The Sacred Beasts (20 page)

They watched the woman perform until she mysteriously vanished
into the crowd. A male singer and dancer followed, and then it all ended
abruptly, in the gypsy fashion, when the performers no longer wished to
perform, oblivious of the audience. Ruth and Sylvie walked around the village
in astonishment, looking at the last moments of a fiesta that had become
another world. “Let’s stay here awhile, at least spend the night,” Sylvie said
suddenly. “Let’s forget about Granada.”

“You’re an artist and you can dismiss the Alhambra?” Ruth asked.

“I’m a woman and I know the Moors generally denied everything of
significance in their culture to women. Screw their art! I plan to transcend
it, anyway, reveal something they never saw.”

“That’s a good reason: we stay, fine by me. I’ve already been to
Granada and the Alhambra. You might be responding to the fact that the gypsies
are matriarchal, as was prehistoric Spain, according to several historians.”

“I know the gypsies are matriarchal. I can feel it.”

“Who would guess we’d come to Spain and turn into gypsies?”

“I would,” Sylvie said, lightly pushed Ruth against a wall and
kissed her slowly, oblivious of the time. “Make love to me,” she said.

“You never need to ask,” Ruth said tenderly. “We’ll find a rural
inn around here, one where the gypsies are performing. They often have bars and
stages on the first floor. We’ll shower and make love, then come down for the
performance. It will relax us.”

“Perfect. How do you always know what I want? How can that always
be true?”

“I just know what it means when a woman pushes me against a wall
and presses her lovely body all over me. Nothing complicated about that.” They
laughed.

“I am obvious, I agree,” Sylvie said, “and I have no shame.”

“I like that about your generation!” Ruth said.

As they drove around the village, Sylvie thought: through the lens
of an orgasm, the Alhambra shrinks to a crack on the floor and women become
giantesses, living in an immense jungle that looks a bit like olive groves, but
is high enough for a forest canopy through which the sun and moon cannot appear
as such, but only glitter and glow in impossibly vivid streaks of blue and
green. The women’s bodies are tawny and round, shaped in primitive lines like
Rousseau. The Alhambra and other architectural wonders of Spain look like a
child’s pile of toys in the corner. Oh, that I must paint!

They soon found a two-story inn with a stage for musical
performances and moved in their backpacks and duffel bags. They showered, and
then made love very roughly, as they had in the forest. Ruth found herself
resisting this, and then decided that it was impossible not to enjoy making
love with Sylvie; perhaps it was time for love on the rough side. Eventually,
they forgot everything and could not stop, just as they had in the forest,
until Sylvie screamed loudly in orgasm and was answered by a hawk flying over
the valley below. To this, they both laughed uproariously, realizing that they
were, at last, satisfied.

“Well,” said Sylvie, “now I’m a bad influence on the birds of
prey.”

“You’ve just overstimulated them, my love; but no matter, we’re
here with the gypsies.”

“Are you relaxed enough?”

“Oh, yes, but you are the question mark. There will probably be
another one of those beautiful gypsy women performing.”

“OK, I’m over the first,” and Sylvie smiled. “All ready for the
second.”

“Apparently the hawk knew that. He wanted his turn.” They laughed
and caressed one another; then decided that yes, indeed they were very relaxed.

They quickly washed and dressed and went down to the bar, which
included both a stage and a restaurant. They ordered dinner and a bottle of the
local wine in delighted expectation of another gypsy performance. Touching
their glasses to their favorite toast,
krasna život
, they felt very
close to one another again, as they had in the forest. “What else but the
beauty of it?” Ruth said.

“That’s just it,” Sylvie said. “I need to draw and paint again
very soon. I’ve had so many ideas that I haven’t been able to tell you.”

“Let me guess,” Ruth said. “You have a burning passion to paint
the Seville prostitute and that gypsy flamenco singer we heard this afternoon.”

Sylvie was quiet, staring. “How did you know that?”

“You looked at them like wolf drooling over a lamb, though you
were a very beautiful wolf. You’ve looked at me like that, too,” Ruth said,
smiling.

Sylvie smiled and looked down. “That’s probably true, though I’m
sure I have never drooled. I’ve had a lot of other ideas, too, and I really
need to stop and paint for a time. Spain will have to wait; though of course,
we’re touring Spain.”

“That’s just too bad for Spain! It loses two tourists.” They
laughed. “You can best do that in Barcelona, you know. Monserrat has plenty of
space for painters. Artists are probably the most fascinating part of the
feminist movement for her. Our stay is open-ended, too, so you can paint for
some time if you want to.”

“So let’s drive straight to the coast and up to Barcelona. Let’s
forget the rest. I want to paint all day and then drink Spanish wine and make
love to you at night. I’ll say to myself, ‘Ah, the life of an artist, just
giving in to every strong urge and miraculously making something beautiful out
of it’!”

“Call that ‘Spain Perfected.’ ”

They clinked glasses and felt that they were celebrating
something, though it was nothing more than the fact and pleasure of their
lives. The wine was nearly finished when they heard a sharp cry behind the
stage; a taut, vibrating male voice full of fire, pain and gravel.

They come, Ruth thought, our element, the wildlife of Spain. The
stage filled with male dancers whose canes tapped the floor in a rapid,
staccato beat like gunfire. Male and female singers entered with guitars, all
in Andalusian dress. Altogether: they stop and are silent; and the heartbeat of
the earth passes; then the fast rhythm of canes beating and the music of crying
voices sounds again only to stop with a crash, breathless, the heart skipping a
beat, and then the rhythmic music again and again. Sylvie thought, they seem to
be conjuring, summoning; perhaps a force of nature is coming, something they
can’t live without. The crying, crashing rhythm sounds again and stops; rhythm
and stop; rhythm and stop.

And onto the stage she came.

Another beauty, Ruth thought, but a dancer this time. She looked
at Sylvie and thought, my love has become a wolf again. I will have to start
believing in the werewolf legends of Galicia. But, it is art that has bitten
her. There are several men alternating between staring at Sylvie and the
dancer, but Sylvie’s oblivious of it. Good.

Sylvie thought, you come to me in the shawl and ruffled skirt I
have seen before, but what a change: now they are charmed objects, alive, your
familiar spirits all in yellow, and your body can add new shapes, sculpt
reality, continually transform itself. You dance with these new creatures: they
are your wings, then your capes, then mysterious spheres appearing at any point
around your body, then a crowd reaching for you, then your weapons—that above
all! Your beauty is not your essence but your weapon: how well I know you! With
the long train of your dress behind you, we know that something immense has
passed, a titanic ship, and left a whirlpool wake that devours us. You raise
your arms in the shawl and advance toward me like a yellow bird of prey, and I
want to be captured. Several people behind me are clapping and saying the word
“buleria,” so your dance has a name; yet you are something beyond words but not
beyond images, for I will capture you in paint. How passionately I will merge
with you then. From the frothy yellow masses you have drawn in the air, your
lean arched back and bare arms rise like blades. Your arms reach to the sky as
though calling a world into being. You are heat and fire; you explode in yellow
flames; then your arms fall straight down and cut like knives through the
turbulence you have created. Again you let the rhythm of your moving body drive
you to frenzy and then stop as one dead, only to arch your lean body again and
become another rhythm traced in yellow fire. Your hands with castanets pierce
the air in knife-like strokes before you, pass over your head and vibrate
behind you. The men cry in a primitive fusion of desire and pain, their canes
stamping the rhythm whose rise and fall is the golden yellow dagger you dance,
back arched, hands and castanets piercing, piercing. Everything about you
pierces—arms, feet, eyes, the severity of your hair pulled back by a comb. The
men work through sound but you, with body arched, are pure fury in elegant
layers of yellow cloth, the sun to the first woman on earth, majestic and
proud.

