Well in Time

by SUZAN STILL

  Calypso knelt beside him and offered the strawberry in front of his hooked and armored nose. In one snap, the tortoise bit the fruit in half, closed his eyes in apparent bliss, and savored.

  Having swallowed, his eyes flew open. They had lost their dolorousness and looked at her with dawning wonder and expectation. Calypso kept supplying strawberries until her bowl was empty.

  “That’s all,” she said, shaking her head. “I’ll bring you more tomorrow.”

  As if understanding perfectly, the tortoise blinked at her and then turned away, resuming his ponderous promenade.

  “For a French tortoise,” Calypso called after him, “you understand English very well.”

  She set the empty bowl on the rusted and listing café table and pulled the metal chair at an angle so she could gaze at a different part of the garden.

  Down an allée of plane trees shading a path lined in overgrown boxwoods, she could glimpse the facade of another building. This, the rental agent had told her, was the former great house of the owners of the mas. Far from her notion of a farmhouse, it was three stories of the same pale golden stone as their rental, which was a remodel of the estate’s former orangerie.

  The rental agent had said that the mas was owned by the same family that had built it in the eighteenth century.

  “But now the children don’t care about it,” the slender, chic French woman had said in charmingly accented English. “They want the city life now. Someday, they will sell this place to a developer and there will be little houses here, instead of a garden.”

  She sighed, as if this conjecture were already an inevitability.

  Almost without realizing it, Calypso left the table and drifted down the allée toward the old house, drawn by the melody of wind and birdsong as by a Siren’s song. Her feet crunched on gravel. A nightingale sang from the depths of a pomegranate tree starred with vermillion blossoms. The scents of mint, of myriad blossoms, of water, and, of sun-warmed soil rose to greet her. Walking almost on tiptoe, she was mindful of rupturing a deep, dreaming peace.

  The great house stood silent and shuttered behind its apron of pale gravel. Faded blue wooden shutters showed signs of rot along the bottom edges, and the lintel was softly crumbling above tall double front doors. Under the verge of rosy terra cotta roof tiles, swallows swooped around a small village of mud nests.

  All around the house, in sharp contrast to its stolid bulk, the overgrown garden danced and flounced in rushing air. A rich warmth, the fecundity of earth, hung like perfume beneath the thick canopy of old trees. A small grove of old olive trees off its western flank hummed with wind, flashing the silvery undersides of leaves like the tongues of mechanical birds.

  It was a scene of enchantment. To Calypso, the great house was as potent a container of mysteries as had been the now-incinerated locket box. She felt the magnetic languor of it in her bones and it held her captive.

  The house stood with its massive weight rooted in the fertile, vine-bearing earth of Languedoc, austere in its gravitas, yet somehow welcoming. There was a buttery softness to its hewn blocks of stone, a giving quality. Were she to accidentally brush against its walls, she felt her sweater would come away marked with pigment, a calligram communicating the soul of the old building. The house held the same sad, dreaming quality as the eyes of the tortoise, as if human company and events had bypassed them for too long and left them lonely.

  Slowly, she made a circuit of the house. Its facade, facing south, presented the dignified central entrance portal, capped by a simple Greek pediment, with long windows on either side, balanced in number down its length. She imagined how the long, narrow fenestration would let in light in a special way, illuminating rooms with nobly high ceilings, rooms zinging with the force and energy of perfect proportion, with the cosmic intelligence of the Golden Mean.

  On the east side, the house dreamed under the shade of a huge plane tree, perhaps eight feet in circumference. Calypso imagined lying in bed at night in a second-story bedroom, the windows thrown open to incessant shifting and rustling of leaves.

  The north side of the house had smaller windows and clearly turned its back on the icy blasts of the north wind. A door on its eastern corner led, she imagined, to a mud room where work shoes would be shed and hands washed after a day in the fields or garden.

