Godhead

by Hansen, Jalex; Alexander, Writing as Jordan

  The next morning the trucks came alive before dawn to finish their destruction. Hour by hour the horizon grew closer, until I could see the temple from my veranda. The sun set over a tattered war zone. Matilde had not come back. Dante had not been seen. The men followed the orders he had left them. A foreman reported to him on the company owned airwaves. The men returned to their tents at dark, to drink, and play cards, and argue.

  I left my empty house and returned to my vigil at Julián’s window. This night, he had moved his work closer to the window, and shortly after I arrived at my place in the hibiscus he lit a candle and set it on the table nearby.

  So I was allowed this then, this tender audience behind glass, where I could watch, but not touch him, not speak to him, not throw any stones that would disrupt this fragile surrender, these hours of separateness together.

  Inside he was illuminated by vagabond moonlight, moving with an odd rhythm and grace. His hands fluttered in tender ministration to a sculpture he seemed to be creating out of the night. He interacted with the clay in a dance of light and friction, the piece under his hands slowly becoming something symbiant and breathing. I was watching the construction of the human soul. He needed only to send it up to God, who would clothe it in flesh and bone, and dense smoldering ravenous heart. The arms reached hungrily toward the heavens, toward the air, the sun, the stars. There was something in the musculature and articulation that seemed to suggest a pleading, a seeking of mercy. Below these arms were the suggestions of shoulder, soft rounded womanly shoulders, tired from the strain of reaching.

  Outside, I lifted my own arms toward the sky, seeing the muscle in the gibbous moon, the fine hairs, I felt the warmth of lifting them. Julián ran his hands along the sculpture’s arms and rested them on the shoulders. He pulled them back suddenly and blew out the candle, leaving me alone in darkness with my palms turned toward God.

  In my house Dante waited, his feet propped up on the coffee table, a glass of port in his hand.

  He said, “I don’t enjoy doing your job for you.”

  I furrowed my brows at him, lifted one shoulder.

  He gestured toward my bedroom and took another gulp of port.

  At the foot of my bed was a tall rectangular phallic thrust of rock, a stone taller than myself, carved on either side with shapes and symbols I did not recognize, as well as a grotesque caricature of a man’s face with animal features and an elongated nose. I ran my fingers in its grooves and shivered, remembering tracing patterns in the dark of the temple. These felt much the same and I was glad for having discovered them first in the darkness where I could feel more of their beauty than their sinister qualities.

  This piece was furtive somehow, a locked box of secrets, designed to keep me out. I did not want to sleep with it here towering over me.

  Dante said. “This is real art,” He lounged in the doorway slurring porty breath. “art that transcends its makers.”

  “What is this thing? A mile marker?”

  “You haven’t completely lost your sense of humor,” he said. “It’s a stele. A big story book, or a postcard from the past, if you prefer. And it’s your responsibility for the time being.” He edged closer, ran his finger down the same groove I had just traced. “Don’t make me wait up for you again.”

  “Where is Matilde?” I do not know why I asked, it was no concern of his, but something urged me, pushed me to ask him and watch his reaction.

  He looked at me askance, one green eye squinting. “She is not here,” he said. “She must not desire my company tonight.”

  He shuffled toward the door, seeming tired to me or perhaps just ballasted down with port. “Goodnight Isabel,” he called over his shoulder. “Get some rest. Tomorrow we burn.”

  PART FOUR

  THE WAGER

  Chapter Ten

  BRIMSTONE

  In the morning they set the fields afire.

  The sun rose clear and angry and burned a pale yellow light through the dishwater scrim of smoke and soot. The sky was the color of a rotten banana and thick with acrid debris.

  I woke with a burn in my throat, and stones in my blood. Dante too was irritable, coughing and spitting phlegm into the brass wastebaskets that Matilde had not returned to empty.

  The day grew hotter, stifling and dulling everything around the edges. Dante lay in the living room, his shirt open, his mound of belly glistening with perspiration. The smell of the fire was a worm that bored its way from my nose into my brain.

