The Sacred Beasts (17 page)

Sylvie sighs and holds her head in her hands. “I’ve spent half the
day feeling nauseous. Thanks for letting me know what’s going on here. Yes,
let’s leave as soon as we can.”

We eat our dinner in the most prolonged silence that has ever
passed between us. We both sense that the world we have found here is dying.
Under a clear, star-lit sky and a crescent moon, we make love in the death that
surrounds us. It is another long, enveloping night when we can’t stop loving
until exhaustion overtakes us. The close presence of death brutally clarifies
the world and like all animals, we can only resist death with sexual love.

The following day, our last in Doñana, we move on to Lake Dulce,
since it still has water and the greatest variety of birds, rich fodder for
both art and science. It is so early in the morning that we drive through the
still, perfect darkness just preceding first light, then we set up our camp on
the riverbank, which is enclosed in a dense morning mist and spanned by a
multitude of invisible birds’ raucous cries. The sounds seem to be revolving
through the sky in arcs as these unseen birds wheel around us. As we eat our
breakfast, the black sky shrieks with their calls, and their size seems to grow
and become monstrous as the volume of sound increases. We silently wait for the
dawn as though in prayer. We could be primeval, mythic beings summoning the
earth’s radiance and bounty to resist darkness full of demons. Then, in the
dawning light, the mist rises and we see the demons transformed into
processions of grave, stately birds at the far side of the lake: heron,
spoonbill, grebe, purple gallinule. When the light is clear and bright, I sit
by the riverbank, alternating between watching the birds and looking at film
footage from the sensors and cameras I placed here a month ago. Sylvie wanders
around the lake with her sketchbook.

My film footage shows so many wonders of the earth and air that I
am continually surprised. The first image sequence is a rare buzzard family
nesting on the ground. These birds generally nest in cork oak trees, but this
family is probably on the ground for its proximity to abundant prey. The
mother’s warrior-like head wears the raiment of a winter morning: dull,
lightless beige and brown color tones. Her hugely round, cavernous eyes rest in
shadows cast by great brow ridges, and her fierce visage ends abruptly in a
powerful, curved beak, short but lethal. At her breast is one of nature’s
wonderful contradictions: two chicks that seem to be the softest, gentlest
young in creation, covered with white down at once so full and delicate that
their shapes can’t be discerned. From these impossibly soft palpitations of
white fluff will emerge some of Doñana’s most rapacious carnivores and
carrion-eaters, as though this predatory species were nurturing its last
vestige of innocence.

In the gleam of many animal eyes, morning becomes afternoon and
then evening as I remain immersed in the endless story of bird lives that my
equipment holds. From time to time, I wonder what Sylvie will find in our last
feast of nature. Sometime close to sunset, I feel a distinct longing for her and
she is suddenly beside me. “I missed you,” she says, kissing me. “Everything
was calling to me, but I wanted to be back here with you.” I can only smile: we
are sharing the same thoughts again. This happens so often between women.

As I look at her sketchpad, I see that she has been able to create
clear renderings of several very swift birds that are difficult to find. Two
appear in one of her compositions, probably as a contrast. Here is the
nightjar’s protective coloration as it fades into the browns of summer’s dying
scrublands. You could mistake it for a stick, a bit of dead scrub, or bark on a
tree. This is the reason it is one of the least known of birds, but Sylvie’s
sharp eye has captured it. Beside it, in trumpeting color, is the multi-colored
bee-eater. This bird is a harlequin of brilliant motley colors that entertain
and invite the eye to play. Vivid green paints the breast, tail and crown of
the head. Bright yellow daubs the throat and drops a stripe on the back. Warm
reddish-brown splashes over the top of the head, neck and portions of the wing.
The bird is a fabulous darting, whirling harmony of color, the work of an
artist at play or a fashion designer. Yet you are seized and held by the bird’s
dark orange eyes that glow like long-burning coals.

As we prepare our dinner and eat, it seems to me that this day has
passed too quickly. We have been too happy chasing our beautiful beasts.
Perhaps we have loved the world too much. Is a reckoning imminent? The earth
does not return a romantic’s love. Sylvie sits silently and watches me with her
intent dark eyes, and I feel a burning emotion or question radiating from her,
though that may simply be the effect of her beauty that is always striking and
never still.