  On the west side, to her delight, a central double French door opened onto a pergola covered in vines. She stepped into the shaded space. Simple Ionic columns upheld an iron basket-like superstructure, over which grape, wisteria and vigne vierge clambered enthusiastically. A rustic table, sloping and chapped from weather, sat outside the shuttered doors. In her mind’s eye, Calypso saw the lady of the house coming through the open doors of a morning, tray in hand, bringing coffee and croissants for petit dejeuner.

  Beside this kitchen door, a Roman fountain with an austere triangular pediment still spilled spring water from its lion’s-mouth aperture into a basin shaped like a scallop shell. The water rippled across the mossy green bowl and spilled over the edges to fall into a still larger seashell, four feet below. From between the hewn blocks of the fountain’s body, maidenhair ferns hung down the facade, dripping water from their delicately incised leaves. The soft splashing of the water sang a contrapuntal melodic line against the basso of the wind.

  Surely ghosts lodged in this enchanted place, trailing veiled memories of vanished ages—perhaps even astonishment at the passage of Hannibal’s elephants that had lumbered through Languedoc two hundred years before the birth of the Christ. The house stimulated her imagination: the clatter of hooves and crunch of gravel as a coach arrived; the heavy drone of cicadas in summer heat; workers coming in from autumnal fields, sheened with sweat, carrying scythes or baskets of grapes; snow edging the cornices like frosting, during the long, silent winter. History, culture, and memory would flow from the opened doors and windows as surely as spring water flowed from the Roman fountain.

  §

  She was so deep in reverie that his voice startled her.

  “Here you are.”

  She jumped guiltily. “Oh! I didn’t hear you come.” She stood uncertainly, as if caught in a questionable act.

  “What are you doing?” Javier approached her curiously.

  “I was just…” She swept her hand toward the house. “You know…”

  “You have that look,” Javier said, half accusingly, half teasing.

  “What look?”

  “Like you’re either starting a new book in your head or planning something big.” He put an arm around her shoulders and squeezed her to his side. “I think I caught you just in time.”

  “Maybe not. I think it’s too late.”

  “I have to watch you or you’ll fly away.” He massaged her shoulders. “Are those tight muscles I feel—or wing buds?”

  She threw him a glance filled with a plea that rose from her heart. “Javier…” Her eyes searched his face, begging for understanding.

  “What, Caleepso? What?”

  “I’ve been thinking.”

  “Yes.” The old, dipping, and rising intonation, denoting obviously.

  “And I think we’ve been out of balance.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that…Let me think how to say this…You know I love Rancho Cielo.”

  “Yes.”

  “And of course, you do, too.” She frowned, searching for words to express her morning’s revelations. “But it’s only part of who we are, Javier. Northern Mexico’s wild and it’s exhilarating. It challenges us with hard work and with harsh weather and difficult politics.” She wouldn’t meet his eye.

  “Yes. And?”

  “And this morning I’m realizing that there’s another part of me. And of you, I think. One that wants rest from the difficulties. Safety even. And roots in a culture that’s more than just five hundred years old.” Her eyes flew to his.

  “I feel safe here, Javier. And I feel the history that’s saturated into this soil. Think of it! Th
e Celts, the Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Moors, the Franks, and the Gauls. Charlemagne, the Count of Toulouse, the Cathars and the troubadours, chivalry, and courtly love. Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals, pilgrim trails, the Black Virgins…”

  She stopped for breath, her arms outstretched, as if they could embrace thousands of years of French culture.

  Javier looked at her there, so earnest and graceful, dappled with golden coins of light beneath the dancing plane trees, and his heart filled with both love and sorrow.

  “You don’t want to live at Rancho Cielo anymore, Caleepso?”

  She came to him and took his hand, raising it to her lips, then resting it on her heart.

  “Javier, of course I want to live at Rancho Cielo again. I’m as eager as you are to see the new house. But I also know that this”—she gestured toward the house and garden—“has been missing in our lives.

  “Imagine going to the opera in Montpellier! Or having neighbors who want to talk about Lamartine or Proust, instead of cattle insemination or the local cartel death toll.

