One night as Juan lay in his bed, staring through the parted curtains at the night sky framed by the casement window, he heard the sound of an opening door. He sat up in bed, bent to peer around a curtain, and saw Mary coming toward him in a hoopless white negligee. “Did I wake you, Sir Juan? Pray forgive me. I cannot sleep and have been wandering through the house these many hours. ’Tis strange, Sir Juan. Though I am always tired, yet I can never sleep. Is it not strange? Sometimes I fear my mind is not right. Georgiana says I never eat. But that is not true. I eat sorrow. I am very tired, Sir Juan. I will lie down here now.” Mary pulled aside the curtain and climbed into the bed. She lay down on her back beside him and did not move.
Juan, in his long nightshirt, crossed his legs irritably and wondered what the devil he ought to do. It occurred to him that never before in his life had he been in bed with a woman and wondered what the devil to do. And after all—after all!— why not? She had come to him in the night. She was a pretty wife—he liked pretty wives—and she was lying next to him on her back in his bed. It was not an impossibly difficult problem requiring the help of a mathematical tutor from the University of Seville. But say a second woman was present in the bed. Say she was a phantom woman with glowing eyes, who lay between you and the living woman beside you. Don Juan had slept with two women in a bed before. But what if the phantom woman was an enchantress who tied you in chains of fire while she lay against you, untouchable, twisting her body into every shape of desire? The living woman lay beside him, in her gown the color of moonlight. But when Don Juan tried to see her, she vanished in the glow of the other woman, who was a fire that burned out his eyes. For the phantom Georgiana was an un-woman, a more-than-woman, an absent presence who harmed him and mocked him and fevered him too. He thought of the monks, his laughable enemies, sickly haters of pleasure who tormented their bodies for the sake of heavenly visions. Now he too had become a monk, pious Brother Juan, a repellent abortion of a man. Nightly he was visited by his succubus. She lay on him like smoke, like the fur on an animal. She breathed in his ear and sucked out his breath through his mouth.
He looked over at Mary, white and still in his bed. And he felt an irritable, exasperated tenderness for poor Mary Hood, his pale sister in sorrow. There she lay, bound in her sad enchantment. He didn’t, after all, not desire her. For wasn’t it true that all women were the same woman, in the difference-dissolving night? Daylight was the element in which forms became distinct, the realm of analysis and discrimination, whereas in the night all things flowed and mingled. And wasn’t it true that he was not finicky in his choice of women, no fussy bourgeois who chose a woman the way you might choose a piece of furniture for the drawing room? No, he was Don Juan Tenorio, conqueror of thousands, who had ravished not only women so disturbingly beautiful that other men, seeing them once, had been changed forever, but also squint-eyed hags, blind beggar women with stinking breath, witch women, hump-backed women, diseased women with suppurating sores. Once he had bedded a bitter woman with one leg, who cursed him and wept. No, he didn’t not desire pretty Mary Hood. Rather, his desire had been consumed by the blast from a fiercer fire—diverted from the bodies of living women by the spell of a demoness.
His eyes burning with weariness, Juan slid down on his back and lay beside his sad sister. Her face was in shadow; a patch of gown shone white-luminous in a streak of moonlight. She might have been Georgiana—didn’t she look a little like Georgiana, if he turned his head a certain way? Three times he moved toward her, tricked into desire, for what did he care whether she was Mary or Georgiana or anyone on earth or in hell or heaven? Three times he fell back with an angry burst of breath. Toward dawn he woke her and led her from the room, for Augustus was sure to be up at any moment. No point in killing his friend over a woman untouched in the night.
He ate breakfast alone, in a shady corner of the breakfast room with a view of the sunny Ymber. His valet, appearing suddenly beside him as if he’d been conjured into existence by the mumbling of a spell, informed him quietly that the mistress of the house was not well and that her sister was tending her. Juan nodded dully, feeling a gloomy pleasure in his solitude and abandonment, and scarcely noticing as his valet dissolved into the bright morning air. After breakfast he went to the library and sat down in an armchair with a copy of The Philosophical Magazine. Immediately he sprang up and began pacing. He strode to the double doors, pulled them open, and nearly collided with a startled chambermaid in a long black calico dress and a white apron, hurrying past with a chamber pot in both hands and a dust brush tucked under one arm.
