The Blood Oranges: A Novel

by Hawkes, John

  “My God, Cyril, they’re going to drown!”

  Her hand was long and white and cold in mine, gently I maneuvered myself so that Fiona could see—it was always essential that Fiona see the crudest accident, the smallest catastrophe, the gravest incident—but would not be able to pitch us without warning into the midst of the little factioned crowd or into the way of the rescuers. She pulled, I held her firmly, she leaned as far as she could toward the bus that was imperceptibly rocking now about ten feet from the embankment where the nearest brute-shaped member of the fire brigade stood shouting out his furious commands.

  “It’s going to sink, Cyril. Isn’t it?”

  I frowned, waited, and with pressure on her hand and a movement of my shoulders and a soft thoughtful sound in my nose and throat tried to convey that it was a question no one could answer.

  “But people commit suicide that way, baby. It has to sink.”

  In the air a handful of slim white pigeons circled the scene, on the embankment half the crowd bent themselves into lewd positions and laughed at the occupants in the bus and at the bus itself, while the other half scowled darkly and pointed to ropes and boat hooks and flimsy ladders. Across the canal a woman in a shuttered window was calling for someone to come and look. And there on the water before us the old high-bodied motorbus still floated. Derelict, obviously painted and repaired endlessly by lazy unskilled workers, khaki-colored and smeared here and there with swatches of lurid purple and smoky black, heavily dented from its long life of collisions (with stone fountains, cornices, rocks in the road, unlucky animals) still it floated in a kind of majestic dementia, though steam was hissing up from its hood and an oil stain was rising from all its submerged gearboxes, tanks, iron pockets packed with grease. I could see air bubbles where the tin body met the water, a drifting orange bobbed against the side of the still floating old machine.

  Here, I thought, were several different modes of incongruity. In a matter of minutes we might be left staring at nothing more than the little orange drifting on the dark and apparently currentless flow of sewage. The pigeons, of course, were small and sweet and serene, while the helpless crowd and remnant of the fire brigade were clumsy, violent. But what of Fiona and me? In all their shock and fear, did those in the bus give a passing thought to Fiona and me? For one terrible instant did it occur to them, driver and passengers, that the tall man and woman on the edge of the crowd might be precisely strong enough and elegant enough to save them, since even the bulky members of the fire brigade were hopelessly entangled in the slick coils of their age-old brutal ignorance and despite all their activity could in fact do nothing? But what of the woman screaming behind the slatted shutter? And how did the motorbus arrive in its present state of danger and momentary suspension on waters more fetid than any waters I had ever smelled? A failure of brakes? Some physical or psychological failure in the stricken driver?

  A single gasp went up then from the serious faction of the crowd, Fiona squeezed my hand and held her breath as if all her fear and courage and sweeping empathy were now mounted forever in still marble, across the canal the screaming woman burst open her shutter, glared out, and as quickly smashed it shut again, the brute-backed leader of the fire brigade fell to his knees, stuck out his arm, waited—because with a sucking sound the front of the old bus started down, dipped with sudden unalterable purpose toward the stinking depths of the timeless pestilential canal. Dipped, started down, but was then somehow relinquished by the deep intestinal tug of the canal and slowly, slowly, rose again to its original horizontal position with nothing to mark the near disappearance of motorbus and occupants except a thin ripple spreading out from the front bumper, some agitation in the orange, and a sigh from those of us who did not suffer from the abnormal attitudes born of the bad blood carried to this warm coast centuries before from central Europe.

  “Do something, Cyril,” she whispered then. “Please, baby.”

  All those on the embankment were quiet. Several of the leather-garbed stumping firemen began, like lunging turtles, to tie together two slender ladders with strips of wire. Fiona put her lips to my cheek.

