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And it was into a blinding whiteout that Hel emerged from the black of the cave shaft. As be unbuckled his parachute harness, Le Cagot’s voice came from somewhere up on the rim of the gouffre.
“This is the surprise they told us about.”
“How nice.” When Hel scrambled up the gouffre side, he could dimly make out five forms hovering around the winch. He had to approach within a meter before he recognized the other two as the lads who had been camping down in Holçarté Gorge, waiting for the outfall of dye from the underground stream. “You climbed up through this?” Nicholai asked.
“It was forming as we came. We just made it.”
“What is it like lower down?”
They were all mountain men here; they knew what he meant.
“It’s grayer.”
“Much?”
“Much.”
If the sheet of mist was grayer below, passing down through it would be folly in this Swiss-cheese mountainside dotted with treacherous cracks and steep gouffres. They would have to climb upward and hope to break out of the mist before they ran out of mountain. It is always wisest to do so in a whiteout: it is difficult to fall up a mountain.
Alone, Hel could have made it down the mountain, despite the blinding mist with its sensory trickery. He could have relied on a combination of his proximity sense and intimate knowledge of the features of the mountain to move cautiously down over terrain hidden in the blinding haze. But he could not be responsible for Le Cagot and the four Basque lads.
Because it was impossible to see clearly farther than a meter and to see at all farther than three, they roped up, and Hel led a slow and careful ascent, picking the long and easy way around outcroppings of rock, across slides of scree, past the rims of deep gouffres. The blanket of mist did not thicken, but it grew ever more blindingly bright as they rose toward the sun. After three-quarters of an hour, Hel suddenly broke through into sunlight and taut blue skies, and the scene that greeted him was beautiful, and awful. In the absolute stillness of the mist layer, the motion of his body up through it created languorous swirls and billows that churned lazily behind him and down into which his rope passed to the next man only ten meters below, but hidden behind the milky wall. He was almost at eye level with a platform of dense white mist that stretched flat and stable for hundreds of kilometers, filling all the valleys below as though with a great snow. Through this blanket of mist, the tops of the Basque Pyrenees stuck up, clear and sharp-edged in the ardent sunlight, like bits of mosaic tesserae set in a fleecy plaster. And above was the taut dark-blue sky peculiar to the Basque country. The stillness was so absolute that he could hear the squeak and surge of blood through his temples.
Then he heard another sound, Le Cagot’s voice from below demanding, “Are we to stand here forever? By the Complaining Balls of Jeremiah, you should have relieved yourself before we started!” And when he broke through the layer of mist, he said, “Oh, I see. You were admiring the Basque spectacle all by yourself, while we dangled down there like bait on a line! You’re a selfish man, Niko.”
The sun was beginning to sink, so they moved around the flank of the mountain with some haste, to arrive at the highest of the artzain xola shelters before dark. When they got there, they found it already occupied by two old shepherds driven up from the other side of the mountain by the whiteout. Their heavy packs revealed them to be smugglers in a minor way. The Basque temperament is more comfortable with smuggling than with commerce; with poaching than with hunting. Socially condoned activities lack spice.
There was an exchange of greetings and wine, and the eight of the “fist” to the intruder, declaring that, if his will had power, that plane would fall from the sky like a wounded bird, littering Spain with the bodies of two hundred stupid vacationers on their way to Lisbon, and relieving the world of the burden of surplus population, for anyone who would fly through so perfect a moment was, by definition, an expendable being.
Le Cagot’s gall up, he went on to extend his malediction to all those outlanders who defiled the mountains: the tourists, the back-packers, the hunters, and especially the skiers who bring vile machines into the mountains because they are too soft to walk up the hill, and who build ugly lodges and noisy après-ski amusements. The filthy shits! It was for dealing with loud-mouthed skiers and their giggling bunnies that God said, on the eighth day, let there also be handguns!
One of the old shepherds nodded sagely and agreed that outlanders were universally evil. “Atzerri; otzerri.”
Following the ritual of conversation among strangers, Hel matched this ancient dicton with “But I suppose chori bakhoitzari eder bere ohantzea.”
“True,” Le Cagot said. “Zahar hitzak, zuhur hitzak.”
Hel smiled. These were the first words of Basque he had learned, years ago in his cell in Sugamo Prison. “With the possible exception,” he said, “of that one.”
The old smugglers considered this response for a moment, then both laughed aloud and slapped their knees. “Hori phensatu zuenak, ongi afaldu zuen!” (An Englishman with a clever story “dines out on, it.” Within the Basque culture, it is the listener who enjoys the feast.)
They sat in silence, drinking and eating slowly as the sun fell, drawing after it the gold and russet of the cloud layer. One of the young cavers stretched his legs out with a satisfied grunt and declared that this was the life. Hel smiled to himself, knowing that this would probably not be the life for this young man, touched as he was by television and radio. Like most of the Basque young, he would probably end up lured to the factories of the big cities, where his wife could have a refrigerator, and he could drink Coca-Cola in a café with plastic tables—the good life that was a product of the French Economic Miracle.
“It is the good life,” Le Cagot said lazily. “I have traveled, and I have turned the world over in my hand, like a stone with attractive veining, and this I have discovered: a man is happiest when there is a balance between his needs and his possessions. Now the question is: how to achieve this balance. One could seek to do this by increasing his goods to the level of his appetites, but that would be stupid. It would involve doing unnatural things—bargaining, haggling, scrimping, working. Ergo? Ergo, the wise man achieves the balance by reducing his needs to the level of his possessions. And this is best done by learning to value the free things of life: the mountains, laughter, poetry, wine offered by a friend, older and fatter women. Now, me? I am perfectly capable of being happy with what I have. The problem is getting enough of it in the first place!”
“Le Cagot?” one of the old smugglers asked, as he made himself comfortable in a corner of the artzain xola. “Give us a story to sleep on.”
“Yes,” said his companion. “Let it be of old things.”
A true folk poet, who would rather tell a story than write one, Le Cagot began to weave fables in his rich basso voice, while the others listened or dozed. Everyone knew the tales, but the pleasure lay in the art of telling them. And Basque is a language more suited to storytelling than to exchanging information. No one can learn to speak Basque beautifully; like eye color or blood type, it is something one has to be born to. The language is subtle and loosely regulated, with its circumlocutory word orders, its vague declensions, its doubled conjugations, both synthetic and periphrastic, with its old “story” forms mixed with formal verb patterns. Basque is a song, and while outlanders may learn the words, they can never master the music.
Le Cagot told of the Basa-andere, the Wildlady who kills men in the most wonderful way. It is widely known that the Basa-andere is beautiful and perfectly formed for love, and that the soft golden hair that covers all her body is strangely appealing. Should a man have the misfortune to come upon her in the forest (she is always to be found kneeling beside a stream, combing the hair of her stomach with a golden comb), she will turn to him and fix him with a smile, then lie back and lift her knees, offering her body. Now, everyone knows that the pleasure from her is so intense that a man dies of it during climax, but still many and many have willingly died, their backs arched in the agony of unimaginable pleasure.
One of the old smugglers declared that he once found a man in the mountains who had died so, and in his dim staring eyes there was an awful mixture of fright and pleasure.
And the quietest of the young lads prayed that God would give him the strength to resist, should he ever come upon the Basa-andere with her golden comb. “You say she is all covered with golden hair, Le Cagot? I cannot imagine breasts covered with hair. Are the nipples visible then?”
Le Cagot sniffed and stretched out on the ground. “In truth, I cannot say from personal experience, child. These eyes have never seen the Basa-andere. And I am glad of that, for had we met, that poor lady would at this moment be dead from pleasure.”
The old man laughed and ripped up a turf of grass, which he threw at the poet. “Truly, Le Cagot, you are as full of shit as God is of mercy!”
“True,” Le Cagot admitted. “So true. Have you ever heard me tell the story of…”
When dawn came the whiteout was gone, churned away by the night winds. Before they broke up, Hel paid the lads for their assistance and asked them to take apart the winch and tripod and bring them down to a barn in Larrau for storage, as they were already beginning to plan the next exploration into the cave, this time with wet suits and scuba gear, for the boys camping down by the fallout in the Gorge of Holçarté had marked the appearance of dye in the water at eight minutes after the hour. Although eight minutes is not a long time, it could indicate considerable distance, considering the speed of the water through that triangular pipe at the bottom of the Wine Cellar. But if the water pipe was not filled with obstructions or too narrow for a man, they might have the pleasure of exploring their cave from entrance shaft to outfall before they shared the secret of its existence with the caving fraternity.
Hel and Le Cagot trotted and glissaded down the side of the mountain to the narrow track on which they had parked Hel’s Volvo. He delivered the door a mighty kick with his boot, as was his habit, and after examining the satisfying dent, they got in and drove down to the village of Larrau, where they stopped off to have a breakfast of bread, cheese, and coffee, after having splashed and scrubbed away most of the dried mud with which they were caked.
