Vermilion Sands (4 page)

The performance at the Casino last night was nothing on the one she gave here yesterday,’ I told them. ‘
The Ring of the Niebelungs
played by Stan Kenton. That Arachnid went insane. I’m sure it wanted to kill her.’

Harry watched the plant convulsing its leaves in rigid spasmic movements.

‘If you ask me it’s in an advanced state of rut. Why should it want to kill her?’

‘Her voice must have overtones that irritate its calyx. None of the other plants minded. They cooed like turtle doves when she touched them.’

Tony shivered happily.

Light dazzled in the street outside.

I handed Tony the broom. ‘Here, lover, brace yourself on that. Miss Ciracylides is dying to meet you.’

Jane came into the shop, wearing a flame yellow cocktail skirt and another of her hats.

I introduced her to Harry and Tony.

‘The flowers seem very quiet this morning,’ she said. ‘What’s the matter with them?’

‘I’m cleaning out the tanks,’ I told her. ‘By the way, we all want to congratulate you on last night. How does it feel to be able to name your fiftieth city?’

She smiled shyly and sauntered away round the shop. As I knew she would, she stopped by the Arachnid and levelled her eyes at it.

I wanted to see what she’d say, but Harry and Tony were all around her, and soon got her up to my apartment, where they had a hilarious morning playing the fool and raiding my Scotch.

‘What about coming out with us after the show tonight?’ Tony asked her. ‘We can go dancing at the Flamingo.’

‘But you’re both married,’ Jane protested. ‘Aren’t you worried about your reputations?’

‘Oh, we’ll bring the girls,’ Harry said airily. ‘And Steve here can come along and hold your coat.’

We played i-Go together. Jane said she’d never played the game before, but she had no difficulty picking up the rules, and when she started sweeping the board with us I knew she was cheating. Admittedly it isn’t every day that you get a chance to play i-Go with a golden-skinned woman with insects for eyes, but never the less I was annoyed. Harry and Tony, of course, didn’t mind.

‘She’s charming,’ Harry said, after she’d left. ‘Who cares? It’s a stupid game anyway.’

‘I care,’ I said. ‘She cheats.’

The next three or four days at the shop were an audio-vegetative armageddon. Jane came in every morning to look at the Arachnid, and her presence was more than the flower could bear. Unfortunately I couldn’t starve the plants below their thresholds. They needed exercise and they had to have the Arachnid to lead them. But instead of running through its harmonic scales the orchid only screeched and whined. It wasn’t the noise, which only a couple of dozen people complained about, but the damage being done to their vibratory chords that worried me. Those in the seventeenth century catalogues stood up well to the strain, and the moderns were immune, but the Romantics burst their calyxes by the score. By the third day after Jane’s arrival I’d lost two hundred dollars’ worth of Beethoven and more Mendelssohn and Schubert than I could bear to think about.

Jane seemed oblivous to the trouble she was causing me.

‘What’s wrong with them all?’ she asked, surveying the chaos of gas cylinders and drip feeds spread across the floor.

‘I don’t think they like you,’ I told her. ‘At least the Arachnid doesnșt. Your voice may love men to strange and wonderful visions, but it throws that orchid into acute melancholia.’

‘Nonsense,’ she said, laughing at me. ‘Give it to me and I’ll show you how to look after it.’

’Are Tony and Harry keeping you happy?’ I asked her. I was annoyed that I couldn’t go down to the beach with them and instead had to spend my time draining tanks and titrating up norm solutions, none of which ever worked.

‘They’re very amusing,’ she said. ‘We play i-Go and I sing for them. But I wish you could come out more often.’

After another two weeks I had to give up. I decided to close the plants down until Jane had left Vermilion Sands. I knew it would take me three months to rescore the stock, but I had no alternative.

The next day I received a large order for mixed coloratura herbaceous from the Santiago Garden Choir. They wanted delivery in three weeks.

‘I’m sorry,’ Jane said, when she heard I wouldn’t be able to fill the order. ‘You must wish that I’d never come to Vermilion Sands.’

She stared thoughtfully into one of the darkened tanks.

‘Couldn’t I score them for you?’ She suggested.

‘No thanks,’ I said, laughing. ‘I’ve had enough of that already.’

‘Don’t be silly, of course I could,’

I shook my head.

Tony and Harry told me I was crazy.

‘Her voice has a wide enough range,’ Tony said. ‘You admit it yourself.’

‘What have you got against her?’ Harry asked. ‘That she cheats at i-Go?’

‘It’s nothing to do with that,’ I said. ‘And her voice has a wider range than you think.’

We played i-Go at Jane’s apartment. Jane won ten dollars from each of us.

‘I am lucky,’ she said, very pleased with herself. ‘I never seem to lose.’ She counted up the bills and put them away carefully in her bag, her golden skin glowing.

Then Santiago sent me a repeat query.

I found Jane down among the cafés, holding off a siege of admirers.

‘Have you given in yet?’ she asked me, smiling at the young men.

‘I don’t know what you’re doing to me,’ I said, ‘but anything is worth trying.’

Back at the shop I raised a bank of perennials past their thresholds. Jane helped me attach the gas and fluid lines.

‘We’ll try these first,’ I said. ‘Frequencies 543–785. Here’s the score.’

Jane took off her hat and began to ascend the scale, her voice clear and pure. At first the Columbine hesitated and Jane went down again and drew them along with her. They went up a couple of octaves together and then the plants stumbled and went off at a tangent of stepped chords.

‘Try K sharp,’ I said. I fed a little chlorous acid into the tank and the Columbine followed her up eagerly, the infra-calyxes warbling delicate variations on the treble clef.

‘Perfect,’ I said.

It took us only four hours to fill the order.

