The King in the Tree

by Steven Millhauser

  Sometimes Don Juan had the sensation that every drop of his bright blood was being replaced by thick, dark smoke. Sometimes he felt tired in an unfamiliar way. He had had moments of tiredness before, the kind of bone-deep tiredness that comes after weeks of excess; then he would withdraw to his rooms, admitting no one but a devoted servant, only to emerge in two or three days, filled with energy and ferocious with desire, as if he wished to seize the world in his fist for breakfast. But this was no fit of sensual exhaustion, no temporary lull in the rush of his vigor. It was something else, something akin to tiredness that wasn’t tiredness—as if a little crack, like a tiny flaw in crystal, had appeared deep within him and begun to spread. He was not bored. Don Juan didn’t know whether he loved women, but he knew that he loved the pursuit and conquest of women, loved the feeling that he was following pleasure to the farthest edges of his nature. No, he felt restless in some other way, dissatisfied deep in his blood; and he began to feel that he was looking for something, though he didn’t know what it was, exactly, or where he might find it.

  He had planned to stay in Venice for a week or two, but he had remained for nearly a year. What bound him was the shimmer of the place, the sense of a world given over to duplication and dissolution: the stone steps going down into the water and joining their own reflection seemed to invite you down into a watery kingdom of forbidden desires, while the water trembling in ripples of light on the stone facades and the arches of ancient bridges turned the solid world into nothing but air and light, an illusion, a wizard’s spell. It was a fragile, trembling world that might vanish at any moment—and perhaps that was the secret of the feverish life that began at night, when women wearing the masks of wolves and birds of prey beckoned from passing gondolas, while torchlight rippled in the black water and dark figures disappeared into doorways. Venetian women were out for pleasure, and Don Juan had bedded so many of them that he sometimes had the sense that Venice was an immense brothel composed of watery corridors and floating bedrooms hung with murky mirrors and paintings of swooning women ravished by centaurs. At other times, leaning back against the cushions of his gondola, gliding under stone balconies along narrow, sinister canals that suddenly opened into broad waterways alive with crowds on bridges, pleasure parties in gondolas, the tremor of jewels in torchlight, laughter and music everywhere, and now and then an ambiguous cry, perhaps of a young girl being thrown down in a doorway or a man being stabbed in a crooked alley, it seemed to Don Juan that he knew exactly where he was: he was on the black, fiery lake he had seen one day in a church fresco, a priestly vision of the damned that he, Don Juan Tenorio, who in a moment would step into the gondola of a woman wearing the mask of a leering satyr, preferred to call A Vision of Paradise.

  Here conquest had been easy—perhaps too easy. Although not every Venetian woman was by profession a whore, the kinds of resistance he had encountered were, with a few refreshing exceptions, entirely conventional and perfunctory. A married woman who set out with the intention of giving herself to the notorious Don Juan would lower her eyes, turn her face to one side to avoid a full kiss, and push away the hand resting on her carefully half-bared breasts; sometimes tears of remorse would form in eyes already clouding over with desire. Under such easygoing conditions Don Juan, who liked nothing better than overcoming a fierce resistance, by force if necessary, found himself contriving difficulties that Venetian society failed sufficiently to provide. He would abduct a woman and lead her blindfolded and weeping to a room so dark that she could not see his face; he would frighten willing victims with a show of rage, so that their bodies stiffened and he had to possess them brutally. Sometimes he disguised himself as a gondolier, or a humble glassblower, or a Greek sailor in a red cap. In order to animate the game, he occupied not only a fashionable palazzo on the Grand Canal, but also a modest set of rooms in a mean alley, in always shifting decors intended to support the role he happened to be playing. That sense of playing a part began to exasperate him, and deepened his mood of discontent; even when he reverted to Don Juan, his legend trailed after him like a heavy velvet cloak. One black-eyed beauty had asked him whether it was true that a famous street in Seville was populated entirely by women who had given birth to his bastards. Don Juan, confirming it with a bow, wondered if it might be true.