When we have finished eating and are drinking wine over our
campfire, she suddenly says, “When we leave Spain, come with me to Paris. Live
with me. Be my lover. I don’t want to leave you. Ever.” I am shocked, as though
I had fallen into frigid water. A pure chaos: the wildest, most intense pleasure
plays my heart like a musical instrument. How I would love to be young and live
my life over again as her lover in Paris! But I am no immortal, no goddess. I
always thought she would know I am much too old to offer her a long-term
relationship. The tears are already falling from my eyes.

“Sylvie, I don’t know how I can do that.”

She looks at me in shock. “Why not?” Her eyes are suddenly as full
of tears as mine. To my continuing astonishment, I see that they are angry
tears and she is enraged with me. I reach out to hold her, but she pushes me
away.

“Sylvie, it’s only that I know you can’t really want this. Not
with me, at my age. You want a lover who is young, with whom you can spend your
life.” Now she is trembling.

“
I
want . . . ?” I reach to touch her but she punches my
shoulder. “Why did you say you loved me when you only wanted . . . what? a
whore for the summer?” Her face betrays astonishment, and I can tell that she
has never said that word aloud before.

“I said I love you because I do, but this has nothing to do with
love.
Sylvie, if I were your age, nothing could stop me from going to Paris
with you!”
I am almost shouting now. “It would be one of the most important
turning points of my life! When you do go back to Paris, it will be a little
like dying for me. I’ll be haunted by you. I felt this when Katia died, too.
But nothing can change the age difference between us.” Now she lets me take her
hands, and her face is suddenly animated, as though she sees another direction
to this.

“No, you don’t understand. I never even think about your age. I
love your body—it’s as slender and muscular as mine, and your face . . . you
must know that I love nothing but character in a face. Young faces bore me. I
do
want you
! I’ve been attracted to you since I was a girl. I remember
watching you with Katia and thinking that she was very striking but dangerously
moody. Even a girl could see it. You were the kind one, the gentle one she
leaned on without knowing it. I always loved you. You
don’t need
to feel
that you’re too old for me . . .”

“I know that, Sylvie. I do understand,” though what she has said
astonishes me. Still, I must persist. “But nothing can turn back the clock. We
have a kind of perfection here. It’s magical. I do feel like a young woman here
with you. But I’m not. You simply can’t have a long-term relationship with a
woman of my age, even if you think you want it now.”

She withdraws from me again. I can see nothing but her bent head
and back. We are silent for much too long a time. I have failed: she still does
not really understand. She picks up my camera and turns it about in her hands
as though it were an enigma. Suddenly, she jumps to her feet and hurls it into
the water. Then she turns on me like a mad animal. “A man would never do this
to me! A man would have the nerve to live with me! So you might get hurt. I
might, too. A man would take the risk!”

There is now so much to explain that I hardly know where to begin.
“A man probably would go to Paris with you. It
is
almost irresistible,
and it is also the most painful thing in the world to know that you can only
live once. But you have to understand what that would mean for you. A man of my
age, who has been your lover as I have, would try to manipulate you into
staying with him. He’d begin on your ego, do everything to make you question
yourself and seek his approval, then make you dependent on him. He would do his
best to destroy your self-worth, your freedom, and even your art might not
survive. He would give you the most destructive relationship of your life. It
goes without saying that he’d try to get you all-too-accustomed to spending his
money and to hate living without it. Have I said enough? Do you see the
pattern?”

She yells, “
Damn
it to hell, yes!” She turns away from me
and runs to the lake, takes off her clothes quickly and dives in. I intensely
want to join her, but I am devastated by the thought that we first made love in
a lake. I must leave her alone now. She will not let me comfort her. She will
swim until she has regained control of herself or is exhausted. In a half-hour
or so, the camera flies out of the water and crashes onto the shore. I pick it
up and examine it. Of course, it is completely ruined, its secrets lost—not the
first one, and I smile ruefully, to be destroyed by the wildlife.

It is dark when she finally comes out of the water, dresses and
sits by the campfire close beside me. I touch her carefully and then, finding
her receptive, I hold her in my arms. “I’m sorry about the camera,” she says in
a faint voice. I can only smile: she does not sound sorry at all. But, I now
know something about her I would never have guessed: no one has ever rejected
her before. Her beauty has protected her from that. Of course, I have not
really rejected her, only acknowledged that she must leave me.

