**
“More water?” he asked, gently. He placed the lantern near her head, so he could look at her. She was sweaty and pale. She opened her eyes, but did not appear to see.
“I found a spring, a lucky break,” he told her. “Pardon the pun.”
Now she was focusing better. She turned and looked at him with a helpless gaze.
“You came back,” she offered.
“I tried to find the car, but I couldn’t get back to it,” he said. “Halfway there, it started to get dark, and I was worried about leaving you.”
“You might easily worry a little less,” she said.
“It’s good that you’re making jokes,” he told her. “I assume your leg still hurts?”
She nodded.
“Do you want to look at the stag again?” He asked. He lit his candle and held it to the image.
“Are there other paintings in the cave?”
“Many,” she said.
“I could make copies for you. Not…just now. But tomorrow.”
She closed her eyes, wincing, apparently in pain.
“You might have a long recovery,” he told her. “I am…interested, I guess, in these cave images. I could help you. I could be an assistant for you. It might be, I don’t know, useful for me. Things are a little…tricky for me right now. I might like the distraction.”
She had no response.
“We might travel together as well. Egypt, perhaps. I think I could be interested…if someone was a sort of helping me to be interested. You don’t know me,” he continued. “But…life has been troubling. It feels like I’m in a muddle, and worst of all, I can’t say for sure what the muddle is. I’ve been exiled, yes, I’ve been exiled. Maybe…you could help me. I could forget, sometimes. The moon will be exceptionally lovely some nights…we will travel over smooth water, sometimes. ”
“I would like to see an Isis, dressed in gold,” she offered, weakly. It was an idea that drifted up through the core of her being. It was akin to spotting the back of a surfacing turtle, beneath a veil of amniotic fluid. In such moments, he thought, is our scaffolding revealed.
He dove after her turtle-thought.
“Isn’t there a story about a city of gold, an Eldorado? I think it’s in South America. Of course, there’s no such thing, people say. Still, a person might look for it, anyway. I think I would like to do that, look for Eldorado, in morning and evenings, perhaps. They say you have to look at morning or evening, when the reflection from the rooftops is just right. Otherwise, you could be standing in front of it, and still miss it entirely.”
“Yes,” she agreed. He hurried back to her.
“I’m sorry, I’m not sure what part you were agreeing to,” he told her. She opened her eyes, looked up, seemed about to respond…and then, he heard shouting, voices. In a moment the tavern owner and his wife had discovered the pair.
“Well, you’ve been rescued,” joked the tavern owner, and Richard could do nothing but set his jaw and keep his thoughts to himself.
**
On the station platform, a thin assemblage of humanity…the dregs of summer in stiff dresses and warm-weather suits. He watched from his window, his ticket crumpled in his hand. In a moment, the conductor would come about and punch a hole through the center of it, and then he would have committed himself. Until then, he was just hovering about the edge, still thinking he could change his mind, even though he wouldn’t.
“Are you headed for the Rivera?” asked the passenger opposite him. She smiled genially…he smiled in return. She was a middle-aged woman, and her hat boasted a crown of artificial violets.
“Yes,” he said.
In a second there would be hole through the center of the paper in his hand, and you would be able to see right through it, if you wanted to.
“There is a salt-water spring that you must visit. Do you suffer from stiff joints?”
“A kind of malaise,” he replied, vaguely.
“It would be just the thing. It lifts the spirits. It’s a cure for most physical and mental ailments,” she declared. “I have a scientist friend who want to present a paper on them. He’s simply gathering his material.”
The conductor appeared in the doorway.
“I’ll have to try that,” agreed Richard, pleasantly. Then, “Yes, it’s worth a try, at least.”
Colette's Cat Page 2
