A Trip to the Stars

by Nicholas Christopher

  At four o’clock the following afternoon, I drove into Naxia to buy the mask required of all visitors to the festival before I headed out to Corona. Suggesting it was good luck to get the mask that very day, Melitta had shown me the shop where I ought to go. Several alleys away from her own workshop in the Kastro, down steep marble steps, it had a door constructed of driftwood with an oarlock for a handle and a brass hand for a knocker. The shop itself was very small and dimly lit. Scented charcoal burned in a brass bowl and flute music was playing somewhere in the back. The floor was a mosaic of colored seashells that formed a stingray. Mythological scenes were depicted on large tiles propped against the wall: Dionysus presiding over revellers in a moonlit vineyard; Theseus strangling the Minotaur in the labyrinth; Ariadne watching the Athenian ship disappear over the horizon. A glass case beneath the counter was filled with masks, also designed around the Ariadne myth: a young woman’s face tragically frozen; a leering masculine face with grape clusters for hair; and various animal masks—bulls, owls, dogs, and foxes.

  A beaded curtain parted in the rear of the store and a thin bearded man appeared. About my own age, he wore a multicolored vest and his long platinum hair was held fast with a scarlet bandanna. He had very dark, direct eyes.

  “A mask?” he said simply.

  I nodded. “Melitta sent me.”

  He smiled, and after looking at me closely, pointed to a small wall mirror.

  Then he patiently showed me one mask after another from the glass case. We didn’t exchange another word, but it was clear none of the masks satisfied me—or him. I was beginning to despair when he put up one finger and murmured, “Wait, please.”

  Disappearing through the beaded curtain, he brought back a flat cardboard box and removed a mask like no other I had seen: a mermaid with crescent eyes, tiny stars for eyebrows, and coral lips verging on a smile. I held the mask to my face, and at once the man nodded his approval. Looking in the mirror, I felt a rush of pleasure—almost of recognition, so perfectly did the mask suit me. I thanked the man and paid him while he put the mask back into its box. Then he made me a small bow and showed me to the door.

  I descended from the Kastro in the direction of the harbor, where I had left my jeep. It was that strange limbo hour at the end of siesta, and zigzagging through the warrens of houses and shops, I encountered no one. Every so often a twisting whitewashed alley would end in an explosion of color, a dense flower garden or wall of bougainvillea. These squares of bright color seemed to have been precisely fitted, as if from above, into a sprawling geometrical puzzle. A jumble of trapezoids, triangles, and rectangles, the town of Naxia was as much a labyrinth as the one Ariadne had helped Theseus to negotiate in Crete. And it seemed that whenever I walked through it, I came on a place I had never seen before.

  This time it happened near the archaeological museum, a neighborhood I thought I knew well. Turning a corner, I was standing before an unfamiliar church in a windy, deserted plaza. The church was dedicated to St. Antony, the desert hermit who lived to be 105 years old in a cave by the Red Sea. His church on Naxos could not have been in a less desert-like setting. Ringed by eucalyptus trees, hibiscus vines climbing its white walls, it was located at one end of a diamond-shaped orchard. A wrought-iron fence surrounded the orchard, and according to a plaque at its gate, the church had been rebuilt after the Nazis bombed the original building. Only the foundation and the west wall had survived the bombing. The enormous ceiling mural, executed in the sixteenth century by the Venetian painter Francesco Gozzoli on a commission from the doge, had disappeared after the war, carted off apparently in a thousand fragments. I was sorry, for I would have liked to see this ceiling, which the plaque described as a celestial landscape populated by hundreds of angels in concentric circles.

  The orchard was so beautiful, the foliage silver, the wind fragrant, that I decided to walk through it before proceeding down the hill. It contained only fruit trees, fig, plum, orange, and lemon, as well as some pomegranate bushes. All but the fig trees were laden with fruit, but it was one of the orange trees that caught my eye. Or was it a lemon tree? Its branches contained both fruits, and also what looked like combinations of the two—big, gnarled, amber ovals. The tree was solitary, in one corner, and at its base, fringed with moss, was a wooden sign that read BIZZARRIA ORANGE. In Greek, the sign detailed the tree’s history. An offspring of the first true hybrid, it read, grown in Florence by one Barone Zelo. Zelo married a Venetian lady born on Naxos and in 1660 brought a grafting from his famous tree to the island; since then, the tree had reproduced itself several times. Looking around quickly, on an impulse I went up on tiptoe, plucked one of the bizzarria oranges, and dropped it into my pocket.

