by John Healey
In all his life thus far, Shiro had never known terrain like this. Autumn felt like spring. Everything shimmered under a sun that warmed the skin without oppressing. It was a land unblemished by husbandry, interrupted only sparingly by an occasional white house, always with two windows and a tiled roof and sustained by a modest patch of vegetables and a simple sty of small gray pigs. Nothing malign intruded.
For the Duke it was different. Each step taken by his stallion sent stabbing pains through the proud man’s hip. That morning’s flagon of wine had done little to dull it. But his vanity, his masculinity, his desire to remain, if only in his own mind, a romantic figure for Rosario, to remain connected by a solid line to a youthful past in which he’d been an envied roué at court kept him going in stoic denial of how little time his body would allow him to stand erect unaided.
They reached the shore by late afternoon, where a steady wind from the straits blew beige clouds of sand at their ankles. After consulting with local fishermen, they unloaded the mules behind low dunes near a pond at the edge of a sizeable extension of Roman ruins. Numerous tall columns and the remains of an amphitheater and streets leading nowhere paved with blocks of neatly placed stones imbued the encampment with an air of antiquity. Shiro implored upon the Duke immediately.
‘What place is this?’
‘I am pained to say I know very little. Some years back I paid two scholars a handsome sum to explore it, but their findings were scant. They thought it had once been called Baelo Claudia, for the Emperor Claudius had given it the status of a municipium in the First Century. It was a town devoted to fishing and to the production of garum and had once boasted temples dedicated to Isis, Jupiter, and Minerva.’
Shiro knew little about the Romans or their emperors, and the Duke was cajoled to impart a history lesson on the spot that all within earshot took pleasure from. He aptly brought his lecture to an end with references to some of his ancestors who had helped recover the territory from Moorish rule in the middle of the 13th century.
That night they ate ribs of pork and sipped a wine diluted with water. Soon after the Duke retired, Rosario was summoned to his tent. Shiro invited Guada on a stroll about the ruins, lit that night by a new moon. A guard followed them maintaining a discrete distance.
A damp chill was in the air. It seemed to rise from the cracks between the millennial stones they walked upon. Holding her cloak tight about her neck, Guada realized she had never strolled at night, at anytime really, unaccompanied, with a man not her husband, and what an unusual man this one was.
‘Once upon a time this was an active town on the sea,’ she said, ‘filled with men, women, and children living under the protection of Roman law, and all the time they lived here, they assumed it would go on forever. Now no one remembers them.’
She knew how banal it sounded, even as the words left her lips, but she also felt it was up to her to initiate conversation with the stranger who, the evening before, had spoken so little.
‘Impermanence is a condition of life,’ he said. ‘These ruins are good reminders. We have places like this in my country.’
She knew nothing about his country, had only learned of its existence the other day, and her sense of geography was elementary at best.
‘I don’t think I like the way that sounds,’ she said, ‘about impermanence.’
‘Why?’
‘It frightens me,’ she said. ‘I like who and how and where I am now. I don’t like for things to change.’
‘But you know they will.’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I know some day I will grow old and die, as surely as we are here tonight. But I don’t like it.’
‘I don’t like it either,’ he said. ‘But I think it can be helpful for—how to live each day.’
‘It sounds like it might be sinful.’
‘How?’
‘Like it might lead to temptation.’
‘Your religion is very concerned with temptation.’
‘It is your religion, too.’
He decided not to challenge her on this point.
‘And the idea,’ he said, ‘that one is always being watched from on high, and judged, and that one will be tried after one’s death is very, how shall I put it…’
‘Tiring?’
He laughed. They both laughed.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Just the word.’
‘But we are born to struggle,’ she said, ‘to struggle against sin, just as animals struggle to survive. Relinquishing our vigilance is unbecoming to God.’
They paused and rested upon an uneven ledge of stone, the remnant of a wall that faced the sea. The sea was only visible at that hour because of the moon.
‘These people who lived here so long ago,’ he said, ‘these Romans, were they Christians, do you think?’
‘I doubt it. The Duke mentioned temples built for mythic deities, but none dedicated to the Savior.’
‘They too struggled,’ he said, ‘to survive, as you say. But how, according to our religion, would they have been judged after death?’
‘They would have been, all of them, condemned to hell for eternity.’
‘Does that seem fair?’ he asked.
‘It is best not to question these issues. It, too, can lead to sin.’
‘In some of our mountain villages, when the elderly are no longer useful, they are carried off to a place and left to die.’
‘That is unfair.’
‘I agree. But I fail to see any difference.’
‘Those who are not members of the Church worship false gods by definition, and that is a sin, a mortal sin.’
‘How lucky I am,’ he said, ‘to have been saved.’
She looked at him.
‘Are you toying with me?’
‘A little,’ he said. ‘Is that, too, a sin?’
‘I shall pray for you,’ she said, ‘to St. Thomas perhaps, for your doubting soul, and to St. Joseph, who is the patron of a happy death, because when he died, Jesus and Mary were at his side.’
‘You are too kind,’ he said.
