The Sacred Beasts (27 page)

ALEX AND SYLVIE were walking along the Ramblas to the ocean,
intending to walk barefoot in the sea before going back to the hotel. The
thoroughfare was full of so many people enjoying late night entertainment and
the balmy breeze of the Mediterranean that it seemed to be the evening of a
holiday. They walked holding hands like all the other lovers, and this was part
of their own unique holiday, never to be forgotten as the first day and night
they became lovers. The constant sense of joy and wonder made all the other
revelers seem to swim past them like waves of color and noise of which they
were barely aware; they truly looked only at one another. As they approached
the sea, Alex stopped at the Columbus monument to look at the distinctively
proud lion sculptures encircling it. She was struck by the animal nobility of
their faces and manes. That’s so like Ruth, Sylvie thought, to look at the
beasts and forget Columbus. I should do a painting of each of them naked and
riding a lion bareback, brandishing the sword of St. George. She smiled at the
thought of the dismay each would feel in seeing such a painting.

Then the great black, foamy arm of the Mediterranean seized them
and they began to walk faster to get away from the crowds. As the surf met
their feet, they stopped, kissing and holding one another for a long time.
“Come with me to Ibiza,” Alex said. “I know beautiful deserted beaches where we
can swim naked, and I can made love to you in the surf.”

“I will come,” Sylvie said. “But, I’ll make love with you
anywhere. Let’s make love now in the surf, here in Barcelona.” Her smile had
the glint of a challenge and she drew Alex on to the darker and more isolated
parts of the beach. Alex was thrilled, shocked, fascinated, overjoyed and
overwhelmed at the thought of making love with the woman she adored in what was
definitely a public place in a densely populated city, yet she could not resist
anything that Sylvie found erotic.

“Goddess, lead on!” she said with a broad smile of delight. Just
what Ruth would have said, Sylvie thought.

They finally came to a completely dark and solitary stretch of
beach and Alex grabbed Sylvie aggressively, kissing and caressing her. “Here,”
she said, simply. They lay down on the sand, and cold water flowed over them as
Alex discovered that Sylvie was not wearing underwear. She almost barked in
laughter, realizing that Sylvie had intended an outdoor sexual encounter all
along. Then, they began to make love as the surf returned again and again,
half-drenching them both. The cold, the wildness and thrill of the thing made
them laugh as their passion grew, and the result was a kind of delirium while
the ritual of love was performed again and again, even in cold, black water and
pure darkness.

After an hour or so, their laughter won out and they rose,
brushing the sand from their bodies and clothes; then they walked back to the
city lights, still wet and laughing. That is the sexiest surf I will ever know,
Alex thought. Nothing like this will happen again, but what an experience!
Approaching the street again, Alex put her arm around Sylvie and they held one
another more intimately as they walked. It seemed as though there was nothing
they could not do.

“Now I
must
go to the Picasso Museum for more love,” Sylvie
said with her look of mischief and something else. “I am a tourist of
Barcelona, after all.” They laughed uproariously.

“It can’t possibly be open,” Alex said.

“Perfect. I so enjoy what we do when we’re alone.” They continued
to laugh at the absurd wildness of this and went to the Ribera section of the
city. When they arrived at the Picasso Museum, they found it empty but well lit
over many parts of the edifice. They entered a dark underpass and found a small
open courtyard lit only by the moon. There were dark corners, however, and Alex
drew Sylvie into one of them. They were still laughing.

“I think the only comfortable way of doing this is sitting up,”
Alex said. They sat on the cobblestones and Alex arranged Sylvie’s legs around
her waist and back and placed her own legs in a circular position around
Sylvie. Sylvie unzipped Alex’s jeans as Alex raised her dress, and they began
to touch one another in the rhythm they had always known. They kissed
passionately and pressed together. Mouth on mouth, they began to climax
together soon. After a long period of pleasure, Alex said, “Lie down and put
your arms behind your head. I just have to do this.” She made love to Sylvie
orally while massaging her breasts.

Again, they stopped when they were overwhelmed by the fear of
being discovered and by laughter. “You are
such
a wonderful tour guide,”
Sylvie said, and they laughed.

“How terrible that we can’t go into the museum and see Picasso’s
paintings,” Alex said.

“Oh, I have no intention of ever seeing his artwork in Barcelona.
I just wanted some very good sex here.” They laughed uproariously again.

“
What
kind of artist are you?”

