The Blood Oranges: A Novel Read online

  But it is hardly a fault to have lived my life, and still to live it, without knowing pain. And dormancy, memory, clairvoyance, what more could I want? My dormancy is my hive, my honeypot, my sleeping castle, the golden stall in which the white bull lies quite alive and dreaming. For me the still air is thicker than leaves, and if memory gives me back the grape-tasting game and bursting sun, clairvoyance returns to me in a different way my wife, my last mistress, the little golden sheep who over her shoulder turns small bulging eyes in my direction. But not Hugh. He is gone for good. And Hugh is the man who died for love, not me.

  And yet every man is vulnerable, no man is safe. If my world has flowered, still flowers, nonetheless it stands to reason that even the best of men and the most quiet and agreeable of lovers may earn his share of disapproval. There are those who in fact would like nothing better than to fill my large funnel-shaped white thighs with the fish hooks of their disapproval. There are those who would deny me all my nights in Fiona’s bed if they could, would strip me of silken dressing gown and fling me into some greasy whitetiled pit of naked sex-offenders. For some, love itself is a crime.

  I realize all this. I could hardly have lived so long among the roses without feeling the thorns, could hardly have enjoyed so much in privacy without seeing the scowls of the crowd. But it will take a dark mind to strip my vines, to destroy the last shreds of my tapestry, to choke off my song. It will take a lot to destroy Hugh’s photographs or to gut the many bedrooms of the sleeping castle. I am a match, I hope, for the hatred of conventional enemies wherever they are.

  THE SUN WAS SETTING, SINKING TO ITS PREDESTINED DEATH, and to the four of us, or at least to me, that enormous smoldering sun lay on the horizon like a dissolving orange suffused with blood. The tide was low, the smooth black oval stones beneath us were warm to the flesh, we could hear the distant sounds of the three girls playing with the dog behind the funeral cypresses. Fiona, wearing a pale lemon-colored bra and pale lemon-colored briefs for the beach, and I in my magenta trunks as sparse and thick and elastic as an athletic supporter, and Hugh in his long-sleeved cotton shirt and loose gray trunks like undershorts, and Catherine dressed in her faded madras halter and swimming skirt and shorts—together we sat with legs outstretched, soles of our feet touching or nearly touching, a four-pointed human starfish resting together in the last livid light of the day.

  No one moved. Without calculation, almost without consciousness, Fiona lay propped on her elbows and with her head back, her eyes closed, her tense lips gently smiling. Even Catherine appeared to be sunk in a kind of worried slumber, aware somehow of the thick orange light on her knees. Prone bodies, silence hanging on the children’s voices and scattered barking of their old black dog, the empty wine bottles turning to gold. All of us felt the inertia, suspension, tranquility, though I found myself tapping out a silent expectant rhythm with one of my big toes while Hugh’s narrow black eyes were alert, unresting, I noticed, and to me revealed only too clearly his private thoughts. But the small black oval stones we lay on were for us much better than sand. Our beach, as we called it, was a glassy volcanic bed that made us draw closer together to touch toes, to dream. With one hand I was carelessly crushing a few thin navy-blue sea shells, making a small pile of crushed shell on my naked navel. And yet it was the sun, the sun alone that filled all our thoughts and was turning the exposed skin of all four bodies the same deepening color. The lower the sun fell the more it glowed.

  I felt someone’s foot recoil from mine and then return. Even the tiny black ringlets in Hugh’s beard were turning orange. I could hear the powdery shells collecting in the well of my belly and I realized that all four of us were together on a black volcanic beach in the hour when fiercely illumined goats stand still and huddle and the moon prepares to pour its milk on the fire.

  “Cyril. We don’t have to go back yet, do we?”

  I glanced at Fiona, heard the matter-of-fact whisper and saw that her expression had not changed, that her lips had not moved. But rolling onto one hip, propping myself on one elbow, brushing away crushed shells with a hasty stroke of one hand, I saw also that there was movement in the curve of her throat and that the sun had saturated one of her broad white shoulders. And before I could answer, Fiona giggled. My sensible, stately, impatient, clear-bodied wife giggled, as if in a dream a small bird had alighted on her belly. Giggled for no reason apparently, she whose every impulsive gesture was informed with its own hidden sense, and at the sound Hugh became suddenly rigid, Catherine opened her eyes. I knew what to do.

