Lucia's Masks Page 28

  Under the aria’s spell, his mother’s tranquillity appeared as a great and unusual gift. For those few minutes the music lived in the ear and mind, they were a family united in hope and yearning for a better world. The song permeated the enclosure of the Egg and made it boundless. Chandelier saw all this and understood that he witnessed happiness, all the more to be treasured because of its evanescence. For this aria held an unfathomable mystery — that after it faded away, he could no longer recall it.

  Until that morning, hearing Candace sing, Chandelier had forgotten the notes and how a liquid, lucent voice could shape itself to them and summon up a palpable joy. He had forgotten those interludes when the bonds of filial love had seemed real to him, and solid and secure. He thought at these times he could imagine his very cradling, and appreciate most fully the dream of benevolent nurture his father had intended the Egg to provide. Through the life of the aria that Candace sets shining upon the air, he sees his parents again as they had been; and in the bitter taste of earth in which he grinds his face, relives again his excruciating loss.

  In the silence that follows her song the boy gets to his feet. He is unsteady still, his pale face streaked with dirt and tears. Bird Girl comes to him and he leans needfully on her shoulder. Chandelier begins to quake, convulsed by a swift and uncontrollable tremor rising from the soles of his feet. It is not just the aftershock of grief that seizes and shakes him, but his present dilemma. He feels — quite literally — as if he is being torn in two. Here is his beloved Miriam, bestowing on him that particular gentle regard he had thought never to see again. And there stands Harry, to whose soul the boy feels himself bound as dear companion. There is no doubt that Harry looks at him as lovingly as does Miriam, and with the same deeply evident concern.

  Bird Girl’s hand at his elbow steadies him. When Chandelier looks again at Miriam, he sees how much more lined and strained her face has become since they first met many months ago. It dawns on him that she is wearing the mantle of the Seamstress. Miriam is now the leader of the People of the Silk, he realizes. This is why she looks so weary, and why her hands are already taking on the rigid shape of claws. He is saddened that her painstaking stitching of rents in silk is taking such a toll. He knows the Seamstress must keep the fabric intact, because the cherished silk is inextricable from the group’s identity and spirit. The Seamstress must also be the group’s wise woman and counsellor. This made a heavy burden, and Chandelier perceives with a pang that Miriam will now age far more rapidly than he.

  If anything, this intensifies his wish to bow down at her feet. He wants, above all else, for her to fold him in her loose robe and strong arms, and later, in the fastness of her fluttering tent, to take him inside her. He believes he has returned to Miriam (for what else could this be but a return?) stronger and nearer to manhood.

  But Snake is writhing and twisting in his spine. The boy sees the flash of emerald scales upon the sapphire air. He flinches as the forked tongue lashes his ear. He does not want to hear Snake’s cold-blooded truth. Snake makes him confront Harry’s name, and the question that pounds in his heart’s blood.

  “Face it. Why do I have a forked tongue, boy?” Chandelier knows he cannot shirk answering. Snake is the severest of taskmasters.

  Dilemma. Conundrum. He sees that the forked tongue signifies choice, and that he must choose.

  He looks to where Miriam waits at the opening of her tent.

  He looks to see Harry standing beside a slim tree of freckled brightness. He sees his old friend reach out to stroke the bark, as if he caressed the cheek of his beloved. Harry beckons to Chandelier, and his outstretched hand is an open cup.

  At that instant, Harry loses his footing and Chandelier feels his own heart lurch, and then quieten, as the old man succeeds in righting himself. So attuned is the boy to the frailties of Harry’s body that he hears, even at that distance, a small gasp of pain escape the old man’s lips. He makes his decision in that instant, marvelling anew at how varied are the forms of love. He goes to receive Miriam’s blessing. This takes the form of a simple kiss upon his brow. He knows the imprint of her mouth is the token of a passion he will never experience with her again. Then Chandelier goes to join Harry, who has made him the gift of his most holy thoughts and hallowed remembrances.

  “Birch,” says Harry.

  It takes a second before Chandelier grasps that this is the name of the slender white tree with the silvery marks and bands.

  “This means,” says Harry, “that we are nearly home.”