Outside he went round to the stable yard, where he stood inhaling a sweetly acrid smell of straw and dung before he swung onto his horse. He nodded at the groom and rode out along the graveled path through the gardens and into the parkland. For a while he kept to the riding path, then branched off onto a narrow woodland trail, coming out near the Isle of Athelney and riding until he found himself on the outskirts of Arcadia. A shepherd was sitting on a rock in the shade of a tree, playing his reed pipe. Half a dozen black-faced sheep grazed nearby. Juan sat on his horse. Idly he wondered whether the sheep were ingenious systems of turning gears covered with wool dyed to look dusty brown. It struck him that all of Swan Park was nothing but a gigantic mechanism, wound up and kept in good working order by that master watchmaker, Augustus Hood. And yet the squire of Swan Park would never allow the evidence of design in Nature to argue for the existence of an unseen Designer, because the universe, my dear Georgiana, is not Dr. Centlivre’s watch, but a riddle without an answer, a mystery that eludes your questioning. So by reason we climb by slow degrees to unreason: in the silence of the mystery, wonder is born. For love, my dear Georgiana, is not a watch in a pretty case, but a merciless angel bearing a sword of fire.
Don Juan rode on into the green Arcadian countryside. Plump sheep with delicate dark legs grazed here and there— somehow the legs reminded him of knitting needles sticking out of lumps of yarn—a forlorn shepherd sat sighing under a tree, and the warm air trembled with a dim sound composed of stream water, bees, the distant notes of a reed pipe, and the faint tinkle of sheep bells. Juan came to a solitary place, where he dismounted. He tethered his horse to a low branch and walked on a little way. A broad shady tree, with round-lobed leaves he did not recognize, grew on a slope not far from a narrow stream.
He sat down and leaned back against the tree. One wrist rested lightly on his raised knee; the other hand lay on the ground beside his outstretched leg. His eyelids began to close, the brown stream flickered with spots of yellow sun and tea-colored leaf shade, and it seemed to him that he was about to fall into a deep sleep, though at the same time he was painfully alert. Across the stream a dense, cool-looking thicket of gnarled trees retreated to form a sunny opening, a small, secret glade at the edge of the stream. As he half watched, shifting his heavy gaze from dark to bright, he saw a movement in the thicket, and a shepherd boy stepped out of the trees into the bright place.
He was thirteen or fourteen years old and wore the white Arcadian tunic, which came down to his knees and was fastened loosely over his left shoulder; his right shoulder was bare. Looking toward the thicket from which he had emerged, he beckoned with his fingers. A moment later a shepherd girl stepped out of the trees, smiling and reaching out her hand. Her straw-colored hair was pulled back lightly on both sides and gathered in back with a comb. She wore a loose white tunic bound at the waist with a belt of straw; whenever she moved, the cloth tightened for an instant against her small breasts, which seemed to appear and disappear. They stood holding hands, smiling at each other as if they were about to burst into laughter. Suddenly the boy dropped her hand and ran to the stream, where he crouched down to scoop water into his hands. He rose carefully, carrying the water to the girl, who bent over his hands to drink.
From under the tree Juan watched, not hidden from view though protected by the shade; and as he watched, keeping very still so as not to startle them, he had the sense that the bo
y had caught sight of him on the slope across the stream— indeed, he was certain of it, for the boy began glancing deliberately in his direction—and soon the girl began casting quick looks at him, the dark stranger watching in the shade. But instead of growing shy, instead of moving back or escaping into the trees, they seemed to become bolder in his presence. Now they began flicking drops of water at each other and leaping away, as if for the amusement of the watcher across the water. Then the boy closed his eyes, reached out both hands, and began searching for the girl, who kept laughing and stepping aside. Once his hand seized her hip before she twisted away. Suddenly they bound up their tunics under their legs and waded into the stream. They held hands as they bent over to search for things in the water, glancing up now and then to catch sight of the stranger watching them. After a while they climbed out of the stream and sat on the grass, where they stretched out their brown legs glistening with water, leaned back on their arms, and flung their heads back, eyes closed against the sun. For a time they stayed that way, as if to invite a secret inspection by whoever happened to be looking at them: here we are, two young bodies, male and female—study us well.
