The Blood Oranges: A Novel

by Hawkes, John

  “Well,” I said, lifting high my glass of cold white wine, “let’s drink to us.”

  “To us, baby. To us …”

  “HE’S NOT THERE.”

  “What?”

  “I mean it, baby. He’s gone.”

  “Catherine too?”

  “She’s still asleep. But he’s not with her. He’s gone. He’s just not there.”

  “Well, look around. He can’t be far.”

  “I’ve looked for him already. Everywhere. Something’s wrong.”

  “Why don’t you come on back to bed awhile. OK?”

  “All right, baby. I’ll go alone.”

  So before I could pull on my frayed white ducks and reach for my old white woolen sweater (no time to search for underpants or shirt, no time for shoes), Fiona had already given me her quick hard sign of disapproval and summoned all her usual self-reliance and walked out of our room, disappeared into that loud dawn wind that almost never blew but was blowing now. Hard-faced, hair untended, barefooted, wearing her crumpled but sporty mid-thigh trench coat open over a short white modest sleeping gown, skin and eyes still bearing the marks of a recent dream—in all her fleeting vividness she too was gone, as if she had not roused me by my naked shoulder, had not stood over me and spoken, had not given me a glimpse of what I took to be undue agitation, had not brought me this latest and, I thought, trivial news of Hugh.

  First from our darkened room. First to abandon without a qualm our bed. First to find Hugh missing and not merely absent from Catherine’s side at the outset of the very day we planned to row the children to the chapel on our little nearby island. First to dart like a golden arrow into the clear and pointless energy of the high wind. That was Fiona, my all but clairvoyant wife, who now, I saw, was once more rushing out of sight through a rift in the wind-blown frieze of cypresses. But I was not far behind her, sleep-ridden and heavy and half dressed, and though I did not catch up with her until she stopped for a moment amidst the first chalky stones of that dead village.

  “Don’t worry,” I shouted through cupped hands, “we’ll find him, wherever he is …”

  For an instant longer I stood there squinting, rubbing my sleep-filled belly, fighting the wind, staring at the invisible spot where the trees and my wind-tossed wife had merged. Why wind? Where was it coming from? How could it blow with so much power and yet no direction? I swayed, I listened, I shaded my eyes, knowing that Catherine was indeed asleep and that Fiona’s haste was justified but futile and that the light itself had turned to wind or that the wind had somehow assumed the properties of the dawn light. We would make no joyous expedition to the island chapel, that much I knew. But if Catherine was still sleeping, at least her children were pathetically and ironically awake. Because with my first deliberate step in pursuit of Fiona, hands in pocket and breath hard won, I heard their piping cries high on the wind—or thought I did. And what were they trying to tell me, those senseless cries, if not the worst?

  There was no reason to hurry, no time to lose. Behind me I left the twin villas now equally desolate, though one was occupied and one was not. Ahead of me lay the white sea and the narrow beach heaped up with the ominous splendor of all those uncountable spears of light and drowned in the silent velocity of the wind’s voice. Instinctively I turned left toward the village, I who was never a partisan to disaster now preparing in full consciousness to share with Fiona all the simple practicalities of pure disaster. My feet did not bleed on those sharp rocks, I did not run. But I knew what was coming and moved forward quickly enough to be of what help I could to Fiona.

  “Wait,” I shouted, catching sight of her and waving, “you can’t do him any good alone …”

  Did she hear me? Did she read my lips or take into account the meaning of my upraised hand? Was she standing there restrained in flight against that white wall out of need for me, out of concern for me, or only to collect her amazing energies and indulge herself in one moment of distraction for the sake of her fear, her plan, her determination? I approached, she waited, I saw the skirts of the tan coat beaten flat to the wall and the white gown beaten between her thighs. There in the driving light and silent wind at the entrance to the village, she might have given me the briefest smile of welcome, recognition, affection. But she did not.

  “Fiona,” I said clearly and gently, “I’m not to blame …”

  “I’m not blaming you, baby. How could I?”

  And then she jerked away her perfect shoulder, jerked away the features of her face baked hard in seriousness, took back the fragment of attention she had given me, turned and ran off abruptly toward the center of the village. And now I ran. Yes, I kept pace with Fiona below roofs of fungus-green or rouge-red tiles and past rows of crooked and tightly shuttered windows. We smelled the fetid smell of the black canal. The wind glazed the chunky white façade of the squat church. At least there were no short and robust leather-suited figures to point to our bare feet and curious attire and to shout croak peonie or crespi fagag in the wake of our progress up that village street.

  “Listen,” I said, “why don’t you wait down here? I think you should.”

