They came to a torchlit region where Juan saw a great wall looming beyond a river of fire. From the other side of the wall rose a clamor of groans, the clanking of iron, the crack of lashes. “Stay close!” cried Hood, as they approached a stone bridge that led over the fiery water; halfway across he tossed over the rail a piece of paper, which turned orange and then black as it drifted down.
On the other shore they came to a dark-gleaming gate that rose high above their heads. Hood shouted into the air, over the rush of flaming water and the noise of clanking chains, and Juan saw at the top of the wall a high tower, where a dark figure stood. Hood explained that she was Tisiphone, one of the Furies, who guarded the entrance to Tartarus. Even as he spoke, the great doors began to open on shrieking hinges.
They entered Tartarus and soon came to the iron-railed rim of an enormous pit, where Juan looked down into blackness, lit here and there by small fires. From the pit rose cries and groans, the bang of iron, piercing shrieks, the rumble of stone. A railed flight of stone steps led downward. Hood, holding up his lantern, began the descent. When he turned to look back, motioning them to follow, Juan saw his cheeks glowing in the lantern light like red iron.
At the bottom he led them through the fire-crackling, smoky dark, past groaning men and women who lay on the ground, toward an alcove where the shadows of flames moved on the walls. Juan stepped up to the opening and saw a figure bound to a wheel of fire that turned slowly on an axle. The man, barely visible in the flames, screamed as he turned; his eyes glowed with a kind of weary horror. Mary put her hands over her eyes, while Georgiana turned disdainfully away, but Juan stared in melancholy fascination at the fiery man turning in torment on his hellish wheel.
The wheel began to turn more slowly; gradually it came to a stop. Almost upright, though still bound to the wheel, and wearing only a blouse and breeches, the man looked at the visitors and said: “I am Ixion.” With awkward dignity he bowed his head. “You see!” Hood cried above the groans and the clashes of iron. “ ’Tis false fire!” Juan, stricken with disappointment, asked Hood if Ixion might return to his torment, while Mary moved away and Georgiana said, “Sir, I see you have a taste for horrors.” And as the actor on the wheel began to turn and howl in agony, Juan watched for many minutes, until Mary tugged at his arm.
“But who is that?” Juan asked, as they came to a low wall of stone that enclosed an immense man who lay groaning on his back. A vulture sat on the giant’s open chest and tore at his liver. “Why, ’tis Tityus, the Euboean giant,” Hood cried, “who offended the gods by attempting the honor of Leto. Here he lies forever, while a vulture eats his liver, which grows again with each circle of the moon. I can explain the mechanism.” But Juan, not wanting to hear, moved a little away and watched as the vulture tore at the bloody liver, while the giant’s hands clenched and unclenched and his great lips stretched over his teeth.
“Let us leave this horrible place, Augustus!” Mary cried, as Juan strolled to a quieter region where, on a steep path, Sisyphus bent his fierce body against the great boulder pressing against him. Nearby, a bearded man with burning eyes stood up to his chin in a pool of black water. “Here’s a jolly fellow,” Hood was saying. “Behold Tantalus—a precious rogue, whom Virgil omits from his masked ball. ’Tis from Homer I fetched him hence.” Tantalus, licking his dry lips, bent to drink from the water, which sank away from him; and raising his weary head, he reached for the fruit that hung just beyond his grasp, his eyes dark with remorse and longing.
“ ’Tis well represented, Augustus,” Georgiana said. “But I do not much care to spend the whole of a summer afternoon walking in the bowels of the earth listening to ceaseless shrieks of torment.” And Juan, who would have liked nothing better, looked with regret at the cruel fruit, the vulture’s beak, the twisted mouths and hopeless eyes, as they made their way out of the pit and up the flight of steps.
“This way lies Elysium,” Hood said, leading them along the right-hand path. “I think you will prefer it, Georgiana.” Suddenly, around a bend, the path opened into a brilliantly lit realm of meadows and streams, of shady groves and river-banks. The ceiling was painted bright blue, with here and there a white cloud, blue-shadowed. A large lake held a scattering of islands.
