The Sacred Beasts (11 page)

When we return to the lake, it is already sunset, the perfect time
for dinner, wine and some of our wildest and most memorable conversation. We
began to love this time of the day while camping down the Costa Brava. After
long hours of art and study alternating with swimming and hiking, we came alive
again in the cinnabar radiance that burnished the headlands and surf all the
way out to the ocean and end of the sky; a slow, majestic opening of the
night’s magically glowing hand. Sylvie’s hair turns a dark, gleaming red in
this fire-laden light, and the rich color rims her face and shoulders down to
the small of her back. Still, sunset in the forest perhaps tantalizes us even
more with its compression of wildness and mystery, shadowy life and strident
sound pressing close to us, never entirely separate from danger and death.

When our dinner is over and we drink Spanish wine over our
campfire, Sylvie becomes curious about Doñana. “How did this preserve come into
being? Was it inhabited by people, or has it always been a park?”

“If you read Spanish history, you will find long descriptions of
Spanish monarchs who had no talent or intellect to do anything but hunt in
Doñana. They brought enormous retinues the size of the entire court with them,
and the land turned into a spectacle. But the true origin and meaning of Doñana
lie with my unknown stewards of the world—eccentric women.”

Sylvie laughs. “
Les
Monstre sacrés
even here? I do
not think of them as everywhere. They are unique, after all.”

“Maybe you should think of them everywhere. They do comprise a
secret history of the world, and we are now taking part in their little known
traditions.”

“Who were they?” Then Sylvie smiles and asks, “Is this my bedtime
story?”

She is right there. I can’t resist telling a tale of the
strangeness, power and mystery of women. Have I been doing this every night?
Perhaps. “It begins with Princess Eboli, a woman notorious for her sexual
voracity. Her daughter, named Ana and eventually Dona Ana, rebelled against her
famous mother and embraced an unusually austere religious faith. Dona Ana set
up the preserve as a kind of outpost for nature and virtue.”

“That’s medieval.”

“She ordered the building of the palace so that she could live
here with the king as much as possible. Unfortunately, her husband, the
monarch, became at least as notorious as Princess Eboli since he was
incompetent enough to have been responsible for the sinking of the Spanish
Armada. So, there was even more scandal and disgrace to escape from.”

Sylvie laughs. “Now, that is modern, an anti-heroine. All this is
really very funny.”

“It gets better. In later life, Dona Ana decided that she and her
husband were so lost in the world as to need incarceration. She insisted that
they completely retreat from the court and live in the palace dungeons.”

Sylvie laughs uproariously. “Have we had too much wine? This is
hysterically funny! Are you making it up as you go?”

“Not at all. That is never necessary with eccentric women. Their
lives simply
are
vivid stories, and they have always been a force to be
reckoned with.”

“Was there only one, Dona Ana? Or were there more?”

“More, of course. A few generations later, a Spanish empress
decided that the male monarchs were wimps for using muskets to hunt. She would
display her superiority by hunting with a spear in Doñana. She brought a bunch
of royal women along as her cheering gallery. They found this more thrilling
than their life at court.”

“That I can believe.”

“Eccentric women are now part of Spanish traditions and culture.”

“That I cannot believe. Yes, another glass of wine. I want to
drink to them if they exist.” We clink our glasses to our favorite toast, the
Czech
krasna život
, “to the beauty of life.”

“The institution I am referring to is the annual pilgrimage
through Doñana to celebrate a unique imaginary spiritual woman. She is called
the Virgin of El Rocio, or Virgin of the Marshes.”

“I’m not impressed by virgins. What do real
women have to do with her?”

“It is actually men who are obsessed with her. In the annual
ceremony, she is carried in a wagon over the marshes, attended by men and women
in Andalusian dress. The men swarm to touch her, keeping the women away in the
process, as though she had some power they could not afford to share.”

“That I can believe.”

“You are alternating between belief and disbelief.”

“Well, we are eccentric.” She smiles as she looks up at the dark
sky. We never noticed how the night had fallen down before us. It is now full
of melodramatic cries from the stone curlew alternating with the softer music
of the nightjar. My story has created a spell, though every word of it is true.
Sylvie is suddenly animated. “I would love to have painted Dona Ana! There must
have been great determination and despair in her face.”

“You would have to allow yourself to be locked up in the dungeon
with her.”

“Imagine it!” Sylvie smiles in delight. “She would have been so
pale . . . so imperious. She would have barely looked at me or her husband
skulking in the corner.”

“She would have doubted your value as an artist, perhaps have
tried to convince you to live in a dungeon more austere than her own. You would
have needed more wine than we have to put up with her.”

“But I would capture the
power
of her strangeness, her
resistance to a world she rejected! I would have to meet the enormous challenge
of imagining a face that implies all of what you have told me!”

“Better than a Greek tortoise?”

“Oh, I love that tortoise, too. I should have found out whether it
was female. Perhaps we can only see eccentrics here; the rest of the world has
vanished.”

Yes, it has been a day and night full of ordinary life
transmogrifying into the extraordinary, much of which we ourselves have
created. It is growing colder, and I get into my sleeping bag. Without a word,
we smile and delight in a night deepened by what we have imagined, a darkness
velvet with possibility. Sylvie places her sleeping bag beside mine and gets
into it.

Suddenly, there is a great altercation in the water just beside
the riverbank. Two huge, powerful bodies hurl themselves through the river just
beyond our feet and spray us with water. Sylvie cries out in fear. An immense,
imperious furry head rises up to see who has dared to make this sound, the last
ray of the sunset gilding great horns that stand out in a broad, nearly
horizontal bar of fire. Beneath large, hairy brow ridges, its eyes are bold
pools of red and black, and dark water streams from its snout. “Oh my god,”
Sylvie whispers, her fear instantly replaced by fascination with the great head
contemplating us. Then the two beasts continue running and kicking their hooves
in the air far down the riverbank.

