Sexing the Cherry (10 page)

Who are they that shine in gold like Apostles in a church window at midday?

The polished wooden floor glows with the heat of their bodies, and one by one they crumble over and lie exhausted on the ground.

Fortunata refreshes them and the dance begins again.

In the world there is a horror of plagues. Of mysterious diseases that wipe out towns and cities, leaving empty churches and bedclothes that must be burned. Holy water and crosses and mountain air and the protection of saints and a diet of watercress are all thought to save us as a species from rotting. But what can save us as a species from love? A man sold me a necklace made of chicken bones; he said these chickens were the direct descendants of the chickens who had scratted round the crib at Bethlehem. The bones would save me from pain of every kind and lead me piously to Heaven. He was wearing some himself.

'And love?' I said. 'And love?'

He shook his head and assured me that nothing was proof against love. Not even the slightest amourette could be forestalled by an amulet. Bringing it on, though, was another matter - did I want a bag of spices mixed by Don Juan himself?

'But surely if it can be encouraged it can also be prevented?'

'Not at all,' said the man, 'for everyone is inclined to love. It is easy to bring on, impossible to end until it ends itself.'

'And yet some people never love. My mother is one such.'

He said, 'They have a secret somewhere. Usually.'

I thought of the great lovers, men and women who had made it their profession, who had tirelessly leapt from one passion to another, sometimes running two, three or four at once like a stunt charioteer. What were they looking for?

My own passions had nothing to recommend them. Not only was I chasing a dancer who, on the evidence of her sisters, was too old to move, I had in the past entangled myself in numerous affairs with women who would not, could not or did not love me. And did I love them? I thought so at the time, though now I have come to doubt it, seeing only that I loved myself through them.

On more than one occasion I have been ready to abandon my whole life for love. To alter everything that makes sense to me and to move into a different world where the only known will be the beloved. Such a sacrifice must be the result of love
or is it that the life itself was already worn out? I had finished with that life, perhaps, and could not admit it, being stubborn or afraid, or perhaps did not know it, habit being a great binder.

I think it is often so that those most in need of change choose to fall in love and then throw up their hands and blame it all on fate. But it is not fate, at least, not if fate is something outside of us; it is a choice made in secret after nights of longing.

When I have shaken off my passion, somewhat as a dog shakes off an unexpected plunge into the canal, I find myself without any understanding of what it was that ravaged me. The beloved is shallow, witless, heartless, mercenary, calculating, silly. Naturally these thoughts protect me, but they also render me entirely gullible or without discrimination.

And so I will explain it as follows.

A man or woman sunk in dreams that cannot be spoken, about a life they do not possess, comes suddenly to a door in the wall. They open it. Beyond the door is that life and a man or a woman to whom it is already natural. It may not be possessions they want, it may very well be the lack of them, but the secret life is suddenly revealed. This is their true home and this is their beloved.

I may be cynical when I say that very rarely is the beloved more than a shaping spirit for the lover's dreams. And perhaps such a thing is enough. To be a muse maybe enough. The pain is when the dreams change, as they do, as they must. Suddenly the enchanted city fades and you are left alone again in the windy desert. As for your beloved, she didn't understand you. The truth is, you never understood yourself.

In one city I visited, the entire population had been wiped out by love three times in a row. After the third occasion the only two survivors, a monk and a whore, determined that love should be illegal in their new state and that anyone found indulging in it would be put to death. Cheered by their admirable plan the two of them made love as often as possible and, thanks to the sturdiness of the whore, were soon able to re-fill the city with inhabitants. From their earliest moment children were warned of the dire consequences, personal and social, of love. They were urged to put aside any romantic fancies, the sexes were carefully segregated and all marriages were arranged. Sex itself, tending as it does to fire the heart as well as the groin, was possible only for the purposes of childbearing, or on the three festival nights when a troop of male and female prostitutes were hired from a neighbouring town and asked to satisfy the longings of the city dwellers. Naturally, even after such brief encounters, there were those who vanished in the night. The monk and the whore, now fabulously old but still absolutely in control, declared all such vanishings illegal and sequestered the person's property.

I questioned them about their strictness, likening them to the Puritans holding sway in my own country. They had not heard of Puritanism, but found the idea of bandaging up the male member so as to leave it immovable very appealing. The religious side, they said, was unimportant; the urgency was to prevent another plague of love sweeping the city and causing its hardworking people to give up their jobs and families and take to flinging roses through the windows and composing ballads.

'A few months of that sort of thing/ said the monk, 'and the people are ruined.'

Then he told me how it had been the last time the plague had struck. It had started quietly enough, a few guitars in the moonlight, a few love-notes sent under cover of darkness. Then the mayor had fallen for a shop-girl and draped his chain of office over a public toilet. Then every single monk in the monastery was caught masturbating in front of a statue of Hildegard of Bingen. They ignored the call to prayer at five a.m. Indeed they ignored it for so long that the old man hired to ring the bell died of heart failure. He was still pulling at eight o'clock, and so were the monks.

