The Blood Oranges: A Novel Read online

  She seemed to understand, and shifted her knees further apart, tightened her kneeling animalistic posture, tugged at a small jagged shard of buried tile and suddenly unearthed a pocket as large as the blade of a shovel and packed like a nest of mud with the sightless snails. In both hands she scooped them up and, while I steadied the pot, dropped them covered with flecks and strings of fresh mud into the warm hole of the pot. Then I laughed, reached into the pot with my large white hand, frayed cuff and golden cuff link (anniversary gift from Fiona), seized one of the snails and pulled it out quickly and smashed it against the cream-colored grainy side of the pot.

  “That’s what they look like, Rosella. Smell?”

  She was backing up. Her haunches moved, her thighs began to work, again one of her sandals cracked against the pot, and suddenly one hand reached behind and tugged up the constricting skirt of her hemp-colored dress. Rosella, I saw, was moving backward. And smelling the gloom of the funeral cypresses, I laughed and, despite the rules, thrust out my hand so that in another moment my hand might have confronted her flesh and staved off the now partially exposed buttocks, though even my hand pushed hard against her buttocks could not have prevented us from tangling in what would have been a kind of accidental Arcadian embrace. I lost hold of the pot and it tipped over. Rosella looked at me, and in the clear rose-tinted twilight and amidst small noises of grass, brambles, stones all disturbed by our movements, I thought that Rosella’s eyes reminded me of the bulging eyes of my little long-lost golden sheep. And then we stopped. Stopped, waited, listened, heard the ticking of the grass, the brushing sounds of a few small birds, the slow dripping of contaminated water and, from somewhere in the increasing shadows, footsteps.

  “Someone’s coming. Hear it?”

  And then it was dark, and I smelled the flaking roof of the well house and stood up and brushed the burrs from the sleeve of my jacket, straightened my golden eyeglasses, pulled at the little points of my vest, and immediately saw the hunchback standing beneath the rotting arbor with a stone crock in his arms.

  Leather coat, leather cap, rubber boots, shoulders as broad as mine, even in the deep green light from the funeral cypresses and with a cluster of dead grapes brushing his high muscular hump, still I could see that he was someone easily frightened. And yet he was staring not at me but at Rosella, seemed to expect not an assault from me but rather some kind of recognition from her. When he spoke as he then did, it became obvious that he was young. He took a breath, his lips moved, he spoke. And out of all that leathern bulk and deformity of a man who looked like a capped and muzzled bear came a voice that suggested only the softness and clarity of a young girl’s voice poured from a shy pitcher. Croak peonie, he must have said, or crespi fagag. I could not be sure.

  “Who is he, Rosella? Your brother? Cousin?”

  I was right, of course, because Rosella said a few words not to me but to the deformed intruder who turned, put down his crock, and in the darkness and crushing shriveled grapes beneath his boots, disappeared around the corner of my long low-silhouetted villa. By now everything had succumbed to the light of the somber trees, to the silence, to the purple shadows of the cypresses. And in this silence, this gloom, the crock was white and plainly visible. I took a step. I heard the slapping of the wooden flats, felt Rosella’s shoulder brush my sleeve in passing, saw her little shadowy figure stooping down. And Rosella and the white crock were gone.

  Night. Silence. Decayed and dormant stones, tiles, vines. Crude arbor. From my pocket I fished a cigarette, glanced up at the stars, inhaled. Turning to retrieve the pot of snails I paused, inhaled again, thought I detected in the wall of funeral cypresses that narrow but convenient passage through which I used to make my nightly way to Catherine.

  No regrets.

  In my mouth the smoke was the color of mustard, around my ears the curling hair was both gold and gray, overhead the night was thick with stars. So I had no regrets. I smelled the peppery darkness, retrieved the pot and left it where Rosella could dump the snails down the hole in the flat stone of our crude lavatory in the morning. Then I groped my way toward Rosella and the light of the olive-twig fire, the smell of smoke.

