The Blood Oranges: A Novel Read online

  “I like you, baby. You.”

  WAKING, WRINKLING MY NOSE, ROLLING OVER, I HEARD my hand slap accidently against my own thick mottled thigh and realized that despite our early agreement intended to safeguard children and husband alike, I had dozed off, so that now we were only a few hours from dawn. I was faced with precisely the situation we had thought it best to avoid. Slowly I climbed out of the bed and found the polka-dotted pajama bottoms and put them on, lit the lantern, yawned, made my way toward the cry that I had recognized as coming from the little tight-lipped mouth of Meredith. And then there was the battle of whispers, one side tormented, bitter, the other dismayed, calm as usual.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Your nose is bleeding.”

  “It’s not.”

  “Stop being a child.”

  “I’m going to tell my father.”

  “Let’s do something about this nosebleed.”

  “He’ll probably kill you for coming here.”

  “Hold still.”

  Despite the eyes of the injured eaglet and her obvious efforts to escape the touch of my hand (cowering, hunching the thin white naked shoulders), she could no longer defend herself from my kindness because the blood was running into her mouth and down her little pointed chin. Her nostrils became dilated, the head drew back. But with the tip of Fiona’s pink sheet, which was already bloody between my fingers, slowly and carefully I wiped her face and pinched her nose until finally the gushing stopped and coagulation started. I cradled her damp head against my chest, waited, then by the light of the lantern satisfied myself that only a few dried streaks and stains now betrayed the lonely extravagance of Meredith’s nightmare bleeding.

  “You can wash it all off in the morning,”I whispered. “Now go to sleep.”

  In the immediate afterglow of the extinguished flame her face hung below me a moment like the small white mask of some sacrificial animal. But though the eyes were still fearful and unforgiving, the mouth, after all, was growing soft.

  WE TURNED, STARTING UP THE HILL TOGETHER, CLIMBINGone of the high narrow twisting streets of the village without purpose, without destination, drawn upward together by the air, the light, the dusty steep grade of the little street, by the abrupt seasonal invasion of the wild flowers that had taken root, matured, bloomed all in a single night. The flowers lay in bright masses of wet color on walls, tiles, flat stones, or packed like some kind of floral mortar in cracks and fissures around slanting doorways and beneath crude window ledges. So the two of us were climbing together and admiring the flowers when suddenly the village street looped again and there above us, amidst priest and children and a crowd of barefoot men, stood the white boat.

  Yesterday? Only yesterday.

  I was taking slow uphill strides and smelling the flowers, asking myself why I had had such unhappy luck with Catherine, wondering how I was ever to win her to all the sensual possibilities of the intimacy I had in mind, persuade her to give me her complete attention, to look at me, to live on with Cyril.

  Yes, I thought, there in all this suffusion of flowers is the familiar Physanthyllis tetraphylla. The ripe and fruity vinelike plant with its wet green leaves, yellow buds and faint traces of silver hair, lay spread across the entire surface of the dusty village street, and I could hardly fail to note its tendrils drifting off into silence, its nodules cup-shaped, as usual, in pulpy succulence. And wasn’t that the Pisum elatius? Yes, I thought, Fiona’s favorite.

  But Catherine, I asked myself, why doesn’t Catherine know by now that I am enough, that she is enough, that we are all interchangeable, so to speak, and that our present relationship is already as unlimited and undeniable as our past affair? After all, there is something glorious about standing together in time as two large white graceful beasts might stand permanently together in an empty field. And yet how could I convey the truth of all this to Catherine?

  At least she was wearing her pea-green slacks (glancing over my shoulder, waiting for her to close the gap between us, frowning at her obvious reluctance to catch up with me), exactly as if her children had yet to smear their little hands in the folds of my dissolving tapestry and we, the four of us, had yet to follow the angular black-haired shepherd into the still grove and then beyond to sun, sea, joyous ruins, long nights, distant piping. At least the pea-green slacks, a white sweater, an old pair of heavy dried-out leather sandals on bare feet. At least there was the clear sound of her matter-of-fact exertion—the sounds of her breath, the grating comfortable sound of the sandals. But nothing more. No corresponding glance at my own black suit and white shirt open at the collar and golden hair beginning to curl at last into tight sprightly barbs over the ears and down the back of my neck. No smile. No music in the way she moved. Nothing for Cyril.

