“Yes, there’s still more for me to do.” I stood and faced him, my back to the pit.
“After all this time you are finally setting the table for me! Why don’t you drop that shawl covering your hands and raise your dress to show me what’s cooking?”
“I can’t undress myself. You have to help.”
“Yes-yes, I’ve brought the spices!” He knelt before me, his fingers at the hem of my dress, pushing the material up my legs. “I want this quick, like a lovely sauce boiling to its essence.”
“Like a lovely sauce.” I looked down. He was about to press his face between my thighs. I dropped the shawl.
Francisco, in the moonlight I could see your straight razor, its sharp blade glinting, its pearl handle taped tightly around my blunt hand. Your razor was all that I asked you for when we parted. Francisco, I wanted you to end him with me. I wanted him to feel it from both of us. I raised my hand to slash our blade across the back of his neck. I shouted my last words at him before swinging down my arm: “You’re the one who betrayed us all!”
He pushed the dress above my hips and glanced up in surprise, seeing the blade. He knocked me back. I fell, not knowing if I was falling into the pit or away from it. I kicked toward him. When I hit the ground I turned and saw that I had knocked him over and he was clinging to the inside of the pit. His hands clawed into soft dirt. One hand reached up and grabbed the sack of letters, hoping for a secure hold, but pulled the sack over the edge. He slid down the slick embankment, falling so far that when he hit bottom his final cry came as a distant whimper, insignificant as a dissipating puff of red dust.
Francisco, the one who collaborated with the new emperor’s army was dead. His last act was to try and touch what he could never have in this world. With him went the last person here who knew my true identity, and with him ended my only connection to your letters. I had made my choice, I was alone. I recalled the collaborator’s words. “This is war. You must decide which side you are on. You must ask yourself: are you motivated only by love for a man, or will you serve a higher purpose?”
I edged closer to the precipice and stared down into the abyss. I thought I could see a body far below, a black dot in a sea of crimson. A tear dropped on my cheek. I realized fully what my love for you had brought me to.
I gazed at the moon. I clung to the light, followed it like a river of honey, as I had the night before when I searched for the ghost of the Fly after the smoke cleared. I had wandered among the charred remains of burnt hives scattered along the base of the fire-blackened cliff. There was no one alive there, not even the bees. I went into the woods. I knew the bees who survived would ultimately cluster, creating a nucleus for a new beginning. On I walked until I came to a clearing. In its center was a dead oak tree, and in the bare branches were huge clusters of bees, hanging like golden fruit. Beneath them, lying on the ground against the trunk of the tree, was the Fly. I knelt at his side. He smelled of burnt leather, smoke, and blood. His clothes were scorched and punctured with bullet holes. I cradled him in my arms, pulled the leather mask off, and exposed his face. I gently drew his eyelids open and the bright blue of the Bee Keeper’s eyes stared up, but they did not see me.
I needed him to see me. I wanted him to know. I broke the buttons of my blouse open with my clawed hands, one of my breasts swung free. I rubbed my nipple against the Bee Keeper’s cheek until a drop of milk began to form. I held my nipple over his face and let the fully formed drop of milk fall into the sky of the Bee Keeper’s eye. I rocked him in my arms. He could see what I see now, the moon overhead, that perfect sphere shining; he could see it reflected across the sea where I row my boat, dipping oars into water, destroying the moon’s perfect image, my boat moving on.
Love,
LOUISE
PART SIX
Road to Zermano
THE ROAD to Zermano was unlike any I had ever traveled before. It led high into Mallorca’s Sierra Tramuntana, the spectacular mountain range that I had seen in the distance the day I climbed to Ramón Llull’s cave on Mount Randa. Speeding along in the car with Serena at the wheel seemed more like a surreal ride in an amusement park than the life-threatening journey it was. The road was terrifyingly narrow, only as wide as the Roman chariots it was built for centuries before—stop one chariot and you stopped an army. High stone walls, impossible to see over, lined the road on both sides. Serena drove fast, swerving to hug a stone wall as a bus swung around the corner ahead, bearing down on us. The passengers stared from the bus as it passed, nearly sideswiping us. Serena sped ahead, honking the horn to warn oncoming vehicles of our presence. She was wearing a dress today, not pants and a blouse as she had the day I met her in Palma. As she shifted gears, forcing the car into hairpin turns and around blind curves, I couldn’t help but notice the hem of her dress as it rose above her knees. It made me think of Louise and Zermano’s drive into Provence on that fateful Day of the Bees. Without taking her eyes from the road Serena, sensing my interest, drew the hem of her dress back over her knees. I wanted to tell her that I hadn’t meant to be rude, but I was reminded of another time. “Pardon me,” I apologized. She shifted again and spoke loudly above the squeal of tires.
