Chapter Six - The Bright Body of Love
I am entirely alone in the little clearing with the stone house. I lean my head up against its rough wall and know that it's time to go. An odd excitement fills me, as if everything up till now has been a dream and I'm just on the verge of waking. As if I've been in a play, on stage or backstage, and am about to walk out into the street.
The forest clears, the fields and gardens spring up, and as I travel on I see the workers, the dressers of vines, the tillers and pruners and planters. They wave and I return the gesture. Into the city I go, but twilight no longer looms. Instead the pink dawn covers everything with an icing of coral light. People mill around and smile at me, but no one speaks to me, and I move on as if in a dream. An excitement like love fills me, and my heart presses on me with happiness.
The streets grow wider and more elaborate. I know this place, where is it? It's on the tip of my mind, it's so familiar. Then I come to a great plaza. In the center sits a finely wrought building, many stories tall. I look up, and on the top stands a figure too bright to see, as if a piece of the sun himself stood up there with wings unfurled.
The path ends at the steps that lead up to the great edifice's wide golden doors. On the steps sits a flower seller. Her rust-colored hair is streaked with grey, and it falls loose over her vermilion-clad shoulders. The basket in her lap overflows with pink and white sweetpeas. Her lined face glows like a torch, giving off light that reflects off the marble stairs. I go to her and bow before her, prostrating myself at her feet.
She places a hand on my shoulder, raising me up. "No," she says gently. "Not to me."
"Who are you, Lady?" I breathe.
"I am she who holds the bright Body of Love within her body," she answers as she fills her hands with blossoms. Handing them to me, she says, "For you."
Into my hands they fall and, as if they had a life of their own, they arrange themselves into a crown of flowers. I put it on my head and then she stands up, clutching her roseate cloak and beckoning me to come with her. Her greying hair falls over her shoulders, and I can tell that once it was red, very red, long and ringleted, and it covers her like a queen's mantle.
"I know this place," I say.
"Of course you do."
Around the plaza all roads lead to this vast and beautiful temple.
"It's the Opera Populaire," I whisper.
"That was but a shadow," she said. "This is real. Come and see."
We mount the steps to the wide door. Written on it in letters of fire is my name, my full name. Below my name is a mirrored window like a porthole, but I can't see through it. Instead, I see my own face shining like a coin in the sun.
"Open it," she says, her face bright with love.
"I can't," I answer. "I can't go through that door, or even touch it. There are still so many I haven't seen, so many with whom I haven't reconciled. All those people burned and trampled in the fire. The ones who lost their positions when the Opera closed. Carlotta. Raoul. Especially Raoul. All the ones I've wronged."
"Behold, beloved," she says, as the door opens of its own accord. "Go within and find the bright Body of Love."
I walk into a light fiercer than any I have ever seen. A wind behind me slams the door shut, and I find myself on a rose-red seashore. Large red rocks cover the shoreline and the violet-blue waves crash. Up ahead I see a big wooden house with gables and a front porch that wraps around the whole front, facing seaward. A figure on the porch stands up and waves to me, then runs down the stairs and down to the beach. Other figures, little ones, move or dance about, jumping up and down.
Oh, unbelievable. Oh, majesty, I say to myself, as I break into a run.
She flies to greet me, her blonde hair blowing in the wind, longer than I have ever seen it. Then her sweet face comes into view, her chin pointed like a flower, her eyes bright and merry.
I stop, not knowing what to say or do. Behind her trail six or eight little children, and they dance and squeal. We stand for a moment and look at one another, not believing what we see, and yet believing it, all of it.
"Meg," I say. "You're … you're my age. We're the same age," and first she laughs, then I, because never would I have imagined that would happen.
Then she comes to me and puts her face up against my chest, and I feel her open yourself entirely. "Come in, my love," she says, and down into her I go, deeper than I ever have gone into her with my body when we lived.
"I wish I had loved you more in life," I murmur. "Forgive my bitterness."
