You could not see the road. The sun dropped lower and was concealed by the clouds that had drifted west from Asia Minor. You waited. Javier would simply have to look for you and find you. The people of the valley would tell him how to climb up to you. You sat on a rock and rubbed your arms where they had been scratched. With tinkling bells the black goats gathered around and looked at you. You thought how it would be to stay here forever, alone, cut off from the world forever, companioned by goats on the dusty summit of a mountain that had lost all contact with the land below, if indeed there had ever been any contact in the first place. You opened your eyes on solitude, awaking from a dream in which other beings existed, your parents and your brother, old schoolmates, old boyfriends, your husband, acquaintances, people known and unknown, living phantoms very busily delivering milk or driving taxis or selling razors or writing books or publishing newspapers or signing documents that declared war or peace … You sighed with a mixture of fear and relief. And there you were, you and the black goats, alone, staring at each other, high in the air on a coin of dust and stone, solitary, sufficient, eternal. Abruptly you jerked to your feet and ran among the jumping goats toward the distant promontory of the Turkish coast. Swift clouds cut the light, made it blaze, sifted it fine, and you ran down through the brush and thistles, down, holding your terror in your throat, unable to find a sound or a word that could express it, down with your eyes fixed on the distant shore, your eyes fixed because otherwise the drumming silence, the radiant darkness, the still wind would have devoured you, down in a descent without a path toward the Aegean.
Asphalt was beneath your feet again. You stopped running and walked slowly, kicking at little pebbles, your arms hugging your chest. The road was narrow, winding. Much sooner than you expected, the roadside refreshment stand appeared and there was Javier seated beneath the naked arbor drinking wine. He saw you on the road and came to meet you. You watched him run toward you: his black hair, his corduroy pants, his turtle-neck sweater. You embraced him. He told you that the police in the valley had merely laughed when you did not appear. It happened often that someone was delayed, but it had never yet happened that anyone had been lost very long in the Valley of the Butterflies. You would show up by and by, frightened perhaps but not the worst for it. You hugged Javier and kissed his neck. Let’s go straight back to Falaraki, you said. You were sleepy and tired, you wanted to lie down.
“What’s happened to Rudy?”
“The German?”
“Yes.” You rubbed cream on the sunburned points of your cheekbones.
Javier stared at the pebbled shore of Rhodes, thronged with vacationers this year of Munich and the Anschluss.
“Rudy is dead,” said Javier. “His wife drowned him while they were swimming. The waiter told me this morning. I thought you knew.”
* * *
Δ Franz finished his beer in a gulp. He paid and the four of you left the restaurant without saying goodbye to the owner.
“Let’s go straight on to Cholula,” you suggested. “There’s no reason to stop in Cuautla.”
“I’m tired of driving,” said Franz.
“Let me take over,” Isabel cried. Franz got in back beside Javier, and Isabel sat behind the wheel.
Isabel takes over, all right. She starts the car and drives off and with one movement of her slender arm reaches toward the radio and turns it on and finds the station that she knows and prefers. Their voices pound out at you, the minstrels, bards, heralds of the new age, the androgynous pages of the monarchic republic, of the democratic elite, who pass up and down from the docks in Liverpool with the poise of the courtier who plays the lute in Giorgione’s country concert. Their hair worn long in the style of Venetians painted by Giovanni Bellini, their lips fixed in the ironic smile of Mantegna’s most amusing St. George, a knight whose graceful armor seems fitter for the conquest of the ladies who await him in the golden palace in the Paduan background than for battle with the green stage-prop dragon that lies at his feet less pagan and less diabolic than the saint himself, now an unarmed saint whose broken lance can serve only to spear the fruit, limes, pears, cherries, pomegranates, that cluster around the frame. As distant as Caesars, as close as Satans, as innocent as angels, they sing
I love you because you tell me things I want to know
and I go on reading my newspaper as I am driven along the superhighway from Mexico City to Puebla. It is an odd sort of newspaper, Dragoness, one I don’t entirely trust, not even when the byline lists someone so respectable as Jacob von Königshofen. His dispatch informs me that in this year of 1349 the worst plague in memory is raging; death runs from one end of the world to the other on both sides of the Mediterranean and is even more terrible for the Moors than for the Christians. In some regions the entire populace is dead, there are no survivors. Full-laden ships have been found drifting at sea with dead crews. Half of Marseilles has perished, the bishop and all his priests, while the toll in other cities and kingdoms defies description. The Pope, in Avignon, has adjourned his Court, has forbidden strangers to come near him, has ordered that a fire be kept blazing before him night and day. Nor can the sages and physicians say more than it is God’s good will, and that it will not cease until it runs its course.
You sit beside St. Isabel, Dragoness, with your eyes closed while the Volkswagen passes Cuautla, constantly accelerating
There’s a place where I can go
swerving around slower cars without blowing the horn, hitting eighty kilometers an hour, then ninety, then a hundred and ten while chickens leap out of the way with flying feathers and bloody-eyed dogs howl and the car races for a moment along the rough shoulder and raises a cloud of dust and shakes the walls of straw-roofed adobe huts and a boy shouts from behind a fence of cactus and Isabel steers with one hand and with the other adjusts the radio, turning the volume up
In my mind there’s no sorrow,
Don’t you know that it’s so?
the voices of the young men who like the painted figures of Luca Signorelli garb themselves with testicular elegance and, releasing the constructive aspects of their spirits of destruction, create around them a world as vast, rich, confused, free, ordered as a canvas by Uccello, as piously demonic as one by the Bosch who pays the price of admission to the rites of Satan. And you have read, Dragoness, and you, Isabel, know intuitively, that no one has clearer visions of God than those of the Devil. That is precisely why he stands so aloof from God; he is God’s other face and like Him is a succession of contraries, a permanent fusion of antitheses:
What am I supposed to do?
Give back your ring to me
And I will set you free:
Go with him
and so they sing, setting us free from all the false and murderous dualisms upon which has been built the civilization of the judges, the priests, the philosophers, the artists and hangmen and merchants, and Plato dies drowning, surrendering, entangled in their long hair, mesmerized by their drowning voices, trampled upon by the pound of their rhythm as the Beatles, liberated, leap high to their heaven and slowly float down again, like Antheus, to the new earth where there are neither men nor women, good nor evil, body nor spirit, substance nor extension, essence nor accident; where there is only the dance and the rite, the fusion and the flowering mask of Arcimboldi which grows continually around everything and is the being and the nothingness of everything, its own moment seen from a helicopter that comprises the totality, the unity, in which die the old schizophrenias of the Greco-Christian-Judaeo-Protestant-Marxist-industrial dualism