Well In Time Part 34

Calypso replaced the receiver slowly, not sure if she wanted to cry or scream in rage. In the next couple of days, Monsieur Signac had promised, the house would be ready for the gang of cleaners he had a.s.sembled from the village.

Floors would be scrubbed and waxed, windows washed, fixtures polished. Draperies would be hung and carpets unfurled, all in preparation for moving in the furniture and the dismantling of the annoyingly moderne metal sheds in the front yard.

It was almost more than she could bear to think of leaving now. It would be a psychological coitus interruptus that would only make her resentful of Rancho Cielo. She had pages of diagrams for the placement of furniture and hanging of paintings. She even knew which of the heavy old handwoven linen sheets, with their looping hand-embroidered monograms and tatted edgings, went on which bed in which room. It was unthinkable, unbearable, unfair to have to leave now.

She sat staring out the window of the orangerie, gnawing on her thumbnail. This was like a return to the earliest days of their relations.h.i.+p, when Javier had turned abruptly cranky and impossible, and she had expended every wile in her a.r.s.enal to break through, without success.

The garden was darkening toward evening. Down the dusky, shadowed path came the tortoise, lumbering along in innocent expectation of his evening slices of fruit. Something in his blameless and irreproachable a.s.sumption of friendly plenitude mirrored her own.

She had made a bond with the creature, almost a pact. They were partners in the rediscovery of this mysterious and neglected place. At that moment, her loyalty to the reptile felt greater than the one to Javier and her heart swelled with affection for the simple old creature, even while her eyes stung with tears.

She went to the kitchen, washed a handful of cherries and pitted them, and then went out into the cool, windy evening, where the tortoise was just arriving at the kitchen stoop. She sat on the bottom stair and offered the creature his first piece of fruit. He waved his nose in front of it like a perfumer appreciating a new fragrance and then took the cherry from her fingers in one gulp.

"It's just you and me, kid," Calypso said mournfully. "I'm not going back, you know. Not yet, at least. So stick with me, okay?"

The tortoise raised his creased, leathery head and gazed at her with his bottomless black eyes. Was it her imagination or did she feel in that moment a jolt of love and understanding that almost rocked her off the step? She reached into the bowl for another cherry and she continued to supply her friend's supper as the sun sank and the penumbra of evening descended upon the garden.

She slept poorly that night. Sometime in the blackest hours of the early morning, she awoke with the stirring conviction that she needed to see the figures in the vault. She lay under the soft, cozy duvet and tried to talk herself out of so rash an adventure.

It was dark. There was no one to help her lift the door, which was heavy with tiles. The stairs were steep and treacherous-if she fell, no one would find her for hours. And lastly, why didn't she just go back to sleep and gratify this urge in the morning?

She stayed in bed, following the conviction that rationality would win in the end. She turned on her side, organized her pillow just so and composed herself for slumber.

Within minutes she was thras.h.i.+ng about, seeking a new position, as if to ward off the attack of the idea, which insisted itself upon her relentlessly. Finally, feeling disgruntled with herself, she turned on the bedside lamp and lay staring at her clothes, where they lay flung over the back of a chair.

She imagined getting up, putting them on, finding the flashlight and shears, opening the door to the chill and windy darkness, and setting out for the house. Even this dismal scenario, however, would not quiet the inner promptings.

At last, with a sigh she threw back the covers and lunged through chilly air toward her clothing. In minutes, she was crunching down the garden path toward the house behind the round disk of the flashlight's beam.

The big building stood against the night sky, a blacker blackness. She rounded its western flank, hearing the sostenuto of rustling olive leaves beneath the fountain's treble. She inserted her key into the lock, threw one glance into the surrounding darkness, as if looking for someone to stop her in this madness, and entered the house.

Monsieur Signac had, of course, closed and locked the door to the stairwell. Calypso knelt and inserted the brand new key into the lock, aware of the sharp, limey smell of fresh mortar. She hoisted the heavy door by its inset ring, hoping that the mortar was fully set and the tiles wouldn't all slide off when the door went vertical. Holding the flashlight between her knees, she wrestled the door upright, and managed to secure its metal loop over the hook in the wall.

