Lucia's Masks (38 page)

From the pelvis. Harry seeks the source of breath and sound from deep within, and strives over and over to keep at bay the fear of smothering death. He utters his sounds they have so carefully rehearsed. He joins in the chorus. Gradually he becomes aware of an extraordinary force filling the cavity of the mask’s bulbous forehead. So powerful is the resonance of his own voice and breath in this hollow that he is initially stunned. Whatever is happening is electric. Then, just as unexpectedly, the reverberation triggers an ecstasy, and a current of joy passes through him. He feels clean and light, as if his body were somehow boundless.

When he looks out again through the eyes of his mask, he cannot at first believe what he sees. Bird Girl has taken off the glazed face, and she is dancing a kind of stately pavane with a great blue heron, whose long toes mark out perfect time upon the sand.

Harry plucks off the mask and rubs his eyes. When he looks again, the great bird is still there, dancing with the young woman. For an instant, as it turns, Harry and the heron exchange a glance.

See, I am returned
, its eye seems to say.
What had been lost is found again
.

Harry continues to watch the slow, circling dance of bird and girl in rapt amazement, his mouth agape in an uncanny mimicry of the mask he holds before his chest. He looks at his companions and sees it is the same with them.

At first, Bird Girl is aware only of a flutter of blue. Then she sees the narrow head, topped by the black plume, the gleaming scimitar-like beak and the golden eyes with their unfathomable ebony pupils.

She takes off her mask and sees mere feet away from her the proud angular heron whose beauty makes her want to weep. He is as tall as she. His spindly legs strike her as absurdly delicate, but she notes their obvious strength as he makes an elegant side-step and inclines his head toward her. He bends his head again, and takes another sideways step. She understands then that he is asking her to dance with him, to mark out a graceful circle upon the sand.

Four times round they go, in keeping with a rhythm she recognizes as from the chant, which still moves through the air although they are all silent. She watches and keeps pace with each slow step and the high lift of the heron’s knee, suspended for a moment. It is a dance performed in discrete parts, and it dawns on her that what the heron is doing is stitching one dimension to another with his delicate, elegant movement — not just space to time, but also the invisible to the visible.

On the completion of their fourth turn, the heron lowers his head, takes two steps back toward the lake. Then he turns, lifts high his great wide wings and rises up and off over the water. They all watch silently until he breasts the cliff to their left and disappears.

Harry is the first to bend down and touch with reverence one of the imprints of the heron’s toes upon the sand. Then each of the others does this in turn, as if this gesture too is now part of the ritual they have performed upon the beach.

“A harbinger,” says the Outpacer.

“A miracle,” says Lucia.

“I did not think I would live to see this day,” says Harry.

Bird Girl smiles widely at Chandelier and blows him a kiss.

“I am happy here,” she says.

Epilogue

I
KNOW, MY BELOVED DAUGHTER, THAT
you are as yet too young understand my words. But these are things I wish to tell you now, so that you can begin to absorb them as readily as you do the clear light and air of our northern home.

Since we came here, I often think of what happened when I put on the theatre mask at Bird Girl’s insistence. At first I panicked badly. Wearing the mask was like being entombed alive. I felt the muscles of my face and my lungs begin to harden. I wanted to pull the wretched thing off before it succeeded in sucking all my breath from me and turning me to stone. I was terrified that the mask would kill me where I stood.

What stopped my hand was the example of Keats’s courage through the ordeal of the making of his life mask. I thought of the many hours he had suffered with the thick plaster encasing his face, and how he was able to draw only the most meagre of breaths through the two tiny straws. He had undergone this gruelling procedure at the request of his artist friend. For my sake too, and the thousands of others like me over the generations who treasured the actual likeness of a great poet on one particular day in his twenty-fourth year. If Keats could endure this sense of suffocation and near-death for Benjamin Haydon’s sake, I chided myself, then I could do the same for Bird Girl who was so desperate to pay homage to Lola’s memory.

“Breathe and produce your sound from the pelvis,” I heard Bird Girl urge us. I strove to follow her counsel, and almost immediately wearing the mask became more bearable. Once we joined again in chorus to utter those strange ritual cries we had practised, I forgot about the mask altogether. It was as if we five now all shared a common breath. I had the sense of a greater company of beings speaking with us, perhaps even countless beings.

Then the first mystery showed itself. My speech-breath filling the bulbous forehead cavity revivified the ancient science of the mask. It was a sound box, designed thousands of years ago, to trigger a state of ecstasy in the wearer. The thrumming resonance in the cavity made every nerve and cell in my body vibrate. It was a shock, like an actual electrification of my entire being. I was opened, head to toe. There was a fountain of golden light inside me. I seemed to look out of other eyes, perhaps even out of the eyes of the original maker of these masks with their vast ritual power.

I knew I had been purified. I walked upon a terrace of stars. I ceased, I think, to be Lucia. A warm and sensuous wind bore me upward. Amidst the rushing stars, I saw faces, including my parents’, as they were when they were young and unburdened. I saw the poet, seated beside an open window, listening to the nightingale sing upon the heath. I saw the long, lean face and body of the Outpacer as we lay together at your making. It was then I saw the glistening Egg come spinning out of the night. The state of ecstasy, as I now know, is preceded by a blinding flash. I could not look at him for long: the majestic, winged being who stepped forth from the Egg. His face and body were of such radiance, I had to close my eyes. When I opened them again, I saw Bird Girl dancing with the heron.