Worse, ordinary men and women, with no eccentricity in their natures, began to eye one another and die for love. Every day new graves were dug in the hillside. The grave-digger himself was so struck by the woman he was burying that he wrenched the lid from her coffin and got in. After hours of pleading his family lost patience and threw the soil in themselves. After that the dead were thrown into the river, and then of course everyone who was left died of contamination. Except the monk, who was on a fast and drinking only holy water from the monastery cellar, and the whore, who drank no water at all.

'The people who live here now,' he said, 'are completely happy and disease-free. You should settle here yourself. It would do you good.'

I decided to look round the place and began by going to a stall to buy some bread. The young woman behind the stall was unsmiling, though I smiled a good deal. Eventually she said, 'What you're doing is illegal. You should stop it.'

'What's illegal?'

Tailing in love with me.'

Tm not falling in love with you.'

'Why are you smiling then?'

Before I could answer she pulled out a book and looked under 'S' in the index. She read out loud: 'Smiling is one of the earliest signs of love. If someone smiles at you, be sure they have another intention.'

Tm very sorry,' I said, my teeth in a straight line.

After that I went to buy a mouth-organ, and I was very careful not to smile at all.

'Have you a little guitar or a mandolin?' I asked.

I might as well have asked for the bones of the Holy Mother to be dug up, so wrathful and insulted did the shop-keeper appear. I explained I was a stranger, and he softened a little and told me that guitars and mandolins were forbidden, as were violins. He had a nice tuba, if I was interested. Politely, I declined the tuba and waited for some enlightenment. He directed me to the city museum.

The museum was a gloomy edifice. No one seemed to be looking after it; there were no guides and no other visitors. It was a Museum of Love. As I walked into the main chamber I was greeted by a statue of Samson, blind and defeated, chained between two pillars in the fleshy palace of the Philistines. Sitting at his heel, laughing gleefully, was Delilah. She was holding his hair.

Very soon I found the outlawed guitars and mandolins. They were hung high on the wall, and underneath was a fierce inscription describing them as: 'INSTRUMENTS OF LUST AND FURY'.

Near-by was a bunch of dried red roses. Over there, Cupid's bow and arrow. There were stale sugar hearts in glass cases, and bad poems pinned firmly to the table. Saddest of all was a carefully stuffed small dog with a bow round its neck. The medallion said: 'i LOVE YOU'.

I was sorry to see under the section marked 'PROFLIGATES
AND WANTONS AND THE HARM THEY HAVE CAUSED' Our OWtt
King Henry towering over his unfortunate wives.

Since I was alone, with no one to challenge me, I reached up and took the guitar from the wall. I blew away the dust and tested the strings. They were loose but not rotten. I carefully tuned them one by one and strummed a gentle chord.

I had been singing quietly for a while when I noticed a pair of feet in front of me. Then another pair and another. I was surrounded by the citizens. They said nothing to me and, seeing there was no escape, I continued to play. Gradually, singing as if in a trance, they began to join in, and one or two slipped their arms round the waists of their companions. We continued in this way until it was almost dark; then one of the men, an innkeeper, shouted that we must all join him in a celebration and that I must come too, and continue my tunes. We straggled out into the night, and at the inn one of the women set up Cupid's bow and arrow over the bar. She laughed - she didn't know what it was, but it was forbidden and she liked it. About midnight, as I was thinking of going to sleep, a shouting and wailing began in the street outside. It was the monk on his purple pallet and the whore on her burnished throne. They had come with the Chief of Police. I wasted no time, but fled through the window holding on to the guitar. The girl slung the bow and arrow over my body and blew me a kiss.

Much later, years later, I heard that from that night the plague of love had overtaken the city once more, but this time it had not followed the normal pattern. The monk had gathered together the entire citizenry and warned them that unless they gave up their wicked ways at once they would all die. The penalty for love, he reminded them, was death. They took a vote and unanimously agreed to be put to death. The monk and the whore shot them all and found themselves alone. They would have to begin again. Wearily they climbed into bed.

When I left the city where love is an epidemic I rejoined Tradescant's ship and we continued our course towards the Bermudas. It was Tradescant's plan to stock up with seeds and pods and any exotic thing that might take the fancy of the English and so be made natural in our gardens. It was our hope to make more of a success of the new fashion of grafting, which we had understood from France, and had already done to some satisfaction on certain fruit trees.

Grafting is the means whereby a plant, perhaps tender or uncertain, is fused into a hardier member of its strain, and so the two take advantage of each other and produce a third kind, without seed or parent. In this way fruits have been made resistant to disease and certain plants have learned to grow where previously they could not.

There are many in the Church who condemn this practice as unnatural, holding that the Lord who made the world made its flora as he wished and in no other way.

Tradescant has been praised in England for his work with the cherry, and it was on the cherry that I first learned the art of grafting and wondered whether it was an art I might apply to myself.

My mother, when she saw me patiently trying to make a yield between a Polstead Black and a Morello, cried two things: Thou mayest as well try to make a union between thyself and me by sewing us at the hip,' and then, 'Of what sex is that monster you are making?'