"My love. My love. You gave me everything, she says. You let me stay with you. Feel the arms of my soul. Look at the beautiful flowers on your brow. Do you know what sweetpeas mean in the language of flowers? They mean pleasures, endless and eternal pleasures. Forever."
Then we withdraw, and the sweetness almost overwhelms me. I fall to my knees in the warm sand. The children come up to me. I sit in a sandy hollow and a little boy crawls into my lap. "Who are they?" I ask.
Meg joins me on the sand, and they're all over us now like puppies. There are seven of them.
"They're little ones who died before they drew their first breath," she says. "The love, the childhood they missed on earth, they have here. We've all been waiting for you."
I stand up and pick up a little one in each arm, a tiny boy and girl with sweet, serious eyes. The others cling to Meg and I, or run ahead of us towards the gabled house with the porch of its arms standing open wide.
"Come on," I say. "Let's go home."
Moving light covers us as Meg and I lie down together in our bedroom in the wide-gabled house on the edge of the amethyst sea.
"So you know Gariela," I comment.
"For ever so long," she answers. "I knew her at once from the afternoon that you died. I thought I was going mad at first. You were in my arms, limp and cold, and then you were someplace else. I couldn't see you but I knew you were there, and there was someone else with you, too." She dusts my side lightly as her hand runs all the way down my flanks, so that a soft purring warmth starts up inside me. "I saw Gariela in the nursing home, too, when they kept giving me those transfusions and injections that hurt so much. She held my hand and cried with me. Then when I really did die, she held me in her arms. You know what it's like."
"Yes, I remember. She was there for me too. She held me at her breast as if I was an infant. I was a baby all over again, a baby in its mother's arms."
"My love," Meg says, "I've waited for you for so long." Her golden hair flows like silk between my fingers. It's been decades since her hair has looked like this. Not that I didn't love it even when it was coarse and gray, but this aureal satin sheet delights me.
"But we're in heaven," I whisper, or at least what feels like it. "I thought there was 'no marrying or giving in marriage.' I thought we were supposed to be like the angels."
She reaches out to hold me, but I withdraw. I remember the huge onrush of feeling when Joseph Buquet put his hand on my chest, and the sensation of being lost in her when she embraced me on the beach. It was overwhelming to hold Christine's living heart in my hand. I can't imagine actually entering Meg's body. The thought terrifies me, and yet opens me up wide inside, with a great thrumming possibility of love.
Meg smiles reassuringly. "Don't be afraid. Gariela's told me about all that can happen. All that we can have."
"Didn't I lose all lust in Piangi's villa?" I ask. "There was a fire, and I saw it all burn up in the flames."
"You lost the selfishness," she says. "You're still a man, and I'm still a woman."
She laughs and the living light dancing around the room laughs with her. The soft gauze curtains around our bed float of their own accord. Her words are tender as she breathes them into my ear, "These are our bodies now. Don't worry about the ones that have long since turned to dust. Oh, there's not marriage as we understood it on earth, with toil and jealousy and frustration. Not that ours was like that," and she laughs again.
"Don't flatter me too much," I reply. "You used to cry at night when you didn't think I heard you, when your feet ached from dancing two shows in one evening. When you came home exhausted I made you stay up and read my librettos. I hated working as a concert violinist and never failed to mention it, ignoring your own sore and bleeding feet. Then when that boy from Berlin fell in love with me, you went wild and I couldn't blame you."
"Oh, my love," she sighs. "You know what was worst?" and I look up at her, not deserving her, not deserving any of this. "What was worst was when you used to write something you didn't like, and then throw the inkstand. India ink is not the easiest thing to get out of a Turkey carpet. But all that's behind us. There are marriages, and more marriages, the deeper in we go, even to the deepest point of all. All marriages come from the One Marriage. I don't begin to understand it."
"Close yourself to me. I want to hold you, but I fear too much coming in too soon."
"Come here, my love," she smiles, and into her warm beautiful arms I slide. Instead of an onrush of memories and sensations, there's blind sweet warmth and quiet. My head rests on the hill of her breast where my mouth has grazed so often, and she strokes my hair gently.
