The Sacred Beasts (28 page)

SYLVIE DID NOT know what came first: the dazzling light, the heat,
the incomprehensible sound or the dismay. Two men in uniforms were bending
toward them, slowly clapping their hands in rhythm. She was lying on her arm,
with Alex lying over her, waking up at the same moment. Their clothes were
still underneath them.

Alex immediately spoke to her in a low voice. “
Don’t
laugh;
don’t
resist. It’s the Guardia Civil, Spain’s moral police. Let me do
the talking and dress as fast as you can.” She smiled awkwardly at the two men,
rapidly pulled out their clothes and covered Sylvie as well as she could, then
herself. “Good morning, officers,” she said.

“And what a good morning it is for you,” said the man with the
mustachios. “Here you are,
en flagrante
, buttocks to the breeze in our
famous Gothic Quarter. Was it, perhaps, a wayward religious impulse that led
you here and inspired you both to disrobe?”

Alex smiled and dressed at an impressive speed. Well, she can get
in and out of clothes faster than anyone I’ve ever seen, Sylvie thought. What a
useful skill. “No, officer,” she said. “We certainly never intended to do this.
We accidentally fell asleep, unfortunately. We are not vagrants. We have a
residence, and we will never do anything like this again, you can be sure.”

“Well,” said the bald and bold officer, shorter than his
colleague. “I would like to point out that you two can now be married in our
wonderfully enlightened country and frankly, we do expect it, rather than
shameless public sexual spectacles like the one you have indulged in.”

“Why would we stop just because we’re married?” Sylvie asked.

Alex gave her an agonized look. “Don’t,
don’t!
” she
whispered furiously. “Shut up or agree with everything they say!”

“If you marry,” said the bald and bold one, and a tired and
cynical look came over his face, “you will soon grow bored. When you are
completely bored, you will not want to fuck in weird places; and then, wonder
of wonders, you will become good Spanish citizens who are commendable rather
than a couple of naked, post-coital fools who got caught with their pants
down.”

“Yes, officer,” Alex said. “I agree entirely.” Sylvie smiled. “I
fully intend to propose marriage to this woman as soon as we are alone. It is a
brilliant suggestion.” Sylvie looked at Alex in shock.

“Of course, you agree,” said the mustachioed one. “For your youth,
obliviousness, misfortune and dubious good intentions, we will make an
exception this time. Too, you do not look at all like the criminal scum we
usually find in situations like this. So, ladies, we will not arrest you today.
But if we find you again, you’ll be thrown into the same cell as the
prostitutes.”

“Certainly,” Alex said. “You are eminently reasonable, kind and
considerate, and we will make every effort to follow your excellent example and
suggestions.”

“Very good. Now, we have important business to attend to and so do
you—fully clothed, I may add.” With that, they left with a kind of rhythmic
strut.

Alex would not allow laughter until they had turned the corner. “
Spain
has moral police?” Sylvie asked.

“In a manner of speaking. They are not Barcelona’s regular police
force; they just show up at strange moments all over the country. They have a
storied past, not all of it moral. They were criminal and greatly feared and
hated under Franco, but to address what’s most important, we are very, very
lucky to get out of this, and we must be much, much more careful in the future.
They were a couple of gay officers, and they let us off for that reason alone,
probably.”

“Why do you think they’re gay?”

“Your body was in full view, and neither of them got a hard-on.
It’s the first thing I looked for. When I saw that, I knew we’d get through
this in some kind of half-decent shape.”

They were dressed now, and Alex pulled Sylvie up on her feet. “And
you’re still gorgeous, and I still love you madly. But, you have no idea how
dangerous that could have been. You really can’t trust men in law enforcement
anywhere on earth, and I shouldn’t have to tell that to a woman who looks like
you. There are good cops, of course, but there are plenty of rotten apples as
bad as the criminals they catch. You could have been taken to the station and
gang-banged by a dozen horny, pimply cops with halitosis. I wouldn’t be able to
do anything to protect you; they’d put me in another cell. You’d end up with
traumatic stress syndrome for the rest of your life. Christ! Please tell me you
understand this danger and that we will never, ever take a risk like this
again.”

Sylvie smiled and touched Alex’s cheek tenderly. “Yes, my love.
Actually, I was terrified and thought you handled them very well. I sensed that
you wanted to protect me from them. Let’s go back to the hotel and clean up,
have breakfast and then sleep. I hurt from head to toe. You were a one-woman
gang-bang last night, but then, I wanted all of it.”