  And then? Then it burst upon us, so to speak, the spectacle, the processional, the very message of our actuality. Suddenly the narrow street was looping again, rising more steeply than ever, and in one single instant priest and children and barefoot men and white boat were poised above us. Suddenly Catherine and I were thrust against high stone walls on opposite sides of the narrow street. The two of us stood upright and facing each other with our flesh and even our bones flush to the rock, precisely as the village priest tried to wave us back down the street and out of the way of the white boat whose lunging destructive descent was prevented only by the crowd of men.

  “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 m
yself, 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.

  So our feet were deep in the sand, I lit a cigarette, the boat was balancing between the loosely divided halves of the launching party. Beneath the plane tree, a young man was seated alone beside a bare wooden table, and it was he who played the archaic heart-shaped stringed instrument. I took it all in—the assembled villagers, the enormous white crescent of the waiting boat, and the dogs, the children, the black shawls, the impoverished young man whose metallic Eastern music was now reaching out toward the rolling sea. And here we were, Catherine and I together at last in the festive air. The sun was overhead but close to us, close and orange. Once more the invisible nets were spread.

  “It’s all right,” I murmured, “take the glass. The old fellow just wants you to toast his boat.”

  At that moment the old goat-faced man himself was suddenly before us and smiling, holding out to Catherine a little battered tin tray bearing not one of their black bottles but a small dirty glass half filled with a colorless drink more powerful, I knew, than the dusty wine. He extended the tray, raised one shoulder, looked into Catherine’s eyes and into mine. Little more than a commonplace event, an instant in time, only a small disreputable old man with a gray shirt ripped open to the waist and partially unbuttoned trousers loose at the large hips. But thanks to his agility and bright blue eyes and stubby fingers, I realized immediately that he was a friendly guide who at a glance had read Catherine’s past and mine in the very shape of our middle-aged bodies that were so much larger than his.

  “Take a sip,” I said. “I’ll drink the rest.”

  Catherine held the glass to her lips, I nodded my approval of the clear fierce taste that suggested both the salt of the sea and the juice of the heavy lemon. I left him a few drops which he licked with his fingers, laughing and tilting the little dirty glass above his burnished head. For another moment the glass hung high in the air while the old man patted Catherine’s arm, shook my hand, pointed with expansive admiration toward the boat still propped upright and waiting for the first touch of the uncontrollable sea.

  The glass fell to the beach, the grip of the vanished hand lingered in my empty hand, Catherine smiled exactly as if the old man had not yet disappeared. But he was already gone and even now was rousing the villagers to the final effort of pushing the majestic slow boat across the sand to the sea.

  “Well,”I heard myself saying, “recovered yet?”

  I glanced at Catherine, the heart-shaped instrument leapt between two or three high notes and one smashing chord, Catherine held her bared elbow still tingling, no doubt, from the touch of that unfamiliar hand.

  “I don’t know why I feel this way.”

  “Excited?”

  “It’s lucky he found us.”

  “Look,”I murmur
ed, “here come the oars.”

  Two youthful figures ran down the beach with a pair of long virginal oars suspended between them. The distant fortress was cupped in the shriveled palm of desolation. The orange sun descended, the open sea undulated in slow fleshy waves. The old man and the angry priest were arguing about a few half-submerged brown rocks which apparently lay directly in the path of the boat. Catherine smiled. Heavy-headed Cyril smiled. The boat was in motion.

  Yes, in motion, and Catherine had already removed her sandals, already I anticipated the sight of Catherine’s green slacks wet to the knees and the sensation of my own black trousers weighted at least to my bulky calves with dark sea water.

  The upheld oars protruded above the sweat-dampened heads of those men straining at the stern of the boat, to one side and at the edge of the beach the priest stood with his skirts awash and the large and radiant silver cross held aloft in both extended fists. Again the two small boys were filled with self-importance and were hard at work. The forward motion of the boat was slow, painful, continuous, unmistakable, and bore no relation to priest, struggling men, old women. No, I thought, that white boat was moving only for the sake of Catherine, me, and for one agile and ageless village elder obviously deformed at birth. Quietly I smiled at the symmetry of orange sky, chunks of bloodied wood, oars that projected into nothing more than air, boat that still lay several yards from the vast tide that would float it into life and yet would one day reduce it to nothing more than a few cracked wooden ribs half buried in sand.

  “Remind you of anything?”

  My smile was embedded in those slow words, and as soon as I spoke I knew that my voice was exactly as audible to Catherine as it was to me, as if all those other sounds (water, music, laborious breathing, grinding of wood on wood) were only a silence for me to fill or existed only that Catherine and I might listen more attentively to what each of us had to say. Catherine glanced over her shoulder and her eyes were larger than I remembered.