The Blood Oranges: A Novel

by Hawkes, John

  “Arise, arise, Catherine,”I whispered then, leaning on the wall and staring at her through golden eyeglasses, “climb to your feet, and let’s comfort each other.”

  But she could not arise, or look at me, or say my name. It was in her power to help me speak for the past, to help me see the future. Her voice might have reinforced my voice, her eyes might have met mine. And yet I knew it was not to be. She still preferred to remain only the inert supine center of my life, the sun that neither sets nor rises. The bell had stopped ringing. I sighed, again I pushed off from the wall and smiled down at her in a way that said I had endless strength and patience to give her in small doses once each week. She could not have mistaken the sound of my breath or the meaning of that distant smile. I dug the toe of my left shoe into the orange sand, shoved both hands into my torn pockets. Nearby a finch was covering itself with pale dust.

  No doubt she heard my breathing long after my heavy footsteps had died away. Perhaps she expected to see me or at least hoped to see me standing there when the little fat women approached her wearing their blue aprons and carrying their terra-cotta bowls and stiff brushes. Perhaps for a moment she did in fact see me, though I was already gone. Perhaps after today she would think more about me and less about Hugh, perhaps now would begin to prepare herself more agreeably for my next appearance. When next I saw her, wouldn’t she be digging happily among the flowers that grew in the little stone pots along the front of her balcony, or standing with her eyes open and her hands clasped together and a vague hopeful smile drawing the top lip from the bottom? I thought so. Soon I would move her back to the villa, soon she would be able to join me arm in arm beside Hugh’s grave.

  And slowly riding back down the narrow path from Catherine’s sanctuary to the broken stones of the empty town, beyond which waited my silent villa and Rosella, squeezing the rusty hand brakes with my aching hands to keep the bike from tearing loose on the hill and pitching over the nearest shaggy precipice, squeezing the brakes and hearing the rusted spokes going around and the soft tires humming like inflated snakes, amused at the thought of the perfect beauty of my large formally attired self mounted on the rust-colored bike, and then thinking of Catherine, already planning my next visit to her balcony while my lip burned and while a mildly rancid breeze played about my face—suddenly in the midst of all this I went around a turn in the path and bumped through a cleft in the mossy rock and applied the brakes, put down both feet, held my breath, forgot all about Catherine and myself.

  There on a low wall of small black stones that resembled the dark fossilized hearts of long-dead bulls with white hides and golden horns, there on the wall and silhouetted against the blue sky and black sea were two enormous game birds locked in love. They were a mass of dark blue feathers and silver claws, in the breeze they swayed together like some flying shield worthy of inclusion in the erotic dreams of the most discriminating of all sex-aestheticians. Together we were two incongruous pairs frozen in one feeling, I astride the old bike and hardly breathing, the larger bird atop the smaller bird and already beginning to grow regal, and all the details of that perfect frieze came home to me. Exposed on the bare rock, lightly blown by the breeze, the smaller bird lay with her head to one side and eyes turning white, as if nesting, while above her the big bird clung with gently pillowed claws to the slight shoulders and kept himself aloft, in motion, kept himself from becoming a dead weight on the smooth back of the smaller bird by flying, by spreading his wings and beating them slowly and turning his entire shape into a great slowly hovering blue shield beneath which his sudden act of love was undeniable. Grace and chaos, control and helplessness, mastery and collapsc —it was all there, as if the wind was having its way with the rocks. There before my eyes was the infusion itself, and the birds remained true to nature and undisturbed by the infinite rusty sounds of my old bike until it was all done and the larger bird loosed his claws, made a bell-like sound, then rose slowly and vertically on the hot breeze. Some time later his small partner toppled off the wall and half fell, half flew down toward the burnt clay roofs of the village, while I rode off slowly on my now humbled bike.

