John Hawkes - The Blood Oranges

“We’re in luck,” I said. “She looks beautifully indifferent. Anything I can do to help?”

Unleashing one of his small black cameras, Hugh frowned at the setting of its highly polished and unmerciful lens.

“In a minute. Right now just smile at her. Make her feel at ease.”

I had only to glance at the girl to see that she was in fact quite unafraid of Hugh, of me, of even the cold and completely foreign complexity of the cameras hanging in their black cases around Hugh’s neck. At once I saw that she was young, untutored, uninterested in anything except the clumsy mattock and challenge of the ceramic field. The dull rubber boots cut off at her bare knees, the dry knees that appeared to have been scoured with sand, the colorless apron tied around a long burlap skirt sewn no doubt by an old woman, and the leather coat — at once I saw that so many unappealing articles of dress might well conceal a body that would prove to be in absolute contrast to the clothes themselves. But would this girl actually pose for Hugh without her rubber boots and burlap skirt and stocky leather coat? I was unconvinced. Her mouth was small, her eyebrows were gently drawn. And yet her face was the color of green olives and made me suspect that the composition of her blood might have been determined at least in part by one of the barbaric strains. Perhaps she was strong. Perhaps her indifference was not at all the same as compliance. Perhaps the old woman who had sewn the skirt had also taught her some outlandish and hence all the more crippling version of a moral code — though the girl’s small eyes were dark, and I had faith in Hugh.

I smiled at Hugh’s latest model. She did not smile back. But her eyes remained on mine and I began to wonder if she was aware of my large and closely shaven face, my slice of pure gold hair. And the barn was filled with a warm aura of suspension. There were the shadows, the dust, the floor that was a soft black pebbled carpet of sheep droppings, the smells and light that made me think of the inside of a dying rose. Hugh was squatting while the girl waited and the sheep peered over their shoulders at the three of us.

“Peasant Nudes,” Hugh whispered, and simultaneously the girl and I glanced down at his camera which was now clicking. “That’s what I’m going to call my collection. Peasant Nudes.”

He was taking photographs, for some time now had been taking photographs. Oddly squatting with one knee sharply bent and one long leg stretched out in a nearly horizontal position, eyes and nose buried inside the back of his camera, in this way he was crouching, inching to and fro at the girl’s feet, aiming up at us the enormous wide-open lens of that clicking camera.

“That’s it. That’s perfect. Now let’s just shove her over against the beam.”

Coming between us, pushing and inching with his dark blue contorted legs, suddenly rising to both knees so that the girl drew back, and clicking the shutter release and rewind lever and hissing eagerly between his lips which had become little more than a tight shadow, slowly Hugh approached us on his knees and then, with little more than his own intensity and the aim of the camera, moved her, repositioned the small dark head against the dark worm-eaten flank of an upright beam.

“Easy. Easy. That’s perfect. See how she’s holding her head jammed against that old beam? Perfect. Most of the faces of these peasant nudes are just fat and happy. They’re all mothers, with or without children. But this one,” inching his knees across the carpet of sheep droppings, doing his one-handed sleight-of-hand tricks with two cameras and what I supposed was a light meter, “this face is skintight with the beauty of illiteracy. That’s what will show up in the pictures. Wait and see. The sullen face of an illiterate virgin.”

I waited, then heard my own low whisper: “I’ve been thinking the same thing. That she’s a virgin.”

“She’s got a few little brown hairs on her chin. She couldn’t be better.”

Yet now I was watching not the girl but Hugh. And Hugh remained on his knees, continued to walk about on his knees. His shoulders were struggling against the sudden unreasonable dictates of his dream, were working against impossible odds to maintain his balance. He was sweating. His thin cotton shirt had come free at the waist. But his arms, or rather that lurid combination of arm and partial arm, most held my attention. And in passing I noticed that the girl’s small dark expressionless eyes were fixed, like mine, on the excited and suddenly gesticulating remnant of his ruined arm.

“Make her smile! Come on, do something. Make her smile. Quick.”

While I was still contemplating the odd magic that Hugh somehow extracted from his injured arm, Hugh himself unaccountably changed position, bolted upright from his knees to his feet and thrust the camera into the girl’s face so that for one instant the poor lips parted in what might have been a silent laugh. I caught a glimpse of her tongue and the small overlapping front teeth, and heard the click of the camera, felt Hugh wheeling in my direction. He let go of the camera, expelled his breath in a single relieved heave of his expanded chest, ducked his head and, with the flat lower side of his twitching stump, wiped the perspiration from his forehead and thin gray face.

“Time to change tactics,” he said, and with one brutal thrust of his hand ripped a small flesh-colored wineskin from the alpine pack, held the wineskin at an angle of shocking self-confidence before his upturned face and shot a steady thin dark jet into his waiting mouth.

“Want some, boy? It’s hot work.”

I declined and hoisted myself to a seat on the ancient cart and crossed my knees, braced myself with both arms and hands. Again Hugh thrust up the bag and squeezed it, prolonged his exhibitionistic drinking as if he were an indelicate disheveled god in the act of forcing some invisible monster to send down its urine.

“Now, boy. To business.”

And suddenly the wineskin lay in the rancid hay, the third camera was in his claw, he was close to the girl. Once again his stone cheeks and little pointed beard were wet with the perspiration of his art photographer’s single-minded desire. He did not move. Yet his stump, though held tightly to the side of his body, was impatient to wag, to flex, to rise into action, and his eyes were sly but also vacant. He seemed to be listening to the girl’s silent life rather than staring at the visible shape of it. The girl continued to stare up at Hugh. The thin sheep had managed to turn and now were facing us and once more were rubbing together their crusted woolly coats. The girl was alert.

Then Hugh sprang back a step, let go of the camera, smiled with absurdly pretended helplessness, with his hand made sweeping motions from the girl’s head against the beam to her booted feet on the dung. Did she understand, he seemed to be asking, could she share his amusement at his own discovery of what was wrong? Slowly, with a mild tightening of the lips, she glanced down the length of her body. She saw nothing wrong.

So he held up the camera, turned it slowly in front of her face, in front of her narrow eyes, displaying and silently extolling its value, its delicacy, its enormous power, suggesting for all I knew that this one small instrument was more important than a simple illiterate young woman or even an entire farm. And then once again he dropped the camera. But now, suddenly, he was stern, insistent, and with one terrible extended finger he pointed at her pathetic boots, her clumsy coat, and slowly moved both hand and finger back and forth, at the same time using tongue and teeth to produce a cadenced clicking sound of austere disapproval and even, perhaps, of anger.

“No boots, no coat,” he said, rolling from side to side the enormous hand and rigid forefinger. “No boots, no coat.”