  At first glance I thought the crock was packed with fur, because by the uneven light of Rosella’s fire the soft brown substance rising somewhat higher than the square mouth of the crock rippled and gleamed softly, was alight with richness and flashing colors so that it suggested fur. But my fingers told me immediately that the crock was packed not with fur but birds. I could feel their concealed bodies smaller than the bodies of mice, could feel the fiercely contracted wings, the feet like flecks of wire, the little beaks that made me think of the sharp nibs of old-fashioned pens. I seized one by a brittle wing and held it to the light and recognized it immediately as some kind of sparrow. More than three or four dozen sparrows in a stone crock, and obviously Rosella intended to cook them all. And weighing the almost weightless bird in my palm I knew, suddenly, that the crock was a gift and that all the time we were hunting snails Rosella had known it would arrive, was perhaps instrumental in its arrival.

  Had she asked that disfigured youth to shoot sparrows among the rocks and in the steep, sparsely wooded hills near the sanctuary? On her demand had he spent all day discharging his untrustworthy weapon at those swift targets? Had Catherine heard those very shots? And was all this for me? All this for the idle middle-aged man from over the mountains? Three or four dozen sparrows, I thought, were a good many.

  We cooked them together, ate them together. For the first time I not only ate with Rosella but joined her in that damp cavelike room of stone and tile where, until now, Rosella had moved alone with a young woman’s bored carelessness through all her days and nights of cooking. I joined her and removed my black coat and in frayed shirt sleeves and soiled vest sat beside my standing Rosella and helped her, pulled the feathers from my share of the sparrows, which was no easy job, and despite my size hovered as near as I could to her shoulder while inside the casserole she built up the layers: butter, thyme, sparrows, onions, butter, thyme, sparrows, onions, and so forth. She prepared a sauce and I scrubbed out the iron vessel. Hovering stolidly beside Rosella, I sniffed the now browning sparrows and fed the fire, felt the oil of the cooking birds on my own brow and on my cheeks, felt without a single touch each movement of Rosella’s small bones, muscles, ligaments. I watched Rosella’s fingers at work, fingers even now stained with the black earth of my garden. Sometime toward the end of these preparations I sighed a deep sigh and realized that next time I too would be able to tie the wings, chop off the miniature feet.

  “The heads. I see we eat the heads, Rosella. And the beaks. For the full effect we must eat the entire bird. I understand.”

  Her example was not at first easy to follow. Beaks that were very much like little split black fingernails. Heads smaller than my thumb and without eyes. I noticed such details, calmly watched how Rosella ate each sparrow in a single bite, and realized that it would be difficult for even a seasoned sex-aesthetician to follow her example. But then I saw that Rosella’s two front teeth overlapped each other, and at this observation, this further instance of poignant incongruity, I could hesitate no more. And there amidst heat, shadows like finger puppets, savory taste and savory thoughts, how wrong I was to have hesitated in the first place. Because thanks to Rosella’s cooking, the sparrows, I found, were simply soft and crunchy too, as if the different textures of sweetness had been so combined that it was still necessary to chew a moment that very substance which had in fact already dissolved, melted, in the aching mouth.

  “Rosella,” I said, with my jaws working and elbows propped casually on the table, “magnificent!”

  Across from each other at that ancient broad lopsided table we sat, and according to the rules there was no touching of knees, no ravaging of sticky lips. My hand did not find her thigh and, in rhythm to that long slow dripping meal, please her thigh with the unexpected strength and tenderness of its unhurried caress. None of th
is. No removal of shoes and sandals, no meeting of bare feet. No slipping down the dress or licking fingers.

  Throughout the meal I was unable to tell what Rosella was thinking, throughout the meal she managed to keep her face expressionless and her eyes averted. To me it was poignant that still I had no desire to put one finger behind her ear or to take her little mouth in mine. And yet her lips were sticky and there were a few drops of gravy on my vest while my plate, at last, was empty. Had I gone too far? Had I somehow raised false hopes? Was that whole vast tapestry beyond villa, cypresses, village, crying out for my re-entry into the pink field? Was my very skin about to be fired again in the kiln that has no flame? At least the sparrows inside me were already singing a different song, and I was listening.

