In the Middle of the Wood (13 page)

The day they went to Pula it was almost unbearably hot. The bus was like a burning cage and the driver didn't leave the door open as they travelled. They talked to a woman whose husband had been taken to hospital with a heart attack. “They have been very kind to him,” she said. But it was odd to think of her having domestic trouble in a distant land like this.

When they got off the bus they wandered down to the market. Linda loved markets, they suited her gipsy transient nature; their colours, their trinkets, their suits and dresses hung out in the open air on rails, attracted her. She loved the jewellery, the woman applying lipstick to her lips at her stall.

After the market they went into the shops. All around them were the high-buttocked tourists with their cameras strung about their necks. They looked so confident, so charged with the wine of sex, the girls with flaring breasts and bottoms tight in jeans. This was what nature should be like, flowering, blossoming, fruits of the transient days. Ralph felt his own white Greekness being devoured, as if he were going mad with love of all these temporary beings. They were almost holy, while his mother-in-law was old and veined with ancient rivers steadily failing in her legs. Linda too was beautiful in that extraordinary glitter and light.

Eventually they stopped at the Roman amphitheatre which was larger than any Ralph had ever seen before. It was roofless, with stone seats. It was a vast empty vase of stone which hoarded the frightening power of the sun. As he sat inside it he thought of the women with their glowing animal eyes, the emperor turning his thumb down, the gladiators with throbbing muscles and swords and nets, the calm-eyed lions and lionesses blinking as they emerged from the darkness of the stalls. There had been days of real life and real death in this ring. In the same way as the rabbit cowers before the weasel, before the dancing stoat, in its advancing playful iron rings of necessity, so too had the slaves watched the lions come. He felt as if he was being slowly broken, hammered into cheap stucco.

“Did you read the story in the guide book?” he asked Linda.

“What about?”

“Why there is no roof on the amphitheatre.”

“And why isn't there?”

“It is said that the fairies were building it and the cock crew at dawn and so they had to leave. So they never finished it.”

“That's a beautiful story,” said Linda. She imagined the fairies with their tiny hammers, and then the feared dawn with its clouds of red ore appearing over the horizon.

Ralph thought of the Englishman and the Englishwoman they had met. He had been a clerk in the Civil Service and he had just had a major operation and was returning to one. He used to umpire cricket matches on green Sundays in southern England. In the middle of the amphitheatre this Civil Servant stood, his thumb pointing down at the amateurish green, tall and stricken. Then he was locked into an iron cage and was feverishly jotting down the numbers of lions and lionesses that were cantering into the arena. Would anyone listen to the fair judgement of an umpire here? In that world, Roman and remorseless, there had perhaps been no referees, there was only the bloodstained emperor, the cries of the hungry plebs avid for sensation. The light burned people to death, they were meshed in shadows.

His mother-in-law was looking for a toilet again but there was none. There was no one here but Japanese, Germans, Frenchmen, strolling about in the amphitheatre, training their cameras on it. The sun beat on Ralph's head like a hammer. He moved in a languor of heat. The umpire stood in the centre of the amphitheatre in his white coat like a surgeon's, and the golden-eyed lions leaped towards him. He was counting them off in a little book he held in his hand and they slunk towards him, their jaws ravening. They had come from Africa, they had eaten their way through cemeteries on their journey towards Rome, towards Pula. He looked at Linda, bewildered and amazed. It was as if her body, his own, that of her mother, were eatable, bones being torn from the flesh, devoured by the lions, sleepy and powerful. He swayed in the middle of the arena. Lights and flame flashed in front of his eyes as if he were watching a continuous television set. The light itself was an animal and the people its prey. Cruel Roman heads glared out of the stone among the roses. Here it was that true tragedy had begun and flowered, in the countries of hot climates, not in the doubtful double countries of the cold and the ice.