“What a perfect place for tea!” exclaimed Mary. Hood, his cheeks flushed with pleasure, led them to the shore of the lake, where a smiling ferryman ushered them onto his boat and poled them to an island. Tea was served by a footman in livery under a spreading oak.
“Now tell me, by my soul!” Hood cried, lifting an arm. “What think you of my Paradise?”
“Oh, Augustus!” Mary cried. “I could stay here—oh, my!” Covering her mouth with a hand, she gave a little laugh. “Why, I almost said: forever.”
“Sir,” said Georgiana, “you look displeased, here in Elysium.”
“Madam,” Juan answered, “upon my word, ’tis all a wonder. And yet, I hope it may not strike you as fantastic, but some prefer Tartarus.”
At this Georgiana burst into laughter; Mary started to smile, forced herself to be serious, and suddenly began laughing uncontrollably; Hood laughed until tears poured from his eyes; and Juan, sitting on a cushioned chair in Elysium, surrounded by the good-natured laughter of friends, smiled tensely as he bent to sip his tea.
Two nights later he found himself pacing back and forth in his moonlit bedroom. As if idly he stepped to the open casement window. There he stood looking out at the sharp tree-shadows on the grass below and a distant glimmer of river. A moment later he sprang onto the ledge, climbed partway down the wall along the two projecting stones, and leaped lightly to the ground. Quietly he made his way around the guest wing to the sloping front lawn, which he followed down to the river. He walked among the osiers, pushing aside branches that made lines in the surface of the water. After a while he stopped, resting one hand on a broad osier branch at the height of his shoulder. With a sudden motion he pulled himself up onto the tree, and as he did so his arm remembered something from long ago, when as a boy he swung himself into an orange tree in his father’s orchard. Juan climbed several branches and settled halfway up, resting each leg along a separate branch. He sat looking out at the clear dark water on one side of his tree and, on the other side, the moon-bright house, sharply outlined against the blue-black sky. Up there, near the top of the slope, he became aware of two dim forms. They were drifting down toward the river. The long, full gowns glowed in the moonlight, and in the stillness he could hear the lap of river water against the bank, the cry of insects, a sharp bark from the kennels, the sound of silk rustling on grass.
“. . . mysterious message that you . . .”
“. . . do not wish to be overheard by . . .”
They began to walk along the osier path.
“. . . strangely, Mary. This urgent matter you speak of— does it really require nocturnal flight, hushed whispers, and perambulation beneath a canopy of stars?”
“ ’Tis not entirely for my sake that I—”
“Do you mean—”
“Rather, for mine,” Juan said, dropping lightly from the tree and sweeping his plumed hat to the ground. “If you would allow me but a single—”
“Is it the fashion in Seville, Sir, for men to jump out of trees?”
“In Seville, Madam, ’tis the fashion for men to jump out of clouds.”
“And in your cloudy Seville, Sir, has it never happened, that two women accosted at night have cried out for help? What say you to that, Sir?”
“Madam, ’tis I who am desperately in need of help, which you alone—”
“But where on earth is Mary?”
“Not far,” she called, invisible among the osiers.
“I fear I have deeply offended you.”
“My sister has offended me. Come, Sir, we can walk a little way, if you like.”
Juan, walking beside her along the osier path, was aware of nothing but the moonlight rippling over her silk gown and lace cap, as if she were dissolving i
nto the summer night. A melancholy exhilaration seized him: he was walking at night, alone, along the river, with a Georgiana who was nothing but the dream of a summer night—for how could it be otherwise? He had waited for this moment too feverishly, and now that it was here he could only walk, rippling beside her, a dream beside a dream. And that was good; that was as it should be. For when you are flesh and blood, Georgiana, then you keep me at a distance, with your cool smile and your eyes glancing away, but when you are a dream we can walk forever in the fleshdissolving night. And because everything is permitted in a dream, Don Juan walked close beside her, so that along with the smell of the river and the trees he could inhale the subtle scent of her face and hair; and bending his face to hers, he whispered the words, the dream-words, the foolish words that he had uttered ten thousand times without giving them a thought but that now, in his dream-walk by the river, seemed to be charged with a new, mysterious meaning: “I love you”— whispered them with such fervent quietness that he wondered whether he had only imagined them, there at the edge of the world. But at once Georgiana stiffened and drew back, saying, “I must go back now. Mary!”—and Juan, stung with the sharp sense of coming up from the bottom of the sea, heard the crushed-paper sound of her gown hurrying up the lawn and saw, as he turned to look after her, his hand suspended in the air, as though he had forgotten it.
