The Sacred Beasts

by Bev Jafek

  And I’ve got that amazing woman to wake up beside, Alex thought.

  When Ruth and Alex finished talking, Monserrat was in the painter’s room, looking at all the new paintings that had been done since she was last there. There was now a striking group of canvases so different from anything she had seen there before that they had to be the ambitious work of Sylvie. For nearly an hour, Monserrat had done nothing but look from one to another. Hearing silence from the living room, she came in and sat beside Ruth, pouring a cup of coffee for herself. “I’ve just had a fascinating encounter with one of our young lovers.”

  “So have I,” Ruth said. “Tell me about yours.”

  “I’ve been looking at Sylvie’s paintings while you were talking to Alex. She is one of the most brilliant artists I’ve ever seen here, possibly even a genius, and developing at a very rapid rate, faster than I did.”

  Ruth smiled and looked at Monserrat in deep appreciation. “I’m so glad to hear that. I thought of her as a genius, too, at times, but I’m not really an artist and can’t judge.”

  “But you are an artist!”

  “Whatever. I will not argue with the woman I love. It’s exciting that her talent is bearing real fruit, given that she’s such un enfant terrible.”

  “What I want to know is, where on earth have the two of you been? Alex says that Sylvie always says that she’s painting Spain. But, what Spain? Where? Whose? There are several paintings of an old woman out of the Stone Age, maybe ten thousand years ago, living in a hut; trees, flowers and vegetation so contorted they look alien to this planet; paintings full of wild animals, even huge snakes hanging from trees; street prostitutes with the stare of an eagle; mountain villages full of gypsies; fantasy and erotic sequences that are beyond my powers of description. Where is this all happening?”

  Ruth laughed. “I assure you that it is Spain. We’ve been nowhere else. It’s just not the Spain you’ve always known. That is the Spain by, for and about men. I’ve seen the drawings that were preparatory to the paintings, and Sylvie paints the Spain of women and animals.”

  “She is painting your heart. I should have known. You are still influencing her.”

  “Not really. She tosses off influences like a bird in a birdbath. She’s her own woman and artist. I might have inspired her at most.”

  “There! That’s it. She is painting your heart from inspiration. I’ve been thinking ahead about this. We have a feminist publishing house here, very well respected, and sometimes I publish a book of paintings by a single young artist. I would like to do this with Sylvie, probably everything she paints in Spain. In fact, after talking to you, I would like to title it, The Other Spain. Would she like that?”

  Ruth laughed and clapped her hands. “She’s bursting with ambition, and she would love it with the force of birth, orgasm and death. You’ll have a wild animal in front of you. She might set the house on fire in joy.”

  “Would you like to tell her?”

  “Absolutely not! She might suspect I influenced you. Let her know she alone has earned it. It will be a gorgeous book, and, print one of her paintings of the old Stone Age woman on the cover of your book about Spanish matriarchy. We met that woman in a ghost town close to the Costa del Sol. She truly seemed to be the great matriarch of all Spain. I’m still not sure it really happened.”

  “That’s a wonderful idea. You see, you’re an artist, too.”

  “I’m just excited for all of you. Alex will be pleased, won’t she?”

  “Oh yes! She thinks Sylvie is the best thing that’s ever happened to her work habits. I’ll tell Sylvie tomorrow on Gay Pride Day, just before we leave for the parade.”

  “That’s perfect timing! Sylvie joins the feminist pantheon on Gay Pride Day; only in a house like this!” Ruth laughed again.

  SYLVIE AND ALEX were driving through the Basque country, soon to arrive at the shepherd’s hut and the lake beside it. “I actually had a chance to talk to Ruth early this morning,” Alex said. “They were up making coffee. Monserrat spent a long time looking at your paintings. Anyway, Ruth’s grief has nothing to do with you . . .”

  “Katia . . .”

  “No! Some people are really not obsessed with a woman! She gave me plenty of detail about her book, and it’s quite enough to make anyone despair. I was glad I talked to her for my own reasons, ultimately. I should be giving more of my energy to liberal political causes. You should, too.”

  “She said that?”

