Chapter Five – One Perfect Rose
Damael and I leave Ubaldo's villa behind us, and we pass through a scrubby, sand-strewn savannah. Boulders dot the horizon and the wind whips grit into my face. We go on a long while without speaking, and then I have to ask. "Why would Christine think that I'm the gardener?"
Sadness creases his lined face. "Some can't let go of their before-lives, and they become ghosts, attached to the places they loved the most. Others want to bring that life with them into this one. They pick together fragments and assemble them, like children who put together a battleship out of chairs and blankets, and think it will carry them on an ocean voyage. But soon the battleship gets taken apart - the chairs are needed for sitting down to supper, after all. The blankets have to go back on the bed. The children protest; they want to play their game forever. But sooner or later, those who live in that illusion begin to break down, and when that happens there's only one place for them. The hospital."
A shiver goes through me at the word. "What kind of hospital?"
"The kind for those who cannot face where they are. Who cannot face what they are. Those who spit on the hand that reaches out to them."
"I knew it," I say. "There have to be punishments here somewhere, don't there?"
"There are no punishments here," he answers gravely. "Only cures, or attempts at a cure. Think of how it was in life. A man is ill and he avoids the physician. The disease grows worse until suffering drives him there. But the disease has spread deep into his vital organs and permeated his being. To remove it means deep cutting, and suffering."
I contemplate his words. "You don't torture people, then."
"From the outside, surgery and torture may look the same. The sufferer may feel the same. But no one is forced to be cured. Even so, the most desperate here undergo it, and embrace the cost willingly."
"What of those who refuse to be cured?"
"We keep them someplace safe, and we wait. Locked in the prison of their own minds, they torture themselves with their own bleak thoughts and mad desires. They know us and see us far more clearly than you. But we never stop extending the hand. We care for them all through it."
"Thus the hospital," I muse.
"Yes. Thus the hospital. I fear for the girl. If she can't come back to herself, it's where she may wind up."
"Please tell me what to do, Damael. Tell me how to help her. Take me to her quickly."
He touches my arm, and with a rush of wind we find ourselves in a city street, bare and strewn with refuse. Paper blows around in the sad air of abandonment. We stand in front of a townhouse once graceful and elegant, but now stained with neglect. A light in the window breaks through a twilight the color of a slate roof left too long without rain.
The door knocker feels heavy in my hand and the hollow thuds ring through the house. A ragged lace curtain covers the door glass. I wait a long time until faint footsteps click on a bare floor. Delicate footsteps, a lady's.
The door swings open and there she is as I remember her. Not quite - her face is drawn and tight, and there are deep circles under her eyes. Then I look at the rest of her and everything stops for a moment. She wears the dress of ivory satin dress I had made for her. It's stained around the hem with a faint tinge of green mold, and torn under the arms.
She absently pushes back her long dark hair with her stained white gloves. "You're late. How can you prune the rose bushes when it's almost dark? And why haven't you gone around the back? It's impudent for a servant to come to the front door."
I remove my cap and step into the parlor. Thin white sheets cover the dusty furniture and mirrors. "I'm not the gardener."
She doesn't seem to hear me as she wanders absently into the other room. "Go cut some roses for me," she orders. "Company will be here in half an hour."
I walk through to the kitchen empty of everything except a few broken plates and cups strewn on the countertops, and go into the garden. Roses cover everything, roses of every kind. Climbers scale the fence, and bushes with tea roses sit in clumps. Their vast profusion makes a thicket of thorns around the back of the house. Enchanted, I walk out into their midst and then feel her behind me, without turning around.
"Why won't you cut my roses?" she says with a hint of a whine. "Here are the shears."
I take them and go over to a bush of long-stemmed reds, and cut one off. It's the first perfect rose I gave her, when she made her debut in the Opera chorus. She was just sixteen then, a long beautiful swan. Never has the color red looked so full, so real. I put the shears in my pocket and turn back to her.
She strains in the dim light, almost recognizing me. I hand her the rose and she backs up a little, anxious and afraid. Something like a mouse skitters across the kitchen counter, but it has too many legs and too long a snout.