Below her, the stairs spiraled down into darkness like the grinding screw in a meat grinder. She felt the hair on her arms rise at the thought of descending, all alone, into their depths. She set the flashlight on the floor with its beam angled over the opening, sat down on the floor, and swung her feet onto the first stair. Picking up her light, she aimed it into the darkness below her and began a slow, very cautious descent.

Her heart was jarring in her ribcage as she stood, finally, before the low wooden door to the vaulted room. The s.p.a.ce between the foot of the stairs and the door was so narrow that she felt as if she were in her own coffin. Reflexively, she reached for the locket and fingered it beneath her sweater. Then, drawing in her breath, she depressed the latch, shoved the door open with her shoulder and ducked into the secret room.

She had shoved a couple of votive candles and a book of matches into her pants pocket before leaving the orangerie. Setting the flashlight on the floor, she knelt and lit the candles. The two small flames threw weak illumination over the room, but their warm light was comforting after the harsh glare of the flashlight. She set them to either side, where they would not throw her own shadow over the work to come.

Then, pulling the shears from their holster on her belt, she rose and turned toward the mysterious tarp-covered teepee in the center of the room.

Old and rotten as it was, the tarp resisted the blades of her shears. She bore down until her fingers felt raw, cutting stroke by stroke into the covering, realizing that the shears would be sprung and have to be replaced after this night's work. She managed to cut three long slits up the side of the mound before she developed a blister on her finger.

After that, she set the shears aside and began inserting her fingers into the rotted rips in the tarp. With sufficient strength and a few sharp jerks, she managed to open the rips into long vertical tears.

After about an hour she was covered in dust and grit, and the tarp hung in tatters but what lay captive underneath was still obscure. Taking up the shears again, she began to cut horizontally across the thin strips with a kind of desperate determination. As each strip fell away, a lengthening incision appeared across the face of the mound.

When the horizontal cut was a couple of feet long, the tarp suddenly s.h.i.+fted backward from its own weight, startling Calypso. She jumped back with a yip. It was almost as if human hands had tugged the covering sheet from behind. Then, her eyes fell on the incision again and she gasped.

"Oh my G.o.d!" she exclaimed.

Picking up the flashlight from the floor, she aimed it into the cut and then stared. Looking back, from where he was cradled on a st.u.r.dy arm, was an infant, smiling at her with sweet serenity.

She was frantic, then, to see the rest of the statue. Cutting, ripping and tugging, she managed finally to dislodge the tarp. With a final yank on its backside hem, she felt its inertia give way and in one sliding movement, it released its hold and crumpled to her feet. She raced around to the front and taking up her flashlight again, spotlighted the entirety of the statue.

What she saw took her breath away. Her legs buckled and she sank to her knees.

"It can't be!" she breathed in wonder that bordered on terror.

Centered in the cone of the flashlight's beam, a statue almost four feet high of a mother and child stood resplendent upon an elegant Louis Quinze table. Carved in wood, colored in polychrome, and s.h.i.+ning with gold gilt, the Queen of Heaven and her Son gazed with divine, untroubled calm into Calypso's astonished eyes.

Calypso shook her head dazedly and exclaimed, "You!"

She switched off her flashlight and let it fall to the floor. In the light of the two candles, the figures above her seemed to move and breathe in the soft, flickering light.

Calypso felt a hot wave of emotion erupt from the very pit of her being. Sobs spewed from her like molten lava. Cradling her forehead in her hands, she bent at the waist and with her elbows braced on her thighs, fell into an att.i.tude of obeisance. Cries arose from her that even she could not interpret with what was left of her rationality. They ripped from her throat unreservedly, a mixture of grief and ecstasy.

She howled her stark amazement and disequilibrium. Her body seemed to fly through undifferentiated s.p.a.ce at warp speed, with fragments releasing and falling away, until she was only a soul, hurtling through endless void like a comet. With one imperious glance, Our Lady had released her from earthly bounds and set her on a timeless and infinite journey.

When she returned from it, she found herself still kneeling before the Mother of G.o.d. Her knees ached, her thighs screamed for release, and her shaking hands were saturated with tears.

