by Ellen Datlow
I called her about eleven o’clock. She commiserated. What could she say? I must rest and take care, and we would all meet further along the week.
In the afternoon, when I was beginning to feel better, she woke me from a long hot doze with two plastic containers of local yogurt, which would apparently do wonders for me.
“I’ll only stay a moment. God, you do look pale. Haven’t you got something to take for it?”
“Yes. I’ve taken it.”
“Well. Try the yogurt, too.”
“As soon as I can manage anything, I’ll try the yogurt.”
“By the way,” she said, “I can tell you the story of the Janfia now.” She stood in the bedroom window, looking out and down at it. “It’s extremely sinister. Are you up to it, I wonder?”
“Tell me, and see.”
Although I had not wanted the interruption, now it had arrived, I was oddly loath to let her go. I wished she would have stayed and had dinner with me herself, alone. Isabella had always tried to be kind to me. Then again, I was useless with people now. I could relate to no one, could not give them any quarter. I would be better off on my own.
“Well it seems there was a poet, young and handsome, for whose verses princes would pay in gold.”
“Those were the days,” I said idly.
“Come, it was the fifteenth century. No sewers, no antibiotics, only superstition and gold could get you by.” “You sound nostalgic, Isabella.”
“Shush now. He used to roam the countryside, the young poet, looking for inspiration, doubtless finding it with shepherdesses, or whatever they had here then. One dusk he smelled an exquisite fragrance, and searching for its source, came on a bush of pale opening flowers. So enamoured was he of the perfume, that he dug up the bush, took it home with him, and planted it in a pot on the balcony outside his room. Here it grew into a tree, and here the poet, dreaming, would sit all afternoon, and when night fell and the moon rose, he would carry his mattress on to the balcony, and go to sleep under the moon-shade of the tree’s foliage.”
Isabella broke off. Already falling into the idiom, she said, “Am I going to write this, or are you?”
“I’m too tired to write nowadays. And anyway, I can’t sell anything. You do it.”
“We’ll see. After all the trouble I had with that cow of an editor over my last—”
“And meantime, finish the story, Isabella.” Isabella beamed.
She told me, it began to be noticed that the poet was very wan, very thin, very listless. That he no longer wrote a line, and soon all he did was to sit all day and lie all night long by the tree. His companions looked in vain for him in the taverns and his patrons looked in vain for his verse. Finally a very great prince, the lord of the town, went himself to the poet’s room. Here, to his dismay, he found the poet stretched out under the tree. It was close to evening, the evening star stood in the sky and the young moon was shining in through the leaves of the Janfia tree upon the poet’s white face which was now little better than a beautiful skull. He seemed near to death, which the prince’s physicians, being called in, confirmed. “How,” cried the prince, in grief, “have you come to this condition?” Then, though it was not likely to restore him, he begged the poet to allow them to take him to some more comfortable spot. The poet refused. “Life is nothing to me now,” he said. And he asked the prince to leave him, for the night was approaching and he wished to be alone.
The prince was at once suspicious. He sent the whole company away, and only he returned with stealth, and hid himself in the poet’s room, to see what went on.
Sure enough, at midnight, when the sky was black and the moon rode high, there came a gentle rustling in the leaves of the Janfia. Presently there stepped forth into the moonlight a young man, dark-haired and pale of skin, clothed in garments that seemed woven of the foliage of the tree itself. And he, bending over the poet, kissed him, and the poet stretched up his arms. And what the prince then witnessed filled him with abysmal terror, for not only was it a demon he watched, but one which performed acts utterly proscribed by mother church. Eventually overcome, the prince lost consciousness. When he roused, the dawn was breaking, the tree stood scentless and empty, and the poet, lying alone, was dead.
“So naturally,” said Isabella, with relish, “there was a cry of witchcraft, and the priests came and the tree was burned to cinders. All but for one tiny piece that the prince found, to his astonishment, he had broken off. Long after the poet had been buried, in unhallowed ground, the prince kept this little piece of the Janfia tree, and eventually thinking it dead, he threw it from his window out into the garden of his palace.”