  Had she forgotten her many visits to that room above? Had she forgotten my own brief visit or two? Had she forfotten the rusty hinges, the knotholes, the formidable latch, the oddly polished surface of that rough wood? Was she oblivious to the significance of a closed door? But none of it meant anything to Fiona, who without listening or even hesitating merely used her shoulder against the sagging street-level wooden door and with one blow knocked it ajar.

  I followed her into that brutal darkness. I was right behind her as she climbed. She stumbled, I heard her breath come back to me in short unhappy gasps. It was cold in the stair well, but we were safe at last from the wind.

  “Hugh? I’m here, baby, I’m here …”

  Yes, she was there. And I was there. And Hugh was hanging in the corner. Fiona, not I, yanked open that second and final low door of wide wooden planks. Fiona, not I, ran forward immediately into the filtered gray light of that small sloping barren room and initiated Hugh’s abortive rescue, with both arms embraced his naked waist and attempted to raise him up and relieve the tension of the rope on his neck. We arrived together, entered that little cold sloping room together, faced together the stark and unavoidable sight of Hugh’s nude body hanging amidst all his photographs in the corner nearest the inevitably shuttered window on the canal side of the room. Yes, Fiona and I were competitors for Hugh’s life from the first moment we intruded upon the scene both of his art, as he called it, and his death. And I too was active, except that I saw in a glance that the rope was much too thick and much too tight for Fiona’s courageous efforts, no matter how sensible they were on the surface, and understood at once what Fiona in all her intensity and devotion could not perceive— that our only hope was to cut him down immediately. So rather than join her in the corner, where now she was making soft agonized sounds of comfort, I turned instead to Hugh’s enormous homemade worktable and with a single heave cleared it of pans, traps, labyrinthine pieces of equipment, glass-stoppered bottles. Quickly I dragged it into position beneath the great rusted hook which, like a beckoning iron finger, held the end of the rope. And noting the open eyes, the smile on the open mouth, the sweat still fresh on his pitted brow, the glossy photograph clenched in his good hand, the white feet side by side and suspended only a few inches from the floor, quickly I stood on the table and freed the rope and helped Fiona lower him gently, swiftly, to the bare floor that was now Hugh’s crude temporary bier. We needed light, so in passing I smashed my elbow through the frail slats of those rotted shutters which Hugh in his love of darkness always kept closed. And when I withdrew my elbow and turned, still heavily in motion and using up no time, no time at all, I saw that that sudden long splintered shaft of light was falling directly on Hugh’s face and on Fiona’s swift hands already reaching for the rope at his throat.

  Together we knelt at either shoulder, Fiona and I, together a
nd in silence did all we could. But Fiona’s fingers, not mine, broke the spell of the noose, though I raised Hugh’s head so that Fiona was able to remove forever the hairy loop of that rope which was thicker than my two thumbs. And Fiona, not me, attempted without respite to blow life into that strangled man. Her face was low, her left hand was pillowing the back of Hugh’s head, her right hand was lightly braced against his chest, she was trying to breathe both for herself and Hugh. But here? Now? This confined space? These thick walls? This cell so bleak and at the same time so lurid? This broken light? This wreckage? This white body stretching as if from one end of the room to the other and welted with thin tendons that would never again relax? Was it possible? Was this the same Hugh who had danced one night for his children and taken his pictures and smiled at Fiona and carried Catherine into Illyria and thanked me solemnly for the song of the nightingale? Could even Hugh have made this miscalculation and closed all our doors? Fiona was not a woman to waste herself, or to expect senseless occurrences to make sense, or to blind herself to what she did not wish to know or punish herself for what she could not have. She was hardly a woman to display grief or to attempt to restore what had already been destroyed. But for once Fiona, still kneeling at what she knew full well was not even a final kiss, was behaving out of character, and I was glad. Until she spoke, which in the next instant she did, and even when she spoke, obviously Fiona was grieving, remembering, flying once more down the whole long road of eccentricity with Hugh. Before she pulled her mouth from his, before she sat back on her heels and looked at me, before she could notice what I was doing, quickly I plucked that cracked and shiny photograph from Hugh’s rigid grasp and thrust it from sight.

  “It’s no good, baby. He’s dead.”

  “At least it was an accident. At least he wasn’t trying to kill himself …”

  “For God’s sake, I understand.”

  “It was bound to happen. If not now then later.”

  “Listen, baby, I’m going to Catherine. You can do the rest.”