  Obviously the two birds mating on the horizon were for me a sign, an emblem, a mysterious medallion, a good omen. They augured well for the time I had spent with Catherine and for my own future in the electrified field of Love’s art. But as I pedaled once more between the funeral cypresses and approached the villa, I found myself wondering if in the brief twining of that dark blue feathery pair I had actually witnessed Catherine’s dead husband and my own wife clasping each to each the sweet mutual dream which only months before had been denied them by the brief gust of catastrophe that had swept among us. Yes, Hugh and Fiona in the shape of birds and finding each other, so to speak, in final stationary flight. Could it have been? I smiled to realize that the pleasure and truth of the vision were worth pondering.

  YOUTH HAS NO MONOPOLY ON LOVE, THE SAP DOES NOT flow solely in the young. In all my adventures and in all my diligent but unemotional study of sex literature I found nothing to justify the happy expressions of total self-confidence we generally read in the superficially attractive faces of so many younger men and still younger girls. Jaunty, spritely people with trim bodies and unclouded eyes are not necessarily the most capable of those thrust into the center of the pink tapestry. After all, at the height of our season Fiona and Hugh were almost forty, Catherine had passed that mark by several years, while I was already two or three long leaps beyond middle age. Furthermore, we were a quartet of tall and large-boned lovers aged in the wood. Too big for mere caprice, too old to waste time and yet old enough to appreciate immodesty, we were all four of us imposing in height, in weight, in blood pressure, in chest expansion. All except Hugh perhaps, who always said that his long thin legs were the legs of the Christ and whose spare fishy chest was actually day by day collapsing, though like me Hugh was nonetheless capable of carrying either Fiona or Catherine across one naked shoulder without stumbling or shortness of breath. Body to body, arms about each other’s waists, our undergarments and bathing apparel dangling together on a line strung hastily between the two villas, or each standing separately and exhibiting his characteristic gesture—Catherine with her hands at her sides, Hugh clutching his impertinent camera, Fiona unconsciously holding her breasts in hands as bold and sensitive as Leonardo’s, I bare-chested and cigarette in mouth and staring with bland eyes at a full wineglass lifted high in my weathered fingers—at the height of our brief season and in the four fully matured figures of our quartet, anyone with an eye for sex would have recognized an experience, purpose and continuity only hinted at in the poignant stances of young girls with thumbs hooked in bikinis and brown legs stiffly apart. There were four of us then, not merely two, and in our quaternion the vintage sap flowed freely, flowed and bled and boiled as it may never again.

  Can youth make such claims?

  ONCE AGAIN WE SEPARATED IN THE DARK EMPTY NAVE OF the squat church, Fiona and I, once again went our separate ways, each to the altar of his choice. The windows were cut through those deep walls as if for the arrows, lances, pikes and small cannon of sturdy peasants who might still attempt to defend this church from the barbarians, and without glass, never intended for glass, exposed us, hidden though we were, to the smells and harsh light of the rocky village around us. The windows, mere rude rectangular holes left high in the moist walls, were themselves barbaric, and made me smile. Yet I smiled not only because the windows were unsymmetrical and gave a feeling of ancient violence to altars, cross, shaky wooden seats for solemn populace, as if the dungeonlike church had been abandoned before they had even morticed the last volcanic stone in place, but smiled also at the symmetry of taste and feeling that pulled Fiona and me apart and drew us to altars so nearly opposite in color, mood, design. Hands in pockets, I could hear Fiona breathing quietly and could hear the sharp sounds of her footsteps as she bent all the energy of her tall and beautiful and impatient self toward finding still better angles from
which to view the altar.

  “Cyril, baby, why don’t you put out the cigarette? For God’s sake.”

  And I smiled to hear Fiona’s voice clipped and imploring, harsh and sweet, a mere whisper filled with the richest possible sounds of assurance in the ear-ringing silence of the stone vault. It was like Fiona to talk without turning her head, to respect the sanctity of old stones in a whisper that ruffled the little moth-eaten dress of the infant in Mary’s arms, to comment on my cigarette in her distracted way while squatting all at once to examine a pair of short yellow bones crossed at the base of her favorite altar. Everywhere Fiona was in lovely character, yet nowhere was she more herself than here in the stone crypt where we joked about some day being buried together alive. Her graceful agitation, her girlish fixation on the altar of the dead, the absolute self-possession of a woman so large and yet so faunlike and hard—I could only smile to hear the soft silver of her voice and to see my athletic angel merging her fluted flesh with those cold shadows.

