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 this. 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?