  A recent escapade continued to disturb him. He had passed a brilliantly successful night, making separate assignations with the handsome wife of a spice merchant and her beautiful daughter, and ravishing each of them an hour apart in his private gondola, which had been fitted with a small cabin hung with blood-red curtains. He had then followed a dark, narrow canal that led to an unfamiliar part of the city, where he climbed a flight of watery steps to a maze of high chambers and marble stairways rising to the third-floor bedroom of a silk draper’s wife. She awaited him in her curtained bed with an anxious face and a transparent nightgown. In the candlelight her dark-ringed nipples resembled the open mouths and thrust-out tongues of a pair of gargoyles he had glimpsed that morning as he glided past a church. She protested that the hour was late, that her husband would return at any moment, that she was a respectable woman, the mother of a beautiful little boy; Don Juan disrobed without answering her chatter, and her protests had changed to cries of pleasure when there was a sound of heavy footsteps on the stairs. Don Juan considered remaining on top of the wife and killing the husband when he drew aside the curtain. He changed his mind and began to dress without haste as the footsteps grew closer. He had just fastened his sword belt and placed his great hat on his head when the door handle began to turn. Juan removed his hat and bowed to his inamorata, sweeping his plumes across the stone floor. As the door burst open to reveal the silk merchant wearing the mask of a weeping clown, Don Juan turned to the man and bowed again, a long, slow, insolently calm bow, then sprang to the window. It was a warm night—a good night for a swim. The weeping clown drew his sword, shouted “Thief! Murderer!” and rushed forward as Juan leaped from the window. As he plunged through the night air toward the canal, where his gondolier waited some twenty feet away, Don Juan saw everything very distinctly: he saw an orange peel floating on the moonlit black water, he saw a blue satin slipper on a stone step lapped by ripples, he saw, in a window across the canal, a figure in the mask of a haughty queen fondling the naked breast of a woman in the mask of a grimacing monkey, and at the same time he saw, in his mind, the merchant’s wife with her eyes widening in terror, a vein in the neck of the silk merchant as he came into the glow of the candle, the big sapphire glittering on his finger, and he saw himself, falling as if slowly through the night, holding on to his plumed hat with one hand—and it seemed to him that he had seen these images before, and that he was nothing but a third-rate actor in a provincial troupe traveling from small town to small town with a play called Don Juan Tenorio—and a sorrow came over him as he understood that he had finished with Venice, that he must change his life.

  Like many men who prey on women, Don Juan had occasional fantasies of a different life. Sometimes he imagined himself a stern, pale scholar bent over a volume of Aristotle in his library, while the brilliant blue light coming through the tall windows changed to plum blue to dove gray to black. At other times he was a humble monk, hoeing a row of peas in the monastery garden. These idle fancies lasted no longer than the next sight of a pretty girl—or an ugly girl with an interesting walk. Don Juan had no illusions about his nature: he craved pleasure, intense pleasure, and the most extreme of all pleasures was to be found in the bodies of women. If he felt a darkness lying across his life, a dissatisfaction deep in his blood, it was because he had become aware of a slight diminution, a lack of zest. It might be true that the women of Venice were a little too willing to be debauched, but it was also true that the most fastidious women had always proved Venetian in the end. And if they did not, and his blood was up, he asked no permission and never looked back. No, what he needed wasn’t a different life, but a more intense version of this one—a life of sensual pleasure uncorru
pted by vague dissatisfactions and elusive ennuis. What he longed for was more desire, a madness of desire, a journey into feeling so intense that he would ride through himself like a conqueror of unknown inner countries. He had perhaps become a little stale. And as he lay in the darkness of his curtained bed, with his arms crossed over his chest and his eyes closed, like the stone effigy of a king, Don Juan tried to see the new life that he knew awaited him, if only he could learn to see in his own dark.

  One night an idea came to him, at first vaguely, then with startling precision. He would leave the south, the lush, soft Mediterranean world where women ripened in the sun like oranges hanging over a whitewashed wall, and he would travel north. Don Juan was a child of Seville, who had always loved the cities of southern Spain and France and Italy; he had never been farther north than Paris. He would go farther than that— he would go all the way to England. England!—that legendary land composed entirely of fog, through which glimmered the crowns of stern kings. It was a land of blond-haired seamen in their high-prowed ships—or was he confusing it with Norway? But precisely what he liked about England was that he didn’t know how to imagine the place; it was an insubstantial land, a cloudland in which he seemed to see pale-haired queens walking in dim gardens. In fact he had met a number of Englishmen on his travels and enjoyed several of their wives, but somehow those very substantial creatures—the broad-shouldered wine merchant traveling in Verona, the hawk-nosed viscount with disdainful eyes who had proved to have a passion for Roman ruins and thirteen-year-old boys, the buxom, lusty wife of an apothecary who had sung him an old song of which he’d understood only the word “never” but which had disturbed him with its melancholy beauty—all these flesh-and-blood emissaries of England seemed to have nothing to do with that mythical northern land of kings and castles and pale princesses gazing down from high towers.