She looked at me.
“Where it grew,” I said, “watered only by the rain, and nurtured only by the glow of the moon by night.”
“Until an evening came,” said Isabella, “when the prince, overcome by a strange longing, sat brooding in his chair. And all at once an amazing perfume filled the air, so mysterious, so irresistible, he dared not even turn his head to see what it portended. And as he sat thus, a shadow fell across his shoulder on to the floor in front of him, and then a quiet, leaf-cool hand was laid upon his neck.”
She and I burst out laughing.
“Gorgeous,” I said. “Erotic, gothic, perverse, Wildean, Freudian. Yes.” “Now tell me you won’t write it.”
I shook my head. “No. Maybe later, sometime. If you don’t. But your story still doesn’t explain the name, does it?”
“Alec said it might be something to do with Janus being the male form of the name Diana—the moon and the night. But it’s tenuous. Oh,” she said, “you do look so much better.”
Thereby reminding me that I was ill, and that the sword still hung by its hair, and that all we had shared was a derivative little horror story from the back hills.
“Are you sure you can’t manage dinner?” she said. “Probably could. Then I’d regret it. No, thank you. Just for now, I’ll stick to that yogurt, or it to me, whatever it does.”
“All right. Well, I must dash. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
I had come to the villa for solitude in a different climate, but learned, of course, that climate is climate, and that solitude too is always precisely and only that. In my case, the desire to be alone was simply the horror of not being so. Besides, I never was alone, dogged by the sick, discontented, and unshakable companions of my body, my own restless mind.
The sun was wonderful, and the place was beautiful, but I quickly realized I did not know what to do with the sun and the beauty. I needed to translate them, perhaps, into words, certainly into feelings, but neither would respond as I wished. I kept a desultory journal, then gave it up. I read and soon found I could not control my eyes enough to get them to focus on the pages. On the third evening, I went to dinner with Isabella and Alec, did my best, watched Alec do his best, came back a little drunk, more ill in soul than in body. Disgraced myself in private by weeping.
Finally, the scent of the Janfia tree, coming in such tides into the room, drew me to the window.
I stood there, looking down at the veranda, the far-away hills beyond described only by starlight, the black tree much nearer, with here and there its moonburst of smoky white, an open flower.
And I thought about the poet, and the incubus that was the spirit of the tree. It was the hour to think of that. A demon which vampirized and killed by irresistible pleasures of the flesh. What an entirely enchanting thought. After all, life itself vampirized, and ultimately killed, did it not, by a constant equally irresistible, administration of the exact reverse of pleasure.
But since I had no longer any belief in God, I had lost all hopes of anything supernatural abroad in the universe. There was evil, naturally, in its abstract or human incarnations, but nothing artistic, no demons stepping from trees by night.
Just then, the leaves of the Janfia rustled. Some night breeze was passing through them, though not, it seemed, through any other thing which grew on the veranda.
A couple of ha
ndsome, shy wild cats came and went at the villa. The woman who cooked left out scraps for them, and I had seen Marta, one morning, leaving a large bowl of water in the shade of the cypress they were wont to climb. A cat then, prowling along the veranda rail, was disturbing the tree. I tried to make out the flash of eyes. Presently, endeavoring to do this, I began to see another thing.
It was a shadow, cast from the tree, but not in the tree’s shape. Nor was there light, beyond that of the stars above the hills, to fashion it. A man then, young and slender, stood below me, by the Janfia, and from a barely suggested paleness, like that of a thin half moon, it seemed he might be looking up toward my room.
A kind of instinct made me move quickly back, away from the window. It was a profound and primitive reaction, which startled me, and refreshed me. It had no place on the modern earth, and scarcely any name. A kind of panic—the pagan fear of something elemental, godlike, and terrible. Caught up in it, for a second, I was no longer myself, no longer the one I dreaded most in all the world. I was no one, only a reaction to an unknown matter, more vital than sickness or pessimism, something from the days when all ills and joys were in the charge of the gods, when men need not think, but simply were.