  “You and I are unique, Javier. We can live in both worlds—and we need to live in both.”

  Javier fought with the bitter disappointment that was rising in his throat like acid. It felt as if Calypso were in revolt, disparaging everything they had built together.

  “You find Mexico wanting, Caleepso?”

  Her look was exasperated as she pulled away from him. She stood with her back to him, her fists clenched. Her shoulders heaved as she took deep breaths to calm herself. How could she communicate to him the longing that was rising in her, the deep and persistent need? Difficult as it was, she had to speak her truth.

  “No, Javier. I don’t find Mexico wanting. But I find it Mexico. Think of it as cooking. I love Mexican cuisine—but does that mean I’m a traitor if I also like French food?

  “Something in me is going unanswered, Javier. Some part of me that longs for this!”

  She flung her arm toward the desolate pile before them.

  “You’re just having house envy, Caleepso. Once you have a home of your own again, this won’t seem so urgent.”

  “No! I am not having house envy! I have a genuine need—a need right in my soul—for France. Mexico is raw and difficult, Javier. It’s the wildness and the mystery that I love about it. Here in France, the centuries have tamed the land but in a kind way. A way that honors the soil and brings up this kind of richness and beauty from it.”

  She spun, holding her arms out as if presenting him with the full beauty and mystery of the old garden.

  “You won’t find this in Mexico,” she said stubbornly. “It’s too far south and the water’s too scarce and the plants that grow here won’t grow there. I can’t replicate it in Chihuahua. And this is the very thing that my soul craves.”

  “I didn’t realize how much you hate Mexico.”

  She stamped her foot in frustration.

  “No! I do not hate Mexico. That’s so unfair! I’ve given the better part of my life to Mexico. And after what we’ve just been through, it’s a wonder one or both of us didn’t give our lives, period. You could have been killed, Javier! I thought you were. And I could have been, too. Climbing that cliff was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. When I fell, I thought I was going to die. And let’s not even think about going through the tube—three times!”

  Flames were scorching his heart again. How could Calypso do this, when the new house was half built and a new start was almost theirs? He tried to collect his thoughts.

  “What is it you want, Caleepso?”

  “I want to buy this place and renovate this house,” she said. It was straightforward and simple—how could he object?

  “And what about Rancho Cielo? You taking up bilocation now, Caleepso? You becoming a shaman?”

  “We could live part of the year at Rancho Cielo and part of the year here. Pedro can run the ranch for us while we’re away.”

  Javier frowned. “You think Pedro can run it as well as I can?”

  “It’s not a matter of who runs it best. Don’t you see, Javier—it’s time for us to retire. Oh! Don’t get me wrong,” she added hastily, “I know we’ll never really do that. We both have too much we want to accomplish. But we’ve been working hard for years, Javier. It’s time for a change. Life is more interesting that way. And it’s part of being in late midlife, to keep growing in new directions.

  “Besides, I know you have a new book in your head. And I know you can influence your country more by writing it than by doing hand to hand combat with the cartels.”

  “I can write it at Rancho Cielo,” he growled.

  Calypso knew this stubborn mood and how obstinate it could be, but she persisted.

  “But you won’t and you know it. There are a thousand distractions to keep you from it. If the sheep aren’t lambing, then it’s the cattle needing branding or the haying or shoeing the horses or…” She raised her hands in a helpless gesture. “You know it’s true, Javier.”

  And he did. He knew in his heart that everything she was saying was true. He felt the urgency of the book pressing inside him. He felt a weariness that was the need for a long physical rest. He knew the pressure of the endless rounds of work on the ranch. And he understood Calypso’s need for safety and some time out from the perilous political realities of the northern Sierra and the cartels. Why, then, was his heart so set against her and her proposed project?

  “I don’t want you to do this, Caleepso. I want us to go home to the ranch like we planned. I feel like you lured me here to France, knowing that you didn’t want to go home again.”