How she was able to climb from the depths and to lower and lock the door, she was never able to remember. The only image that remained of the time between her return to consciousness and her arrival back at the orangerie was of her own hands, moving as if disembodied, taking the two candles from the floor, and placing them reverently before the throne of the Queen of Heaven.

"This is truly remarkable." Calypso read the e-mail from her friend Eleanore with weary, strained eyes, the day following her discovery. "If this is real-and of course we would have to do many tests to prove it-then you have discovered a kind of missing link."

Calypso could imagine Eleanore in her office in the depths of the Louvre, that was crowded with files and diminished by three looming walls of shelved reference books, bending in disbelief over the photos Calypso had e-mailed her. Her friend, an art historian of the Middle Ages, was almost as amazed as was Calypso.

"This image clearly draws its iconographic references from Egyptian prototypes of Isis suckling Horus," Eleanore's email continued. "If testing shows that it predates other Black Madonnas-and I suspect it will-then this image is a perfect example of the transition between the wors.h.i.+p of Isis as Queen of Heaven and the veneration of Mary by the same t.i.tle." She ended the message with a question, "When can I see Her?"

Since her discovery, Calypso had been busy. Although Monsieur Signac had arrived with his crew of cleaners that morning, Calypso had declared the back entrance and its room off limits. Then, borrowing extension cords and moveable work lights from the builder's shed and refusing all help from him or his a.s.sistants, she had made numerous trips up and down the stairs to the vault, setting up lights. Finally, she brought her camera and tripod from the orangerie and disappeared into the back of the house, locking herself into the back room, much to the mystification of the others.

Having taken shots of the statue from numerous angles, she downloaded the photos and sent them to Eleanore, who had an international reputation as an art historian and an impregnable position at the Louvre, because of her expertise. On a day when she had expected to be overjoyed with the progress on her new home, Calypso was largely oblivious to the work being accomplished in other rooms. As she dismantled the lighting and lugged it up the stairs, her thoughts were solely on Eleanore's response.

Now, as she bent over the screen of her laptop, gnawing on a hastily made sandwich, she felt a wave of emotion at her friend's evaluation. Living beneath her new home was an ancient and heretofore unknown aspect of the Divine Feminine, Her fire and compa.s.sion hidden deep in earth and darkness and forgotten, diminished or derided on the surface.

Calypso was certain that it was She who had called her to buy and restore the property; She who brought Calypso to defy even Javier and to risk their love in order to secure Her future.

How unthinkable that the property might have been sold for a housing development! What if She and Her vault had been mindlessly desecrated by a bulldozer and then simply covered over, never again to know human reverence? Calypso shuddered at the thought.

Accustomed to the power of the locket and to the sometimes shatteringly prophetic dreams is brought, still Calypso was amazed by the power of the call of the Black Madonna, as she had come to think of the statue. In Her, nature had become conscious matter-mere wood had become a living channel of the divine through the agency of human attention, love, and devotion.

In recognizing what drove her to buy and renovate the place, even at the expense of her relations.h.i.+p with Javier, Calypso had endured the eruption of an inner volcano of pa.s.sion-her love for the soil of France, for its aesthetic, and for the history saturated into its soil-all now embodied in the statue of Isis/Mary. Furthermore, the uncanny realization that the image of the Black Virgin was identical to the one on the locket!

She brought up ancient images of Isis and Horus on her screen, side by side with one of her frontal photos of the statue. They were almost identical. Each held her Infant on her lap with her left hand and each had both b.r.e.a.s.t.s bared. The only difference lay in that the traditional Isis figure used her right had to guide her left breast to her child, while in the transitional figure, the breast in the right hand had been translated into a globe, which She extended to all.

Calypso stared at the orb in Her right hand, feeling she understood the iconographic s.h.i.+ft. Divine consciousness, the milk of the Mother, would eventually expand to encompa.s.s the globe. Moreover, the globe was a mandala whose center is humankind, a center which is the consciousness humans bring to it. Spheric wholeness and completion are the milk the G.o.ddess offers.

She flipped down the lid of her laptop and went to sit on the kitchen stoop to finish her sandwich. Her thoughts s.h.i.+fted to Javier and his patriarchal world of business, politics, warfare, and violence. She longed for a world at peace, where the inclusive values of the Feminine could be expressed-and she knew, in all fairness, that this was ultimately what Javier had expended his life trying to establish in Mexico.