The boy grew restless first. He glanced at the girl, whose eyes remained closed, her face upturned and glowing in the light of the sun. He looked about, then picked a blue wildflower that grew near his shoulder. Bending toward her, he placed it carefully in her hair. In the brilliant sun her pale hair, straw-colored but shot through with whitish yellow and milky brown, gave off little glimmers, as if it contained flecks of metal. The boy tipped back his head to study the effect of his wildflower, leaned closer to make an adjustment. She gave a slow, drowsy smile, raised one hand lazily to her hair, and touched the flower. Smiling at each other, they seemed to come to an agreement. The boy stood up, reached out his hand, and lifted her to her feet; and throwing a bold, unmistakable look at Juan across the stream, they walked hand in hand out of the sunny glade and disappeared into the trees.
And Juan was shaken: they hadn’t mocked him, but they had displayed themselves proudly before him. They had drawn him into the circle of their not-quite-innocent love play, in the spirit of those who must proclaim their happiness, must reveal their superiority to all mere mortals who are born, grow old, and die—and especially to all solitary watchers in the shade, whose task it is to witness the unbearable joy of laughers in the sun. And after all, hadn’t there been a touch of mockery in it? For how could they fail to be amused by the sight of a shadow-man banished from sunlight, a no-man who had crept out of the rush of things into the secret, bitter shade?
Juan stood up. He had become a pathetic creature. Children laughed at him—at him, Don Juan Tenorio—the grim man brooding under a tree. No doubt others were laughing at him too. It was very quiet, and as he listened he seemed to hear sounds of laughter rising all about him: the laughter of shepherds and shepherdesses in Arcadia, the laughter of actors playing Charon and Dido, Tantalus and Ixion, the laughter of farmers plowing their fields and laborers swinging their picks, the laughter of chambermaids and footmen and gardeners and grooms—a low, rippling hum of laughter like a sound of cicadas in high grass. It was the sound of all those who walked in the midst of life, who didn’t sit off to one side, dreaming in the shade. What was he? Who? He was no longer Don Juan. He had wandered away from himself, he couldn’t find his way back. Who are you? I am the one I no longer am. Basta! He would have his life. He would go to her room that night. He would beg her—or kill her. He would take her by force. He would kill anyone who got in his way. He would do something. For love, my dear Georgiana, is not a sad man sitting under a tree, but a raging sword flashing with blood and fire.
Don Juan walked over to his horse, untethered it, swung up into the saddle, and rode out of Arcadia.
When he returned to the house he found Georgiana in the drawing room, looking tired as she leaned back on a sofa and held flat in her lap, in one limp hand, an open fan that pictured a landscape. “Oh, there you are,” she said, glancing up at him as if she had something more to say, but saying nothing. Juan went up to his sitting room and stretched himself across the sofa, where he lay yawning repeatedly, as if something were wrong with his jaw. At dinner there was still no sign of Mary. Georgiana seemed distracted, and Hood told a long, rambling anecdote about a laborer in his under-realm who had been trapped with his pick in a collapsed tunnel. The poor fellow had hacked his way in another direction, advancing slowly with diminishing strength and gradually losing all sense of time; on the point of death, he felt his pick break through the wall and found himself in China. The solution to the mystery was that he had broken into a Chinese temple constructed under Hood’s supervision years ago, abandoned, and soon forgotten. The laborers who rescued the poor man said he seemed confused and kept insisting that he had reached China. “Which of course he had,” Hood added, as they walked along the Ymber at dusk. “For say a man reads of China, dreams of China, and does not go to China. And say another man hacks his way through a wall and enters a Chinese temple. Now riddle me this: which China is more real?”
“They are each of them false in different ways, surely,” remarked Georgiana.
“A third man,” Hood said, “sails to China. Upon his arrival he is stricken with a peculiar madness, which makes him believe he is in London.”
“And is the world composed only of dreamers and mad-men, Augustus?”
