by Bev Jafek
It is the warrior face of what was until recently the land’s top predator, and its hunting skills are commensurate: it can jump to seize a bird in mid-flight or kill a deer many times its size. It can also kill exclusively for pleasure. Does this fierce face belie an innate cruelty, or does it represent deadly extravagance? The same question could be asked of humans who kill for sport. It is all there, a fiery enigma, in Sylvie’s drawing. I feel a well of pain and frustration that this animal is now the rarest cat species in the world. It was abundant during my last stay in Doñana in the 1970s.
“These are absolutely wonderful, Sylvie. You are showing me new ways of perceiving.”
“You are showing me so much every day. I want to give back.” Her face relaxes in luminous pleasure as she rests on one elbow, and her body has the sinuous receptiveness of a woman in love. Our intimacy does not disturb me anymore. All of our creation together, much of it side-by-side—the moments of pure surprise, wonder, novelty, bottomlessness—all merging into the infinite spaciousness of mental play; making a world and then wanting only to live there; what one imagined as solitary and then found to be shared with an incendiary spirit; its law solely that you must give your self to it completely or miss it entirely; this existence together—is so much like love-making that we have begun to look like lovers. How it would horrify Mariska; how it delights me.
It is now late afternoon, and I want to look at the data collected by one of my cameras placed beside a cork oak tree several miles away. Sylvie wants to come with me in the jeep, and we drive through forests of pinewood and heather. Suddenly she cries, “There!”
I stop the jeep. “What is it?”
She is breathless again. “Something alive, an animal with magical colors, orange and black as though painted with Picasso brush strokes. It was crawling on the ground so slowly, rhythmically. We went past it so fast I could think of nothing but a small, colorful gnome with a magic disk. But that can’t be . . .”
I laugh in delight. “No, from your description, it was a Greek tortoise.”
She looks at me in consternation. “Must you always know everything?”
“I have no idea what you will say from one moment to the next, and I love it! Do you want to draw that tortoise?”
“Oh, yes!” She takes her chalk and paper pad, and we walk slowly back through tall clinging heather, rosemary and rock rose until we come to the oblivious, plodding tortoise Sylvie thought was supernatural, the one for whom our little drama is less than nothing. “It’s gorgeous!” she says, “orange and black, autumn.”
“They’re all over the Mediterranean.”
“Can you leave me here so that I can draw it?”
“Of course.” Another piece of the universe—maybe Sylvie is the woman to reach the end of it. “I’ll be back in, say, an hour and a half.”
Before driving off, I turn to take a last look. She is drawing rapidly with intense concentration, but walking slowly and carefully beside the tortoise as it plods along. I surely can’t drive back to the same place. Where will they be in an hour and a half? Not even the tortoise knows. I am utterly delighted by the chance encounter of this animal and woman. I drive off thinking that I should tell Sylvie the story of Adwaitha the giant sea turtle, who has a life span of two hundred and fifty years. As a hatchling, he was given to the first head of the British colonial Raj and has now outlived the entire British Empire. I love to imagine the incongruously languorous pace and infinite immediacy of his perception. India’s colonial and religious wars—and, for that matter, the world wars of the twentieth century—were no more than the shifting of sand, sunlight and water beneath his four dancing feet. I can imagine no gentler creature. How fitting that such a mind should exist in this world; how tragic that his species, with little or no inbred fear of humans, has been hunted to near-extinction.
I arrive at the cork oak tree where my camera and sensors have been hidden in tall nearby grasses. I particularly want to see footage of birds, wild boar and rutting deer. But first, I must appreciate the magnificence of this tree. It is such a phenomenon that Sylvie will undoubtedly want to draw it. Cork oak trees are found between scrublands and marshes, which is also the range of nearly all of Doñana’s animals. It is a perfect place to find images of wildlife because the tree offers nurturance to all species. In its youth, it is an aviary for the nests of birds both large and small. Like a Manhattan apartment building, every bit of the bough’s surface is taken by residents, whose nests are side-by-side, and the birds also divide it into sections so that they can nest with their own kind. In the spring, the sound of so many young birds being nurtured is that of a rushing river. I treasure this sound.