The next day Georgiana kept to her room. She wasn’t feeling well, Mary reported, a little breathlessly, throwing him a look. In the unforgiving sunlight Juan rehearsed the events of the night with fascinated revulsion: the childish plan, the idiotic leap from the tree, the wordless walk, the breathed-out words that had affected Georgiana like a lash across the cheek— and again he saw himself leaning close to her, his eyes red with exhaustion and longing, an unhealthy flush in his cheek, a repulsive vein beating in his neck, and Georgiana stiffening, drawing back, and a look in her eyes—or had he imagined it?—of rage and sorrow.
The sight of Mary, eager to console him, her eyes heavy with sympathy, filled him with anger. In the morning he rode hard, in the open countryside. When he returned to the house he went up to his sitting room and flung himself across the sofa. He came down to dinner at four, saw that Georgiana was still absent, and returned to his rooms. All night Don Juan lay brooding in his bed, and the next day, when he tried to rise, it seemed to him that he was being held down by a great weight resting on his chest. As he lay there, in the curtained light of morning or afternoon, breathing with difficulty, his heart beating rapidly against the bones of his chest, his cheeks warm and his eyes burning, Don Juan saw that he was not alone.
Rising over him, pressing into him but soaring through the canopy to the height of the ceiling, stood a dark angel with wings of fire and an upraised flaming sword. The angel pressed into him heavily, so that Juan thought his chest would crack, but at the same time the creature seemed to be composed of trembling light or fire. Its gaze was directed straight ahead, in an attitude not so much of pride as of absolute authority. And Juan knew that this triumphant angel, the angel of his inner fever, was the terrible angel of Love, who crushed his victims,
destroyed the power of their wills, humiliated them in every fiber of their being. But it did not stop there. For like a conqueror who can never be content with mere destruction, the harsh angel demanded of its victims that they lift their voices in praise. And Don Juan seemed to hear himself say, as he lay there broken in spirit: Praise be to you, O fiery one, O angel of my devastation, for without you I would have known only a terrible calm.
When he opened his eyes the angel had gone. Mary was seated in an armchair beside the bed. Her maid stood somewhere in the background, looking away.
“You cried out in your sleep,” Mary said.
“I need—” Juan said. “I need—”
“I will bring you what you need, Don Juan,” Mary said, lowering her eyes.
When he woke it was dark. A candle burned on the small table where four volumes of English poets—Spenser, Milton, Waller, and Pope—lay one on top of the other, turned in different directions. In the chair beside the bed sat Georgiana, looking at him with an expression of interest.
“Good evening to you, Don Juan. I hope you are feeling a little better.”
When he said nothing, she continued.
“I am told you are suffering, Don Juan. Suffering because of—me. Nay, Sir—pray don’t speak. ’Tis highly irregular for me to be here—in this room—at this hour. My maid is posted at the door, but I must hurry. Your attentions—flatter me, Sir. When you first came among us, I confess I did not like you very much. It seemed to me you were a proud, self-loving man, who looked upon the world as a feast prepared expressly for his own pleasure. I have come to think better of you, Sir. I will say that to you now. But I will also say, Don Juan, that I can never return your feelings in the way you might wish. I tell you this not to cause you unhappiness, but to spare you needless . . . sorrow. I will tell you one other thing. You should leave this place, Don Juan. You should leave this place at once.”