Linda looked radiant. She was so kind to animals, to people, so aware of their pain. Did she not see to what kind of land they had come? The quick bright sudden thrust, the world of the animals, man as a body not a spirit (only in the cold countries was man a cold white spirit, a ghost). Ralph's shirt hung sweatily on him, like a becalmed sail. He was pouring with sweat, a waterfall of hot moist perspiration. Linda looked calm and radiant in her white blouse. Ralph passed his hand across his brow, mopping the sweat away. The sky above the roofless amphitheatre was a cloudless blue without any shadow of thought on it. It was a world without reflection, brutal and barbarous. He couldn't write in a place like this. It would disable him with its ferocious heat and light. It demanded instant reflexes, of terror, fear, lust. There was no shelter, no hiding place. It did not compose long meandering reflective narratives. Its morality was that of this pitiless light. The sun was a golden ball which bounced from stone.

“Come on,” he said suddenly. Did they not see what he saw, could they not see it? Was he going mad? It was as if the sun was flaying him, tearing strips from his flesh, burning his spirit, cauterizing it. They were like ghosts in this inferno.

“Is something wrong?” said Linda.

“No. Nothing. It's just the … heat.” But it was worse than the heat, it was a vision of the ultimate animal world. He saw the Japanese, the Germans, the Frenchmen turning on each other, eating each other, mounting each other. There was a flagrant riot of copulating flesh while the wounded dying clerk sat at his tall desk counting. And the sleepy eyes of the lions emerged out of the darkness like jewels. Like yellow jewels.

His whole body was a dying arena of sweat, he was shaking and trembling. He put his hand in his pocket and popped a red pill in his mouth. And the Roman stony face smiled at him for taking it. He was hiding from the terror of real life, from the rending jaws, the bloodied teeth. The amphitheatre was a calm ship in the middle of a burning ocean, stone sails set. And the women in the front seats had glittering eyes as they watched the gladiator with the spidery net and the massive throbbing parts. Their dresses were a pure white avid flame.

“Are you all right?” said Linda.

“I'm fine,” said Ralph again. They left the amphitheatre and made their way towards the bus. It was the same hot cage as before, and they had to wait, door shut, till two German girls who had got lost returned. “Move, move,” said Ralph under his breath to the driver, for he was almost unable to breathe. There was not a whisper of a breeze. The seats under the open roof at the back had all been taken, the leather of the others was on fire.

This was one of the circles of hell.

“Did you notice,” said Linda, “as we were coming to Pula that they cultivate everything. Every little part of land they cultivate. And the vines, they have so many vines.”

“Yes,” said Ralph, recalling the cars drawn up among the vine fields. “They work very hard. No question about it.”

“Well, I didn't like Palma much,” said his mother-in-law. Palma? Where was Palma? Was there an actual place called Palma? She would go home and talk about that hot day in the amphitheatre in Palma. Linda smiled at him and he smiled back. His mother-in-law was busy changing the terminology of the country in which they were. She sometimes called it Czechoslovakia.

Suddenly she said, “I think he had cancer.”

“Who?” said Linda.

“The man from Scotland we met the other day.”

“From England,” said Linda. “He was from England.”

“Wherever he was from he had cancer. He can't deceive me. I've seen people like that before. His wife is hiding it from him but he has cancer.” And her face looked inflexible.

The two German girls still hadn't come. And the bus moved off in search of them, slowly, bearing its freight of heat.

Ralph put his hand in his pocket to see if his passport was there but remembered that Linda had it locked in her case in the hotel.

She seemed to him to be much younger than he was. She could, unlike him, have lived in this hard immediate light.

“That was a quaint story about the roof of the amphitheatre,” said Linda.

“Yes, wasn't it?” He imagined the fairies preparing to slide the roof into place like the tombstone on top of the Englishman who was going to have the operation: and the dawn rose red over Istria and over the sea, and the cock crew, with its angry red comb, and the fairies had to flee back to wherever they had come from.

“Fairies,” said his mother-in-law. “No such thing. They used to talk about fairies, but back of my hand to them.”

“There are more things in heaven and earth,” said Linda. “Witches, fairies. There may be.”

“Not unless Mary Macinnes is a witch,” said her mother. “She's the only witch I've seen.”

Linda laughed. Mary Macinnes was an old lady of eighty who lived by herself in a huge white house and read Ouspensky. She was much interested in religion, the more arcane the better.