  “No, it wasn’t necessary. I knew what she meant, and as for her grief, I think Monserrat is probably better for her, really. Ruth needs to be with her, write her books, and pass her ideas on to the next generation. She hardly needs to be with a young hottie.”

  “Oh, she loves those young hotties, too!” Sylvie said angrily.

  Alex laughed. “Well, of course; how could she not? But, we will both help Ruth most by working on her political causes, with which I completely agree. That’s what she needs. Other than that, just be her friend. You’re free of this, really free!”

  “I wonder . . .” Sylvie said and smiled.

  She can’t resist planning something outrageous, Alex thought. What will go on in that hypothetical hotel a year from now? Alex laughed softly.

  When they arrived at the shepherd’s hut, Sylvie was impressed to find a two-story structure. Primitive externally, it was well furnished inside, with a large kitchen, bathroom and shower. They immediately went down to the lake to spend several hours swimming naked, which caused a unique mixture of excitement and tranquility. They stayed long enough to see, reflected in the water, the tangled pink clouds of sunset and a brightly clashing orange moon. “I must see these colors, reflected,” Sylvie said. “They are beyond what I can imagine alone. I’m in love with these dying embers, floating through black vines of aquatic plants and insects. It is another reality. I will paint a woman’s face reflected in the water, as though she could only live in that element, one of clashing intensities. Perhaps it should be a self-portrait.” She touched the reflections and made them multiply.

  “I’m no dying ember,” Alex said. “I’m hungry, cold, hot for your body, in need of libations, and ready for whatever madness you’re going to inflict on me tonight.”

  “My perfect lover!” Sylvie said, “The only one I’ve ever apologized to, the only one I’ve been ready to fall on my knees for. You’re going to get some very hot sex tonight; don’t worry.”

  “That is the last and least of my worries about you.”

  They prepared their dinner with groceries they had brought along and opened a bottle of wine. “This is heaven,” Sylvie said. “You’re right that it’s necessary to get away from there. This is a secret place of our own. We’ve been living in Monserrat’s haunted castle for days now. It’s marvelous and anything can happen there. But, I can’t be completely alone with you and I want to be.” Sylvie touched Alex’s cheek.

  Alex had brought a CD player along, and they listened to De Falla’s “Love, the Sorcerer” while eating and drinking wine. The movement, “Dance of the Game of Love,” came on and Alex, with a smile of childish delight, asked Sylvie to dance. They danced together, both facing one another and also with their backs and heads touching. “This is the most exquisitely tender and erotic music I know,” Alex said. “I heard it first as a child and learned Spanish at a lightning pace, all so that I could dance with the woman I loved to this music, some twenty years in the future. I imagined her then and craved her, and in a way it was you I saw.”

  “What long-term erotic planning,” Sylvie said with a smile. “Oh yes, the music is child-like, too, isn’t it? It’s one of your very long-delayed orgasms. I still don’t know how you can do that, but this music somehow tickles me and makes me tingle, pleasurably delaying the inevitable.”

  When the movement was over, they silently took off their clothes and climbed up to the open-air loft on the hut’s roof. “And such a moon!” Sylvie said. They lay down and Alex began by covering Sylvie with her
body and then massaging her thighs with her strong hands. Sylvie was very excited and would have liked her to continue, but she stopped Alex instead and rolled over on top of her.

  “The particular madness that I am going to inflict on you,” she said with a smile, “is that I am going to ravish you; yes, ravish you for hours as you do me! You’re really going to get it tonight! You talked with Ruth, so you must know that she has evidence that says, pruriently enough even for me, that everyone, but everyone except gay men wants to be ravished by a lovely woman! It’s the world’s best-kept secret, the foundation perhaps of all other secrets. Ruth has said this; I read nothing into it, and now I will ravish you—thoroughly and madly. Let’s see if you are really so different from me, or if you scream non-stop.”

  Sylvie made love to Alex for about two hours—orally, caressingly, tenderly, harshly, teasingly, completely, and with different parts of her body—discovering that Alex would not scream during her many orgasms. Rather, she loudly ground her teeth and muttered, yelled, bellowed, yelped, coughed, hacked and made other indescribable sounds of agony, apparently to avoid screaming. Finally Sylvie stopped and said, “Good job, soldier! Not a single scream out of you. You’ll get a promotion for that, though you sounded like a gravel-voiced beast boiling in oil most of the time. What do you have against screaming?”

