“You’re strong,” she was saying then, “why don’t you help them?”
Together, side by side, slowly we retraced our steps downhill at the rear of the crowd as if I had never been the headless god nor she my mistress, but as if she and I were simply the two halves of the ancient fruit together but unjoined. The dust was rising, Catherine was pushing up the sleeves of her sweater, her very profile made me think that she was responding at last to me as well as to the white hull. Why not assume that she was beginning to value my mental landscape? Why not assume that a now invulnerable Catherine and reflective Cyril were starting over? Why not?
“Let’s get closer,” she was saying, “I want to see.”
All the sounds in the air were suddenly co-ordinated to Catherine’s voice. There below us the priest was chanting prayers across the bright water, someone was striking authoritarian chords on one of their old stringed instruments, dogs were barking.
“It’s a big affair,” I heard myself saying above the noise. “Like it?”
“Yes. I like it.”
“Remind you of anything?”
She was looking at me, shrugging, beginning to smile, preparing to express some kind of recognition. But suddenly we were pushing downhill with the rest of them, past open doors and hanging nets, pursuing the white hull that was rocking and grinding down the last incline of the village street. For one instant the entire crowd flung hands and shoulders against the sides and stern and ran, shoved, not attempting to restrain the descent of the boat but rather leaning into it and contributing to the possibility of that very crash which all this time they had been attempting to avoid.
And then the shuddering cessation, the shock of stopping, the thick and absolute immobility of the boat’s dead weight on the beach. The hour had fled, the light had changed, the stones and doorways of the dark village had given way to a thin strip of gray sand and the smell of the sea. Behind us the rising village, to our left the distant fortress, somewhere off to the right but hidden from view the cypresses and the twin villas, in front of us the brilliant sea. And men and boys were laughing and standing still while the priest stood shouting brutal, imperative instructions to an agile old man with a deformity between his shoulders and the face of a goat. The high white prow was pointed directly toward the horizon, unmoving and yet soaring, an aesthetic actuality that belied the work required to convey all this curving weight across the sand to the life of the foam. Surely the grace of the boat itself went far beyond the necessity to feed a few dark mouths from the depths of the sea.
So our feet were deep in the sand, I lit a cigarette, the boat was balancing between the loosely divided halves of the launching party. Beneath the plane tree, a young man was seated alone beside a bare wooden table, and it was he who played the archaic heart-shaped stringed instrument. I took it all in — the assembled villagers, the enormous white crescent of the waiting boat, and the dogs, the children, the black shawls, the impoverished young man whose metallic Eastern music was now reaching out toward the rolling sea. And here we were, Catherine and I together at last in the festive air. The sun was overhead but close to us, close and orange. Once more the invisible nets were spread.
“It’s all right,” I murmured, “take the glass. The old fellow just wants you to toast his boat.”
At that moment the old goat-faced man himself was suddenly before us and smiling, holding out to Catherine a little battered tin tray bearing not one of their black bottles but a small dirty glass half filled with a colorless drink more powerful, I knew, than the dusty wine. He extended the tray, raised one shoulder, looked into Catherine’s eyes and into mine. Little more than a commonplace event, an instant in time, only a small disreputable old man with a gray shirt ripped open to the waist and partially unbuttoned trousers loose at the large hips. But thanks to his agility and bright blue eyes and stubby fingers, I realized immediately that he was a friendly guide who at a glance had read Catherine’s past and mine in the very shape of our middle-aged bodies that were so much larger than his.
“Take a sip,” I said. “I’ll drink the rest.”
Catherine held the glass to her lips, I nodded my approval of the clear fierce taste that suggested both the salt of the sea and the juice of the heavy lemon. I left him a few drops which he licked with his fingers, laughing and tilting the little dirty glass above his burnished head. For another moment the glass hung high in the air while the old man patted Catherine’s arm, shook my hand, pointed with expansive admiration toward the boat still propped upright and waiting for the first touch of the uncontrollable sea.
The glass fell to the beach, the grip of the vanished hand lingered in my empty hand, Catherine smiled exactly as if the old man had not yet disappeared. But he was already gone and even now was rousing the villagers to the final effort of pushing the majestic slow boat across the sand to the sea.
“Well,”I heard myself saying, “recovered yet?”
I glanced at Catherine, the heart-shaped instrument leapt between two or three high notes and one smashing chord, Catherine held her bared elbow still tingling, no doubt, from the touch of that unfamiliar hand.
“I don’t know why I feel this way.”
“Excited?”
“It’s lucky he found us.”
“Look,”I murmured, “here come the oars.”
Two youthful figures ran down the beach with a pair of long virginal oars suspended between them. The distant fortress was cupped in the shriveled palm of desolation. The orange sun descended, the open sea undulated in slow fleshy waves. The old man and the angry priest were arguing about a few half-submerged brown rocks which apparently lay directly in the path of the boat. Catherine smiled. Heavy-headed Cyril smiled. The boat was in motion.
Yes, in motion, and Catherine had already removed her sandals, already I anticipated the sight of Catherine’s green slacks wet to the knees and the sensation of my own black trousers weighted at least to my bulky calves with dark sea water.
The upheld oars protruded above the sweat-dampened heads of those men straining at the stern of the boat, to one side and at the edge of the beach the priest stood with his skirts awash and the large and radiant silver cross held aloft in both extended fists. Again the two small boys were filled with self-importance and were hard at work. The forward motion of the boat was slow, painful, continuous, unmistakable, and bore no relation to priest, struggling men, old women. No, I thought, that white boat was moving only for the sake of Catherine, me, and for one agile and ageless village elder obviously deformed at birth. Quietly I smiled at the symmetry of orange sky, chunks of bloodied wood, oars that projected into nothing more than air, boat that still lay several yards from the vast tide that would float it into life and yet would one day reduce it to nothing more than a few cracked wooden ribs half buried in sand.
“Remind you of anything?”
My smile was embedded in those slow words, and as soon as I spoke I knew that my voice was exactly as audible to Catherine as it was to me, as if all those other sounds (water, music, laborious breathing, grinding of wood on wood) were only a silence for me to fill or existed only that Catherine and I might listen more attentively to what each of us had to say. Catherine glanced over her shoulder and her eyes were larger than I remembered.