Lucia's Masks Read online

  I wake some mornings and taste a different air, cold, blue-spangled.

  What I cannot control is the circling of my thoughts, which drain my energy and make me sometimes irritable with the others. I go round and round this same conundrum that obsesses me: this folly I committed and the stain it has left upon my spirit.

  Why did it happen? This is the question I ask myself a hundred times a day, although I know the answer perfectly well.

  It happened because he had the face of a god, and hands like an angel-artist, with long, slender fingers.

  It happened because I was stone turned to water.

  He closed in on me in the wood. I was on my knees, gathering moss for my next menstrual cycle. I stood to stretch and ease the cramp in my thighs and back. Thus he surprised me, with my arms high above my head, and my back arched.

  On his padded feet, with their soiled matted fur, he had approached me with an animal’s stealth. I, who am never taken unawares, was for once absolutely undone. I understood then what it actually means to be petrified by fear. I was shackled by fear, every muscle frozen with the exception of my frantic heart. I recognized that I was under a spell; that doom had overtaken me despite my best efforts to outrun it. For here he was in all his corrupt and stinking flesh — one of the Rat-Men I had managed to elude in the City. The wry, useless thought came to me that I had escaped death-by-plague in the metropolis only to have it find me hundreds of miles away in a dismal forest. I struggled to scream so that I could warn the others, but no sound came.

  I knew the Rat-Man’s weapon would be a syringe, the tip encrusted with the blood of recent victims. Once the needle plunged into my skin, the best I could hope for was a speedy death, and that my polluted corpse would not infect my companions. As he came closer, his ugliness froze my blood, as well as my muscle and bone. Had I been able, I would have flinched away from the unspeakable head on human shoulders: the narrow, thrusting snout and the slit eyes set too close together and too near the coarse tongue visible through pronged teeth. I wanted to weep and send a great lamentation heavenward. I had loved beauty so. Why must I have this loathsome hybrid as my last sight on earth?

  The graceful legs and elegant hands made the monstrous creation even more abominable. I was in anguish not just because of my approaching death and my inability to alert the others, but also at witnessing this absolute eclipse of hope for the world. I believed I was looking at the future: a repugnant experiment that had succeeded only too well. I had not thought it possible that the maggot of evil could glut itself any further. Yet here the proof stood before me.

  I strove to ready myself for the death that now seemed imminent. I concentrated hard, for what I wanted above all was that my last thoughts be consecrated to those things in which I had been most blessed: my art, my family, ancestral images of umber Tuscan hills and orderly medieval towns, and the language of the great Dante that so often verged on music. Per una selva oscura.

  I will die here, I thought, in a dark wood. My life ends where Dante’s journey began. The rat’s head came so close I could see the pores around its nostrils. The monster waved its exquisite hands; then folded them together, the fingertips touching in a classic attitude of prayer. I found this gesture so defiled I had to shut my eyes. I could no longer bear to look at this desecration of the human form with its heartless pantomime of faith. I closed my eyes and willed myself to picture the glazed red roofs of an ancient Italian hill-top town. These roofs, with their half-cylindrical tiles, seemed to undulate under my gaze. Here was the wave — the flawless, enduring red-glazed wave — that would carry me from this begrimed, corrupt world of mortal flesh to Keats’s realm of ethereal things and rarefied truth and beauty.

  Did I murmur aloud some words in Italian as a kind of benediction to myself? Even now, I am uncertain. I steeled myself to look again at the monster. I knew I must show courage in these final moments of my unwinding fate.

  The instant I opened my eyes, the miracle occurred.

  The Rat-Man tugged and plucked at the fur on its neck and the entire head fell away. The revealed face was of such extraordinary beauty, I gasped. Now I recall that sound with acute shame for it seems with that instinctual reaction I unconsciously invited all that happened afterwards.

  Yet the transformation I witnessed was so astounding, it was impossible for me to keep silent. It was like seeing the heart of a myth enacted — a myth that was also the highest truth. How seamlessly the story unfolded: the ugly rodent turned into a young man glowing with health, his dark eyes and hair lustrous as polished jet. His lips were full; his smile beguiling. I saw a promise of paradise in those eyes and in that mouth. In another age, I might have fallen to my knees worshipping. Now I sighed and moaned — a sweet moan born partly of relief.

  Did he misinterpret that sound?

  “Donna mi prega,” he whispered. And again: “Donna mi prega.”

  I was not aware that I had asked anything at all. But by that point, it was already too late for thought.

  How exactly did it happen? Why do I feel compelled to go over this repeatedly, movement by movement? Why am I drawn to relive, scene by scene, the shameless spectacle of myself in the throes of desire? Is it because I still desire him, despite my distress at what I have done?

  He told me his name was Guido Santarcangelo.

  His beautiful mouth sought out the throbbing pulse at the base of my throat. The touch of his lips was a tease and a torture to me. I was recalled to the narrow bed of my adolescence, where I lay in chaste longing, waiting for the zephyr to part the thin curtains, and move over my body with a gentleness that made me flush and tremble.

  Did I moan? “Donna me prega,” he whispered. I revelled in his warm breath in my ear, and those luscious sounds born of my ancestral blood — “Bella. Bella donna. Donna me prega.” My mouth opened to his. My back arced toward him so that my blouse brushed the taut cloth of his shirt. I did what my body bid, following where it led. But was this action wanton or pure? Am I wanton? But I must not vacillate. I know the answer.

  “Enter me.” Did I say this aloud?

  “Donna me prega.”

  “Enter me.” Yes, I said this. I urged him on.

  We undid my blouse so that my breasts were fully exposed to his hands and his mouth. I was overcome by the tumult of my own desire. I felt both torrential and verdant, as if petals flowed from my lips and from my fingers and toes. A single thought filled my mind: I had discovered a new meaning for the word “god.”

  While his hands cupped and stroked my breasts, his lips and tongue played over my belly and then down, as I helped him to draw down my long skirt. His hands and tongue sought out that part of me I had thought no man would ever touch. The play of his tongue on my flesh took me to the verge of ecstasy. I cannot deny that this was so. His tongue thrust deeper. My mind was a whirl of marvellous shapes: fluid sculptured forms made and yet to be, and always foremost, his beautiful face that rivalled the most sublime of Donatello’s. I felt I stood on the balcony of a high tower in a hill-top town, looking out toward a glittering sea. I heard a song that was the coursing of my own blood, and of his. Surely this music came from the blood of our ancestors, making their claim?

  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 hand
s 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.