  An hour later, I was midway to Corona in my jeep, climbing the tall mountains of the interior. Night had fallen fast. The moon rose, its craters sharply visible, and the stars began to shine. As promised, the Corona Borealis and Scorpio beside it—Antares bright as a drop of blood—were directly overhead. The air was cold in the mountains, and I turned on the jeep’s heater to warm my legs. In an isolated town like Corona, where I would be one of only a few foreigners, it would have been disrespectful to wear anything but a white or black dress, as the local women did, depending on whether or not they were widows. I wore white, though sometimes at that point in my life I felt like a widow. Certainly I did that night, driving into the darkness, increasingly preoccupied with thoughts of the people and things I had lost over the years, until I saw the lights of Corona twinking in a deep valley.

  I had been to the village once before, in daylight, to see its streets and buildings that were composed of marble. It wasn’t because the inhabitants were wealthy that marble had been used so lavishly; on the contrary, with a quarry a kilometer away, marble was the cheapest available building material. Now as I entered those streets, they seemed, in the moonlight, to be illuminated from below. A crowd was milling in the main square, everyone in masks. In my travels I had seen Carnaval in Río and Mardi Gras in New Orleans, but this reminded me most of the Venetian Carnival, on a much smaller scale. Blinking colored lights were strung through the trees and around door frames. Several troubador bands—with ouds, bouzoukis, accordions, and drums—wandered the streets. Torches flared under the trees and fires salted with incense burned in steel drums, filling the air with the powerful scents of cinnamon and myrrh. The sweet, purple local wine was being served outdoors from barrels.

  Purple was Ariadne’s color. Young girls in purple tunics were performing the crane dance, a complicated step dating back to the Cretan labyrinth, where it was danced by the maidens to appease the Minotaur. Old men in black felt masks wore the military medals and ribbons of their youth. Goats festooned with flowers and bells were tethered to trees, braying, and all the caged birds in the town, from magpies to parrots were hung outside their owners’ windows, with purple ribbons through the cages. Previously lost objects, recovered during festivals past, were also displayed in purple baskets on people’s doorsteps. And they were as varied as Melitta had indicated: from the mundane (key rings and gloves) to the esoteric (a glass tortoise, with a hinged shell, that was a jewelry box) to the unexpected (a pet ferret). On one doorstep there was even a forlorn little girl with onyx eyes, sitting on her heels with her legs tucked under, the sight of whom made my pulse quicken: perhaps you could find lost people, after all, I thought.

  All at once everyone grew silent, and the air hummed with expectation as the priest offered a blessing from the steps of the church. There were at least two hundred people in the square, and all of us had fastened our masks in place. Everywhere there were foxes and bulls, Ariadnes and Dionysuses, but I was the only mermaid in sight, and I attracted a few stares. What was once a pagan event, I thought, had become a fixture in the local church calendar, and I watched closely as four men in white robes, wearing owl masks, strode single file from an unlit alley where dogs were barking. Swinging censers with burning coals, they split up and walked to the corners of the square.
Drummers perched on rooftops pounded bass drums in unison, and were answered by other drums at the edge of town. Then the men in robes simultaneously drank off glasses of wine while the crowd broke up into four groups, each one following a different man.

  I was in the group that walked around the church, through a smaller square, up the tortuously steep alleys that climbed into the mountains. In a very short time, I saw two people find lost objects from their pasts. First, an old woman in a fox mask discovered a pair of cat’s-eye earrings from her youth in the basin of a fountain. Then a heavyset, middle-aged man, wearing a bull mask, came on a fountain pen under an oleander bush. It was his father’s pen, he exclaimed, lost at the time of his death. As people gathered around him, the man uncapped the pen and on a scrap of paper showed them that it could still write. In fresh blue ink he printed the date, April 30, 1980, and then rushed off, surrounded by companions now, for good luck in these searches was reputed to rub off.

