Lucia's Masks Read online

  He is relieved to find that his bone seems intact, with the exception of a small lump rising on the taut skin, and a soreness that would spread into one of the blue-black bruises he had so often sported in his youth. So why do his eyes tear at the solicitude of the boy and Lucia and the Outpacer as they circle him with their urgent questions, and Lucia gently examines his injury? Is he surprised he is loved?

  He stands on his good leg, assisted by Chandelier, and watches as Lucia and the Outpacer tug the offending box from out of the hollow where it lies, half obscured by the root and thick vine that sent him tumbling. Are they all hoping for a hoard of dried foods, he wonders: apricots, slices of apple and pear, wrinkled raisins whose goodness would enliven their blood?

  The hasp closing the box swings back easily, as does the lid itself. Both Harry and Chandelier start as Lucia cries out in alarm.

  For an instant, craning forward to peer into the box, Harry sees the same ghastly sight that has upset Lucia. Staring up at him from beneath a layer of gauzy fabric are three decapitated heads, the mouths stretched wide open as if in some last plea for mercy. He blinks and sees the truth: that these heads are in fact masks. The Outpacer picks one up from beneath its flimsy veiling. Harry now sees clearly its high glaze, the dark cavity of the gaping mouth, the black, elongated eyes and pronounced bulbous forehead.

  This is not a face one warms to, he thinks. Yet he recognizes its power. He knows that the sounds issuing from that cavernous mouth with its reddened lips would likely transfigure a man’s life; or at the very least, make him twist away in fear.

  “Papier mâché,” Lucia says. Her initial repulsion has apparently shifted to curiosity, as she touches one of the masks delicately on forehead, cheek, and chin. “How many are there?” she asks.

  The Outpacer takes out the top three masks, two female and one male, all with shining black hair and lustrous eyes. Underneath, he finds a slatted shelf. This he lifts out to reveal three more masks also swathed in gauze. Two of these have male faces: one young with a sleek beard; the other grizzled, and with drooping eyelids. The third mask of this set is a woman with exceptionally wide cheekbones and a broad sculpted nose. Like the first three masks, this group all have the same wide-stretched mouths; the same bulging foreheads.

  There is a third shelf in the box, and lifting it, the Outpacer uncovers two pairs of wings, made of white linen and wire. A fine hand, applying an iridescent blue paint, has created the illusion of profuse, overlapping feathers.

  Lucia claps her hands as the Outpacer opens and folds the wings to mimic the progress of a butterfly.

  “Will they divert Bird Girl, do you think?” The Outpacer folds the wings away and restores the masks to their original order. He hoists the chest to take back to their camp site, while Lucia and Chandelier help Harry whose leg is beginning to throb badly. Harry takes a paradoxical comfort from the fact he can still feel pain. He is far from dead yet.

  When they get back, they see a pitiful sight. Bird Girl sits on the ground, hugging herself and rocking back and forth. She bites at her knuckles. She rocks and sobs and sometimes plucks at the flesh of her forearms.

  “She will not be comforted,” says Candace, who sits opposite the distraught girl. “She must go through it,” Candace adds. “There is no other way.”

  This strikes Harry as the wisest thing he has ever heard Candace say. Yet he wishes desperately he had something to offer the girl to help her through her grieving.

  He recalls how his mother had always baked fruit pies for funeral gatherings. As a boy, he had often wondered about this strange urge to feed those who were mourning. Only now, in his eighty-eighth year, as he watches the stricken girl rocking herself upon the earth, does he comprehend at last the significance of his mother’s midnight labour, kneading and rolling out the pastry, and dabbing the flawless pie tops with milk. Finally, he understands that her baking had been an act of communion; that her gift of the tart and the sweet and the wheat-based crust was an affirmation of life’s goodness.

  Oh taste and be! He hears his mother’s voice.

  If he were a conjuror, Harry knows just what he would produce out of thin air for Bird Girl: a tray of chocolates, both white and dark, in fantastical shapes to make her smile.