  “What’s the matter with my cigarette?” I whispered across the nave in a deep and gentle echo as rich in reverence as Fiona’s. “The little boys have been relieving themselves back there in the darkness. Smell it?”

  “Cyril, you’ re making me nervous. OK?”

  Then my own slow, bemused, vigorous whisper: “If the little boys can make water, I can smoke.”

  How like the two of us to spend each day these long minutes together and yet apart in this little medieval church of cold passion, how like us to choose these different altars. Hands in pockets, brief cigarette still in my mouth, I lounged against my own small altar which was of white marble and was devoted to gold, to fresh flowers, to the wooden Virgin recently lacquered in bright blue paint and stiffly cradling the crude doll dressed in his rotting gown of real lace. The two crowns, the sightless eyes, the feeling of water sprinkled over the whole thing and the sunlight that warmed altar and shoulders alike—here I could lounge suspended in a childish array of cheerful artifacts quite appropriate to my luminous good nature, here laugh aloud and take my time watching Fiona trying to penetrate the secrets of that other altar so absurdly opposite from mine.

  “My God, I’ve found the skeleton of a child. Head, ribs, hands, feet—the whole works. How could they do it?”

  A moment before she had been sitting on her heels, with the open coat of yellow suede drawn tight across her widened buttocks, but now, never at rest, she was standing on tiptoe directly in front of that black and white altar, while with my usual pleasure I noted her straight legs, her narrow calves stretching with a kind of girlish muscular determination, her hands spread wide and resting firmly on the black marble. Even stock still she was trembling, I thought, even motionless appeared already to be wheeling and running on naked white feet toward her next confrontation with bright light, old stones, new lovers.

  “He’s beautiful, poor thing. I’m going to kiss him, Cyril. Shall I?”

  Yellow was Fiona’s color, as in the case of the almost tissue-thin suede coat which, in her stretching efforts to reach the skull of the child, was now lifted high above the tight skin behind her knees. And for more than eighteen years she had been most obviously true to character and to her color yellow in the act of kissing, and had spent those years kissing each letter she wrote, each book she enjoyed, kissing flowers, shadows, dead birds, dogs, old ladies, attractive men, as if only by touching the world with her open lips could she make it real and bring herself to life. So even while I was grunting my approval and pleasure, which was the only way to reply to any of Fiona’s questions about kissing, she had already found the small white skull with her eager mouth, and I could only smile still more broadly at the sight of Fiona lavishing one of her brief floods of compassion on the tiny cold features of a grinning relic. It was like Fiona to leave her jasmine scent perfuming the mere skeleton of some unknown infant embedded along with thick-lettered unreadable injunctions against frivolity and sex in their unfrequented altar. To her, no expenditure of her own affection was ever wasted.

  But I smelled wax, dust, flaking wood, rusting iron, all the effluvium of devotion and religious craftsmanship. Taking my left hand from my pocket and between thumb and first finger rubbing half-consciously the hem of the tattered dress on the Virgin’s doll, at that moment I found myself looking not at Fiona, who had forgotten me in her brief moment of frenzy in front of the dark altar, but up at a small pulpit lacquered with circus colors of blue and gold and somehow fastened high on the stone wall opposite me. The sun, as on my altar, warmed the pulpit and struck with fire a life-sized wooden arm that protruded over the edge of the pulpit and was extended, as in some kind of benediction, in the wet air. Except for the arm, with its crack near the elbow and its flowing wooden sleeve and pasty yellow hand, and except for the two altars and little peculiar pulpit, I might have been standing in some gutted cellar of the ancient world, some pit giving onto secret viaducts packed with the old world’s excrement.

  “Look, Fiona, a wooden arm!”