Damael, I call out in my mind. Help me.
His presence comes to me. She is free to leave whenever she wishes. Just be kind. Be gentle. Forgive her.
I anguish. I never understood why she did the things she did. I don't understand now.
He soothes me, You have some things to say to her. You'll know what they are.
Warmth falls on my cheek like a kiss, and I follow her as she carries her rose. "Christine," I call to her softly. "Christine."
She turns, confused. "You can't be here. I'm dreaming again. So many dreams, and all I do is look for you, down halls and through tunnels, and I never find you. And where's your mask?"
"I haven't worn a mask in almost fifty years, when I was alive. I have no more need of masks."
"When you were alive?" she says in a daze.
"Christine, do you know where you are? Do you know where we are?"
She ponders, then says, "What a foolish question. I'm at home, in our Paris townhouse. Tonight we're having a party. Can't you see I have decorating to do? I thought at first you'd come to take care of the flowers. I must have flowers around me; they're the only things that make me happy. Why are you here, anyway? You don't want Raoul to see you. It would make him terribly angry to see you." She stands in front of a tall mirror and plays with the dust cloth, whimpering, "It's so hard to keep everything clean. The servants all leave, one after another. My son won't come to help, or even visit. Oh, he'll come if his father asks him, but not me. Why does my son hate me?" she asks, her eyes wide and distracted.
"I don't think he hates you," I say. "It's all too late for that."
"What are you talking about? You never spoke to me that way before. Your words were always beautiful, poetic. Not like this."
"Christine, please let me talk to you. Please sit down and listen to me."
She wanders into the living room but won't sit on the cotton-covered sofa whose arm she absently strokes. "Do you think I should get these chairs reupholstered? The fleur-de-lis pattern is so overdone."
"Christine," I beg, standing directly in front of her. "Please, Christine." I don't touch her, because she can still be frightened, and I have frightened her so much already.
Her eyes focus, and for the first time she sees me, really sees me. They grow wide and dark and she staggers over to one of the mirrors. "Why have you come?" she says breathlessly. "I thought you were dead. Then I found out you weren't. Then it turned out you had married my best friend. How could you do that?"
"Christine, you married someone else too."
"But I didn't want to," she wails. "Nothing seemed right. None of it was right."
"No, I agree. It wasn't. That's why I'm here, to make amends. To tell you I was wrong."
She moves over to the window and draws the filthy, ragged curtain aside to reveal the dark, deserted street below. "Raoul should be home soon," she says in a dreamy sing-song. "I used to imagine you'd come here, late at night when the servants were asleep. I used to think you'd take me away. But you never came for me. You never came."
"I had a wife, and work. You had made your choice."
"But how could I have had any choice?" she cries, whirling around, chased out of her dream. "That choice was not free. I never knew who you were. You never showed me. How could I choose an unknown?"
Then a great wave of sorrow pushes me under and fills my lungs, and the pain in my hands from hauling logs, the pain in my skin and limbs from pulling thorns, can't even come close to it. It is like the pain of dying all over again, but it lasts far longer. It's as if my flesh were being squeezed in a giant spring, twisted and compressed to the break of tearing. "You're right, I say through the agony. "Calling me 'false friend' as you did was a kindness. When you said that I deceived you, you spoke the perfect truth. I lied to you from the very start."
"I was singing in the chapel," she says, and then she starts a slow, soft chant, "Te Deum laudamus …"
"That was when I noticed you for the first time. That's when you heard me for the first time, and it was really me, not your dreams or imagination as when you were a child. You were fifteen, and so sad. You were trying to light a candle, but it kept going out. When you finally got it going, you burned your fingers and I wanted to kiss them."
"Te Dominum confitemur …"
"Then I started to sing with you," I went on. "You stopped, terrified when you heard me. I told you not to be afraid; I'm the angel of music, sent by your father. I told you I would make you a great singer. I told you everything but the truth."
"Te aeternum Patrem …"
"Then I let you go on believing it, even when it made no sense anymore. I had promised, and if all hell had to be let loosed, I would deliver. What I didn't expect was that you would ask for me, that you would actually want to see me."