She stood up. The kindness in her voice had soothed him, had masked, to a certain extent, a harshness that he preferred not to contemplate at the moment, and it seemed to him that it was absolutely necessary to keep her standing there beside his bed, looking down at him, for when she left there would be nothing to prevent the harshness from rushing in.
She looked at him kindly, with her faint smile. Suddenly she bent over and placed on his forehead a cool, chaste kiss.
She straightened quickly and drew back a little, but continued to look down on him.
“Good night, Don Juan. May you have a good night’s rest.”
She turned to go. Perhaps it was the kindness of the kiss, perhaps it was the aloofness in that kindness, perhaps it was the sight of her body turning to go, but something seemed to give way deep in Juan’s chest, and he heard himself groan—an unpleasant sound that might have come from an old man— and tears began to fall along his cheeks. He had last cried at the age of six, when his father had struck him in the face for cringing before a rearing horse. “Never show fear,” his father had said with outraged eyes. “Fear is for women and animals.” Georgiana had half turned at the sound of the unpleasant groan and stood looking at him with a frown. Juan felt the deep shame of his tears, and he scorned himself, for wasn’t he weeping like a child? But at the thought that he, Don Juan Tenorio, was weeping like a child, a pity came over him, for the grown man stricken in his bed, and the tears came hot and fast, in great heaving desperate convulsions—which almost comforted him a little, as if, by abandoning himself to his unhappiness, he were protecting himself from some deeper harm.
V
If Georgiana’s kiss had been cool and chaste, if her night visit had had about it all the signs of a farewell, it was also true that she had been kind to him—kinder than ever before—that she had placed her mouth against the burning skin of his forehead, and that she had remained in the room until he fell into uneasy sleep. Encouraged faintly by these signs, as well as by the fact that she hadn’t expressly forbidden him to see her, Don Juan rose the next day and returned wearily to the life of Swan Park. He had the sense that he had entered a new era of feeling—an era of hope no longer believed in, of hopeless hope and joyless longing relieved at times by dim and unpersuasive illusions of distant happiness. Georgiana no longer avoided him. She was friendly and even attentive; but there was a propriety in her friendliness, a discipline in her attentiveness, that stung worse than dismissal. She no longer mocked him, or openly disdained him, but instead watched carefully over his feelings. It was as if she would do anything to prevent another outburst. The new watchfulness troubled Juan, for it was the opposite of intimacy: she paid close attention to him in order to hold him at the precise distance that allowed her to bear his presence at all.
Exhausted with longing, oppressed by obsession, Juan found that he was soothed a little in the company of Mary. He knew that Mary was drawn to him, even in love with him—in th
e old days he would have considered her easy prey. He’d had scores of women like her, the pretty, not unhappy, faintly discontented wives of busy husbands. Now she seemed to him a fellow sufferer. She doted on him, longed for his company, hungered for a sign of tenderness; in her pretty hazel eyes he sometimes saw a look of terrible yearning. He felt for her a delicate, wounded sympathy. She was his sad sister—they were members of the fellowship of the forlorn. It comforted him to speak to her of Georgiana, who sometimes left them to themselves, but it also comforted him to feel her own formidable despair. He studied the plum-colored pouches under her eyes, knowing that she lay awake at night thinking of him. He tried to recall whether her face had always been so pale and cheerless and drawn. And a tenderness came over him for poor Mary Hood, who had fallen so foolishly in love with Don Juan. He understood that his tenderness was itself painful to her, because it was the tenderness of a brother toward a sister; and sometimes he felt a little angry at her, for failing to inspire passion in him, for failing to be Georgiana.
One morning at breakfast Mary began to rise from her seat, stopped suddenly, and stood with her hands on the table, her head bowed, her eyes closed, before falling very slowly to one side. A footman caught her as she fell; Georgiana rose dramatically. Mary was carried into the drawing room and placed on a sofa, where Georgiana soon revived her with hartshorn and water fetched by a maid. “You don’t eat properly, Mary,” Georgiana said, but Juan, looking at the pale woman lying wearily on the sofa, felt in his blood the restless nights, the devouring fantasies, the ferocious longing destined to disappointment.
The King in the Tree Page 10