The Blood Oranges: A Novel
For James Laughlin
Is there then any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows andn coolness?
—Ford Madox Ford; THE GOOD SOLDIER
LOVE WEAVES ITS OWN TAPESTRY, SPINS ITS OWN GOLDEN thread, with its own sweet breath breathes into being its mysteries—bucolic, lusty, gentle as the eyes of daisies or thick with pain. And out of its own music creates the flesh of our lives. If the birds sing, the nudes are not far off. Even the dialogue of the frogs is rapturous.
As for me, since late boyhood and early manhood, and throughout the more than eighteen years of my nearly perfect marriage, I always allowed myself to assume whatever shape was destined to be my own in the silken weave of Love’s pink panorama. I always went where the thread wound. No awkward hesitation, no prideful ravaging. At an early age I came to know that the gods fashion us to spread the legs of woman, or throw us together for no reason except that we complete the picture, so to speak, and join loin to loin often and easily, humbly, deliberately. Throughout my life I have never denied a woman young or old. Throughout my life I have simply appeared at Love’s will. See me as small white porcelain bull lost in the lower left-hand corner of that vast tapestry, see me as great white creature horned and mounted on a trim little golden sheep in the very center of Love’s most explosive field. See me as bull, or ram, as man, husband, lover, a tall and heavy stranger in white shorts on a violet tennis court. I was there always. I completed the picture. I took my wife, took her friends, took the wives of my friends and a fair roster of other girls and women, from young to old and old to young, whenever the light was right or the music sounded.
Now there is only my little South European maid. She speaks an ugly language that will never be mine, she cannot understand a word of my lengthy erotic declarations. She does not smile, she has never known my sexual embrace, may never have known the sexual embrace of any man, this small solemn girl who appears to have been created only to draw water and build fires. But together we live in our otherwise abandoned villa which is one of a pair, long and single-storied, with broken red tiles and fireplaces like abandoned urinals, live together in our drafty and sometimes muddy villa where I knew my last mistress, sang my last song, last spread the legs of my wife. I have named my maid Rosella because the calves of her legs are raw, unshaven, and because she wears thick gray woolen socks. She cooks, she draws water, I spend my time attempting to inflame Rosella with words she does not understand, attempting to surround the ignorant virginity of Rosella’s spirit with at least the spoken tones of joy and desire. I have made myself rules: no touching, nothing overt. Only the spoken tones of joy and desire.
Why, after more than eighteen years, does the soft medieval fabric of my tapestry now hang in shreds—here the head of a rose, there the amputated hoof of some infant goat? Is it possible that in purging her field of Hugh’s sick innocence Love (impatient Love) purged me as well? Eliminated even her own faithful sex-singer from the joyous field? It is possible. The villa that is twin to mine and that lies just on the other side of the funeral cypresses is empty.
But I am patient, I am faithful, perhaps one day I will reach out and close my fingers on Rosella’s thigh, perhaps my last mistress may again become my mistress. It is possible. We shall wait and see.
YESTERDAY I PAID MY WEEKLY VISIT TO MY LAST MISTRESS. She has been given refuge in the sanctuary, that small white cluster of Moorish-looking buildings above the town. Each week I visit her. My ritual, my weekly ritual of hope and fidelity, and in the process I suppose I reveal vestiges of the former lover, the former man of good taste.
Yes, in these visits and in my personal habits which involve crude but elaborate baths, the selection of a shirt and faded tie for the day, the trimming of thick waves of hair around the ears, the care of fingernails as well as exercises for the body, and even an effort to pay some attention to shoes (to brush or knock the dried mud from them if not to polish them), yes, in visits and habits I tell myself and my indifferent and backward world that this abandoned man survives the period of his uselessness, that no catastrophe can destroy true elegance. Each night I wear my nearly ruined black dinner clothes, Even though I expect never again to travel, still I keep in the stone loft above my bed those old cowhide suitcases now covered with mold. Weekly visits, personal habits, a very nearly aesthetic memory— to me it is worth something to know that if circumstances ever gave me back my last mistress or my wife Fiona, I would be as attractive to both these women as I was in the days when, to both of them, I was the white bull brightly fired in Love’s kiln. To me fidelity is the most masculine trait of all.
Yesterday the small white cluster of Moorish-looking buildings above the town looked exactly as it had the week before, and as usual the little fat women in their white dresses, blue aprons and worn-down sandals were expecting me. Even while I was chaining the bicycle to the stunted tree (the bicycle is old, rusted, with large wheels and rotted tires and a pair of narrow handlebars without grips, a pathetic machine yet still functioning, so that if left unchained it would be stolen by the first man, woman or child who happened to see it leaning unguarded against the tree) and even while I was reaching for the thong that hangs from the clapper in the bell that is like a baby’s head cast in iron, even in the midst of these preliminaries, one of the little fat women was already staring at me over the low wall.