Their hostess was a vigorous widow with a strong ample body and a bawdy laugh who used two rooms of her house as a café/restaurant/tobacco shop. She and Le Cagot had a relationship of many years, for when things got too hot for him in Spain, be often crossed into France through the Forest of Irraty that abutted this village. Since time beyond memory, the Forest of Irraty had been both a sanctuary and an avenue for smugglers and bandits crossing from the Basque provinces under Spanish occupation to those under French. By ancient tradition, it is considered impolite—and dangerous—to seem to recognize anyone met in this forest.
When they entered the café, still wet from the pump in back, they were questioned by the half-dozen old men taking their morning wine. How had it gone up at the gouffre? Was there a cave under the hole?
Le Cagot was ordering breakfast, his hand resting proprietarily on the hip of the hostess. He did not have to think twice about guarding the secret of the new cave, for he automatically fell into the Basque trait of responding to direct questions with misleading vagueness that is not quite lying.
“Not all holes lead to caves, my friends.”
The hostess’s eyes glittered at what she took to be double entendre. She pushed his hand away with pleased coquetry.
“And did you meet Spanish border patrols?” an old man asked.
“No, I was not required to burden hell with more Fascist souls. Does that please you, Father?” Le Cagot addressed this last to the gaunt revolutionary priest sitting in the darkest corner of the café, who had turned his face away upon the entrance of Le Cagot and Hel. Father Xavier nurtured a smoldering hate for Le Cagot and a flaming one for Hel. Though he never faced danger personally, he wandered from village to village along the border, preaching the revolution and attempting to bind the goals of Basque independence to those of the Church—the Basque manifestation of that general effort on the part of God-merchants to diversify into social and political issues, now that the world was no longer a good market for hell-scare and soul-saving.
The priest’s hatred (which be termed “righteous wrath”) for Le Cagot was based on the fact that praise and hero worship that properly belonged to the ordained leaders of the revolution was being siphoned away by this blaspheming and scandalous man who had spent a part of his life in the Land of the Wolves, out of the Pays Basque. But at least Le Cagot was a native son. This Hel was a different matter. He was an outlander who never went to Mass and who lived with an Oriental woman. And it was galling to the priest that young Basque cavers, boys who should have chosen their idols from the ranks of the priesthood, told stories of his spelunking exploits and of the time he had crossed with Le Cagot into Spain and broken into a military prison in Bilbao to release ETA prisoners. This was the kind of man who could contaminate the revolution and divert its energies from the establishment of a Basque Theocracy, a last fortress of fundamentalist Catholicism in a land where Christian practices were primitive and deep, and where the key to the gates of heaven was a profound weapon of control.
Shortly after he bought his home in Etchebar, Hel began to receive unsigned threats and hate notes. Upon two occasions there were “spontaneous” midnight charivaris outside the château, and live cats bound in burning straw were thrown at the walls of the house, where they screamed in their death throes. Although Hel’s experience had taught him to despise these fanatical Third World priests who incite children to their deaths for the purpose of linking the cause of social reform to the Church to save that institution from natural atrophy in the face of knowledge and enlightenment, he would nevertheless have ignored this kind of harassment. But he intended to make the Basque country his permanent home, now that the Japanese culture was infected with Western values, and he had to put an end to these insults because the Basque mentality ridicules those who are ridiculed. Anonymous letters and the mob frenzy of the charivari are manifestations of cowardice, and Hel had an intelligent fear of cowards, who are always more dangerous than brave men, when they outnumber you or get a chance to strike from behind, because they are forced to do maximal damage, dreading as they do the consequences of retaliation, should you survive.
Through Le Cagot’s contacts, Hel discovered the author of these craven acts, and a couple of months later he came across the priest in the back room of a café in Ste. Engrace, where he was eating a free meal in silence, occasionally glaring at Nicholai, who was taking a glass of red with several men of the village—men who had previously been sitting at the priest’s table, listening to his wisdom and cant.
When the men went off to work, Hel joined the priest at his table. Father Xavier started to rise, but Hel gripped his forearm and returned him to his chair. “You are a good man, Father,” he said in his prison whisper. “A saintly man. In fact, at this moment you are closer to heaven than you know. Finish your food and listen well. There will be no more anonymous letters, no more charivaris. Do you understand?”
“I’m afraid I don’t—”
“Eat.”
“What?”
“Eat!”
Father Xavier pushed another forkful of piperade into his mouth and chewed sullenly.
“Eat faster, Father. Fill your mouth with food you have not earned.”
The priest’s eyes were damp with fury and fear, but he shoveled forkful after forkful into his mouth and swallowed as rapidly as he could.
“If you choose to stay in this corner of the world, Father, and if you do not feel prepared to join your God, then this is what you will do. Each time we meet in a village, you will leave that village immediately. Each time we meet on the trails, you will step off the track and turn your back as I pass. You can eat faster than that!”
The priest choked on his food, and Hel left him gasping and gagging. That evening, he told the story to Le Cagot with instructions to make sure it got around. Hel considered public humiliation of this coward to be necessary.
“Hey, why don’t you answer me, Father Esteka?” Le Cagot asked.*
* Esteka is Basque for “sexual deficiency.”
The priest rose and left the café, as Le Cagot called after him, “Holà! Aren’t you going to finish your piperade?”
Because they were Catholic, the old men in the café could not laugh; but they grinned, because they were Basque.
Le Cagot patted the hostess’s bottom and sent her after their food. “I don’t think we have made a great friend there, Niko. And he is a man to be feared.” Le Cagot laughed. “After all, his father was French and very active in the Resistance.”
Hel smiled. “Have you ever met one who was not?”
“True. It is astonishing that the Germans managed to hold France with so few divisions, considering that everyone who wasn’t draining German resources by the clever maneuver of surrendering en masse and making the Nazi’s feed them was vigorously and bravely engaged in the Resistance. Is there a village without its Place de la Resistance? But one has to be fair; one has to understand the Gallic notion of resistance. Any hotelier who overcharged a German was in the Resistance. Each whore who gave a German soldier the clap was a freedom fighter. All those who obeyed while viciously withholding their cheerful morning bonjours were heroes of liberty!”
Hel laughed. “You’re being a little hard on the French.”
“It is history that is hard on them. I mean real history, not the verité à la cinquième République that they teach in their schools. The truth be known, I admire the French more than any other foreigners. In the centuries they have lived beside the Basque, they have absorbed certain virtues—understanding, philosophic insight, a sense of humor—and these have made them the best of the ‘others.’ But even I am forced to admit that they are a ridiculous people, just as one must confess that the British are bungling, the Italians incompetent, the Americans neurotic, the Germans romantically savage, the Arabs vicious, the Russians barbaric, and the Dutch make cheese. Take the particular manifestation of French ridiculousness that makes them attempt to combine their myopic devotion to money with the pursuit of phantom gloire. The same people who dilute their burgundy for modest profit willingly spend millions of francs on the atomic contamination of the Pacific Ocean in the hope that they will be thought to be the technological equals of the Americans. They see themselves as the feisty David against the grasping Goliath. Sadly for their image abroad, the rest of the world views their actions as the ludicrous egotism of the amorous ant climbing a cow’s leg and assuring her that he will be gentle.”
Le Cagot looked down at the tabletop thoughtfully. “I cannot think of anything further to say about the French just now.”
The widow had joined them at table, sitting close to Le Cagot and pressing her knee against his. “Hey, you have a visitor down at Etchehelia,” she told Hel, using the Basque name for his château. “It is a girl. An outsider. Arrived yesterday evening.”
Hel was not surprised that this news was already in Larrau, three mountains and fifteen kilometers from his home. It had doubtless been common knowledge in all the local villages within four hours of the visitor’s arrival.
“What do you know about her?” Hel asked.
The widow shrugged and tucked down the corners of her mouth, indicating that she knew only the barest facts. “She took coffee chez Jaureguiberry and did not have money to pay. She walked all the way from Tardets to Etchebar and was seen from the hills several times. She is young, but not too young to bear. She wore short pants that showed her legs, and it is said that she has a plump chest. She was received by your woman, who paid her bill with Jaureguiberry. She has an English accent. And the old gossips in your village say that she is a whore from Bayonne who was turned out from her farm for sleeping with the husband of her sister. As you see, very little is known of her.”
“You say she is young with a plump chest?” Le Cagot asked. “No doubt she is seeking me, the final experience.”
The widow pinched his thigh.
Hel rose from the table. “I think I’ll go home and take a bath and a little sleep. You coming?”
Le Cagot looked at the widow sideways. “What do you think? Should I go?”
“I don’t care what you do, old man.”
But as he started to rise, she tugged him back by his belt.
“Maybe I’ll stay a while, Niko. I’ll come back this evening and take a look at your girl with the naked legs and the big boobs. If she pleases me, I may bless you with an extension of my visit. Ouch!”
