I felt the tugging at my sleeve and saw the large docile rabbit in Catherine’s arms. The sable-colored head was on her shoulder, one of the long soft ears was brushing against her neck. I nodded and retreated silently without disturbing this brief portion of my old tapestry that would now undulate forever, I thought, with gentle yet indestructible life.
Had she known I was there? Had she in fact cradled in her arms the warm trusting rabbit for my benefit as well as her own? Might she have heard my breathing, seen my shadow, and busied herself with these simple mysteries for the sake of the large perspiring middle-aged man who was the only lover she had ever known? The plain shorts, the kneeling position, the silken animals — were these fresh omens, the unmistakable signs that Catherine had finally changed her mind and retracted her vow of speechlessness? Yes, I thought, unmistakable. And striding down the caramel-colored hillside path with its purple rocks and white streaks of dust, and far below, the vista of the slick dark village and empty sea, walking more quickly and hearing my own hot dusty footfalls, the heavy irregular sounds of my lonely but powerful descent, at that moment I knew at last that it was only a question of time and that my final visit to the sanctuary was drawing near. If Catherine had begun her metamorphosis and could play with the rabbits, she could also return to my villa among the funeral cypresses and share with me the still music of what I had already come to think of as our condition of sexless matrimony.
After that, who knows?
TWILIGHT WAS ALWAYS MY FAVORITE HOUR, AND SO IT remains. At twilight I stroll, I smoke, I hum to myself, I inspect my lemon trees which are at their peak of bearing, and inspect my arbor thick now with hanging tendrils of grapes no larger than small warts or the heads of pins, mere intimations of all the bunches of fat clear green grapes to come. I stroll among my trees and under the arbor and then say good night to Rosella and sink into the darkness, sleep alone. And my nights are never sleepless. My concentration is quiet and slow paced, after all, and filled with purpose. My large hand never shakes. The headless god? Perhaps. I eat my lemons as other men eat oranges. In my slow mouth the lemon pulled by Rosella from one of my twisted trees and thoughtfully sliced by me with my faded gold-plated pocketknife is sweet. I think, I chew, I suck my cheeks. My mouth hardly puckers. I sleep in peace.
Catherine will have to learn to do the same.
WHAT WAS HE DOING? SUNBATHING? OR WAS HE LYING in naked embrace with my equally naked wife at last? He was there, I knew, a prone white emaciated figure just visible through a low, dark green fringe of crab grass agitated by a sultry midday wind, a long low sheet of green flame burning at the edge of the bed of black rocks about twenty feet from where I stood in the shadows cast by the thick growth of pine. Hands in pockets, freshly bathed, wearing my yellow shirt in the hopes of meeting Fiona on this dark seaside path, a path she often took alone, here I stood in the darkness on a blanket of dead pine needles, stroking my chin and wondering if I had indeed discovered Fiona but worn the yellow shirt in vain.
With my usual presence of mind I had awakened from my dreamless midafternoon sleep, had rolled over, found Fiona missing, had assumed that I would meet her on the ocean path. And fresh from immersion and scrubbing in the clear water of my ancient stone bathing tank, scented, externalizing my mood in the special color of my bright shirt, slowly I had strolled past the second villa, had paused to listen, had drifted on, assuming that Hugh and Catherine and all their distracting daughters lay just beyond those tight shutters and thick white walls drugged in the heat. On both counts had I been wrong? Taking a soft step forward and catching another glimpse of his naked movements out there in the crab grass, it appeared that I had indeed been wrong. But those movements, of course, were what Fiona wanted, so that my trivial mistakes were righted, so to speak, by the richness of the vision and what I took to be the abrupt fulfillment of Fiona’s latest dream.
He was facing south, and the horizontal position and the density and frenzy of the low wind-whipped screen of nearly black grass made his long white body appear longer than it actually was. I watched, pulled at my chin, took a few more slow steps that placed me definitely beyond the safety of the trees and into his aura of bright colorless sun and the hot wind that clashed in the ears. Beneath my thonged and silver-studded sandals, the blanket of dead pine needles had given way to a strip of unclean gray sand. I could not hear the ocean but saw that it was thrashing with unusual and irregular fury up and down the length of our desolate private beach of black stones.
Just as I had decided to return to the dark and echoing shelter of the pine trees, leaving the two of them to enjoy in peace whatever they had found together in that exposed and inhospitable spot amidst wind and sun, speculating to myself about the kind of passion that had driven them to strip off their clothes in all this shattering light and noise, suddenly it occurred to me that I could see nothing of Fiona’s brown arms and passionate hands which, even from this distance, should have been visible clasping Hugh’s thin white naked back or stony buttocks. I hesitated, turned again into the wind that now seemed to beat the motionless sunlight into my face, my hair, the depths of my yellow shirt. I took another look and, filled with a kind of voiceless compassion as well as a curiosity I had not known before, knew that Fiona’s invisibility was no longer a problem and that I could not retreat. Because Hugh was alone, I was convinced of it, and I could not abandon him there to sunstroke or aching muscles, certainly could not allow the reason for his lonely presence there on the empty beach to go unexplored.
But what was he doing? Sunbathing? Embarking on some kind of freakish photographic experiment? Reading one of his faded erotic periodicals hidden from my sight in the crab grass? What?
And then I stopped, leaning into the wind with legs apart, hands in pockets, head lowered, stood there frowning and trying to resist the temptation to lean down and shake him by the shoulder. He lay at my sandaled feet like a corpse, a long fish-colored corpse, or like some fallen stone figure sandblasted, so to speak, by centuries of cruel weather. Yes, an emaciated and mutilated corpse or statue, except that he in his oblivion was moving, while I, despite the compassionate concentration of all my analytical powers and alerted senses, had become immobile, only the immobile witness to this most florid and pathetic expression of Hugh’s reticence.
Because he lay there on his stomach embracing not Fiona but only his clothes, the twisted black long-legged sailor pants, soiled jersey and white shorts. No magazine, no camera, no living partner. Only the white shorts beneath his head and the pants and shirt bunched and almost out of sight now beneath his chest, his hidden loins, his rigid outstretched white legs of the Christ.
The motion in the pitted gray-white buttocks was intensifying, the shoulders were beginning to heave, the black grass was beating against his long meager thighs, the tight black curls on the back of his head were blowing, springing loose, were becoming drenched with black light. Was he moaning? Did he believe himself to be lying at midnight among our percale sheets a half mile away at my villa instead of sprawled out here in the grass with a few uninteresting broken sea shells and some large black ants that would soon be scurrying in aimless circles on his heaving back? I could not be sure.