I smiled, nodded, threw away the small wet butt of my precious cigarette, and through a series of gestures (lifting of eyebrows, baring of teeth, a rolling motion of the hand) tried both to ask if I was to be admitted safely this morning and to make it clear that I knew perfectly well that I was.
Each week it is the same. My slow bike ride takes me from the villa where I live by choice with Rosella, through the poor coastal village with its ruined aqueduct and small houses of charred bone (that wet dark place always fetid with the faint bulbous aroma of sewer gas still rising from the deep pits dug by ancient barbarians), then out of the darkness and up the crusted slope of the hill and on to these white Moorish buildings and clean fat women and stubby men lolling in their constricting uniforms. The same each week, from dead snails and sediment and the stately gloom of the funeral cypresses to the sudden light, peace, charm of this walled sanctuary. The yellow fountain, the orange sand of the courtyard, the white walls and deep-set windows, the tobacco-colored trees with their enormous leaves in the shape of fat supplicating hands, the low balconies, and above everything the pale blue tile roofs that suggest a bright powdery fusion of sky, sea, child’s eye, a soft lively blue unlike any other blue I have ever seen. Each week I find all this waiting at the end of the bike ride, and enjoy it, delight in it, my sophistication only enriching if anything the aching candor of the blue tiles. The sanctuary is simple and mysterious too, is antithetical to the brambles and broken tiles of the primitive landscape above which it is set. Surely the sanctuary was conceived and built by someone who could never vocalize the harsh unimaginative language of this terrain.
Aching candor. Though I am a dispassionate man, the phrase is equally appropriate to me and to the blue tiles roofing the sanctuary. Aching candor describes exactly what I felt yesterday, and feel each week, when we crossed the remaining portion of the orange courtyard, passed into the shade of the trees, at last turned to the right and approached the nearest balcony where my last mistress sat wrapped in a large thick woolen blanket. I smiled, stood close beside her low balcony wall, stared at her apparently sleeping face until my own head, eyes, mouth, chest, felt saturated with aching candor. Once my mistress, now Hugh’s widow, perhaps some kind of essential invalid, though I think not, there sat Catherine
merely feigning sleep, I knew, and in her silence still basking, blazing, bristling, collapsing in the invisible aftermath of our long adventure.
I spoke to her softly, as I do once each week: “Come on, Catherine, you know you still want me to woo you.” And then my voice filled with the honeyed sweetness of the golden lion or white porcelain bull: “Stop being a child, Catherine. Take the flowers.”
To her, I knew, my admonitions were like chocolate stars, chocolate half-moons, dark balls of honey. I knew she was listening, waiting, watching me behind those closed eyelids, in her mind was clutching at the gentle sounds of my voice and once again was slipping, rolling over the edge and falling among the shadows of her past life and mine.
The matrons were gone, my usual half-hour of peace with Catherine was mine once more, though nearby one of the small swarthy men in uniform was sitting on a low urn containing the ashes of a Roman lover. On the air I smelled a mixture of citrus leaves and the transparent secretions of pale and disintegrating roses. I had only to begin swinging my leg over the balcony wall to arouse the sentry to angry shouts of croak peonie. But I had discovered on previous visits that I could talk to Catherine, smoke, laugh, even sit on the wall, as long as I, the godlike foreigner suspected of being connected with her trouble and who in small dark smoldering eyes was too tall, too strong, too blond, too handsome, much too elegant and good natured, made no effort to cross the wall perhaps to do the large sick woman some further harm. But I could sit on the wall and did so, lit one of my precious puffy cigarettes that smelled of nitrates, burning paper, animal stains, sex. In my mouth and nose I bottled up that smoke, that tumultuous pungent smoke of the cigarette of my tragedy and good humor. And thanks to burning lips, burning eyes, thick golden cough, yesterday I was best able to study Catherine feigning sleep in the same hot woolly blanket that Fiona used to spread across our bed on cold nights in the villa.
I started to blow smoke rings. Tiny and egg-shaped, large and ragged, out they came from the casual oval of my pursed lips and then smashing one into the other, piling rapidly one on top of the next, soon they turned into silver cornucopias, silver wreaths, large ghostly horns of invisible rams. For I was an artist at blowing smoke rings, from an early age had delighted the little girls I knew with my swans, my elephants, my beach balls all blown in smoke. And between puffs: “Why don’t you open your eyes, Catherine? I know you want to watch your old smoke ring artist hard at work.”