Hel paid and went out to his Volvo, which he kicked in the rear fender, then drove away toward his home.
Château d’Etchebar
“This is the surprise they told us about.”
“How nice.” When Hel scrambled up the gouffre side, he could dimly make out five forms hovering around the winch. He had to approach within a meter before he recognized the other two as the lads who had been camping down in Holçarté Gorge, waiting for the outfall of dye from the underground stream. “You climbed up through this?” Nicholai asked.
“It was forming as we came. We just made it.”
“What is it like lower down?”
They were all mountain men here; they knew what he meant.
“It’s grayer.”
“Much?”
“Much.”
If the sheet of mist was grayer below, passing down through it would be folly in this Swiss-cheese mountainside dotted with treacherous cracks and steep gouffres. They would have to climb upward and hope to break out of the mist before they ran out of mountain. It is always wisest to do so in a whiteout: it is difficult to fall up a mountain.
Alone, Hel could have made it down the mountain, despite the blinding mist with its sensory trickery. He could have relied on a combination of his proximity sense and intimate knowledge of the features of the mountain to move cautiously down over terrain hidden in the blinding haze. But he could not be responsible for Le Cagot and the four Basque lads.
Because it was impossible to see clearly farther than a meter and to see at all farther than three, they roped up, and Hel led a slow and careful ascent, picking the long and easy way around outcroppings of rock, across slides of scree, past the rims of deep gouffres. The blanket of mist did not thicken, but it grew ever more blindingly bright as they rose toward the sun. After three-quarters of an hour, Hel suddenly broke through into sunlight and taut blue skies, and the scene that greeted him was beautiful, and awful. In the absolute stillness of the mist layer, the motion of his body up through it created languorous swirls and billows that churned lazily behind him and down into which his rope passed to the next man only ten meters below, but hidden behind the milky wall. He was almost at eye level with a platform of dense white mist that stretched flat and stable for hundreds of kilometers, filling all the valleys below as though with a great snow. Through this blanket of mist, the tops of the Basque Pyrenees stuck up, clear and sharp-edged in the ardent sunlight, like bits of mosaic tesserae set in a fleecy plaster. And above was the taut dark-blue sky peculiar to the Basque country. The stillness was so absolute that he could hear the squeak and surge of blood through his temples.
Then he heard another sound, Le Cagot’s voice from below demanding, “Are we to stand here forever? By the Complaining Balls of Jeremiah, you should have relieved yourself before we started!” And when he broke through the layer of mist, he said, “Oh, I see. You were admiring the Basque spectacle all by yourself, while we dangled down there like bait on a line! You’re a selfish man, Niko.”
The sun was beginning to sink, so they moved around the flank of the mountain with some haste, to arrive at the highest of the artzain xola shelters before dark. When they got there, they found it already occupied by two old shepherds driven up from the other side of the mountain by the whiteout. Their heavy packs revealed them to be smugglers in a minor way. The Basque temperament is more comfortable with smuggling than with commerce; with poaching than with hunting. Socially condoned activities lack spice.
There was an exchange of greetings and wine, and the eight of the “fist” to the intruder, declaring that, if his will had power, that plane would fall from the sky like a wounded bird, littering Spain with the bodies of two hundred stupid vacationers on their way to Lisbon, and relieving the world of the burden of surplus population, for anyone who would fly through so perfect a moment was, by definition, an expendable being.
Le Cagot’s gall up, he went on to extend his malediction to all those outlanders who defiled the mountains: the tourists, the back-packers, the hunters, and especially the skiers who bring vile machines into the mountains because they are too soft to walk up the hill, and who build ugly lodges and noisy après-ski amusements. The filthy shits! It was for dealing with loud-mouthed skiers and their giggling bunnies that God said, on the eighth day, let there also be handguns!
One of the old shepherds nodded sagely and agreed that outlanders were universally evil. “Atzerri; otzerri.”
Following the ritual of conversation among strangers, Hel matched this ancient dicton with “But I suppose chori bakhoitzari eder bere ohantzea.”
“True,” Le Cagot said. “Zahar hitzak, zuhur hitzak.”
Hel smiled. These were the first words of Basque he had learned, years ago in his cell in Sugamo Prison. “With the possible exception,” he said, “of that one.”
The old smugglers considered this response for a moment, then both laughed aloud and slapped their knees. “Hori phensatu zuenak, ongi afaldu zuen!” (An Englishman with a clever story “dines out on, it.” Within the Basque culture, it is the listener who enjoys the feast.)
They sat in silence, drinking and eating slowly as the sun fell, drawing after it the gold and russet of the cloud layer. One of the young cavers stretched his legs out with a satisfied grunt and declared that this was the life. Hel smiled to himself, knowing that this would probably not be the life for this young man, touched as he was by television and radio. Like most of the Basque young, he would probably end up lured to the factories of the big cities, where his wife could have a refrigerator, and he could drink Coca-Cola in a café with plastic tables—the good life that was a product of the French Economic Miracle.
“It is the good life,” Le Cagot said lazily. “I have traveled, and I have turned the world over in my hand, like a stone with attractive veining, and this I have discovered: a man is happiest when there is a balance between his needs and his possessions. Now the question is: how to achieve this balance. One could seek to do this by increasing his goods to the level of his appetites, but that would be stupid. It would involve doing unnatural things—bargaining, haggling, scrimping, working. Ergo? Ergo, the wise man achieves the balance by reducing his needs to the level of his possessions. And this is best done by learning to value the free things of life: the mountains, laughter, poetry, wine offered by a friend, older and fatter women. Now, me? I am perfectly capable of being happy with what I have. The problem is getting enough of it in the first place!”
“Le Cagot?” one of the old smugglers asked, as he made himself comfortable in a corner of the artzain xola. “Give us a story to sleep on.”
“Yes,” said his companion. “Let it be of old things.”
A true folk poet, who would rather tell a story than write one, Le Cagot began to weave fables in his rich basso voice, while the others listened or dozed. Everyone knew the tales, but the pleasure lay in the art of telling them. And Basque is a language more suited to storytelling than to exchanging information. No one can learn to speak Basque beautifully; like eye color or blood type, it is something one has to be born to. The language is subtle and loosely regulated, with its circumlocutory word orders, its vague declensions, its doubled conjugations, both synthetic and periphrastic, with its old “story” forms mixed with formal verb patterns. Basque is a song, and while outlanders may learn the words, they can never master the music.
Le Cagot told of the Basa-andere, the Wildlady who kills men in the most wonderful way. It is widely known that the Basa-andere is beautiful and perfectly formed for love, and that the soft golden hair that covers all her body is strangely appealing. Should a man have the misfortune to come upon her in the forest (she is always to be found kneeling beside a stream, combing the hair of her stomach with a golden comb), she will turn to him and fix him with a smile, then lie back and lift her knees, offering her body. Now, everyone knows that the pleasure from her is so intense that a man dies of it during climax, but still many and many have willingly died, their backs arched in the agony of unimaginable pleasure.
One of the old smugglers declared that he once found a man in the mountains who had died so, and in his dim staring eyes there was an awful mixture of fright and pleasure.
And the quietest of the young lads prayed that God would give him the strength to resist, should he ever come upon the Basa-andere with her golden comb. “You say she is all covered with golden hair, Le Cagot? I cannot imagine breasts covered with hair. Are the nipples visible then?”
Le Cagot sniffed and stretched out on the ground. “In truth, I cannot say from personal experience, child. These eyes have never seen the Basa-andere. And I am glad of that, for had we met, that poor lady would at this moment be dead from pleasure.”
The old man laughed and ripped up a turf of grass, which he threw at the poet. “Truly, Le Cagot, you are as full of shit as God is of mercy!”
“True,” Le Cagot admitted. “So true. Have you ever heard me tell the story of…”
* * *
When dawn came the whiteout was gone, churned away by the night winds. Before they broke up, Hel paid the lads for their assistance and asked them to take apart the winch and tripod and bring them down to a barn in Larrau for storage, as they were already beginning to plan the next exploration into the cave, this time with wet suits and scuba gear, for the boys camping down by the fallout in the Gorge of Holçarté had marked the appearance of dye in the water at eight minutes after the hour. Although eight minutes is not a long time, it could indicate considerable distance, considering the speed of the water through that triangular pipe at the bottom of the Wine Cellar. But if the water pipe was not filled with obstructions or too narrow for a man, they might have the pleasure of exploring their cave from entrance shaft to outfall before they shared the secret of its existence with the caving fraternity.
Hel and Le Cagot trotted and glissaded down the side of the mountain to the narrow track on which they had parked Hel’s Volvo. He delivered the door a mighty kick with his boot, as was his habit, and after examining the satisfying dent, they got in and drove down to the village of Larrau, where they stopped off to have a breakfast of bread, cheese, and coffee, after having splashed and scrubbed away most of the dried mud with which they were caked.