"Omnis terra veneratur …"
"I thought if I taught you to sing, gave you triumphs on the stage, if I touched you and gave you pleasure, if I forced roles to open for you and helped you in your art, that you would be mine. All mine, as if you were an expensive toy from the shop that I purchased with my own blood. All that desperation, all that anger, all that destruction started from a lie."
She falls silent, then comes over to me. A mad thought passes through me, we have done this before, we've been through this before. She can't do this, it's not possible. It would annihilate me entirely with pain.
But she doesn't kiss me. She just leans her head up against my breast, under my chin, and even though I feel my bones twist and break, I put my arms around her. Enfolded there I see the little girl, left at home while her father played at concerts and went to parties afterwards. I see the money dribbled away on corsages and cigarettes, and a young girl left with no inheritance or prospects, taken in by strangers, saved from the orphanage.
In her loneliness she built a choir of angels to keep her company, and in the sadness and confusion of her mind they did speak to her as she grew up. After my lie, she held a secret to her breast, she who had nothing but a dormitory bed and some cast-off costumes, and it made her feel special, more than just another girl in the row of dancers.
For years when I fell to silent brooding, Meg would look at me and know my thoughts without asking. She could see the churn of the bitter question over and over, Why? Why? She never spoke of it to me, but she knew.
Poor Meg, to suffer through that, and never to complain.
Now, if I wanted to I could press my forehead to Christine's, force myself into her soul, penetrate her with glowing power, and discover the why that haunted me for fifty years in life. But what if she herself doesn't know? The tight spring of agony relaxes. It's not important. Then what is? What does matter is compassion in the face of what I don't understand. What matters is my compassion in the face of her pain and bewilderment.
Then the spring squeezing me breaks entirely, and my bones are free. I no longer care why she unmasked me on the bridge, why she kissed me with such passion in front of the man she was to marry, why she came back to tear at me once again with that ring. I don't even care to know whether she really loved me or not. It doesn't matter anymore.
All that matters to me is that she linger no longer in this ruin of a house built of the cobbled-together fragments of her old life. I don't want her to go to the hospital.
"Christine," I say as she nestles into me like a child welcoming her father home after a long absence, "let me help you build another house. Let me help you find another garment. Let me serve you another cup than the bitter and selfish one I prepared for you so long ago. Let me make it better, because the weight of my bitterness has helped to keep you here."
She pulls herself away from me and slowly, one after another, peels off her dirty gloves. Her fingers are long and delicate in the dim light. I hold out my hand to her as I did so long ago. Now, instead of leading her straight into my possession, she puts her hand in mine and I lead her out into the street. From the edge of that gray town we walk into thickets full of flowering bushes and trees. The town fades and the light grows brighter. Here the trees are ancient, tall and straight, with grass dense as moss beneath them. I hear water and she follows me trustingly toward it like a child.
There in the center of wide and arching trees is a small grotto, and from the rock itself bubbles a small spring. Moss and vines overhang the rocks, and the air rises off the water fresh and cool. It's as if an old quarry was once here. Stones of all sizes lie around in rugged heaps.
"Here," I say. "We'll build your house here."
She looks at the water longingly. "What an exquisite pool. I feel so grimy, without a bath in ever so long. Is it all right? Do you think it's allowed?"
"Everything is allowed here."
She goes over to the spring and takes off her dress to show her long, lovely nakedness. Inside me is a space where lust once lived, but now all I find there is praise for that sleek beauty. She bathes herself with quick, delicate movements and washes her dress as well. When she takes it out of the water to wring it, it's no longer the stained, molded remnant of my wishful thinking, but a long soft tunic of pale blue.
"That's so much better," I say. "Now we collect stones."
"Let me help."
So on and on we gather stones, and break them on each other into flat pieces. We mix mud from the well with sticks and gravel for mortar. When her hands bleed, I bathe them in the spring. When she falls down, I pick her up and we continue. Slowly the walls grow stone by stone. Then come the windows, open to the soft breeze.