And then, I did think. I thought of some intruder, something rational, and I moved into the open window again, and looked down, and there was nothing there. Just the tree against the starlight.
“Isabella,” I said to her over the telephone, “would you mind if I had that tree carried up to my bedroom?”
“Tree?”
I laughed brightly. “I don’t mean one of the pines. The little Janfia. It’s funny, but you know I hadn’t been sleeping very well—the scent seems to help. I thought, actually in the room, it would be about foolproof. Nonstop inhalations of white double brandies.”
“Well, I don’t see why not. Only, mightn’t it give you a headache, or something? All that carbon monoxide—or is it dioxide—plants exude at night. Didn’t someone famous suffocate themselves with flowers? One of Mirabeau’s mistresses, wasn’t it? No, that was with a charcoal brazier—”
“The thing is,” I said, “your two gardeners have arrived this morning after all. And between them, they shouldn’t have any trouble getting the urn upstairs. I’ll have it by the window. No problems with asphyxia that way.”
“Oh well, if you want, why not?” Having consented, she babbled for a moment over how I was doing, and assured me she would “pop in” tomorrow. Alec had succumbed to some virus, and she had almost forgotten me. I doubted that I would see her for the rest of the week.
Marta scintillantly organized the gardeners. Each gave me a narrow look. But they raised the terracotta and the tree, bore them grunting up to the second floor, plonked them by the window as requested. Marta even followed this up with a can of water to sprinkle the earth. That done, she pulled two desiccated leaves off the tree with a coarse functional disregard. It was part of the indoor furnishings now, and must be cared for.
I had been possessed by a curious idea, which I called, to myself, an experiment. It was impossible that I had seen anything, any “being,” on the veranda. That was an alcoholic fantasy. But then again, I had an urge to call the bluff of the Janfia tree. Because it seemed to me responsible, in its own way, for my mirage. Perhaps the blooms were mildly hallucinogenic. If so, I meant to test them. In lieu of any other social event or creative project, an investigation of the Janfia would have to serve.
By day it gave, of course, very little scent; in the morning it had seemed to have none at all. I sat and watched it a while, then stretched out for a siesta. Falling asleep, almost immediately I dreamed that I lay bleeding in a blood-soaked bed, in the middle of a busy city pavement. People stepped around me, sometimes cursing the obstacle. No one would help me. Somebody—formless, genderless—when I caught at a sleeve, detached me with a good-natured, Oh, you’ll be all right.
I woke up in a sweat of horror. Not a wise measure any more, then, to sleep by day. Too hot, conducive to the nightmare. … The dream’s psychological impetus was all too obvious, the paranoia and self-pity. One was expected to be calm and well-mannered in adversity. People soon got tired of you otherwise. How not, who was exempt from distress?
I stared across the room at the Janfia tree, glossy with its health and beauty. Quite unassailable it looked. Was it a vampire? Did it suck away the life of other things to feed its own? It was welcome to mine. What a way to die. Not messily and uncouthly. But ecstatically, romantically, poignantly. They would say, they simply could not understand it, I had been a little under the weather, but dying—so very odd of me. And Isabella, remembering the story, would glance at the Janfia fearfully, and shakily giggle the notion aside.
I got up, and walked across.
“Why don’t you?” I said. “I’m here. I’m willing. I’d be—I’d be only too glad to die like that, in the arms of something that needed me, held, in pleasure—not from some bloody slip of a careless uncaring knife, some surgeon with a hangover, whoops, lost another patient today, oh dear what a shame. Or else to go on with this bloody awful misery, one slap in the teeth after another, nothing going right, nothing, nothing. Get out, to oblivion hopefully, or get out and start over, or if there’s some bearded old damnable God, he couldn’t blame me, could he? ‘Your honor,’ I’d say, ‘I was all for keeping going, suffering for another forty years, whatever your gracious will for me was. But a demon set on me. You know I didn’t stand a chance.’ So,” I said again to the Janfia tree, “why not?”
Did it hear? Did it attend? I reached out and touched its stems, its leaves, the fruited, tight-coiled blossoms. All of it seemed to sing, to vibrate with some colossal hidden force, like an instrument still faintly thrumming after the hand of the musician has left it, perhaps five centuries ago.
