Well in Time

by SUZAN STILL

  Since her discovery, Calypso had been busy. Although Monsieur Signac had arrived with his crew of cleaners that morning, Calypso had declared the back entrance and its room off limits. Then, borrowing extension cords and moveable work lights from the builder’s shed and refusing all help from him or his assistants, she had made numerous trips up and down the stairs to the vault, setting up lights. Finally, she brought her camera and tripod from the orangerie and disappeared into the back of the house, locking herself into the back room, much to the mystification of the others.

  Having taken shots of the statue from numerous angles, she downloaded the photos and sent them to Eleanore, who had an international reputation as an art historian and an impregnable position at the Louvre, because of her expertise. On a day when she had expected to be overjoyed with the progress on her new home, Calypso was largely oblivious to the work being accomplished in other rooms. As she dismantled the lighting and lugged it up the stairs, her thoughts were solely on Eleanore’s response.

  Now, as she bent over the screen of her laptop, gnawing on a hastily made sandwich, she felt a wave of emotion at her friend’s evaluation. Living beneath her new home was an ancient and heretofore unknown aspect of the Divine Feminine, Her fire and compassion hidden deep in earth and darkness and forgotten, diminished or derided on the surface.

  Calypso was certain that it was She who had called her to buy and restore the property; She who brought Calypso to defy even Javier and to risk their love in order to secure Her future.

  How unthinkable that the property might have been sold for a housing development! What if She and Her vault had been mindlessly desecrated by a bulldozer and then simply covered over, never again to know human reverence? Calypso shuddered at the thought.

  Accustomed to the power of the locket and to the sometimes shatteringly prophetic dreams is brought, still Calypso was amazed by the power of the call of the Black Madonna, as she had come to think of the statue. In Her, nature had become conscious matter—mere wood had become a living channel of the divine through the agency of human attention, love, and devotion.

  In recognizing what drove her to buy and renovate the place, even at the expense of her relationship with Javier, Calypso had endured the eruption of an inner volcano of passion—her love for the soil of France, for its aesthetic, and for the history saturated into its soil—all now embodied in the statue of Isis/Mary. Furthermore, the uncanny realization that the image of the Black Virgin was identical to the one on the locket!

  She brought up ancient images of Isis and Horus on her screen, side by side with one of her frontal photos of the statue. They were almost identical. Each held her Infant on her lap with her left hand and each had both breasts bared. The only difference lay in that the traditional Isis figure used her right had to guide her left breast to her child, while in the transitional figure, the breast in the right hand had been translated into a globe, which She extended to all.

  Calypso stared at the orb in Her right hand, feeling she understood the iconographic shift. Divine consciousness, the milk of the Mother, would eventually expand to encompass the globe. Moreover, the globe was a mandala whose center is humankind, a center which is the consciousness humans bring to it. Spheric wholeness and completion are the milk the Goddess offers.

  She flipped down the lid of her laptop and went to sit on the kitchen stoop to finish her sandwich. Her thoughts shifted to Javier and his patriarchal world of business, politics, warfare, and violence. She longed for a world at peace, where the inclusive values of the Feminine could be expressed—and she knew, in all fairness, that this was ultimately what Javier had expended his life trying to establish in Mexico.

  She knew, too, that for all her love of France, it too had had long periods of violence, ignorance and warfare, as Father Xavier’s letter had shown. It was not Mexico that was the crucible of human disorder but throughout the ages, the human heart.

  Suddenly, her longing for Javier was almost unbearable. Each of them, in their desire for that elusive peace, was creating a sliver of it in their chosen corner of the world and each hoped that the other would share in it unreservedly. In their desire to give one another this anointing in the Divine Feminine, they had almost torn their love apart. She didn’t know whether to cry or laugh.

  On impulse, she went into the house and made a call to Rancho Cielo, even though she knew it was already late at night there. The phone rang and rang and rang. With a sad heart, she replaced the receiver and went to see how the house was coming along under the ministrations of the cleaners.