“Aye, and landskip gardeners, too. Now say a fourth man, an English merchant, travels to China. ’Tis the very opposite of your dreamer. He cares for naught under the sun but trading good English wool for Chinese silk. Thirty years go by and your good merchant can recollect but two things: the storm that nearly destroyed his ship, and a green river with yellow boats, which might have been in Japan. Now, by Heavens, tell me: has this man traveled to China?”
“A fifth man,” Don Juan said, “travels to China. He likes the country, travels for many years, and never returns home. Poco a poco—mmm, little by little—his early life becomes vague, dreamlike. He too has never traveled to China. He has always been there.”
“Oh, Gemini! You sound like Augustus,” Georgiana remarked, and Don Juan gave a sharp, nervous laugh—a single syllable that ended abruptly.
That night Juan sat in the walnut armchair before the casement window, looking out through burning eyes at the bend in the river as he waited for the great house to fall asleep. For some reason he thought of a dragon circling round and round its cave, settling in a corner, lowering its head onto its dangerous, peaceful claws. Deep in his chest he felt the beginning of a yawn. It rose slowly to his jaw, shuddered along the bones of his face, and floated to the top of his head, where it clung to his skull like a bat. His tiredness was so ferocious that it had become almost interesting, almost a thing of beauty. All this idiotic early rising was bad for a man. It was an unnatural form of exercise, harmful to health, disastrous to mental vigor, even—yes—morally questionable. For why should a man wrench himself from his bed in the miserable middle of the morning, after a useless night, solely in order to breathe the dangerous air surrounding a woman crackling in her clothes like fire? Better to go back to bed, close your ruined eyes, and die into the naked body of a devouring succubus. A dog barked three times, stopped, and barked once more. Juan looked about. Where was he? He was sitting in a room—in a house— in a garden—in a park—in England, a wholly imaginary country called up from depths of dream by a lustful friar hunched over a book of spells, a country inhabited by demon-women so desirable that to look at one of them for a single second was to go mad. Juan stood up. A sudden yawn shuddered through him, as if he were being lashed by an inner whip. He walked across the room, pulled open the door, and set forth in search of Georgiana.
He stepped into a corridor so black that he had to feel along the wall with one hand as he made his way slowly forward. Georgiana’s bedroom was somewhere at the far end of the house. He knew that to reach it he had to descend a staircase and make his way across the main drawing room, the
dining room, the library, and a second drawing room to a stairway that led up to the apartments in the family wing. But he had never mastered the plan of the meandering mansion, with its long and sometimes turning corridors, its various wings, each with so many rooms that it was impossible for him to make his way by day across any wing without becoming lost, its many stairways going up or down, its galleries, its hidden chambers reached only by secret passages known to servants long since deceased, its wine cellars and storage rooms, its coin room and medal room, its chambers half built and suddenly abandoned, its forgotten rooms into which a chambermaid sometimes strayed with a gasp. In the corridor his fingers found the top of a flight of stairs. As he made his way down into the darkness of the drawing room, he understood that the heavy curtains had been drawn; no glimmer of moonlight on glass or polished wood indicated the way.
He advanced with his left hand outstretched, his right hand grasping his sword hilt. Suddenly he felt something cool and hard and smooth that might have been the side of a vase or the cheek of a bust. He tried to picture the drawing room carefully in his mind, but the imagined furniture kept shifting and sliding about—and in the slippery blackness he wondered whether he might have entered some other room, after descending a stairway he had never used before.
He continued forward, through the room that ought to have been the drawing room, holding out his hand in empty space. It was an odd immensity of space, as if he had accidentally stepped through a door into a black meadow—and who was to say he had not stepped into a meadow, or into the orchard that went down to the Guadalquivir? Slowly he advanced across the meadowy room. Then he began to wonder whether he was moving in a straight line, perhaps he was veering a little with every step, so that he was doomed to turn forever in this desolate black place, a Sisyphus without a rock—and as he set down one foot after the other, in the deliberate and thoughtful manner of a man who had every reason to suppose that he would arrive at his destination, even though he no longer remembered it, the outstretched fingertips of his left hand seemed to quiver, like the antennae of an insect.
The King in the Tree Page 12