Their hostess was a vigorous widow with a strong ample body and a bawdy laugh who used two rooms of her house as a café/restaurant/tobacco shop. She and Le Cagot had a relationship of many years, for when things got too hot for him in Spain, be often crossed into France through the Forest of Irraty that abutted this village. Since time beyond memory, the Forest of Irraty had been both a sanctuary and an avenue for smugglers and bandits crossing from the Basque provinces under Spanish occupation to those under French. By ancient tradition, it is considered impolite—and dangerous—to seem to recognize anyone met in this forest.
When they entered the café, still wet from the pump in back, they were questioned by the half-dozen old men taking their morning wine. How had it gone up at the gouffre? Was there a cave under the hole?
Le Cagot was ordering breakfast, his hand resting proprietarily on the hip of the hostess. He did not have to think twice about guarding the secret of the new cave, for he automatically fell into the Basque trait of responding to direct questions with misleading vagueness that is not quite lying.
“Not all holes lead to caves, my friends.”
The hostess’s eyes glittered at what she took to be double entendre. She pushed his hand away with pleased coquetry.
“And did you meet Spanish border patrols?” an old man asked.
“No, I was not required to burden hell with more Fascist souls. Does that please you, Father?” Le Cagot addressed this last to the gaunt revolutionary priest sitting in the darkest corner of the café, who had turned his face away upon the entrance of Le Cagot and Hel. Father Xavier nurtured a smoldering hate for Le Cagot and a flaming one for Hel. Though he never faced danger personally, he wandered from village to village along the border, preaching the revolution and attempting to bind the goals of Basque independence to those of the Church—the Basque manifestation of that general effort on the part of God-merchants to diversify into social and political issues, now that the world was no longer a good market for hell-scare and soul-saving.
The priest’s hatred (which be termed “righteous wrath”) for Le Cagot was based on the fact that praise and hero worship that properly belonged to the ordained leaders of the revolution was being siphoned away by this blaspheming and scandalous man who had spent a part of his life in the Land of the Wolves, out of the Pays Basque. But at least Le Cagot was a native son. This Hel was a different matter. He was an outlander who never went to Mass and who lived with an Oriental woman. And it was galling to the priest that young Basque cavers, boys who should have chosen their idols from the ranks of the priesthood, told stories of his spelunking exploits and of the time he had crossed with Le Cagot into Spain and broken into a military prison in Bilbao to release ETA prisoners. This was the kind of man who could contaminate the revolution and divert its energies from the establishment of a Basque Theocracy, a last fortress of fundamentalist Catholicism in a land where Christian practices were primitive and deep, and where the key to the gates of heaven was a profound weapon of control.
Shortly after he bought his home in Etchebar, Hel began to receive unsigned threats and hate notes. Upon two occasions there were “spontaneous” midnight charivaris outside the château, and live cats bound in burning straw were thrown at the walls of the house, where they screamed in their death throes. Although Hel’s experience had taught him to despise these fanatical Third World priests who incite children to their deaths for the purpose of linking the cause of social reform to the Church to save that institution from natural atrophy in the face of knowledge and enlightenment, he would nevertheless have ignored this kind of harassment. But he intended to make the Basque country his permanent home, now that the Japanese culture was infected with Western values, and he had to put an end to these insults because the Basque mentality ridicules those who are ridiculed. Anonymous letters and the mob frenzy of the charivari are manifestations of cowardice, and Hel had an intelligent fear of cowards, who are always more dangerous than brave men, when they outnumber you or get a chance to strike from behind, because they are forced to do maximal damage, dreading as they do the consequences of retaliation, should you survive.
Through Le Cagot’s contacts, Hel discovered the author of these craven acts, and a couple of months later he came across the priest in the back room of a café in Ste. Engrace, where he was eating a free meal in silence, occasionally glaring at Nicholai, who was taking a glass of red with several men of the village—men who had previously been sitting at the priest’s table, listening to his wisdom and cant.
When the men went off to work, Hel joined the priest at his table. Father Xavier started to rise, but Hel gripped his forearm and returned him to his chair. “You are a good man, Father,” he said in his prison whisper. “A saintly man. In fact, at this moment you are closer to heaven than you know. Finish your food and listen well. There will be no more anonymous letters, no more charivaris. Do you understand?”
“I’m afraid I don’t—”
“Eat.”
“What?”
“Eat!”
Father Xavier pushed another forkful of piperade into his mouth and chewed sullenly.
“Eat faster, Father. Fill your mouth with food you have not earned.”
The priest’s eyes were damp with fury and fear, but he shoveled forkful after forkful into his mouth and swallowed as rapidly as he could.
“If you choose to stay in this corner of the world, Father, and if you do not feel prepared to join your God, then this is what you will do. Each time we meet in a village, you will leave that village immediately. Each time we meet on the trails, you will step off the track and turn your back as I pass. You can eat faster than that!”
The priest choked on his food, and Hel left him gasping and gagging. That evening, he told the story to Le Cagot with instructions to make sure it got around. Hel considered public humiliation of this coward to be necessary.
* * *
“Hey, why don’t you answer me, Father Esteka?” Le Cagot asked.*
* Esteka is Basque for “sexual deficiency.”
The priest rose and left the café, as Le Cagot called after him, “Holà! Aren’t you going to finish your piperade?”
Because they were Catholic, the old men in the café could not laugh; but they grinned, because they were Basque.
Le Cagot patted the hostess’s bottom and sent her after their food. “I don’t think we have made a great friend there, Niko. And he is a man to be feared.” Le Cagot laughed. “After all, his father was French and very active in the Resistance.”
Hel smiled. “Have you ever met one who was not?”
“True. It is astonishing that the Germans managed to hold France with so few divisions, considering that everyone who wasn’t draining German resources by the clever maneuver of surrendering en masse and making the Nazi’s feed them was vigorously and bravely engaged in the Resistance. Is there a village without its Place de la Resistance? But one has to be fair; one has to understand the Gallic notion of resistance. Any hotelier who overcharged a German was in the Resistance. Each whore who gave a German soldier the clap was a freedom fighter. All those who obeyed while viciously withholding their cheerful morning bonjours were heroes of liberty!”
Hel laughed. “You’re being a little hard on the French.”
“It is history that is hard on them. I mean real history, not the verité à la cinquième République that they teach in their schools. The truth be known, I admire the French more than any other foreigners. In the centuries they have lived beside the Basque, they have absorbed certain virtues—understanding, philosophic insight, a sense of humor—and these have made them the best of the ‘others.’ But even I am forced to admit that they are a ridiculous people, just as one must confess that the British are bungling, the Italians incompetent, the Americans neurotic, the Germans romantically savage, the Arabs vicious, the Russians barbaric, and the Dutch make cheese. Take the particular manifestation of French ridiculousness that makes them attempt to combine their myopic devotion to money with the pursuit of phantom gloire. The same people who dilute their burgundy for modest profit willingly spend millions of francs on the atomic contamination of the Pacific Ocean in the hope that they will be thought to be the technological equals of the Americans. They see themselves as the feisty David against the grasping Goliath. Sadly for their image abroad, the rest of the world views their actions as the ludicrous egotism of the amorous ant climbing a cow’s leg and assuring her that he will be gentle.”
Le Cagot looked down at the tabletop thoughtfully. “I cannot think of anything further to say about the French just now.”
The widow had joined them at table, sitting close to Le Cagot and pressing her knee against his. “Hey, you have a visitor down at Etchehelia,” she told Hel, using the Basque name for his château. “It is a girl. An outsider. Arrived yesterday evening.”
Hel was not surprised that this news was already in Larrau, three mountains and fifteen kilometers from his home. It had doubtless been common knowledge in all the local villages within four hours of the visitor’s arrival.
“What do you know about her?” Hel asked.
The widow shrugged and tucked down the corners of her mouth, indicating that she knew only the barest facts. “She took coffee chez Jaureguiberry and did not have money to pay. She walked all the way from Tardets to Etchebar and was seen from the hills several times. She is young, but not too young to bear. She wore short pants that showed her legs, and it is said that she has a plump chest. She was received by your woman, who paid her bill with Jaureguiberry. She has an English accent. And the old gossips in your village say that she is a whore from Bayonne who was turned out from her farm for sleeping with the husband of her sister. As you see, very little is known of her.”
“You say she is young with a plump chest?” Le Cagot asked. “No doubt she is seeking me, the final experience.”
The widow pinched his thigh.
Hel rose from the table. “I think I’ll go home and take a bath and a little sleep. You coming?”
Le Cagot looked at the widow sideways. “What do you think? Should I go?”
“I don’t care what you do, old man.”
But as he started to rise, she tugged him back by his belt.
“Maybe I’ll stay a while, Niko. I’ll come back this evening and take a look at your girl with the naked legs and the big boobs. If she pleases me, I may bless you with an extension of my visit. Ouch!”
Hel paid and went out to his Volvo, which he kicked in the rear fender, then drove away toward his home.
