John Hawkes - The Blood Oranges

“Don’t move,” I said across the space between us, “there’s plenty of room.”

“What are they doing?”

“Just trying to launch their boat. Don’t worry.”

The entire procession was upon us in clamorous motion. Gesticulating priest and darting boys and barefoot men strained backward against the full weight of wood and brass and shouted to each other, calling out in violent square-mouthed appeal to some archaic and obviously indifferent deity. But only the wide, high-prowed boat itself appeared to move as it groaned, listed to one side and then dragged its ragged half-naked attendants another few feet down the steep grade toward Catherine and me. I saw the golden fish on the white prow above my head, watched the broad gunwales swelling from stone wall to wall and filling the street. And if they let go? Or if one of them stumbled or too many turned away to drink from the several black wine bottles passing from man to man? And if the enormous white sun-struck prow then veered toward Catherine, veered toward me?

“We’ll let them pass,” I called, “and then we’ll join the procession. OK?”

But already the great curve of the towering white prow was slipping between us, stopping, inching on again. Now Catherine and stone wall and little street were gone, obliterated by the white enamel sweep of the boat and the sudden presence of the men who were clutching her gunwales, clutching her sides, and struggling, sweating, laughing, warning each other of collision and disaster. High on the prow they had fastened a handful of Lobularia maritima, and I found myself nodding because the flowers were white and implied fleeting tenderness on the part of even these boatbuilding villagers.

How like them, I thought, to lay the keel in some tin-roofed shed up here on the high edge of the village, laboring with crude tools and rusty old circular saw until their boat finally stood finished not within reach of the dark tide but gleaming and massive beside the boatbuilder’s cottage. Of course they were a dark-eyed people, I reminded myself, and not entirely ignorant, because if they had built this enormous empty vessel up here amidst their tethered goats, and had employed typical perversity and illogicality in its construction, nonetheless they had managed to lift it, transport it, move it down these steep and treacherous streets with a display of what I could only call true primitive ingenuity. Despite their sweat, their shuffling, their grunts of fagag, crespi fagag and their shouts of croak peonie, the desperate movements of their naked feet, the anger and sudden lapses to childish carelessness, wasn’t all this anomalous effort nonetheless an unmistakable example of their practicality?

Yes, I told myself, of course it was. Because these very men who were adept at mending nets and whose feet were bare and cracked and whose voices were tuned to nothing more than shouting to each other throughout their long hours of night fishing, even these same men had apparently held council. Suddenly and together they had leapt from emotionalism to cogency, from baffled dream to rationality, and in one moment of lucid silence had overcome the problem of a graceful and necessary white boat constructed witlessly in the wrong part of the village.

Simple, I thought, and pure, mysterious, crudely logical (seeing Catherine’s head and then her shoulders reappearing gradually on the other side of the enormous white canted hull), because it all depended on a few oblong blocks of cream-colored wood and on the agility and stamina of two small boys who were sweating even more than the shouting and laughing men. Yes, I thought, how like them to rely on children and to see in a few pieces of scarce wood a somehow religious solution to a mechanical problem. They had cut the blocks, shaped them, in the center of each had chiseled a half-moon indentation broad enough and deep enough to hold the boat’s keel. In that tin-roofed shed above us, out of sight, they had raised the prow and forced the front block beneath the keel and shoved, pushed, pulled, and had driven the second block beneath the keel. They had continued this process until the greased wooden blocks were spaced out evenly in the form of a movable and slippery track across which their enormous empty white boat was sliding painfully but safely down through the entire steep length of the village toward the beach and sea.

Religious insight. Primitive ingenuity. And the two small boys? Even now they were moving in their assigned positions, one of them staggering forward with a great block in his arms and reaching the prow, daring to stoop and drop the heavy block directly in the path of the advancing keel. The second small crouching boy fell to his knees and tugged, dragged, lifted into his arms the full weight of another cream-colored block that had emerged from beneath the stern and, grimacing and wobbling, ran forward to dispose of his load as had the first small boy.

But did it matter to Catherine, I wondered, that they had greased their dozen or so oblong blocks of wood with a dark thick shiny substance that was obviously blood? Amidst flowers, noise, dust, the tilting of the black wine bottles, the sudden lurching of the boat and shouts of fear, had Catherine begun to discern the religious insight implicit in their use of partially coagulated blood as a rich and appropriate lubricant? Perhaps, I told myself, deciding that in all likelihood Catherine had in fact observed the thickening stains of blood just as she must have seen the few loose sprays of Lobularia maritima affixed to the high prow of the boat. Priest, blood, Lobularia maritima, procession — how could it have been more plain?

“You’re strong,” she was saying then, “why don’t you help them?”

Together, side by side, slowly we retraced our steps downhill at the rear of the crowd as if I had never been the headless god nor she my mistress, but as if she and I were simply the two halves of the ancient fruit together but unjoined. The dust was rising, Catherine was pushing up the sleeves of her sweater, her very profile made me think that she was responding at last to me as well as to the white hull. Why not assume that she was beginning to value my mental landscape? Why not assume that a now invulnerable Catherine and reflective Cyril were starting over? Why not?

“Let’s get closer,” she was saying, “I want to see.”

All the sounds in the air were suddenly co-ordinated to Catherine’s voice. There below us the priest was chanting prayers across the bright water, someone was striking authoritarian chords on one of their old stringed instruments, dogs were barking.

“It’s a big affair,” I heard myself saying above the noise. “Like it?”

“Yes. I like it.”

“Remind you of anything?”

She was looking at me, shrugging, beginning to smile, preparing to express some kind of recognition. But suddenly we were pushing downhill with the rest of them, past open doors and hanging nets, pursuing the white hull that was rocking and grinding down the last incline of the village street. For one instant the entire crowd flung hands and shoulders against the sides and stern and ran, shoved, not attempting to restrain the descent of the boat but rather leaning into it and contributing to the possibility of that very crash which all this time they had been attempting to avoid.

And then the shuddering cessation, the shock of stopping, the thick and absolute immobility of the boat’s dead weight on the beach. The hour had fled, the light had changed, the stones and doorways of the dark village had given way to a thin strip of gray sand and the smell of the sea. Behind us the rising village, to our left the distant fortress, somewhere off to the right but hidden from view the cypresses and the twin villas, in front of us the brilliant sea. And men and boys were laughing and standing still while the priest stood shouting brutal, imperative instructions to an agile old man with a deformity between his shoulders and the face of a goat. The high white prow was pointed directly toward the horizon, unmoving and yet soaring, an aesthetic actuality that belied the work required to convey all this curving weight across the sand to the life of the foam. Surely the grace of the boat itself went far beyond the necessity to feed a few dark mouths from the depths of the sea.