  “Home?” The word tastes strange on the boy’s tongue. Yet when he says it again, the sound delights him. Both his mind and body yearn for this mysterious place he has never really known. He plunges his hand deep in his pocket where his fingers tighten on the little green stone tablet that had been his father’s. It comes to him at last what this object is, and why his father had valued it so highly.

  “The key to our underground in the air,” his father called it, as he tapped out his messages to the Arêté with the tablet’s little metal paddle. This object Chandelier had taken from the ruins of the Egg was a Morse key. Morse was an ancient code, the boy recalls, its alphabet made up of dots and dashes of sound. So old was this code that the EYE, and all who served the EYE, had long ago forgotten it ever existed.

  Chandelier cannot contain his excitement. He must tell Harry of his discovery. “A Morse key,” he explains to his old friend, “for transmitting messages in code.”

  “Is it, boy?” Harry peers at the object that Chandelier cupped in his hands as reverentially as if it were a crystal chalice wrought for a saint.

  “You don’t say,” says Harry. “Well, I never heard of such a thing.”

  Chandelier is delighted. If Harry has no knowledge of the Morse technology, this means the code is ancient indeed. Very likely the EYE is still oblivious to a means of communication so archaic. He begins to wonder if he might find a way to contact the Arêté’s underground in the air once they reach this place that Harry calls “home.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Harry Meditates on the Ice

  HARRY HAD SOMETIMES DOUBTED HE WOULD ever again touch a birch tree. Yet here it was, one of a pale and gracious company that rose from this blessed earth on which he stood. Blessed, because here he had witnessed the miracle of the boy’s rescue from a lance about to pierce his young heart. And Chandelier’s saviour, oh wonder of wonders, was Candace-the-Self-Obsessed, Candace the Chatterer, the constant bane of an old man’s existence. This unlikely twist in the group’s destiny reinforces Harry’s conviction that they are nearing some deep-dwelling source after which they all thirst.

  Who would have thought it? Who would have thought that Candace would be the one to stay the giant’s hand and save his beloved boy? Who would have imagined the Garrulous One had the courage, the daring, the fire in her belly, and the generosity to carry out this reckless but essential deed? The sheer unexpectedness of her act restores his faith in the possibilities for humankind. Candace stood revealed in his eyes. He is not at all chagrined or ashamed at his former poor opinion of her character. Instead, he is delighted to have his own caustic appraisal overturned.

  “Delight,” he thinks, is the correct word. It holds the luminescence that happiness brings to the seen world. This is the innocent clarity of earth’s and his own first days. The boy lives. Candace has tumbled into a sea of erotic bliss. The tents and faces of the People of the Silk glow in the keen, clear air. The bleat of the goat is like a song rising out of his boyhood.

  He and his five travelling companions have emerged from the jagged forest intact, if not unscathed. Harry can smell the clean north. He is sure he can hear, not too far off, the lapping waves of the huge lake of unfathomable depth, which millennia ago, mammoth, roaring sheets of ice had carved out of the earth. This might well be the same ice, Harry thinks, on which thousands of years later, he stomped out his ebullient, half-delirious ritual dance beneath the golden sun dogs of the southern pole.

/>   Gigantic sheets of ice had travelled the face of the earth, shaping and sculpting, opening veins for turbulent rivers, raising mountains that would inspire men to dream of the faces of the gods. Ice was the prime mover in all he now beheld: the moss, the yarrow, the dark-purple hills, and this birch, whose papery smoothness is still cause for wonder. Harry would not have been at all embarrassed to admit that his first love was a slim white birch. He had been a solitary boy and a dreamer. The young tree, with its fluid grace, readily metamorphosed into a girl, whom in his chaste imaginings he adored. As he grew older and the pall of winter sometimes dragged upon his spirit, it was the birch that had the power to lift his mind again. Against the dark backdrop of the stolid conifers, they were a company of supple dancers with arms outstretched. Birch trees seemed to him to be always giving of themselves, sending out into the world bright, fluttering ribbons of silver and pale bronze.

