Hold Back the Night (4 page)

❧

The unicorn had been given to her for her third birthday. At that age Domini had not been aware that she was the daughter of a famous man. To her, Le Basque was simply Papa, the centre of a small universe bounded by great stone walls, with the soaring strength of the Pyrenees towering in the purple distance. Her world extended no farther than the huge flagged courtyard where Papa kept his special stone and where sun glittered on a spilling fountain.

Papa's stone was a central fact of his existence. But even now, with her third birthday nearly twenty years and many tears past, Domini was not sure why it was so important to him. It was a large piece of rough stone, crudely hewn out of bedrock, far heavier than a person could lift but not so heavy that it could not be moved by one powerful man with the help of chains and crowbars. From her earliest youth Domini knew that Papa had quarried it himself, high near a mountaintop, and somehow brought it down, single-handed, to the great walled farmhouse he had bought shortly after Domini's birth ... a great bastion of a place on a high rocky pasture in the mountainous Basque-speaking district of the Pyrenees. And he was not a young man then: he had been in his fifties at the time.

Domini was the child of Le Basque's later years and he gloried in her, lavishing her with a love that shone through every brushstroke in every canvas she graced. She found nothing odd in having no mother, because she knew no better. Papa's models, a succession of placid dark-eyed Basque women during those years, accepted without question that they should also fulfil the double role of mistress to the great man and mother to his child. And perhaps he did not ask too much of them after all; it was a small price to pay for immortality.

Domini's mother, Anastasia Greey, had died in childbirth. She too had been one of Le Basque's models and mistresses, but an American, chosen during the period when he had lived and worked in the United States, that long, tormented period of his life that the critics referred to as the Bitter Years. She had not been one of his more famous models; he had painted very few portraits of her. From three likenesses ... two at the farmhouse and one she had since seen in the Museum of Modern Art ... Domini knew her mother as a graceful woman with an aureole of golden hair, somewhat shallow she guessed, according to the studies. Anastasia had been painted with cynicism, not with love. Le Basque had never considered marrying her; nevertheless Domini knew her death had for some reason moved him deeply.

As a child, Domini sometimes asked about her mother. 'She was like light and air,' Le Basque had answered one time with a deep rue ageing his eyes. 'But I had forgotten that a man needs air to breathe and light to see.'

His cynicism of the Bitter Years, which had lasted until the time of Anastasia's death, was generally believed to have been caused by his one and only church-sanctioned union, a marriage to an American woman who had borne Le Basque's three legal children ... Domini's much older half-brothers, whom she did not know. The marriage had broken up some years prior to Domini's birth; the woman had subsequently died; the grown sons had scattered. The Bitter Years had come to a close when Le Basque, with the tiny bundle that was Domini, had left America and returned to the country of his birth.

'Oh, God,' whispered Domini, hurting, wondering if she would ever see her father again. There were times, especially in the beginning when Tasey was tiny and money had been very scarce, when she had been sorely tried not to turn to him for help. Pride had prevented it then, although Domini had always known she would contact her father in time. But now that she knew he had sold the unicorn...

❧

The child Domini, known as Didi, grew up a golden and happy creature. Hers was a free-hearted existence, her boundaries the waterfalls and rugged amphitheatres of the mountains. Her father's great rambling house was far more than a simple farmhouse: it had once been owned by a wealthy man who had extended it for use as a hunting lodge. Nevertheless it was remote from any spa or ski resort. Certainly it was a far cry from that craggy coastline, the Cote d'Argent, where silver breakers from the Atlantic marked the western boundaries of a Basque domain that stretched like a tiny kingdom from the picturesque fishing villages beloved by tourists, to the high and lonely domes of the mountains, true heartland of the Basque heritage.

In the remote fastnesses where Domini grew up the flocks were not of tourists but of sheep. Against the sharp green of summer grasses, Basque sheepherders, accustomed to the solitude of the mountains, grazed their tangle-haired lacha sheep, prized not for wool but for milk. Rugged rimrock rose from the pasturelands, and there the craggy heights were ruled by the majestic horned isard, the agile goatlike chamois of the Pyrenees.

Other than the isard, neighbours were scarce. The nearest village, a hamlet of tidy whitewashed houses decorated with the hearts and birds beloved by Basque peasants, was ten miles distant, too far for easy walking. Somewhat nearer lay a mountain pass that breeched the lofty Pyrenees to give access to the Spanish border; it was used by the peasants for the netting of pigeons during the annual migrations. The household servants, the simple villagers, the Basque sheepherders, peopled Domini's earliest memories; natural caves and tumbled Roman ruins were the closest sights to be seen.

But Domini travelled beyond the wild, rocky domain of the Pyrenees in the pages of books, and later there were real travels too. Her upbringing was far from that of a simple, uneducated farm girl. There were long, memorable visits to places where great art and architecture could be seen ... Venice, Rome, Siena, Paris, New York, Florence, London, Vienna, Prague, Greece. Even in the farmhouse it was not a wholly isolated existence. At times, when Le Basque failed to seek the world, the world sought him. Often Domini met great and famous men at her father's table and heard them talk.