  Below in the fields the men wore handkerchiefs over their noses and mouths. When they took them off to drink or spit, they had beards of clean brown skin.

  “I cannot stand this infernal stink,” Dante finally announced around noon. “Let’s go out.”

  “But the stele, you just want to leave it?”

  “Lock your door and do not bother about it. No one knows it’s here. Matilde is not coming back.” He sounded final, resolute. “And you have let others pay for your crimes this week, so you have earned a reprieve. Come, get dressed, we will go to church and then we will go out on the water, we will invite the good Father.”

  I shook my head, “No not Julián. I don’t want him with us.”

  “I wish I could be flattered, but I know your motives are pure for once. I think you are desperately in need of prayer, your pagan blood is luring you away from the one true God.”

  “You mock everything.”

  “Naturally. I have found nothing worth taking seriously.”

  I was terrified to walk into that church with Dante. There were a hundred things people would be thinking, any one of them plausible. I knew he did not care, that he was tempting my fate, not his own. This was just something better to do than sit around and watch the world incinerate. It was a holiday away from Hell.

  I dressed in a modest button up and stuck my bikini in my handbag. I pulled on white gloves and tried not to touch anything on the way out so that the residuals of the fire would not be seen.

  I could still smell smoke in my clothes when I got to church. We came in the back door with the service already started and I was certain that everyone in there knew what I was doing, that they could smell my treachery. Julián hesitated when we entered, his head cocked, his nostrils flaring. He could tell that something unusual was occurring by the reaction of the congregation, but he could not sense me here in the back, could not scent the rain under the whiff of brimstone around me.

  Dante wore buttery soft linen the color of the sea, and a jaunty Panama hat. He looked cool and at ease, he could have been holding lemonade in one hand and a cigar in the other.

  Julián picked up where he had apparently left off. He read from the Song of Solomon. “Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse; thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes, with one chain of thy neck.”

  It was meant to be allegory, to speak of Christ’s relationship with his bride the Church, but as he continued I began to doubt the prudence of the ancient church fathers including it in the canon. If Christ had felt this way, he would never have died a virgin on the cross.

  “How fair is thy love, my sister, my spouse! How much better is thy love than wine! and the smell of thine ointments than all spices!”

  He continued to read without stopping, without explanation as the congregation shifted and sighed, and unbuttoned their blouses, or hitched their skirts up an inch or two. Julián had quite flagrantly chosen the most inappropriate passage he could find, or perhaps he chose it for its very fittingness. But the way he read on and on, telling the story of the black Shulamite and her kingly lover, his voice rising and falling with the passion of a good Baptist, did not leave room for a reprimand.

  Beside me, Dante snickered through the oration, while those near enough to hear moved away as best they could, pressed in on each other.

  Julián finished into a thick steamy silence, on top of which Dante’s low laughter sat like cherries on a sundae. “Thou that dwellest in the gardens, the companions hearken to t
hy voice: cause me to hear it.”

  “Make haste my beloved, and be thou like a roe or a young stag upon the mountains of spices.”

  He closed the Bible. “Choose your beloved carefully.” he said. That was all. And then church was over.

  Thankfully Dante did not linger to press his luck, but back in the car I found us navigating and reconfiguring the country path back to Julián’s that had been built only for bicycles.

  We waited on the porch not speaking to each other until Julián came squeaking up on his bicycle.

  “Rousing sermon Father!” Dante called off the porch.

  “I was surprised to see you there.” Julián was blunt and wary, reaching for Dante’s outstretched hand as if it were holding a serpent.

  “Isabel suggested I might need a dose of God.”

  “It was hot,” I said.

  The nights that Julián and I had spent separated by glass and darkness while he sculpted were a dream now, and I did not know where to look.

  “I smell the fire,” Julián replied without expression. “It must be miserable on the plantation.”