  In silence, while the sun flushed us most deeply and unrecognizably with orange light, I got to my knees beside Fiona, who did not move, and with a flick of my hand untied the silken strings of her pale lemon-colored halter, those thin silken cords knotted in a bow behind her bent neck and curving back, and then with a few more skillful movements removed altogether Fiona’s little lemon-colored bra. Then I folded this the briefest of all Fiona’s half-dozen bathing bras, stuck it for safekeeping inside one of my empty shoes, and flowed back slowly into my former position on the hot rocks.

  Understandably perhaps, for the first few moments Catherine and even Hugh could not bear to look. I myself hardly dared to look. But then I heard a sound like a finger scratching inside Hugh’s throat and our three heads turned furtively, shyly, violently or calmly in my wife’s direction. And Fiona’s eyes, I saw, were open. We said nothing, Fiona was looking straight at the sun and smiling. But had she wanted me to expose her breasts, I wondered, for Hugh’s sake or mine? Or was the exposure purely my own idea and something that entered her consciousness and gave her pleasure only after I had touched her, untied the strings? I could not know. But I knew immediately that it was a good idea.

  Fiona’s breasts were not large. Yet in the sun’s lurid effulgence they glistened, grew tight while the two nipples turned to liquid rings, bands, so that to me Fiona’s two firm breasts suddenly became the bursting irises of a young white owl’s wide-open eyes, and when in the next moment she giggled again, again apparently without reason, those bright naked eyes, breasts, recorded the little spasms of pleasure that, otherwise unseen, were traveling down Fiona’s chest and neck and arms.

  “Baby, can’t we just stay like this forever?”

  We heard the words, we watched the very motion of Fiona’s speech in her lips and breasts. In mouth and breasts my wife was singing, and despite the possibility of another unexpected giggle, which no doubt would be accompanied by another small eruption of rolling or bouncing in the lovely breasts as well as a slight twisting in the slope of the shoulders, despite all this or perhaps because of it the preciousness of what Fiona said maintained the silence, prevented the rest of us from talking. I could see the thin white edge of Fiona’s teeth between the slightly parted lips, the voice was soft and clear, the naked orange breasts were unimaginably free, her eyes were partially open. Even in the silence she was singing, and the rest of us were listening, watching.

  Then suddenly Hugh began to scratch viciously at himself beneath the loose gray shorts, and Catherine moved. With a brief flashing sensation of regret, it occurred to me that she was about to climb heavily, angrily to her feet and leave. She too could hear that in the distance the children were beginning to quarrel, beginning to tease the dog. But I was wrong, and she merely drew herself slowly out of her supine state, raised her back and lifted up her long heavy legs and sat upright with her thighs pressed together on the black rocks and her knees bent and her strong calves crossed at the ankles.

  And then Hugh spoke. Stopped scratching himself and spoke, while Catherine’s unreadable eyes met mine and I smiled, allowed my large right orange hand to lie comfortably where my upper thighs, which were about twice the girth of even Catherine’s thighs, joined in special harmony the inverted apex of my own magenta briefs for the beach.

  “That’s it. All these years you’ve been castrating him!”

  On this occasion it was hardly what I thought he would say. Was this the exte
nt of the private thoughts I had been watching all this time in his black eyes? But then I laughed, because Hugh had been staring all this time at the bare breasts of my wife and because he was thin and because despite the ringlets of his beard and curls of black hair across his forehead was nonetheless wearing the long gray shapeless bathing trunks and the white cotton collarless shirt with the right sleeve pinned up with one of Catherine’s large steel safety pins. Perhaps he did not enjoy the sight of Fiona as much as I did, or would not admit that he did. Nonetheless, that he could lie in my shadow and stare at my wife as he was in fact staring at her, and then pronounce what he had just pronounced, aroused in me new admiration for so much craft, for so much comic design.

  “Cyril is virile, baby. He really is.”

  The absolute certainty of the soft voice which in timbre matched the curve of Fiona’s throat, the pleasing brevity of the assertion, the mild sex-message of the accompanying giggle, which was more than the giggle of a mere girl, the fact that Fiona still had not moved but lay back on her elbows with one slender leg raised at the knee and her breasts falling imperceptibly to either side—at that moment I could not have loved Fiona more or felt more affection for my courageous, self-betraying Saint Peter, as I had come to call Hugh mentally whenever our quaternion reached special intensity or special joy.

