I saw the perfect, black-haired child.
I cried out sharply, for his fingers had discovered my hymen.
The pain brought me to my senses. I was filled with self-disgust. What was I was doing behaving like a slut? I did not know this man and I stood naked before him, with his fingers inside me. I had fallen as low as the performers on the sky-screens, with lust driving me, and only lust.
“Stop,” I told him. “Stop!” But my panic and self-disgust made me go further and I dug my nails so deeply into the flesh of his forearm that I drew blood.
He winced, pulled away and looked at me with hatred. Or so I thought.
“
Mi scusi
,” he said. But truly I did not believe he was sorry. His words sounded hollow to me.
He began to dress rapidly. I could see his hands were shaking.
“
Mi scusi. Mi scusi
,” he repeated.
He began telling me of danger, of a ball of poison gas in the sky that threatened us even as he spoke; of how it was imperative he get back to his duties. I wondered if he might be more than a little mad. But he was so insistent I began to believe him.
“You must hurry. I am going now to warn your friends. This danger I tell of you is real. Believe me! You must flee this place. Promise me you will do this.”
I watched him race away from me through the wood; saw how he stumbled briefly as he pulled the hideous rat face over his own. Never before had I felt so sullen of body and spirit. I cleaned myself perfunctorily with a clump of moss because his probing fingers had made me bleed a little, and dressed as quickly as I could. I felt I put on clothes of shame. And I cried out in anguish.
I was amazed at what I had done. I had come so close to throwing away my chastity. I had
urged
a stranger to penetrate me.
Enter me.
I shuddered at the thought of my utter immodesty.
When I saw him again at the stone house, I could not meet his eye. My shame made me sluggish and despairing. I seemed not to know myself at all. For one unforgivable instant, I considered staying behind, letting the ball of poison gas find and exterminate me. It was an instant only, and I expelled the thought as craven and unworthy. I shook myself and stretched, striving to reclaim the body that was mine, and mine alone.
Once we were again on the road, in flight from the poison gas and the killing red rain, I tried to recover my habitual resolute purpose. I tried as well, not to think at all. I welcomed the familiar sensations of being foot-sore, the honest ache in my thighs and in my back; even the way in which thirst prickled like a thing alive in my throat. Our steady pace, the comforting reality of my body moving through space, the willing bearing of burdens (sometimes Lola, and always, containers of water and my own personal pack) helped to calm me.
I concentrated on images of the place I hoped one day to find: an environment untainted, with an abundant source of fine clay, where I could work and live in good faith with human and animal companions. I tried not to dwell on Guido Santarcangelo or to demean myself for what I had done. Regret was pointless, and a drain on my energy and spirit.
I turned my attention to Lola, who had begun to utter little cries in her sleep as she rode upon Bird Girl’s back. I stroked the old woman’s hand as we walked, and this effort to ensure Lola’s comfort also helped restore me to myself. In this way I managed to walk a good half-mile, without a single thought of Guido Santarcangelo, or how my wantonness might undermine my strength and my daily duties to the others.
Then the dreadful thing happened. I saw Bird Girl fall, and the arrow lodged in her breast.
After the firestorm, even through the rawness of Bird Girl’s grieving, I managed to fend off my own morbid thoughts. My worst lapse was when we took refuge in the dank cave with its dark cleft of heaving water. I looked down into that underground river and saw my sinfulness mirrored there. I faltered badly at that point, thinking myself sordid and tainted. It is still a struggle, but so far I have succeeded in keeping my consternation to myself. When images intrude — too bright, too lush, and definitely too hot — of all I did in that clearing, I counter them with my memories of dawn-work at my wheel.
In these recollections of my dearest task, I find the balm I need for my troubled spirit: the chaste sensation of handling the cool, moist clay; the thrill of sensing the pulse of yearning in the sleek, spiralling stuff upon the wheel. Some day, when I come at last to a place where the soil yields me a fine, workable clay, I will try to sculpt Lola’s sacrifice. Yes, even the final terrifying rictus. Fleeting, subtle forms come to me, whose achievement I know will elude me time and again. I long ago learned to accept the likelihood of repeated failure. What matters most is the rich blessing of a state I sometimes enter where I am no longer myself, but a channel for an unseen force, potent and good.