  He touches the silky inner bark with a reverence that seems as natural as breath. He feels the thrill and thrum of life beneath his fingers. For a moment he is a boy again, enamoured of an ivory tree whose mysterious markings bear a message he is not yet ready to understand. Does he grasp this message now? It is more, he realizes, than the simple promise of water underground. These trees speak of persistence, of the radiant spirits of earth. They tell the passionate story of endurance. Harry sees that he has himself lived out this story, and that his love for these trees is undiminished. The Handel aria Candace sang has reminded him of the deep roots of his boyhood attachment.

  “The music is sublime and the plot absolutely absurd.” So a cultivated companion in Antarctica had first introduced Harry to Handel’s Xerxes. This man was a composer on a travel grant seeking inspiration from the great continent’s ethereal spaces and unearthly silence. He took pleasure in playing for Harry some of the recordings he had brought south with him. Harry still treasures the memory of those bountiful hours.

  “The Persian king Xerxes is singing of his great passion for a plane tree.” Thus the composer had paraphrased for Harry the perplexing words of the opera’s most famous aria. “Ah well, I told you it was absurd, “the composer continued.

  “But there is basis in fact, apparently. Historical records claim that Xerxes was indeed sent into raptures at the sight of a particularly magnificent specimen of plane tree. And he behaved as any wealthy lover would and hung her branches with precious gems and set a guard to keep watch over her constantly, lest she come to harm.

  “But only listen,” he exhorted Harry, “and you will hear something rare indeed that transcends the apparent nonsense of the words.”

  Harry listened and the aria poured through him. He tasted fleetingly a poignant insight into exalted love and longing. Yet almost as soon this idea crystallized in his mind, it vanished, and he could not articulate what he had understood so clearly only seconds before.

  Ombra mai fù di vegetabile

  Cara ed amabile soave più

  Whatever the nature of the fugitive insight, now so many decades gone, Harry still sees no absurdity whatsoever in the tale of the king and his beloved. In fact, he feels a deep bond with Xerxes. Just as now he feels a most surprising bond with Candace whose mellifluous rendering of the largo still stuns him, even in retrospect. That she should choose this particular song, and bestow it so angelically upon the air, crowned Harry’s own contentment. The boy lived. This was the bracing north and they would head out soon, farther north still, nearer to the mighty lake where long ago artists had made their pilgrimage, seeking the holy secret of creation and paying it homage with paint on canvas.

  Harry understands the deep need of humankind for these acts of ritual observance. He senses that Lucia also understands. She sits not far from him on a stool of simple and practical design, fashioned by the Maker. Her face, with its look of rapt attention, declares her passion for her work as she shapes a handful of moist and yielding clay newly dug from the stream bank.

  She glances up, sees Harry watching her and smiles.

  “I have made a curious snake,” she says. “Would you like to see?”

  Harry peers at the sinuous form on Lucia’s palm, and involuntarily blinks, so remarkable is the illusion of taut, electric life. She has fashioned the snake curled round on itself to make a double circlet. With a twig? — or perhaps her fingernail — Lucia has scored the body so as to give the impression of iridescent, diamond-patterned scales. With its sleek head upraised, the snake seems to regard Harry intently through long, narrow eyes. It has tiny distinct nostrils and a mouth set in an ironic twist that suggests a bemused omnipotence.

  “You can almost see its tongue flicker,” Harry tells her.

  Lucia laughs and looks pleased.

  The next morning, under a bronze-green dawn, the group, minus Candace, prepares to leave the camp of the People of the Silk. The most painful farewell is Chandelier’s leave-taking of Miriam. From this scene, Harry averts his gaze. Just as they are departing, his eyes meet Miriam’s. He sees she grasps the truth that he has already perceived: ultimately her love would have smothered the boy. Such truths are hard to bear, their eyes say. We who have lived so long know these things.

  Harry wonders briefly how matters will turn out between Miriam and Candace; then embraces his own happy deliverance. There is no doubt that Candace had preyed upon everyone’s nerves. Yet he is also well aware that their shared irritation, whether at her loudness, her interference or her clumsy attempts to dominate, has served them well. Justified anger at Candace had helped to spur them on and bond them one to the other.