In old age, the tree is hollow and it then houses the lynx, wild cats, jackdaws, little owls and barn owls. In death, it collapses into a mass of limbs and bark that has been completely utilized by the forest animals, and it then replenishes the soil beneath them. I stare up at this cork oak tree from below. It is in its youth and possesses hugely twisted and gnarled limbs that cover the sky, both Madonna and colossus of the forest. It makes me think of both an octopus and a Minoan goddess. In the still light of late afternoon, its entire surface glistens with the white dung of numberless birds.
Here I will find my wildlife, and I begin transferring the data from the cameras to my computer until images of animals appear in extended sequences on my screen. Then I come upon you, El Magnifico, my wild boar, the black-pelted god who has carried out orgies of eating beneath this tree. There you are with your thick black fur rumpling whatever shape your body may have had and your tiny but brilliantly shining eyes and upturned tusks that seem to be laughing. There is leering delight all over your furry face and I know why, for it is there in my film footage: Your favorite food is the plethora of cones this tree has dropped upon you as though you were its favorite. In the most sensual fashion, your long tongue has sucked the sweet center of these cones and spit out the bract like the most orgiastic of ancient Romans. How Sylvie will adore your face and want to draw it, you creature of excess.
When we return to the lake, it is already sunset, the perfect time for dinner, wine and some of our wildest and most memorable conversation. We began to love this time of the day while camping down the Costa Brava. After long hours of art and study alternating with swimming and hiking, we came alive again in the cinnabar radiance that burnished the headlands and surf all the way out to the ocean and end of the sky; a slow, majestic opening of the night’s magically glowing hand. Sylvie’s hair turns a dark, gleaming red in this fire-laden light, and the rich color rims her face and shoulders down to the small of her back. Still, sunset in the forest perhaps tantalizes us even more with its compression of wildness and mystery, shadowy life and strident sound pressing close to us, never entirely separate from danger and death.
When our dinner is over and we drink Spanish wine over our campfire, Sylvie becomes curious about Doñana. “How did this preserve come into being? Was it inhabited by people, or has it always been a park?”
“If you read Spanish history, you will find long descriptions of Spanish monarchs who had no talent or intellect to do anything but hunt in Doñana. They brought enormous retinues the size of the entire court with them, and the land turned into a spectacle. But the true origin and meaning of Doñana lie with my unknown stewards of the world—eccentric women.”
Sylvie laughs. “Les Monstre sacrés even here? I do not think of them as everywhere. They are unique, after all.”
“Maybe you should think of them everywhere. They do comprise a secret history of the world, and we are now taking part in their little known traditions.”
“Who were they?” Then Sylvie smiles and asks, “Is this my bedtime story?”
She is right there. I can’t resist telling a tale of the strangeness, power and mystery of women. Have I been doing this every night? Perhaps. “It begins with Princess Eboli, a woman notorious for her sexual voracity. Her daughter, named Ana and eventually Dona Ana, rebelled again
st her famous mother and embraced an unusually austere religious faith. Dona Ana set up the preserve as a kind of outpost for nature and virtue.”
“That’s medieval.”
“She ordered the building of the palace so that she could live here with the king as much as possible. Unfortunately, her husband, the monarch, became at least as notorious as Princess Eboli since he was incompetent enough to have been responsible for the sinking of the Spanish Armada. So, there was even more scandal and disgrace to escape from.”
Sylvie laughs. “Now, that is modern, an anti-heroine. All this is really very funny.”
“It gets better. In later life, Dona Ana decided that she and her husband were so lost in the world as to need incarceration. She insisted that they completely retreat from the court and live in the palace dungeons.”
