And some day you will tell me that the flies were coming in the window and buzzing, irritating you, but Franz left the window open while you said to him,
* * *
Δ “I walked out leaving him lying there on the bed half asleep, talking to himself, still telling that old story about the party. It’s my period. Do you mind?”
“On the contrary,” Franz said as you rested your head on his nude chest. “We don’t have to bother with rubbers.”
“Say something bad about him, Franz.”
Franz laughed and cupped your chin in his palm. You nestled against his shoulder.
“No, forgive me. Why bother with him at all? Tell me about you. A love story, Franz. Of real love. God, how he bored me. That same old tale. I’ve heard it a thousand times. Tell me a new story, Franz, a true one. One about youth and young love.”
You lived on the beach at Falaraki. On the beach itself, in a little house half buried in the sand, there where the shore and the sea form a half-moon of white water the perfect symmetry of which is broken by gentle breezes that undulate the sea all the way to the horizon in perpetually moving silver bands. Say it, go ahead and say it: the foaming Greek sea, the dark empire, as dangerous as it is immense. And Javier said that he could understand it: it was a summons that had to be answered, a road that had to be traveled, an imperative contrast to the hummocks of yellow stone, the low arid mountains that were like the loin of some beast, the hump of a camel driven across the earth and barred from the sea. You rented the cottage. Like all the others it was white, white outside and inside, and sunken into the sand with two narrow windows, completely white under the hot sun but twined about with hyacinth, hibiscus, and oleander. The first morning you woke there, you held hands
“… and did what we ought to have done on the beach itself in broad daylight…”
smelling the thick perfume of the poisonous summer flowers, and behind their smell that of the sea with the dawning sun resting on its stone beds, that of the freshness of the darkness just fading. Javier squeezed your hand and you looked out the window beyond the yellow flowers and saw the earth and the sea, darkness and dawn, coolness and heat, the disappearing orange moon and the glass sun, the unfurled nets, the red fish, the olive trees and the rootless wind, and you felt that you were at the center of everything and that the words you spoke would spread in ever widening circles through all being. Ah, yes. Youth and young love.
And here, right at the beginning, let’s stop, Elizabeth, and ask if you are sure you can avoid lying. You don’t know whether to be ashamed or to feel pity when Javier tells the story of the girl at the party, a story so complex and devious that it cannot be about love, yet in its own way a story of love too. He didn’t use to be like that. You used to go to bed with such simplicity. There was no other way. Nothing could have been added to that summer on the coast of Rhodes. You had arrived very simply, traveling by steamer on the money Javier had gotten from selling his parents’ home on Calzada del Niño Perdido, not enough for first class, but you didn’t want first class. With a single trunk, and at that, most of its drawers were empty. You arrived simply after the simple events: meeting in New York at City College and falling in love. You said goodbye to Gershon and promised to write … did you keep that promise, Elizabeth?… and you didn’t see Becky at all, for by that time you had stopped going to see her. And so you came to Rhodes on a slow ship, and once you were there, if you needed words, you left them for daylight or the ocean or books. Words were not for night when you lay together very simply in the plain white room with the white beams and the white chimney. And you could think with great clarity then, clearly and subtly because wrapped in each other’s arms in that fishermen’s bed you believed that together you were holding, forming, the parts of a very brief past. Today you find yourselves carrying the empty yet heavy shell of many years together, yet these years seem briefer than that little past you were discovering and creating together then, a past that taught you how simple love can be, yet how difficult. Like certain poems in which the words are not veiled and have meaning in themselves, yet at the same time are bridges to a hidden and deeper meaning, so your nights then were a story that told a second story, silent and concealed, in the background, and everything, your life in the cabin on the beach, like the writing Javier was beginning to do — and his writing was why you had come there — had two realities. There is a moment, and for you and Javier it came then perhaps, in the warm white room scented with hyacinth and ocean salt and old wine soaked into wood, a moment when we can act for ourselves and in concert with others because what we are doing is both meaningless and meaningful, not so much significant in itself as in its revelation to us of the second reality that is sustained and concealed by what we do. Then we go back to fundamentals, and then only can we know that, like art, life is a struggle with what appears to be real, the stubborn world that makes demands upon us and restrains and represses us, a struggle to deform, reform, affirm, and negate reality until it becomes a truer reality, what we want and need. You and Javier came to Rhodes worn out by your struggle with the world, that was all. Perhaps you realized as you lay in his arms caressing his skin that never again would you possess the time and the clarity, the solitude and the closeness, to recover what each of you had lost in childhood in the great obligatory fusion of life lived with your families. And now you were alone together, yet joined. And it was that and not the mere sex, the commonplace of the century, not the physical communion alone, although that was full and complete, it was that which the two of you