"There's something inside me," I tell her, and she nods, understanding. "It's a kind of humming, a power I've never felt. I'm going to burst into flame, but it's a cool flame, if you know what I mean. As if I'm the wick of a candle burning with a flame that won't consume me."
"A flame that can burn forever," she whispers. "I know what that is. I've felt it a long time, waiting for you to arrive."
"Meg, can we feel desire? Is it right to feel it?"
"Nothing is wrong here. If you want to you can feel it. If you don't want it you can keep it at bay."
"What if you want it, and I don't?" I ask, remembering one of the acute sufferings of married love. "Or if it's the other way around?"
Smiling, relaxed, she stretched out on the bed. "Then we wait until the other one does. We have all the time in the world."
I lie on my back and look at the ceiling, all convoluted and folded like the petals of a shiny ivory flower. I don't understand this house, I think, so much bigger inside than out, whose rooms don't conform to the outside dimensions. "Can you tell what I'm thinking? Can you sense my thoughts?"
"Only if you decide to let me in. So normally, no. But whatever you were just thinking, it must have been amusing."
"It occurred to me," I say, "that I haven't lost my desire for everything to be in proportion, to fit. So I've been thinking about and studying this house's odd proportions. I still want to build and measure and it's strange, for the first time since I've been here I want to compose. I haven't seen a single instrument, and the only music I've heard has been that of the birds, or singing, but I could, I know it."
"Of course. You're still yourself. I'm still me. I dance with the children all the time, and the music that we need just comes to us from out of the sea."
"From the sea," I muse.
"You'll hear it, and it will amaze you. It's like this. The fundamental parts of us don't change. I'm still a dancer, and you're still an architect and a musician. It's natural to want those things. We still have our gifts that were instilled in us, that we were born with. So we still want to work, to build things, to create. We can and we will."
"Speaking of the children, where are they?" I sit up, suddenly concerned.
"Off playing, or swimming in the ocean riding on the sharks, perhaps. They also like to go off into the woods over the sand dunes. There is a whole flock of other children in the houses on the other side of the woods and they all roam in a band through the countryside. But they most love the ocean with the sharks."
"The sharks?"
"And the dolphins," she comments. "The sharks and dolphins play together. The children ride them, like Christine and I used to ride the little ponies during our summers in Wales."
She sees my shocked expression and beams at me, "Oh, my love, there's nothing that can hurt them. If they need us we're here. That's what we're here for. That's what they need us for, just to be here." But it's not the mingling of shark and dolphin that startles me. It's that she can say Christine's name so lovingly, without pain in her eyes.
"I always thought of children as trouble," I say, hoping that it won't hurt her, forgetting momentarily that she's beyond hurt.
"I know."
"I wanted them because you did so badly, and I knew how terribly it hurt you when we had none, but secretly most of the time I was glad. Men in the orchestra pit would talk about their wives' sickness and weakness, or joke about sleeping on the sofa for months. Meanwhile you and I always shared a bed. The intimacies of the theater could be unspeakable at times but I sat through it silently, just listening, sickened and fascinated by what I heard. Mostly though, I didn't want to share your time or your attention with children."
"I knew how you felt, not directly, of course. In a lot of ways you were like a child yourself, weren't you?"
"That I was," I admit, and then something occurs to me as I lie down again. "The children here … will they grow up?"
"Most do. Some choose to remain children, for how long I don't know. Perhaps those grow up eventually, too."
Lazily she strokes my face and the humming inside me grows more intense, like hundreds of strings all quivering under the bow at once, honing in on the same note that slowly rises in intensity.
"Do you remember the last time we made love?" she asks.
My memories sit like hundreds of thousands of little jewels arranged in velvet boxes, all neatly categorized. They don't weigh on me if I don't focus my mind on them, yet if I want one all I have to do is reach over and pull it out, to lift and examine.
This one's dull and black, a rough sapphire with a faded, dim star. It was in our last two decades that the seventeen years of age difference between us grew most bitter. I was in my early seventies, and already nursing the sickness that would rob me of my sight some years hence. Her monthly cycles stopped but her appetite for love remained, and I disappointed her so many times, even though she never reproached me.