“Let me tell you about my father. He’s ninety years old. At least we think he is, there never was a birth certificate, or if there was it’s been lost or destroyed. He doesn’t function at the level he once did; his brain has been traumatized by all the anesthesia he was given for various operations he’s had to keep him going. Because of that, and his age, he sometimes acts very odd. It’s not that he’s lost his powers of intelligence—I wish I had half of what he has now—it’s that sometimes he loses the ability to organize his thoughts. He can be amazingly lucid, other times he makes no sense at all. This is one of the reasons we have protected him from the public. It’s also why I didn’t want you in particular to see him, to bring up the past. We were afraid it might undo his mind, making him so fragmented that he’ll leave the present completely. His mind must be protected, but also his heart. There’s the sensitive matter of his … hallucinations.”
“I’ll be very careful with what I say to him. What do you mean by hallucinations?”
Her jaw tightened. “He floats constantly in and out of reality, and then shouts uncontrollably. It’s a terrible disjointed outpouring. It’s hard to know if what he’s saying actually happened in his life, or if it’s hallucinations.”
“Is he speaking to someone when he does this? I don’t mean someone there at the time, but someone who is not there.”
“Yes. He talks to—or about—a lot of people.”
“Any one name you can recall?”
“Not offhand.”
“What period of his life do you think he’s in when he’s doing this?”
“During the war.”
“Which war? He was in Spain at the beginning of the Civil War, and France during World War Two.”
“I’m not certain. His knees were damaged in a war but we don’t know which one. He always refused to talk about it.”
“It must be very hard for you not to be able to give him all the comfort he deserves.”
“When it rains his knees swell and he howls with pain. He waves his wooden staff at some distant figure that no one else can see. It’s sad and horrific, and he’s so convinced the figure is there that sometimes I think I can see it too.”
“And what do you see?”
“A woman. He’s always calling to her. He …” She wiped a tear away. “He shouts that he’s coming to her.”
“It must seem like a nightmare to you.”
“A fantastic nightmare.” She fell silent.
I gazed through the window. The passing landscape was also fantastic. The road broke free of the Roman walls and the mountainous coast came into view, carved by ancient glaciers and the violent shifting of continents. Everything was so poetically balanced that it seemed to have been drawn rather than created. No wonder the artist Gustave Doré had been inspired to use i
t in his illustrations for Dante’s Commedia: it was a mystical moonscape with a startling overlay of the tropical—orange, fig, and lemon trees cascading down mountainsides to the sea. As we drove higher it felt as though we were piercing veiled atmospheres into brilliant Mediterranean light that flooded the sky with violent extremes of color.
My mind raced back to those who had taken this road before, like Jules Verne, seeking a landscape that could spark his prodigious imagination. Or Chopin and George Sand, who spent the winter of 1839 in a fifteenth-century Carthusian monastery we had passed earlier. The consumptive Chopin, coughing blood and tapping out warm notes with cold fingers, composed many of his Preludes here while his lover George Sand, dressed as a man, smoked cigarettes and drank coffee all day, then worked on her novels all night, scandalizing the locals. The light we were passing through must have been the same that Chopin experienced when he described Mallorca as “the most lovely country in the world.”
Ahead of us, beyond a bridge over a plunging gorge, appeared what seemed to be the last mountain before all land ended, leaving only sky and sea. On the ridge of the mountain was a Moorish fortress, its circular towers still rising defiantly to the clouds, its thick stone walls capable of sheltering a caliph’s army. Serena stopped the car. A steel gate blocked our way. Next to the gate was a guardhouse with two soldiers inside.