Sylvie laughs uproariously. “Have we had too much wine? This is hysterically funny! Are you making it up as you go?”
“Not at all. That is never necessary with eccentric women. Their lives simply are vivid stories, and they have always been a force to be reckoned with.”
“Was there only one, Dona Ana? Or were there more?”
“More, of course. A few generations later, a Spanish empress decided that the male monarchs were wimps for using muskets to hunt. She would display her superiority by hunting with a spear in Doñana. She brought a bunch of royal women along as her cheering gallery. They found this more thrilling than their life at court.”
“That I can believe.”
“Eccentric women are now part of Spanish traditions and culture.”
“That I cannot believe. Yes, another glass of wine. I want to drink to them if they exist.” We clink our glasses to our favorite toast, the Czech krasna život, “to the beauty of life.”
“The institution I am referring to is the annual pilgrimage through Doñana to celebrate a unique imaginary spiritual woman. She is called the Virgin of El Rocio, or Virgin of the Marshes.”
“I’m not impressed by virgins. What do real women have to do with her?”
“It is actually men who are obsessed with her. In the annual ceremony, she is carried in a wagon over the marshes, attended by men and women in Andalusian dress. The men swarm to touch her, keeping the women away in the process, as though she had some power they could not afford to share.”
“That I can believe.”
“You are alternating between belief and disbelief.”
“Well, we are eccentric.” She smiles as she looks up at the dark sky. We never noticed how the night had fallen down before us. It is now full of melodramatic cries from the stone curlew alternating with the softer music of the nightjar. My story has created a spell, though every word of it is true. Sylvie is suddenly animated. “I would love to have painted Dona Ana! There must have been great determination and despair in her face.”
“You would have to allow yourself to be locked up in the dungeon with her.”
“Imagine it!” Sylvie smiles in delight. “She would have been so pale . . . so imperious. She would have barely looked at me or her husband skulking in the corner.”
“She would have doubted your value as an artist, perhaps have tried to convince you to live in a dungeon more austere than her own. You would have needed more wine than we have to put up with her.”
“But I would capture the power of her strangeness, her resistance to a world she rejected! I would have to meet the enormous challenge of imagining a face that implies all of what you have told me!”
“Better than a Greek tortoise?”
“Oh, I love that tortoise, too. I should have found out whether it was female. Perhaps we can only see eccentrics here; the rest of the world has vanished.”
Yes, it has been a day and night full of ordinary life transmogrifying into the extraordinary, much of which we ourselves have created. It is growing colder, and I get into my sleeping bag. Without a word, we smile and delight in a night deepened by what we have imagined, a darkness velvet with possibility. Sylvie places her sleeping bag beside mine and gets into it.
Suddenly, there is a great altercation in the water just beside the riverbank. Two huge, powerful bodies hurl themselves through the river just beyond our feet and spray us with water. Sylvie cries out in fear. An immense, imperious furry head rises up to see who has dared to make this sound, the last ray of the sunset gilding great horns that stand out in a broad, nearly horizontal bar of fire. Beneath large, hairy brow ridges, its eyes are bold pools of red and black, and dark water streams from its snout. “Oh my god,” Sylvie whispers, her fear instantly replaced by fascination with the great head contemplating us. Then the two beasts continue running and kicking their hooves in the air far down the riverbank.
As they vanish into the dark, I say, “Doñana is full of wild cattle. If they are threatened, they become the most dangerous animals here, but these two were just playing, chasing each other through the water. We are silent and pensive; then we explode with laughter at this end to our day.
“Eccentric Doñana nights!” Sylvie says with a charming smile and moves in her sleeping bag directly beside me. As I close my eyes, I feel the gentle pressure of her shoulder and hip, the softness of her hair, and her arm twines with mine in the dark.
Exquisite.