Every endearment, every caress brought me only to a vague, half-erect state. Then before she could come to her crisis I flopped out of her, a useless old man, and it was only after I left our bed in shame that she released her tears. I heard her crying and came back, tried to pleasure her by touch, but she pushed me away, saying No, no, it's not the same, it just makes it worse, don't you think I've tried that? Oh, just hold me, I feel death breathing down our necks, she cried, and so I held her, and continued to hold her through the years that remained, even though my flesh never rose for her again.
"I do remember," I reply. "I grew old so much sooner than you."
"Share your memory with me," she asks, and so I do, as in my mind I hand her the dull little gem, and tears come to her eyes, silvery tears like those on the faces of the angels. I kiss them away and they're sweet, not salty. Something thunders through my body like the hooves of a horse wanting to charge unbridled across the fields, but I don't release the reins, not yet.
"I remember the first time, too," I tell her. "This is all that was left of it after Piangi's fire, where we burned the all the brush I pulled out of his vineyard," and from another box I take a tiny diamond, so dark that it's almost navy blue, barely a speck but bright as the flake of a star, and I present it to her at once so that she can share it, too.
When we immerse ourselves in the memory together, it's as if I'm there again. The utter and unrelieved blackness of my cave hideout covered us entirely, and yet I can see us in the darkness. The lust that overwhelmed me when I woke in her arms no longer has the power to batter me since it's been cooled and purged. Her head rested heavy on my chest. Her hand in sleep randomly stroked my belly so that I groaned against my will, but she didn't wake. When she finally stirred, I could feel her complete surrender, and knew that she would give herself to me, without reservation.
I once watched a diamond cutter in Morocco who took lumpish, uninspired stones from Afghanistan and turned them into glowing, faceted masterpieces of light. You cut away so much, I said to him, and he answered, You have to, or it won't be worth anything.
Great chunks of that dark blue gem of my memory were cut away or ground to dust, all those parts where I lay in the dark, bursting against my clothes, Christine's taste on my mouth mixing with Meg's, Christine's ring burning in my pocket while the rest of me burned in my trousers, and I thought, She didn't want me, fine. Someone else does, and this one's nice, very nice. I've seen her for years; the two of them were virtually inseparable, like sisters. She's always been kind, even to Carlotta, even to that bitch of a prima ballerina who made fun of her for having a voluptuous body. I'm not a rapist. I'll ask her if she wants me first, and I won't abandon her if she does. If she doesn't want me, I'll take her to the Rue Scribe under cover of darkness, and that will be that.
It's not a matter of love, I told myself. She'll have to accept that I don't love her, that I'll never love anyone again. However, it would be good to have a woman to look after me, to warm my bed at night, and if I can't have Christine, then this is the next best thing. This one actually wants me, unlike Christine. She'll slow me down getting out of Paris, but that can be managed.
Then she woke up all the way and kissed me, warmly, thoroughly, all through me, and her hand moved over my belly and below with purpose now, so that the sweetness of that roving hand on my flesh almost overcame me. But I checked myself in time, and when I held back the sea of my lust, my tongue loosened in my mouth, and for her I did what I never could with Christine. Before I accepted her surrender, I asked her if she wanted me.
When I finally did ask her if this was what she wanted, if I was what she wanted, and she breathed her "Yes" in the heart of the black earth, it was I who surrendered to her. Then her love and desire and devotion washed over me like a sea, and it was the blue heart of my surrender which remained in the navy depths of that tiny stone.
They are just facts, I think. I'm not ashamed of them anymore, because she knew anyway, forgave me long ago, and still loved me. As I finally came to love her.
"Do you have memories like this too?" I ask, and she claps her hands in delight. I feel suddenly timid, as if I were asking her to disrobe in the middle of the Place de la Concorde, and I ask her if she will share her memory of that first time with me. She hands me a glowing ruby with a heart of fire. Into it I drop, and it's as if I live inside her skin.
