Shibumi (35 page)

“And did you meet Spanish border patrols?” an old man asked.

“No, I was not required to burden hell with more Fascist souls. Does that please you, Father?” Le Cagot addressed this last to the gaunt revolutionary priest sitting in the darkest corner of the café, who had turned his face away upon the entrance of Le Cagot and Hel. Father Xavier nurtured a smoldering hate for Le Cagot and a flaming one for Hel. Though he never faced danger personally, he wandered from village to village along the border, preaching the revolution and attempting to bind the goals of Basque independence to those of the Church—the Basque manifestation of that general effort on the part of God-merchants to diversify into social and political issues, now that the world was no longer a good market for hell-scare and soul-saving.

The priest’s hatred (which be termed “righteous wrath”) for Le Cagot was based on the fact that praise and hero worship that properly belonged to the ordained leaders of the revolution was being siphoned away by this blaspheming and scandalous man who had spent a part of his life in the Land of the Wolves, out of the Pays Basque. But at least Le Cagot was a native son. This Hel was a different matter. He was an outlander who never went to Mass and who lived with an Oriental woman. And it was galling to the priest that young Basque cavers, boys who should have chosen their idols from the ranks of the priesthood, told stories of his spelunking exploits and of the time he had crossed with Le Cagot into Spain and broken into a military prison in Bilbao to release ETA prisoners. This was the kind of man who could contaminate the revolution and divert its energies from the establishment of a Basque Theocracy, a last fortress of fundamentalist Catholicism in a land where Christian practices were primitive and deep, and where the key to the gates of heaven was a profound weapon of control.

Shortly after he bought his home in Etchebar, Hel began to receive unsigned threats and hate notes. Upon two occasions there were “spontaneous” midnight charivaris outside the château, and live cats bound in burning straw were thrown at the walls of the house, where they screamed in their death throes. Although Hel’s experience had taught him to despise these fanatical Third World priests who incite children to their deaths for the purpose of linking the cause of social reform to the Church to save that institution from natural atrophy in the face of knowledge and enlightenment, he would nevertheless have ignored this kind of harassment. But he intended to make the Basque country his permanent home, now that the Japanese culture was infected with Western values, and he had to put an end to these insults because the Basque mentality ridicules those who are ridiculed. Anonymous letters and the mob frenzy of the charivari are manifestations of cowardice, and Hel had an intelligent fear of cowards, who are always more dangerous than brave men, when they outnumber you or get a chance to strike from behind, because they are forced to do maximal damage, dreading as they do the consequences of retaliation, should you survive.

Through Le Cagot’s contacts, Hel discovered the author of these craven acts, and a couple of months later he came across the priest in the back room of a café in Ste. Engrace, where he was eating a free meal in silence, occasionally glaring at Nicholai, who was taking a glass of red with several men of the village—men who had previously been sitting at the priest’s table, listening to his wisdom and cant.

When the men went off to work, Hel joined the priest at his table. Father Xavier started to rise, but Hel gripped his forearm and returned him to his chair. “You are a good man, Father,” he said in his prison whisper. “A saintly man. In fact, at this moment you are closer to heaven than you know. Finish your food and listen well. There will be no more anonymous letters, no more charivaris. Do you understand?”

“I’m afraid I don’t—”

“Eat.”

“What?”

“Eat!”

Father Xavier pushed another forkful of piperade into his mouth and chewed sullenly.

“Eat faster, Father. Fill your mouth with food you have not earned.”

The priest’s eyes were damp with fury and fear, but he shoveled forkful after forkful into his mouth and swallowed as rapidly as he could.

“If you choose to stay in this corner of the world, Father, and if you do not feel prepared to join your God, then this is what you will do. Each time we meet in a village, you will leave that village immediately. Each time we meet on the trails, you will step off the track and turn your back as I pass. You can eat faster than that!”

The priest choked on his food, and Hel left him gasping and gagging. That evening, he told the story to Le Cagot with instructions to make sure it got around. Hel considered public humiliation of this coward to be necessary.