  Suspension, suffusion, peace for the four of us on that black beach. But it was all beginning to pass, I knew, and still I waited, now hearing the older girl shouting at the smaller girls behind the funeral cypresses. Shifting a little, growing mildly impatient myself, I waited, wondering if this momentary idyl would pass before the rose and golden metallic threads could begin to spin our separate anatomies forever into the sunset scene, would come to a sudden conclusion, incomplete, unbalanced. What was the matter with Hugh? Why was he not holding up his end?

  I could understand Hugh’s affected lack of gratitude, could enjoy his efforts to conceal his feelings on seeing Fiona without her bra. And of course Hugh could not possibly know that I was well aware of the fact that he had already seen Fiona’s naked breasts, had already held her breasts in his good hand, so that in taking off her halter I knew full well that I was violating no confidence and was merely extending naturally the pleasures of a treat already quite familiar to the two of us. And I realized also that Hugh did not know that already I was as familiar with Catherine’s naked breasts as he was with Fiona’s, so that the baring of Catherine’s breasts would be no surprise for me. Was he then thoughtless? Selfish? Without even the crudest idea of simple reciprocity? Certainly he must have known that it was up to him, not me, to unfasten Catherine’s overly modest halter and take it off. What was holding him back? Could he not see that Catherine herself was puzzled, uncomfortable? Could he deliberately mean to embarrass his wife and to tamper with the obviously intended symmetry of our little scene on the beach? Hugh was unmusical, but I had hoped I could count on him for at least a few signs of romantic temperament. After all, how could any man love my wife and yet fail to appreciate simple harmonious arrangements of flesh, shadow, voice, hair, which were as much the result of Fiona’s artistry as of mine. But perhaps I had been wrong. Perhaps Hugh had no eye for the sex-tableau.

  I yawned, glanced at the finely muscled music of Fiona’s breathing, began crushing another pile of shells. Back at the villas one of the smaller girls was now shrieking distantly in short monotonous bursts of pain.

  And then, nearly too late, Catherine acted on her own behalf, brought herself to do what Hugh should have done, and out of feelings of exclusion or possibly pleasure or more likely irritable retaliation, managed to complete the picture that Hugh had almost destroyed. She frowned, tightened her lips, took a short breath and, crooking her elbows so that her bent arms became the rapidly moving wings of some large bird, reached behind her back and quickly, without help, unfastened her halter and pulled it off. It was an awkward, rapid, determined, self-sufficient gesture of compliance, and I was proud of her. And even though in that first moment of exposure she looked as if she wanted nothing more than to cross her arms and conceal beneath the flesh of her arms the flesh of her breasts, still she sat up straight and kept herself uncovered. I was proud of her.

  And though I had already known what we would see when she finally bared herself, could visualize to the last detail the surfaces of Catherine’s nakedness, still it pleased me to see the round rising breasts and the nipples that resembled small dark rosebuds tightly furled, and to see all this, not at night in their villa, but here at sunset on the polished black stones born of the volcano’s chaotic fire.

  How long would we manage to preserve this balance of nudity? For how long would we be allowed to appreciate the fact that the nude breathing torsos of these two very different women simply enhanced each other? I could not know. But here, at least, was the possibility of well-being, and though Catherine sat with eyes averted and arms straight and the large halter half-wadded, clutched, in one large hand in her lap, still at that moment I found myself tingling with the realization that Hugh’s wife had acted deliberately and in large part for me. And now, this instant, if Catherine had been able, say, to cup her breasts in her hands with Fiona’s thoughtless exhilaration, might not the sight of Catherine be as stimulating as that of Fiona? Then again, wasn’t the naturalness of Catherine’s slight lingering discomfort exactly as stimulating as the naturalness of my own wife’s erotic confidence? I smiled, I found that the ball of my right foot was pressed gently to the solid front of one of Catherine’s knees, I heard Fiona giggling and saw that Hugh’s blue-gray ankle was now trapped, so to speak, between both of Fiona’s energetic feet, and again I began to hope that I had not overestimated Hugh after all.