Once in the woods, when we're gathering wood, we find a long strong saw with a blade shining like a jewel. I wonder if Joseph Buquet left it there for us. It makes the work go so much faster.
We gather the long rushes and dry them in the sun, then weave them into thatch for the roof. The best rushes are rough and coarse, and her fingers first bleed, and then toughen as she works them. We lay the roof and secure it, and the house is done. She makes a broom of twigs to sweep the floor, and I fashion a cot for her from boughs, laid over with a mat of soft dried grass tied into a bundle.
Then we go down to the spring together and bathe, first her, then myself. I submerge myself entirely in the pool, and it's as if all the waters of the deep pass over my head and face. When I come up and wipe my face with my hands, I stop in shock.
My fingers go up and down the entire right side of my face like soldiers out on reconnaissance. There's hair over my right ear, and an eyebrow. The flesh around my eye feels smooth, as does the cheek. My hair is thick and soft, not the coarse mat that I've always had. Slicked back with water, it dries quickly in the even white light.
I look down into the water, but although it's clear as polished glass, the surface casts no reflection. A strange wonder fills my body from the center outwards, but I say nothing, not wanting to break the spell, not wanting to find it to not be true. Sitting in cool water up to my neck, I wonder why, after all these years of my life, and all of what I have seen and done here, I should find myself so restored. I accepted my face, finally, as my life went on. In this strange country, it never occurred to me to want it changed. Yet here it is beneath my fingers, symmetrical, healed.
Christine calls to me and comes out to the fountain. "Come see what I've found inside."
I rise out of the water, coming toward her, and she stops cold in my path.
"Your face," she says. "Oh, your face. If you could see it."
"What is it?" I say slowly, although I know.
"Oh, mercy. It's all the same now." Then she looks very small and sorry, and says, "I shouldn't have taken your mask off when you were writing your music. I shouldn't have pretended to stay unconscious. And when you touched me, I should have opened my eyes."
I stare at her, and for the first time when we look at each other, we really see. I take her left hand in mine, to kiss the spot where for a few moments so long ago a ring once rested. Then I know what she did. I know what she gave up for me, and why she almost found herself in the hospital. On my breast I place her hand, saying, "I know now why you gave your ring back to me." She sighs, and I go on. "It wasn't just a token. It really was a piece of you."
Onto her own breast, where the skin is like ivory velvet, she places my hand. Inside flails the woundedness of her heart.
I see her climbing my stone stairs in her dripping wedding dress, the ring clenched in her fist. I hear her pray to gods that were old when the Cross came to her pine-covered northern land. She begs them to send some of her own living substance into the ring, to bathe my black and bleeding soul with it, and thus save my life. I feel the hole inside her that remained, and the piece of her soul that now beats inside my own.
That piece was hers, I know now. It's time to give it back, and so I do.
Into my own breast I plunge my hand, and with a great wrench of pain I rip something out of me, thick and red, with bleeding roots of agony that drip onto the ground beneath us. My heart has been drawn and quartered, and while three of the pieces are mine, the fourth I pluck out for her. It's the color of her first perfect rose, and she stares at it with fascination as it quivers before us on my palm.
"All you gave up for me lies here in my hand," I tell her. "I became a man of solidity and life. You became the ghost, didn't you? Can you forgive me for how much I made you suffer?"
"I would have given more," she says.
The piece of my heart that is Christine's twitches like a live thing, and smears my hand with blood like liquid roses.
"Will you put it back in me?" she asks.
"Of course I will," and then plunge my hand into the tender flesh of her soft left breast. She cries out, but not with pain. Her eyes roll back in her head, and I've seen that look before, in her deepest throes of passion.
Hesitating, I pull back a little, but she says, "No, go on, it's all right, oh please, go on." The opening doesn't bleed. Her ribs part of their own accord, and with my other hand I slip the quivering living fragment of her soul back into her chest. She gives a little moan of pleasure and looks straight at me, eyes wide.
"All that I missed having with you," she says with a hint of sadness.
"It was my fault," I reply. "I drove you away with murder and jealousy and rage. Never did I know what you did for me, how much of your own joy you set aside so that I might have mine."