  “We came to take you out on the water with us, the boat is loaded with ice, and the water is blue and deep.”

  Julián said, “I would be a fool not to accept.”

  I was surprised by this. I had anticipated that he would have sense enough to refuse. Ultimately he was as intrigued as I was, and hid his interest in a presumed air of obligation and priestly duty. He agreed to come along to mind our souls for us.

  He left us waiting on the porch while he changed. Dante seemed not to notice the slight. Julián returned in his casual clothes, faded denim, and worn boots, and on his wrist a bracelet woven from many colorful threads. I was immediately glad he was going, that denim shirt and his graceful reaching walk all seemed familiar and comforting. I had been returned to his good graces then.

  In the dinghy our knees bounced against each other as we jostled across the tide, and he did not flinch.

  On the boat he chatted amiably with the armed men and followed Dante as he showed him his craft. He did not go into the hold, but instead was brought upwards to the captain’s deck where he ran his fingers over the instrument panel and sounded the foghorn.

  For lunch there were cold shrimps and firm avocados nestled in ice, and tea in frozen glasses. The men talked of distant politics, and finance, and rumors of changes at the Vatican. They spoke with a familiar ease. I was growing sleepy, lulled by the rhythm of the water, the gentle cool air, and the rise and fall of the waves of their voices. I walked unsteadily to the bathroom and removed my stockings and then found myself in Dante’s bedroom again. This time the bed was made, and I crawled across the sheets, the cool satin not at all like the hot red color. I lay with my eyes closed. This was the bed of the Shulamite, the secret chamber, the inner sanctum. I dozed off and woke with the gentle bumping of the hull against sand bars. No one had come looking for me.

  The satin had grown hot under my body and it stuck in damp patches to my skin. I peeled myself out of the bed and went on deck where we were within a short trip on the dinghy to a caye that lay in the ocean, a smooth white crescent moon.

  “Snake’s Caye,” Dante told me. “I have convinced the Father that today is the day you should swim in the ocean.”

  I would have protested if it had not looked so inviting, the twisted scroll of sand, the cool blue tongues of water. I wanted to immerse myself in that blue and white and green. To drift down and lay at the bottom in a depression of sand the shape of my body, and watch the fish swim overhead.

  I was sent back downstairs to change into my bikini, which though it was generous, in my present company suddenly seemed immodest. I found a shirt in Dante’s closet, a splashy number covered in flowers, and fruit, and flamingos, and pulled it over myself.

  On deck Julián was climbing over the edge, getting into the rubber boat. Dante reached a hand to me to help me up. “You look like Carmen Miranda’s hat in that shirt,” he said to me.

  “There is no accounting for taste,” I answered. “Aren’t you coming?”

  “Three’s a crowd, wouldn’t you agree?” His eyes were lit by an angle of sunlight, an odd emerald green.

  “Dante…”

  “Go frolic,” he said sending me down the ladder. “Get it all out of your system if you can.”

  I steered us to shore with the small outboard motor which droned too loudly for us to talk comfortably. We pulled the boat ashore and collapsed in the warm milky sand with smiles on our faces.

  “Does it look as good as it feels?” he asked me.

  “Almost.” I sat up and watched the Sea King anchored and patient in the distance. Dante stood on the bowsprit with a pair of binoculars trained in our direction. “Julián, let’s walk around the caye, that man can see better than both of us.”

  He stood beside me and took my hand following me around the necklace of beach through a scattering of palms and over a rocky promontory that blocked the Sea King from our view. The rocks formed a sort of grotto, a curved volcanic ear that caught the sound of the gentle surf and held it cupped around us. The sand reached out into the ocean and scooped it toward the beach making a quiet little bay the color of aquamarines, and blue marbles, and old glass windows.

  “Sometimes I wish I could escape the watchful eyes of God so easily,” Julián said standing on the edge of the bay with his long brown feet half in the cool water and half on the scalding sand.

