Painted Horses (42 page)

Elixabete says, “
Aucune.”

“Et il ne sait rien ni de la préhistoire ni de l’anthropologie? Il est un artiste, point final?”

“Oui, un artiste, mais aussi un cavalier. Un cow-boy américain.
” She looks at the priest, but she speaks to John H. “I told him you know nothing about prehistory, that you’re an artist, also an American cowboy.”

“I gathered.”

The abbé gives a crooked smile.
“Ça commence et finit par les chevaux, n’est-ce pas? Autrefois tout comme aujourd’hui. Venez avec moi.”

“He says it begins and ends with horses, now and in history. You’ll see what he means.”

They roll the canvas, return it to its cylinder. The younger man fires a second torch and walks behind them and with the abbé shuffling ahead they move beneath the arbor of the unfinished entry and step into a vein of the earth.

The air changes, acquires a density, a pressured stillness. A walkway is under construction on the floor and in the cone of light from the lamp John H sees wheelbarrows and shovels tilted against the wall, smells disturbed earth, the sticky odor of damp sliced clay.

He lifts his eyes and the cavern’s ceiling rolls at him like a mushroom cloud, a billowing catastrophe locked in a crust of white stone, and his eye fixates so completely on the glitter of its surface in the bobbing light of the torch that his brain cannot quite accept the massive head of the bull on the wall.

His eye jumps and he sees his horses,
sees his horses
, moving down the corridor. He goes weak not only in the bad knee but in the good one as well. A pale red stallion fully the size of life lopes along not five feet in front of him, its muscles rippling across the texture of the wall.

A second red horse with a slower gait moves out ahead and skirts the horns of the oncoming bull, and the man sees he is not in the path of a stampede but square in the eye of it, the painted figures or his muddled brain or for all he knows the very vault itself set somehow magically awhirl.

“Vous voyez ce que nous avons hérité? Il y a tout de même de la hiérarchie, de l’ordre dans cet orage.”
The abbé moves his light along the wall.

“Établi par Dieu pour être perçu par l’œil du chasseur. Les autres bêtes ont pour but de nous fournir de la nourriture et des vêtements.”

Elixabete murmurs only a partial translation, for the abbé rambles nearly without pause, as though delivering a manifesto for his ears alone. “We’ve inherited an order within the storm,” she says. “Created by God for the eye of a hunter.”

“Mais le cheval, le cheval, avec sa ligne pure et sa grâce magistrale: ce n’est qu’au cheval que Dieu a accordé le pouvoir de nous porter, nous, qui avons été créés à l’image de Dieu.”

“The other beasts clothe and feed us but the horse alone has the power to transport us, we who are crafted in the image of God.”

He holds his hand in the beam of light, the shadow of his fingers splayed upon the panel.

“Non que la chair du cheval ait attiré l’œil du chasseur, mais c’est plutôt dans la beauté et la grâce de l’animal, créés à travers des milliers d’années ou dans un instant, que l’œil du chasseur a trouvé son destin.”

“The grace of the horse caught the eye of the hunter, and the eye of the hunter saw its destiny.”

“C’est-à-dire de conquérir le monde entier à travers l’art.”

“To conquer the world with art.”

John H cannot understand the priest and can barely hear Elixabete. When it comes time to move along she nearly has to pull him from the figures on the wall.

They duck into a passage at the back of the vault. The low ceiling undulates in shallow white domes, as though the four of them have been inhaled down the trachea of a giant. Other horses thunder ahead, rippling along the flow of the walls.

They see yellow horses, upside-down horses, horses wrapped around pillars of stone. Horses scratched into the stone but not painted, horses weaving through great mixed herds of other beasts. At times he’s nearly disoriented, the shadow of the cave and the endless dancing animals bending his brain like the lick of a gas. The air presses in.

Eventually he tries to speak and nothing comes out. He can’t get his tongue to touch the roof of his mouth, can barely get the muscles of his jaw to pry his lips apart, as though paralyzed in a dream in which he should be running for his life.

Finally his voice tumbles into speech, an alien sound even to himself. “How long have these been here?”

She translates the question to the abbé
.

“
Une centaine de siècles, même plus.”

“Ten thousand years.”

He tries to fathom this and he can’t. A line of horses crosses the mottled wall in front of him, crosses to a territory he knows he might recognize if only he could follow.

But he can’t.

He looks at Elixabete in the dim wash of light, hears the hiss of the lamps. Even the familiar details of her face are blotted by shadow. He says, “Where are we?”

Back in the city the images wheel furiously through his mind and just as furiously he paints them, onto canvas, onto butcher paper, onto the plastered wall of the apartment. He’ll have his easel set up in a garden or on a sidewalk to interpret what’s before him and a horse will dart through his mind and that will be that.

He knows he’s not getting them exactly, or at least not getting them fully, both because he works from memory and because the flat plane of the canvas is no second for the natural contour of calcium or stone.

He experiments, more than once painting figures across Elixabete’s abdomen, across her back, over the ridges and flutes of her ribs. Her belly button becomes an eye, her shoulder blade a forequarter.

Other parts of the experience come back to him at different times. In the middle of the night he wakes with the abbé’s voice in his ears and he tries to rouse Elixabete, tries to get her to reconstruct everything the priest said in the cavern.

She’s half-asleep, not cooperating. “Mm,” she says. “I need to think. Something about horses existing outside of time. I don’t remember. Something about a mirror of the soul. Sleep, babe.”

But he doesn’t, not for a long time.

She tells him she doesn’t believe she can become pregnant, that things happened during the war, which she believes left her sterile.