Château d’Etchebar
After parking in the square of Etchebar (he did not permit automobiles on his property) and giving the roof a parting bash with his fist, Hel walked down the private road to his château feeling, as he always did upon returning home, a paternal affection for this perfect seventeenth-century house into which he had put years of devotion and millions of Swiss francs. It was the thing he loved most in the world, a physical and emotional fortress against the twentieth century. He paused along the path up from the heavy gates to pat the earth in around a newly planted shrub, and as he was doing this he felt the approach of that vague and scattered aura that could only be Pierre, his gardener.
“Bonjour, M’sieur,” Pierre greeted in his singsong way, as he recognized Hel through the haze of his regularly spaced glasses of red that began with his rising at dawn.
Hel nodded. “I hear we have a guest, Pierre.”
“It is so. A girl. She still sleeps. The women have told me that she is a whore from—”
“I know. Is Madame awake?”
“To be sure. She was informed of your approach twenty minutes ago.” Pierre looked up into the sky and nodded sagely. “Ah, ah, ah,” he said, shaking his head. Hel realized that he was preparing to make a weather prediction, as he did every time they met on the grounds. All the Basque of Haute Soule believe they have special genetic gifts for meteorological prognostication based upon their mountain heritage and the many folk adages devoted to reading weather signs. Pierre’s own predictions, delivered with a quiet assurance that was never diminished by his unvarying inaccuracy, had constituted the principal topic of his conversation with M’sieur Hel for fifteen years, ever since the village drunk had been elevated to the rank of the outlander’s gardener and his official defender from village gossip.
“Ah, M’sieur, there will be rain before this day is out,” Pierre chanted, nodding to himself with resigned conviction. “So there is no point in my setting out these flowers today.”
“Is that so, Pierre?” How many hundreds of times had they had this conversation?
“Yes, it is so. Last night at sunset there was red and gold in the little clouds near the mountains. It is a sure sign.”
“Oh? But doesn’t the saying go the other way? Isn’t it arrats gorriak eguraldi?”
“That is how the saying goes, M’sieur. However…” Pierre’s eyes glittered with conspiratorial slyness as he tapped the side of his long nose. “…everything depends on the phase of the moon.”
“Oh?”
Pierre closed his eyes and nodded slowly, smiling benevolently on the ignorance of all outlanders, even such basically good men as M’sieur Hel. “When the moon is ascending, the rule is as you have said; but when the moon is descending, it is the other way.”
“I see. Then when the moon is descending it is: Goiz gorriak dakarke uri?”
Pierre frowned, uncomfortable about being forced to a firm prediction. He considered for a moment before answering. “That varies, M’sieur.”
“I’m sure it does.”
“And… there is an additional complication.”
“You’re going to tell me about it.”
Pierre glanced about uneasily and shifted to French, to avoid the risk of offending the earth spirits who, of course, understand only Basque. “Vous voyez, M’sieur, de temps en temps, la lune se trompe!”
Hel drew a long breath and shook his head. “Good morning, Pierre.”
“Good morning, M’sieur.” Pierre tottered down the path to see if there was something else requiring his attention.
His eyes closed and his mind afloat, Hel sat neckdeep in the Japanese wooden tub filled with water so hot that lowering himself into it had been an experience on the limen between pain and pleasure. The servants had fired up the wood-stoked water boiler as soon as they heard that M. Hel was approaching from Larrau, and by the time he had scrubbed himself thoroughly and taken a shock shower in icy water, his Japanese tub was full, and the small bathing room was billowing with dense steam.
Hana dozed across from him, sitting on a higher bench that allowed her to sit neck-deep too. As always when they bathed together, their feet were in casual embrace.
“Do you want to know about the visitor, Nicholai?”
Hel shook his head slowly, not willing to interrupt his comatose relaxation. “Later,” he muttered.
After a quarter of an hour, the water cooled enough that it was possible to make a movement in the tub without discomfort. He opened his eyes and smiled sleepily at Hana. “One grows old, my friend. After a couple of days in the mountains, the bath becomes more a medical necessity than a pleasure.”
Hana smiled back and squeezed his foot between hers. “Was it a good cave?”
He nodded. “An easy one, really. A walk-in cave with no long crawls, no siphons. Still, it was just about all the work my body could handle.”
He climbed the steps on the side of the tub and slid back the padded panel that closed the bathing room off from the small Japanese garden he had been perfecting for the past fifteen years, and which he assumed would be acceptable in another fifteen. Steam billowed past him into the cool air, which felt bracing on his skin, still tight and tingling from the heat. He had learned that a hot tub, twenty minutes of light meditation, an hour of lovemaking, and a quick shower replenished his body and spirit better than a night’s sleep; and this routine was habitual with him upon returning from a caving bash or, in the old days, from a counterterrorist stunt.
Hana left the tub and put a lightly padded kimono over her still-wet body. She helped him into his bathing kimono, and they walked across the garden, where he stopped for a moment to adjust a sounding stone in the stream leading from the small pond because the water was low and the sound of it was too treble to please him. The bathing room with its thick plank walls was half hidden in a stand of bamboo that bordered the garden on three sides. Across from it was a low structure of dark wood and sliding paper panels that contained his Japanese room, where he studied and meditated, and his “gun room,” where he kept the implements of the trade from which he had recently retired. The fourth side of the garden was closed off by the back of his château, and both of the Japanese buildings were freestanding, so as to avoid breaking the mansard perfection of its marble facade. He had worked through all of one summer, building the Japanese structures with two craftsmen he brought from Kyushu for the purpose, men old enough to remember how to work in wood-and-wedge.
Kneeling at a low lacquered table, facing out toward the Japanese garden, they took a light meal of melon balls (warm, to accent the musky flavor), tart plums (glaucous, icy, and full of juice), unflavored rice cakes, and a half glass of chilled Irouléguy.
The meal done, Hana rose from the table. “Shall I close the panels?”
“Leave one ajar, so we can see the garden.”
Hana smiled. Nicholai and his garden… like a father with a delicate but willful child. The garden was the most important of his possessions, and often, after a trip, he would return home unannounced, change clothes, and work in the garden for hours before anyone knew he was home. To him, the garden with its subtle articulations was a concrete statement of shibumi, and there was an autumnal correctness to the fact that he would probably not live to see its full statement.
She let her kimono fall away. “Shall we have a wager?”
He laughed. “All right. The winner receives… let’s see. How about one half-hour of the Delight of the Razor?”
“Fine. I am sure I shall enjoy it very much.”
“That sure of yourself?”
“My good friend, you have been off in the mountains for three days. Your body has been manufacturing love, but there has been no outlet. You are at a great disadvantage in the wager.”
“We shall see.”
With Hana and Nicholai, the foreplay was as much mental as physical. They were both Stage IV lovemakers, she by virtue of her excellent training, he because of the mental control he had learned as a youth, and his gift of proximity sense, which allowed him to eavesdrop on his partner’s sensations and know precisely where she was in relation to climax contractions. The game was to cause the other to climax first, and it was played with no holds or techniques barred. To the winner went the Delight of the Razor, a deeply relaxing thrill massage in which the skin of the arms, legs, chest, back, stomach, and pubes is lightly brushed with a keenly honed razor. The tingling delight, and the background fear of a slip, combine to require the person receiving the massage to relax completely as the only alternative to unbearable tension and pleasure. Typically, the Delight of the Razor begins with the extremities, sweeping waves of thrill inward as the razor approaches the erogenous areas, which become ardent with pleasure and the shadow of fear. There are subtleties of technique when the razor comes to these zones that are dangerous to describe.
The Delight of the Razor culminates in quick oral lovemaking.
Whichever of them won the wager by making the other climax first would receive the Delight of the Razor, and there was a special cachet to their way of playing the game. They knew one another well enough to bring both of them to the threshold of climax quickly, and the game was played out there, on the teetering edge of pleasure and control.
It was not until after he got away from Sugamo Prison and began his life in the West that Hel’s sexual experience took on form and articulation. Before that there had been only amateur play. His relationship with Mariko had not been physical in essence; it had been youthful affection, and their bungling sexual experiences had been nothing more than a physical footnote to their gentle and uncertain affection.
With the Tanaka sisters, Hel entered Stage I lovemaking, that healthy and simplistic stage of sexual curiosity during which strong young animals brimming with the impulse to continue their species exercise themselves on one another’s bodies. Although plebeian and monotonic, Stage I is wholesome and honest, and Hel enjoyed his time spent in that rank, regretting only that so many people are sensationally crippled by their cultures and can accept the strong, sweaty lovemaking of Stage I only when disguised as romance, love, affection, or even self-expression. In their confusion, they build relationships upon the sand of passion. Hel considered it a great pity that mass man had come into contact with romantic literature, which created expectations beyond the likelihood of fulfillment and contributed to that marital delinquency characteristic of Western sexual adolescents.