  As she walked down the garden path, her hand went automatically to the locket beneath her sweater and she fingered its cool orb to calm her agitation. How could it be that the image on the locket was the same as the image in the vault? Although made perhaps three thousand years before the statue, still the Isis of the locket held an orb in her extended hand.

  Overcome by this strange synchronicity, Calypso sank onto a stone bench, her mind singed by an echo of the delirious flight of consciousness of the previous night. What was time, really, or consciousness or matter that was shaped intentionally to expand it? It was all an unfathomable mystery.

  She sat for many minutes until the feeling of dizziness passed. Then she pulled herself together, rose to her feet and went toward the house, vowing to focus for this afternoon on cobwebs and sawdust only.

  §

  The house was nearly clean. The crew had started at the top, on the troisième étage and worked downward. When she arrived, they were on the ground floor. The smell of lavender soap hung in air damp from still-drying floors and windows. She found Monsieur Signac tinkering with a window latch to assure its perfect functioning.

  “Is there anything left for me to do?” she asked.

  “No, Madame. I think all is well in hand. We can even begin moving in furniture upstairs if you would like. Luc and Jean-Pierre can be spared from cleaning now, I think.”

  As if a switch had been thrown, Calypso found herself suddenly as eager to have her house in order as she had been driven, that morning, to photograph the statue.

  “Are the drapes hung up there?”

  Monsieur Signac nodded.

  “Yes. All the draperies are hung on the second and third floors. We are waiting for the windows all to be cleaned before we hang them here on the ground floor.”

  Calypso gave him a radiant smile.

  “Then let’s get going!”

  §

  It took four full days to move into the house. Luc and Jean-Pierre worked like Trojan slaves, heaving and wrestling into place the massive armoires, chests of drawers, tables, and desks. The rest of the crew, liberated from cleaning, brought the boxes and bags of treasures she had purchased during the months of renovation, in a long procession from the orangerie through the garden to the house.

  In the kitchen, ivory-handled knives and silver flatware were washed, polished, and carefully laid down in newly painted drawers. In the salon, study and bedrooms, paintings were hung, chairs and couches posed in groupings, and beds assembled and made up. Calypso ran herself ragged, going up and down the stairs to the calls of the crew, asking if the placement of a table was correct or if she liked the positioning of a painting before it was hung.

  Each night she collapsed into bed with a growing feeling of joy, made inexplicable in the face of her longing to see Javier. It was as if the two were growing in direct proportion to one another: the more finished and delightful her new abode, the more, too, her heart pined to see and touch the man of her heart.

  §

  It was late Friday afternoon when Monsieur Signac finally released his crew. He and Calypso did a quick tour through the rooms beforehand, to make sure that last minute cleanups were finished and all was in perfect order.

  “Well, Madame, do you approve?” Monsieur Signac asked when they reached the salon.

  The rays of late sun slanted in almost horizontally, touching glowing parquet, polished furniture, and gleaming acce
ssories with a nostalgic golden glow.

  “It’s perfectly beautiful!” she exclaimed. “You’ve created something special, Monsieur Signac. I can’t imagine that anyone else could have done what you’ve done. I can’t thank you enough.”

  The builder smiled in genuine pleasure.

  “It was nothing, Madame Searcy. A house like this, it is so well made even an old broken-down carpenter like me couldn’t spoil it.”

  Rather than reply, Calypso reached for his hand and held it in both of hers. Their eyes met, and the deal they had sealed with a handshake so many months before was completed without a word said.

  As Calypso walked back to the orangerie, she realized that the house was ready for habitation. The cleaning crew had even brought over her clothing, had moved her food from one kitchen to the other, and then had cleaned the orangerie, as well.

  She fished in her pocket for the keys as she did a quick walk through, looking for things that would need to be transferred in the future. Her laptop still sat on the desk and she coiled its wires into her pocket before hoisting it under her arm. With a last look around, she stepped through the front door and locked it, making final one phase of her life, even as she was about to begin a new one.

