The Blood Oranges: A Novel Page 6

  And nodding toward the field that looked like fired putty: “The haystack would make a pretty good picture. Don’t you think?”

  He waited. “Hold on now,” he whispered. “When she’s warmed up a little, I’ll wave.”

  Already I was beginning to see the afternoon through the eye of one of Hugh’s cameras. Sitting on a naturally sculpted boulder in the bend of our dirt road, smoking and clasping my knee, and with a certain mild intensity watching Catherine’s one-armed husband cross the field and in long cheerful strides approach the stooping figure, suddenly I began to smile at that total incongruity which must lie, I thought, at the center of what Hugh had several times referred to as his field trips into the old world of sex. At best a photograph could result in small satisfaction, I thought. Yet now even this small satisfaction was beginning to take shape in my mind, and for Hugh’s sake I welcomed it, breathed deeply of the scent of pepper on the hot air, made fish lips for myself and through them expelled a few thoughtful puffs of smoke, considered the artfulness my one-armed friend might yet display.

  Certainly Hugh was artful even now. Watching them from my place of comfort on the large hot boulder, I could see that he was talking, though he could no more speak croak peonie than I could, was demonstrating his cameras and displaying the contents of his alpine sack, which by now he had unslung from the enormous bony construction of his shoulders. Already the mattock lay abandoned in the deep brown furrow, already the tall man and short girl were standing face to face, obviously Hugh was trying to use his pinned-up flipper to fence his way through the darkness and sullenness of her suspicion. In the distance and in the shade of my hand they faced each other, and already I knew that today the lone girl would farm no more.

  Hugh’s head was nodding. Once he squatted and reached his single all-purpose hand into the furrow and then extended that dark hand palm up to the girl. What lay cupped in the palm of his unquenchable hand? Was he admiring the soil? Was he admiring some scrap of root, some fibrous hooflike bulb that the girl had been attempting to cultivate with patience and the dull hand-crafted mattock? To myself I laughed at Hugh’s ingenuity, energy, determination to win the lone figure in the field for the probing unblushing gaze of his high-powered cameras.

  I changed hands, squinted at Hugh’s distant, persuasive, perhaps even poetic use of sign language. The heat was intense, I realized, and yet my skin was dry.

  And then all the glazed ceramic substance of that colorful and nearly lifeless panorama trembled, shivered, cracked and splintered into new and suddenly moving fragments of light, color, shards of earth, and side by side Hugh and his new photographic subject turned, began to walk together in the direction of the crumbling barn. Hugh’s one long powerful arm was in the air and waving.

  We stood in the earthen darkness of that barn, the three of us, and I saw immediately that two urine-colored sheep were trembling together in one heavily cobwebbed corner.

  “My latest model is going to pose. These sullen types always end up compliant.”

  “We’re in luck,” I said. “She looks beautifully indifferent. Anything I can do to help?”

  Unleashing one of his small black cameras, Hugh frowned at the setting of its highly polished and unmerciful lens.

  “In a minute. Right now just smile at her. Make her feel at ease.”

  I had only to glance at the girl to see that she was in fact quite unafraid of Hugh, of me, of even the cold and completely foreign complexity of the cameras hanging in their black cases around Hugh’s neck. At once I saw that she was young, untutored, uninterested in anything except the clumsy mattock and challenge of the ceramic field. The dull rubber boots cut off at her bare knees, the dry knees that appeared to have been scoured with sand, the colorless apron tied around a long burlap skirt sewn no doubt by an old woman, and the leather coat—at once I saw that so many unappealing articles of dress might well conceal a body that would prove to be in absolute contrast to the clothes themselves. But would this girl actually pose for Hugh without her rubber boots and burlap skirt and stocky leather coat? I was unconvinced. Her mouth was small, her eyebrows were gently drawn. And yet her face was the color of green olives and made me suspect that the composition of her blood might have been determined at least in part by one of the barbaric strains. Perhaps she was strong. Perhaps her indifference was not at all the same as compliance. Perhaps the old woman who had sewn the skirt had also taught her some outlandish and hence all the more crippling version of a moral code—though the girl’s small eyes were dark, and I had faith in Hugh.