  The occupants of the bus were unaware of Fiona’s efforts on their behalf, were apparently unaware of the will power she was now exerting. Yet might not the power of Fiona’s psyche have been as much responsible as anything else for the continued presence of the motorbus on the viscous surface of the historically significant canal? And, as far as I could see, they were unaware of the disaster which, a moment before, had all but concluded. Pigeons, ladders, Fiona’s white face and yellow coat, an old man with a stack of twigs on his back and determined to tell someone that they should tie a rope to the head of a pike—none of it meant anything to the pathetically small group of occupants inside the bus. The driver gripped his wheel, the man and woman were holding the edges of the seats in front of them, only the heads of the three female children and the black dog were visible, but those few faces were cold, expressionless, unusually small, and were, all seven of them, including the dog’s, forced rigidly to the front. As I bent down to get a better look through the windows it occurred to me that driver and passengers did not in fact comprehend that they were afloat precariously in an ancient canal, but rather were expecting some more conventional catastrophe and were still looking ahead toward the as yet invisible landscape of the impending crash. It occurred to me also that beneath the water those six people and the small black animal would be lost, so to speak, in so large and so nearly empty a motorbus.

  And then it sank. Again the crowd gasped, the old man threw down his twigs, Fiona with one round movement of her shoulders tore free of my hand. But of course I was familiar with all the bright severity and wildness of Fiona’s spirit and now was ready for one of her stronger displays of grace and determination. So in my left arm I caught her slender waist exactly as the motorbus went down.

  “Wait a minute,” I whispered, feeling the fight going out of the stomach muscles against my arm, “just wait a minute, Fiona. It’s all right.”

  Then once again the laughing faction of the crowd was laughing, and even while she felt my soothing voice in her ear and the comforting tension of my forearm drawn tight across the central portion of her body, still Fiona must have understood the laughter and forced herself to see what was actually happening to the old bus before our eyes. Because now it sat more firmly than it had ever rested on dirt road or cobbled street, sat immobile with all four wheels solidly positioned on the hard bed of excrement which, down through the centuries, had accumulated like lava in the bottom of the black canal. But windows, roof, luggage strapped to the roof, spare tire, hood—all the upper half of the old high-bodied machine rose above the water, would no doubt remain emerging from that motionless water as long as the canal walls stood and there were sudden figures to shout croak peonie and tip the contents of stinking buckets into the holes and stone gutters that fed the very smell of time. The waters were not deep (how like these villagers and members of the fire brigade and the old men not to know the depth of their own canal), not deep, yet deep enough to rise well above the wheels, to flood the interior of the bus at least as high as the knees of the still unmoving occupants, with its black weight to anchor the motorbus where it sat forever. In all the village there was no hoist to lift it, no barge to drag it down to the mouth of the canal. But even if they could, would red-eyed peasants ever take the trouble to remove the enormous old motorbus from a canal that had once been choked with the bodies of dead barbarians? I knew they would not.

  “Baby, look! That little girl is waving at me!”

  Then Fiona snatched my face into her two hands, kissed me, wheeled about and waved back at the child, while even above the shouts and clatter of the fire brigade we heard, suddenly, the muffled terror-stricken yelps of the black dog that was now jumping from seat to seat up and down the long water-filled interior of the half-sunken bus. Momentarily out of sight, it reappeared with wet shredded ears and tail, with wet fur slick on its belly
and on its short black sturdy legs, had obviously fallen, had been swimming and barking in the fetid water between the seats. And now the woman was attempting to wade to the help of the smaller children who were kneeling, apparently, on the wooden seats, the oldest girl was waving timidly at Fiona, the tall black-haired man was stooping and holding to his chest an armful of photographic equipment and grinning.

  “Oh, Cyril, he’s handsome! And look at his wife!”

  The sucking of the boots of the brute-backed leader of the fire brigade, the sound of shattering glass, the wheezing and laughter and shouts of the crowd, all of whom clearly suffered from some congenital rasping respiratory disease, the thin high cries of the sopping wet dog—suddenly through all this abrasive noise I heard, as if directly into my left ear, the strong but milky vocal qualities of Fiona’s voice which told me, in sense and tone, that she was once more making one of her aesthetic evaluations.

