Painted Horses

by Malcolm Brooks

  She is several years older than he, hard forged by fascism and righteous indignation and danger not the least. She takes him to a party at a friend’s apartment, a chain-smoking assemblage of writers and intellectuals. John H does not speak French well enough to follow their conversation, which whirls and flashes like a festival, but he gathers she loves to argue, her tongue quick as a matador’s cape.

  He tries to explain where he comes from in America and what he is other than a painter and finally out of linguistic desperation he defaults to cowboy.

  They love this. Between them they appear to have seen every Western movie ever made and have a photographic recall for memorable dialogue, saloon brawls, and shootouts. They reenact scenes from My Darling Clementine, They Died with Their Boots On, and Stagecoach, laughing riotously among themselves at this recollection or that. The latter is the only film John H has seen himself, projected against a canvas wall at a mess hall in Naples, he and a thousand other soldiers. He recognizes impressions of the Ringo Kid and Buck the stage driver, but most of the rest is lost on him as the conversation resumes in French. At one point he glances at Elixabete and sees she has been watching, studying while he tries to follow.

  A day later they become lovers. This follows a dispute, which in retrospect he can only regard as the natural course of events.

  He tells her he was gone from Naples when Vesuvius went off. March of ’44, more than three years already past. He saw the eruption from miles away, orange lava catapulting in the night like jets out of hell’s own loins, liquid fire flowing down the mountain setting houses and trees alight.

  Intellectual or not, Elixabete has her superstitions. She says, “That was the earth, firing a warning shot.”

  “A warning at what?”

  “At stupid humans.”

  John H does not even mull this. “From what I’ve seen I can’t say I agree. That lava took whatever was in its path, and mostly what was in its path was farm huts and people’s meal tickets. Woodcutters’ lots and truck gardens. Little shacks that would’ve rotted five hundred years ago except they were made of stone. Those people had enough on their plates, what with the lead flying and foreign armies roughshod all over the place.”

  “The Italians were complicit for years. They loved their little Duce, right up to the moment it became unprofitable to love him anymore. They have allegiance to nothing except convenience, to, to, what’s the expression? To whatever wind happens to blow.”

  Now he did think a little. “We’re talking about two different things.”

  “Do you know what Italians did to Basques at Santoña? No of course you don’t. You’re American; all you know is newness. That, and your myth of endless reinvention. You talk about foreign armies. I can tell you and the Italians all about foreign armies, and something about toil on the face of the earth as well. And we are not talking about two things. Consider your dust bowl. Your Grapes of Wrath. A chip falls in New York and the rain stops a thousand miles away. What is that?”

  He can’t remember the last argument he had with a woman. Possibly never. “The people I saw in Italy who were most affected were the ones living right on the edge to begin with. Women who’ve been washing clothes in the same creek for a thousand years. Some of them washed mine. Nothing convenient about their lives, never has been. Dirt farmers and goat herders. What’s the earth got against them?”

  “Fate,” she said. “The earth weighs their fate, exacts their fate. Is the cradle of fate. We come out of the earth and we take our survival from it, and because we take from it the earth has the power to exact a price.”

  He goads her a little, tells her this is her Catholic upbringing talking. He tells her the earth is no Eden and never was.

  She ignores this, her eyes darting around the café while the gears whir in her mind. They have attracted the attention of others, either the elevation of her voice or the fact they are speaking English.

  “Think of this. Everyone in your country defers to the same dream, the dream of the towering individualist. The few who achieve the dream perpetuate the dream, because by selling the dream they ensure the admiration of the masses who will never achieve the dream.

  “The essence of this is not new,” she says. “Think of the path of art over twenty-five centuries, the grand illusion peddled by art.”

  He has a feeling things are about to get personal. “What illusion is that.”