“The real thing,” Sylvie said. “I intend to see much more in the
world than he did. The women I paint will not be crying all the time. I just
wanted his famous museum to give me some great orgasms, and you’ve done that so
well, my love.” They could hardly stop laughing.

“This is the wildest thing I’ve ever done,” Alex said. “I am
absolutely crazy about you! You can get me to do anything. What shall we do
now, goddess?”

“How about coming with me to the Gothic Quarter? When we were
there before, you could hardly think about anything but my body. Shouldn’t we
go back and be tourists in a way that gives you more satisfaction?”

They got up and ran into the street, laughing
and holding hands. When they reached the Gothic Quarter, they found it well lit
by lanterns and full of other revelers enjoying the late night hours. They
looked for dark corners and passages and in doing so passed a building Sylvie
noted as the Generalitat. “Isn’t this where the city government meets?” Sylvie
asked.

“Yes it is, and the historical rulers from the Catalan centuries
met here, the Council of 100.”

“That’s terribly sexy!”

They laughed. “But it’s well-lit, too, and probably guarded.”

“Not in back, I bet,” Sylvie said. Their eyes flashed as they
walked to the back of the building, which had no lighting, only a barren wall
and an exit door. “Haven’t you ever had a fantasy about making love to a woman
against a wall?”

Alex laughed. “Of course, and if I hadn’t, I would certainly have
one now.” She pressed Sylvie against the wall and raised her dress while Sylvie
opened Alex’s jeans in the dark. Mouth on mouth, they began to touch one
another and press together, moving in sync. They made little sound as they
began to feel very excited, welded together, and then felt close to orgasm.

Two guards passed them, which they failed to
notice until one of them spoke. “What a man!” he said. “He just gives it to her
up against a wall.”

The other guard laughed. “Yeah, what a man! That’s a beautiful
girl, too. Let’s leave him to his business. He sure knows how to get a woman to
do what he wants!”

When the guards turned a corner, Alex and Sylvie burst out
laughing, re-arranged their clothing and ran off. They couldn’t stop laughing
and running. That’s how I’ll remember it, laughing and running and crazy with
love, Alex thought.

When they slowed down and began walking again, Sylvie said, “Well,
you’re quite a man, my love.”

“It was your muy macho idea, remember?”

“So we’re both tough guys. Well, once again, it was delirious
fun.”

“Oh, I’ll give it to you against a wall anytime.” They laughed and
laughed as time seemed to slow down. They kissed against walls many times, and
then ran again, holding hands. We’re completely drunk on love, Alex thought.

When they walked along the dark, cramped streets again, the crowds
and lanterns seemed even more oppressive and unwanted. Yet the freedom of
darkness enclosed them. They came to an overpass beyond which there was nothing
but black night. “Let’s see what’s there,” Alex said. They found a small
courtyard and another bridge lit only by the moon; it was almost completely in
shadow.

“Crazy, crazy love! I’m out of my mind, so let’s do it here,” Alex
said. She quickly pulled off Sylvie’s dress and her own clothes, which she
arranged in a surface for them to lie on. Then they lay down and began to make
love passionately, as though they had never known anything else. Their love was
seemingly endless again, with all the rituals and stratagems they had learned
about one another’s bodies. They were too excited to feel uncomfortable.

Finally, the painting came to Sylvie. I’ve been waiting for you,
my love, she thought. She saw two completely intertwined women’s bodies united
in passion. Their lines were rough, simplified and slightly abstract so that
they nearly formed a sphere together. Sculptures of animals on buildings she
had seen in the afternoon flashed into the painting. She saw their huge, round
eyes and open mouths of passion, wildness, ferocity—lions, dragons, horses,
gargoyles. Their bodies were caught in fabulous poses—leaping, dancing,
running, rearing up—their hair and fur in moving coils. They were the reverse
of the humans—static and lifeless. Toward the sphere of love, these Gothic
animals reached with their jagged paws and muzzles, their eyes gleaming black
midnight.

Now the painting lives in a lapis darkness with swirling clouds,
she thought. The bodies of the women are the purest and most intense red of
sexual heat. The animals are the colors of the night—black, blue, purple,
green. In all, the size and intensity of the eyes strike first in a knife of
black fire. There is passion in all they see and feel. A brilliantly burning
truth redraws itself from a religious cliché about God’s all-seeing eye. That
is the art, the complete truth, of this day and night, this love, this woman,
Sylvie thought as she lost consciousness.