“Hey, why don’t you answer me, Father Esteka?” Le Cagot asked.*

*
Esteka
is Basque for “sexual deficiency.”

The priest rose and left the café, as Le Cagot called after him, “Holà! Aren’t you going to finish your piperade?”

Because they were Catholic, the old men in the café could not laugh; but they grinned, because they were Basque.

Le Cagot patted the hostess’s bottom and sent her after their food. “I don’t think we have made a great friend there, Niko. And he is a man to be feared.” Le Cagot laughed. “After all, his father was French and very active in the Resistance.”

Hel smiled. “Have you ever met one who was not?”

“True. It is astonishing that the Germans managed to hold France with so few divisions, considering that everyone who wasn’t draining German resources by the clever maneuver of surrendering en masse and making the Nazi’s feed them was vigorously and bravely engaged in the Resistance. Is there a village without its Place de la Resistance? But one has to be fair; one has to understand the Gallic notion of resistance. Any hotelier who overcharged a German was in the Resistance. Each whore who gave a German soldier the clap was a freedom fighter. All those who obeyed while viciously withholding their cheerful morning
bonjours
were heroes of liberty!”

Hel laughed. “You’re being a little hard on the French.”

“It is history that is hard on them. I mean real history, not the
verité à la cinquième République
that they teach in their schools. The truth be known, I admire the French more than any other foreigners. In the centuries they have lived beside the Basque, they have absorbed certain virtues—understanding, philosophic insight, a sense of humor—and these have made them the best of the ‘others.’ But even I am forced to admit that they are a ridiculous people, just as one must confess that the British are bungling, the Italians incompetent, the Americans neurotic, the Germans romantically savage, the Arabs vicious, the Russians barbaric, and the Dutch make cheese. Take the particular manifestation of French ridiculousness that makes them attempt to combine their myopic devotion to money with the pursuit of phantom
gloire.
The same people who dilute their burgundy for modest profit willingly spend millions of francs on the atomic contamination of the Pacific Ocean in the hope that they will be thought to be the technological equals of the Americans. They see themselves as the feisty David against the grasping Goliath. Sadly for their image abroad, the rest of the world views their actions as the ludicrous egotism of the amorous ant climbing a cow’s leg and assuring her that he will be gentle.”

Le Cagot looked down at the tabletop thoughtfully. “I cannot think of anything further to say about the French just now.”

The widow had joined them at table, sitting close to Le Cagot and pressing her knee against his. “Hey, you have a visitor down at Etchehelia,” she told Hel, using the Basque name for his château. “It is a girl. An outsider. Arrived yesterday evening.”

Hel was not surprised that this news was already in Larrau, three mountains and fifteen kilometers from his home. It had doubtless been common knowledge in all the local villages within four hours of the visitor’s arrival.

“What do you know about her?” Hel asked.

The widow shrugged and tucked down the corners of her mouth, indicating that she knew only the barest facts. “She took coffee
chez
Jaureguiberry and did not have money to pay. She walked all the way from Tardets to Etchebar and was seen from the hills several times. She is young, but not too young to bear. She wore short pants that showed her legs, and it is said that she has a plump chest. She was received by your woman, who paid her bill with Jaureguiberry. She has an English accent. And the old gossips in your village say that she is a whore from Bayonne who was turned out from her farm for sleeping with the husband of her sister. As you see, very little is known of her.”

“You say she is young with a plump chest?” Le Cagot asked. “No doubt she is seeking me, the final experience.”

The widow pinched his thigh.

Hel rose from the table. “I think I’ll go home and take a bath and a little sleep. You coming?”

Le Cagot looked at the widow sideways. “What do you think? Should I go?”

“I don’t care what you do, old man.”

But as he started to rise, she tugged him back by his belt.

“Maybe I’ll stay a while, Niko. I’ll come back this evening and take a look at your girl with the naked legs and the big boobs. If she pleases me, I may bless you with an extension of my visit. Ouch!”

Hel paid and went out to his Volvo, which he kicked in the rear fender, then drove away toward his home.