They returned to the hotel, washed, had breakfast in a café and
were soon nearly asleep back at the hotel. As they held one another and began
to doze, Sylvie suddenly asked, “Who will you tell about this night with me?
Monserrat?”

“Christ,
no!
I won’t tell
anyone
,
ever!
Who
would believe it? My friends would just laugh and tell me I had a wet dream.”

Sylvie smiled. “Then we have a secret together.”

Alex smiled, too. “Yes, we do, a crazy one, an ecstatic,
wonderful, unforgettable one that we just, barely, didn’t have to pay for. I
hurt from head to toe, too, and I wanted every bit of it. Will you marry me in
Spain?”

Sylvie sighed. “I was hoping that was another lie to the moral
police. I’ve been thinking about my answer, in case it wasn’t. At the moment, I
have two answers that contradict one another: one is that I have no idea what
I’m going to do with you. The other is yes. When I’ve slept and recovered from
this, the most likely answer will be yes, but no marriage on this trip. Come
live with me in Paris first.”

Alex only said “ah!” in absolute pleasure; and then, after a long
time, “the only thing better than gang-banging you in Barcelona would be
gang-banging you in Paris.”

“I never thought I’d ever tell anyone that he/she could fuck me
forever, but I certainly can’t resist you. We are very compatible sexually.”

“I guess you’ll want to make love in the Louvre, somewhere on the
Eiffel Tower, maybe hanging from the Eiffel Tower . . .”

“I hope we don’t accidentally kill each other.”

They instantly slept.

“I’LL BET THIS is your favorite work of art in all Barcelona,”
Monserrat said. “You see with the eyes of an artist, but this beast will please
all of you.”

“It does,” Ruth said and smiled. “You’ve predicted me. This one
strokes my love of animals to ecstasy. And I doubt anything else but you can do
that.”

It was midmorning. Monserrat had taken Ruth to Gaudi’s dragon, the
animal emissary that welcomes all visitors to Park Guell. They intended to see
all of Gaudi’s buildings for his richest patron, Guell, as well as the
unfinished Church of the Holy Family. “Our favorite question: what do you see?”
Monserrat asked.

“Well, I think this beast is uniquely joyous, even for Gaudi, who
seems to create from his own childish joy almost exclusively. The dragon’s
mouth is open and he seems to be laughing, his eyes drowsy with pleasure. His
body is a colorful multiplicity of patterns and shapes—undulant stripes and a
riot of polka dots—all created from broken tiles, deliberately asymmetrical.
He’s also covered with curious bumps that could be wondrous flowers growing out
of him or even seeds dispersing to become baby dragons. He seems part animal
and part plant, the patterns on his body completely spontaneous, as though
blown by the wind. He also seems to be guarding what is below him. I first
think it must be eggs but then see that it’s floral and vegetative. He is
guarding nature, his duty to protect it.

“I would say that his beauty is that of inevitability, completion;
beyond this we do not ask or conceive. We only smile. Though broken tiles have
been strewn over his body, he does represent a unity. It is that of cosmic
laughter and human delight. He says that joy and the love of life are spiritual
and possess power in the world. It’s ironic to me that the dragon is associated
with evil in Western art, a thing to be speared to death by an armored saint.
Gaudi follows the concept of the East, where the dragon is the symbol of cosmic
energy and author of the universe. Needless to say, this is all very familiar
to me, that ancient pagan glove that fits so well. Now, I have pontificated enough.
It’s your turn. My love, what do you see?”

“Your pleasure pleases me so much that I want to wander through
Wonderland with my beloved. This park is a found paradise. Let’s see the rest
of it.” They went up the stairs, sat on colorful, circling benches, and saw
Barcelona in a panoramic view. “I want to know everything you think and feel.
You are now most dear to me of all,” Ruth said.

“Your pet dragon?”

“Oh, no, Sylvie might have been my dragon, but you are the queen
of my heart.”

“Then our paradise has indeed been found. We are lovers in
Wonderland.”

“And what does it look like?”

“Benches that undulate like the sea, covered with nature’s forms
and forces in their highest states of energy—the sun, wind and sea creatures
with swirling tails present in all patterns. Like the dragon, they’re embodied
in broken tiles, the more colorful and fragmented the better. The principle of
organization is symmetry created from asymmetry. It’s the same cosmic order as
all of Gaudi’s other buildings, but here it’s used purely in play. After
sunlight and water, only earth is left. So, we find viaducts and stations of
crosses that look like crumbling pillars, rough-hewn and of only one color like
dirt, as though the earth had thrust them up and the artist had left. The earth,
it says, is only material: we are the strivers after meaning, the designers. We
are the creators of Gaudi as he gives us our Wonderland.

