Beautiful Blood

Epilogue

On an island far from anywhere Rosacher has built his home close to the shore. From the verandah he has an unimpeded view of the ocean, a cashew tree, and a strip of tawny sand criss-crossed by beachvine. If he leans forward and to the left, he can see the house of his immediate neighbor through a stand of palmettos—a little box set on stilts against the tides, painted light blue, a darker blue on the window frames. Beneath the house is a pen wherein pigs are kept. Once in a great while his neighbor, a black man named Peter, will shoot one of the pigs and butcher it. The remaining pigs appear to take no notice of the event. On Rosacher’s right, the beach is lined with wind-bent palms and dotted with coconut litter—it stretches away toward a point of land, Punta Manabique, a place so pestilent that no one can dwell there. At night people walk along the shore, shining lanterns to light their way. Occasionally blood is shed over a woman or a property dispute, but otherwise it is a tranquil place, and it is this untroubled quality, this calm imperviousness to minor passions and upheavals that has encouraged Rosacher to put down roots here.

His mind often turns to Griaule—and how could it not?—and there are times when he suspects he may have witnessed the evolution of a god. Gods, he thinks, are produced by extreme circumstances and what could be more extreme than millennia of imprisonment, century upon century of striving to escape, learning to manipulate people and events to his benefit, growing ever more powerful, creating converts and eventually, having won his freedom, becoming discorporate, abandoning those people, and then, the final stage of evolution, going off somewhere to play a game of fiddlesticks, incomprehensible to all but himself. It’s the kind of idea that once would have excited him, yet now induces boredom. Ideas in general no longer interest him, though he is rankled by the fact that his life seems to have no sum, no coherent shape, to be nothing more than a sequence of imperfectly realized scenes in an ill-conceived play.

For the longest time he feared that he would not die, that Griaule bestowed upon him an unwanted immortality; but now that he notices a stiffness in his limbs, an uncertainty in his step, a slight diminution of vision, all the minor failures of the flesh, he has come to feel at ease with himself as never before. All he needs of the world washes to his door. His neighbors’ children scamper along the beach in front of Rosacher’s house and he entertains them by playing the guitar, an instrument he took up when he first settled here, and by carving crude wooden toys. He is especially good at carving whistles. Women sail through his life, stopping for days, for a week, but he does not seek to hold onto them, he wants them to leave and, sensing this in him, they do. He has begun to dream of one woman in particular. She is quietly attractive, a slender brunette with a sly wit and a gentle manner. He pictures her in a white summer frock with an unobtrusive floral print. She teases him in his dreams, makes fun of his posturing, his foibles, but does so in a loving fashion. He is not the center of her world—she has her own obsessions and indulges them regularly, cultivating them with an artist’s flair and a gardener’s consistency. In bed she is fiercely concentrated, she assumes different shapes that conform to his, she takes as much as she gives, she promises him eternity without speaking a word. He thinks he will never meet her—she is someone he might have met had he not become involved with Griaule, if life had proceeded at a sedate rhythm, a Prussian waltz instead of a dervish whirl. And yet, knowing that the dream will have to suffice, he continues to look for her in every woman that happens along.

Of an evening, the people of the beach community come to sit on his verandah, singly for the most part, though on occasion a family will stop by, and they will talk of this and that, the weather, the fishing, their hopes for their children, a piece of gossip overhead in town. From time to time they will express their dissatisfaction with the direction of their lives, they complain about their lot and frequently express some need. They could use a new net, a communion dress for their youngest, a spirit level, a larger skiff, a more dependable clock, a cow to replace one that has died. Often, as if by a miracle, they will one morning find a communion dress neatly folded on their doorstep, a skiff bobbing at anchor just offshore, a net draped across the pilings of a rickety pier. Rosacher realizes that these small gifts are but another example of the kindness of monsters. He has no children and he is grateful that he did not have to watch a son grow to manhood, becoming in opposition to his father a person of sedate habits and accomplishments, viewing himself as a decent man, a moral entity, only to awake in the end to his own monstrous nature, his fundamental indifference to others’ pain. The people of the beach have become his surrogate children, children he can keep at a distance and bless whenever the mood strikes. They appear to understand and respect the anonymity of his charity, infringing upon it only during moments of drunkenness during which they demand money or liquor or some other inessential that will do nothing apart from establishing a dependency—to these he does not respond.

Lately he has begun writing in a journal, recording fragmentary conversations, his observations of people and the natural world, bits of description and ironic commentary. A recent entry goes as follows:

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“Two weeks ago, while walking on the beach, I came upon a wooden whistle, one of mine, half-buried in the sand, carelessly tossed aside by a forgetful child. A tiny crab, no bigger than the nail of my little finger, had made its home inside it. Finding this conjunction of the crab and the whistle irresistible, appealing for its incongruity, I carried it home and set it on my verandah railing. The crab must have been terrified. It remained within the whistle for most of the evening, but I managed to entice it forth with a few crumbs of fish from my dinner plate. Having eaten, it scuttled merrily to and fro along the railing, seeming to have gained new confidence in its home, safe now from known predations and the erratic movements of the tides.

“I’ve fed it every night since and it appears to be growing larger. One day soon it will find the whistle too constraining and will emerge for a last time and explore fresh opportunities for food and housing in the wider world, or perhaps it will drift out on the tide, becoming for a brief span a mariner. I imagined it to be an exemplar among crabs, a crustacean genius nurtured by its musical house and taught to seek in all things a grand design, inspired to explore the possibility of land beyond Punta Manabique, to visit places that I, in my frail shell, cannot, sunset countries with beaches of rose and peach, surmounted by indigo cliffs and stars flashing signals from the depths of the universe that promise spectacular realms of light, infinite answers, a moral with which to caption our petty tale…but then my reverie was interrupted by Walker James joining me on the stoop, and the thought of answers and morals evaporated as he chatted about his day, discussing his daughter’s earache, the girth of his prize sow, and the cupidity of a local tavern owner, a man who ‘wouldn’t stand you a drink unless the sun duppy come down and sour his whiskey.’ On an island of storytellers, he was acknowledged one of the best, and that night he told how the tavern owner became infatuated with a Spanish lady from the mainland and the increasingly ludicrous acts he performed in his efforts to win her affections. Thereafter we sat for a while, enjoying the heavy crush of the surf and the palm fronds lashing in a north wind that threatened a storm by morning, the sky beyond Manabique ablaze with a shrapnel of golden fire. Then Walker heard his name called by a woman’s voice from off along the shore. He stood and stretched, working out a crick in his spine, his head thrown back.

“‘Look at all that glory. Richard,’ he said, gesturing at the heavens. ‘Don’t it make it make you a trifle sad sometimes, how we won’t never hear a story to match all this sky and stars?’”