  Barefooted, wearing only her bra and brief for the beach, as well as the yellow coat, of course, which was her concession to the disapproving village and intended to spare us both from muttered threats of croak peonie, and alert, unappeasable, quick-breathing, austere and supple, the only woman I have ever known who, as sex-aesthetician, was nearly my equivalent, woman whose aging body was nonetheless a young green tree—how like my wife, Fiona, to thrust her proud chin and hungry mouth into the crumpled face of the sightless dead and then to fly on, magnificent and quite oblivious to my own discoveries, my own passing sensual interest in a wooden arm. Perhaps the aesthetic pleasures of the wooden arm were subtle, even for Fiona. Because now she spoke again in her whisper that was firm and clear, submissive and peremptory, and already her mind and eyes were elsewhere, had not comprehended the comic miracle of the arm in space, the wooden hand that no one would ever hold.

  “Cyril, I want to light a candle. OK?”

  She had turned, was facing me, the coat hung open, her stomach appeared to be unusually small and round above the wide hips and wonderfully frank pelvic area bound up in the tight spongy whiteness of her brief for the beach. So I drew the smoke back in through my heavy nose and took my time, once again admired myself for thinking to bring this woman into the humorless solemnity of empty nave and squat buttressed church, once again tried to follow the new course of her flight.

  “Sure. But who on earth would we light it for?”

  “Oh, Cyril, does it matter? I just want to light a candle, baby.”

  And Fiona would have had her way, would have sailed in long quick strides to the other end of the nave, would have selected the perfect thin white candle and kissed it, impetuously kissed it, and then would have watched while I slowly took the candle from her firm hand and impaled this, Fiona’s candle, on one of the little upright spikes set in rows for that purpose, would have had me strike the match and light the wick for the benefit, perhaps, of the infant whose ancient and miniature skeleton she had already made her own—would have caused all this to happen, would have had us standing side by side and inhaling the long black strings of smoke and appreciating together the honeyed scent of the wax, had not the candle-lighting idea been destroyed the very instant Fiona was beginning to move by a sudden ominous clamor in the cobbled alley just outside the church. We heard men running and grunting, heard the sound-of boots on the stones. Simultaneously the nave was filled with the sharp clanging of the bell in the squat tower above our heads, and with the ugly blasts of the obsolete mechanical horn always blown by some village official in times of crisis.

  “Is it a fire, Cyril?”

  “Button your coat and we’ll find out,”I said, smiling at the disappearance of the flame that was never lit.

  In the next instant we fled fragile bones and rotting lace and wooden arm, fled the rows of little upright spikes that were spattered with dusty clots of melted wax and on one of which a single crooked candle was, as a matter of fact, already b
urning, hand in hand ran from the cold nave, appeared together briefly against the sagging and worm-eaten wooden church door that we pushed shut behind us, and then took up the chase after two squat men in rubber boots and crude black leather helmets. Fiona’s coat was closed, the black horn was blowing. From a short distance ahead came gruff intermittent shouts, commands of croak peonie and, oddly enough, the sound of laughter.

  “What the hell,” I said, pacing my breath, holding Fiona’s hand and restraining somewhat her flight, “they’re laughing.”

  “Come on, baby. Please. I want to see.”

  One more booted and helmeted figure, short and fat and carrying some kind of boat hook, thundered up from behind and passed us, despite his clumsiness, and sped on after the other two and disappeared. Broken tiles, the familiar stone cups filled with poison and set out on empty window ledges and in empty doorways, the closeness of the narrow walls that magnified every sound so that we could hear distinctly the choppy breathing of the three stunted men who were, I knew, members of the much-feared and openly hostile fire brigade—through this brief stretch of dismal labyrinth we ran, the elegant woman who dared show to all the village her hard naked feet and the spectacular man who, in actual sight of the church, had been seen to blow from his mouth disrespectful shapes in blue smoke.

  But then we emerged from the hollow darkness of a low arch into full view of the black canal whose simple low cobbled embankment was wide enough to accommodate roving dogs, sullen families on foot and, one at a time, those rare engine-powered vehicles that appeared, now and again, from beyond the mountains. Here the crowd was gathered, we saw, not for fire or bicycle accident or fist fight between children with slack jaws and bloodshot eyes, but instead was pressing toward the edge of the canal in anger or with laughter because a large khaki-colored motorbus had somehow found its way off the sloping embankment and now sat, floated, right side up on the still water black with pollution.