  “My God, he’s handsome. Just look at him!”

  She had twisted her head in one direction, her shoulders in another, at the same time twisted her hips in the same direction as her sharp-featured and happily agitated face, and out of all this sinuous exertion and equilibrium had come her voice, her judgment, another fresh gift of discovery which, as usual, she gave to me swiftly and without hesitation. So now I listened, lit one of my clumsy cigarettes, glanced around at all the illiterate faces and powerful but sagging shoulders, and then leaned down again for another and better look at the man in the half-sunken bus. Fiona was already waving again at the white-faced girl.

  Stroked my chin, leaned down, frowned a little and got some intensity into my large brown eyes, until suddenly I caught him there knee-deep in the excremental waters, from all the chaos of dog and children and large unsmiling wife was able to isolate his grinning face and for a moment to hold him still, so to speak, for appraisal.

  She was right. As usual Fiona had made another good aesthetic judgment. Because the tall black-haired man stooping in the bus window was dressed, I could see, in a powdery blue tweed jacket and black turtleneck shirt which was a combination that had always been one of Fiona’s favorites. More important, perhaps, he had a well-weathered face, a face not tanned and darkened in the wind and sun like mine, for instance, but so weathered and pebbled, so grained in darkness and cold rain that it resembled stone. Gray stone. I knew I had never before seen the thin lips, narrow bright boyish eyes, high sandblasted cheekbones, pointed ears, black hair curling across his forehead and curling in a few odd ringlets in what appeared to be a beard newly grown. Yet I recognized his face immediately because its exact replica, an image of Saint Peter that was perfect except for the broken ears, had been chiseled along with the head of Saint Paul into the granite arch of the entrance to the squat church where one candle, I knew, was still burning. Saint Peter in stone. No wonder Fiona called his striking features to my attention. Any woman would have found Saint Peter attractive. And in the case of my wife, how could Fiona help but appreciate a face whose exact replica we had seen and admired during every one of our rambling visits to the squat church? On every one of our visits the stone face, with its strength and malice, had invariably caused Fiona to hold her breasts while standing perfectly still and gazing up at it. Now of course she was busily waving at the frightened child.

  But then the tall figure with the saintly goatish face was grinning, not to himself, not at Fiona, but directly at me, and in that instant I recognized that we were friends already and, seeing the empty powdery blue sleeve bent double and fastened with a large safety pin just below the shoulder, realized that for some reason Fiona had failed to comment on his obvious deformity, which to me was the most interesting thing about him, and realized that it was in my power to lead them both to the exact spot where his missing arm was hidden.

  “He’s great, Fiona. But did you notice his arm?”

  I would have liked to see her face at that moment, but she went on waving. And then it was too late. Because suddenly the hatless driver and stunted members of the fire brigade began to cooperate, made large gestures with hairy hands, splashed into the water, manipulated the ladders tied together with wire and thongs, found the escape hatch in the roof of the bus, pushed and pulled and cried croak peonie beneath the slow wheeling of the pigeons, cut loose the baggage on the roof and mingled together inside the bus and then again waist-deep in the canal, bumped and struggled together until at last the empty motorbus was abandoned altogether to the smell of time.

  The eyes of the rescuers were concealed, of course, beneath the thick curving brims of leather helmets. And yet as by a begrudging and prearranged signal, and somehow understanding that the man and woman in the bus were as tall as the man and woman on the embankment, and that there was in fact some similarity between yellow suede coat, white pullover, blue jacket, and pea-green slacks (which was what the woman in the bus was wearing), each struggling member of the fire brigade deposited one by one his burden of dog, child, suitcase in my own waiting arms or at my feet. I was picked out of the crowd, so to speak, as the man with the authority to receive survivors.

