John Hawkes - The Blood Oranges

I shifted my position so that I was sitting sidesaddle, so to speak, on the low wall. I licked the small painful spot on my burned lip. And now a different bell was ringing. I listened to it, recognizing it, between its strokes I heard the silence that fell between Catherine and me like a festering marsh whenever I stopped talking.

Pain is saddest, I thought, on plain features. The dark swiftly floating schools of grief and bitterness were far more visible on Catherine’s round face, for instance, than they would have been on the proud and youthful face of my Fiona. Fiona had the face of a faun, an experienced faun, and its elegance would have obscured or leavened or enriched her pain. Catherine’s broad cheeks and heavy lids merely gave pain room to play — alone, unadorned. Pain, beneath Fiona’s eyes or in the corners of her mouth, would simply have become a kind of spice to her beauty. But when the shades of pain were drifting across Catherine’s face, as they were drifting now, there was nothing else to see, to marvel at, to desire. Catherine’s pain was her beauty.

The bell I listened for each week was ringing. From far below the sanctuary, from the top of the squat and crumbling tower in the center of the smashed shards of the little coastal town, it called to us faintly, tonelessly, not in firm even strokes as if the ringer meant to announce the hour or send forth a summons, but with an irregularity that to me sounded like the soft dispirited voices of all those who were dead. I listened and heard the ringing of Catherine’s soul, the toneless calling of Hugh’s voice. It continued to ring, to vibrate down there through empty windows and black olive branches, the faintly metallic sound so distant and pointless in this bright sun that it made me smile deeply, seriously, in the midst of these meditations with my big-limbed and heavy-hearted Catherine. Then softly: “Remember how Hugh’s coffin made that poor wreck of a hearse sag in the rear? I guess I like endings. I like flat bells, don’t you?”

And at that moment I stood up, as I do each week, and stretched, glanced away from Catherine where she lay at my feet, glanced swiftly at the blue tiles, the dark clumps of peppery leaves, the blue of the sky, and then breathed in an enormous amount of that sweet air and abruptly leaned down with my two hands spread on the wall and my two eyes once again cradling Catherine in their brown benevolence. The vest was tight around my heavy ribs, the black jacket was hot and heavy on my shoulders. Would she ever open her eyes and look at me, say my name, ever again hang around my neck in graceless confusion?

“Arise, arise, Catherine,”I whispered then, leaning on the wall and staring at her through golden eyeglasses, “climb to your feet, and let’s comfort each other.”

But she could not arise, or look at me, or say my name. It was in her power to help me speak for the past, to help me see the future. Her voice might have reinforced my voice, her eyes might have met mine. And yet I knew it was not to be. She still preferred to remain only the inert supine center of my life, the sun that neither sets nor rises. The bell had stopped ringing. I sighed, again I pushed off from the wall and smiled down at her in a way that said I had endless strength and patience to give her in small doses once each week. She could not have mistaken the sound of my breath or the meaning of that distant smile. I dug the toe of my left shoe into the orange sand, shoved both hands into my torn pockets. Nearby a finch was covering itself with pale dust.

No doubt she heard my breathing long after my heavy footsteps had died away. Perhaps she expected to see me or at least hoped to see me standing there when the little fat women approached her wearing their blue aprons and carrying their terra-cotta bowls and stiff brushes. Perhaps for a moment she did in fact see me, though I was already gone. Perhaps after today she would think more about me and less about Hugh, perhaps now would begin to prepare herself more agreeably for my next appearance. When next I saw her, wouldn’t she be digging happily among the flowers that grew in the little stone pots along the front of her balcony, or standing with her eyes open and her hands clasped together and a vague hopeful smile drawing the top lip from the bottom? I thought so. Soon I would move her back to the villa, soon she would be able to join me arm in arm beside Hugh’s grave.

And slowly riding back down the narrow path from Catherine’s sanctuary to the broken stones of the empty town, beyond which waited my silent villa and Rosella, squeezing the rusty hand brakes with my aching hands to keep the bike from tearing loose on the hill and pitching over the nearest shaggy precipice, squeezing the brakes and hearing the rusted spokes going around and the soft tires humming like inflated snakes, amused at the thought of the perfect beauty of my large formally attired self mounted on the rust-colored bike, and then thinking of Catherine, already planning my next visit to her balcony while my lip burned and while a mildly rancid breeze played about my face — suddenly in the midst of all this I went around a turn in the path and bumped through a cleft in the mossy rock and applied the brakes, put down both feet, held my breath, forgot all about Catherine and myself.

There on a low wall of small black stones that resembled the dark fossilized hearts of long-dead bulls with white hides and golden horns, there on the wall and silhouetted against the blue sky and black sea were two enormous game birds locked in love. They were a mass of dark blue feathers and silver claws, in the breeze they swayed together like some flying shield worthy of inclusion in the erotic dreams of the most discriminating of all sex-aestheticians. Together we were two incongruous pairs frozen in one feeling, I astride the old bike and hardly breathing, the larger bird atop the smaller bird and already beginning to grow regal, and all the details of that perfect frieze came home to me. Exposed on the bare rock, lightly blown by the breeze, the smaller bird lay with her head to one side and eyes turning white, as if nesting, while above her the big bird clung with gently pillowed claws to the slight shoulders and kept himself aloft, in motion, kept himself from becoming a dead weight on the smooth back of the smaller bird by flying, by spreading his wings and beating them slowly and turning his entire shape into a great slowly hovering blue shield beneath which his sudden act of love was undeniable. Grace and chaos, control and helplessness, mastery and collapsc — it was all there, as if the wind was having its way with the rocks. There before my eyes was the infusion itself, and the birds remained true to nature and undisturbed by the infinite rusty sounds of my old bike until it was all done and the larger bird loosed his claws, made a bell-like sound, then rose slowly and vertically on the hot breeze. Some time later his small partner toppled off the wall and half fell, half flew down toward the burnt clay roofs of the village, while I rode off slowly on my now humbled bike.

Obviously the two birds mating on the horizon were for me a sign, an emblem, a mysterious medallion, a good omen. They augured well for the time I had spent with Catherine and for my own future in the electrified field of Love’s art. But as I pedaled once more between the funeral cypresses and approached the villa, I found myself wondering if in the brief twining of that dark blue feathery pair I had actually witnessed Catherine’s dead husband and my own wife clasping each to each the sweet mutual dream which only months before had been denied them by the brief gust of catastrophe that had swept among us. Yes, Hugh and Fiona in the shape of birds and finding each other, so to speak, in final stationary flight. Could it have been? I smiled to realize that the pleasure and truth of the vision were worth pondering.