  “Taste and be,” he would say, as he enticed her away from her agony with his solemn gift of sweetness. “Taste and be. And then gather up her spirit into your keeping.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Cravings

  WHEN WAS IT, HARRY WONDERS, THAT he lost his craving for fine food? Like his sexual urge, it seemed to have disappeared altogether. But he certainly feels no less human in consequence. These days he eats enough to keep going. It sometimes surprises him what meagre nourishment he requires. He sees this as a great advantage. Even with what the gifted forager brings in, food is scarce. The five others are young, with sharp physical needs and desires. His tiny daily repast barely cuts into their supply. So where exactly is he drawing his energy? Harry believes he feeds on his memories of the two places he loved most in his life. And on hope, as well.

  Often, his hope centres on a bird. Harry is not particular. It need not be a bird with a melodious song, or indeed any song at all. A croak, a caw, a cacophonous blast from a stretched throat, he would rejoice at any such sound as long as its maker was a bird. This is his dearest wish: that before he dies, he might once again see and hear a bird. It is not just a selfish wish, for Harry is certain that the bird’s return will signal the world’s redemption.

  This certainty is rooted in primeval awe. When he was a young boy, a heron passed so low over his head he was momentarily enveloped by its shadow. Was the initial chill in his blood an atavistic fear he might be preyed upon and eaten? But all his anxiety dissolved as soon as he looked up at the angular silvery grey form sailing over his head. The bird folded itself sideways and landed in the stream beside him, with such a slow and elegant stateliness it seemed it was lowered lovingly, by some unseen power, on wires beaten thin as gold. He watched the heron make its way through the water, mesmerized by its measured cross-wise step. He did not think he blinked, yet suddenly the bird disappeared, as if it had passed through a door imperceptible to any human eye.

  “Secret” and “mysterious” were the words that came to him. Years later, shaken to the marrow by his first sight of the monumental albatross, he had added the word “holy.” Harry was certain — absolutely certain — that the spirit of creation moved in birds. Which was all the more reason to mourn the species after species he had seen disappear in his own lifetime.

  So the hope of their return lives on in Harry, nourishing him as he nourishes it. What better food could there be, he often asks himself, for an ancient man in a cursed world? He realizes this hope that now flourishes in him is a force reborn. For many years, he had thought his capacity for hope was just as extinct as the many species he mourned. Harry knew it was Chandelier who had wrought this change. He looks at the boy and is amazed by the vigour of the child’s selfless love. He does sometimes worry that he is undeserving of the devotion of such a rare and luminous boy. But what Chandelier gives, he gives freely, and Harry daily rejoices that fate has brought them together in his final frail years.

  Since leaving the ruins of the Egg, Chandelier has himself discovered just how fluid is love’s power. With Harry, his deep affection is sometimes a son’s, sometimes a father’s, and sometimes an acolyte’s. With Bird Girl, he is becoming both brother and dear companion. With Miriam he had been son and lover in one, a bond that he nevertheless knew to be faultless. But at the core of their passion he sensed an unsettling power, like the live, quivering energy that jolts him if he mistakenly touches Snake when his guide is deep in thought. Chandelier understands this dangerous facet of the bond he had with Miriam through his nerves, rather than his mind. It was somehow a love too intense to endure, or be endured.

  There is not a day when he does not think of Miriam, often with a sharp-toothed desire that perturbs him. Because h
e has not yet learned to masturbate, he is sometimes in pain. He has found a way to turn his thoughts from the demands of his sore need, and this is to focus on how Miriam mothered him. In particular, he concentrates on recalling the foods she prepared for him, with all the wonderful tastes he had not known existed. For like Harry’s restricted fare in Antarctica, Chandelier’s diet in the Egg had relied heavily on products freeze-dried and frozen. His father was uneasy about foods that might be genetically corrupted, and chose the nutritional elements of his family’s diet carefully. On the other hand, their meals were strictly functional, with little to distinguish one substance on their plates from another. Food was fuel, Chandelier’s father maintained. He had long ago turned his back on anything resembling Epicureanism.

