I spoke to her softly, as I do once each week: “Come on, Catherine, you know you still want me to woo you.” And then my voice filled with the honeyed sweetness of the golden lion or white porcelain bulclass="underline" “Stop being a child, Catherine. Take the flowers.”
To her, I knew, my admonitions were like chocolate stars, chocolate half-moons, dark balls of honey. I knew she was listening, waiting, watching me behind those closed eyelids, in her mind was clutching at the gentle sounds of my voice and once again was slipping, rolling over the edge and falling among the shadows of her past life and mine.
The matrons were gone, my usual half-hour of peace with Catherine was mine once more, though nearby one of the small swarthy men in uniform was sitting on a low urn containing the ashes of a Roman lover. On the air I smelled a mixture of citrus leaves and the transparent secretions of pale and disintegrating roses. I had only to begin swinging my leg over the balcony wall to arouse the sentry to angry shouts of croak peonie. But I had discovered on previous visits that I could talk to Catherine, smoke, laugh, even sit on the wall, as long as I, the godlike foreigner suspected of being connected with her trouble and who in small dark smoldering eyes was too tall, too strong, too blond, too handsome, much too elegant and good natured, made no effort to cross the wall perhaps to do the large sick woman some further harm. But I could sit on the wall and did so, lit one of my precious puffy cigarettes that smelled of nitrates, burning paper, animal stains, sex. In my mouth and nose I bottled up that smoke, that tumultuous pungent smoke of the cigarette of my tragedy and good humor. And thanks to burning lips, burning eyes, thick golden cough, yesterday I was best able to study Catherine feigning sleep in the same hot woolly blanket that Fiona used to spread across our bed on cold nights in the villa.
I started to blow smoke rings. Tiny and egg-shaped, large and ragged, out they came from the casual oval of my pursed lips and then smashing one into the other, piling rapidly one on top of the next, soon they turned into silver cornucopias, silver wreaths, large ghostly horns of invisible rams. For I was an artist at blowing smoke rings, from an early age had delighted the little girls I knew with my swans, my elephants, my beach balls all blown in smoke. And between puffs: “Why don’t you open your eyes, Catherine? I know you want to watch your old smoke ring artist hard at work.”
But of course she was already watching me, I knew, behind those closed eyelids of hers, was watching every move I made and every thick gray acrid creation that sprang or floated from my large and sympathetic lips. And all this time, as I drew one foot up and rested it on the wall and crooked my right arm around the upraised knee on top of that low wall in the warm sun, all this while I was studying Catherine as she feigned sleep, through the luxury of my loosely packed and hotly burning cigarette was nodding and squinting attractively, scrutinizing each feature for the mere pleasure of the sight, but also hoping with my eyes alone to appeal to her as I had once appealed to her with all my unlimited gentleness, on those dark licorice-smelling nights in their villa or ours.
Sinuous smoke, sun on the back of my hand, smile reaching out for the pain that lay behind the skin of her face, the sound of my voice already gone, frames of golden eyeglasses warm on the bridge of my nose and behind the ears, and smiling in silence, leaning forward, waiting, receiving no answer. Then my shoe scraped, my eyes became heavier and larger with concentration and good humor, became even darker brown in color: “Listen, Catherine. There’s comforting silence, there’s childish silence. Yours is childish. I don’t even need to say it, do I?”
I saw what I had seen for weeks, the shape and substance of the woman both familiar and unfamiliar, both young and old, and I kept staring at her with admiration, remoteness, aching candor. Only her head was visible, the large head always seen in comparison with the head remembered on the pillow, gripped between my hands, rippling in Fiona’s little mirror, clouding over suddenly with her uncertain laugh. The body itself was hidden. Yet no blanket was thick enough, rough enough, dense enough, or so wildly colored or so grotesquely patterned or so filled with other associations (the sensations of Fiona, say, on a cold night) as to prevent that large female torso and the arms, legs, hips from taking solid and in a way maximum shape under my first glance.
I knew what lay beneath the blanket. I knew quite perfectly the hips and calves and thighs somewhat fallen and still minutely falling, spreading from classical lines, knew well indeed the navel oddly sculpted, as if her belly had been sealed with a final flare of some hot iron. I had seen and always would see beneath old blankets or behind black funeral cypresses the heavy knees and feet and hands, the placid buttocks, all the immensity of the plain flesh that still suggested classical lines. The large but ordinary body, then, of someone who had borne children and overcome self-consciousness, body of someone who had never been aware of the statuesque design the ancient artist had in mind for it, a body so plain and big, so close and yet so far from the target of beauty that to me it was the richest beauty of all. I knew Catherine’s body, saw it, loved it for its totally unconscious grandeur.
She moved, something trembled (or so I thought) beneath the ugly folds of Fiona’s blanket. And once again, smiling, reaching out to her with silent smoke, all this awareness came back to me as it does each week. My finger tips were burning but my mind was filled only with this vision of the body of my Catherine lying before me in pretended sleep.
It was a knee that moved. And had it not been for the squat man seated upright on the urn, I would have thrust out my hand, placed it firmly on the sloping forehead of Catherine’s knee and given her great uplifted knee a tender shake. It would have pleased me to touch the blanket just as it had pleased me when, in the stillness of absolute sexual purpose, I first swung her big plain body into the arc of my life.
Another amusing creation out of poisonous smoke, another silent sequence of meditation, and then I lifted my chin, stretched heavily, and nipped the undulating smoke ring with the very lips that had blown it. And softly laughing, in my own ears hearing the appealing sounds I knew she wanted to hear from deep in my diaphragm, hearing my own sympathetic laughter even while it was yet riding the tide of smoke in the dark resonant hollows of my nose and throat: “You can’t forget me, Catherine. Why try?”
All this awareness, all this richness of feeling came back to me. As it does each week. And now the emotion that was clouding Catherine’s face was pain (I could see it like schools of microscopic black fish drifting just beneath the skin), and now my precious cigarette was nothing more than the taste of black ashes and a small livid blister on my lower lip, while the last of the smoke was already dissolving in the sunlit peppery-looking leaves of the nearest tree. The blue tiles appeared to be white with frost.
And smiling, touching my burned lip with my tongue, slowing still further the cadences of my rich appeaclass="underline" “I might have prevented our — what shall I call it? Idyl? Yes, I might have prevented our idyl. Maybe I could have stuck my hands in my pockets instead of using them to remove my golden eyeglasses. I didn’t have to climb into my dressing gown and silk pajamas and cross from our villa to yours and turn down the pink percale sheets on your bed. After all, I could have walked down to our pebbly beach and thrown pebbles into the phosphorous wash for a couple of hours. But a steady, methodical, undesigning lover like me really has no choice, Catherine. The eyeglasses come off in my hands, the skirts of the dressing gown fall open, I fold the wings of the glasses. No choice. And don’t forget you were waiting for me. You wanted my slow walk, my strong dark shadow, my full pack of cigarettes, the sound of my soft humming as I approached your villa. We both knew you were waiting, Catherine. Neither one of us had any choice that first night. It was inevitable.”