Through the passion of sculpting, I know it is possible to slip the confines of self and fly; then return, stronger and purified, ready to work the deepest seams of solitude and honest labour. By contrast, my one experience of sexual passion left me feeling weak, grimy, and compromised. I soared briefly, yes. But the descent was abrupt and painful.
A single nasty thought continues to hammer in my brain: that I have transgressed against myself and ruined my own wholeness by inviting a man to enter me. Why had I cheapened myself in this way after all those years of caution?
This is what blind, eruptive passion does. I find myself thinking often now of the victims of Pompeii, and the hot lava that smothered them and moulded them, making their agony immortal. Some of these victims were found in brothels, although I was not told this as a child. The old aunts of course had postcards depicting the dead at Pompeii and my stomach would lurch whenever the images of those lava-caked victims appeared. I experienced a similar queasiness when I first saw the masks in the theatre box. I dislike their high glaze, their heartless eyes, and the brittleness of their manufacture. I find their bulging foreheads unnerving. But it is their cavernous black mouths that repel me most. Is it because these openings (are these beings singing, howling, or wailing?) remind me of my own dark cleft where Guido thrust his fingers?
The fact is that I still hate to look at these masks. Whenever Bird Girl takes hers out, I have to turn my face away.
Bird Girl’s wound has healed well enough for us to move on. She is insisting that we take the theatre box and its contents with us. I keep trying to make her see sense; that the box is far too cumbersome and too heavy; that we would all soon weary of carrying it. As Bird Girl frowns and stamps her foot, I realize that I am the one who is weary. It is only then it strikes me how uncharacteristically bone-tired I am, yet simultaneously restless.
“But we must take everything. We just have to,” Bird Girl pleas. Harry, Chandelier, and Candace all look at me in silence.
“Let’s mind-weave,” Candace says. My teeth clench at this saccharine phrase. I imagine her simpering, yet cannot bear to look at her. “Surely,” she urges, “we can come to a compromise?”
I am concerned that the others are all thinking me intransigent, and insensitive to Bird Girl’s needs.
“Yes,” I say, as graciously as I can manage, “a compromise.” And so we agree that Bird Girl and Chandelier will take the diaphanous wings to which they have become so attached for their pantomimes, and that we will each carry one of the masks.
“Six of us. Six masks,” Bird Girl reiterates. “Six and six. And how light they are,” she adds, plucking up one of the female masks and waving it about, before holding it up to her face.
I have to avert my gaze from the austere, haughty features, but the mask’s censorious, heavy-lidded eyes pursue me nonetheless. I force myself to return the stare of this other face that seems to float in front of Bird Girl’s own. I make myself study the cunning moulding of the papier mâché visage, the boldly realistic colouring, the crowning mass of coiled ebony hair, thick and shining, the pale bronzed-gold complexion which in a more cruel light, might appear jaundiced. It is a heartless face. A face, I am sure, that would have smiled to see the arrow pierce Bird Girl’s breast. But could the muscles of that mouth ever move, even in the mask-maker’s imagination? Or must it always be frozen in that black and gaping O?
I cannot help my reaction. My instinct tells me that these theatre masks harbour some unearthly and perhaps unsavoury secret. Yet what could I do but acquiesce to the girl’s urging? It is true the mask is light-weight enough. The object adds no great extra burden, once stored in my pack. As we get ready to depart, I am careful to put my woman’s mask in a large pocket separate from the one in which I kept the poet’s life mask. I do not want them touching, or even proximate. I take care as well, to ensure the eyes in the harshly gleaming face stared outward, rather than at my back.
When I have finished, I see Bird Girl looking at me quizzically.
“Are you all right, Lucia?”
“Of course.”
Bird Girl’s brow furrows; then she turns to join Chandelier who is helping Harry massage his legs, in preparation for our journey onward.
Had I sounded impatient or churlish? I am ashamed of this new shortness of temper that sometimes infiltrates my words, and of my disinclination to forage for as long and as far afield as usual. The guilt is like a thorn lodged in my brain. I keep thinking I have harmed myself irreparably; that I am no longer what I was.