During his brief sojourn in Stage II—the use of sex as psychological aspirin, as social narcosis, a kind of bloodletting to reduce fevers and pressures—Hel began to have glimpses of the fourth level of sexual experience. Because he realized that sexual activity would be a significant part of his life, and because he detested amateurism in all its forms, he undertook to prepare himself. He received professional tactical training in Ceylon and in the exclusive bordellos of Madagascar, where he lived for four months, learning from women of every race and culture.
Stage III, sexual gourmandizing, is the highest stage ever reached by Westerners and, indeed, by most Orientals. Hel moved through this stage leisurely and with high appetite because he was young, his body strong and taut, and his imagination fertile. He was in no danger of getting bogged down in the sexual black masses of artificial stimulation with which the nastier-than-thou jetsetters and the soft intellectuals of the literary and filmmaking worlds seek to compensate for callused nerve ends and imaginations by roiling among one another’s tepid flesh and lubricating fluids.
Even while in the sexual smorgasbord of Stage III, Hel began to experiment with such refined tactics as climax hovering and mental intercourse. He found it amusing to associate sexual techniques with Gô nomenclature. Such terms as aji keshi, ko, furikawari and hane lent themselves easily as illuminating images; while others, such as kaketsugi, nozoki, and yosu-miru, could be applied to lovemaking only with a liberal and procrustean view of metaphor.
By the age of thirty, Hel’s sexual interests and capacities led him naturally to Stage IV, the final “game phase,” in which excitation and climax are relatively trivial terminal gestures in an activity that demands all the mental vigor and reserve of championship Gô, the training of a Ceylonese whore, and the endurance and agility of a gifted grade VI rock climber. The game of his preference was an invention of his own which he called “kikashi sex.” This could only be played with another Stage IV lovemaker, and only when both were feeling particularly strong. The game was played in a small room, about six tatami. Both players dressed in formal kimonos and knelt facing one another, their backs against opposite walls. Each, through concentration alone, was required to come to the verge of climax and to hover there. No contact was permitted, only concentration and such gestures as could be made with one hand.
The object of the game was to cause climax before climaxing yourself, and it was best played while it was raining.
In time, he abandoned kikashi sex as being somewhat too demanding, and also because it was a lonely and selfish experience, lacking the affection and caressing of afterplay that decorates the best of lovemaking.
Hana’s eyes were squeezed shut with effort, and her lips were stretched over her teeth. She tried to escape from the involute position in which he held her, but he would not release her.
“I thought we agreed that you weren’t permitted to do that!” she pled.
“I didn’t agree to anything.”
“Oh, Nikko… I can’t!… I can’t hold on! Damn you!”
She arched her back and emitted a squeak of final effort to avoid climaxing.
Her delight infected Hel, who relinquished his control to allow himself to climax just after she did. Then suddenly his proximity sense sounded the alarm. She was faking! Her aura was not dancing, as it would at climax. He tried to void his mind and arrest his climax, but it was too late. He had broken over the rim of control.
“You devil!” he shouted as he came.
She was laughing as she climaxed a few seconds later.
She lay on her stomach, humming sleepily in appreciation as he slowly inched the razor over her buttock, a perfect object blending the fineness of her Japanese blood with the useful shape of her Black. He kissed it gently and continued the Delight.
“In two months your tenure with me is over, Hana.”
“Hmm-hmm.” She did not want to break her languor by speaking.
“Have you considered my suggestion that you stay on with me?”
“Hmm-hmm.”
“And?”
“Unh-nh-nh-nh-nh.” The prolonged sound through slack lips meant, “Don’t make me talk.”
He chuckled and turned her over onto her back, continuing the thrill massage with close attention to technique and detail. Hana was in a perfect state. She was in her midthirties, the youngest a woman can be and still possess the training and experience of a grand lover. Because of the excellent care she took of her body and because of the time-annihilating effects of her ideal blend of Oriental, Black, and Caucasian strains, she would be in her prime for another fifteen years. She was a delight to look at, and to work on. Her greatest quality lay in her ability to receive pleasure completely and graciously.
When the Delight of the Razor had closed to her centers and had rendered her moist and passive, he concluded the event with its classic quick finish. And for a time they lay together in that comfortable lover’s twine that knows how to deal with the extra arm.
“I have thought about staying on, Nikko,” she said, her voice buzzing against his chest. “There are many reasons that might prompt me to do so. This is the most beautiful spot in the world. I shall always be grateful to you for showing me this corner of the Basque country. And certainly you have constructed a life of shibumi luxury here that is attractive. And there is you, so quiet and stern when you deal with the outside world, so boyish in lovemaking. You are not without a certain charm.”
“Thank you.”
“And I must also confess that it is much rarer to find a well-trained man than an accomplished woman. But… it is lonely here. I know that I am free to go to Bayonne or Paris whenever I wish—and I have a good time when I do go—but day to day, despite your attention and the delights of your conversation, and despite the bawdy energy of our friend Le Cagot, it is lonely for a woman whose interests and appetites have been so closely honed as mine have been.”
“I understand that.”
“It is different for you, Nikko. You are a recluse by nature. You despise the outside world, and you don’t need it. I too find that most of the people out there either bore or annoy me. But I am not a recluse by nature, and I have a vivid curiosity. Then too… there is another problem.”
“Yes?”
“Well, how shall I put this? Personalities such as yours and mine are meant to dominate. Each of us should function in a large society, giving flavor and texture to the mass. The two of us together in one place is like a wasteful concentration of spice in the course of an otherwise bland meal. Do you see what I mean?”
“Does that mean that you have decided to leave when your tenure is up?”
She blew a jet of breath over the hairs of his chest. “It means that I have not yet made up my mind.” She was silent for a time, then she said, “I suppose I would really prefer to have the best of both worlds, spending half of every year here, resting and learning with you, and half of each year out there, stunning my audience.”
“I see nothing wrong with that.”
She laughed, “It would mean that you would have to make do for six months each year with the bronzed, long-legged, mindless nymphs of the Côte Basque. Actresses and models and that sort. Could you do that?”
“As easily as you could make do with round-armed lads possessing excellent muscle tone and honest, empty eyes. For both of us, it would be like subsisting on hors d’oeuvres. But why not? There is some amusement in hors d’oeuvres, though they cloy without nourishing.”
“Let me think about it, Nikko. It is an attractive idea.” She raised herself onto one elbow and looked down into his half-closed, amused eyes. “Then too, freedom is also attractive. Maybe I won’t make any decision at all.”
“That’s a kind of decision.”
They dressed and went to shower beneath the perforated copper cask designed for the purpose by the first enlightened owner of the château nearly three hundred years before.
It was not until they were taking tea in the cream-and-gold east salon that Hel asked about the visitor.
“She is still asleep. When she arrived yesterday evening, she was desperate. She had walked from the village after flying in to Pau from Rome and hitchhiking to Tardets. Although she tried to chat and follow the forms of politeness, I could tell from the first that she was very distraught. She began weeping while she was taking tea. Weeping without knowing she was doing it. I gave her something to calm her and put her to bed. But she awoke during the night with nightmares, and I sat on the edge of her bed, stroking her hair and humming to her, until she was calm and dropped off again.”
“What is her problem?”
“She talked about it while I stroked her hair. There was a nasty business at the airport in Rome. Two of her friends were shot and killed.”
“Shot by whom?”
“She didn’t say. Perhaps she didn’t know.”
“Why were they shot?”
“I have no idea.”
“Did she tell you why she came to our home?”
“Evidently all three of them were on their way here. She had no money, only her plane ticket.”
“Did she give you her name?”
“Yes. Hannah Stern. She said her uncle was a friend of yours.”
Hel set his cup down, closed his eyes, and pushed out a long nasal sigh. “Asa Stern was a friend. He’s dead. I am indebted to him. There was a moment when, without his help, I would have died.”
“And this indebtedness, does it extend to the girl as well?”
“We’ll see. Did you say the blow-away in Rome International happened yesterday afternoon?”
“Or morning. I am not sure which.”
“Then it should be on the news at noon. When the girl wakes up, please have her come and see me. I’ll be in the garden. Oh, and I think Le Cagot will take dinner with us—if he finishes his business in Larrau in time.”
Hel worked in the garden for an hour and a half, trimming, controlling, striving for modest and subtle effects. He was not an artist, but he was sensitive; so while his garden, the major statement of his impulse to create, lacked sabi, it had the shibui features that separate Japanese art from the mechanical dynamics of Western art and the florid hyperbole of Chinese. There was that sweet melancholy, that forgiving sadness that characterizes the beautiful in the Japanese mind. There was intentional imperfection and organic simplicity that created, then satisfied, aesthetic tensions, functioning rather as balance and imbalance function in Western art.