Bird Girl believes the heron was drawn to the tremulous quiver of our bodies and voices as we chanted inside our masks. She thinks the bird recognized our human desire to rise above what we are, and that he came to us in fellowship. There is no doubt he and Bird Girl made sublime partners. As they circled one another in the formal dance he defined, I was magnetized by his godly self-containment and awkward grace. I noticed that the bird kept a good distance between them so as not to hurt Bird Girl with his sharp beak. I also remember thinking: this cannot be happening. This dance Bird Girl is performing with the blue heron is a hallucination that will leave me desolate. But I had only to glance at the others, at their astonished eyes and open mouths, to be reassured. We all partook in this extraordinary privilege.

It was the heron who gave the sign the dance was done, with a slight inclination of his sleek neck. Then he turned to face the great lake, leant forward, spread wide his wings, and soared away over the water. We watched until he disappeared from view; then turned our gaze to the marks his feet had left upon the sand. Each of us bent down to touch the indentations his long toes made. Then we looked and saw in each other the same bracing joy that follows on an epiphany.

Bird Girl tells us that when she could bear it, she would look into the heron’s fiercely glittering eye. There she seemed to see the whole of time, and the worlds within worlds that are creation, passing through their eternal cycles of doom and splendour. The dance was the miracle, she believes, that made us “darklings” light at last.

We tell each other this story often, oh my daughter, because Bird Girl’s dance with the heron ushered in our time here and married us to this place.

Our new home is a group of sturdy cabins built long ago by prospectors and later used by an artists’ colony. That first night there was a full moon, a dazzling milky white that made the lowly cabins look unearthly, even numinous. There were cabins enough that we each had one of our own. I made a simple bed of dry leaves under the small, square window through which I could see the moon. In the ethereal lunar glow I went over again all I had seen in the grip of the mask’s power: the terrace of stars, my youthful parents, Keats and his nightingale, and the glorious, winged god who emerged from the flawless ivory oval of the Egg.

It was soon thereafter that Chandelier told us all the story of how Eros was contained in the World Egg, begotten by Night and made immaculate and polished by the wind. When the Egg cracked, it was the light of the first dawn. Then the god flew out bearing the seeds of all things, and that was the beginning of our cosmos. So we all have our beginnings in Love. Chandelier’s father told him that this cosmogony belonged to the ancient Greek mystery religion of the Orphics. They cultivated rituals of purification and sought the state of
ekstasis —
the stepping out of the body we had all experienced when we chanted through the masks.

Part of the mystery for me is whether I shared the thought-image of the World Egg with Chandelier when we performed our ritual chorus, or if it was the sound-box secret of the mask itself gave birth to the vision. But I know with full certainty that you were born of love, Speranza. Of this I have no doubt. Nor does your father.

We are nourished by many stories here in our new home. Bird Girl and Chandelier, in particular, have a great store of myths, tales, and stirring narratives. Every day Chandelier recites from his compendious, unfaltering memory, and Bird Girl writes down a poem, or a chapter of a novel in the massive log books left behind by the mining company. We are building a library here. These days, we each find great solace in our work.

We are all makers of some sort. We are becoming a part of this wild place, with its rock and mighty lake and green and lilac morning skies. We are being knitted into its monumental story.

Out of the clay of the soil, I made sun-baked bricks and built a little house shaped like the dome of Santa Maria del Fiori. The arched doorway and ovoid windows of my dome-shaped home let in a light of incomparable softness. It was here I gave birth to you, my dearest daughter. On the lintel above the door, I wrote in the soft clay “
Speranza mi fe
.” Hope made me.

This is what I have learned above all on my journey, Speranza: that hope must be added to each day and given shape through our singular acts of faith, and our unfailing attention to truth and beauty.

We add to our hope in many ways. Harry, Outpacer, and Chandelier together managed to resuscitate the ancient generator left by our predecessors. We use it sparingly, in part to operate the short-wave radio they also unearthed, which bears the proud Italian name Marconi. With the help of the radio, Chandelier, who paid close attention to all of his father’s business, has managed to contact “the underground in the air” known as the Arêté. This is the worldwide lifeline network that broadcasts any resurgence of art and ceremony, and the re-emergence of species. We believe the Arêté is still safe from surveillance because the EYE is ignorant of the Morse code Chandelier is using for transmission. In fact, the EYE has probably forgotten that short-wave radio frequencies even exist.

We have sent the Arêté news of the heron. We hear of wonderful things through the air-underground, including the rebirth of birdsong in many places throughout the world. Last week came news of sightings of the robin redbreast and the wren. We have ourselves now witnessed the return to the lake of the eider, the plover, and the tern.

I am greatly blessed as well in your health and beauty, my child, and I find myself often wishing my sister Sophia could see you, and you her. When you are older, I will tell you about Sophia and your grandparents, and the ancestral spirits who kept our family strong through a dark time.

I will teach you too, the stories that nourish the soul of our community: of Harry’s enduring love for breathtaking places that have disappeared from the face of the earth; of Bird Girl’s search for books and of her indomitable mother’s crusade; of your father’s dream of reviving the former splendour of the cinema; of how the garrulous Candace found love most unexpectedly. And why Chandelier’s father created a protective Egg, where his son built up a vast knowledge he now generously shares with us all. In these ways the dream of the World Egg persists, and we feed on the truth of its founding myth as we would on honeycomb and other delicacies I sometimes find on my daily foraging.

These are skills I will also teach you when you are older.

Chandelier has just come to give me news gleaned through the Arêté I never expected to hear. Guido Santarcangelo of the confraternity known as the Rat-Men is seeking the whereabouts of a woman called Lucia, last seen near a stone house in Outland Tract 17 on the day the fireball struck.