  He had forgotten the invitation, but it came back to him now: the odd, likable traveler he had met one night at the beginning of his stay in Venice. Don Juan had been gliding along in his gondola at three in the morning, when he’d seen a strange sight: a man standing in a gondola staring up at the sky through a telescope mounted on a three-legged support. Don Juan had drawn up alongside him and addressed him in Italian, which he knew perfectly, and the man had replied in an equally fluent Italian colored by a faint accent impossible to place. He had, he said, been looking at the moon. Don Juan’s interest was aroused; the man proved amicable, and soon the two were drifting about in Don Juan’s gondola, while the man showed him the wonders of the universe. His name was Augustus Hood. He was traveling through Italy with his wife and her sister. He was one of those round-faced, plump-cheeked Englishmen who seem boyish at thirty, with a small mouth and very wide eyes, as if life for him were a perpetual surprise. Within ten minutes he had impressed Don Juan with his flow of easy erudition, his knowledge of a hundred curious subjects such as the manufacture of cannon and the methods of irrigation under the pharaohs, his travels to China, Egypt, and Constantinople, his modesty, his energy, his unlikely mixture of man-of-the-world and earnest schoolboy. He asked Don Juan questions he had never been asked before—about the manufacture of Seville lace, the shearing of merino sheep, the arrangement of rooms in his childhood home. He was leaving Venice the next day, on his way to Rome and perhaps Sicily. He would return to England in a month or so; he invited Don Juan to visit him at Swan Park in Somerset. His most recent passion was landscape gardening, and he would like to show his new friend a few little things he had accomplished in that line. The Englishman had stayed with him in the gondola until dawn, betraying no sign of tiredness, and though Don Juan had quickly forgotten Augustus Hood and his telescope, he remembered everything now in immense detail. He would go to England. He would visit Swan Park, in the mist-filled shadowy North. He might stay a week or a century. He would keep his rented palazzo on the Grand Canal, leaving behind all his servants but one. It was crucial that he take with him as little as possible of his former life.

  That night Don Juan dreamed that he and Augustus Hood were walking in his father’s orchard on the bank of the Guadalquivir. Hood was pointing up at an orange tree with his walking stick, which he handed to Juan, who raised it to his eye like a telescope and looked at an orange that suddenly leered at him and stuck out its tongue, and when he swung the telescope at it he saw that he was holding in his hand a gondolier’s oar, he was rowing through the watery spaces between trees hung with jewels, and the next day he left Venice and headed north.

  II

  “Adam was the first gardener,” Augustus Hood remarked, stepping from a cypress grove onto a grass path that led to a distant grotto.

  “And this, then, is a second Eden,” Juan gallantly replied, sweeping out an arm. They were speaking Italian; Juan held in one hand a small English grammar bound in buckram.

  “In English—” Mary Hood began, in English.

  “Before or after the Fall, Sir?” her sister Georgiana remarked in French, and Juan, turning to look at her, again had the irritating sense that he couldn’t tell whether her remark was in earnest or whether she was being mischievous in some elusive English way.

  “In inglese,” Mary Hood said, and then returned to English, “we say ‘Eden.’ ‘Eeeee-den.’ You see: ’tis the same word. La stessa parola.”

  The sisters, each wearing a flat straw hat with a low crown tied round with silk ribbons, stepped onto the path rippling with sunlight and leafshade. The front and back of the wide hat-brims were turned up, and the edges of the lace undercaps showed beneath.

  “That, Georgiana, depends entirely on the divine plan,” Augustus Hood mysteriously remarked. “Why, here’s a jolly fellow. Look! An usignuolo.”

  “Nightingale,” Mary Hood said. “Night. In. Gale.”

  “Pouring forth its melodious song,” Georgiana said.

  And indeed a nightingale was pouring forth its song from a low branch at the shady border of the grove. Hood walked quietly up to the bird and, to Juan’s surprise, took it gently in his hand. The squire of Swan Park was continually surprising him.