As they vanish into the dark, I say, “Doñana is full of wild
cattle. If they are threatened, they become the most dangerous animals here,
but these two were just playing, chasing each other through the water. We are
silent and pensive; then we explode with laughter at this end to our day.

“Eccentric Doñana nights!” Sylvie says with a charming smile and
moves in her sleeping bag directly beside me. As I close my eyes, I feel the
gentle pressure of her shoulder and hip, the softness of her hair, and her arm
twines with mine in the dark.

Exquisite.

First light comes as filaments of gray fleece in the sky as I
become aware of movement next to me; then I fall back to sleep, only to awaken
in the breadth of dawning light: another soft spring day. As my body quickens
and my eyes focus, I see a chalk drawing of the head that astonished us last
night—the vanishing red flame of light still faintly glowing on the edges of
its horns and in its eyes. I smile in amazement. I would never have guessed she
could capture that light and its shade of red, a color relinquishing itself to
darkness, yet here it is. Now there is sound in the lake, and I can see that
Sylvie is bathing in the water. I will join her.

In the lake, we are surrounded by sounds of birds and insects I
cannot name, cold dark green water pungent with life. Water plants are softly
clinging to my legs and thighs, and in a moment, I will recognize them. Now,
however, my mind is wonderfully empty. Sylvie smiles and hands me the soap,
then begins to float on the surface of the lake. “The drawing is magnificent,”
I say, yet my words are paltry before this vision: Sylvie’s full breasts are
gleaming and floating on the water; her skin is a delicate olive that becomes
translucent in the light, her nipples large and plum-colored, her legs gently
open to the current. The water plants cling lightly to her hips and thighs; one
threads itself over one breast, as though I were not the only one to adore this
sight.

I cannot resist her beauty: this woman simply fills the universe.
I can’t take my eyes away from her, and I have not carefully hidden my desire
this time. She looks up and sees my immersion in her loveliness, begins to rise
to me, and a flock of birds passes overhead, prepares to land in the water. They
block the sun and fill the sky with the color of flesh. My mind moves so slowly
that I can hardly name them: flamingoes. Their heads, breasts and torsos are
thickly feathered white. The rich pink color is a cape on their wings, whose
undersides are black; their heads, beaks and legs are pink. The colors merge as
they sway in movement together, and it is the color of flesh swaying in a
rhythm I can only perceive as ecstasy. Under this sky of flesh, all things are
necessary, inevitable: Sylvie and I are pressing together, our hands gliding
over the wet surface of the other. It is what I have wanted for days, perhaps
months, years—making love—and it is happening beneath a sky of flesh. We can
only press together, go inside one another, throb in movement together.

For hours.

It is afternoon. We have moved to our sleeping bags. She is lying
beside me, asleep. We have loved one another completely, as women do, until we
lost consciousness. I raise myself on my elbows and look out at the simplest
and greatest of luxuries: a land at peace. I know nothing and want nothing but
this woman. I never expected it to happen again. What dangers will befall us?
All too many: it can’t last for the difference in age and experience. We will
begin to grow apart as soon as we leave Doñana. She will understand this, and I
will release her as easily as it was to make love to her. I will not regret a
moment: it is a gift.

The flamingoes are now settled in the water, for their favorite
food resides here, a crustacean that gives them their pink color. They are
marching in tandem at the meeting of water and land. Two by two, males to one
side and females to the other, they strut with a wobbly motion in an uneven yet
perfect rhythm. These monogamous pairs almost seem to be promenading, performing
the ritual of courting couples in the small villages of Spain and Italy. The
incongruity of their long slender pink legs and beaks gives their motion a
great elegance, like a line of exquisitely thin Spanish dancers, and I wonder,
as I often do in watching wildlife, if beauty and simple satisfaction can ever
be joined as completely as here and now. Not for humans, surely.

Sylvie is now awake, watching this vigorously wobbling line of
pink feathers with me, and then we laugh at our impetuous love overtaken by a
flock of flamingoes. What can we call it? “Love with Flamingoes.” She sits up
and takes my face in her hands. “Now I want to know everything from you. When
did you first think of me like this? I don’t think I’ve ever passed out from
sex before. Did you actually make love to me in the lake? I didn’t know whether
I was being born or giving birth. How did you do it?”

“I just held you up with my arms. Let me say this: we have to eat.
We’re running on pure sex right now.” We laugh and begin to make our breakfast.
When we are sitting quietly and eating, still without clothing, I ask, “Do you
have any idea what you are getting yourself into?”

Sylvie pauses to think and then smiles charmingly. “About as much
as the flamingoes do.”

“Irresistible woman! And you are old enough to give irresistible
reasons.” Now she will astonish me for a new set of reasons. It has been a
circuitous, almost tortuous path to one another: the world does not want us to
know how completely women can love one another.

“So tell me, when did you want this to happen?” Her voice is warm,
thrilling velvet. It is the question that always comes, the most beautiful.

“From the beginning, but I could not believe you would want it.” I
smile effortlessly, perhaps dreamily. “And you?”

“I’ve always been fascinated by you, from the time I was a little
girl. It began with all those photos of animals on your walls. I thought that
you were unique, ideal and perhaps not human.” This pleases me so much that I
can only touch and kiss her, draw her to me, though we are still eating
breakfast. “And you? You haven’t really answered.”

“Your beauty is so overwhelming that I can only describe it
slowly, over several days. It completely overpowered me. But of course, I
thought you could not want a woman old enough to remind you of your mother or
even your grandmother. What is that like?”