  I smiled at Hugh’s latest model. She did not smile back. But her eyes remained on mine and I began to wonder if she was aware of my large and closely shaven face, my slice of pure gold hair. And the barn was filled with a warm aura of suspension. There were the shadows, the dust, the floor that was a soft black pebbled carpet of sheep droppings, the smells and light that made me think of the inside of a dying rose. Hugh was squatting while the girl waited and the sheep peered over their shoulders at the three of us.

  “Peasant Nudes,” Hugh whispered, and simultaneously the girl and I glanced down at his camera which was now clicking. “That’s what I’m going to call my collection. Peasant Nudes.”

  He was taking photographs, for some time now had been taking photographs. Oddly squatting with one knee sharply bent and one long leg stretched out in a nearly horizontal position, eyes and nose buried inside the back of his camera, in this way he was crouching, inching to and fro at the girl’s feet, aiming up at us the enormous wide-open lens of that clicking camera.

  “That’s it. That’s perfect. Now let’s just shove her over against the beam.”

  Coming between us, pushing and inching with his dark blue contorted legs, suddenly rising to both knees so that the girl drew back, and clicking the shutter release and rewind lever and hissing eagerly between his lips which had become little more than a tight shadow, slowly Hugh approached us on his knees and then, with little more than his own intensity and the aim of the camera, moved her, repositioned the small dark head against the dark worm-eaten flank of an upright beam.

  “Easy. Easy. That’s perfect. See how she’s holding her head jammed against that old beam? Perfect. Most of the faces of these peasant nudes are just fat and happy. They’re all mothers, with or without children. But this one,” inching his knees across the carpet of sheep droppings, doing his one-handed sleight-of-hand tricks with two cameras and what I supposed was a light meter, “this face is skintight with the beauty of illiteracy. That’s what will show up in the pictures. Wait and see. The sullen face of an illiterate virgin.”

  I waited, then heard my own low whisper: “I’ve been thinking the same thing. That she’s a virgin.”

  “She’s got a few little brown hairs on her chin. She couldn’t be better.”

  Yet now I was watching not the girl but Hugh. And Hugh remained on his knees, continued to walk about on his knees. His shoulders were struggling against the sudden unreasonable dictates of his dream, were working against impossible odds to maintain his balance. He was sweating. His thin cotton shirt had come free at the waist. But his arms, or rather that lurid combination of arm and partial arm, most held my attention. And in passing I noticed that the girl’s small dark expressionless eyes were fixed, like mine, on the excited and suddenly gesticulating remnant of his ruined arm.

  “Make her smile! Come on, do something. Make her smile. Quick.”

  While I was still contemplating the odd magic that Hugh somehow extracted from his injured arm, Hugh himself unaccountably changed position, bolted upright from his knees to his feet and thrust the camera into the girl’s face so that for one instant the poor lips parted in what might have been a silent laugh. I caught a glimpse of her tongue and the small overlapping front teeth, and heard the click of the camera, felt Hugh wheeling in my direction. He let go of the camera, expelled his breath in a single relieved heave of his expanded chest, ducked his head and, with the flat lower side of his twitch
ing stump, wiped the perspiration from his forehead and thin gray face.

  “Time to change tactics,” he said, and with one brutal thrust of his hand ripped a small flesh-colored wineskin from the alpine pack, held the wineskin at an angle of shocking self-confidence before his upturned face and shot a steady thin dark jet into his waiting mouth.

  “Want some, boy? It’s hot work.”

  I declined and hoisted myself to a seat on the ancient cart and crossed my knees, braced myself with both arms and hands. Again Hugh thrust up the bag and squeezed it, prolonged his exhibitionistic drinking as if he were an indelicate disheveled god in the act of forcing some invisible monster to send down its urine.

  “Now, boy. To business.”