experienced in the heat and coolness of skin touching skin, hands interlaced, kisses endlessly prolonged and repeated. Alone and together, Elizabeth and Javier, in the night you made love to cease to be what you had been as children in your homes, what you had been hidden in the closet with your brother while your mother Becky looked for you to take you to dinner with the Mendelssohns, what Javier had been reading in the rainy patio under a naked light bulb buzzing with mosquitoes while Ofelia his mother spied upon him from the cracked bedroom door; what you had been mounted on your father’s shoulders to ride along Manhattan’s summer-blue streets to the Hudson; what he had been holding Raúl’s hand and walking a Mexico City that on Sunday was thronged with organ-grinders and bored servant women. To cease to be what you had been, to become what you were. And you would never be sure, although those nights you had lived that certainty, whether like you Javier was denying the appearances of love that make it a semblant echo of the relationships we have with everyone. You told yourself that he was, for he never kissed you in public, never showed you off to others, never moved close to you simply to be close to you, never took advantage of an idle moment to hold you in his arms and make love. Yet neither had he deformed your relationship by insisting, either in words or in his attitude, that it should have more meaning or value than it had sufficiently in itself. That was why your kisses could cover his body with full freedom and you could close yourself off from the persistent sounds of the sea and the night with its crickets and mandolins and give yourself completely, taking completely. The depth of your relationship was between only the two of you and meant nothing that could have meant anything to anyone else, nothing that could explain the world or speak even one word. Nevertheless only there, hidden between Javier’s arms, Javier hidden in the darkness of your open flesh, did the world become orderly and serene. For you were neither of you asking for anything. You were both simply grateful. Grateful for the heavy August heat, almost tangible, for the thick scent of hyacinth, for the heavy bed that would never lose the smell of the lambskins the fishermen who usually occupied the cabin slept beneath, for the tactile closeness of the tile floor that retained the warmth of afternoon, for the weight of your two bodies above all; for without this diffuse denseness of feeling and smell and hearing the other, the cool and sufficient isolation of each in the very union of love, could not have happened. Thus as you came together you remained apart, maintained that essential distance that permits us to see and respect each other, the distance which is maintained by being broken in the fusion of sex, yet is not broken. Like wealth, this had value only if it was spent. The way to preserve it was to use it. And so you needed to remain yourself, he himself, not to plunge into the maze of entire oneness, both then and during the winter when the townspeople brought fish and resinous wine and goat’s cheese and olives and the wind sounded ragged and gray and now and then a mountain of water would fall upon the pebbled beach and you and Javier would hide in the cabin and listen to the wind on the tiles of the roof and with gaiety and excitement pretend a fear that would draw you closer, give yourself to hours of long, unforeseen, always surprising caresses and kisses, each embrace longer, everything unnecessary suspended, everything alien to the hours of your love removed as you lay together in front of the fire on the lambskins on the damp tiles looking up from time to time at the old beams beneath the roof that challenged and withstood the storm. And during the day Javier lost himself in thought, walking the wet beach in his turtleneck sweater and corduroy trousers, and then sat to write at the pine table that faced the sea, and you went out so as not to distract him. Barefoot, with your trench coat soaked, you would walk beside the sea and discover that in Greece the sea is not another face of the earth because there is no separation here between earth and sea, one does not go into the sea, there is no line of demarcation to pass, no frontier, no rupture. The quiet green sea remembers summer and rejects no one. It seems another, softer, sweeter land across which one can walk while the liquid earth rises and envelops but does not drown. A sea so calm. A sea that is faithful, always present, always real. A sea that wets your face with its spray and makes your tanned skin and your blond hair lustrous as you walk possessed by the sea and by the man who has brought you here, who has come here to write, to free himself from destructive denials, elegant demands. Who sits at his plain table writing and therefore also struggling with reality in order to deform it, reform it, assert it, make it clear, make it speak. And you ran to him when he finished his morning’s work and appeared in the door of the cabin; ran to him while his forehead was still feverish from concentration, and then behind you, as you lay beneath him on the lambskins joining him in an act that was sufficient in itself, the sea could be heard and could be named with the words that remained always outside and behind, the words that could be spoken only to the extent that your love and pleasure could not be spoken. And the world also had a name and belonged to both of you because you possessed it by remaining alien to it, dominating it with solitude in which you could see only each other, together and apart in a dark arc that pulsated from the sexual hair to the seeking lips. You by your life gave life to the earth, and away from you the men who spoke the names of things could utter the names of the sea, the words by which they have created and discovered the sea and the islands, the words that belong to all languages of all centuries: