Bereavements (39 page)

“The most extravagant of my extravagant expressions of bereavement,” she said, her hand a white dove in flight settling on a corner of the coffin. “Twenty cubic feet of honey: clarified, sterile; every tissue, every cell in his body saturated.” There was an eerie happiness, almost ironic laughter in her tone. “If there are any Egyptian Pharaohs left in their graves, which I doubt, they’re writhing in envy for not having thought of this.” She paused, abstracted, with effort recovering the thought. “Of course, I don’t know if he’ll remain as you see him: perfect, unchanging, forever. There was, in the beginning an accident—” (and now her blood-drained face and heavy eyes returned to Angel, seeing him imperfectly) “—a small bubble was sealed inside, a pearl, the tiniest seed of air . . . ” (she looked for it as she had done a thousand times before) “ . . . which has since disappeared.”

Now she moved, a queen at the moment of her coronation, to the foot of the coffin and stood gazing at the glory of her son in a darkened fury, adding—a grace note at the end of an elegy—“I’ve been sick with the thought that it may have entered his body.”

It was like a book that had ended, with just an epilogue left to read, a play minutes before curtain, or a fugue—with all the single voices and contrapuntal themes finally stilled—with only the “marked climax” for which the fugue is noted still to come.

It came—the marked climax, the epilogue, the beginning of the play’s end—with a tableau: three figures of the dramatis personnae remaining on stage. One was dead, two alive but barely living: a boy burning with fever, ill with the loss of an indispensable love, quick to hallucinate, dream while awake, subject to visions; and a dazed, drugged woman getting ready to die, seeking to destroy with herself what she believed she possessed and had acquired through a profundity of grief and desire and ultimate, absolute faith—destroy that perfect, dreadful finger which is able to wither the fig tree.

“He
moved,”
Angel said.

They watched, and together saw Jamie’s eyes close. Then open.

One hand, crossing the other on his chest, sank down, disturbing its environment which became undulant, small eddies moving upward to agitate the hair.

The lips parted. The boy smiled at his mother, then in a slow drift turned his head toward Angel, unable quite to see, but filled with longing and desire—reaching, reaching out to possess the sun like the frieze of golden children on the walls.

If it had been the croak of a raven, the cracked hoarse cry of a crow, the sound couldn’t have been uglier.

It was Mrs. Evans, revolted, now seizing the corners of the coffin with a rattle of rings on the glass.

“You must leave,” she whispered to Angel, her throat too constricted to shout. “Now. Or it will be too late.”

Her lips continued to move but her voice was gone. Silent, speechless, shaken with fury at the loss, she crowded herself between Angel and the coffin.

Then something cracked in her throat, freeing a shattered voice: “He
extends,
he
reaches,
he
becomes.
I’ve given him life, but I can’t stop giving.”

There was that astonishing evil in her eyes whose other name is love, and in her eyes also were all things possibly angelic, whose other name is Love.

The moments passed, as well as the temptation in the desert.

“Come help me kill myself,” she said, taking his hand.

But it wasn’t as easy as all that.

She smashed the top from the bottle, almost smiling as it spat, then frothed in a fountain, having thrown a shower of blood-red roses across the white of her dress.

She filled the glass, put the bottle down, then with one hand scooped the other full of pills, haphazardly, all colors, which she raised quickly to her mouth, only to find herself struck with such force she fell half across the coffin.

“I won’t let you do it!” Angel shouted, smashing the bottle, before he stamped underfoot every pill he could find.

Jamie groaned. Startled, Mrs. Evans looked down to see him twisting in agony, straining wildly against the glass that contained him.

Sick with pity, she stepped back, then, weeping, fell to her knees, covering her face.

Why, in that moment, should she think of Jamie’s father? Perhaps because of his “moment of truth.” How many such moments did one need in a lifetime?—the bull dead (so many, so often!) at his feet, he triumphant, the crowd frenzied, shrieking its adoration.

One pays—whatever the price. Years later—not so many—the beast was triumphant, the crowd silent and dumb with awe. The impossible had happened: Carlos de Vinaz Rojas had been tossed, trampled, gored to death and lay broken and bloodied at the feet of the snorting brute.

With his mother’s drop to her knees, Jamie’s agony stopped. He was still for some moments, then began to move: small, ambiguous gestures, but these quite relaxed, the body apparently feeling its renewed life, sensuously loving itself, aware that its source—his mother’s love, her faith, if still wavering, irresolute—was beginning to return.

The boy stretched, smiled, the mysterious light of the coffin growing more abundant. He turned his head to one side to let his eyes find his mother’s with a gaze that carressed them.

One hand, the left, drifting through its sea of honey, now without effort, with pause, without the slightest impediment or strain—as if the environment, the atmosphere of the entire world itself were honey—moved through and outside the glass of the coffin. There it rested.

On her shoulders, Angel’s grip which had been strong, ready to pull her away, now loosened, relaxed; one hand, the left, reached forward, became still, rested lightly . . .

Of course she knew what was to happen next. The first step: the ring. After that: the others, the entire transmutation.

Behind her, she felt Angel press close, his breath grown shallow and rasping—so close she could feel the fantastic speed of his heart.

“It’s okay,” were his whispered, incredible words. “I’m ready.”

It was Love, not love, which had spoken, and she answered in kind, seizing one of the heavy candle-holders, straining to lift it from the floor.

“Help me!” she wailed, pitting her small strength against the weight of it.

Angel was at her side and together they swung it into the air in an arc, crashing the leaded base of it into the center of the coffin.

While preserving an unaltered outer surface, a shell of perfection, the “pearl,” that “tiniest seed of air” that so worried Mrs. Evans had long ago entered Jamie’s body and done its work quickly. Like a worm in wood that can fell a giant tree, it internalized swift flowers of decay.

Jamie, abuptly freed from his coffin, empty of the life his mother had given him, the temple of a body without a spirit, became instantly what it was and what time would have made it.

After the coffin shattered, more implosion than explosion, with fragments, daggers, splinters of gleaming glass curving inward and caught, the honey then erupted outward and down in a slow undulant river of luxurious, tumbled languor and ease, taking a fantastic Jamie with it: a monstrous beauty of melting body and boy. Parts of him—fingers, eyes, hands, head—became the flotsam of a sea of separate selves, curving with the curve of the thick stream that contained it, carried it, crowded it into a disordered collage of debris at one end of the golden room.