But I smelled wax, dust, flaking wood, rusting iron, all the effluvium of devotion and religious craftsmanship. Taking my left hand from my pocket and between thumb and first finger rubbing half-consciously the hem of the tattered dress on the Virgin’s doll, at that moment I found myself looking not at Fiona, who had forgotten me in her brief moment of frenzy in front of the dark altar, but up at a small pulpit lacquered with circus colors of blue and gold and somehow fastened high on the stone wall opposite me. The sun, as on my altar, warmed the pulpit and struck with fire a life-sized wooden arm that protruded over the edge of the pulpit and was extended, as in some kind of benediction, in the wet air. Except for the arm, with its crack near the elbow and its flowing wooden sleeve and pasty yellow hand, and except for the two altars and little peculiar pulpit, I might have been standing in some gutted cellar of the ancient world, some pit giving onto secret viaducts packed with the old world’s excrement.
“Look, Fiona, a wooden arm!”
Barefooted, wearing only her bra and brief for the beach, as well as the yellow coat, of course, which was her concession to the disapproving village and intended to spare us both from muttered threats of croak peonie, and alert, unappeasable, quick-breathing, austere and supple, the only woman I have ever known who, as sex-aesthetician, was nearly my equivalent, woman whose aging body was nonetheless a young green tree — how like my wife, Fiona, to thrust her proud chin and hungry mouth into the crumpled face of the sightless dead and then to fly on, magnificent and quite oblivious to my own discoveries, my own passing sensual interest in a wooden arm. Perhaps the aesthetic pleasures of the wooden arm were subtle, even for Fiona. Because now she spoke again in her whisper that was firm and clear, submissive and peremptory, and already her mind and eyes were elsewhere, had not comprehended the comic miracle of the arm in space, the wooden hand that no one would ever hold.
“Cyril, I want to light a candle. OK?”
She had turned, was facing me, the coat hung open, her stomach appeared to be unusually small and round above the wide hips and wonderfully frank pelvic area bound up in the tight spongy whiteness of her brief for the beach. So I drew the smoke back in through my heavy nose and took my time, once again admired myself for thinking to bring this woman into the humorless solemnity of empty nave and squat buttressed church, once again tried to follow the new course of her flight.
“Sure. But who on earth would we light it for?”
“Oh, Cyril, does it matter? I just want to light a candle, baby.”
And Fiona would have had her way, would have sailed in long quick strides to the other end of the nave, would have selected the perfect thin white candle and kissed it, impetuously kissed it, and then would have watched while I slowly took the candle from her firm hand and impaled this, Fiona’s candle, on one of the little upright spikes set in rows for that purpose, would have had me strike the match and light the wick for the benefit, perhaps, of the infant whose ancient and miniature skeleton she had already made her own — would have caused all this to happen, would have had us standing side by side and inhaling the long black strings of smoke and appreciating together the honeyed scent of the wax, had not the candle-lighting idea been destroyed the very instant Fiona was beginning to move by a sudden ominous clamor in the cobbled alley just outside the church. We heard men running and grunting, heard the sound-of boots on the stones. Simultaneously the nave was filled with the sharp clanging of the bell in the squat tower above our heads, and with the ugly blasts of the obsolete mechanical horn always blown by some village official in times of crisis.
“Is it a fire, Cyril?”
“Button your coat and we’ll find out,”I said, smiling at the disappearance of the flame that was never lit.
In the next instant we fled fragile bones and rotting lace and wooden arm, fled the rows of little upright spikes that were spattered with dusty clots of melted wax and on one of which a single crooked candle was, as a matter of fact, already burning, hand in hand ran from the cold nave, appeared together briefly against the sagging and worm-eaten wooden church door that we pushed shut behind us, and then took up the chase after two squat men in rubber boots and crude black leather helmets. Fiona’s coat was closed, the black horn was blowing. From a short distance ahead came gruff intermittent shouts, commands of croak peonie and, oddly enough, the sound of laughter.
“What the hell,” I said, pacing my breath, holding Fiona’s hand and restraining somewhat her flight, “they’re laughing.”
“Come on, baby. Please. I want to see.”
One more booted and helmeted figure, short and fat and carrying some kind of boat hook, thundered up from behind and passed us, despite his clumsiness, and sped on after the other two and disappeared. Broken tiles, the familiar stone cups filled with poison and set out on empty window ledges and in empty doorways, the closeness of the narrow walls that magnified every sound so that we could hear distinctly the choppy breathing of the three stunted men who were, I knew, members of the much-feared and openly hostile fire brigade — through this brief stretch of dismal labyrinth we ran, the elegant woman who dared show to all the village her hard naked feet and the spectacular man who, in actual sight of the church, had been seen to blow from his mouth disrespectful shapes in blue smoke.
But then we emerged from the hollow darkness of a low arch into full view of the black canal whose simple low cobbled embankment was wide enough to accommodate roving dogs, sullen families on foot and, one at a time, those rare engine-powered vehicles that appeared, now and again, from beyond the mountains. Here the crowd was gathered, we saw, not for fire or bicycle accident or fist fight between children with slack jaws and bloodshot eyes, but instead was pressing toward the edge of the canal in anger or with laughter because a large khaki-colored motorbus had somehow found its way off the sloping embankment and now sat, floated, right side up on the still water black with pollution.
“My God, Cyril, they’re going to drown!”
Her hand was long and white and cold in mine, gently I maneuvered myself so that Fiona could see — it was always essential that Fiona see the crudest accident, the smallest catastrophe, the gravest incident — but would not be able to pitch us without warning into the midst of the little factioned crowd or into the way of the rescuers. She pulled, I held her firmly, she leaned as far as she could toward the bus that was imperceptibly rocking now about ten feet from the embankment where the nearest brute-shaped member of the fire brigade stood shouting out his furious commands.
“It’s going to sink, Cyril. Isn’t it?”
I frowned, waited, and with pressure on her hand and a movement of my shoulders and a soft thoughtful sound in my nose and throat tried to convey that it was a question no one could answer.
“But people commit suicide that way, baby. It has to sink.”
In the air a handful of slim white pigeons circled the scene, on the embankment half the crowd bent themselves into lewd positions and laughed at the occupants in the bus and at the bus itself, while the other half scowled darkly and pointed to ropes and boat hooks and flimsy ladders. Across the canal a woman in a shuttered window was calling for someone to come and look. And there on the water before us the old high-bodied motorbus still floated. Derelict, obviously painted and repaired endlessly by lazy unskilled workers, khaki-colored and smeared here and there with swatches of lurid purple and smoky black, heavily dented from its long life of collisions (with stone fountains, cornices, rocks in the road, unlucky animals) still it floated in a kind of majestic dementia, though steam was hissing up from its hood and an oil stain was rising from all its submerged gearboxes, tanks, iron pockets packed with grease. I could see air bubbles where the tin body met the water, a drifting orange bobbed against the side of the still floating old machine.