She knew he was mocking her, but she did not mind. She had never had a conversation like this before.
‘I’m cold,’ she said. ‘Let us return to the camp.’
He stood and helped her off the ledge, touching her hands for the first time. He wanted to kiss her, and she knew it.
They began to walk back. The guard bowed as they went past him, a bow Shiro acknowledged with one of his own. They returned in silence, one that made sleep difficult for the both of them. Once in his tent, Shiro listened to the waves and the wind while picturing the coast of Edo so far away in what felt like another lifetime. Guada clung fiercely to a pair of gloves given to her by Julian, smelling them, resting her head upon them, missing her husband with an intensity that bordered on anger.
– XIV –
In which a night wind blows and confidences are exchanged
Rosario and the Duke lay under a coverlet listening to the wind buffeting the tent. Of all the young women over the years with whom he had exercised his droit de seigneur, she was, by far, his favorite. Her beauty, her seeming obliviousness to his age, her openness to pleasure, the offhand way she took his money, the clarity she maintained between what they did together and the rest of her life.
‘How are things with your husband?’ he asked.
‘Difficult,’ she said. ‘He keeps trying to get me pregnant.’
He wondered if she said it to irk him, which it did.
‘It’s time for that, I suppose. And he must, of course, desire you fiercely.’
‘I do not feel his desire. He only wants a child so that our families will stop making fun of him.’
‘To expect anything else from a man like that is foolish.’
‘That is what my mother says.’
‘She was always wise.’
She kissed his bare shoulder. He closed his eyes to savor it.
‘What was she like—then?’ she asked.
‘Quiet, angry at first. But that changed over time.’
‘Are you certain I am not your daughter?’
‘She assured me you weren’t.’
‘What if she is wrong?’
‘I think women know such things. If you became pregnant by me, wouldn’t you know who the father was?’
‘That would be easy. Antonio is short and hairy. You are tall and handsome.’
‘Bless you. But I am an old man.’
‘Not with me,’ she said. ‘I should never have married him.’
‘If you hadn’t, you would have been forced into a convent. Seeing you like this under those circumstances would have been much more difficult.’
For however sinful a thought, part of her wished he was her father. Her own had been coarse and mean. Then she imagined herself in the convent back up in the village, where the nuns were only glimpsed at mass through a Moorish grill when they sang hymns. Or you could only see their hands when they placed the pastels they made through the small iron bars in exchange for coins.
‘Have you ever been with a nun?’
‘Once.’
‘What was she like?’
‘Hairy, like your husband.’
They laughed aloud together.
‘What do you make of our guest,’ he asked her, ‘the stranger from the Orient?’
‘I have never seen anything like him. I wonder if he might be a devil.’
‘But he is handsome.’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you think Guada likes him?’
‘Guada is too in love with her esposo to notice anyone else.’
‘How do you know?’
‘She’s told me. She has said it often since arriving here.’
‘Too often perhaps.’
‘You are an evil man, Your Excellency.’
‘I care about her happiness. Is that so evil?’
‘But she is already happy.’
‘That’s what she tells herself and the world. But her husband is a bit of a scoundrel, more than she knows.’
‘Woman can be in love with scoundrels.’
She sat up. The whiteness of her slender back and the blackness of her hair caught him by surprise. She began to put her long tresses up with pins.
‘And you think there may be something between them?’ she asked.
‘Have you not noticed?’
‘My mind has been too occupied with you.’
He kissed a small dimple near the base of her spine.
‘You are an evil girl.’
‘I have been an evil girl, but now I must be a good girl again and return to Guada’s tent.’
– XV –
In which sushi is served and a hand is asked for
Shiro woke and swam at dawn. No one entered the sea willingly at any time of the year there, and the local fishermen who saw him thought him mad. The water was cold and clear, but once accustomed to it he felt a surge of invigoration that approached a state of grace. Looking back to shore, he took in the wide sweeping beach, the towering dune at its western edge, the ruins of Baelo Claudia, the tops of the Duke’s encampment where the Gúzman colors fluttered in the steady wind.
By the time the others appeared, Shiro had befriended the tuna fishermen and a roundup was under way. Skiffs placed a wide net out from the shore held by buoys that horses on the sand drew slowly shoreward. As the muscular school of bluefin tuna, massive and silvery, began to understand what was happening, they started to panic and thrash, turning the diminishing volume of water into a spectacle of frothing foam. Awaiting them on the beach was a group of executioners clad in rags, armed with hooks and spikes. Off to the side, the Duke and his retinue observed the proceedings. The men waded into the low breaking waves, meting out mighty blows that turned the water crimson. Shiro, wearing little more than a loincloth, walked among the dying victims looking for the best specimen. Though focused on the task at hand, he could not help but remember the careless slaughter of the elephant seals he’d witnessed on the beach in San Simeon.
The two young women, plus some of the guards and locals, found it hard to look away from Shiro’s lean body, tall and taut, gleaming with blood and salt water. Guada finally did avert her gaze when instinct cautioned that sin was near. Soon after the last fish was hauled to shore, the young Samurai chose one that a guard then promptly paid for. Using his tanto, Shiro gutted it on the spot. The rapidity of the cuts and the knowledge it displayed impressed the tuna men, and the Duke enjoyed it, knowing it would somehow raise his reputation in their eyes.