I hoped our continued trek northward would help to steady me and come to terms with my own failing. But after four days’ steady walking, I am still in turmoil. By the time we set up camp tonight, my thoughts were once again a storm I am endeavouring to settle.
I try seeking comfort from memorized words of Keats’s letters that I love in particular. “My solitude is sublime. The roaring of the wind is my wife and the Stars through the window pane are my children.” Yet these words, which I have cherished for so many years, no longer bring me comfort because I have squandered my own precious solitude. I have abandoned myself to lust and am no longer worthy of the poet’s idea of the sublime. The glinting stars I see above me seem fixed upon me in judgement.
At this thought fear takes hold of me, feeding on my every cell. Sleep will not come now. I have no choice, despite the dangers of the night-forest, but to get up and walk. I know I am far more likely to shake loose the needling remorse if I am moving through the surrounding dark. There is a moon, sometimes hidden and sometimes fully revealed, and I take this to be a good sign. As I walk, always keeping our camp-fire in sight, I almost immediately feel my hope renewed. I begin to make plans of building a home of blocks of clay, a kind of protective shell for myself. I picture a dwelling shaped like a beehive, with rounded windows for looking out and letting the pellucid blue air in.
I keep treading in a rough circle, with our campfire as its centre. My right hand is near the knife strapped to my thigh, and I make my way cautiously and quietly. When an odd bleating sound comes out of the dark, I am thus able to stop, and set my foot down again soundlessly.
I stand still, my body all attention, and take out my knife.
The bleating comes again, then a groan apparently wrenched out of deepest misery, and then a sob. There follows a sizzling sound, as if someone has laid a brand upon the night air. And then again: the pathetic bleating, the groan, the sob.
I recognize the voice that utters these sounds. But they so obviously belong to some private ground of pain, I am reluctant to intrude.
Then I smell the iron scent of blood. This smell, together with the human bleating and the sizzling upon the air, all come together in a picture I find unendurable. I have to intercede.
When I come upon him, I am appalled by what I see. The moon has emerged to reveal his nakedness. His burlap gown lies heaped at his feet. His mouth is twisted in agony, ruining his lean, wolfish beauty. The shadows under his eyes look like indelible stains left by years of bleeding or weeping. In his right hand he holds the viper-slim whip, twined with what look like stinging nettle and burrs.
It is harrowing to look at what he has done to his body. Yet I know I must. I cannot begin to guess the number of wounds he has inflicted on himself. Stripes, gashes, lacerations — some festering and some scabbed over and reopened by the lash — and blood running black in the moonlight. Never had I imagined that this was the secret the Outpacer hid beneath his robe. I wince to think of the burlap rubbing against his ulcerated flesh. It is all intolerable, as intolerable as if he had been flaying himself alive.
What he has done makes me think of Titian’s painting of the flaying of Marsyas. The doomed man hung upside-down, while intently busy satyrs peeled off his flesh in strips. A dog lapped at a pool of blood at his head. Marsyas was being punished, Aunt Giulietta told me, by the god Apollo. As a child, this picture had revolted me. It had seemed to belong more to Dante’s Hell than to the work of the sensuous Venetian painter.
The sickening thought comes to me that the Outpacer might be his own satyr. Was it possible he enjoyed this torture of himself?
He has not moved since my approach. He still grips the whip, which lies inert along his right flank. I both sense and see his alertness. I am aware now of the acrid odour of sweat mixed with blood.
“Who is there?” he cries out.
In answer I move closer so that I stand only a few feet from him.
I see some of his tension drain away when he recognizes me. He makes no move to cover his genitals, and I see that he is not sexually aroused. I understand that by his quiet acceptance of my presence we have entered some new, indefinable bond.
“If anyone had to discover me at my business,” he says, “I would prefer it be you.”
I feel dizzied by his use of the word “business.” Yet what words would adequately describe this scene and the activity at which I have discovered him? Surreal? Nightmarish? Primal?
I look at this naked man of uncommon strength, and at the rope-like cording of muscle on his forearms and thighs and calves. I see the dark cavity that hunger has made under his rib cage. I see the greying tendrils of his pubic hair. I see the slashes and scores and punctures and abrasions that seem to cover every inch of his skin, with the exception of his hands and feet and face. It is a vulpine face, with blue burning eyes.