“Oh? You have a free moment when you can listen to me? You don’t have to run scribble something down?”
You drank Turkish coffee together and Javier paid and you got up and walked in step toward the Matoyannia and the high whitewashed stairs with painted wooden railings that lead directly from the street to the quarries above.
“But you don’t carry it off well, my love. When you pretend that your muse is sweating you, you don’t really seem at all burdened. Or at least, not burdened with inspiration.”
Badly shaven men wearing white shirts and old caps, donkeys loaded with baskets: grapes, figs, tomatoes, pumpkins. You walked past the Alefcandra, where the white houses fall with mossy skirts into the gulf, showing their piles of gnawed green wood covered with barnacles like the hull of a ship.
“What you fail to pretend well is that you aren’t pretending. It shows, Javier. Fake, fake. You’re not so goddamn tired. You’re just tired of me.”
Javier looked up toward the mountain. Then the church of Paraportiani, the sand castle of his boyhood, of the vacations Ofelia and Raúl had promised and never provided, a white sand castle with smooth corners caressed rather than built by two hands, left to crystallize in the sun, to be worn away by waves of hard white water.
“But maybe I’m wrong. Let’s look at it another way. You’ve come to be afraid you may satiate me. Can that be it? Admit it, Javier. That’s why you stay at your work so long. You…”
You pass into the Hagia Heleni. A golden belly, a cloister where you cannot breathe. Incense rises as high as the shining cross, the copper candelabra. Light enters from a very high, very small niche. The walls are covered with icons of dull gold. Javier is in front of you and your voice pursues him: “You don’t want me to think that you…”
Fifty saints, apostles, virgins, martyrs, patriarchs, priests, each framed by a golden circle, all surrounding the virgin of St. Cyril. In her arms she holds a child who lifts her mantle with one hand and in some secret, even forbidden way seems to dominate her.
“That you’re available…”
Javier hurries on down a white street past the statue of the heroine of 1821, Mado Mavrogennous. Your sandals, following, are noisy upon the cobblestones.
“But don’t be afraid of exhausting our love, Javier. If you trust yours, then don’t worry about the weakness of mine.”
You follow him down the little street, smudging your shoulders with white plaster. There are many small shrines. High chairs line each side. The whiteness blinds and tires Javier and he searches for some relief from it. Venders of cactus leaves and chestnuts. The millers who at twilight roll up the sails of their wind vanes. Children with cropped scabby heads. Old women, staring, with enormous balls of yarn. Sailors who sweat as they haul boats up the sand. Porters with their pants rolled to their knees and makeshift jute hoods.
“Do you think that we should give ourselves to each other only when everything is perfect? I understand, Javier, but you’re wrong.”
You sit again at the same café facing the bay. Night falls. You order ouzo again and they bring you the white bottle.
“Please, Javier, I do understand. But our love exists to be used. I don’t want only the rare perfect moments. Javier, Javier, don’t hurt me. Love is made to be used, to be spent. Only by using it can we make it last. Only when it is gone will it renew itself. Give yourself to me, Javier. Only by giving will you receive.”
White, bled, and exhausted, are the guardian lions of the island of Delos alive? Javier was afraid to go down to them and so were you. The point is that they are there and they aren’t there. They are there because their hind legs rest sunken forever in the stone pedestal, their forelegs are erect and secure, about to rush upon whoever would profane; they are there because of their long torsos and powerful ribs, their eroded heads, their open throats, their grieving eyes. But they are not there because your Island of Delos itself is not there, Elizabeth. It’s a dream, a mirage, and everything it contains is a dream. It exists only for you. And you want your men, myself, Franz, Javier, to let themselves be dragged into the mirage, to be infected by it and participate in it. When you and Javier stopped before the lions, you dared to say that they held a mystery, a miracle, a surprise, and Javier said nothing. And that afternoon in Mykonos, on your way back, you pursued him like a rejected and bitter fury, baiting him …
“You wanted to defeat me, Ligeia. You’ve always wanted to defeat me, to pull me away from my purposes and down me and drown me in the rites of your sensuality. And I had wanted you because I needed a bridge between my world and the world of what is. You didn’t give it to me. You gave me only an appetite that was always aroused, always waiting to be satisfied. You demanded that I attend to it, and to your dream built upon it, rather than to my own needs. Shut up now. Shut up, it’s enough, enough! You will never understand how you have destroyed me.”
You burst out laughing.
In the first chapter of his Pandora’s Box, Javier wrote: “A novel discloses what the world has within itself but has not yet discovered and may never discover.”
* * *
Δ “It looks like scenery from a movie by Pedro Armendáriz and María Félix,” Isabel laughed. She pressed down harder on the accelerator.