At the midday meal, served about a makeshift table, Shiro presented them with small slices of toro carefully sliced from the bluefin’s underbelly. They were bite-sized and gleaming, pressed upon small clusters of Calasparra rice harvested from the low mountains of Murcia. The Duke, Rosario, and the Duke’s chef were the only ones willing to try it. Guada found it difficult to look at and regarded the presentation as yet another example of the young man’s primitivism. She used this latest affront to her sensibility in conjunction with the sacrilegious tone he used in his conversation during their walk the night before, the ignorance of modesty displayed by his casual nakedness in the sea, the manner in which he swam and waded through the bloodied water, his eyes, the hair pulled back into a short tail, the odd clothing and armament, to reinforce her opinion as to his extreme and troublesome foreignness. She found her uncle’s fascination with his guest disconcerting and was disappointed when she realized that Rosario, whom she had come to like and confide in, was having some sort of relationship with the Duke, a idea she felt to be obscene and tasteless. Were it up to Guada, they would return to Medina-Sidonia that very day. But her uncle was insisting upon another night by the unsettling ruins and the infernal waves that she now believed carried all manner of harmful humors within their ceaseless, wind-sprayed emanations. For reasons she could not, or simply would not, try to uncover, she’d been uncomfortable within her own skin since waking that day. She was even looking forward to her mother’s visit, willing to trade the restrictions Doña Inmaculada’s presence would impose, to regain some sense of normalcy. Why had Julian left her side so eagerly?
That afternoon Shiro disappeared into the hills to practice his physical and spiritual ‘regimen.’ But when, upon his return, he invited Guada to accompany him once again on a walk, this time by the sea, she turned him down. Stifling a sensual tremor the invitation provoked, she rechanneled it into a sensation of discomfort she ascribed to an indisposition she blamed on prolonged exposure to the maritime climate. He of course, as she expected, expressed surprise.
‘Where I come from, the sea and its surroundings are among the most salutary to be found.’
‘Nevertheless,’ she said, but she had nothing else with which to further her assertion. After allowing her voice to trail off, she added, as if to bolster the wall between them, ‘It is yet another example, I suppose, of the differences between us.’
Shiro took his walk alone while the Duke slept a long siesta. Rosario was vexed from having to pray a long novena on her knees next to Guada in their tent. The rote succession of Ave Marias spoken to the sandy floor made her sleepy, and it was only her fear of being reprimanded by the all-too-virtuous young lady beside her that kept her rigidly in place.
But with the arrival of night, she was able to relax, even though it seemed the darkness only increased the tension radiating from Guada. Rosario ate the evening meal with gusto, as did the Duke, the foreigner, and everyone else with the exception of Guada. Afterwards it took all the patience Rosario had to wait for Guada to fall asleep so that she could go to the Duke once again. And when she rose to leave, convinced the blonde beauty was finally wrapped in slumber, Guada spoke out.
‘What is it, Rosario?’
‘Ma’am?’
‘Where are you going at such an hour?’
‘To relieve myself ma’am.’ It was a statement not altogether untrue.
‘Go then, but do not tarry. It is not safe out there
.’
‘We are surrounded by armed guards, ma’am.’
Frustrated, she entered the Duke’s tent and reported his niece’s sleeplessness.
‘Let her be,’ he said.
‘My Lord?’
‘Stay here with me.’
‘But she will surely come looking for me if I do not return.’
‘I doubt it. And if she does, so be it then.’
She remained standing, trying to understand what felt different in the air.
‘But if she were to say anything,’ she said, ‘back at the finca—my reputation …’
‘What would you say if I asked you to marry me, Rosario?’
The winds were unusually strong that night, and the leather flap at the entrance to the tent made a jarring noise at odds with the stillness within. Next to the wavering taper, the Duke had lit a stick of pomegranate incense that filled the air with a scent she would always identify with him. She came in farther.
‘I am already married, my Lord.’
‘To an individual I do not wish for you to ever return to.’
The statement, uttered with quiet simplicity, shocked her.
‘I am getting on,’ he said, ‘and you are a young woman. But we are good together. Would you not agree?’
She smiled. ‘I would, my Lord.’
‘Spending time away from you no longer amuses me. Solitude, which has served me well this past decade, no longer amuses me. Having to conduct my personal life in secrecy as if I were a criminal or an adolescent does not become me. I find I have a deep affection for you. So would you have me, a gray man who has trouble walking?’
‘I do not know what to say, my Lord.’
‘A simple yes will do,’ he said gently.
‘If I could, my Lord, nothing would please me more.’
‘Do you mean that? Tell me the truth.’
She fell to her knees before him, took his hand, kissed it, and then, still clinging to it, rested her head upon it. It was a narrow hand, but strong in sinew, and the thick gold of the ring on his middle finger was cold and wondrous pushing against her cheek.