  Calypso shrieked in rage. “That is so not true! This place ambushed me! I’m astonished by its hold over me! It’s like the locket—its irresistible. I’m as surprised by this as you are.”

  The wind was picking up. The canopy of branches lifted and seethed in agitation. Their shadows pooled about them in the late morning sun like cast-off clothing, his as upright and rigid as a post, hers dancing with frustration, and streaming with windblown hair as if emitting coils of energy.

  They stared at one another, her eyes pleading, his adamant.

  “We’re out of balance, Javier,” she said again. “We need a change of pace.” Even to her it felt feeble in the face of his resistance.

  “I’m going to do this thing,” she said with more conviction. “I’m going to take the money from the last two books and I’m going to buy this place and renovate it. Please stay and help me. Please, Javier.”

  He stood his ground, still staring at her, his face hard and closed. Then he spun on his boot heel and strode down the garden path toward the rental without a word.

  “Javier!” she called after him. But he did not answer and he did not stop. When she got back to the orangerie, he was gone.

  §

  Calypso stood her ground but being separated from him proved to be a living hell. She was surprised, at first mildly and then with increasing alarm, to find her heart so lacerated by simple absence. That such passion existed, unguessed, caused her to question her entire being: If this could loiter in the recesses, what else might be there, lurking? What was possible for her? Of what acts of self-betrayal or self-sacrifice might she be capable?

  As weeks went by, the feeling grew in force until it was a hurricane of grief and loss that flung her about the bed at night and bowed her shoulders by day. The quiet, orderly life she was accustomed to inhabit was ripped apart by the force of these winds. Her mind was like a corrugated tin roof—everything around and within her seemed to flap, squeal, groan, or shudder from the unseen gale. Food lost its savor. Her skin grew pale, all blood having sunk, she surmised, by some psychological deep-diving effect, into the core for self-preservation.

  She stopped seeing friends, the slow rituals of the cafés seeming tedious now and meaningless. Not given to drink or drugs, she could find no anesthesia for the howling pain. She went sleepless, walked ceaselessly, sat and stared.

  Without
warning and in the most inappropriate places, tears would start, brim over and roll. All she could do was turn away from the curious or sympathetic, whose lame ministrations revolted her, knowing there was no way to stop the flow until some secret source went dry or shut its weirs for a period of replenishment.

  She was utterly helpless in the throes of it all and too absent-spirited even to be angry about it. She must have arrived, finally, at the iron gates of love. Hammering there was bloodying, exhausting.

  The word Please! can be flung into the empty maw of the universe only so many times without losing its apotropaic powers. A sense of fatedness began to settle upon her like smothering smoke. She could taste its bitterness. It burned her nostrils and left her throat parched and scratchy. Her heart, always so glad and eager, hunkered down in the quivering, terror-stricken passivity of mortified flesh. The world was absolutely void of solace.

  Then, in her cowardice, she would consider packing her bags and returning to Rancho Cielo. She would hover in this meek, servile place for a day or two, and then come out fighting.

  A thousand times she vowed simply to throw him off. Willed herself to forget. To move on. But like a mother bird whose nest has been robbed by the dark probings of a raven, her mind flew in endless circles, shrieking and grieving around the emptiness that had so lately been full of life and promise.

  There seemed to be no remedy. No cure for the endless hemorrhagic flood of sorrow and longing that was bleeding her to pallor. She listened for his step on the gravel path. Sat by the phone, knowing he would not call. She read and reread a careless note he had written and stuck on the orangerie refrigerator, seeking to draw some faint scent from it, some tincture of love that surely must have motivated its posting.

  Her eyes, blurry from weeping, looked blankly into the future without seeing a single flicker projected on that white screen. Would she creep back to Mexico, leaving her heart’s longing unfulfilled? Without him there, there was no plan. No meaning. No point in continuing.

  She feared her health would collapse. She thought of walking into the depths of the garden, where the shrubbery was overgrown and almost impenetrable, and putting a pistol in her mouth.