  “The illusion of topic. Even for Shakespeare the proper subjects were princes and kings, intrigues of court, as though these are central to the human condition. Forget the struggle to subsist from one hour to the next. The towering man has transcended survival, gone on to bigger things. Art spins grandeur into false reality and still you hold to it, even after the towering men brought chaos to banks and industries and to farms and the fields as well.

  “So the rain dried up. The soil blew like empty money. Even in your land of newness, your land of dreams. The earth had its price.”

  John H has never met anyone like this, never heard anyone talk the way she does. He can fall back only on himself.

  “Well,” he says. “I don’t know that particular dream. The way I see it forces of nature are just what they are. Forces. If a bullet doesn’t get you, a hard winter might. Or a fire or a flood or a sting from a bee. A vein goes bad, bursts in your head. No rhyme or reason.

  “Though I can’t say there’s no rhyme or reason. There’s order to horses. A shifting order, sometimes peaceful and sometimes not, but order all the same, and no way to survive without it. No way to survive without strength at the top, and no strength at the top without a challenge from below.”

  “Ah, the purity of hierarchy. The right of the strong to rule. I’ve heard this one before. Euskara has become an outlaw language in its own home, cut off from its own heritage. Does order justify that?”

  John H thinks a moment. “Say some old shepherd comes out of one of those valleys, one of those places time flat forgot. He’s a good old guy, harmless to puppies, but he takes a wrong turn and he wanders into modern life and all he speaks is Basque. No Spanish and no French either.”

  She cocks her head, tells him to go on.

  “In order to inform this old shepherd his language is against the law, the constable’s got to resort to Basque himself. So does the prosecutor, if they drag him before a judge. What do they do then, throw the book at each other?”

  She smiles. She doesn’t want to, he knows that, but she can’t help it.

  “I shouldn’t laugh,” she says. “The way things are now there could in fact be consequences, even for such a harmless person. Absurd as it is.”

  “So that law’s a joke. That we agree on. Like a law against something grows out of the ground.”

  She nods. “That we agree on.”

  “In my experience the earth’s laws aren’t a joke. A mystery, maybe—who knows why the world does what it does, why it’s calm when it’s calm and not when it’s not.

  “I spent ten years dodging rock slides and lightning storms, occasionally starvation and in the end I got sent halfway around the world to dodge German bullets. The things the earth throws at you are nothing to laugh at, but the biggest thorns in my side have come from governments.

  “On the other hand America has Basques, and it has Italians. English, Irish, Poles, and Krauts for that matter. Everybody under the same volcano. I guess I’m as loyal to that as anything. How you stack one against the other, I don’t know. I ain’t that smart.”

  She purses her lips and looks at him. To his surprise she reaches across the table, touches the scar on his chin.

  With the sensations of the city in his eyes and on his tongue and always at the tip of his brush he spins onto canvas all manner of things, filaments of the same great web, gardens and cityscapes and street life from observation, orchards and villas and ruination out of memory. But always and forever, he returns to his line of hills.

  Elixabete refers to them as his hobbyhorses, teases him that he is hi
mself a one-trick pony. In point of fact these are the paintings she herself is most drawn to, as though the flaring nostrils and long fine bones of cannon and skull hold the secrets to a great elemental mystery, some profound cosmic knot she might unravel if she stares long enough, stares hard enough.

  During that first month they are at one another constantly, two strays sating themselves on the same sudden feast. She has an animal ardor, wants to pin him down and possess him only to be in the end pinned down by him. Though she has long favored pants she takes to wearing a skirt that he may hike it around her hips in a doorway, in a phone booth, within the plummeting cage of an elevator.

  On a wall of his apartment opposite his bed hangs an unframed canvas five feet long depicting a rush of horses, some spotted, some with stripes flashing from the withers, horses overlapping and milling and in their collective trajectory directing the eye to one predominant horse with its flank tinted red, which bleeds into tan, which bleeds yet again into slim black stockings, a horse with a wild gleam for an eye and some hypnotic quality by which she finds herself endlessly ensnared.