  YESTERDAY I KISSED MY MIMOSA TREE. AT NOON, WALKING slowly toward the well house with my shoulders heavy and hands thrust into empty pockets, I noticed that overnight my mimosa tree had reached its prime, had attained the totality of its yellow massiveness, and a little more. Each of its green filaments was bright, each of its seeds had become a puffy yellow globe as large as the tip of my middle finger, and packed together they hung, drooped, in thick puffy clumps, clouds, each one three times the size of a cluster of fat grapes. I stopped, reconsidered, turned to the mimosa tree, and with nothing more than a mild and rational interest in this sudden burgeoning, approached the tree and found myself standing unusually close to its silent flowering. Actually, at that moment one of the yellow clumps was already brushing against my vest. I stood there thinking of the delicate structure of so much airy growth and admiring this particular depth of yellow. I was alone, the sun had warmed the tree, the tree was full throated, I began to smell its gentle scent. And then I raised my hands, displaying my thick black coat sleeves, my frayed white cuffs, my golden cuff links and golden ring, and slowly thrust my hands deep into the vulnerable yellow substance of the mimosa tree. Into my hands I gathered with all possible tenderness one of the hivelike masses of yellow balls. And keeping my eyes open, deliberately I lowered my face into that cupped resiliency, and felt the little fat yellow balls working their way behind my spectacles and yielding somehow against my lips. I stopped breathing, I waited, slowly I opened my mouth and arched my tongue, pushed forward my open mouth and rounded expectant tongue until my mouth was filled and against all the most sensitive membranes of tongue and oral cavity I felt the yellow fuzzy pressure of the flowering tree.

  The kiss, for it was a passionate kiss, really, reminded me of the grape-tasting game, though of course we never allowed ourselves to use hands in the grape-tasting game. But also in the midst of the kiss I thought I heard Fiona’s giggle, Catherine’s sigh. And Rosella may have seen me kissing the mimosa tree. If so, will she today or tomorrow follow my example? I think not. Kissing the rich yellow fluff of the mimosa tree may always lie just a step beyond Rosella’s abilities or inclinations. Yet kissing me, or her chances of kissing me, daily assume a still faint but ever-increasing tangibility. Perhaps I shall turn out to be Rosella’s mimosa tree as well as her white beast. Who knows?

  TOGETHER TWO HEAVENLY CREATURES SPREAD THEIR BLUE feathers for me on a rock wall overlooking sea and sky. I uncupped Fiona’s breasts and Catherine lifted her own white breasts from the madras halter. The buttons on Catherine’s white cotton pajama top were like eyes of pearl. Fiona caressed the wooden arm, I removed my spectacles, Hugh moaned. Between the two villas I strung the clothesline high. Remember?

  WITHOUT PAIN? PERHAPS NOT EXACTLY WITHOUT PAIN. After all, the artistic arbiter of all our lives—Love—is only too expert at depressing with one of her invisible fingers the lonely key, the sour note of pain, and most of us enjoy the occasional sound of pain, though it approaches agony. In fact, could any perfect marriage exist without hostile silences, without shadows, without sour notes? Obviously not. Throughout the many years of my sexually aesthetic union with Fiona, for instance, there were the momentary but nonetheless bitter whispered confrontations over use of the bed in the master bedroom, brief spurts of anger about a sudden loss of form on the violet tennis court. And there were also instances of deeper and more prolonged periods of threatened harmony, such as the nearly disastrous days of my love for a small young woman whose husband was one of the few men whose spirit and personality and entire body (his lips, his eyes, his fat chest, his beard) Fiona found intolerable. Revulsion in my wife was rare, this woman whose very quickness of breath could liberate the lover buried inside the flesh of almost any ordinary man in undershorts. But despite his strength and crippling desperation, the husband of the small young woman was clearly doomed. I pleaded for him. Fiona tried. We failed. There were tears, locked doors, a wedding ring slipped like a cigar band around a rolled-up handwritten note of accusation. We failed. Then luckily enough, Love herself changed the metallic scene, shifted to some sweeter pitch our melodies.

  I am a man of feeling. And in our more than eighteen years of dreams and actuality, Fiona and I knew hours of miserable silence, knew the shock of intimacy momentarily spurned, attended funerals, held hands in the whiteness of other weddings, tasted departure and the last liquid kiss, tried to console each other for each pair of friends who, weaker or less fortunate than ourselves, went down in flames. Once in anger Fiona snatched from my hand the brief silken panties she had only moments before slipped down and removed. Once I was graceless enough to lead Fiona nude from our dimly lit living room under the quiet eyes of a naked man whose extended fingers were pressed together as if in prayer.