But of course she was already watching me, I knew, behind those closed eyelids of hers, was watching every move I made and every thick gray acrid creation that sprang or floated from my large and sympathetic lips. And all this time, as I drew one foot up and rested it on the wall and crooked my right arm around the upraised knee on top of that low wall in the warm sun, all this while I was studying Catherine as she feigned sleep, through the luxury of my loosely packed and hotly burning cigarette was nodding and squinting attractively, scrutinizing each feature for the mere pleasure of the sight, but also hoping with my eyes alone to appeal to her as I had once appealed to her with all my unlimited gentleness, on those dark licorice-smelling nights in their villa or ours.
Sinuous smoke, sun on the back of my hand, smile reaching out for the pain that lay behind the skin of her face, the sound of my voice already gone, frames of golden eyeglasses warm on the bridge of my nose and behind the ears, and smiling in silence, leaning forward, waiting, receiving no answer. Then my shoe scraped, my eyes became heavier and larger with concentration and good humor, became even darker brown in color: “Listen, Catherine. There’s comforting silence, there’s childish silence. Yours is childish. I don’t even need to say it, do I?”
I saw what I had seen for weeks, the shape and substance of the woman both familiar and unfamiliar, both young and old, and I kept staring at her with admiration, remoteness, aching candor. Only her head was visible, the large head always seen in comparison with the head remembered on the pillow, gripped between my hands, rippling in Fiona’s little mirror, clouding over suddenly with her uncertain laugh. The body itself was hidden. Yet no blanket was thick enough, rough enough, dense enough, or so wildly colored or so grotesquely patterned or so filled with other associations (the sensations of Fiona, say, on a cold night) as to prevent that large female torso and the arms, legs, hips from taking solid and in a way maximum shape under my first glance.
I knew what lay beneath the blanket. I knew quite perfectly the hips and calves and thighs somewhat fallen and still minutely falling, spreading from classical lines, knew well indeed the navel oddly sculpted, as if her belly had been sealed with a final flare of some hot iron. I had seen and always would see beneath old blankets or behind black funeral cypresses the heavy knees and feet and hands, the placid buttocks, all the immensity of the plain flesh that still suggested classical lines. The large but ordinary body, then, of someone who had borne children and overcome self-consciousness, body of someone who had never been aware of the statuesque design the ancient artist had in mind for it, a body so plain and big, so close and yet so far from the target of beauty that to me it was the richest beauty of all. I knew Catherine’s body, saw it, loved it for its totally unconscious grandeur.
She moved, something trembled (or so I thought) beneath the ugly folds of Fiona’s blanket. And once again, smiling, reaching out to her with silent smoke, all this awareness came back to me as it does each week. My finger tips were burning but my mind was filled only with this vision of the body of my Catherine lying before me in pretended sleep.
It was a knee that moved. And had it not been for the squat man seated upright on the urn, I would have thrust out my hand, placed it firmly on the sloping forehead of Catherine’s knee and given her great uplifted knee a tender shake. It would have pleased me to touch the blanket just as it had pleased me when, in the stillness of absolute sexual purpose, I first swung her big plain body into the arc of my life.
Another amusing creation out of poisonous smoke, another silent sequence of meditation, and then I lifted my chin, stretched heavily, and nipped the undulating smoke ring with the very lips that had blown it. And softly laughing, in my own ears hearing the appealing sounds I knew she wanted to hear from deep in my diaphragm, hearing my own sympathetic laughter even while it was yet riding the tide of smoke in the dark resonant hollows of my nose and throat: “You can’t forget me, Catherine. Why try?”
All this awareness, all this richness of feeling came back to me. As it does each week. And now the emotion that was clouding Catherine’s face was pain (I could see it like schools of microscopic black fish drifting just beneath the skin), and now my precious cigarette was nothing more than the taste of black ashes and a small livid blister on my lower lip, while the last of the smoke was already dissolving in the sunlit peppery-looking leaves of the nearest tree. The blue tiles appeared to be white with frost.
And smiling, touching my burned lip with my tongue, slowing still further the cadences of my rich appeal: “I might have prevented our—what shall I call it? Idyl? Yes, I might have prevented our idyl. Maybe I could have stuck my hands in my pockets instead of using them to remove my golden eyeglasses. I didn’t have to climb into my dressing gown and silk pajamas and cross from our villa to yours and turn down the pink percale sheets on your bed. After all, I could have walked down to our pebbly beach and thrown pebbles into the phosphorous wash for a couple of hours. But a steady, methodical, undesigning lover like me really has no choice, Catherine. The eyeglasses come off in my hands, the skirts of the dressing gown fall open, I fold the wings of the glasses. No choice. And don’t forget you were waiting for me. You wanted my slow walk, my strong dark shadow, my full pack of cigarettes, the sound of my soft humming as I approached your villa. We both knew you were waiting, Catherine. Neither one of us had any choice that first night. It was inevitable.”
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 ringin
g. 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?