With a deep low cry she pushes my hand into her chest a little further, and the newly-inserted piece melds with the glistening ablated organ in the velvet box of her chest. Through her translucent skin her completed heart glows with a warm red light.
"Go ahead, it's all right," she says, and I know at once what she wants me to do, what she will allow. My hand is large enough to encircle her heart completely, and so I do. Its pulsing wholeness glows like a little sun at the center of a galaxy of strong flesh, my flesh.
"Oh, sweet man," she sighs, and her shining gazelle eyes flow over me.
With a glance I invite her into myself. "You can do the same. You don't need to long hopelessly for me anymore. Feel my heart. Feel the part of you that's carved into it forever."
My breast lies open from when I retrieved the shining quarter of her heart, and into it she slides her own slim-fingered hand. I gasp with pleasure as the ribs part to her search. It's hard work for her to penetrate the thick mass of fascia and muscle, but eventually she gets through. As her hand slides through me I shiver with tough fibrous delight. My heart gives a massive, spasmodic flutter as she seizes it, reluctant to surrender.
Tenderly she holds my soul until the wild flailing dies down, and for the first time I truly lose the boundaries of time. We might have stood there ten minutes. We might have stood there ten thousand years. Everything that she was, everything that she is, rests in my hand, and everything of mine rests in hers. We envelope and are penetrated; we penetrate and are enveloped, hand to heart, heart to hand, breast to breast.
When I first died, Gariela poured into me the full measure of a mother's love. In our trembling hands our hearts beat into each other the rhythms of an entire lifetime of shared love, a lifetime that never was ours in the flesh, but whose substance we now both feel.
"You have to find him," I say to her, and she knows at once what I mean. "Show him all of you that he missed. He loved you, but he never really knew you." Then from her fingers the glowing center of my being slips, and I shiver with pleasure as her hand slowly, wetly withdraws. She pinches the flesh of my breast closed like a mouth full-fed.
Her whisper echoes through my whole body, "Cover me, close me up," and the core of her life slides out of my grasp. As I press the open lips of her flesh together, the edges join themselves onto the seamless plush of her soft breast. A verse comes to me that I have not thought of in many years, "A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed."
"Forgiven," I almost sob. "Sister of my heart, we're both forgiven." I hear the sharp sweet cries of birds calling to each other from the treetops and once again feel the earth underneath my feet. Under my chin her head rests, and since she's trembling, I smooth the soft curled silk of her hair to soothe and gentle her.
When she's calm, she stirs and takes me in her slender hand, saying, "Come see what's in the house."
We go in, and on the rough log table is a green wine bottle, two clay cups, and a few pieces of flat crusty bread.
"It's Ubaldo's vintage," I say.
"Ubaldo Piangi?" she exclaims. "You've seen him?"
"I stayed with him and pulled thorns from his vineyard. He showed me how to make wine. This is a red, so maybe it's what I made."
But it isn't; it's a sweet red instead of a dry, and far lighter in color. It coats our tongues like honey and we talk on and on, remembering. The wine lightens our hearts and the words flow freely between us. We break the bread and eat it, and the bread and wine fill up the yearning, evacuated space within my breast.
"Bread for the journey," I say.
"You're leaving?" she asks.
Suddenly I know I must. "But someone is coming to see you, a friend."
We go to the spring and wash the cups and bottle. Through the clearing Damael approaches, his kind shabby face nodding in approval at the little stone house. He greets us warmly, and says to me, "Your path goes through there." I look up and there's a clearing through the woods, directly on the path of his approach. "Follow the path until it ends, into the great city. Are you ready for the final leg?"
I nod, and then Damael holds his hand out to Christine. "There's someone we go to see," he says to her. "He has been waiting for you a long time."
"Will we meet again?" she says to Damael, but she looks directly at me.
"You're never apart now," he tells her, and her face relaxes. "There are no more partings, no more sorrow, no more regrets. You'll come to see."
She takes his weathered hand and the two disappear into the greenwood mist.
(To be continued…)