  And more. The gradual discovery that most people detest a lover, no matter how modest. My unavoidable fist fight with an older wind-sucking man over the question of virginity in young girls. Fiona weeping through the wood with the sun running wild over her lovely buttocks. Hugh’s neck in his noose. All this and more we knew, all this we suffered.

  Much of it must be described as pain, or at least as degrees of pain. But when I saw Fiona’s long fingers reaching inside somebody else’s heavily starched white shirt, or when I heard her voice receding, or when I listened with interest to one of her analytical and yet excited accounts of a night of love away from me, or smelled cigar smoke on her belly, or (to shift perspective) on all those occasions when I found myself alone for the last time with a weeping woman, when I tore myself away from the small sheep’s golden curls and gave back keys, turned off certain bedroom lights forever, understood that this small voice or that would never again lie coiled in my golden ear and that never again would I know this girl’s saliva, that woman’s passionate secretions, when an unhappy negative magic was actually transforming a real mistress into a mental mistress —was all this at least my true pain, my real agony?

  Not at all. The nausea, the red eyes, the lips white in blind grief and silent hate, these may have been the externals of a pain that belonged to Hugh but never once to me. Hugh’s pain perhaps. Not mine. It is simply not in my character, my receptive spirit, to suffer sexual possessiveness, the shock of aesthetic greed, the bile that greases most matrimonial bonds, the rage and fear that shrivels your ordinary man at the first hint of the obvious multiplicity of love. Once Hugh told me that some small question of sex or the mere beginnings of jealousy often produced in him the sensation that he was drawing fire into his large intestine through a straw. But this pain, at least, is a pain I have never known. Not for me the red threads around the neck, the pillow in the open mouth, the ruptured days, the nights of shouting, the nights of trembling on the toilet. Jealousy, for me, does not exist, while anything that lies in the palm of love is good.

  Of course in his own way Hugh was also a sex-singer of sorts. But Hugh was tormented, tempestuous, unreasonable. He was capable of greed and shame and jealousy. When at last he allowed the true artistic nature of our design to seep into consciousness, for instance, he persecuted himself and begrudged me Catherine, tried to deny me Catherine at a time when I knew full well that, thanks to my unseen helping hand, he himself was finally about to lurch down his own peculiar road with Fio
na. And yet Hugh was also a sex-singer of sorts. But in Hugh’s dry mouth our lovely song became a shriek.

  “THERE SHE IS!”

  Hugh clutched my arm with that hand that served as two, whispering and pointing his flipper into a nearby field: “There she is. See her? Perfect, perfect!”

  His whisper was as dark and sparkling as the light in the black center of his narrow eyes. Hearing his curiously eager words and the three small black cameras knocking together on the ends of their straps, and seeing the white sun and sandy hills and the sweat that was already seeping from under the alpine pack Hugh carried high on his shoulders, of course I felt that his black sylvan whisper and all this hot rich ceramic desolation augured well for this our first photographic expedition together. And in sympathy if not complete understanding, my own whisper became as deep and eager as Hugh’s.

  “Perfect,” I said, “let’s hunt her down.”

  For a moment his fingers squeezed my arm in a fierce rippling peristaltic motion, and then his hand, that serpent’s head, drifted down to one of the cameras and rested. Together we stared at the field, I with one hand in a convenient pocket, Hugh with his curly black hair uncombed as usual and the long black sailor pants low on his hips. The mattock, wielded by our quarry in a nearby field, continued to rise and fall, to flash in that hot clear air, to ping on an occasional stone. The crumbling cottage, the crumbling stone lean-to, the haystack shrunken and propped in position with pieces of fossilized wood, the small well without visible rope or chain or bucket—at a glance the desolation of the farm was obvious, and already I knew that so much desolation aroused in Hugh at least a shade of my own crisp appreciation. It was all complete, down to the usual upright skeleton of a dog affixed to the tall stake driven through the center of the haystack. And shading my eyes with one dry hand and nudging Hugh, gesturing toward the white bones strung intact to the pole, I could not help smiling at this poignant evidence of their archaic ways, could not help thinking that the bones of the dead dog might serve some greater purpose than the bones of the child Fiona had discovered that distant day in the church.