You turned and looked back at your husband, seated beside Franz. “And I know all your defects.”
“The advantage in losing your innocence is that you also lose your prejudices,” Javier replied.
“Hey, we’re going into Cholula now,” said Franz.
“Listen!” you cried, Dragoness. “Listen, I’m going to tell everything! Out with it, everything!” You looked at them, from one to the other, and found only patient, tolerant smiles. There was no need for Javier to lean forward, apparently to light your cigarette, and whisper, “I remember, too, Ligeia, but I don’t talk.”
Aloud, he went on: “As a child, I used to scribble on the walls of toilets the words I was afraid to speak to anyone’s face. Bitter insults … challenges. Then later I came to understand that writing books amounts to the same thing … insults and challenges converted into the names of characters. But the advantage was now my dream and my life were the same at least, and one could summon up the other at any time. How about you, Franz?”
“I’ve said it before. The small truth becomes the big lie. And it’s the same with lies.” Isabel turned down the radio to listen to him. “For example, it’s a small lie that when you are accused, you always stand, while your accuser kneels. But just the same, that’s a big truth. It’s what really happens.”
It’s so nice to have a man around the house, sang Eartha Kitt.
You laughed, Elizabeth, Ligeia, Dragoness. “I’ve wanted to tell you something, Javier. That we make love and speak and write the words of love only to add to the unreality of the world. To make life a little better lie.”
Javier nodded. “We say things that are alien to life,” he said quietly. “Fearing that the world may merely accept their strangeness and observe to us, somehow, that it has all been said before, that we’ve failed to surprise, nor have we made the world change in the least.”
“Zero hits, zero runs, one big error,” said Isabel. She laughed alone. “And which needs the new manager, the writer or the world?”
* * *
Δ I got out of my turismo limousine in the square in Cholula and said to you, Dragoness, though you didn’t hear, that the evil is not to be a whore but to be a whore who makes bad investments. The evil is not to be a thief, but to be a crummy pickpocket. The evil’s not to be a crook, but to be … But what the hell, what difference does it make in the end? All that matters is the harem and the sideshow, the carnival acts that can divert us for a little. The magician Simon, for example. Simon Magus, who sought the mother of everyone, the mother of the temple, the mother of everyone, the loving bitch who becomes, in Irenaeus’s translation, the Helen whose skin launched the ships of Troy and who emigrates from flesh to flesh until she finally reaches the cathouse: our little lost lamb, the only lamb who merits redemption. But Hippolytus lays it on the line: the whole earth is only earth and it makes small difference where you sow, so long as you sow. And when Simon the Magician got to Rome, he ordered his disciples to bury him alive so that he could rise again on the third day, a ploy he found most admirable. They obeyed. They dug his grave and put him into it and waited three days and then many more, but Simon Magus did not rise, then or later. No, adds malicious Hippolytus, “for he was not the Redeemer.” That may be granted, but it’s beside the point. The point is that orthodoxy is no stronger or weaker than the heresies that keep it bouncing. A dogma without its heresy is pale and feeble tea indeed, Dragoness. For when orthodoxy absorbs the central moonshine of a faith, all tenets and rites that lie toward the fringes — the midnight eye, the seer’s crystal ball, the fangs of the vampire — can live on only as heresy, only by going underground in the hope of some day being touched by the purple of bonding consecration. The beauty of a well-made gospel is that it has two faces and it survives precisely because we can play heads and tails with it. Pascal, that Dracula whose beat was from convent to convent, shocks us: “Earth is not the dwelling place of truth; truth wanders among men lost and unrecognized.” And the very Testament of your old folk proclaims: “Follow not the multitude.” What if fair-haired J.C., our era’s first hippie, had made his peace with Rome and the Pharisees and sat down to a few quiet hands of gin rummy with Iscariot, as if his ministry were a movie made by Buñuel? Or what if he had joined the laundry soap business of Pilate, Procter, and Gamble? What our gentried holy don’t dig about the Holy Ghostling nailed to His cross is that in reality He was history’s first psychopath, the first Son of Man really way out in grassy left, and that if He were making His pitch today we would find Him with His legs wrapped around a motorcycle, His eyes goggled and a wide belt circling His waist, or shaking His behind to the watusi in order to shake free of the sanctimonious. And those bits about reviving the dead, walking on water, and sailing up from neighborhood chimneys were merely shock treatments, for then as now, to shock was the only way to consecrate. Suppose J.C. had had the politician-sportsmen of the P.R.I. in his corner, or that master handler, L.B.J.; Jesus, he would still be stuck there in Israel, buried in his little province, and the New Testament would have to be written by Theodore White: