Yesterday? Only yesterday.
I was taking slow uphill strides and smelling the flowers, asking myself why I had had such unhappy luck with Catherine, wondering how I was ever to win her to all the sensual possibilities of the intimacy I had in mind, persuade her to give me her complete attention, to look at me, to live on with Cyril.
Yes, I thought, there in all this suffusion of flowers is the familiar Physanthyllis tetraphylla. The ripe and fruity vinelike plant with its wet green leaves, yellow buds and faint traces of silver hair, lay spread across the entire surface of the dusty village street, and I could hardly fail to note its tendrils drifting off into silence, its nodules cup-shaped, as usual, in pulpy succulence. And wasn’t that the Pisum elatius? Yes, I thought, Fiona’s favorite.
But Catherine, I asked myself, why doesn’t Catherine know by now that I am enough, that she is enough, that we are all interchangeable, so to speak, and that our present relationship is already as unlimited and undeniable as our past affair? After all, there is something glorious about standing together in time as two large white graceful beasts might stand permanently together in an empty field. And yet how could I convey the truth of all this to Catherine?
At least she was wearing her pea-green slacks (glancing over my shoulder, waiting for her to close the gap between us, frowning at her obvious reluctance to catch up with me), exactly as if her children had yet to smear their little hands in the folds of my dissolving tapestry and we, the four of us, had yet to follow the angular black-haired shepherd into the still grove and then beyond to sun, sea, joyous ruins, long nights, distant piping. At least the pea-green slacks, a white sweater, an old pair of heavy dried-out leather sandals on bare feet. At least there was the clear sound of her matter-of-fact exertion — the sounds of her breath, the grating comfortable sound of the sandals. But nothing more. No corresponding glance at my own black suit and white shirt open at the collar and golden hair beginning to curl at last into tight sprightly barbs over the ears and down the back of my neck. No smile. No music in the way she moved. Nothing for Cyril.
And then? Then it burst upon us, so to speak, the spectacle, the processional, the very message of our actuality. Suddenly the narrow street was looping again, rising more steeply than ever, and in one single instant priest and children and barefoot men and white boat were poised above us. Suddenly Catherine and I were thrust against high stone walls on opposite sides of the narrow street. The two of us stood upright and facing each other with our flesh and even our bones flush to the rock, precisely as the village priest tried to wave us back down the street and out of the way of the white boat whose lunging destructive descent was prevented only by the crowd of men.
“Don’t move,” I said across the space between us, “there’s plenty of room.”
“What are they doing?”
“Just trying to launch their boat. Don’t worry.”
The entire procession was upon us in clamorous motion. Gesticulating priest and darting boys and barefoot men strained backward against the full weight of wood and brass and shouted to each other, calling out in violent square-mouthed appeal to some archaic and obviously indifferent deity. But only the wide, high-prowed boat itself appeared to move as it groaned, listed to one side and then dragged its ragged half-naked attendants another few feet down the steep grade toward Catherine and me. I saw the golden fish on the white prow above my head, watched the broad gunwales swelling from stone wall to wall and filling the street. And if they let go? Or if one of them stumbled or too many turned away to drink from the several black wine bottles passing from man to man? And if the enormous white sun-struck prow then veered toward Catherine, veered toward me?
“We’ll let them pass,” I called, “and then we’ll join the procession. OK?”
But already the great curve of the towering white prow was slipping between us, stopping, inching on again. Now Catherine and stone wall and little street were gone, obliterated by the white enamel sweep of the boat and the sudden presence of the men who were clutching her gunwales, clutching her sides, and struggling, sweating, laughing, warning each other of collision and disaster. High on the prow they had fastened a handful of Lobularia maritima, and I found myself nodding because the flowers were white and implied fleeting tenderness on the part of even these boatbuilding villagers.
How like them, I thought, to lay the keel in some tin-roofed shed up here on the high edge of the village, laboring with crude tools and rusty old circular saw until their boat finally stood finished not within reach of the dark tide but gleaming and massive beside the boatbuilder’s cottage. Of course they were a dark-eyed people, I reminded myself, and not entirely ignorant, because if they had built this enormous empty vessel up here amidst their tethered goats, and had employed typical perversity and illogicality in its construction, nonetheless they had managed to lift it, transport it, move it down these steep and treacherous streets with a display of what I could only call true primitive ingenuity. Despite their sweat, their shuffling, their grunts of fagag, crespi fagag and their shouts of croak peonie, the desperate movements of their naked feet, the anger and sudden lapses to childish carelessness, wasn’t all this anomalous effort nonetheless an unmistakable example of their practicality?
Yes, I told myself, of course it was. Because these very men who were adept at mending nets and whose feet were bare and cracked and whose voices were tuned to nothing more than shouting to each other throughout their long hours of night fishing, even these same men had apparently held council. Suddenly and together they had leapt from emotionalism to cogency, from baffled dream to rationality, and in one moment of lucid silence had overcome the problem of a graceful and necessary white boat constructed witlessly in the wrong part of the village.
Simple, I thought, and pure, mysterious, crudely logical (seeing Catherine’s head and then her shoulders reappearing gradually on the other side of the enormous white canted hull), because it all depended on a few oblong blocks of cream-colored wood and on the agility and stamina of two small boys who were sweating even more than the shouting and laughing men. Yes, I thought, how like them to rely on children and to see in a few pieces of scarce wood a somehow religious solution to a mechanical problem. They had cut the blocks, shaped them, in the center of each had chiseled a half-moon indentation broad enough and deep enough to hold the boat’s keel. In that tin-roofed shed above us, out of sight, they had raised the prow and forced the front block beneath the keel and shoved, pushed, pulled, and had driven the second block beneath the keel. They had continued this process until the greased wooden blocks were spaced out evenly in the form of a movable and slippery track across which their enormous empty white boat was sliding painfully but safely down through the entire steep length of the village toward the beach and sea.
Religious insight. Primitive ingenuity. And the two small boys? Even now they were moving in their assigned positions, one of them staggering forward with a great block in his arms and reaching the prow, daring to stoop and drop the heavy block directly in the path of the advancing keel. The second small crouching boy fell to his knees and tugged, dragged, lifted into his arms the full weight of another cream-colored block that had emerged from beneath the stern and, grimacing and wobbling, ran forward to dispose of his load as had the first small boy.
But did it matter to Catherine, I wondered, that they had greased their dozen or so oblong blocks of wood with a dark thick shiny substance that was obviously blood? Amidst flowers, noise, dust, the tilting of the black wine bottles, the sudden lurching of the boat and shouts of fear, had Catherine begun to discern the religious insight implicit in their use of partially coagulated blood as a rich and appropriate lubricant? Perhaps, I told myself, deciding that in all likelihood Catherine had in fact observed the thickening stains of blood just as she must have seen the few loose sprays of Lobularia maritima affixed to the high prow of the boat. Priest, blood, Lobularia maritima, procession — how could it have been more plain?