Lucia's Masks (29 page)

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.

Consonance. 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

W
E 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.

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?