  Alex sighed deeply. “I don’t want to deny you anything, but I just can’t scream. It may be the essence of a woman in love, but it’s just too feminine and I can’t. This is beyond my control. I had plenty of orgasms, though.”

  “Oh yes, I could feel your hot little peanut going up and down, all the while you sounded like a great warrior dying on the battlefield with baritone or bass shouts, which I’ve never heard in your speaking voice. I didn’t know that you could sound like the dying Gaul at the supreme moment.”

  “Forgive me. I can’t ever scream.”

  Sylvie only smiled and tenderly kissed Alex. “It’s kind of fun that I’m not the only problematic lover around.”

  “I loved it! I loved being ravished by you,” Alex said in a soft voice.

  “Now you’re forgiven!” Sylvie said and kissed her passionately, then stared at her. “You’re going to be my woman, too, even if you bellow like an ox. I sort of like oxen. I just never thought I’d end up in bed with one.”

  Alex smiled and changed positions with Sylvie. “I must do what I wanted to do to that woman when I was a child, listening to De Falla’s ‘Dance of the Game of Love.’”

  “Another compulsion? Fascinating,” Sylvie said. “And very welcome,” she whispered. “I love fulfilling sexual fantasies, especially such an old one and so long unfulfilled. Give me your secret!” Sylvie found this very exciting and after a time, she screamed so loud that an owl swept past and screeched in response.

  “Now we’re turning on the animals,” Alex said.

  “I’m only showing a good example. That one was a bird of prey who wanted to make war and not love.” Sylvie then looked up at the stars and moon while loving Alex’s hands and mouth. At some point, they fell asleep in one another’s arms.

  In the morning light, they washed up and then looked at one another silently. What will Alex come up with now? Sylvie thought. What on earth will Sylvie do next? Alex thought. They smiled and lay down again, looking like co-conspirators.

  “What was it like for you to be ravished?” Sylvie asked.

  “Loving and craving and drinking and thirsting and spilling all the water in the world and craving and loving and laughing and sleeping, then dreaming. Life, in other words. How will you ever paint it?”

  “There were no images in my mind at all, though it’s implicit in all my paintings. Maybe it will just be a black circular line on a blindingly white background.”

  “I’m crazy about you,” Alex said.

  “I love you madly.”

  “Marry me in Spain.”

  “I will, but not this trip. Come live with me in Paris first.”

  “I will, ecstatically, and get more work done than ever before.”

  “Funny about that. Great sex is a turn-on for creative work, too.” Sylvie softly touched Alex’s genitals. “It’s getting dangerous. We’re declaring our love and making commitments again. Dangerous! Are you afraid?”

  “Oh, yes! I already know you’ll want to make love at night in the Louvre or somewhere on the Eiffel Tower or in that famous cemetery.”

  “The Arc de Triomphe, definitely. I want to have orgasms at night at every French patriotic monument. I am a patriot, you know.”

  “That’s one the military didn’t think of.” Alex began to make love to Sylvie orally, and then hummed the entirety of “La Marseillise,” the French national anthem, pressed to her clitoris, creating a vibration. Her voice, pressing and humming, sounded like a kazoo.

  Sylvie screamed, and then burst into laughter that did not end. When she could finally speak, she said, “That was a lovely sensation that I could never have imagined. You terrible brute! You’ve beaten me at my own game!”

  IN THE EVENING, Ruth and Monserrat sat in the living room beside Idoia Ibarruri, a sociology professor and socialist councillor in the Basque country. She had arrived earlier just as Monserrat had described to Ruth, through underground Civil War tunnels and their entrances to the house. A woman was in the secret lookout tower on the roof, watching all activity on the street and another was close to the house. Idoia had the typical Basque features; she was small with short dark hair, gold earrings and a formidable nose that she was not self-conscious about. A few women were present who Monserrat had carefully screened, professors and writers, several from the Basque country. All admired Idoia’s political career and courage, and they talked very little, treating her as an honored guest and woman to be protected.

