The Sacred Beasts (19 page)

Sylvie looked at the ceiling, walls and
shutters and imagined gravity releasing two women who were pulling renaissance
garb off each other. Their faces are enraptured as they rip one another’s
fabled bodices open, and Sylvie began to laugh. Then they make love, naked and
hungry, at the top of the ceiling, their clothing spiraling artfully downward
to perfect the composition. The canvas would be tall and narrow to enclose the
scene, Sylvie thought, and then, suddenly, her thoughts seemed to revolve 180
degrees. “I just noticed something amazing,” she said. “Imagination destroys
pornography. I have no more desire to re-arrange you. What a surprise!”

“Imagination does. So does empathy. Sympathy, too. Pornography’s a
very small world,” Ruth said. “But I’m done talking, my beauty.” Then they made
love with renewed pleasure. At one point, they were playfully fighting one
another to see who could remain on top of the other and rolled over the side of
the bed, landing on a cool, marble floor.

“Oh shit!” Sylvie shouted. “Oh damn!” Tell me you’re alright, my
love.”

“I didn’t hit my head, just landed on your leg,” Ruth said.

“I landed on my arm. It still feels like hell, doesn’t it?”

“Well,” Ruth said, “now we know we’ve returned to civilization.”
They picked themselves up painfully, wearily, and collapsed into the bed and
each other’s arms.

They slept immediately and did not make love
until first light, wh
en Sylvie awoke in a state of intense
excitement. “You would not believe the dream I just had,” she said rapidly.
“I’m completely . . . you know . . .” Ruth understood at once and softly
touched her clitoris and circled her labia while moving down to take them into
her mouth. She put three fingers deep into her vagina and with two of them
circled her uterus while massaging the exterior area rhythmically. Sylvie had
an instant series of rapid orgasms growing more intense and screamed for a
minute, then burst into laughter. Ruth felt the blood leaving her genitals and
withdrew. “I guess I woke up the whole damned place,” Sylvie said, still
laughing.

“We’re in Spain,” Ruth said. “It’s expected, night and day, and if
not you, then someone else—woman, man, animal.” They both laughed. “Now, what
did you dream?”

“I can’t remember, of course. But it doesn’t matter, my love.
You’ve fulfilled the need expressed in my dream. Are you . . . ?”

“After seeing you like that, oh yes!” Ruth
said. Sylvie massaged the area around Ruth’s clitoris and labia, only to touch
them in circular motions later and finally quite hard. Ruth had one very long
orgasm, thinking, she’s learned just how I like it. In a week, we’re old
lovers. Then they were both unconscious until they heard a woman’s voice in the
next room, singing an unknown Andalusian folk song in a rich mezzo voice. They
suddenly registered dazzling sunlight, the persistent touch of the heat and a
softer sound of a mattress being moved as the song continued, clear, strong,
and supple.

They smiled, they listened. “How perfect,” Sylvie whispered. They
touched one another without words.

Finally, Ruth said, “Yes, though it’s probably a terrible job,
changing and washing all that linen, cleaning the rooms and being ordered
around. But if anyone can be satisfied with it, she is.”

“But what a gift to give us, what a way to wake up in Seville . .
. I haven’t loved this city until now. Maybe she’s singing deliberately, to all
the noisy lovers.” They continued to lie together, listening and smiling.

“We’ll never know.”

“How lovely mysteries are.”

“How necessary they are.” This will be our fondest memory of
Seville, Ruth thought. That’s perfect, too, because she probably won’t want to
stay another day, not with an adventure like yesterday.

They had brunch at a restaurant recommended by the concierge. “Are
you up for another day in Seville?” Ruth asked. “There’s so much to see—the
Alcazar, the Moorish palace; the Museum of Fine Arts; and I don’t think we even
made it to the town square.”

Sylvie was pensive and silent. “No, I want to feel free,
footloose. Let’s move on, though I do appreciate soft beds, showers,
restaurants and even strange walks through contorted old cities that make me
think of horizontal live oak trees.”

“So you don’t find this Spain’s most beautiful city?” Ruth asked.
Sylvie thought of the chapel, the prostitute, the hard looks of the men and the
maze-like streets that held them.

