by Linda Talbot
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The people on the boats silently succumb to the hollow slap of oars in deep water. The island that had fallen from above into the underground lake of Melissani, persists with incongruous growth. A ragged piece of sky hangs in the hole left by its collapse.
For the first time that day Lise is silent; uneasily beset by the echoes of the lake, subdued by the impassive boatman and alarmed at the water's depth.
Jules watches her face, and with sullen satisfaction, sees the fear that has frozen her unmitigated malcontent. He looks up to the area of blue where the sun-soaked life of Cephalonia persists; easy with the influx of tourism in towns rebuilt since the earthquake of 1953 with money brought back from abroad.
Briefly, Jules sees a young woman, watching them from the sunlit gap above the lake. Wryly she smiles, then is absorbed by air.
Lise is silent as they drive back to Skala; her eyes unseeing as they slip through unruly rock speared with cypress.
She declares, "You have never tried to better yourself. You have deliberately destroyed your chances. I'm surprised you managed to bring me this far."
Her complaints about his low salary as a salesman with few clients, flow freely now. And from his lack of ambition, according to her, stems their inability to communicate, to entertain people of consequence, to plan for an early retirement in the sun.
She has red hair today, which frames her fury like leaping flame. She changes its colour according to impulse, as she darts through diversions, believing that the unlocking of wealth will ease the tedium to which by nature she is condemned.
Jules, darkly immaculate, yet careless of career and social standing, stoically bears the brunt of the clipped complaints, but looks with longing at the calm of the crystalline Ionian, lapping the curve of Myrtos beach below.
The purity and peace shimmers; eternal, while witnessing the passing of people who glimpse the gently eroded grandeur and depart.
Then, in the aquamarine, the Assos peninsula stands unsullied; symbol of the unattainable.
The courier is telling them of Cephalos, after whom the island is named. "In one myth, he rejected the love of the goddess Hera and in another, the seduction of Eos - the dawn - who to be avenged, cast doubt on the fidelity of Procris, his wife. Eos said she would betray him if sufficiently tempted by the wealth of another man.
"Cephalos, in disguise, found this to be so and when he revealed his true identity, she went into exile. Cephalos, meanwhile, had succumbed to Eos. Procris returned and followed him at the hunt. Cephalos, seeing a bush disturbed, presumably by an animal, shot at it and killed his wife. Haunted by her and grief stricken, Cephalos went into exile and was given the island of Cephalonia in recognition of his help in wars against the Teleboans and Taphians. But he was haunted by Procis's ghost and leapt from Cape Leucas to his death."
Lise listens; on her face, a fleeting fear, as though prompted by premonition.
Next day at dawn, Jules wakes to the slap of a wind-worried sea. He leaves Lise, her face fraught with fine lines, even in sleep, to walk into the unseasonable wildness of the bruised beach.
Initially, the woman who approaches from the strengthening sun, seems a figment of its light, tentatively touching the sand, suffused with the pale potential of the day.
She gains ground, as though moved by mystic means and is laughing, her fair hair flowing around wryly dancing eyes. She wears a rose pareo that the wind unwinds. She extends a supple hand. She is the woman he saw looking down onto the Melissani lake. Impulsively he grasps the proffered hand. He holds the essence of the early morning sun.
Like light, she enters him; expunging his cold core of rejection, seeking his retreating soul, severing the filaments of fear.
He feels the lick of wind-flecked foam, the harshness of shingle and sand. He bathes in the woman's rose light. And as dawn turns to day, he feels her slipping and contracting, until she is a small sensation in his hungry hand. And then no more.
All day, as Lise berates him in the sun and shade, Jules seeks the rose-limbed woman. He lies sleepless in the night which is windless now and waiting; its long breath in suspense. Towards dawn it is released and a light wind ferrets inland.
Involuntarily, Jules leaves the bed and walks towards the sea. Lazily it laps in the pearly light. And again, from where the sun will rise, moves the rose-limbed woman of the dawn.
Now she stops before the man and, smiling, tells him in a low voice, "Enjoy me. Lise will betray you with a man of means."
Jules looks into her unreadable eyes. " I don't believe that," he says. Despite Lise's discontent, Jules retains an illogical faith in his wife.
"Come!" the rose woman reaches. This time Jules declines, fearing now submergence in a force that would sever him irrevocably from Lise.
The woman, suffused once more with the strengthening rays of the sun, laughs; a sound caught and carried to the sea's soft edge. She shimmers, sighs and spirals into air.
Jules returns to find Lise has already left. He walks back down the main village street, and halts, disbelieving, as he sees her seated with a dark-jowled man at the back of a breakfast bar. She is laughing - a transformation; eagerly amiable. From her fingers drifts a fine gold chain hung with a fire-flecked stone.
The man, a Greek, whose casual clothes are meticulously cut, raises a hand to Lise's face, tracing the contours of her gratitude.
Later, Lise joins Jules in their usual place by the sea. All day she does not utter one word of criticism or complaint.
Jules withdraws, needing to challenge her, needing to know. Where is the chain? What are the implications of this gift? Who is the man? Yet he is mute.
Sunset. Soon sunrise. Anticipation. The realisation that now he is justified in seeking the rose-limbed woman. Is she a prophet? Where is she staying? Slowly, Jules grasps she is a composite of present and past; man and mythology. Perhaps she exists solely in his mind.
