it until this moment? Ruth thought. Why have I been so foolishly distracted?

  No words, no images at all now, Sylvie thought. It’s baking me into a hot knot of pleasure, its own design. Why aspire? Why even move my arm to paint? Maybe I’ll give it all up—after fucking Ruth to death, of course. She so deserves to die in my arms in beautiful Spain.

  THEY ENTERED SEVILLE in mid-afternoon, driving first along a wide avenue lined by mansions on huge estates filled with palm trees and jacarandas casting trails of purple petals over endless lawns, all exuding the smell of orange blossoms. I can see why it has the reputation of being Spain’s most beautiful city, Ruth thought. The heat seems to make luxury and history bloom as one, a unique charm. Again, the heat is part of all thought and sensation. You are moving yet part of a flaming still point that is Spain of previous centuries.

  Overcooked exotica, Sylvie thought. A nude woman covered with those wet purple flowers, a furry marsupial with sleepy eyes hanging from a palm tree, a jungle full of moisture and fire. No, the marsupial and jungle are South American, not Spanish, and moisture can’t coexist with fire. The heat and scenery are putting me to sleep. I am in a waking dream, she thought, and gently punched Ruth on the arm. Ruth gently punched her back. “Good,” said Sylvie. “I had almost fallen asleep. All that luxury is facile beauty, and this city is too hot for me.”

  “We’ll go straight to the old city. Thick stones stay cool longer,” Ruth said. Soon they were passing tall baroque buildings built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on narrow circuitous streets dusted by golden late afternoon light. Ruth parked and said, “We walk from here. You can’t see it in a car.” Sylvie suddenly grabbed Ruth and kissed her slowly and passionately, as though they had all the time they wanted for love on a hot summer day. Ruth could not resist cupping Sylvie’s breasts in her hands.

  “Now I’m waking up,” Sylvie said, smiling.

  “But we’re no longer in a forest,” Ruth answered. “Look.” Four men were pressed to the car, their faces against the windows. Ruth and Sylvie quickly got out of the car and elbowed their way through the crowd. Hearing whistles and catcalls, Sylvie thought, eat your hearts out, assholes!

  In a short time, they found themselves in a winding city of ochre stones and narrow alleyways with orange trees and buildings trimmed with iron latticework, all seeming to pulsate and glow in the soft orange light. It was only slightly cooler. Their pace quickened as a curious thought came to both of them: that they were part of an enigma, and it was unfolding as streets before them, perhaps ultimately leading to the unknown heart of an ancient, sensuous Spanish city. The streets were filled, too, with hungry male eyes that always rested, lingeringly, on Sylvie. So distracting, Sylvie thought. Without them, I would be generating ideas and images like a fountain. Ruth thought, it will be like this for her in every big city. The fishing villages on the coast were much less intrusive.

  They stopped in front of a chapel that intrigued them for reasons they could not fathom, perhaps a hint of the bizarre. “Let’s have a look,” Ruth said, and they walked in together. Their sight could hardly take in all the statues of virgins, cherubs, angels, crosses, horns, scrolls, pennants, heavenly circling clouds; all winged, robed, and haloed; cheek by jowl but for space covered with religious paintings; altogether barely allowing pews. “I believe we’ve been saved,” said Ruth. “It must be salvation. What more could they stuff in here?” They sat in a pew.

  “How absurd to just pile together all this stuff,” Sylvie said. “There is literally not an inch without religious symbols.” Here’
s my surrealist painting, she thought. I will cover every inch of the canvas with cherubs, virgins, crosses, etc., all this religious paraphernalia, but alter the viewer’s distance perception several times so that there are large figures seemingly close to you and also more distant, smaller ones tilted at different angles. It will feel as though many dimensions are crushing themselves together as they rush to envelope you in not art but religious symbolism. My title will be “Heaven.” Maybe Spaniards need piles of religious symbols to restrain themselves, she thought.

  “I almost feel like hiding here rather than being followed by all those male stares,” Sylvie said.

  “We can’t have you remembering this as Seville!” Ruth said. “Let’s go get lost in quaint baroque chaos on the streets instead. At some point, it will become too complicated for them to follow us.”

  They quickly walked along a street chosen at random and discovered, three streets and a corner later, that it opened upon a dimly lit ancient square. The sky was full of orange and red streaks of color, yet the light mysteriously did not penetrate this square, as though it held a secret that could repel nature. Strange, they both thought. They retraced their last steps and followed another random street only to find, four streets and two corners later, that it opened upon a lovely old fountain, pouring streams of golden water in the light. I sensed it was an enigma, Ruth thought. “This seems to be arranged as a baroque game,” Sylvie said.

  “Delightful,” Ruth said. “Let’s keep playing.” After retracing their last steps, they picked another street at random and found, two streets and a corner later, that it opened upon a miniature park with benches, gardens and a pool of water burnished golden red in the light of sunset.

  “It does seem to be a game,” Ruth said, “as though we were being entertained by the stones.” To Sylvie, the buildings seemed to be crowding together to watch them. “On with the game,” Ruth said with a smile. They retraced their steps and followed a random street; then, four streets later, they found that it ended in an enclosed space with a statue of a robed male saint and an old church behind. The saint’s eyes reflected the red light of sunset in an inhuman and ominous glow. “So you are responsible for this game,” Ruth said, and to Sylvie, “will you continue playing?”