  Walking back to the house, she encountered the tortoise, toiling along in the same direction.

  “You must have gotten the word,” she said companionably. “Treats at the kitchen door over here from now on. Understand?”

  The tortoise didn’t stop to look at her, but continued his earnest shuffle toward the house.

  “You are the most understanding of creatures,” Calypso marveled. “If only my husband understood things so clearly.”

  She bade the tortoise good evening and went toward the welcoming salon lights of her new home.

  She was standing in her new bathroom, arranging the items of her daily toilette on an étagère by the lavatory, when it hit her. She stared at herself in the mirror in dismay.

  A woman of late middle age stared back at her. Her long hair was pulled up in a knot on top of her head and her newly washed face had smooth, unlined skin. What struck her were the eyes. They spoke of humor and intelligence and a depth of experience that, as a younger woman, she had only hoped to gain. She looked like someone who would understand the full implication of what she was about to say.

  “You called him your husband again,” she said to the woman in the mirror. The woman looked back at her silently, apparently as quietly bemused by this revelation as was Calypso.

  §

  In the night, wind seethed in the plane tree outside her new bedroom window. As she had anticipated, it was a delicious sound, like the very soul of the huge old tree singing the secrets of earth’s day. In it she heard birdsong and rain, the glad shouts of flowers as they opened their petals to the sun, the slither of lizards and the slow scratch of the tortoise along the garden’s gravel.

  With this recitation of the day just past came bruits of the one to come, as if the duende of the genius loci, cornucopia in his left hand and libation bowl in his right, were sitting in the branches, humming the new day into existence. Calypso lay long, listening to the singing of her new life into being.

  Her mind was filled with ecstatic images of the rooms that were now hers to inhabit, with plans for the renovation of the wildly overgrown garden, and with imaginings of the dishes she would prepare in her new kitchen. She had yet to even turn on a burner of the new La Cornue stove that sat, solid and massive as a bank vault, in blue and gold splendor against the east kitchen wall. In her new study, a Louis Quinze desk already held her laptop on its inlaid leather top, just waiting for her fingers to allow inspiration to flow.

  So many future delights danced and fluttered through her tired brain that at first she could not even approach slumber. Her entire body relished the cool, smooth finish of antique linen sheets. The high-ceilinged space around her seemed to zing with energy, as if rejoicing in its own beauty of proportion and its softly tinted new plaster. Occasionally, her eyes drifted open and wandered toward the dark bulk of the marble mantlepiece and her imagination lit a winter fire there, relishing the coming of long nights of rain, its rush and splatter syncopated with the rising and falling of the flames.

  Only in the bass undernote of the wind did her mind pick up the thread of another narrative. Her hand stole from her side toward the empty half of the bed. She fell asleep with Javier’s face rising before her, his lips drawn in that perfect arc that precedes a kiss.

  §

  In the morning, Calypso dressed in old jeans and an indigo sweater, slid her feet into a pair of slouching blue and white striped espadrilles, wrapped a bright scarf around her neck, and hurried downstairs to her kitchen. It was the first day of her new life and she was determined to stay aware in order to soak in every delicious detail of it, moment by moment.

  Everything was new to her. The kettle she filled with water was a copper one she had found moldering greenly in the cupboard on her first inspection of the house, now polished and gleaming in morning light. She managed to light the burner of the new stove and put the kettle on to boil, ground coffee in an antique wooden hand grinder, and slide the grounds from the little drawer into her French press. Each act was a tessera in the mosaic of her new life and world, invested with the sacred importance of ritual.

  While the water was heating, she opened the west side doors and shutters and went out under the pergola. Its vines filtered golden morning light onto the restored wooden table. She threw a fresh white linen tea towel down on the tabletop and brought out a basket of bread, a plate of butter, a pot of local strawberry jam that one of the ladies of the cleaning crew had brought her, and laid out flatware and an antique faience plate.