The two German girls were found, and the bus headed out for the country. There was a flutter of air from the roof. The iron cage cooled: they had left the arena.

Unlike the colosseum the caves at Portojua were very cold, after the heat of the upper world. In a large straggling crowd they followed their guide whose name was Nino, a young Italian. He led them towards a train which would take them down into the caves. On the platform was a woman in a green cape who made sure that they were safely in their seats before the train left. It rocked from side to side and though they instinctively bent their heads to prevent themselves being hit by the stone above them it was certain that clearance had been allowed for. All the time an eerie icy air blew coldly towards them. It was like being in the centre of a chilly womb, deep in the middle of the earth. Linda's mother was hanging on desperately, frightened out of her wits. After what seemed quite a long time the train came to a stop and they saw another woman, also in a green cloak, waiting for them. She looked impersonal, professionally remote, harsh. She shouted at a passenger in a foreign accent which sounded machine-like, “Don't get off till train stops.” It was as if she belonged to this eerie underground world, as if she never rose to the sunny world above.

They helped their mother out of the train and found themselves standing in a vast space with people of all nationalities milling around them.

“Where is the guide,” said Ralph in a panic.

“Look,” said Linda, “there's a notice.”

She felt quite relaxed and in charge of the other two. The notice stated that English-speaking people should follow an English-speaking guide, Germans a German-speaking one and so on. Linda drew the other two into the appropriate queue.

Before they set off the guide told them a little about the caves. Ralph hardly listened, and neither did his mother-inlaw. She was clutching Linda's arm with the desperation of death. They followed the guide upwards and along a wooden path which here and there was wet and slippery with melting ice. Directly in front of them was a fair-haired woman, probably German, leading a fair-haired little girl, a small duplicate of herself. Their mother grasped the railing with fear and nervousness. Ralph noticed on his left-hand side a worm-like pattern of brown clay. There were stalagmites — or were they stalactites?? — of a pink coral colour.

All around him he could see fantastic images, as in an illustrated book of ice. There were gnomes shaped from ice, the icy faces of old men and old women, and what looked like two chess players facing each other and immersed in an icy game, with icy pawns and icy bishops. Below the wooden path he sensed chasms of water while to all sides of him there were these crazy obsessed shapes as if they had once been real warm-blooded people on which an Ice Age had unexpectedly descended. Stalagmites — stalactites? hung their sharp swords. The lights turned the icy columns into an enchanted autumn wood.

It was a world such as he had never seen before and he was afraid of it. Sweat broke out on his body though the caves were icy cold. It seemed to him too that it was a world he had inhabited before, symbolically, a book of icy characters frozen perpetually, unable to come to life, to move. It would need a huge effort of the imagination to fill them with life and animation. They were distant, cold, bizarre, locked in their own world. He passed his hand across his brow to wipe the sweat away. He looked at Linda but she seemed to be quite calm, gazing around her with interest. His mother-in-law was hanging on to the railing for dear life muttering to herself what might have been a prayer. He imagined misers counting their icy coins and transported to a perpetual hell. He shivered suddenly in the draught of cold wind. He thought, If one got lost here, if one were separated from the others, one would never find one's way
again back to the warm circle, the central human fire. It was like hell itself except that it was bitterly cold. The guards in their infernal green — symbols of nature gone poisonous — had unsettled him with their quaint mechanical English: they were like robots in the service of an unknown god. He felt dizzy, unstable. Images wavered in front of him, with faces of conscious repellent evil. Even his mother's face looked evil, witchlike.

“It's beautiful,” breathed Linda. “So intricate.”

He didn't answer. He didn't think of it at all as beautiful. It was as if the crazy images in his mind had become objectified in this place in a bizarre surrealistic fashion. He was surrounded by his own imperfect creations, getting on with their own business, not caring about him, and not even looking at him. It was as if he was in a morgue. The script of his life unrolled before him. The daggers of ice pointing downwards were smooth and shiny. Faces of old women peered cunningly from the centre of the pink involuted forest.