  “Oh, baby, you’re doing beautifully,” came Fiona’s cold milky voice ringing with pleasure, and holding the dog by the long wet fur and folds of skin at its throat, holding one of the little girls by an elbow bundled into the sleeve of a sweater the color of her father’s coat, noticing that the laces of all three children’s blunt brown shoes were untied and dangling, and that the older girl had hair the color of ginger, and waiting now for the woman and the man himself to climb dripping to our embankment and repossess their dog, their girls, their wet luggage—during all these first moments of their rescue and their arrival I was grateful for the laughter in Fiona’s voice, took a curious pleasure in the smell and feeling of the large quantity of canal water that my pullover and beige-colored trousers had already absorbed from the clothes of the children and the black hair of the dog.

  I was squatting down on a knee and a foot, one of the smaller girls was climbing onto my back, the luggage was piling up around us. I saw the round-faced woman in Fiona’s immediate embrace, watched the woman’s one-armed husband pushing toward us unassisted and with leather cases dangling from straps held high in his single hand. But it was not for us to see the future, not for me to know that the large woman trembling in the arms of my wife was soon to be my own last mistress, while the man with the face of Saint Peter and who was now climbing the shaky ladder into our midst was soon to use his one good hand to explore the cool white skin of Fiona’s life.

  When at last he stood among us, grinning and dripping, smelling of the canal and dangling the leather cases of all his cameras against the wet knees of what I saw were long-legged navy-blue bell-bottom trousers, and when Fiona dropped her arms, turned quickly with aimless hands and bright eyes that appeared not to see flying pigeons or squatting husband or distant embarrassed driver of the motorbus, and then laughed and took a step and suddenly kissed the gaunt stony cheek of this tall hero who had come to us over the same mountains once crossed by the barbarians, certainly I knew then that we were due for some kind of new adventure, Fiona and I. What else could it be?

  AM I EMBRACING AIR? COULD THAT BE ALL? IS THAT WHAT it feels like to discover with absolute certainty that you yourself have simply disappeared from the filmy field? When Love withdraws her breath from your body, and as with the tip of a long green tail flicks the very spot where you stood or thought you stood in the upper right or lower left-hand corner of the endless tapestry, is that what it is like? Embracing air?

  Fiona’s mouth kissed dozens of aching mouths, including mine, and my own large mouth kissed at least an equal number of smaller mouths, including Fiona’s, and though her lips were small, Fiona’s mouth could in the proper light and proper mood become quite as hard and voracious as my own and nearly as large, and time after time we kissed so that bone struck bone and teeth lay against teeth, each of us struggling, maneuvering, to eat the other’s mouth, to catch the other’s jaw between th
e rows of his own hard teeth. Time after time I ate the darkness that Fiona pumped from her throbbing throat into her open mouth, time after time Fiona took from my own lips and tongue and teeth a taste much stronger than cigarettes or wine. For my part no flavor discovered in a kiss ever aroused my oral greed as did the special flavor I always found in Fiona’s mouth, a special taste of mint tinged with that faint suggestion of decay which I drew each time from the very roots of her perfect teeth.

  Is it then mere pompous lyricism to talk, to chew, to blow smoke rings, to breathe when I am no longer able to look at Fiona or talk with her or run my finger along the curve of her smallest rib or put my mouth to hers? Are memory and clairvoyance mere twin languorous drafts of rose-tinted air? Or to notice Rosella’s raw hips beneath her mangy skirt and then not even to seize them for a moment in friendly hands, or to allow Rosella to sleep alone at the far end of my villa without so much as one clandestine visit from a man who was once master of the clandestine visit, or to do no more than smile at a few of Hugh’s now-faded photographs of naked girls, or to explain to Rosella in a language she cannot understand exactly what pleasures await us when the veil of dormancy dissolves—are all these further instances of mere wind feathering endlessly through hands, fingers, empty arms? Should I be feeling some kind of loss, some hollow pain? Or am I dying? Already dead?