“Christ, I’m going crazy,” I said, and turned from the tree with an insulting laugh. See, the laugh said, I know all that is a He. So, I dare you.
There was a writing desk in the room. Normally, when writing, I did not employ a desk, but now I sat at it and began to jot some notes on the legend of the tree. I was not particularly interested in doing this, it was only a sort of sympathetic magic. But the time went swiftly, and soon the world had reached the drinks hour, and I was able with a clear conscience to go down with thoughts of opening a bottle of white wine. The sun burned low in the cypress tree, and Marta stood beneath it, perplexed, a dish of scraps in her hand.
“Cats not hungry today?” I asked her.
She cast me a flashing look.
“No cats. Cats runs off. I am say, Where you go give you better food? Mrs. Isabella like the cats. Perhaps they there. Thing scares them. They see a monster, go big eyes and then they runs.”
Surprising me with my surprise, I shivered.
“What was it? That they saw?”
Marta shrugged.
“Who’s know? I am see them runs. Fat tail and big eyes.”
“Where was it?”
“This minute.”
“But where? Down here?”
She shrugged a second time.
“Nothing there. They see. I am go along now. My aunt, she is waits for me.
“Oh yes. Your aunt. Do go.”
I smiled. Marta ignored my smile, for she would only smile at me when I was serious or preoccupied, or ill. In the same way, her English deteriorated in my presence, improved in Isabella’s. In some fashion, it seemed to me, she had begun to guard herself against me, sensing bad luck might rub off.
I had explained earlier to everyone that I wanted nothing very much for dinner, some cheese and fruit would suffice, such items easily accessible. And they had all then accordingly escaped, the cook, the cats, and Marta. Now I was alone. Was I?
At the third glass I began to make my plans. It would be a full moon tonight. It would shine in at my bedroom window about two in the morning, casting a white clear light across the room, the desk, so that anything, coming between, would cast equally a deep shadow.
Well, I would give it every chance. The Janfia could not say I had omitted anything. The lunar orb, I at the desk, my back to night and moon and tree. Waiting.
Why was I even contemplating such a foolish adolescent act? Naturally so that tomorrow, properly stood up on my date with delicious death, I could cry out loudly: The gods are dead! There is nothing left to me but this, the dunghill of the world.
But I ought to be fairly drunk. Yes, I owed the situation that. Drink, the opening medicine of the mind and heart, sometimes of the psyche.
The clean cheeses and green and pink fruits did not interrupt the spell of the wine. They stabilized my stomach and made it only accommodating.
Tomorrow I would regret drinking so much, but tomorrow I was going to regret everything in any case.
And so I opened a second bottle, and carried it to the bath with me, to the ritual cleansing before the assignation or the witchcraft.
I fell asleep, sitting at the desk. There was a brief sealike afterglow, and my notes and a book and a lamp and the bottle spread before me. The perfume of the Janfia at my back seemed faint, luminous as the dying of the light. Beginning to read, quite easily, for the wine, interfering itself with vision, made it somehow less difficult to see or guess correctly the printed words, I weighed the time once or twice on my watch. Four hours, three hours, to moonrise.
When I woke, it was to an electric stillness. The oil lamp which I had been using in preference, was burning low, and I reached instantly and turned down the wick. As the flame went out, all the lit darkness came in about me. The moon was in the window, climbing up behind the jet-black outline of the Janfia tree.
The scent was extraordinary. Was it my imagination?—it seemed never to have smelled this way before, with this sort of aching, chiming note. Perhaps the full moon brought it out. I would not turn to look. Instead, I drew the paper to me and the pen. I wrote nothing, simply doodled on the pad, long spirals and convolutions; doubtless a psychiatrist would have found them most revealing.
My mind was a blank. A drunken, receptive, amiable blank. I was amused, but exhilarated. All things were supposed to be possible. If a black specter could stalk me through eight years, surely then phantoms of all kinds, curses, blessings, did exist.