  “I love it here,” Idoia said. “This is more freedom than I have anywhere else in Spain.” She smiled and brushed a few tears from her eyes.

  “Is it getting any better?” Monserrat asked. “So many ETA soldiers are in jail now.”

  “Ah! No, it’s actually worse. They’re all taking university correspondence courses in jail to think up new ways of killing me. I still have three offices, so they can’t assume only one place could be bombed. There are cardboard boxes all over the floor at them all; it’s a mess wherever I work. I still have two bodyguards so they can’t assume only one could be killed. I still don’t use the elevator and of course, I’m as far-sighted as ever.” There were sympathetic murmurs from the room; everyone knew ETA had tried to bomb her office, put a bomb on an elevator she regularly used, and the police had detected one plan with instructions that said read, “she’s so far-sighted that you can just go right up to her and shoot her in the head.”

  “The doors of my armored car hurt my arms. I’m so furious and envious when I see how freely the nationalists live. All the socialists and conservatives have to take precautions as elaborate as mine. It just makes me so mad. At rare, rare moments, it’s actually funny. ETA has been calling me ‘socialist whore’ again. Apparently, they think that redistribution of income, which we’ve never actually supported, applies to sex, too.” She smiled through tears.

  “But aren’t there some friends, too, people you’re close to?” Monserrat asked, a look of pain on her face.

  Idoia looked down, even more desolate. “I’ve had both men and women as lovers, you know. I’ve never told you that, but I have. But eventually . . . they’re all frightened off by the death threats. Those bombs will kill anyone with me, too. So, I’m alone with my bodyguards, paid employees. That’s cold comfort.”

  “What do you take strength from?” Ruth asked.

  “It all goes very deep; it’s in the bone. There are nothing but militants and trade unionists on both sides of the family. La Pasionaria was a cousin of my parents, and she once lived in our basement during the Civil War. There are very powerful women on both sides of the conflict. You know how violent La Tigresa is, and they say Riano has killed twenty-three people.
We are very strong women, matriarchal according to the legends.”

  The women felt the need to distract Idoia from her suffering. Suddenly, one was playing the txistu, a Basque flute, and another responded with a small drum. Idoia smiled and relaxed, sinking deeper into the sofa. “Thank you!” she said. “How I love this house! There’s a bit of the Basque country in such a cosmopolitan atmosphere. I take strength from you, too.” She reached over and squeezed the hands of the two musicians.

  All the women rose spontaneously and squeezed her hands. “We’re not afraid to be with you, ever,” one woman said.

  “You’ll be safe with us,” said another.

  Idoia smiled through tears, and her mood instantly changed. “This won’t go on forever,” she said with sudden determination. “It will be resolved, somehow, and I can live again. Another thing happened that was funny in a terrible way,” she said. “ETA tried to bomb me when I spoke at the new museum, the Guggenheim, in Bilboa. They were trying to lift the bomb into a forty-three-foot tall sculpture of a puppy by Jeff Koons. The police found out, and a policeman fired his gun at them and got killed; that part was awful. We saw him die. But, it was intended for me, and I wondered what on earth they would have said in my obituary.”

  “Death by exploding puppy?” offered one of the writers with an appalled look on her face, and everyone laughed. Idoia smiled and looked relaxed. “Tell us the story of your mother,” said the same writer.

  Curiosity shone in Idoia’s eyes. “Whatever for?”

  “We’ve recently discovered that this part of our lives is very important.”

  “They’ve been telling the stories of their mothers for the last few evenings here,” Monserrat said. “It has been a revelation.”

  Idoia relaxed again and sank further back in the sofa. Now she looked like any other woman at Monserrat’s. “Well . . . we lived in a very old caserio, a wide, three-story stone house with a sloping roof. It was the kind of house you see most often in the Basque country. The people used one floor for livestock, one for grain, and the last for the family’s living space. We weren’t farmers, so we lived everywhere in it and had a lot of space. We were leftist political activists, but my father worked as a police sergeant.