  “AND VIRGINITY ? THE ADOLESCENCE OF THE VIRGIN? THE stiff pictographic story of downcast eyes, clear water, empty hands, light the color of cut wheat? Is all this mere chaff in the wind of the practical lover? Mere fading sickness of men like Hugh? Unreal? Perhaps. But sex-singing is hardly possible without the presence of the frail yet indestructible little two- or three-note theme of innocence, and though I am anything but insensitive to boring technicalities and dangerous by-products (religious inventions, martyrs amputating their own breasts with stolen swords, and so forth), nonetheless I have always defended the idea if not the fact of purity and have always felt warmly inclined toward the sight of narrow beds and young girls carrying clay pots to massive fountains. Fiona understood what I meant Did Catherine? Does she now? After all, there was a time when all our days were only memories of hours that had not yet passed and each one of us was in some way virginal. Lounging on all that remains of Fiona’s old settee, I wonder if I could put the adolescence of the Virgin into words for Catherine. In the twilight should I lead her back again to the chapel of the wooden arm and let her look for herself? Tomorrow, I tell myself, smiling through my own thick smoke, or the day after.

  But virginal? Four large virginal human beings? The suggestion is not that I myself ever experienced the slightest preference for virginal over nonvirginal girls or women. The suggestion is not that my wife or Hugh’s could ever suffer significantly by comparison with the young and half-naked shepherdess chasing across the sunburnt field after her shaggy goats. No, one body does not diminish beneath another, there is no amorous oil to lose, the woman bathing in her blue pool renews not her flesh but her readiness.

  Yet even now I see once more the adolescence of the Virgin herself, those few still scenes discovered only toward the end of our idyl and in that very chapel where Catherine collapsed in grief on those cold stones.

  Look up there, Fiona. Proof enough?

  Sketches. Only a half dozen or so crude sketches of innocence joining the thick wall to the vaulted darkness, small panels of hazy paint invisible except when, once a day and thanks to some cosmic situation and the faulty construction of the squat church, the sun at last becomes a thin blade that slips beneath each of my brief glimpses of the Virgin and for a moment illuminates the three hooded attendants and their rigid and yet somehow submissive charge.

  At first glance the wordless story is simply barren, undecipherable, says nothing. And yet to the patient viewer the colors begin to speak, the plaster glows. That yellow stroke? Her gown. And the purple pear? A vessel filled to the lip with water undoubtedly. As for the large dark object held with apparent effort by the attendant bound and hooded in the ocher-colored robe, it is a hairbrush, obviously, though the yellow figure of our young Virgin has no hair while the brush itself resembles nothing so much as a crude, gigantic iron key for a medieval lock. But the color is the important thing, the yellow that dominates each scene— now blond, now sandalwood, now gold, now the yellow that flows in cream, now the color carried in the furry sacs of unmoving bees. The skin of the tree is yellow, the stiff gown is yellow, the bare feet, one of which is missing in the third frame, are pale variants of the small female lemons that once hung from a white branch but now hang from nothing. Is it the color of truth and adolescence? The color of youth removed from the context of age? Simply the color of innocence? The Virgin hue? I suppose it is. And so one figure supports the shoulders and one holds the feet while the yellow but now horizontal girl remains as stiff as ever: she is rising. But the third attendant, ocher-colored, robed and hooded, is sitting on the end of the bed with his wide back to the day’s first event. Or the Virgin stands upright and faceless in a large receptacle of ancient wood: she bathes. But nonetheless she is still clothed in the yellow gown, no water flows from what must have once been a bucket tilted above her head. Or among leafless trees she walks with hands held as if for some illuminated book: she prays. Yet trees, book, attendants are now invisible. And in this frame our yellow Virgin has suffered the same decay as the surrounding plaster and is all but gone.

  Yellow was Fiona’s favorite color. I have seen Hugh’s narrow eyes downcast in the midst of his craving. Catherine’s face did not betray her longing. Even at night the four of us walked in that light the color of cut wheat.

  THE SUN CASTS ORANGE DISCS ON THE SEA, OUR NIGHTS ARE cool. From three adjacent wooden pegs on my white wall hang a dried-out flower crown, a large and sagging pair of shorts, the iron belt—and is it any coincidence that all my relics are circular? Who can tell? Everything coheres, moves forward. I listen for footsteps.

  In Illyria there are no seasons.

  Also by John Hawkes

  The Beetle Leg The Cannibal

  Death, Sleep & the Traveler

  Humors of Blood & Skin: A John Hawkes Reader

  The Lime Twig

  The Passion Artist

  Second Skin

  Travesty

  Virginie: Her Two Lives

  COPYRIGHT © 1970, 1971 BY JOHN HAWKES

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 74-152516

  (ISBN: 0-8112-0061-2)

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Portions of this book first appeared in The Dutton Review, The Harvard Advocate, Tri-Quarterly and Works in Progress, to whose editors grateful acknowledgment is made.

  The author is grateful for generous help given him by

  The Rockefeller Foundation.

  ISBN: 978-0-811-22255-6 (e-book)

  First published clothbound in 1971.

  First published as New Directions Paperbook 338 in 1972,

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada Limited

  Des
igned by Gertrude Huston.

  New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin,

  by New Directions Publishing Corporation,

  80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011