She knew, too, that for all her love of France, it too had had long periods of violence, ignorance and warfare, as Father Xavier's letter had shown. It was not Mexico that was the crucible of human disorder but throughout the ages, the human heart.

Suddenly, her longing for Javier was almost unbearable. Each of them, in their desire for that elusive peace, was creating a sliver of it in their chosen corner of the world and each hoped that the other would share in it unreservedly. In their desire to give one another this anointing in the Divine Feminine, they had almost torn their love apart. She didn't know whether to cry or laugh.

On impulse, she went into the house and made a call to Rancho Cielo, even though she knew it was already late at night there. The phone rang and rang and rang. With a sad heart, she replaced the receiver and went to see how the house was coming along under the ministrations of the cleaners.

As she walked down the garden path, her hand went automatically to the locket beneath her sweater and she fingered its cool orb to calm her agitation. How could it be that the image on the locket was the same as the image in the vault? Although made perhaps three thousand years before the statue, still the Isis of the locket held an orb in her extended hand.

Overcome by this strange synchronicity, Calypso sank onto a stone bench, her mind singed by an echo of the delirious flight of consciousness of the previous night. What was time, really, or consciousness or matter that was shaped intentionally to expand it? It was all an unfathomable mystery.

She sat for many minutes until the feeling of dizziness pa.s.sed. Then she pulled herself together, rose to her feet and went toward the house, vowing to focus for this afternoon on cobwebs and sawdust only.

The house was nearly clean. The crew had started at the top, on the troisieme etage and worked downward. When she arrived, they were on the ground floor. The smell of lavender soap hung in air damp from still-drying floors and windows. She found Monsieur Signac tinkering with a window latch to a.s.sure its perfect functioning.

"Is there anything left for me to do?" she asked.

"No, Madame. I think all is well in hand. We can even begin moving in furniture upstairs if you would like. Luc and Jean-Pierre can be spared from cleaning now, I think."

As if a switch had been thrown, Calypso found herself suddenly as eager to have her house in order as she had been driven, that morning, to photograph the statue.

"Are the drapes hung up there?"

Monsieur Signac nodded.

"Yes. All the draperies are hung on the second and third floors. We are waiting for the windows all to be cleaned before we hang them here on the ground floor."

Calypso gave him a radiant smile.

"Then let's get going!"

It took four full days to move into the house. Luc and Jean-Pierre worked like Trojan slaves, heaving and wrestling into place the ma.s.sive armoires, chests of drawers, tables, and desks. The rest of the crew, liberated from cleaning, brought the boxes and bags of treasures she had purchased during the months of renovation, in a long procession from the orangerie through the garden to the house.

In the kitchen, ivory-handled knives and silver flatware were washed, polished, and carefully laid down in newly painted drawers. In the salon, study and bedrooms, paintings were hung, chairs and couches posed in groupings, and beds a.s.sembled and made up. Calypso ran herself ragged, going up and down the stairs to the calls of the crew, asking if the placement of a table was correct or if she liked the positioning of a painting before it was hung.

Each night she collapsed into bed with a growing feeling of joy, made inexplicable in the face of her longing to see Javier. It was as if the two were growing in direct proportion to one another: the more finished and delightful her new abode, the more, too, her heart pined to see and touch the man of her heart.

It was late Friday afternoon when Monsieur Signac finally released his crew. He and Calypso did a quick tour through the rooms beforehand, to make sure that last minute cleanups were finished and all was in perfect order.

"Well, Madame, do you approve?" Monsieur Signac asked when they reached the salon.

The rays of late sun slanted in almost horizontally, touching glowing parquet, polished furniture, and gleaming accessories with a nostalgic golden glow.

"It's perfectly beautiful!" she exclaimed. "You've created something special, Monsieur Signac. I can't imagine that anyone else could have done what you've done. I can't thank you enough."

The builder smiled in genuine pleasure.

"It was nothing, Madame Searcy. A house like this, it is so well made even an old broken-down carpenter like me couldn't spoil it."