First light comes as filaments of gray fleece in the sky as I become aware of movement next to me; then I fall back to sleep, only to awaken in the breadth of dawning light: another soft spring day. As my body quickens and my eyes focus, I see a chalk drawing of the head that astonished us last night—the vanishing red flame of light still faintly glowing on the edges of its horns and in its eyes. I smile in amazement. I would never have guessed she could capture that light and its shade of red, a color relinquishing itself to darkness, yet here it is. Now there is sound in the lake, and I can see that Sylvie is bathing in the water. I will join her.
In the lake, we are surrounded by sounds of birds and insects I cannot name, cold dark green water pungent with life. Water plants are softly clinging to my legs and thighs, and in a moment, I will recognize them. Now, however, my mind is wonderfully empty. Sylvie smiles and hands me the soap, then begins to float on the surface of the lake. “The drawing is magnificent,” I say, yet my words are paltry before this vision: Sylvie’s full breasts are gleaming and floating on the water; her skin is a delicate olive that becomes translucent in the light, her nipples large and plum-colored, her legs gently open to the current. The water plants cling lightly to her hips and thighs; one threads itself over one breast, as though I were not the only one to adore this sight.
I cannot resist her beauty: this woman simply fills the universe. I can’t take my eyes away from her, and I have not carefully hidden my desire this time. She looks up and sees my immersion in her loveliness, begins to rise to me, and a flock of birds passes overhead, prepares to land in the water. They block the sun and fill the sky with the color of flesh. My mind moves so slowly that I can hardly name them: flamingoes. Their heads, breasts and torsos are thickly feathered white. The rich pink color is a cape on their wings, whose undersides are black; their heads, beaks and legs are pink. The colors merge as they sway in movement together, and it is the color of flesh swaying in a rhythm I can only perceive as ecstasy. Under this sky of flesh, all things are necessary, inevitable: Sylvie and I are pressing together, our hands gliding over the wet surface of the other. It is what I have wanted for days, perhaps months, years—making love—and it is happening beneath a sky of flesh. We can only press together, go inside one another, throb in movement together.
For hours.
It is afternoon. We have moved to our sleeping bags. She is lying beside me, asleep. We have loved one another completely, as women do, until we lost consciousness. I raise myself on my elbows and look out at the simplest and greatest of luxuries: a land at peace. I know nothing and want nothing but this woman. I never expected it to happen again. What dangers will befall us? All too many: it can’t last for the difference in age and experien
ce. We will begin to grow apart as soon as we leave Doñana. She will understand this, and I will release her as easily as it was to make love to her. I will not regret a moment: it is a gift.
The flamingoes are now settled in the water, for their favorite food resides here, a crustacean that gives them their pink color. They are marching in tandem at the meeting of water and land. Two by two, males to one side and females to the other, they strut with a wobbly motion in an uneven yet perfect rhythm. These monogamous pairs almost seem to be promenading, performing the ritual of courting couples in the small villages of Spain and Italy. The incongruity of their long slender pink legs and beaks gives their motion a great elegance, like a line of exquisitely thin Spanish dancers, and I wonder, as I often do in watching wildlife, if beauty and simple satisfaction can ever be joined as completely as here and now. Not for humans, surely.
Sylvie is now awake, watching this vigorously wobbling line of pink feathers with me, and then we laugh at our impetuous love overtaken by a flock of flamingoes. What can we call it? “Love with Flamingoes.” She sits up and takes my face in her hands. “Now I want to know everything from you. When did you first think of me like this? I don’t think I’ve ever passed out from sex before. Did you actually make love to me in the lake? I didn’t know whether I was being born or giving birth. How did you do it?”
“I just held you up with my arms. Let me say this: we have to eat. We’re running on pure sex right now.” We laugh and begin to make our breakfast. When we are sitting quietly and eating, still without clothing, I ask, “Do you have any idea what you are getting yourself into?”
Sylvie pauses to think and then smiles charmingly. “About as much as the flamingoes do.”