Nor was she raised to be naive; in fact, the opposite was true. Her questions, from an early age, were answered freely and fully and without inhibition, especially in matters of sex, for her father had little use for social taboos.

She thought she knew a good deal about the world, and certainly she knew many facts. She had tutors, all of them American at her father's behest, because he said she must grow up speaking all the languages of her roots. And so she grew fluent in three tongues ... English, French, and the archaic language of the Basque people, a language related to no other in the world, a language so old that its origins remain shrouded in the dim mists of prehistory; a difficult language in which counting is done by twenties, in the strange manner of the ancient Mayas. To Domini the obscure and enigmatic tongue, spoken only by Basques, became as natural to the ear as the sound of wind soughing through the mountain passes, or the bleating of ewes at lambing time, or the murmurous cooing of pigeons in a quiet dawn.

During Domini's early years her papa was playmate as well as father. Often he deserted his easel to join in her childhood pastimes, which seemed to delight him as much as if he himself were discovering the joys of growing up all over again. Roaring with delight, he would romp in games of tag and hide-and-seek; he would roll up his trousers and wade in frigid mountain brooks; he would skip stones in still pools and watch as fascinated as any child at the interlocking ripples they created. As if rejuvenated by Domini's high young spirits, at the age of sixty he once spent half a day rolling exuberant somersaults in the pastureland beyond the farmhouse. On another occasion he lay for long minutes in the courtyard alongside his small daughter, chin like hers solemnly propped on his hands, watching with awe the progress of one single ant trying to move one overlarge crumb across a flagstone.

He loved to dance, as all Basques do, almost more than he loved to eat. Sometimes he would don traditional peasant costume and in the courtyard fling himself into teaching Domini the vivacious and demanding
jota
or
mascarade
dances of the Basque people, his rope-sandalled feet flashing and stamping and kicking high, his powerful arms raised high above the Basque beret he wore, his scarlet sash swirling around a sturdy body clad in a white so brilliant it hurt the eye.

Sometimes he would take her to the nearby village, where beside the quaint three-spired church the men of the mountains played
pelote
or
jai alai,
that most strenuous of games, invented by the Basques and so beloved that it was virtually a national sport. When he saw the players sweating and the hard goatskin ball slamming against the wall of the court, he would become as excited as a small boy. 'Ho!' he would cry. 'Ha! Ha, ha!' And then his feet would become restless, and perhaps if he had had one of the wicker baskets used as a racket strapped to his own arm, he would have rushed to join in the game himself. But instead he would contain his excitement and hoist Domini to his powerful shoulder to give her a better view.

When she grew older, he taught her to drink wine from a goatskin
bota
such as the sheepherders used, sending a ruby stream from the leather pouch unerringly to his mouth. He would miss no drop himself and would chuckle with glee when Domini's less practised arm sent red liquid splashing over her cheek or her chin. And then, seizing the
bota
again and deliberately misdirecting its neck, he would send wine squirting over his own chin to dribble down on a clean shirt while Domini clapped her hands in merriment.

He taught her also to play
mus
, a high-spirited variation of poker, which Le Basque insisted on playing with pebbles as the only stakes, because except for a mistress or a visitor who sometimes joined in, the other players were generally Basque peasants or perhaps an itinerant sheepherder who had no spare sous to lose. Le Basque would trounce everyone unmercifully, and when Domini groaned in exaggerated disappointment, he would cry:

'I give you the world's riches, Didi, and all in exchange for one single smile!'

When Domini rewarded him as she always did with her sunniest expression, he would rumble with laughter. And while the peasants or sheepherders watched, grinning but not understanding, he would pour all his pebbles into her lap as if offering the most precious of jewels.

To others, his behaviour might have sometimes seemed odd for a man in his declining years; but to Domini, who somersaulted or waded or danced the
jota
or played
mus
with an eagerness and enthusiasm equalling her father's, he was just Papa, her papa, friend as well as father. When she grew old enough to understand such things, she came to know that he was a man whose artist's vision made the whole world seem constantly new.

And sometimes she saw another side of him as well. When the peasants spread their nets to trap migrating pigeons, his furrowed eyes would sometimes turn sad. He said nothing, because the Basques did such things not for sport but for food; but when Domini managed to save an occasional netted pigeon and carry it back to the farmhouse, he would allow her to keep it in the courtyard until its broken wing was mended, and he took as much interest in its progress as did his warm-hearted daughter.

She had learned compassion from Le Basque himself, and some harder lessons too. One year during her youth, when there were sheep grazing near the farmhouse and the sheepherder was busy with lambing, Le Basque had taken little Domini to witness the phenomenon of birth. Early in the day they had seen a newborn lamb lying dead alongside its mother. With no hesitation Le Basque had borrowed a sharp knife from the sheepherder, rolled up his sleeves, and started at once to skin the small lifeless creature. When Domini cried out in horror to see the blood on her father's hands, he had paused long enough to explain.