Suddenly, she pins my arms behind my back and makes love to me
very aggressively. At first, her passion is one that also wants to hurt me,
like pornography, but it changes into very gentle love that begins the slow
process of leave-taking. We will make love like this in Madrid and Barcelona
until we can finally leave one another.

Before we fall asleep, I say, “I never meant to imply that
I
would
leave
you
. I do believe that you will need to leave me and it will
happen very soon. But, if it hasn’t happened after Madrid and Barcelona, and
you still want me to live with you in Paris, I will do that.” She closes her
eyes slowly and smiles with the sweetness of a Cambodian Buddha, then holds my
face in her hands, caressing and kissing all parts of my face again and again.
How on earth will I ever give up this lovely girl?

“If you think you’re old now, what an old bat you’ll be before I’m
done with you,” she says. “I am going to surprise you.”

“You have either surprised or shocked me on every day of this
trip,” I say. We fall asleep immediately, exhausted by our emotions.

IN THE BRILLIANT, telling sunlight of the following day, we are
standing on opposite sides of the jeep, each watching the other. We have had
breakfast and finished our packing, and all of our gear is piled in the back of
the jeep. We are ready to leave Doñana, a moment I have feared but accepted. I
know that ultimately she will not want to live with me in Paris, but she does
not know it yet. Still, I am so astonished by the outrageousness, the pure
wildness, even the insane magnificence of our love here that I know I will
never regret it. “We broke every rule in the book,” I say.

“That we did,” she says. “I can’t think of another one to break.”

Suddenly we both reach over the hood of the jeep and hold hands.
Tears are falling down my face and then hers as well. “You’re the only lover I
haven’t terrified a bit,” she says.

“I can certainly see how you would terrify your lovers,” I say and
we laugh through our tears. I do not say: you will terrify them less and less
as the years pass, and one day you will realize how much you miss terrifying
them. Our faces are wet with tears. One of the many things I love about women
is that you can cry together and still be strangely happy.

“I love you. Helplessly,” she says.

“I love you hopelessly,” I answer. Then we are beyond tears and
laughter.

“OK, let’s do it,” she says. “Barcelona, Madrid. Even Paris, if I
can get you to believe it exists.” I am grateful that I don’t need to end this
moment. We will begin to grow apart as soon as we enter this jeep, even before
Doñana is behind us.

Our hands break apart. We get into the jeep and drive away.

Krasna život
.

III

The Middle

Secrets and Symmetry

IT’S THAT LIGHT, Ruth was thinking as she drove, the soft white
light of southern Spain that seems to exist as waves, oceans of white washing
over you. The heat is part of it—we’re just past the first of June. It must be
over a hundred degrees. The inevitable sense of being overwhelmed, becoming white
wave-like ephemera, the world scaled almost to zero. I remember the bright
white light of San Francisco: what a contrast. It was sparkling, cool and
brisk, a perfect city to work in, to create durable, utilitarian things used
for good purposes. Eternal Spring, it roused you to change your life like a
musical refrain. This light is the reverse, utter passivity, pure being. How we
need both. White will be the last color I see when I die.

You could not paint it other than in broad white strokes; Sylvie
was thinking, an entire canvas of red and black and those thick white strokes
across the center. If any landscape or human figure is necessary, it must be no
more than an outline, a fast brush stroke over the canvas in a single thin line
of gray paint. As a conceptual painting of Spain—here, now—this idea intrigues
me.

They passed two riders on horseback followed by a faint, tiny foal
with glassy eyes. They smiled in pleasure at the foal’s diminutive sweetness.
“One of the horses must be a mare, its mother,” Ruth said. “It looks no more
than a week old. It will follow its mother anywhere.”

“It’s adorable,” said Sylvie. How I would love to kiss that funny,
rumpled new fur, she thought.

They had just decided to drive to Barcelona before Madrid, visit a
few cities along the way—Seville, Granada, Ronda and whatever else took
them—then head up the Costa del Sol. They were in agreement that they needed a
rest and nothing should hurry them. “Are we tourists yet?” Sylvie asked.