  That didn’t seem to be the case with me: neither lost objects nor lost people came my way at the Festival of Scorpio. I followed my group around for several hours, then wandered alone until well past midnight, when I admitted to myself how disappointed I was to have come up empty-handed. As the festival wound down, I watched an assortment of islanders return to the main square to lay what they had found on a purple blanket on the church steps: a red fedora, a violin bow, a set of false teeth, a pair of green leather slippers, a white cat with a broken tail, and so on. By that time, the wine was flowing fast. Platters of roasted lamb, potato casseroles, pilaf with almonds, plates of figs and olives, baskets of grapes, and great circular loaves of rye bread had been set out on long tables. People were dancing to the troubador bands, who were now playing as one. Some of the drunkest revellers had removed their masks, though it was forbidden to do so before dawn.

  Picking at a plate of food, I sat quietly on a low wall under a fig tree and watched the dancers from behind my mermaid’s mask. The musicians played with increasing abandon, never stopping for a break, and the dancers kept up with them. I fingered my star bracelet, and as I had often done before, reviewed the Christmas morning on which I had first seen those stars when they were still jagged pieces of shrapnel embedded in Cassiel’s flesh. The sounds of that time came back to me: the muffled whomp-whomp of chopper blades in the night, the hum and click of my X-ray machine, the clinking of surgical instruments, the moans and screams of men, and their death wails. And then the smells: iodine, alcohol, tannic acid, and plasma, and the sickly metallic scent of blood, and the hot winds heavy with phosphorus and napalm smoke that blew out to sea from the jungle. That smoke was in my nostrils now, I thought, raising my head as the four men in white, swinging their censers, crisscrossed the square and disappeared together behind the church, signalling the official end of the festival.

  I pushed my mermaid’s mask back on my head as I walked to my jeep. Someone had scattered gardenia petals on the hood, and as I drove out of town they gusted high into the air. At that moment, on an impulse, I decided to take a detour to the eastern shore to watch the sun rising up out of the sea. Living as I did on the western side, this was something I had never seen on Naxos. Though I had been up all night, I was not tired so much as overstimulated, and I thought driving by the sea would calm me.

  Descending from the mountains, I crossed the great gypsum plain stretching from Apéiranthos to Moutsana that seemed, with each mile, to tilt downward toward the sea. On the narrow road, thick with dust, I passed only a farmer leading a white mule and a boy hunched over on a motorbike. A few houses were set back on treeless plots, chickens pecking in the baked yards and goats grazing on the jagged weeds. Nearer the coast, the wind grew brackish with the smells of the sea. And then suddenly, up and over a ridge, I was in Moutsana.

  In its brief and improbable heyday the emery mining capital of Europe, Moutsana was now a ghost town. Cats darted across the streets and wild dogs lurked in the shadows. I passed a boarded-up restaurant, a former ferry office filled with nesting birds, and the foundation of a hotel that had burnt down years before. The town ended abruptly near the remains of the cable car trellis that had run from the mines to the harbor. Beyond that, after a rusted sign cautioning hazardous driving conditions, the road continued on between a rocky beach and jutting white cliffs. One of the few roads on the island with which I was unfamiliar, it was a soft mixture of sand and limestone powder, for which I had to downshift into first gear. I gripped the steering wheel high and stiffly, with both hands. To my left, the sea was dark, but the horizon had begun to glow a pearly gray.

  After a few more miles, the horizon went from violet to pink and the stars grew dimmer. I parked the jeep on the shoulder and walked down to the sea. The shoreline there was all coarse white sand punctuated by coves with pebble beaches. Dunes dotted with salt grass and thistles separated the beach from the road. In that transitional, ashen light the entire expanse looked lunar, right down to the craters in the road and on the cliffside. Thirsty, my lips coated with limestone dust, I realized I still had the bizzarria orange in the pocket of my dress, and I peeled it as I walked on. The knobby rind pulled away in thick strips. The pulp was amber-colored and firm. When I bit into one of the wedges, my tongue was flooded with bittersweet juice.