After parking in the square of Etchebar (he did not permit automobiles on his property) and giving the roof a parting bash with his fist, Hel walked down the private road to his château feeling, as he always did upon returning home, a paternal affection for this perfect seventeenth-century house into which he had put years of devotion and millions of Swiss francs. It was the thing he loved most in the world, a physical and emotional fortress against the twentieth century. He paused along the path up from the heavy gates to pat the earth in around a newly planted shrub, and as he was doing this he felt the approach of that vague and scattered aura that could only be Pierre, his gardener.

“Bonjour, M’sieur,”
Pierre greeted in his singsong way, as he recognized Hel through the haze of his regularly spaced glasses of red that began with his rising at dawn.

Hel nodded. “I hear we have a guest, Pierre.”

“It is so. A girl. She still sleeps. The women have told me that she is a whore from—”

“I know. Is Madame awake?”

“To be sure. She was informed of your approach twenty minutes ago.” Pierre looked up into the sky and nodded sagely. “Ah, ah, ah,” he said, shaking his head. Hel realized that he was preparing to make a weather prediction, as he did every time they met on the grounds. All the Basque of Haute Soule believe they have special genetic gifts for meteorological prognostication based upon their mountain heritage and the many folk adages devoted to reading weather signs. Pierre’s own predictions, delivered with a quiet assurance that was never diminished by his unvarying inaccuracy, had constituted the principal topic of his conversation with M’sieur Hel for fifteen years, ever since the village drunk had been elevated to the rank of the outlander’s gardener and his official defender from village gossip.

“Ah, M’sieur, there will be rain before this day is out,” Pierre chanted, nodding to himself with resigned conviction. “So there is no point in my setting out these flowers today.”

“Is that so, Pierre?” How many hundreds of times had they had this conversation?

“Yes, it is so. Last night at sunset there was red and gold in the little clouds near the mountains. It is a sure sign.”

“Oh? But doesn’t the saying go the other way? Isn’t it
arrats gorriak eguraldi?”

“That is how the saying goes, M’sieur. However…” Pierre’s eyes glittered with conspiratorial slyness as he tapped the side of his long nose. “…everything depends on the phase of the moon.”

“Oh?”

Pierre closed his eyes and nodded slowly, smiling benevolently on the ignorance of all outlanders, even such basically good men as M’sieur Hel. “When the moon is ascending, the rule is as you have said; but when the moon is descending, it is the other way.”

“I see. Then when the moon is descending it is:
Goiz gorriak dakarke uri?”

Pierre frowned, uncomfortable about being forced to a firm prediction. He considered for a moment before answering. “That varies, M’sieur.”

“I’m sure it does.”

“And… there is an additional complication.”

“You’re going to tell me about it.”

Pierre glanced about uneasily and shifted to French, to avoid the risk of offending the earth spirits who, of course, understand only Basque.
“Vous voyez, M’sieur, de temps en temps, la lune se trompe!”

Hel drew a long breath and shook his head. “Good morning, Pierre.”

“Good morning, M’sieur.” Pierre tottered down the path to see if there was something else requiring his attention.

His eyes closed and his mind afloat, Hel sat neckdeep in the Japanese wooden tub filled with water so hot that lowering himself into it had been an experience on the limen between pain and pleasure. The servants had fired up the wood-stoked water boiler as soon as they heard that M. Hel was approaching from Larrau, and by the time he had scrubbed himself thoroughly and taken a shock shower in icy water, his Japanese tub was full, and the small bathing room was billowing with dense steam.

Hana dozed across from him, sitting on a higher bench that allowed her to sit neck-deep too. As always when they bathed together, their feet were in casual embrace.

“Do you want to know about the visitor, Nicholai?”

Hel shook his head slowly, not willing to interrupt his comatose relaxation. “Later,” he muttered.

After a quarter of an hour, the water cooled enough that it was possible to make a movement in the tub without discomfort. He opened his eyes and smiled sleepily at Hana. “One grows old, my friend. After a couple of days in the mountains, the bath becomes more a medical necessity than a pleasure.”