Serena turned the car engine off. “From here on we have to walk. Ahead it’s only a camino conejo, a rabbit road.”
We got out of the car. The soldiers came out of the guardhouse, rifles slung over their shoulders. One of them saluted and smiled at Serena, “Bon día, Señorita Zermano.”
The other soldier looked suspiciously at me, for I was carrying one of Louise’s large baskets. He laughed sarcastically and mumbled something; they both laughed.
“What’s so funny?” I asked Serena.
“They think you’re gay.”
“Tell them I’ve got a bomb in the basket.”
“That’s not funny. What do you have in there that’s such a secret? Maybe you think we’re going on a picnic?”
The soldiers unlocked the gate and pushed it open. We walked through and followed an old stone path that led down into a valley of ancient olive trees. The massive trunks of the trees twisted up from the plowed red earth and their gnarled branches fingered the breeze with silver leaves. Between the trees goats moved, the bells around their necks tinkling as they skittered away and stood back, their limpid eyes taking us in with haughty disdain. Serena walked ahead. She untied her hair and let it spill down her back, shining and black against her white dress.
Watching her, I recalled something Zermano said in an interview he gave in the nineteen fifties on one of his rare trips to the United States. He was asked about the inspiration for the style of painting he was doing in Mallorca, which was completely different from what he had done in Paris. He said he was not interested in talking about inspiration, because there were only two ways an artist would be perceived if he did so—as a finicky romantic or as a taboo-breaker. Mallorca for him was not about the outer eye, as was Paris, where all the landscape was man-made and man’s mind was his religion. In Mallorca everything was below the natural surface, beneath the spread of venerable olive trees where roots sank deep to suck precious moisture. To miss that was to miss life, and he didn’t give a damn for those who considered he needed psychoanalyzing for thinking such a thing. The only head-doctor he needed, he said, was his “doctor of poetry,” Federico García Lorca, who put the whole idea of making art into its purest context: Human hands have no more sense than to mimic roots beneath the soil. “I am a mimic,” Zermano declared to the interviewer.
Following Serena beneath the spread of trees formed by centuries of wind made me see it Zermano’s way. Everything he said became clear in this context. Cities didn’t exist, museums and universities were unheard of, there were no theories of art. I spoke Lorca’s words aloud:
“Human hands have no more sense than to mimic roots beneath the soil.”
Serena stopped and turned, startled. For the first time her eyes met mine and she spoke directly to me.
“You know Lorca’s poem?”
“Not really. Just that line.”
She walked back down the trail and stood before me, her brown eyes excited.
“My father lives by that poem. Do you want to hear the first stanza?”
“With pleasure.”
“I have often been lost on the sea with my ear full of fresh-cut flowers, my tongue full of agony and love. Often I have been lost on the sea, as I am lost in the heart of certain children.”
“Beautiful.”
“Yes.”
She turned and continued up the trail.
Finally I had broken through. I wanted to keep her talking. I called out a question.
“Why are the soldiers guarding your father? It’s as if they have him under house arrest.”
“It’s more like they are protecting a national treasure.”
“We all know how important he is, but he doesn’t need to be guarded like the Pope.”
“You’re so far from the truth. All of this land, my father bought it forty years ago.”
“He was planning his hideout that far back?”
“No. He bought it because this is one of the last places in the Mediterranean where there are still giant black vultures. They’re almost extinct; fewer than thirty are left. Do you know the bird I’m talking about? It has a wing span of more than six feet.”
“We have similar birds in California, called condors.”
“Yes, they are like that. My father gave this land to the government with the restriction that it remain protected. The birds nest on the cliffs on the other side of the Moorish fortress.”
“So the soldiers guard the condors and the condors guard your father?”
“Something like that. So you see, this was already a private area before my father disappeared. No one thought of searching for him here.”
I looked above Serena. We were just below the stone walls of the ninth-century fortress. Only now was it possible to grasp the intimidating monumentality of the architecture; it appeared to have been built by giants who expected to fight other giants. There were hundreds of slots in the soaring towers for archers to aim arrows at anyone approaching from this direction. Walking the final few steps to the forty-foot-high entrance with its solid wooden gate, I had the uneasy sensation of being exposed. At any moment arrows, spears and boiling oil could come raining down.