A year after they visit the cave her cycle skips, then skips again and proves her wrong. Later he will think back and remember two other times in the interim when she was likely miscarrying, blood streaking the bed sheet like the scene of a crime. In retrospect he’s not surprised, given their shared abandon, the sheer frequency and enthusiasm with which he shot himself into her womb.

She’s told him a hundred times she doesn’t believe in marriage, sees it as outmoded, a system of ownership. Also that she doesn’t want to be taken for granted, not by him and not by anyone. Likewise she doesn’t want to take him for granted.

But the baby inside her changes something, proves her wrong twice. Ask me again, she tells him, and when she puts on his ring he puts on her name, because in Paris his own is a fiction.

John H by now speaks passable French. He can’t always follow her friends’ furious conversations but he can generally get by, can read the newspaper or follow a joke to a laugh.

They talk about leaving the city after the baby comes, heading back to Bayonne. She has relatives who farm, who hunt rabbits and boar and deer. There are horses. She wants their child to grow up Basque, to know the language and the land that has sheltered it these hundreds of years. John H thinks back to the cave and wonders what else the land down there shelters.

He sees the course of his life charted in a certain way. He’s never allowed himself to do this, not even as a child, to stand solidly in place and look far out ahead at an image of himself, and to want what he sees. Maybe it’s the mood in the air, the war receding year by year into the past and life good again, even the city’s trees lush and leafed out, full of springtime, full of good hope.

Whether the baby is a boy or a girl he wants it to carry the middle name Bakar. This is the one thing he asks, and it’s the one thing that makes her nervous. He tugs her hair, tells her it’s her superstition again, and she gives him an uneasy laugh and says she knows she’s silly. After all it’s just a name.

Never has he been more wrong. With the baby not due for another month Elixabete wakes one night with her insides twisting like an auger. She tries to let John H sleep, tries to convince herself she’s merely got a nervous stomach but in no time she’s wringing with sweat and then nearly sobbing in agony and terror both.

He phones for a cab and then phones the hospital and finds his neophyte French flummoxed by panic, and while he’s trying to communicate with a nurse Elixabete struggles out of the bed on her own to get to the water closet, doubles in a paroxysm and hits the floor on her hands and knees. She cramps into a ball holding her belly as though she’s been disemboweled and when she wets herself on the floorboards John H at first thinks her water has broken.

He learns his mistake ten minutes later when her water actually does burst, as he’s helping her to hobble down the front stoop to the waiting cab. She’s still in her nightshift with a blanket around her shoulders, still doubled in pain. He’s unable to lift her because that hurts her even worse. She clutches his arm and takes the two steps as though each is a precipice and she’s no sooner got both feet on the cobbles before a gush comes out of her like an upended jug. He feels the splash on his shoes and against his shins and though she wails out she also tells him in the cab that she feels a little better, that releasing the fluid seemed to release some of the pain as well. He tells her everything will be fine. For a little while he believes it himself.

At the hospital two sisters get her into a wheelchair and rush her through a set of doors into what he suspects is a surgery rather than a delivery room. He tries to follow and another nun stops him and speaks to him, soothingly but firmly, and guides him instead to a waiting room. He gives this a few restless minutes and then drags a chair out and waits by the surgery doors.

Later he’ll hate himself for falling asleep but evidently he does because the doors bang open and snap him awake, somebody in white rushing toward him and seizing his hand, stabbing the tip of his finger, then rushing away again with a bead of his blood on a plate of glass.

A little after a siren in the streets dies in front of the hospital and John H thinks it must be an ambulance until a policeman bursts through the entry, confers with a nun at the desk, and then darts past him into the surgery. A shriek pulses out, rising and subsiding as the doors baffle on their hinges.

He stands and parts the doors and listens, but apparently another door has closed deeper into the surgery because now he can pick up only muffled crying. Then her voice at an awful pitch, yelling in Basque and then muffled again.

He goes back to the desk and asks the nun what’s happening. She tells him they’re all fighting very hard.

He asks if she’s having the baby, or if it’s something else. She tells him it’s both.

“
C’est mal?”

“
Oui, monsieur.
Very bad
.”

He asks if she is going to die.

“
Je ne sais pas, monsieur.
Only God knows.”

In the morning they bring a priest and he has his answer.

He walks back to the apartment with the spring sunshine warm on his neck, holding the blanket he’d wrapped around her the night before. He’d wanted to see them before he left the hospital but they wouldn’t let him, told him to come back later when the trauma of the night had passed. He wishes now he’d asked for a lock of her hair, or the ring from her finger. Anything to carry home.

In the apartment he sits in a chair and weeps and wonders what he could have done. Not fall asleep. He curses his own lapse, his own escape. He wonders if God in his heaven holds a scale that weighs such things, that tips the balance of a life in one direction or the other based on the strength or the weakness of somebody else. He remembers what his father told him in a Maryland jail cell, how it’s in the Bible that children pay for the sins of their parents. He wishes he could go back and only stay awake.

It crosses his mind to retrieve the Mannlicher rifle from behind the door and set the trigger and then turn the gun and place the muzzle beneath his chin, reach with his thumb and with no more effort than the force of a sigh he’ll run through the stars to catch them, knows if such a thing is possible she’ll hear his call and turn to wait, that she’ll tuck her babe beneath her chin like a Madonna.

But he doesn’t know if such a thing is possible, any more than he knows the location of heaven or the mind of God. He thought he had heaven. Thought he’d won a benediction but now in some intentionless episode of original sin he might just as easily tip another scale and doom them both to perdition. He simply doesn’t know.

He takes them south by train in a single casket. She was estranged from her family and then close to them again and now they feel a loss greater for the reconciliation. They are haunted the way he is haunted, by a baby who never drew a single breath of air.