“Have you ever seen a photo of Gaudi? Does he look like a crazed
sea scallop?”

“No, he looks like the repressed, tormented Victorian that he
was.”

“Let’s see more of the Guell buildings. I want to know where this
ingenious race of tormented Victorian sea scallops lived.”

They drove to the Guell Pavilions and Palace as well as the Guell
crypt in a village outside Barcelona, and then visited Gaudi’s huge, unfinished
Church of the Holy Family. It took all the hours of the morning and afternoon,
and they were too tired to exchange their thoughts; rather, they were silent
lovers looking out at the world together, which pleased them equally. They
returned to the harbor for dinner and, after coffee, wine and food subtly
seasoned with nightfall and the Mediterranean, they became animated and
talkative again.

“We’ve seen a lot of Gaudi now, enough to exhaust us,” Monserrat
said. “It’s your turn: what did you see?”

“The buildings are beginning to merge in my mind, and Gaudi is
becoming a single point of view that fascinates me as a scientist. He’s an
artist who seems to incorporate my life’s work, a reflection of my mind. He
says that the spirit is to be found in animal life, whose origin is the sea,
and he asserts this against Catholicism as what is no more than the delight of
your child’s heart. All that we can know and experience is present in nature
and animal life. It’s human wonder, complete spontaneity, dream consciousness.

“I was struck by the gateway to the pavilions, which was designed
as an enormous moving dragon. The Guell Palace adds a huge crustacean that
seems to be dancing up a wall it nearly covers. They remind me of La Pedrera,
which is the most oceanic of his buildings, that wave-like, undulating line
present everywhere, ultimately creating an entire building in a spiral like the
Nautilus. And, I think it was there we saw that huge, iron grillwork doorknob
resembling a bouquet of spider webs with a snake darting into its center.

“Most amazing of all to me was the Guell Palace’s central hall
with that parabolic perforated ceiling, allowing natural light to fall into the
room. As I looked up, I felt that I was seeing through the eyes of a great
oceanic being, the mother of us all, watching the universe or even the night
sky from the bottom of the ocean. It seemed to be Gaia looking upward, waiting
for its errant creature, humans, to evolve sufficiently to live on another
world that would become Gaia’s first child. If the earth is a living being,
it’s subject to evolution as we are. After we’ve seen all the surfaces,
patterns and forces of nature, we pass directly into the mind of Gaia. That was
the relationship I saw to the Gaia hypothesis, and there’s more scientific
influence in the concept of symmetry created from asymmetry. It reminds me of
the concepts of quantum physics, in which chance extends to infinity at the
subatomic level but nonetheless comprises our larger, more orderly dimensions
of space and time that exhibit Einstein’s four cosmic forces.”

“You make science sound like a realm of the marvelous,” Monserrat
said.

“It is,” Ruth said, “and your home is a city of the marvelous. I
am honored to reflect it back to you. My pontificating is done. It’s your turn,
my love. What did you see?”

“I should begin by telling you that Gaudi incorporates natural
lighting into all of his buildings, not just Guell Palace. That seashell shape
of La Pedrera is the ideal form to enhance natural lighting along with its
obvious archetypal associations. For me, the crypt of Guell is another myth or
universe, like your ceiling of Palace Guell. It was intended as a church, but
Gaudi only finished its base, the crypt. In the columns, I see the torsos of
giants and great trees, a merging of plant and animal, as you found in Gaudi’s
dragon. The ceilings then become the powerful arms of giants and the boughs of
gigantic trees, all holding up the world. The high stained glass windows are then
the fruit of these cosmic trees and the spiritual consciousness of the giants.
They are mindless but like no others, since rounded shapes are intrinsic to
their order, ultimately creating a design that looks like flower petals. As a
crypt, it’s so full of life that it nearly denies the reality of death, all
from a perspective outside Christianity, as you observed, though Gaudi
considered himself a devout Catholic.

“This merging of mythic humans and the plant kingdom to create a
world reminds me of your Gaia. Gaia is also implicit in the leviathan structure
of Casa Battló and La Pedrera: you’re inside a sea mammoth in both of them.
Both buildings had attics like the skeletal arches of a huge animal’s backbone
or the ribbed roof of a mouth. They’re both designed to be lit by natural light
as well as Casa Battló’s huge crystal lamp with its hanging appendages like a
giant octopus or a jellyfish.”