  I was afraid to answer. I was confused. Maybe I wasn’t in his good graces at all, maybe he had stepped down into my limbo. His being here was a surrender, an admission of fallibility, of his human failings.

  Without a word I took off the obnoxious shirt, and then slowly, deliberately, undid my bikini and stood before him naked. I tested him without his knowing it, tempted him with the vibration of my body in the air around him. “I am going in the water,” I said.

  I ran across the few feet that separated me from deep wet release and dove in. The water was shallow here close to the caye and I had to stand to make any progress out into deeper water. As I walked beyond the promontory I could see half of the Sea King again, but I did not see Dante, and at any rate I did not care. He was too far away to touch me here.

  Behind me Julián slogged against the tide catching up. Soon the water was over my hips, and then my breasts, and then I had to pick up my feet. It was warm and refreshing at the same time, filling all my spaces, washing through my pores, rinsing the smoke from my hair. Julián swam beside me with clean swift strokes. We gave ourselves wordlessly over to the water, orbiting each other but kept distant by the forces of nature. When my limbs grew heavy and the water began to chill, I headed back for the beach where I stood in the sun with my eyes closed painting my lids red.

  Julián stood beside me his eyes clear and open, not seeing but feeling me acutely. He shifted where he stood, rippled, and a chill of gooseflesh ran up his legs, and chest, and arms. “How fair and pleasant you are, O love with your delights! This stature of yours is like a palm tree, And your breasts like its clusters. I said, ‘I will go up to the palm tree, I will take hold of its branches.’ Let now your breasts be like clusters of the vine, The fragrance of your breath like apples, And the roof of your mouth like the best wine.”

  I took two steps toward him, so close that we could feel the returning heat in each other’s bodies. I leaned forward and delicately, impelled by my destiny as woman, succubus, dark panther, I licked the salt from the skin of his throat. It tasted of shame and willingness.

  He felt my flesh pressed against his, was aware of my nakedness all this time next to him in the cloak of water. His chin tilted up to the sky, and I made my own collar, encircling his throat with kisses.

  He sucked my tongue into his mouth like the draw of the tide, held it with his own, broke his orbit and collided against me. We hung there, the wind drying the sea to frost on our skin, our mouths and lips pulling, competing against each other, each trying to swallo
w the other, to own them completely. He pulled away from me at last, but held me still with his hands though they trembled around my arms.

  “I am my beloved’s and his desire is toward me,” I whispered against his pulse, his bare and impious skin.

  He thrust me away at that, I had chosen wrongly, I was not sanctified enough to use his holy words. They were cold water thrown in his face. He took off his own wet shirt and wrapped it around me where it clung and concealed. He staggered back the way we had come and I shouted at his back.

  “It was you! Your fault Julián. You agreed to come, you seduced me with the heat, and the ocean, and the Song of Songs. You wanted me to kiss you! You are only angry because you wanted it!”

  “Yes!” he roared, “Yes I wanted it, I want it still. You have been sent to torment me.” He continued back up the beach to the dinghy. “You are weak Isabei, like your mother. I took advantage of that when you were young...but it is that very weakness that has allowed you to be possessed by the devil.”

  “You sound crazy.”

  He swung around, caught my hair in his hand and dragged my face perilously close to his. “I am crazy now,” he said his voice calm and cool, and pitched so low I had to strain to hear it. “Madness and devotion go hand in hand, and if you are wise, you will not forget that.”

  He got into the boat and started the motor and I was sure he would have left me there if I had not jumped in. He was aboard the Sea King before the motor had gone silent.

  Dante reached down and hauled me aboard studying me. “You lost your shirt,” he said.

  I did not answer, and Julián remained cold and sullen on the foredeck staring into the waves.

  “Now you are both blind and mute,” Dante said casually as he poured himself a gin. He shrugged and sat in the captain’s chair and idly watched our return to the mainland.

  When we returned Julián to his house Dante said, “Thank you for coming Father. I hope it was an invigorating experience for you.”