'It is to save another lamb, Didi,' he had said with great gravity and gentleness, in the lambing, some ewe will die, and then there will be a newborn with no mother at all. This ewe will suckle only a lamb she believes to be her own, and she knows her own by its scent. And so I make a little wool coat for some other Iamb to wear. There is no cruelty in what I do. It is not death that matters, but life.'

And after that Domini had watched with no revulsion, her confidence in the order of the universe restored, until the moment when her father laid an orphaned Iamb clad in its strange vest alongside the bereaved mother, who allowed it to feed and so stilled its piteous bleating.

Once, when she was about eight, her father took her beyond Basque country and into the town of Lourdes. Although he was not a religious man himself, he thought she should know of the nearby shrine of Bernadette and of the pilgrimages that were made by more than two million visitors each year. 'Are there miracles, Papa?' she had asked after watching a torchlight procession that had caused her young eyes to turn troubled.

'Oh, yes,' Le Basque had said simply, dropping to his knees to hold her close. 'There are miracles in the heart. The world is a miracle. Life is a miracle. I know it is so, because it gave me you.'

❧

It was several years after the advent of the unicorn, when Domini was nine, that her father had taken the mistress who remained with him to this day. Like the women who had nurtured Domini from babyhood, Berenice a Soule was a Basque with a calm country beauty and fine dark eyes. But she was a woman of more education than her predecessors, a separated woman undivorced because of church law.

'How many lovers have you had?' Domini had asked shortly after Berenice's arrival in the Pyrenees, her question prompted by an open curiosity she had never been taught to suppress.

Berenice had looked a little surprised, but she hadn't taken offence. 'My husband and your father,' she had said.

Domini's nine-year-old eyes had widened. Papa's women were usually more experienced, and it was not the answer she had expected. 'Really? You mean Papa is your first affair?'

'Really. I've never done this sort of thing before.'

'Not even before you married?'

Berenice had taken one deep breath, steadied herself, and then smiled with admirable calmness. In fact, she had begun to look quietly amused. 'Not even then. In fact, I was a very innocent bride. I had some ideas, but they were nearly all wrong, for the nuns didn't tell me a thing. Nor did my mother. I had to marry in order to find out.'

In her teens Domini had grown to love Berenice second only to her father. And gradually over the course of the years, because Domini was not shy with her questions nor

Berenice with her answers, she learned a good deal about the older woman's background. What Berenice did not tell, Domini learned from Le Basque.

In her youth Berenice had been carefully shielded from the world's changing ways. Daughter of a wealthy and prominent landowner with strictly orthodox views, she had been convent-bred in Bayonne and married off in the Old World way, by family arrangement, before she was mature enough or sophisticated enough to rebel against a loveless match. Her chosen husband was a man she hardly knew, the scion of a landowner whose vast holdings abutted on her father's.

During the fifteen years of her marriage she had lived in Paris, where her worldlier husband, a flagrant and incurable womanizer, had become a lawyer of consequence. The marriage had been bitterly unhappy for Berenice. Her husband's insatiable thirst for conquest left a great emptiness that was not filled by children, although specialists assured Berenice the fault was not hers. Her husband refused to consider fertility tests, adoption, or the prospect of a working wife. Berenice had found herself relegated to a meaningless role as hostess in a social milieu for which she had no taste. Eventually she had walked out. The parting had been amicable enough, with the husband ... perhaps out of guilt for his peccadilloes, and perhaps out of genuine fondness for his wife ... offering an extremely handsome settlement at the time of separation. His generosity had made Berenice a rich woman.

She had met Le Basque shortly thereafter while buying one of his sketches at the opening of a show. He had been at once intrigued by her classic bone structure and extraordinarily fine eyes, as well as by her Basque background. Berenice's features were not perfect to the casual eye, and because of her close acquaintance with heartache the little lines of living had already marked her, but there was about her a serene and ageless beauty that transcended minor flaws. She had the kind of face Le Basque most liked to paint; a face with character.

And with character, Berenice had almost immediately become involved in the open liaison with Le Basque, although her rich and deeply religious family had been shocked and furious at her public flaunting of convention, especially as she was also serving as an artist's model for Le Basque, a measure sure to advertise her equivocal position to the world. Independent because of her husband's generous settlement, Berenice had refused to listen to their entreaties, even at the risk of losing the very large inheritance her father threatened to withhold. For the first time in her life she was in love, with a man many years her senior.

Despite her considerable private means and the polish acquired during her Paris years, Berenice had simple tastes, and she was endowed with an earthly wisdom that allowed her to hold the interest of a man who had become one of the truly influential artists of the twentieth century. She was wise enough, too, to interfere little in the strong relationship between father and daughter. Like Picasso's Jacqueline, Berenice was to be the companion of a great man's twilight years, although, unlike Jacqueline, Berenice was unable to seal the relationship in marriage. Domini's father was well into his seventies now; he would not take another mistress.