Just before noon, a servant brought out a battery radio, and Hel listened in his gun room for the twelve o’clock broadcast of BBC World Service. The news reader was a woman whose distinctive voice has been a source of amusement for the international Anglophone community for years. To that peculiar pronunciation that is BBC’s own, she adds a clipped, half-strangled sound which the world audience has long taken to be the effect of an uncomfortable suppository, although there is lively dispute and extensive wagering between those who maintain that the suppository is made of sandpaper and those who promote the ice-cube theory.
“Bonjour, M’sieur,” Pierre greeted in his singsong way, as he recognized Hel through the haze of his regularly spaced glasses of red that began with his rising at dawn.
Hel nodded. “I hear we have a guest, Pierre.”
“It is so. A girl. She still sleeps. The women have told me that she is a whore from—”
“I know. Is Madame awake?”
“To be sure. She was informed of your approach twenty minutes ago.” Pierre looked up into the sky and nodded sagely. “Ah, ah, ah,” he said, shaking his head. Hel realized that he was preparing to make a weather prediction, as he did every time they met on the grounds. All the Basque of Haute Soule believe they have special genetic gifts for meteorological prognostication based upon their mountain heritage and the many folk adages devoted to reading weather signs. Pierre’s own predictions, delivered with a quiet assurance that was never diminished by his unvarying inaccuracy, had constituted the principal topic of his conversation with M’sieur Hel for fifteen years, ever since the village drunk had been elevated to the rank of the outlander’s gardener and his official defender from village gossip.
“Ah, M’sieur, there will be rain before this day is out,” Pierre chanted, nodding to himself with resigned conviction. “So there is no point in my setting out these flowers today.”
“Is that so, Pierre?” How many hundreds of times had they had this conversation?
“Yes, it is so. Last night at sunset there was red and gold in the little clouds near the mountains. It is a sure sign.”
“Oh? But doesn’t the saying go the other way? Isn’t it arrats gorriak eguraldi?”
“That is how the saying goes, M’sieur. However…” Pierre’s eyes glittered with conspiratorial slyness as he tapped the side of his long nose. “…everything depends on the phase of the moon.”
“Oh?”
Pierre closed his eyes and nodded slowly, smiling benevolently on the ignorance of all outlanders, even such basically good men as M’sieur Hel. “When the moon is ascending, the rule is as you have said; but when the moon is descending, it is the other way.”
“I see. Then when the moon is descending it is: Goiz gorriak dakarke uri?”
Pierre frowned, uncomfortable about being forced to a firm prediction. He considered for a moment before answering. “That varies, M’sieur.”
“I’m sure it does.”
“And… there is an additional complication.”
“You’re going to tell me about it.”
Pierre glanced about uneasily and shifted to French, to avoid the risk of offending the earth spirits who, of course, understand only Basque. “Vous voyez, M’sieur, de temps en temps, la lune se trompe!”
Hel drew a long breath and shook his head. “Good morning, Pierre.”
“Good morning, M’sieur.” Pierre tottered down the path to see if there was something else requiring his attention.
* * *
His eyes closed and his mind afloat, Hel sat neckdeep in the Japanese wooden tub filled with water so hot that lowering himself into it had been an experience on the limen between pain and pleasure. The servants had fired up the wood-stoked water boiler as soon as they heard that M. Hel was approaching from Larrau, and by the time he had scrubbed himself thoroughly and taken a shock shower in icy water, his Japanese tub was full, and the small bathing room was billowing with dense steam.
Hana dozed across from him, sitting on a higher bench that allowed her to sit neck-deep too. As always when they bathed together, their feet were in casual embrace.
“Do you want to know about the visitor, Nicholai?”
Hel shook his head slowly, not willing to interrupt his comatose relaxation. “Later,” he muttered.
After a quarter of an hour, the water cooled enough that it was possible to make a movement in the tub without discomfort. He opened his eyes and smiled sleepily at Hana. “One grows old, my friend. After a couple of days in the mountains, the bath becomes more a medical necessity than a pleasure.”
Hana smiled back and squeezed his foot between hers. “Was it a good cave?”
He nodded. “An easy one, really. A walk-in cave with no long crawls, no siphons. Still, it was just about all the work my body could handle.”
He climbed the steps on the side of the tub and slid back the padded panel that closed the bathing room off from the small Japanese garden he had been perfecting for the past fifteen years, and which he assumed would be acceptable in another fifteen. Steam billowed past him into the cool air, which felt bracing on his skin, still tight and tingling from the heat. He had learned that a hot tub, twenty minutes of light meditation, an hour of lovemaking, and a quick shower replenished his body and spirit better than a night’s sleep; and this routine was habitual with him upon returning from a caving bash or, in the old days, from a counterterrorist stunt.
Hana left the tub and put a lightly padded kimono over her still-wet body. She helped him into his bathing kimono, and they walked across the garden, where he stopped for a moment to adjust a sounding stone in the stream leading from the small pond because the water was low and the sound of it was too treble to please him. The bathing room with its thick plank walls was half hidden in a stand of bamboo that bordered the garden on three sides. Across from it was a low structure of dark wood and sliding paper panels that contained his Japanese room, where he studied and meditated, and his “gun room,” where he kept the implements of the trade from which he had recently retired. The fourth side of the garden was closed off by the back of his château, and both of the Japanese buildings were freestanding, so as to avoid breaking the mansard perfection of its marble facade. He had worked through all of one summer, building the Japanese structures with two craftsmen he brought from Kyushu for the purpose, men old enough to remember how to work in wood-and-wedge.
Kneeling at a low lacquered table, facing out toward the Japanese garden, they took a light meal of melon balls (warm, to accent the musky flavor), tart plums (glaucous, icy, and full of juice), unflavored rice cakes, and a half glass of chilled Irouléguy.
The meal done, Hana rose from the table. “Shall I close the panels?”
“Leave one ajar, so we can see the garden.”
Hana smiled. Nicholai and his garden… like a father with a delicate but willful child. The garden was the most important of his possessions, and often, after a trip, he would return home unannounced, change clothes, and work in the garden for hours before anyone knew he was home. To him, the garden with its subtle articulations was a concrete statement of shibumi, and there was an autumnal correctness to the fact that he would probably not live to see its full statement.
She let her kimono fall away. “Shall we have a wager?”
He laughed. “All right. The winner receives… let’s see. How about one half-hour of the Delight of the Razor?”
“Fine. I am sure I shall enjoy it very much.”
“That sure of yourself?”
“My good friend, you have been off in the mountains for three days. Your body has been manufacturing love, but there has been no outlet. You are at a great disadvantage in the wager.”
“We shall see.”
With Hana and Nicholai, the foreplay was as much mental as physical. They were both Stage IV lovemakers, she by virtue of her excellent training, he because of the mental control he had learned as a youth, and his gift of proximity sense, which allowed him to eavesdrop on his partner’s sensations and know precisely where she was in relation to climax contractions. The game was to cause the other to climax first, and it was played with no holds or techniques barred. To the winner went the Delight of the Razor, a deeply relaxing thrill massage in which the skin of the arms, legs, chest, back, stomach, and pubes is lightly brushed with a keenly honed razor. The tingling delight, and the background fear of a slip, combine to require the person receiving the massage to relax completely as the only alternative to unbearable tension and pleasure. Typically, the Delight of the Razor begins with the extremities, sweeping waves of thrill inward as the razor approaches the erogenous areas, which become ardent with pleasure and the shadow of fear. There are subtleties of technique when the razor comes to these zones that are dangerous to describe.
The Delight of the Razor culminates in quick oral lovemaking.
Whichever of them won the wager by making the other climax first would receive the Delight of the Razor, and there was a special cachet to their way of playing the game. They knew one another well enough to bring both of them to the threshold of climax quickly, and the game was played out there, on the teetering edge of pleasure and control.
It was not until after he got away from Sugamo Prison and began his life in the West that Hel’s sexual experience took on form and articulation. Before that there had been only amateur play. His relationship with Mariko had not been physical in essence; it had been youthful affection, and their bungling sexual experiences had been nothing more than a physical footnote to their gentle and uncertain affection.
With the Tanaka sisters, Hel entered Stage I lovemaking, that healthy and simplistic stage of sexual curiosity during which strong young animals brimming with the impulse to continue their species exercise themselves on one another’s bodies. Although plebeian and monotonic, Stage I is wholesome and honest, and Hel enjoyed his time spent in that rank, regretting only that so many people are sensationally crippled by their cultures and can accept the strong, sweaty lovemaking of Stage I only when disguised as romance, love, affection, or even self-expression. In their confusion, they build relationships upon the sand of passion. Hel considered it a great pity that mass man had come into contact with romantic literature, which created expectations beyond the likelihood of fulfillment and contributed to that marital delinquency characteristic of Western sexual adolescents.
During his brief sojourn in Stage II—the use of sex as psychological aspirin, as social narcosis, a kind of bloodletting to reduce fevers and pressures—Hel began to have glimpses of the fourth level of sexual experience. Because he realized that sexual activity would be a significant part of his life, and because he detested amateurism in all its forms, he undertook to prepare himself. He received professional tactical training in Ceylon and in the exclusive bordellos of Madagascar, where he lived for four months, learning from women of every race and culture.