Hana smiled back and squeezed his foot between hers. “Was it a good cave?”

He nodded. “An easy one, really. A walk-in cave with no long crawls, no siphons. Still, it was just about all the work my body could handle.”

He climbed the steps on the side of the tub and slid back the padded panel that closed the bathing room off from the small Japanese garden he had been perfecting for the past fifteen years, and which he assumed would be acceptable in another fifteen. Steam billowed past him into the cool air, which felt bracing on his skin, still tight and tingling from the heat. He had learned that a hot tub, twenty minutes of light meditation, an hour of lovemaking, and a quick shower replenished his body and spirit better than a night’s sleep; and this routine was habitual with him upon returning from a caving bash or, in the old days, from a counterterrorist stunt.

Hana left the tub and put a lightly padded kimono over her still-wet body. She helped him into his bathing kimono, and they walked across the garden, where he stopped for a moment to adjust a sounding stone in the stream leading from the small pond because the water was low and the sound of it was too treble to please him. The bathing room with its thick plank walls was half hidden in a stand of bamboo that bordered the garden on three sides. Across from it was a low structure of dark wood and sliding paper panels that contained his Japanese room, where he studied and meditated, and his “gun room,” where he kept the implements of the trade from which he had recently retired. The fourth side of the garden was closed off by the back of his château, and both of the Japanese buildings were freestanding, so as to avoid breaking the mansard perfection of its marble facade. He had worked through all of one summer, building the Japanese structures with two craftsmen he brought from Kyushu for the purpose, men old enough to remember how to work in wood-and-wedge.

Kneeling at a low lacquered table, facing out toward the Japanese garden, they took a light meal of melon balls (warm, to accent the musky flavor), tart plums (glaucous, icy, and full of juice), unflavored rice cakes, and a half glass of chilled Irouléguy.

The meal done, Hana rose from the table. “Shall I close the panels?”

“Leave one ajar, so we can see the garden.”

Hana smiled. Nicholai and his garden… like a father with a delicate but willful child. The garden was the most important of his possessions, and often, after a trip, he would return home unannounced, change clothes, and work in the garden for hours before anyone knew he was home. To him, the garden with its subtle articulations was a concrete statement of
shibumi,
and there was an autumnal correctness to the fact that he would probably not live to see its full statement.

She let her kimono fall away. “Shall we have a wager?”

He laughed. “All right. The winner receives… let’s see. How about one half-hour of the Delight of the Razor?”

“Fine. I am sure I shall enjoy it very much.”

“That sure of yourself?”

“My good friend, you have been off in the mountains for three days. Your body has been manufacturing love, but there has been no outlet. You are at a great disadvantage in the wager.”

“We shall see.”

With Hana and Nicholai, the foreplay was as much mental as physical. They were both Stage IV lovemakers, she by virtue of her excellent training, he because of the mental control he had learned as a youth, and his gift of proximity sense, which allowed him to eavesdrop on his partner’s sensations and know precisely where she was in relation to climax contractions. The game was to cause the other to climax first, and it was played with no holds or techniques barred. To the winner went the Delight of the Razor, a deeply relaxing thrill massage in which the skin of the arms, legs, chest, back, stomach, and pubes is lightly brushed with a keenly honed razor. The tingling delight, and the background fear of a slip, combine to require the person receiving the massage to relax completely as the only alternative to unbearable tension and pleasure. Typically, the Delight of the Razor begins with the extremities, sweeping waves of thrill inward as the razor approaches the erogenous areas, which become ardent with pleasure and the shadow of fear. There are subtleties of technique when the razor comes to these zones that are dangerous to describe.

The Delight of the Razor culminates in quick oral lovemaking.

Whichever of them won the wager by making the other climax first would receive the Delight of the Razor, and there was a special cachet to their way of playing the game. They knew one another well enough to bring both of them to the threshold of climax quickly, and the game was played out there, on the teetering edge of pleasure and control.