Rather than reply, Calypso reached for his hand and held it in both of hers. Their eyes met, and the deal they had sealed with a handshake so many months before was completed without a word said.

As Calypso walked back to the orangerie, she realized that the house was ready for habitation. The cleaning crew had even brought over her clothing, had moved her food from one kitchen to the other, and then had cleaned the orangerie, as well.

She fished in her pocket for the keys as she did a quick walk through, looking for things that would need to be transferred in the future. Her laptop still sat on the desk and she coiled its wires into her pocket before hoisting it under her arm. With a last look around, she stepped through the front door and locked it, making final one phase of her life, even as she was about to begin a new one.

Walking back to the house, she encountered the tortoise, toiling along in the same direction.

"You must have gotten the word," she said companionably. "Treats at the kitchen door over here from now on. Understand?"

The tortoise didn't stop to look at her, but continued his earnest shuffle toward the house.

"You are the most understanding of creatures," Calypso marveled. "If only my husband understood things so clearly."

She bade the tortoise good evening and went toward the welcoming salon lights of her new home.

She was standing in her new bathroom, arranging the items of her daily toilette on an etagere by the lavatory, when it hit her. She stared at herself in the mirror in dismay.

A woman of late middle age stared back at her. Her long hair was pulled up in a knot on top of her head and her newly washed face had smooth, unlined skin. What struck her were the eyes. They spoke of humor and intelligence and a depth of experience that, as a younger woman, she had only hoped to gain. She looked like someone who would understand the full implication of what she was about to say.

"You called him your husband again," she said to the woman in the mirror. The woman looked back at her silently, apparently as quietly bemused by this revelation as was Calypso.

In the night, wind seethed in the plane tree outside her new bedroom window. As she had antic.i.p.ated, it was a delicious sound, like the very soul of the huge old tree singing the secrets of earth's day. In it she heard birdsong and rain, the glad shouts of flowers as they opened their petals to the sun, the slither of lizards and the slow scratch of the tortoise along the garden's gravel.

With this recitation of the day just past came bruits of the one to come, as if the duende of the genius loci, cornucopia in his left hand and libation bowl in his right, were sitting in the branches, humming the new day into existence. Calypso lay long, listening to the singing of her new life into being.

Her mind was filled with ecstatic images of the rooms that were now hers to inhabit, with plans for the renovation of the wildly overgrown garden, and with imaginings of the dishes she would prepare in her new kitchen. She had yet to even turn on a burner of the new La Cornue stove that sat, solid and ma.s.sive as a bank vault, in blue and gold splendor against the east kitchen wall. In her new study, a Louis Quinze desk already held her laptop on its inlaid leather top, just waiting for her fingers to allow inspiration to flow.

So many future delights danced and fluttered through her tired brain that at first she could not even approach slumber. Her entire body relished the cool, smooth finish of antique linen sheets. The high-ceilinged s.p.a.ce around her seemed to zing with energy, as if rejoicing in its own beauty of proportion and its softly tinted new plaster. Occasionally, her eyes drifted open and wandered toward the dark bulk of the marble mantlepiece and her imagination lit a winter fire there, relis.h.i.+ng the coming of long nights of rain, its rush and splatter syncopated with the rising and falling of the flames.

Only in the ba.s.s undernote of the wind did her mind pick up the thread of another narrative. Her hand stole from her side toward the empty half of the bed. She fell asleep with Javier's face rising before her, his lips drawn in that perfect arc that precedes a kiss.

In the morning, Calypso dressed in old jeans and an indigo sweater, slid her feet into a pair of slouching blue and white striped espadrilles, wrapped a bright scarf around her neck, and hurried downstairs to her kitchen. It was the first day of her new life and she was determined to stay aware in order to soak in every delicious detail of it, moment by moment.

Everything was new to her. The kettle she filled with water was a copper one she had found moldering greenly in the cupboard on her first inspection of the house, now polished and gleaming in morning light. She managed to light the burner of the new stove and put the kettle on to boil, ground coffee in an antique wooden hand grinder, and slide the grounds from the little drawer into her French press. Each act was a tessera in the mosaic of her new life and world, invested with the sacred importance of ritual.