  And suddenly the wineskin lay in the rancid hay, the third camera was in his claw, he was close to the girl. Once again his stone cheeks and little pointed beard were wet with the perspiration of his art photographer’s single-minded desire. He did not move. Yet his stump, though held tightly to the side of his body, was impatient to wag, to flex, to rise into action, and his eyes were sly but also vacant. He seemed to be listening to the girl’s silent life rather than staring at the visible shape of it. The girl continued to stare up at Hugh. The thin sheep had managed to turn and now were facing us and once more were rubbing together their crusted woolly coats. The girl was alert.

  Then Hugh sprang back a step, let go of the camera, smiled with absurdly pretended helplessness, with his hand made sweeping motions from the girl’s head against the beam to her booted feet on the dung. Did she understand, he seemed to be asking, could she share his amusement at his own discovery of what was wrong? Slowly, with a mild tightening of the lips, she glanced down the length of her body. She saw nothing wrong.

  So he held up the camera, turned it slowly in front of her face, in front of her narrow eyes, displaying and silently extolling its value, its delicacy, its enormous power, suggesting for all I knew that this one small instrument was more important than a simple illiterate young woman or even an entire farm. And then once again he dropped the camera. But now, suddenly, he was stern, insistent, and with one terrible extended finger he pointed at her pathetic boots, her clumsy coat, and slowly moved both hand and finger back and forth, at the same time using tongue and teeth to produce a cadenced clicking sound of austere disapproval and even, perhaps, of anger.

  “No boots, no coat,” he said, rolling from side to side the enormous hand and rigid forefinger. “No boots, no coat.”

  Again he pointed, again he sucked tongue to teeth, filling the barn with that loud unmistakable sound of exaggerated negation, and then with amusing yet somehow admirable restraint he actually pantomimed the removal of his own slick boots and the removal of an imaginary cumbersome sheepskin coat. She watched. She listened.

  And then he transposed himself from the girl to the alpine pack and knelt and thrust his hand inside the pack. The girl, without a glance at Hugh, slowly unfastened her scarred leather coat and removed it, leaned against the and slowly pulled off first one worn-out rubber boot and then the other. Hugh’s back was turned. But I was watching, waiting, and was close enough to take from her the discarded coat, close enough to wait until she dropped the boots and then to indicate with gentle fingers the familiar apron and the billowing and slackening skirt which, after only a brief moment of further incomprehension, she also took off and gave me.

  Perhaps I should have known, as Hugh had known, that without the coat and skirt and boots she would be nude. Should have known, perhaps, and yet had not, so that standing now with the apron, coat and skirt still warm in my arms, I was both pleased and surprised at her apparent indifference to her own nakedness, and was amused to think that for this naked girl the world of underclothing was a world unknown.

  Did I hear the camera? Had Hugh returned again to his work? Perhaps, perhaps. But I too could become absorbed in the act of assessment, appreciation, and now it seemed to me that the mild sag in the breasts of this girl might in her case be an aesthetic attribute. Through my polished gold-rimmed spectacles I stared at the nude girl, and it occurred to me that I was at last acquiring a more personal understanding of Hugh’s photographic collection. I realized that never before had I seen a young female body quite so aesthetically self-defeating as this one. I stared and smiled. She glanced at me. She scratched her right flank.

  Yes, self-defeating, as perhaps are the bodies of most girls whose origins lie in historical darkness beyond the mountains. The breasts, for instance, had never given suck and yet already they sagged. And the thickness of the fat at the waist seemed to pull against the hardness of the belly, the muscles in the calves detracted from the solid but symmetrical thighs, the narrow but slumping shoulders somehow maimed the aesthetic reality of the full and rounded buttocks. Self-defeating, I thought, but harmonious too.