RUTH AND MONSERRAT had just finished love-making in the large,
ornate room she had shared with Damiana, which was in an isolated part of the
house where she painted and went to be alone. Their bodies were much as they
had imagined and desired. Ruth was the taller and more muscular,
small-breasted, like the ancient Greek ideal of beauty. Monserrat was smaller
and had the strikingly dark, olive-skinned and voluptuous beauty of the Hindu
ideal. Both were still slender for their active engagement with the world.

As Ruth had intuited, Monserrat wanted complete,
surface-to-surface love; and their bodies, so different, melded together
beautifully in desire. Ruth found freshness in this; she was astonished by how
much the complete surface of a woman’s body could say. Now, it said, I love and
accept you completely in a naked, rhythmic and orphic speech; like the moving,
rarely perceived background of nature and the unknown, fluctuating self that
exists below thought. This love had a hint of eternity in it, as did all things
vibratory and full of song.

Often, Ruth like Alex was compelled to break the rhythm to make love
orally, creating another rhythm. Here, too, Monserrat wanted as much physical
contact as possible by caressing Ruth’s face or placing her legs over Ruth’s
shoulders. Ruth, to the contrary, needed only strong touch for orgasm; though,
like Alex, she was always close to orgasm throughout lovemaking.

Both Ruth and Monserrat were struck by how little their minds
functioned in this love; how instantly they were rhythmic together; how
completely instinctual. This contrasted with the lovemaking of their much younger
lovers, particularly Ruth and Sylvie, who was the most restless and
unpredictable of lovers. Katia, too, was overly restless when her moods
overcame her, Ruth thought. What a long journey it was to this love, they
thought. They had known all the youthful challenging, straining to the limits,
experimenting with another’s body as though it was that of a stranger.

Now there was something new in the world, though they were old
lovers.

Their thoughts returned to them. They were not falling asleep yet.
“Tell me one of your secrets,” Monserrat asked.

Ruth laughed. “Our bodies no longer have any. But yes, our minds
do, true enough. I don’t know if this secret is now all-too-obvious, but I grew
up thinking that human life was a curtain, hiding all that is really thought
and felt. Everything truly worth knowing is a secret. I always wanted to look
behind the curtain, and I did find what was there: sexuality and our deepest
emotions place us directly into the animal kingdom. Above, all, we are animals,
barely human as another, exalted state. It’s here that we are most dangerous to
the world and ourselves. The question mark has become a quest for me, I think,
and it has determined my profession, my outlook and, to the degree that we are
prophets, my prophecy for the world we live in. Now, after all these ponderous
imponderables, you tell me a secret, a good one that I could never guess.”

“Mine is similar in some ways. I identified with the French
children’s book hero,
The Little
Prince
, as one who is not
exactly alien or human, male or female, child or adult; something entirely
different. I felt this when I was very young, and when I was much older, I knew
that it was the heart of another that is always alien, wild and unexpected when
we first encounter a person who becomes important to us and even when we love.
Now, you tell me another secret, if possible less basic and more intuitive.”

Ruth was silent and thoughtful. “I can only tell you the first
image I ever had of freedom: it was a beautiful city on water, San Francisco.
I’d found this endlessly fascinating city of people with a light in their eyes
and freedom on their lips. All the compulsions and fears of childhood ended
there in a matter of hours, incredibly. I had found the freedom to explore the
world as an adult. I saw my life as a trajectory of new worlds to discover and
that I would never know the outcome, which might very well be tragic; but this,
too, I loved because it was unknown and free.

“I later found this beautiful city on water in many different countries;
the most hedonistic and perhaps the wildest was Rio de Janeiro. There were
others with different histories and peoples: Amsterdam of intellectual and
sexual freedom; Hong Kong of capitalism as the strangest form of romanticism;
now Barcelona with the most extraordinary buildings that look as though they
were designed by sea creatures.

“The people of these cities are those who, for very different
reasons, are in love with the world; that is what they chose with their
freedom. And, every new generation can come to these cities and also know that
yes, there is a place that beautiful, with golden light and a brisk spring air,
where they will be free to embrace the unknown. This is the heart of why I am
sickened by the future I have prophesized. These cities will be among the first
to be destroyed. Or, they will exist behind huge sea walls; and how then can
they, as fortresses, ever be the image and spirit of freedom for those who come
after us? I am sorry that my secret is ultimately a sad one. If you have the
impulse to go on, then tell me another secret.”