Serena banged the heavy iron knocker. “It will be a while before he comes.” She turned and lifted her hair away from the nape of her neck, letting the air cool the sheen of perspiration there. “Whew, it’s hot.”
I didn’t want to appear to take undue notice of how graceful the curve of her neck was, so I looked back down at the trail we had just climbed. We were so high up that the tinklings of goat bells in the valley below mingled together, sounding like the melodious flow of water rushing over stones.
The timber gate creaked as its enormous weight swung slowly open with a screech of iron hinges. I followed Serena into a huge cobblestone courtyard the size of a football field; an army on horseback could have assembled here. An old man with a shaved head stood before us, clad in sandals and a coarse woven cloak. He beamed at me in greeting with all the fervor of a long-lost relative. He took my hand in both of his and pumped it. I was at a loss for words, so Serena spoke.
“It’s all right, Professor, you can speak. He hasn’t taken a vow of silence. He’s one of the Buddhist monks who live here and watch over my father.”
The monk’s grin grew broader and he heaved words from his chest in a half-laughing, half-crying voice.
“The … maes … tro … is expecting … you!”
He turned and set off at a fast trot across the cobblestones. We followed him, racing across the courtyard and under the wide stone columns supporting overhead parapets, then into an immense hall. Its domed ceiling was cove
red with intricate tiles revealed by shafts of sunlight that played like spotlights through openings in the roof. It was clear we were in the former mosque, large enough to accommodate the faithful of Damascus. The monk opened a door and sped across a walled-in patio, then through another door and down a dark stairway. The air thickened with the musty scent of rancid wine. At the bottom of the stairs the monk struck a match. As it flared, he took down a lantern hung on the wall and lit it, smiling. He raised the lantern, throwing the room into shadowy relief, and illuminating rows of wine barrels unlike any I had ever seen. The oak barrels were thirty feet wide and belted with bands of rusted iron; they contained wine enough to keep an army drunk for a two-year siege. The monk darted off between barrels with us behind. The lantern’s light cast our passing shadows on the high walls, tiny as three dwarves in this world of giants. The bald monk turned and grinned back at me: he was enjoying the chase.
The monk stopped before an iron door, took out a key, and slipped it into the lock. He pulled the heavy door open, exposing a tunnel hewn into solid rock. The tunnel was four feet high and wide enough only for a single person. Its serpentine path disappeared into the gloom. This was obviously the secret escape passage if the fortress was about to fall into enemy hands. The monk plunged into the tunnel’s gloom, followed by Serena and me. He swung the lantern before him as if sweeping away any lingering spirits with the light. If it weren’t for the sight of Serena before me, I could have been a condemned man being led out of the Bastille on his way to the guillotine. I wanted to reach out and touch her, to make certain this was all real, that she was real. But I couldn’t; I could only watch the shape of her, bent over as she moved forward. Her black hair swung off her shoulders, her breathing was a slight pant, and the scent of her skin filled the tunnel.
I thought back to when Zermano had met Serena’s mother. I had pieced the event together from published accounts and the few interviews he gave. It was in the nineteen fifties, during the Lenten carnival. Palma’s narrow medieval streets were lit by smoking torches. Pipers, drummers, and fiddlers played music to spur on a prancing menagerie of revelers costumed as Greek fertility goddesses, shepherdesses with sprigs of rosemary in their hair, and demented demons deformed by leprosy. The parade of carousers was led by a blood-red Lucifer with pointed horns and a swishing tail. In their midst, Zermano spotted a devout young woman going up the cathedral steps. He followed her into the incense-scented interior. She knelt before a bank of votive candles, bending toward the rows of flickering lights. He watched the arc of her body assume the very line he had painted on his last canvas in Paris. Now the line seized upon itself and seemed to form a redemptive point, the closure of a wound. He wanted to reach out and touch her, but instead he waited politely until she finished her prayer, then asked if she would allow him to sketch her one day, just as she was, illuminated before candles. He assured her that no one would recognize her likeness in the sketch, for his art at this time was not representational; it was the idea of her he wanted to capture. He married her two weeks later.
The Day of the Bees Page 23