It was not until after he got away from Sugamo Prison and began his life in the West that Hel’s sexual experience took on form and articulation. Before that there had been only amateur play. His relationship with Mariko had not been physical in essence; it had been youthful affection, and their bungling sexual experiences had been nothing more than a physical footnote to their gentle and uncertain affection.

With the Tanaka sisters, Hel entered Stage I lovemaking, that healthy and simplistic stage of sexual curiosity during which strong young animals brimming with the impulse to continue their species exercise themselves on one another’s bodies. Although plebeian and monotonic, Stage I is wholesome and honest, and Hel enjoyed his time spent in that rank, regretting only that so many people are sensationally crippled by their cultures and can accept the strong, sweaty lovemaking of Stage I only when disguised as romance, love, affection, or even self-expression. In their confusion, they build relationships upon the sand of passion. Hel considered it a great pity that mass man had come into contact with romantic literature, which created expectations beyond the likelihood of fulfillment and contributed to that marital delinquency characteristic of Western sexual adolescents.

During his brief sojourn in Stage II—the use of sex as psychological aspirin, as social narcosis, a kind of bloodletting to reduce fevers and pressures—Hel began to have glimpses of the fourth level of sexual experience. Because he realized that sexual activity would be a significant part of his life, and because he detested amateurism in all its forms, he undertook to prepare himself. He received professional tactical training in Ceylon and in the exclusive bordellos of Madagascar, where he lived for four months, learning from women of every race and culture.

Stage III, sexual gourmandizing, is the highest stage ever reached by Westerners and, indeed, by most Orientals. Hel moved through this stage leisurely and with high appetite because he was young, his body strong and taut, and his imagination fertile. He was in no danger of getting bogged down in the sexual black masses of artificial stimulation with which the nastier-than-thou jetsetters and the soft intellectuals of the literary and filmmaking worlds seek to compensate for callused nerve ends and imaginations by roiling among one another’s tepid flesh and lubricating fluids.

Even while in the sexual smorgasbord of Stage III, Hel began to experiment with such refined tactics as climax hovering and mental intercourse. He found it amusing to associate sexual techniques with Gô nomenclature. Such terms as
aji keshi, ko, furikawari
and
hane
lent themselves easily as illuminating images; while others, such as
kaketsugi, nozoki,
and
yosu-miru,
could be applied to lovemaking only with a liberal and procrustean view of metaphor.

By the age of thirty, Hel’s sexual interests and capacities led him naturally to Stage IV, the final “game phase,” in which excitation and climax are relatively trivial terminal gestures in an activity that demands all the mental vigor and reserve of championship Gô, the training of a Ceylonese whore, and the endurance and agility of a gifted grade VI rock climber. The game of his preference was an invention of his own which he called
“kikashi
sex.” This could only be played with another Stage IV lovemaker, and only when both were feeling particularly strong. The game was played in a small room, about six
tatami.
Both players dressed in formal kimonos and knelt facing one another, their backs against opposite walls. Each, through concentration alone, was required to come to the verge of climax and to hover there. No contact was permitted, only concentration and such gestures as could be made with one hand.

The object of the game was to cause climax before climaxing yourself, and it was best played while it was raining.

In time, he abandoned
kikashi
sex as being somewhat too demanding, and also because it was a lonely and selfish experience, lacking the affection and caressing of afterplay that decorates the best of lovemaking.

Hana’s eyes were squeezed shut with effort, and her lips were stretched over her teeth. She tried to escape from the involute position in which he held her, but he would not release her.

“I thought we agreed that you weren’t permitted to do that!” she pled.

“I didn’t agree to anything.”

“Oh, Nikko… I can’t!… I can’t hold on! Damn you!”

She arched her back and emitted a squeak of final effort to avoid climaxing.

Her delight infected Hel, who relinquished his control to allow himself to climax just after she did. Then suddenly his proximity sense sounded the alarm. She was faking! Her aura was not dancing, as it would at climax. He tried to void his mind and arrest his climax, but it was too late. He had broken over the rim of control.