  Unaccountably she took hold of one of her breasts, appeared to squeeze it, then dropped her hand. And with this gesture I found that I was witness not only to the girl’s patient nudity but also to that leave-taking scene which perhaps only an hour before Hugh had disdained to photograph. In the acrid and rose-tinted darkness, and transparently superimposed on the olive and white reality of the undressed girl, clearly I saw Hugh’s wife and mine standing within arm’s length of each other beneath the clothesline on Hugh’s side of the funeral cypresses and waving, watching us depart, and saw the dog in mid-air, the two fat smaller children holding hands but also waving at their lanky father, saw Meredith with her back to us and no doubt scowling at Catherine’s white cotton pajamas on the clothesline, and beyond it all the rocks and bright sun and silhouetted wreckage of the small coastal fort. How they complemented each other, this girl we had conducted into a near-empty barn and this prior vision, our suddenly present bird song of domesticity embedded in the flank of collapsing time. Deliberately I shut my eyes, as if the better to taste some offered drink, and thought of the wine I planned to share with Catherine when the night was again ours.

  “Come on, Cyril, give her the rake. Let’s try the rake. And then you can give her the pants.”

  At the sound of his choking voice the tableau of domestic multiplicity dissolved in an instant. And with the girl breathing methodically within arm’s length of my softly sweatered chest and now and again shifting the position of her feet or glancing into the darkness overhead, it was no longer possible to separate the photographs and the waiting girl. While smelling the girl I could not help looking at Hugh and saw him sprawled on his back with head and shoulders propped against the alpine pack and the camera once more substituting its cyclopian lens for his eyes and nose. Above the sound of Hugh’s voice and the girl’s breathing I heard the clearly and inexorably rapid sounds of the camera and knew that I had been hearing it all this time.

  “Look,”I whispered, knowing that prone on the dung he could not possibly have seen what I had just seen, “look there. She’s grazed a cobweb. My god, her breasts tangled in a broken cobweb. Can you see it?”

  And writhing, jerking the camera to and from his face, lying on his back and with his sharp heels and single elbow propelling himself about in crablike motions for the sake of angle, light, depth, expression: “Magnificent… It’ll all show up in the enlargements… I’ve spent more than a year on my collection, my catalogue of natural art photographs, my peasant nudes… My unmarried girls of barren countries… Each one’s better than the last… I’ve got them sitting in straw, standing in the black and empty doorways of ruined barns … And all nude or nearly nude … My peasant specimens… Each one gets a cheap little gift…”

  He laughed, gave me a long look over the swiftly lowered camera, and then I stood up to my knees in the white pulpy straw in order to reach down the wooden rake, dragged a bottomless iron bucket from under the straw, and hauled from beneath the oxcart a great leather skein of primitive mildewed harness. And thanks to my own patient industry and quickening interest, and also to Hugh’s sweating inventiveness, we managed that day to photograph our sm
allish naked girl holding the rake, holding the bucket, managed to photograph her with the entire length and weight of the crusty black leather harness draped over one narrow shoulder so that, front and back, it hung down stiffly as far as the bare feet.

  “The pants,” he whispered. “Give her the pants.”

  The girl watched my every move, the small red eyes of the sheep were filled with ruby-colored supplication. And of course I found the cotton underpants lying in a heap beside the alpine pack. I picked them up, turned to the girl, and between thumb and first finger of both hands held out the underpants in a cheerful and magnanimous display. Her eyes tightened, the camera clicked.

  But what was wrong?

  Silence. The clicking had stopped, the agonized camera was silent. And then Hugh moaned.

  “What’s wrong?”I whispered. “For God’s sake, what’s the matter?”

  At a glance it became apparent to me that Hugh lay there in the grip of something serious. He was not moaning in the throes of a pseudosexual climax resulting, say, from the many photographs he had taken of a girl who was, after all, young, naked and a stranger to us both. The hunching shoulders, the forgotten camera, the single hand driven against the center of his bony chest, the apparent sapping of that little color usually evident in the long thin granite face, the fact that he was frowning and that his usually crafty eyes were suddenly wide open and staring at what I was sure was nothing—all this told me that Catherine’s husband was sprawled motionless before me not in the aura of trivial physiological reaction, but in pain. He appeared to be thinking about some deeply unpleasant subject, the hand was trying to dig its way inside his chest.