“Not yet,” said Ruth with a smile. “We’re still in the thrall of
art. Your head must be completely empty. We may never be tourists again as long
as we live.” A red tractor with a huge shovel and a laughing young man at the
wheel passed them. The shovel held a laughing young woman. I wonder how that
happened, they thought with a smile.

“I haven’t told you yet where we’re staying in Barcelona,” Ruth
said with sudden energy. “We’ll be at the home of one of Katia’s feminist
friends, an internationally known artist named Monserrat Mistral. She is of my
generation, though you might know her work. Katia said it was an amazing house,
one of those early twentieth century Modernist mansions that so distinguish
Barcelona from other Spanish cities. The architect was not Gaudi, but someone
else in the Modernist movement. Monserrat’s family was solidly placed in the
wealthy industrialist class of Spain for decades: her father made his fortune
in construction and development. Katia said that the family fractured
politically during the Spanish Civil War. The father was pro-Franco, of course,
but her brother and two sisters joined the anarchist and socialist movements
and fought in the resistance. They were killed when Franco’s forces took
Barcelona.

“Monserrat was born as a late, last child after the war, a tragic attempt
by her parents to regain a family. She was finally the sole heir to the estate
and business, which is still generating a fortune in construction on the Costa
del Sol. So, she decided to devote the greater part of the family fortune to
Spain’s still-nascent feminist movement. The house provides a meeting place for
women in every profession, afternoon and evening, every day. Women professors,
journalists, media professionals—you name it—all meet there. A bunch of artists
have their studios there. Mujeres Libres, a contemporary version of the old
Spanish Civil War anarchist group, meets there, too. Even the Spanish
prostitutes union meets there. It will probably turn into a fiesta atmosphere
this month leading up to Gay Pride Day. Monserrat is a gay woman, though her
partner of forty years died recently. I’ve never met her, but she wrote a very
sensitive, heartfelt condolence letter to me after Katia’s death and invited me
to stay with her when I traveled to Europe again. It must be a very exciting
place, to say the least.”

Aha, thought Sylvie. That’s why you think I’ll leave you so soon.
We’ll be surrounded by so many fascinating women that I’ll throw you over the
first night, and you will have your consolation with Monserrat beside you. But
what if I surprise you? Maybe I’ll just fuck you to death there instead.
Imagine how happily you’ll expire: in that famous, one-of-a kind feminist
mansion. What a noble end and what a scandal, too. Surely some woman should die
during orgasm in such a place. Sylvie laughed aloud, reached over and squeezed
Ruth’s thigh.

Even the idea of the place excites her, Ruth thought. She’ll want
to paint every woman there. And in a short time, she’ll meet a woman she can’t
resist. I’d love to see her drop all her brushes and paint tubes on the floor
when that moment comes. Now Ruth was laughing, too.

I wonder if she’s thinking about dumping me right now, Sylvie
thought. Bet she is. Plunk Sylvie down in the living room and she’ll go
a-whoring on the spot. They looked at one another with broad smiles on their
faces as though each knew a secret about the other, a curious new habit that
had come over them since leaving Doñana.

We’re so far apart, I may never have another serious conversation
with her, Ruth thought.

You dear old fucker, Sylvie thought. What are you really up to,
anyway?

Then each relinquished the other and gave in completely to the
heat and light. All around them were dark green olive groves ripening in the
heat. The heat and light seemed to quiver in the air, as though invisible
phantoms were rushing past them. Moisture glinted from the dark green leaves of
the olive trees and above them, the umber shadows of the Sierra Nevada
mountains rose up, pale as a watercolor sketch.

But then, Sylvie thought, it is all recreated in a single
alchemical moment of the mind: it is the complete stillness of delight; it is a
tincture of magic and musk; it’s the Spanish cytinus flower’s yellow petals
opening into a spray of suns; it’s a woman loosely wrapped in green and blue
with earthen streaks who can devastate you with her simple presence. Never
mistake her power. Any or all of these may comprise my next painting—here,
now—of Spain.

Why didn’t I love it until this moment? Ruth thought. Why have I
been so foolishly distracted?

No words, no images at all now, Sylvie thought. It’s baking me
into a hot knot of pleasure, its own design. Why aspire? Why even move my arm
to paint? Maybe I’ll give it all up—after fucking Ruth to death, of course. She
so deserves to die in my arms in beautiful Spain.