Beautiful Blood

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.