“We will have to talk this out later. I see now that you are often
hiding your deepest feelings from me, perhaps trying to protect me, which won’t
succeed. I sense that you are reluctant to talk about it now, so we have much
to do later. I have a similar secret but it bears no prophecy. I have traveled
all over the world, too, and once I discovered what I thought was an ideal
point of view, one to orient myself to life and appreciate it most. I say to myself,
I am twenty years old and in a new, cosmopolitan city, full of rich experiences
and secrets to be revealed. While I am here, anything can happen, and it is
ultimately the unknown that I love. I think this is similar to your image of
freedom as a beautiful city on water.”

“Yes, it is, and you are fortunate to carry no prophecy.”

They were silent for a long time and then, with much physical
contact, they slept.

In the middle of the night, Monserrat awoke and saw that Ruth’s
sleep was restless and her eyes were wet with tears. She began to touch her
slowly, which instantly penetrated Ruth’s dream. When Ruth was awake, Monserrat
held her and said, “You are still grieving. Now you must tell me everything.”

“I’ll tell you the nightmare. All that grieves me is longer than
Scheherazade’s tales, which I would never expose you to in the middle of the
night. In the dream, I was once again seeing a TV nature program I saw a year
ago that showed a polar bear and its cub struggling on melting Arctic ice. The
cub was small and light and could stand and move. The mother, however, was
enormous in size and kept falling into the ocean. Eventually, it could only
move on the joints of its front and rear legs. It was so horrible to see. It
took tremendous energy and concentration just to try to get out of the melting
snow and onto real ice. The mother bear never found the ice and kept falling
into the ocean. It was obviously a long and agonizing death, since getting food
and nutrients was out of the question. The cub tried to stay with its mother,
but it would float away on the broken ice at any moment.

“The mother’s huge, heavy white body that had once made it the
Arctic’s most effective hunter, the top of the food chain, could now only drag
itself slowly to a certain death from drowning. If it remained for even a few
moments in the ice hole, the fast current of the ocean would drag it away,
leaving it unable to break through the ice to oxygen. It could even die in
front of its cub. It was so horrible to see, so horrible! I was very close to
the animal and could feel its terror. That’s a horrible way to die, below a
layer of ice with no way to break through. It must be like being buried alive.
You can see the world beyond that could save you, yet you are fully conscious,
suffocating. So many polar bears have been found drowned, and that’s exactly
how it happens. I was there and close, not the animal but somehow united with
it.”

“You’re so concerned about the issues in your book that it’s
entering your dreams.”

“Yes, and even though I’m otherwise so happy. I’ve never been
happier than here with you. You must know that.”

“I know; I understand that. At our ages, we can see the world to
come. We want to preserve what we’ve loved and known to be the finest things in
our world; we want them there for the generations to come. It’s not that we
never find the meaning of life but that what we find is so fragile, ultimately,
and threatened by so much human stupidity and carelessness. I think about this
every day, but it rarely comes into my dreams. What you’ve said is the
future—uncontrollably destructive weather and mass extinction—do you believe
that it is inevitable?”

“No, not at all. There will be things that can be done up to the
last. But, in the political realm, the ‘great powers’—the U.S. and China
primarily—are conscious of the dangers but unable to act. When I’m happy with
you and have so much to live for, I feel the destructiveness of human apathy
more acutely. Can you accept me like this?”

“I have already,” Monserrat said and smiled. “I have said it with
my body, that wanted nothing but contact with you. You are something very rare,
a guardian in all your heart and spirit, and I love and revere you completely.
But, you must talk this out with me.

“This has no place in the middle of the night, at the hour of the
wolf. I would be a poor guardian of the woman I love if I kept you from your
sleep.”

“All right, but you must be sure to finish, talk it all out with
me. Don’t withhold anything. This nightmare came out of nowhere, and now I know
that you’re trying to protect me from knowing what disturbs you.”

“I know, but we must sleep and tomorrow, you must show me more of
your home. I so loved the day in Barcelona.”

“All right, I’ll give you up now, but only to take you up later.”

“That I can’t live without. We must take one another up every
night, if possible. I love the full body treatment you gave me.”

Monserrat smiled. “You aren’t serious. But tell me this: what of
our young lovers? I almost said, our children.”

“They are some of the most creative, brilliant, brazen children
around. They’ll be pursuing their extremes and limits for decades. They’ll lead
magnificent lives and when they are old, they’ll probably be a lot like
us—provided my prophecy is wrong. I would love to believe that I’ve failed in
my analysis, and some hope is justifiable.”

“Then I’ll let you all go.”

“That would be best for your health, my great love.”