  More than once he wakes to find her sitting in the bed with the sheet above her knees, transfixed by the painting across the room. Her own eyes with a fierce hard shine, that glare they get when she’s enraged or aroused. A forgotten cigarette unlit in her fingers, gooseflesh across her naked back. More than once he says something to her and she never responds, never knows he’s spoken.

  More than once she asks him, “What is it? It’s driving me crazy. It’s something hidden, isn’t it, something concealed inside a horse?” But if he knows the answer, he does not say.

  One afternoon he returns from the stable to find her waiting, a valise packed and a sharp little beret on her head and the painting pulled from the wall. She tells him he has ten minutes to get his things together.

  They board a train and travel south out of the city, the buildings and boulevards falling away and the eternal calm of the countryside coming along in a patchwork of new lavender and black soil, grapevines strung on gnarled trunks. In the evening roe deer and pheasants emerge from the hedges.

  They stop at a village. John H never knows its name. They walk in the night through narrow deserted streets, the darkened old buildings jutting at crooked angles. They cross a canal on a stone footbridge and come to a cobbled square with a massive central fountain, its cherubs and finials eerie in a skewed wash of electric light. The fountain does not at the moment run with water and somehow this is eerier still. They room for the night in an inn at the edge of the square, a great stone building with brilliant whitewashed walls and plank flooring that shows here and there the crosshatch left by some long-ago saw and with the air clean through the window and the woman warm against him he sleeps like he’s been darted with a drug.

  In the morning they wake to a gentle rain and ride another train west, the terrain increasingly rugged with limestone crags and outcroppings thrusting up out of green river bottoms and cultivated lowlands, other crags looming through gray mist in the distance.

  By noon the rain has passed. They disembark at Condat-Le-Lardin and travel on foot down a dirt lane, stepping around puddles here and there, the odors of honeysuckle and wild thyme heavy in the still-damp air. They hear the distant clank of a cowbell but never see the cow.

  In the evening with the sun shafting through the clouds she leads him up a pathway onto the hill behind the town. Through the trees he sees the husk of an old château. Elixabete yells at the house, and a second later the house yells back. She grins at him. She carries a lamp in one hand, the rolled canvas in the other. John H follows along, still not entirely certain what it is they’re supposed to be doing.

  The pathway ends at an opening in the side of the hill, an excavated ramp sloping down to scaffolding and a domed entryway still under construction, beyond that the contorted natural maw of a cavern. Two men loaf in identical black berets and identical work smocks, smoking identical cigarettes, and although probably forty years separate them John H has the disorienting sense he is seeing twins of a sort, or perhaps parallel incarnations of the same beast, unified in spirit yet separated by the long crawl of time. The younger of the two is solidly built and blocky, the older barrel-chested, hunched at the back so severely his head appears to protrude straight out of his clavicle rather than extend from any neck.

  Elixabete says, “Bagnard,” and walks right into the arms of the younger man, kisses his cheeks and speaks to him in very rapid French, then disentangles herself and turns to the other, and though this one calls her mon enfant and gives her a sideways nod John H has the sense they are in fact meeting for the first time.

  The three talk for a while. John H catches words and partial phrases but can’t keep up except to gather that the younger of the two slips in and out of some other, irregular dialect, French at its core yet coarser, harder edged. Elixabete is clearly endeared to him, even though or perhaps because he seems an entirely different animal than her intellectual friends in the city. He has a raffish, streetwise edge, also a sort of natural ease that appears to calm her down rather than rile her up. John H wonders what history they have. He suspects he’ll never know.

  The two men finish their cigarettes and each fires another and Elixabete smokes as well, all in their black berets. John H stands idly by in his battered campaign hat, flexing his knee against the ache from the trudge up the hill.

  “Monsieur l’Abbé,” Elixabete says, and with the older man’s attention she rattles off something with recurring words. Américain, artiste, cheval.

  The older man looks at John H, then back at Elixabete. Elixabete says, “Il n’a aucune idée de ce qu’il y a dans la grotte.”