  The wind was whistling and sawing as it swept in from sea, trailing sheets of spray. As I crossed the dunes toward the nearest cove, shielding my eyes with one hand, I heard the buzz of an airplane overhead. I thought I saw some flashing lights high in the sky, but they could as easily have been falling stars as navigational lights. In an instant they were gone and the buzzing had ceased. Turning around, I scanned the beach and the cliffs, and when I had come full circle, facing the cove again, I blinked hard and rubbed my eyes. I thought I was seeing things, for there was a man silhouetted against the sea, just emerging from the surf, as if he had dropped out of nowhere.

  I stood still with my head tucked down against the wind and watched him follow the waterline away from the cove, onto the wet sand. As he drew nearer, I saw that he was a tall, broad-shouldered man wearing a rubber body suit. He had blue goggles pushed back into his wavy black hair, and clipped onto his belt, beside a sheathed knife, was a small net filled with shellfish. In his hand he held a single creature, still wriggling, which I couldn’t make out clearly. He walked with a firm gait, studying whatever it was he was holding. Finally, when he was no more than twenty yards away, he glanced up and froze at the sight of me. I was so intent on him that I had forgotten how strange I myself would appear in that remote place: a woman in a white dress, her hair flying out the sides of the mermaid mask pushed back on her head.

  Several seconds ticked away, the waves rolling in, the wind gusting the sand, before he started walking toward me. The closer he came, the more he blurred for me against the sea—like a shadow. Another ghost? No, if he was a ghost, it was of a very different sort. His lungs were heaving. His powerful hands were flesh and blood. Muscles rippled beneath his rubber suit. Over his heart, I could now make out an insignia: a star-speckled blue circle intersected by red wings, with the initials NASA stitched in bold letters. An American—and an astronaut, I thought with surprise—on an island that didn’t even boast an airport? Then, when he was just ten yards from me, I could identify that wriggling creature: a starfish. And an instant later, god help me, my knees went soft when I saw his face fully. His eyes. His eyes gray with the silver lights, older but the same as he came right up to me. Half-smiling, curious, his mouth the same too, though harder now, and his hair tinged with gray and his forehead creased, a thin scar crossing it on a diagonal. I raised my head and pulled my mask off, and watched his curiosity turn to astonishment and then fear. I saw my own face—just as astonished and fearful—reflected in his in those first few moments when we stood just two feet apart, in the same time and place, after all the fractured years of other times and places among the living and the dead.

  When he finally recovered his senses enough to move, it was to touch my ch
eek, softly, tentatively. Then he touched my hair. His lips parted, but he didn’t speak. He shook his head slowly. And then, before he took my hands in his, I held up my bracelet for him as the tears began running down my dusty cheeks and the stars faded in the broad sky, and, dripping seawater, a starfish in his hand, Geza Cassiel stood before me.

  15

  The Hotel Rigel

  Even before noon it was 105° that day and when the wind blew in from the desert you hoped it would stop. From the roof of the Hotel Rigel, at the end of Corona Street on the outskirts of Albuquerque, I could see the silver ribbon of the Río Puerco. This was the river, I remembered well, that Calzas had first shown me from Acoma, the one Dalia had read to me about, which Friar Varcas had followed northward from Los Lunas after he was bitten by the vampire at the way station. Whether or not Varcas ever reached Albuquerque, and what he may have done there if he did, Dalia had never said. But I felt sure he was there now—and Dalia, too.

  Twice I thought I had sighted him: first, when I went to the Revenant Press at 3000 Daedalus Circle to inquire after Dalia’s translation of Varcas’s manuscript, and a pale bearded man with a hooked nose peered at me from behind a curtained window, shaking his head that they were closed; and then, again, on a dark deserted street corner near my own hotel where the same man was slipping into a black car with tinted windows behind a tall woman in a red dress. I couldn’t see her face, but I had no doubt who the woman was. My heart sank, but at the same time I had no desire to chase after them.