  Back inside, she stood before the Provençal hutch and its shelf of cups and saucers, choosing carefully which would become her morning favorite. Finally, from among Limoges cups covered in hand-painted roses, Lunéville with innocent bouquets of flowers and Minton with elaborate oriental designs, she chose a large hexagonal cup of white Paris porcelain, decorated only with a gold ring around its lip. Even though it had a chip along the edge and its saucer was mismatched, Calypso responded to the dignity and resilience of the two hundred-year-old vessel.

  “When I’m your age, I’ll have a few chips and dings, too,” she said.

  Setting the cup on the counter, she filled it with hot water from the kettle and then filled the French press. From the drawer of the hutch she produced an antique tea cozy stitched like a Provençal boutis in a charming cicada pattern and, from a cupboard, a worn Empire tole tray in chapped red enamel and spotty gold.

  She depressed the French press and the smell of hot coffee welled up blissfully. Putting the press on the tray, she popped the tea cozy over it, added a bowl of brown sugar cubes, a little pitcher of cream and the warming cup, and carried the tray outside.

  Settling in behind the table, faced so that she could look down the sun-dappled length of the pergola, she poured her coffee, and slathered bread with butter and jam. A small breeze shivering through the leaves of the plane trees and the Roman fountain’s languorous plash, were rustic music spiked with birdsong. Calypso thought, then, of the figure in the vault. Down in darkness, like an anchor for a ship bobbing in a pleasant harbor, the Goddess radiated her joy up and outward, filling the world with song.

  Sharp concussions of footfall on gravel interrupted her musings. Before she could rise to investigate, a voice behind her said, “There you are! I’ve been hammering on the front door.”

  Her body convulsed in shock and joy.

  “Is it you?”

  She pushed back her chair, twirled to face him, and collided with his onrushing chest. His arms went around her, pressing her to him, and she smelled the scent that, since their first embrace almost fifty years before, had annihilated all reason in her. She buried her face in his shirt and clung to him, her arms wrapped around him.

  “Oh, my God, Javier!” was all she could say, and was n
ot surprised when he was too overwhelmed to respond.

  §

  They sat half the morning under the pergola, catching up. She plied him with food and coffee, which he accepted but did not eat in the intensity of their chatter. Their coffee grew cold. Wasps trekked through the jam on their plates, unheeded. They bent toward one another, holding hands across the table, lost in the amazement of being together again.

  “You’ve been traveling a long time,” Calypso said.

  “Yes. Two full days. But you won’t believe it, Caleepso. I was in such a hurry to get here, I forgot my passport back at the ranch. It took four days to get a temporary one issued. Can you believe something so stupid as that?”

  He rubbed his head, amazed at his own mistake.

  In her mind’s eye, she traced his long journey down from the Sierra into Chihuahua City. The unbearably convoluted and frustrating bureaucratic hassle over the passport and then the airport, the flight into El Paso, then onward to New York, the change of planes, the hop across the Atlantic, then customs and the rush across Charles de Gaulle Airport from the international terminal to the domestic one and finally, the short flight to Montpellier. It made her tired just to think about it.

  “You rented a car in Montpellier?”

  “Yes. I spent the night there last night, at the Palais Hotel. I wanted to come last night, but I was too tired.”

  “I’ve missed you.” Her chest was compressed with emotion and it came out in a whisper.

  “I have missed you too, Caleepso. I need to tell you something.”

  She was suddenly wary. What if he had come to insist that she come back to Rancho Cielo? Or worse, unbearable to think of, that he was so tired of missing her that he wanted out—wanted a fresh start, so that the wound of her absence could heal?

  Tears glossed her eyes and she could barely wheeze, “What?” It came out more sharply than she had anticipated.

  He pulled his hand away, stood, and brought his chair around to her side of the table. She turned her chair to face his and he reached for her hands with both of his.