  Finally he shrugs, turns, and says something to the younger man who throws a flippant gesture with his cigarette hand at Elixabete and says, “Celle-là ne ment pas.”

  He looks back at Elixabete. “Bon, mon enfant. Je vous accorde deux minutes pour m’étonner.”

  She looks at John H. “I told him you have no idea what’s in the cave. He’s giving me two minutes to show you off.”

  Evening has fallen on the hillside, the mouth of the cave yawning blackly in the dusk. Elixabete slides the canvas out of the cylinder, enlists John H and le Bagnard to unfurl the painting while she holds the flashlight. The abbé does her one better and ignites an acetylene lamp, and when he directs this blaze at the figures of the horses John H watches Elixabete’s eyes widen in the throw of the light. She sees in the lamplight what eluded her before.

  The wild gleam in the red horse’s eye, that shine of wet light at the edge of an iris. The gleam is not formed by any random splash of paint but by the tiny yellow figure of a human hand. She looks at John H with a child’s delight, and though he smiles at her he also puts his finger to his lips.

  The abbé may see it himself or he may not, but whatever the case he certainly sees something. He moves the lamp down the length of the canvas and then back, very slowly in each direction, squints at various details of form and shading up close and then shuffles backward and studies the whole of the composition from a few steps away. He says nothing for a spell, merely seems caught in the effect of the thing, or in the technique that creates the effect.

  Finally he looks at John H with the same intensity and says, “Vous dites qu’il n’a aucune idée de ce qu’il y a dans la grotte?”

  Elixabete says, “Aucune.”

  “Et il ne sait rien ni de la préhistoire ni de l’anthropologie? Il est un artiste, point final?”

  “Oui, un artiste, mais aussi un cavalier. Un cow-boy américain.” She looks at the priest, but she speaks to John H. “I told him you know nothing about prehistory, that you’re an artist, also an American cowboy.”

  “I gathered.”

  The abbé gives a crooked smile. “Ça commence et finit par les chevaux, n’est-ce pas? Autrefois tout comme aujourd’hui. Venez avec moi.”

  “He says it begins and ends with horses, now and in history. You’ll see
what he means.”

  They roll the canvas, return it to its cylinder. The younger man fires a second torch and walks behind them and with the abbé shuffling ahead they move beneath the arbor of the unfinished entry and step into a vein of the earth.

  The air changes, acquires a density, a pressured stillness. A walkway is under construction on the floor and in the cone of light from the lamp John H sees wheelbarrows and shovels tilted against the wall, smells disturbed earth, the sticky odor of damp sliced clay.

  He lifts his eyes and the cavern’s ceiling rolls at him like a mushroom cloud, a billowing catastrophe locked in a crust of white stone, and his eye fixates so completely on the glitter of its surface in the bobbing light of the torch that his brain cannot quite accept the massive head of the bull on the wall.

  His eye jumps and he sees his horses, sees his horses, moving down the corridor. He goes weak not only in the bad knee but in the good one as well. A pale red stallion fully the size of life lopes along not five feet in front of him, its muscles rippling across the texture of the wall.

  A second red horse with a slower gait moves out ahead and skirts the horns of the oncoming bull, and the man sees he is not in the path of a stampede but square in the eye of it, the painted figures or his muddled brain or for all he knows the very vault itself set somehow magically awhirl.

  “Vous voyez ce que nous avons hérité? Il y a tout de même de la hiérarchie, de l’ordre dans cet orage.” The abbé moves his light along the wall.

  “Établi par Dieu pour être perçu par l’œil du chasseur. Les autres bêtes ont pour but de nous fournir de la nourriture et des vêtements.”

  Elixabete murmurs only a partial translation, for the abbé rambles nearly without pause, as though delivering a manifesto for his ears alone. “We’ve inherited an order within the storm,” she says. “Created by God for the eye of a hunter.”