“It might have been for you. For me, there’s the city I look at
and then the one that looks back at me. What looked back at me yesterday was
predatory, distorted, pure Goya. And that chapel had a rare purity of
ugliness.” We’ve been in two different Sevilles, Ruth thought, and that
prostitute lives in still another, one that Sylvie will paint. But I saw it. I
saw that Goya looking back at Sylvie.

We’re still in the forest, Ruth thought.

Why do I imagine nothing but harsh guitars sounding, Sylvie
thought, their strings dry and raw? Is it the heat?

“How about seeing more countryside, olive groves, Andalusian villages
on hilltops?” Ruth asked.

“Let me at it!” The heat was suddenly full of tenderness, a child
clinging. “How do you always know?”

“I’m ancient, easily old enough to be an oracle. You always forget
that.”

Ruth drove south, though she intended eventually to go east to
Granada and the coast. They were again immersed in waves of white light, dark
green olive groves and now rows of orange trees, the Sierra Nevada mountains so
pale they could be brown shadows or a mirage and heat, heat as palpable as a living
thing beside them. Hilltops began to appear, and one displayed a white
Andalusian village at its summit.

“Ah, there,” Sylvie said with an ache in her voice, as though
imagining an inevitably finer world. “I want to be there.”

The road wound its way up the hill and soon they drove into the
noisy courtyard of a small village of whitewashed houses with salmon-colored
ceramic tiles on their roofs. The courtyard was obviously a city square, full
of people dressed for a fiesta. Narrow streets dropped away from it, with small
white houses and potted red flowers hanging by grillwork from their windows.
They parked on one of these streets and returned to the courtyard.

The scene was loud and chaotic yet inviting: some sort of
procession, now barely visible, had passed from the church through the square,
and they were seeing its aftermath. Many men were in Andalusian dress with
flat, round Cordovan hats, sashes around their waists, brown suits with short
jackets, all in muted brown colors but for very white shirts open at the
collar. Some were still carrying drums, long flutes, and banners from the
procession. Others carried guitars.

Several women wore colorful Andalusian flamenco dresses, tightly
fitted and heavily ruffled low on their skirts, with shawls, fans and giant
combs setting off their long, sumptuous hair. A few men and women were on
horseback, and several horses were also attached to what looked like ancient
Conestoga wagons with red ribbons decorating their white cloth exteriors. They
had huge wooden wheels. A crowd of men in casual attire pressed close to the
others in Andalusian dress, as though they expected some kind of theater.

The courtyard was full of steadily increasing noise: talking,
yelling, laughing, drinking, singing, swearing, telling tales and occasional
firearms shooting into the air. Three roasted boars on spits were visible in a
fiery pit, and there were tables with plates and other food—sausage with
chickpeas, gazpacho, tomato salad, and slices of ham and cheese. The casual
crowd was noisier and drunker than the people in Andalusian dress, and they
pressed against them, open-mouthed, with an emotion that was almost violent and
erotic at once.

More shots were fired into the air by the crowd, who were now more
visible and carrying guns, and a quail fell dead on the plaza. Cheers erupted
from the crowd, and someone yelled, “You should have stayed in Seville,
compañero!” and everyone laughed and cheered. Another round of shots went into
the air and another quail fell from the sky. “Didn’t you like Madrid,
compañero?” someone yelled. “No, he’s from Barcelona!” another yelled, and the
crowd’s laughter turned derisive. “Live and die in Andalusia!” someone else
cried out. “Yes, yes! Live and die an Andalusian!” The crowd roared and
applauded.

“Can this possibly be an Andalusian sacred day or is this just a
plain old drunken bash?”

“More likely a fiesta after a hunt,” Ruth said. “Their kill—three
wild boars—is roasting in the pit. More people would be in Andalusian dress for
a holiday, I think, and they wouldn’t be drunk and wild so early. The gypsies
are here to entertain. There will be flamenco tonight, or whenever the gypsies
want to perform.”