  But rolling onto my hands and knees, getting to my feet with a cheerful groan, lumbering to cut off the oldest girl who was running toward us out of the cypresses and shouting for Catherine, and stopping her and displaying friendliness and knowing that when I turned to wave I would see distant gestures of busy hands fastening big and little halters once again into place—still I could only smile and do a few dancing bear steps for the angry child, because no sex-tableau was ever entirely abortive and because ahead of us lay an unlimited supply of dying suns and crescent moons which Fiona, and Catherine too, would know how to use.

  “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to,” whispered Meredith and shook off my hand. But after all, I told myself, her one poor sour note could never be any match for old Cyril’s song.

  YESTERDAY ROSELLA AND I WENT HUNTING FOR BLACK snails. And yesterday, for the first time, Rosella and I ate a meal together. Side by side on hands and knees, or squatting together, prowling about the walls of the villa, spreading the tall grass that grows in senseless clumps against the smoke-blackened walls of my crumbling villa, or poking one after the other in the flower beds nearly invisible now under thickets of crab grass, dead brambles, translucent yellow weeds that turn to powder at the slightest touch, or taking turns with a stick at the base of the little well house which is like a miniature chapel and in fact once wore a small flimsy hand-wrought Byzantine cross of iron on its conical stone roof—for some time Rosella has joined me in my pursuit of the snails, in silent accord has accepted the snail hunt as one of my simple activities safe enough, perhaps, to share. But then yesterday, filling the two hot bowls and with no change in her reluctant movements or empty face, pretending that our meal for two was a mere matter of course, Rosella sat across from me and ate her evening meal at the same time that I ate mine.

  Because of the way the birds changed the pitch of their singing, or because of subtle light changes where I sat under the low hand-hewn beams, or because I could tell by the smoke’s odor that the fire was out, and by the breath of air at my small lopsided window as well as the sounds that reached me from the dead gardens could tell that the day was fading, somehow I knew as usual that the time was right, that Rosella had put aside her broom of twigs, had emptied her buckets and left her scrub brushes out to dry, had
once again come unstuck from the web of her crude and exhausting day. It was twilight and time to look for the silver trails. Rosella stood waiting for me beside the well house, and I was pleased to see the earthen pot in her arms, the worn-down wooden sandals on the naked feet, the thin earthen-colored dress worn with blunt indifference.

  “Here you are again, Rosella. The girl by the well.”

  I smiled, Rosella merely shifted the chipped pot in her arms. Did she yearn for my hand, did she sometimes wish that I might join her in the squat church of the wooden arm? Did she admire my shabby black coat and vest and trousers, did she yearn sometimes to feel between her stubby insensitive fingers the golden watch chain that hung across all the breadth of my black vest? Was she beginning to need some physical gesture of affection? I thought she was.

  I was close enough now to see the pocks in the fired flesh of the old pot and to see the bones in Rosella’s shoulders and the crow’s-feet at the corners of her youthful eyes. Her skin was swarthy, her nose was oddly aquiline, no doubt she was a long-descended daughter of the barbarians. But in her childhood had she also been tutored in the lore of the female saints? Is that where she got her indifference, her strength, the blunt crippled look in her dark eyes, from wooden pitchforks and the lives of the female saints?

  There was moisture in one of her nostrils, her hands curved naturally to the roundness of the pot, a little dried blood was caked on one of her feet. For a moment I thought of Catherine, as I often do, and then wished that Fiona could see me boxed in by the funeral cypresses with Rosella whose head barely reached my chest and whose voice I hardly heard from one month to the next.

  And with my knuckle tapping the earthen shape in her arms: “This evening, let’s see if we can fill it right to the brim, Rosella.”

  Moments later I was once more able to enjoy the sound of heavy snails falling into the wide-mouthed pot. In the twilight we were side by side, Rosella and I, kneeling together at the edge of a small rectangle of pulpy leaves. The snails were plentiful and the sticky silver trails crept down dead stems, climbed over exposed roots, disappeared under black chunks of decomposing stone. Everywhere the snails were massing or making their blind osmotic paths about the villa, eating and destroying and unwinding their silver trails. They were the eyes of night, the crawling stones. “Faster, Rosella,”I murmured, “a little faster.”