She picked up my mask. Through the dropped curtain she charged off behind me. The arrow of her desire pinned me to the stone wall as I dragged her inside the hidden passage. I see my hated face through her eyes as she stroked my tears away with her hair, but to her my face wasn't hateful. She thought my mouth was beautiful, and traced its curves with her fingers, then explored the graced line of my jaw that sloped around to the tiny cleft in my chin. To her I was radiant and strong beneath the crust and the horror.
Her hand rested on my shoulder and through her I felt my strength and breadth. As blind at the beginning of our love as at the end, I never knew the intensity and purity of her desire. In her hand she held my mask, hatred for it rising like sparks from her fingers. Then tears come to my own eyes as the memory lies between us pulsing and naked, the memory of that moment when she tossed my mask into the gorge beneath the rope bridge.
Her refrain surged through me, Let me stay, please, let me stay. I felt my own kisses through her mouth, felt how I crushed her to numbness with my weight as I slept exhausted on her breast. When I woke in pitch blackness, into her body I went with that first rude blind shove. She opened to me, accommodated me, surrendered to me. She bled and winced, and exulted in my acrid, shuddering pleasure that took no heed of her pain.
I would have had to kill her to make her leave, I realize. She takes the gem of fire back with lowered eyes as a lacerating glory opens around her.
"We've seen the Alpha and the Omega," she tells me as she replaces her memory. "We've seen the beginning and the end."
The room has grown much larger, and the bed is a vast plain, with the delicately embroidered quilt a landscape of patchwork fields and groves. The gauze around the bed floats like ivory clouds.
"But that was back then," she says. "The beginning starts here if you want it to. And we can have children."
"What?" I exclaim, astonished, not understanding. It's impossible, incomprehensible. The punishments, the tortures that everyone expects are here after all, and this must be the start. It tears me with unfairness that she should suffer first instead of me. "It's not possible. How can that be?"
"Where do you think new souls come from?"
"The priests would say from God. Not that on earth I paid any attention to what they said."
"The priests are right," she replies. "But if we want, we can help make new ones."
"How?"
"If you lie with me. Yes, you can lie with me. Oh, look at your face, I don't think your jaw can drop any farther. Your mouth is so beautiful when it's open like that, did I ever tell you?"
"Only thousands of times," I reply, pulling my mouth shut.
"It curves just like a pink seashell, and your lower lip pouts right out. But listen. If you lie with me, then a soul will come into being. That soul will grow in me, and I'll labor to bring him forth, but not in sorrow. I'll bear him, nurse him at my breast, and we'll raise him in love. Then when he's ready to go forth on his own, he'll be born into a body of flesh, if not on earth, then on some other star where he's needed."
On the quilt below me a flock of sheep moves lazily from one green field to another.
"On some other star?" I breathe out. It's almost too much to take in at once. "Then Giordano Bruno was right?"
"Yes," she laughs. "There are men on other stars, but they don't look exactly like us. They're here, too. I want to meet them, don't you? Maybe we can some time. Anyway, I don't know why some souls go straight from the womb of Holy One to their earthly bodies, and others grow up here first before entering the flesh. Gariela didn't answer me when I asked her that. It's just part of the purpose, she said. Even as an angel she didn't fully understand it."
The quilted fields and forests below me seem very far away. Under us little clouds like white pillows float, and I think it would be pleasant for us to lie down on them, to feel them embrace us.
"Will you actually swell with a child?" I ask, batting at a little cloud with my hand. Instead of cold and wet, it's warm and puffy. "Would you feel him move inside you? It's astounding, I never would have imagined it."
"I couldn't believe it either. Can you imagine my surprise? It's when I knew that I was really in heaven. My aunt would always tell me as a little girl, 'Heaven is the fulfillment of our heart's greatest desires.' She always looked so solemn when she said that, and eventually I forgot about it. What could a sweet powdery old nun like her know about the heart's greatest desire?"
"Obviously a lot," I say, starting to tremble as the whole landscape of possibility opens up beneath me.
(The End)