  Miriam could not have been more opposite. All her life, she had derived the greatest pleasure from sampling the diverse foods and cuisines that were still available in a badly fractured world. During her life in the City, she had spent many happy hours preparing meals to make her friends smile and believe again in innocent pleasures. This was why one of her chief delights in living with the Silk People was their pair of goats. She rejoiced in these animals’ robust health, their sprightliness and silkiness, their natural hauteur and their lustrous eyes. Miriam learned, through much trial and error, to make rounds of creamy cheese from their milk. This delicacy was shared among the Silk People, and the sharing itself had become ritualized, with a chant of thanks to Miriam for her patient labour, and to the goats for being what they were.

  Miriam had fed Chandelier morsels of her precious cheese in her efforts to reclaim him from the trauma that made him freeze, burn, and shake by turns. She drew on the full range of her sensuous store to save him: the heat of her body, the warmth of her voice and breath, the prodding touch of her tongue, and the enticing tastes of as many different foods as she could conjure up. And at last, it was the sliver of ripe goat’s cheese on his tongue that brought him back from the brink. He opened his eyes in surprise and Miriam’s hand flew to her heart for she saw that he was saved.

  Chandelier remembers still the delicious shiver along his spine, the way the buds on his tongue contracted, and how his mouth — or was it his entire body? — yielded to the creaminess, tartness, and sweetness. He heard a wild cry in his blood. Here was a whole realm of human experience of which he had been ignorant. And at that instant, inside Miriam’s tent of parachute silk, he thought he glimpsed his father’s shadow.

  Chandelier had an inkling then of the boundless, dazzling and various world of which he had been deprived — a world that made his soul dance with joy. He did understand that his father had kept him apart from this world in order to protect him. It had been a deprivation founded in love. Just as it was love that prompted Miriam to feed him a morsel of goat’s cheese, an enticement that showed him the way out of his wretchedness and near-madness. Love had saved him, and the taste of love had saved him, and never afterward could he separate the two.

  Candace too, believes that food does not truly nourish the body unless love goes into its preparation, and the serving and the eating, and the thanks for all of these. She means by this the love of community; not the lesser, inevitably corrupting, personal love. She has planned in great detail the foods on which her ideal community would thrive. At the centre — of the table and of every meal — was bread. Round, wholesome granary loaves. Never, ever baguettes, whose shape she has always found offensive.

  At night, when she is most aware of her constant hunger, she takes comfort in picturing herself at the head of a long table, covered by the fine linen cloth that lies folded now at the bottom of her pack. She will break off portions of the perfect bread with just-scrubbed hands, and distribute the pieces clockwise. She sees the glowing faces of the members of her fellowship — a word she treasures, which she has carried over from another time and kept safe. This vision generates a contentment that helps keep her warm as she lies curled at night on the hard ground. Her limbs relax as she recites to herself the various stages of the bread-making in which every community member would share: the vigorous kneading, the hopeful rising, the careful baking, the blessed eating. In the bread’s dense, moist texture, she would taste both optimism and love. “Scrumptious” is the word she hugs to herself just before sleep comes. Scrumptious.

  This is not a word that the Outpacer would ever utter except ironically. Food has always ranked rather low on his scale of sensuous pleasures. When he eats, he eats sparingly. He cannot abide gluttons. The tastes he favours tend to be dramatic: like the explosion of red-hot chillies producing a fire in his mouth that verges on pain. He yearns some evenings for a slim-necked bottle of pepper sauce from the Pleasure Zone. He could so easily have slipped one into the capacious pocket of his monk’s robe when he was leaving the City. Then he could experience that simple joy of a few drops of flame upon his tongue. This was his familiar, beloved haunt: the land of pleasure-pain.

  Or is that really what he yearns for? He wonders now if he wanted that fire in his mouth to restore his innocence, burn away all that he had been and done that was corrupt so that he could love at last, as other, far more virtuous beings loved. As Chandelier appears to love Bird Girl, selflessly and without taint.

  Bird Girl had grown up in a household where everyone ate only what was wholesome. The New Amazons forbade self-indulgence of any kind. Food strengthened muscles, bones and blood, nerves and brain. Although she bristled at their expectation she would become a full-fledged Amazonian fighting machine, Bird Girl tried to keep to their dietary strictures. She ate frugally.