  Now they are five, moving northward in a silence that is both expansive and nourishing. In the quiet, the world comes to him in ways Candace would have disrupted had she still been of their company. He revels in leaf flutter, the slide of shadow and the sway of light, the surging power of stripped rock; even in the pleasurable awareness of his own breathing and the movement of his blood enlivened by this northern air. He rejoices too, at the great span of space through which they move. No matter in what direction he looks, the horizon affirms the endless unfolding of the world. In his mind’s eye he sees the high-peaked waves of the majestic lake beckoning them onward.

  It seems as if they have wandered into a new season of earth, as well as of time. The sun no longer pains his flesh or his eyes. Is this possible, he wonders, or just an old man’s foolish fancy?

  Bird Girl runs on lightly ahead, the breeze ruffling her pale blond hair, and fanning out the purple skirt she wears over bright-blue leggings. Harry is reminded of the dazzling hummingbirds he had seen long ago in Costa Rica. As if in response to his thoughts, the girl’s arms become wings, rising, falling, circling. She is transformed into a whirl of colour, and at the end of her performance, she utters a strange ecstatic cry.

  Beside him, Chandelier laughs. Then the boy falls silent a moment, before asking Harry: “Is she not beautiful?”

  Harry is uncertain whether the boy means Bird Girl or Miriam. But he is happy, in either case, to give his affirmation.

  By early afternoon, they come to a beach of fine sand bordering a bay of the great lake. A soft wind rises, circling them, where they sit captivated by the glittering mass of the incoming waves. To the farthest extent of their vision the steel-blue water surges and falls, and surges and falls. Harry soon enough makes his own breath and heartbeat consonant with this rhythm. He feels at home in this place where the monumental labour of the shaping ice is still so evident.

  Farther to the west, a sheer cliff face rings the bay. Harry imagines that every crevice in that obdurate rock must hold an echo of the thunder of its own creation. The rock remembers, he thinks, and this realization strikes him as itself an act of worship. It is good to sit upon the beach with his companions, eating and drinking a little from the generous provisions gifted to them by the People of the Silk. Soon, they must set off again. Only a few miles more, and they will come to the abandoned mining company settlement. Its simple buildings are apparently still serviceable and sturdy. T
he People of the Silk told them there is even a generator that might be resuscitated.

  Harry is not much interested in the generator. But he looks forward to some insulation from the damp night air and soil, and to viewing the sky through a window cut into stout logs. He is more than ready for looking at the world again from within a snug enclosure. Is this an ancient human need insisting itself, he wonders, or just the weariness of his old bones?

  A tortured groan breaks in upon his thoughts and his spine stiffens in fear. The irrational fancy comes to him that what he hears is the lamentation of his mother’s ghost, mourning his own imminent death. He shakes himself, and turns round to see Bird Girl at the water’s edge. She holds aloft one of the papier mâché masks from the theatre box on which he had banged his shin. He sees she is using the mask as a sound box, funnelling the breeze from the lake through the wide-stretched mouth in the shellacked face.

  He struggles to quell a prickling anger, whose sharpness is all the more surprising given that he has never had anything but the most benign feelings for the young girl. What is it about the inhuman mouthings from the black hole in that artificial face which disturbs him so? Why does this sound, and the look of this object that Bird Girl still holds skyward, make his sparse flesh contract even more tightly on his bones?

  He has found the masks offensive since he first saw them staring up at him from inside the wooden box. Their slippery gloss, unnatural yellow and green flesh tones, bulbous foreheads and yawning mouth cavities, all stir in him the deepest unease. He had only agreed to carry one because Bird Girl was so insistent. He tries, as far as possible, not to think of the heartless, rigid old man’s face that accompanies him as he walks, stuffed at the bottom of his drawstring sack.

  Bird Girl springs round and makes one of her little leaps forward. Harry thinks her eyes look uncharacteristically wild. She holds her woman’s mask, with its black lacquered hair and heavily lidded eyes, up against her chest. For a second, Harry feels a genuine fear for her sanity. Or perhaps for his own, for from his perspective it does look as if she cradles a cleanly decapitated head, the wide-open mouth frozen in a last attempt to speak. He glances at Lucia and the Outpacer, who still sit upon the sand, and at Chandelier, who has been staring out at the waves. On all their faces, he sees a mirror of his own concern.