Ochre smoke, a Goyan crowd, fire rimming the edges of thought,
Toulouse Lautrec drunk and on holiday in the Spanish countryside, and thank-god
I am invisible! Sylvie thought. Is this the twenty-first century crowding
around a nineteenth-century version, or am I in two different universes at
once?

Pure forest masquerading as fiesta, Ruth thought. They’re close to
a brawl. This could get dangerous. There are many men watching Sylvie, but
she’s too fascinated by the atmosphere to notice.

Ruth and Sylvie walked slowly and cautiously around the square as
more firearms were shot into the air. They noted that the riders had led the
horses away and were re-attaching them to the wagons, which were now farther
away from the courtyard. Still, some of the horses reared up at the noise and
were comforted by the gypsies.

Fascinating, Ruth thought, the gypsies stay cool and the crowd
goes out of control. I thought the reverse was supposed to happen.

Suddenly a low, powerful woman’s voice rang out in a fast flamenco
rhythm. Other voices, hands immediately answered it with drums and castanets,
all beating the same rhythm, guitars suddenly throbbing along. The men with
guitars cried out in falsetto like rhythmic ululations of despair. The woman’s
voice overpowered the others, leaving only her clear, deep, rich mezzo singing
while others danced and beat her rhythms. The casual male crowd rushed into the
courtyard and began to dance and clap their hands. Behind them were women,
obviously villagers in casual dress, smiling and clapping their hands. They did
not move forward. Now the men who could see the singer were awe-stricken, as if
before a goddess or a saint. Their violent emotion instantly channeled itself
into child-like wonder, and they were completely under the spell of the woman’s
voice.

Just in time to avoid a brawl or a flock of dead birds, Ruth
thought.

I have never seen anything like this, Sylvie thought.

At last, the woman whose voice transfixed the crowd advanced into
view in Andalusian gypsy flamenco attire. The crowd of men instantly opened and
fell back so that all could see and hear her. Ruth thought, what a stunningly
beautiful woman—face, figure, voice—walking with slow, regal carriage,
commanding the crowd like the most exquisite general. Ah no, it’s partly
physics: her dress is so tight and heavily ruffled below that she can’t move
other than slowly, grandly, with measured steps. She’s several of their myths
in one—goddess/unapproachable virgin/whore—so the men predictably go crazy. Yet
how spontaneous this performance is! It could not possibly be rehearsed: the
crowd and the performers are reflecting and infusing one another, moving and
sounding as one. Fascinating: is it like performance art in the US? A bit, but
it’s something much deeper, older, vastly more intense and emotional. What can
Sylvie be thinking? But of course, there’s that wolfishly hungry look on her
face. It is inevitable that she will paint this woman.

You are my bird of paradise, Sylvie thought, and that is how I
will paint this moment. How spontaneously you come to me, like an animal, and
that I can only love, for you come to me in the pride of your womanhood, every
movement regal, stately, and grand. Your formula may be simple: a tight dress
with ruffles low on the hem, a flower beside your ear, a colorful shawl, and
your hair too wild and thick for a comb. But what a transformation you have created:
your dress is midnight blue and sheerly follows your body, embraces it with
passion. You come to me as dreams begin in the midnight color of night. Your
shawl is part of the dream yet what a contrast: swirls of the most glowing
orange and yellow color, like gems turning fluid and draping themselves to you,
your lovers. Everything, everyone, is your lover. These are the wings I will
paint for my midnight bird’s luxuriant body. Now, you fold your wings like the
bird that knows paradise only too well, and for the moment only your deep,
dark, wine-colored mezzo soars. In these brilliant colors, your large dark eyes
and olive skin are translucent, devastating. The orange flower beside your ear
is artless, hence more powerful. You are art yet artless, for you and the earth
dream together, paint colors and make sounds together, and I can only dream and
paint with you. My painting will be the ecstatic love—artistic, erotic,
intrinsic—that you compel in me, for you come to me in the power of your
womanhood. It gathers force, and you are almost in flight, almost! My painting
will complete you, and there you will raise your wings and soar away from us, a
wild thing, too perfectly beautiful for this world, my bird, my art, of
paradise.