Stage III, sexual gourmandizing, is the highest stage ever reached by Westerners and, indeed, by most Orientals. Hel moved through this stage leisurely and with high appetite because he was young, his body strong and taut, and his imagination fertile. He was in no danger of getting bogged down in the sexual black masses of artificial stimulation with which the nastier-than-thou jetsetters and the soft intellectuals of the literary and filmmaking worlds seek to compensate for callused nerve ends and imaginations by roiling among one another’s tepid flesh and lubricating fluids.
Even while in the sexual smorgasbord of Stage III, Hel began to experiment with such refined tactics as climax hovering and mental intercourse. He found it amusing to associate sexual techniques with Gô nomenclature. Such terms as aji keshi, ko, furikawari and hane lent themselves easily as illuminating images; while others, such as kaketsugi, nozoki, and yosu-miru, could be applied to lovemaking only with a liberal and procrustean view of metaphor.
By the age of thirty, Hel’s sexual interests and capacities led him naturally to Stage IV, the final “game phase,” in which excitation and climax are relatively trivial terminal gestures in an activity that demands all the mental vigor and reserve of championship Gô, the training of a Ceylonese whore, and the endurance and agility of a gifted grade VI rock climber. The game of his preference was an invention of his own which he called “kikashi sex.” This could only be played with another Stage IV lovemaker, and only when both were feeling particularly strong. The game was played in a small room, about six tatami. Both players dressed in formal kimonos and knelt facing one another, their backs against opposite walls. Each, through concentration alone, was required to come to the verge of climax and to hover there. No contact was permitted, only concentration and such gestures as could be made with one hand.
The object of the game was to cause climax before climaxing yourself, and it was best played while it was raining.
In time, he abandoned kikashi sex as being somewhat too demanding, and also because it was a lonely and selfish experience, lacking the affection and caressing of afterplay that decorates the best of lovemaking.
* * *
Hana’s eyes were squeezed shut with effort, and her lips were stretched over her teeth. She tried to escape from the involute position in which he held her, but he would not release her.
“I thought we agreed that you weren’t permitted to do that!” she pled.
“I didn’t agree to anything.”
“Oh, Nikko… I can’t!… I can’t hold on! Damn you!”
She arched her back and emitted a squeak of final effort to avoid climaxing.
Her delight infected Hel, who relinquished his control to allow himself to climax just after she did. Then suddenly his proximity sense sounded the alarm. She was faking! Her aura was not dancing, as it would at climax. He tried to void his mind and arrest his climax, but it was too late. He had broken over the rim of control.
“You devil!” he shouted as he came.
She was laughing as she climaxed a few seconds later.
* * *
She lay on her stomach, humming sleepily in appreciation as he slowly inched the razor over her buttock, a perfect object blending the fineness of her Japanese blood with the useful shape of her Black. He kissed it gently and continued the Delight.
“In two months your tenure with me is over, Hana.”
“Hmm-hmm.” She did not want to break her languor by speaking.
“Have you considered my suggestion that you stay on with me?”
“Hmm-hmm.”
“And?”
“Unh-nh-nh-nh-nh.” The prolonged sound through slack lips meant, “Don’t make me talk.”
He chuckled and turned her over onto her back, continuing the thrill massage with close attention to technique and detail. Hana was in a perfect state. She was in her midthirties, the youngest a woman can be and still possess the training and experience of a grand lover. Because of the excellent care she took of her body and because of the time-annihilating effects of her ideal blend of Oriental, Black, and Caucasian strains, she would be in her prime for another fifteen years. She was a delight to look at, and to work on. Her greatest quality lay in her ability to receive pleasure completely and graciously.
When the Delight of the Razor had closed to her centers and had rendered her moist and passive, he concluded the event with its classic quick finish. And for a time they lay together in that comfortable lover’s twine that knows how to deal with the extra arm.
“I have thought about staying on, Nikko,” she said, her voice buzzing against his chest. “There are many reasons that might prompt me to do so. This is the most beautiful spot in the world. I shall always be grateful to you for showing me this corner of the Basque country. And certainly you have constructed a life of shibumi luxury here that is attractive. And there is you, so quiet and stern when you deal with the outside world, so boyish in lovemaking. You are not without a certain charm.”
“Thank you.”
“And I must also confess that it is much rarer to find a well-trained man than an accomplished woman. But… it is lonely here. I know that I am free to go to Bayonne or Paris whenever I wish—and I have a good time when I do go—but day to day, despite your attention and the delights of your conversation, and despite the bawdy energy of our friend Le Cagot, it is lonely for a woman whose interests and appetites have been so closely honed as mine have been.”
“I understand that.”
“It is different for you, Nikko. You are a recluse by nature. You despise the outside world, and you don’t need it. I too find that most of the people out there either bore or annoy me. But I am not a recluse by nature, and I have a vivid curiosity. Then too… there is another problem.”
“Yes?”
“Well, how shall I put this? Personalities such as yours and mine are meant to dominate. Each of us should function in a large society, giving flavor and texture to the mass. The two of us together in one place is like a wasteful concentration of spice in the course of an otherwise bland meal. Do you see what I mean?”
“Does that mean that you have decided to leave when your tenure is up?”
She blew a jet of breath over the hairs of his chest. “It means that I have not yet made up my mind.” She was silent for a time, then she said, “I suppose I would really prefer to have the best of both worlds, spending half of every year here, resting and learning with you, and half of each year out there, stunning my audience.”
“I see nothing wrong with that.”
She laughed, “It would mean that you would have to make do for six months each year with the bronzed, long-legged, mindless nymphs of the Côte Basque. Actresses and models and that sort. Could you do that?”
“As easily as you could make do with round-armed lads possessing excellent muscle tone and honest, empty eyes. For both of us, it would be like subsisting on hors d’oeuvres. But why not? There is some amusement in hors d’oeuvres, though they cloy without nourishing.”
“Let me think about it, Nikko. It is an attractive idea.” She raised herself onto one elbow and looked down into his half-closed, amused eyes. “Then too, freedom is also attractive. Maybe I won’t make any decision at all.”
“That’s a kind of decision.”
They dressed and went to shower beneath the perforated copper cask designed for the purpose by the first enlightened owner of the château nearly three hundred years before.
It was not until they were taking tea in the cream-and-gold east salon that Hel asked about the visitor.
“She is still asleep. When she arrived yesterday evening, she was desperate. She had walked from the village after flying in to Pau from Rome and hitchhiking to Tardets. Although she tried to chat and follow the forms of politeness, I could tell from the first that she was very distraught. She began weeping while she was taking tea. Weeping without knowing she was doing it. I gave her something to calm her and put her to bed. But she awoke during the night with nightmares, and I sat on the edge of her bed, stroking her hair and humming to her, until she was calm and dropped off again.”
“What is her problem?”
“She talked about it while I stroked her hair. There was a nasty business at the airport in Rome. Two of her friends were shot and killed.”
“Shot by whom?”
“She didn’t say. Perhaps she didn’t know.”
“Why were they shot?”
“I have no idea.”
“Did she tell you why she came to our home?”
“Evidently all three of them were on their way here. She had no money, only her plane ticket.”
“Did she give you her name?”
“Yes. Hannah Stern. She said her uncle was a friend of yours.”
Hel set his cup down, closed his eyes, and pushed out a long nasal sigh. “Asa Stern was a friend. He’s dead. I am indebted to him. There was a moment when, without his help, I would have died.”
“And this indebtedness, does it extend to the girl as well?”
“We’ll see. Did you say the blow-away in Rome International happened yesterday afternoon?”
“Or morning. I am not sure which.”
“Then it should be on the news at noon. When the girl wakes up, please have her come and see me. I’ll be in the garden. Oh, and I think Le Cagot will take dinner with us—if he finishes his business in Larrau in time.”
Hel worked in the garden for an hour and a half, trimming, controlling, striving for modest and subtle effects. He was not an artist, but he was sensitive; so while his garden, the major statement of his impulse to create, lacked sabi, it had the shibui features that separate Japanese art from the mechanical dynamics of Western art and the florid hyperbole of Chinese. There was that sweet melancholy, that forgiving sadness that characterizes the beautiful in the Japanese mind. There was intentional imperfection and organic simplicity that created, then satisfied, aesthetic tensions, functioning rather as balance and imbalance function in Western art.
Just before noon, a servant brought out a battery radio, and Hel listened in his gun room for the twelve o’clock broadcast of BBC World Service. The news reader was a woman whose distinctive voice has been a source of amusement for the international Anglophone community for years. To that peculiar pronunciation that is BBC’s own, she adds a clipped, half-strangled sound which the world audience has long taken to be the effect of an uncomfortable suppository, although there is lively dispute and extensive wagering between those who maintain that the suppository is made of sandpaper and those who promote the ice-cube theory.