  Intellectually, on the other hand, she knew herself to be greedy. She was ravenous for other realities, insights, and perspectives. Outside The New Amazons’ warehouse fortress, a multiplicity of worlds beckoned. She wanted to see and taste and touch them all. And because she was young and eminently desirable, she found few doors in the City barred to her. Some of these doors she later dearly wished she had never entered. But others gave her access to the realms of learning she had dreamed of so long.

  After the fee was paid and the deed was done, she had some clients — most often foreign — who chose to pay for her company for another hour or so because she was so frankly appreciative of their erudition and cultured sensibility. Bird Girl had gleaned a lot simply by putting on her round-eyed, little girl all-agog face. She had acquired, for example, a short history of porcelain; and learned about the symbolism of white jade, the handling of rogue elephants, and the search for the elusive thylacine. She heard poems in languages where she understood not a word, but whose sounds made her contemplative or happy nonetheless.

  And there had been a man — an older, slender, Chinese man — who had covered her nakedness with an embroidered scarlet silk gown, and slipped jewelled silk slippers on her feet. He made her a vegetarian meal, working rapidly and gracefully, and set it before her and watched her eat. She could summon up every detail still: the crispness of lotus root and water chestnut, the dense goodness of the bean curd flavoured with ginger, pepper, sesame oil, and soy. And best of all were the lily buds and black mushrooms, with their yielding fleshiness and mysterious taste and scent of earth.

  She exclaimed in delight — the food seemed to her so perfect. It struck her that respect and wonder had gone into its making, and so she ate slowly, aware that this was somehow an act of worship. Her Chinese client told her the dish was called “Buddha’s Delight.” He described for her the island of P’u-t’o, a nature sanctuary under the protection of the Goddess of Mercy. On this island in the China Sea, no life had ever been taken, he said, not even that of the smallest fish. P’u-t’o was home to the fantastic barking deer and the monks who lived according to the precepts of the goddess. They were compassionate, vegetarian, enlightened, and pacific.

  Did such a place truly exist, she asked him. He assured her it did. The proof, he said, was in this dish he had prepared for her, in the tastes and textures she savoured. She wanted so much to believe him.

  Consonan
ce. Purity. Mercy. Yes, she thought she had been able to taste all these things. She hopes, always, that one day she might do so again.

  Lucia’s food craving has more to do with the making than the eating. She yearns to stand again over a simple, solid stove, gripping a wooden spoon as she stirs and watches the live, rolling essence of polenta on the boil. It could be a dangerous process, when the mixture in the pot turned volcanic, heaving, peaking, and spitting. One had to take great care.

  Making polenta also required a muscular arm and much patience. Strength went into the stirring as the mixture grew gradually thicker. Getting the right consistency took time. But when at last the ideal blend was achieved, the corn meal and boiling water, butter and Parmesan transformed themselves into a substance that resembled molten gold. It flowed from the pot, ready for its metamorphosis into squares or rounds or heaped mounds.

  As a child, Lucia found the entire process thrilling, but she had loved especially that final stage of shaping and moulding what was fluid and golden into perfect forms. Whether this fascination was the origin of her desire to work with clay, she was uncertain. Yet she did not doubt that from these simple components of bubbling water, yellow grain, labour and patience, there emerged a food both sensuous and wholesome. Polenta was part of her heritage. It sustained life and helped to keep it holy.

  More and more these days, she yearns for this kind of sustenance to replenish her sense of well-being, for she is deeply troubled. She is plagued too, by what she sees as a sore moral failing: her duties as principal forager are starting to weigh heavily upon her.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Lucia Consoles a Sinner

  WE HAVE SO MUCH FOR WHICH to thank good fortune. O buona Fortuna. Bird Girl has regained her strength. Her breast wound is knitting together well, although she will always have a scar. Grimoire, her heinous tracker, lies dead in the black water of the cave’s abyss. By the workings of chance, and the doctor’s help and advice, we all survived the fire-storm and the poisoned gas.