  “Here,” Hood said, handing the bird to Juan. The nightingale sat very still in his hand—was this a habit of English birds? “I made it myself,” Hood continued. The bird was covered with real feathers; under one wing was a small pin that operated a spring.

  “Your husband is a man of many surprises,” Don Juan remarked to Mary Hood, who smiled pleasantly at him and lowered her hat-shaded eyes, while Georgiana Reynolds looked at him with a faint smile that might have meant “And you, Sir, are a great fool” or “What an amusing thing to say” or anything else or nothing at all. Juan examined the bird and returned it to Augustus Hood, who replaced it carefully on the branch and led them up the path.

  But Swan Park was in truth a surprising place, a realm of wonders, an artful Eden, of which Augustus Hood was the presiding genius. He had designed every feature of his two hundred acres of gardens, including the grottoes, the cascades, the mounts, the serpentine streams, the sudden openings onto distant prospects, the seats under shady trees, the ruined priory, the Temple of Flora, the scenes arranged to remind the wanderer of paintings by Salvator Rosa, Nicolas Poussin, and Claude Lorrain. Beyond the gardens lay four thousand acres of parkland, which Hood had also designed and which he had promised to show his guest in the coming days. The brilliant art of English landscape gardening had swiftly replaced the dreary old rigidities of the continental style, but in Hood’s view the revolution had barely begun, and in any case was not sufficiently understood even by those in the vanguard of the movement. It was all very well to turn away from artifice in the direction of the natural and wild, but those wild prospects, those tumbling cascades and rugged grottoes, were all the work of ingenious artificers. You might say that the wilder the prospect, the more cunning the hand of the maker. If the movement toward the natural were taken to its logical conclusion, there would be no distinction whatever between Nature and the English garden. No, the true way was to assert art
ifice even in the act of paying homage to Nature.

  “Ingenious, certainly,” Georgiana was saying. “But is the real nightingale any less wonderful? Can anyone possibly believe that Nature herself is without design? For my part—”

  “You must forgive us,” Mary Hood said. “We English are rather fond of argument.”

  “I am not arguing, Mary, I am merely saying that in this age of mechanical ingenuity—”

  Don Juan listened with delight to the voices of the Englishwomen, one speaking Italian, the other French, a language he understood nearly as well—the one with a gentle, musical voice, the other more energetic and abrupt, reaching higher and lower in the scale—while greenish shadows rippled down onto the cream-colored and sky-blue silk of their hooped gowns. It was a brilliant summer afternoon. Everything interested him: the wide, forearm-length cuffs of Hood’s coat, the tight horizontal side-curls of his wig, the figure of Moses striking water from a rock at the top of a cascade, the silk ribbons around the sisters’ necks, the Rotunda with its telescope and its view of the river Ymber, the Garden of Shakespeare with its sixty-four statues of comical and tragical characters in dramatic attitudes, Hood’s explanation of the construction of a rill. At the top of the path they entered the cool grotto, passed out the other side into a picturesque meadow bordered by a wood, and walked along a winding path that somehow led back to the great house.

  Dinner was served at four o’clock on the broad lawn that sloped down to the Ymber. Osiers trailed their branches in the slow brown water; a few swans swam flickering through sun and shade. On the grass by the riverbank was a stone bench on which lay a yellow silk pillow, a fan with ivory sticks, and a book bound in red morocco. A footman stood before Don Juan, holding out a silver bowl containing bunches of grapes so purple and glistening that they looked like a painting of a bowl of grapes, each with its careful highlight. Juan dropped a grape into his mouth, hesitating a moment, as if it might be an object of wax, before biting down and feeling the juice burst against his tongue—and while Mary Hood smiled at her husband under the shade of her hat, and Georgiana brushed an ant from her blue silk shoulder, and the pleasant voice of Augustus Hood was saying that a universe was not precisely like a pocket watch, and beyond the river a field of hayricks lay burning in the sun, Don Juan felt a rich sense of peace, of relaxation, as if for a long time he had been clenching unknown muscles. He felt ten years old again, listening to his father explaining how the flower ripens into the fruit, in the orchard that went down to the Guadalquivir. Venice seemed a dark dream, a fever-vision from which he had wakened to a new morning. Don Juan had no intention of sparing the women— idly he wondered whether Mary or Georgiana would lead the way—but for the first time in his life he was in no hurry.