The night is interminable. At dawn Jules rises and softly leaves the room. The pearl grey air is cold yet shot with intimations of ensuing warmth. The sea is plucked, breaking restlessly at random.
Jules hurries to the beach. But the woman does not walk today from the first rays of sun.
He panics. He scours the shingle. Then, as he turns to seek her in the fields beyond, she is suddenly before him, as though created from cold air.
She is laughing, her pareo loose, then crumpled on the ground. She places soft yet fleshless hands on his shoulders; the gentle pressure easing him into the sand.
He is suffused with rose red warmth, then the intensity of a fire whose origin is boundless, enveloping; a consummation.
He opens his eyes to find beside him a roseate spread of warming sand. It glimmers and slowly fades as the sun gains strength.
"Bastard!" The words are hurled at him by Lise beneath the broad-leaved tree at lunch. Jules, believing her berating to have begun again, flinches but does not retaliate.
"Who is she?" Lise is shrill. Jules starts. How could she know?
"That couple from next door saw you on the beach with her this morning. I was asking if they'd seen you around - they always take an early morning walk."
Jules wants to demand, "And who is the man you see at breakfast? Where is the gold chain; the fire stone?"
The words burn but some force freezes them within. He sits in silence. Lise rises and walks, enraged, towards the village. Jules lingers, then, numb and motivated by a strange and increasingly ominous impulse, he too gets up and returns to pack.
He goes home alone, reaching the suburbs of Paris as though borne through dream; his actions forged by fate. Still he looks for the rose-limbed woman. On wasteland littered with sad heaps of sand, he expects to see the fluttering pareo. In narrow streets between the faceless flats, he waits for her hands to draw him beyond time.
Lise is lost to him. Her face, tautly contentious, forms in the autumn air but is rapidly replaced by that of the rose-limbed woman; now smilingly iridescent; the essenc
e of dawn - potential spirit merged with man.
In his isolation Jules wanders in the early hours, waiting for first light to reveal the blatant blocks of the outer city. Slowly his expectation falters, leaving in its wake, the creeping cold.
He starts talking to himself between bleak walls. The words are incoherent, already comprising a language of loss. Neighbours look askance, then decide he is harmless. He rejects their offers of help.
On Cephalonia Lise meets Yiorgos at dusk. He says, "After the earthquake many of us went abroad - to America, Australia. We made good money which we sent back to rebuild the island. I have two houses - one in Argostoli, the other in Lixouri."
He produces a turquoise bracelet and, with a slow smile, fastens it on Lise's wrist. She allows him to take her to a friend's flat where his surplus flesh encloses her like a confirmation of comforts to come.
One morning, as they breakfast, a small woman, darkly neat and rigidly resolved, comes crisply up to them and brings down a heavily jewelled hand on the table. The ensuing exchange is in rapid Greek. Yiorgos stands, shrugs and says wryly to Lise, "Meet my wife."
Drawn and uncommunicative, Lise returns to Paris. The limits of her life, that had been briefly stretched, contract once more.
She lives with her sister in St.Cloud, wanting to see Jules, regretting her castigations, needing forgiveness. But she is unable to go home. She envisages the rose-limbed woman; sensual, compassionate, accessibly addictive.
One night Lise returns at last to the street where she had lived. Four times she passes the impersonal apartment block but recoils from entering and offering Jules her humility.
She turns into a deserted side street. An autumn mist drifts. The lights are rudimentary, the shadows deceptive. One materialises ahead; the black bulk of a man with head bowed. He talks incessantly, the words incomprehensible. Jules. Lise slows. She senses another shadow beside him. Surely he is with the woman. The former fury, fired now with jealous pain, impels her to lunge at Jules. He staggers, then deals a self defensive blow. Lise falls with a moan. Jules bends and recognises the woman whose head wound has rendered her unconscious.
Lise dies the next day. Jules, numbed and motionless now in the apartment, sees the rose-limbed woman recede into a dim dimension; a cruel catalyst born of his despair.
He climbs at last into the lonely bed. As he restlessly turns, he feels Lise's brittle fingers working on his arm and is aware of her acrid breath. Horrified, he recoils. But the fingering persists, growing stronger, the nails penetrating his flesh until he protests in pain. Petulantly, her presence withdraws.
The next night she presses frozen lips to his. He tries to pull away. She grasps him with arms like ice and draws him against her stiffened flesh. He is assailed by decomposition.
With difficulty he fights free. He runs from the room into the fog-filled night. He heads for the river as the sour earth falls about his body. Fragments of Lise's flesh float before his eyes.
He reaches the bridge. He does not see the water but brushes at the flesh fragments which multiply, accompanied now by a disembodied moan. Is it his, or that of Lise's traumatised soul?
Jules jumps. The water washes and drags. Insistent, oily, yet cleansing the dead flesh, the martyred moan. But as he sinks for the third time, the fog clears, the water is shot with rose and dawn delivers the pale warmth of a winter sun.
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The Second Season
When Persephone was snatched by Hades and taken to the Underworld, Demeter, her mother, responsible for the world’s fertility, demanded to see her daughter. Would she then prevent the world withering or was that up to man?