Monserrat suddenly looked down and was silent. Then she looked
quietly up at Ruth for a long time. “I’m avoiding a very difficult question:
why were your eyes full of tears inside the Church of the Holy Family? It
happened just as we were leaving.”

Ruth sighed and was silent. “I had hoped you didn’t see that. At
first, I was very excited there. I felt an affinity again: that this building
resonates with what I’ve discovered as a scientist. It’s a temple that reaches
to the sky, predictably, but it does so in the shape of a honeycomb, with the
Christian cross as a heraldic flower, which surprised and delighted me. The spiritual
is completely embedded in the organic, in nature. You see the same strategy
when you ascend the stairs and then look down to realize that everywhere you
have passed forms the spiral of a Nautilus. The unfinished glory facade,
similarly, looks like a forest canopy. The cosmic reach, then, only leads to
the structure of trees, flowers and animals. In fact, we come first from the
sea and most recently from the trees of Africa.

“The nativity facade, with its sculptures of the holy family as
well as angels, human believers and animals, are unlike any religious art I’ve
ever seen. Their faces show only wonder, awe, tenderness, spontaneity, dream
consciousness. Those that are reaching out or playing musical instruments are
in what is clearly a trance. The spiritual is to be found, then, in the
wellspring of consciousness, below thought, where all is understood
intuitively. This is the reverse of any formal religion, which is full of laws,
prescriptions, threats, rituals of obeisance, reasons for fear, shame and
loathing, dichotomies of good and evil, etc. Rather, it tells me that the
cosmic is perfectly natural. It tells me how to live and strive, as religion
does not in any real sense.

“And then, I imagined it under water before its completion, as it
will be if not behind sea walls. I felt the terrible disparity between the best
and worst in human beings. I’ve felt this many times during this trip to Spain
and probably for the last several years of my life. The more I seek, study,
think, feel; the more I’m led to this disparity. I think Gaudi has been ahead
of his time up until now, the twenty-first century. We are the people to whom
this art is intended to speak; we are the most receptive; and we are the
people, equally, who will destroy it before it can be completed.” Ruth’s eyes
were full of tears again.

“Then we have to talk this out more,” Monserrat said. “I shouldn’t
have let you go last night.”

“You’ll only hear the old professor talking. I’ve taught college
students for so long that it has taken over my language. You don’t want to
listen to an essay.”

“I’m ready. I completely accept you as you are. I know what you’ve
been, and you
never
bore me! You need to talk this out.”

“Well, in the two most powerful players, the U.S. and China,
there’s too great a divide between rich and poor. It has been growing in the
U.S. all the time I’ve been teaching at the university as an American citizen.
The middle class is under siege, unable to understand the real issues and too
weak to use the political process. A tiny fraction of the upper class,
far-right conservative, is now a danger to all life on the planet; they are
immoral, mendacious, oblivious, ignorant, coarse and unstoppable. The people
have been electing Republican presidents for decades, and the present Republican
Party has become more and more conservative. The spending of such a small group
can’t create a mass market; only a powerful middle class and a strong safety
net for those below can do that. So, the economy stagnates and there are too
few jobs to support the population.

“The vast majority has been manipulated by this dangerous
upper-class with arguments about the need for some abstract notion of freedom,
when it’s only the freedom to be controlled and impoverished by the upper
class. Evangelical religious groups are equally manipulated into violating the
word and spirit of the New Testament, which surely testifies against the
selfishness of elites more than any other written document with which they have
regular contact. Further mendacious arguments involve the value of weak
government and salvation through a free market, when these ideas have always
been proven false by our own economic history and that of other countries.

“Any solution must involve strong government and more ethical
industry that meets the needs of labor, and people in the highest positions of
American industry are hopelessly decadent and will accept no higher goal than
profitability, albeit criminal and immoral. In the long term, American industry
will stagnate and then be destroyed by foreign competition. The final leg of so
many Republican presidents and congresses and so much corrupt influence is an
economic depression. You can see it in steps—less and less taxation of the
wealthy, less government control and regulation of industry, big budget
deficits for the sole purpose of cutting if not destroying Social Security and
Medicare, then financial collapse and massive job losses yet continued
profitability for that pernicious fraction of the wealthy.