Now your movement is perfectly angular, your arms straight in the
air like swords, then caressing the air above you; then your castanet hands
weave themselves tenderly down and trace the lines of small flowers behind your
back. You clap and stamp your feet—faster, faster!—only to show the mastery of
your body. You pace to me, half pawing the floor like a wild animal, then your
feet seem made only for fast, rhythmic beats. You raise your arms, only to lean
into your own body’s curves. When you move fast, you cast the world into
shining yellow pieces. When you stop, you take my breath. You undo all that you
do, explode and implode. You are the flame of life that clenches itself into a
pattern; then releases itself into another, only to repeat, repeat; as agonized
as it is ecstatic; losing control only to stop on a line; all in a roar of
stamping feet and canes. You are the power of excess that can only become the
fluidity of desire. To say that you have seduced me is to belittle your
victory: you have seduced the world into dancing in the domain of art. You
complete the dance with sweat pouring from the lean arched blade of your body.
You are my warrior love: how well I know you! You give me the power to say that
you and you alone are Spain. You are the matador and the bull.

She is simply magnificent, Ruth thought, and so deserving of our
admiration and protection. She reminds me of the wildlife I left behind in
Doñana. What will happen to them all when the heat of the planet puts so much
land under water? What body politic can act in sufficient unity to create the
infrastructure that protects life? Not my country, not the US; no center-right
nation suspicious of government will have a chance. Spain? Who knows; I suppose
the gypsies will return to their wandering lifestyle. I think I’ve read that
the government forced most of them into an Andalusian slum by the Guadalquivir
and it often floods, even now. This dancer probably either lives there or grew
up there. Maybe all of Spain will take up the gypsy wandering life. Who will
have the luxury of living a sedentary life on a hill with complete resources
for life—and who would ever want to live that way? Besides, they’ll be destroyed
in the first tornado. Who will feel what is being lost? Who will care, really?
Human beings seem to be disappearing into their economic fears, their crazy
religions, their cell phones and their video games.

Sylvie was shocked to see how pale and serious Ruth looked; she
had nearly forgotten to clap for the dancer. In their room, later, she said
angrily, “You are still grieving and you said nothing! You are thinking of
Katia even now!”

Ruth smiled wearily. “It’s not Katia; not at all. I love being
here with you, and I do love you. How you’ve made me live again! What an idiot
I would be not to appreciate it!” Her voice showed a painful intensity that
Sylvie immediately trusted. “Sometimes, I can’t avoid thinking about the world
I will leave behind me. I felt this way in Doñana when I realized how decimated
the animal populations were.”

“But you will write your book!”

“Yes, and what a pathetically small act that will be, given the
enormity of the problem. But that’s all I can do and I will.”

They held one another and fell asleep quickly. The day had
exhausted them both. In the morning, they felt renewed and were only too glad
to be back on the road again. Love it while you can, Ruth thought, while anyone
can. It’s so easy to love this world, the road opening in front of you like
something that will never end. It says, life goes on, there’s always hope, and
hope is the most powerful seducer we ever meet in this life.

As they drove further east, the land became even more arid. It’s
almost Biblical, Ruth thought. I see medlars and carobs, date palms like the
ones in Arabian deserts, and even almonds, like those eaten by John the
Baptist. They had nearly reached the coast when a strange village on a hill
caught Sylvie’s eye. “Look there!” she said. “It has the same lay-out on a hill
like the other one, but it’s dark, almost brown, and I can’t see the roofs. Was
there a fire? What’s wrong with it?”

“It looks like it hasn’t been whitewashed in a long time and the
roofs have fallen in. It could be abandoned.”

“But, a whole village abandoned?”

“All the jobs might be on the coast. That could empty a village.”

“I have to see it!” Sylvie said, and Ruth took the first off-ramp.
Soon they were ascending another hill. They drove into a courtyard whose design
was much like the other village they had visited. But, all the buildings were
covered with desert dust and fists of bristling yellow vegetation. The roofs
had fallen in on most of the buildings, and the windows had been shattered by
desert winds. They suddenly became aware of the low desolate sound of a
powerful wind. The village seemed to be completely abandoned, defeated and
dying in the strange, dark voice of the wind.