‘You’re better than the Arachnid,’ I congratulated her. ‘How would you like a job? I’ll fit you out with a large cool tank and all the chlorine you can breathe.’

‘Careful,’ she told me. ‘I may say yes. Why don’t we rescore a few more of them while we’re about it?’

‘You’re tired,’ I said. ‘Let’s go and have a drink.’

‘Let me try the Arachnid,’ she suggested. ‘That would be more of a challenge.’

Her eyes never left the flower, I wondered what they’d do if I left them together. Try to sing each other to death?

‘No,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow perhaps.’

We sat on the balcony together, glasses at our elbows, and talked the afternoon away.

She told me little about herself, but I gathered that her father had been a mining engineer in Peru and her mother a dancer at a Lima vu-tavern. They’d wandered from deposit to deposit, the father digging his concessions, the mother signing on at the nearest bordello to pay the rent.

‘She only sang, of course,’ Jane added. ‘Until my father came.’ She blew bubbles into her glass. ‘So you think I give them what they want at the Casino. By the way, what do you see?’

‘I’m afraid I’m your one failure,’ I said. ‘Nothing. Except you.’

She dropped her eyes. ‘That sometimes happens,’ she said. ‘I’m glad this time.’

A million suns pounded inside me. Until then I’d been reserving judgment on myself.

Harry and Tony were polite, if disappointed.

‘I can’t believe it,’ Harry said sadly. ‘I won’t. How did you do it?’

‘That mystical left-handed approach, of course,’ I told him. ‘All ancient seas and dark wells.’

‘What’s she like?’ Tony asked eagerly. ‘I mean, does she burn or just tingle?’

Jane sang at the Casino every night from eleven to three, but apart from that I suppose we were always together. Sometimes in the late afternoons we’d drive out along the beach to the Scented Desert and sit alone by one of the pools, watching the sun fall away behind the reefs and hills, lulling ourselves on the rose-sick air. When the wind began to blow cool across the sand we’d slip down into the water, bathe ourselves and drive back to town, filling the streets and café terraces with jasmine and musk-rose and helianthemum.

On other evenings we’d go down to one of the quiet bars at Lagoon West, and have supper out on the flats, and Jane would tease the waiters and sing honeybirds and angelcakes to the children who came in across the sand to watch her.

I realize now that I must have achieved a certain notoriety along the beach, but I didn’t mind giving the old women – and beside Jane they all seemed to be old women – something to talk about. During the Recess no one cared very much about anything, and for that reason I never questioned myself too closely over my affair with Jane Ciracylides. As I sat on the balcony with her looking out over the cool early evenings or felt her body glowing beside me in the darkness I allowed myself few anxieties.

Absurdly, the only disagreement I ever had with her was over her cheating.

I remember that I once taxed her with it.

‘Do you know you’ve taken over five hundred dollars from me, Jane? You’re still doing it. Even now!’

She laughed impishly. ‘Do I cheat? I’ll let you win one day.’

‘But why do you?’ I insisted.

‘It’s more fun to cheat,’ she said. ‘Otherwise it’s so boring.’

‘Where will you go when you leave Vermilion Sands?’ I asked her.

She looked at me in surprise. ‘Why do you say that? I don’t think I shall ever leave.’

‘Don’t tease me, Jane. You’re a child of another world than this.’

‘My father came from Peru,’ she reminded me.

‘But you didn’t get your voice from him,’ I said. ‘I wish I could have heard your mother sing. Had she a better voice than yours, Jane?’

‘She thought so. My father couldn’t stand either of us.’

That was the evening I last saw Jane. We’d changed, and in the half an hour before she left for the Casino we sat on the balcony and I listened to her voice, like a spectral fountain, pour its luminous notes into the air. The music remained with me even after she’d gone, hanging faintly in the darkness around her chair.

I felt curiously sleepy, almost sick on the air she’d left behind, and at 11.30, when I knew she’d be appearing on stage at the Casino, I went out for a walk along the beach.

As I left the elevator I heard music coming from the shop.

At first I thought I’d left one of the audio switches on, but I knew the voice only too well.

The windows of the shop had been shuttered, so I got in through the passage which led from the garage courtyard round at the back of the apartment house.

The lights had been turned out, but a brilliant glow filled the shop, throwing a golden fire on to the tanks along the counters. Across the ceiling liquid colours danced in reflection.

The music I had heard before, but only in overture.

The Arachnid had grown to three times its size. It towered nine feet high out of the shattered lid of the control tank, leaves tumid and inflamed, its calyx as large as a bucket, raging insanely.

Arched forwards into it, her head thrown back, was Jane.

I ran over to her, my eyes filling with light, and grabbed her arm, trying to pull her away from it.

‘Jane!’ I shouted over the noise. ‘Get down!’

She flung my hand away. In her eyes, fleetingly, was a look of shame.

While I was sitting on the stairs in the entrance Tony and Harry drove up.

‘Where’s Jane?’ Harry asked. ‘Has anything happened to her? We were down at the Casino.’ They both turned towards the music. ‘What the hell’s going on?’

Tony peered at me suspiciously. ‘Steve, anything wrong?’

Harry dropped the bouquet he was carrying and started towards the rear entrance.

‘Harry!’ I shouted after him. ‘Get back!’

Tony held my shoulder. ‘Is Jane in there?’

I caught them as they opened the door into the shop.

‘Good God!’ Harry yelled. ‘Let go of me, you fool!’ He struggled to get away from me. ‘Steve, it’s trying to kill her!’

I jammed the door shut and held them back.

I never saw Jane again. The three of us waited in my apartment. When the music died away we went down and found the shop in darkness. The Arachnid had shrunk to its normal size.

The next day it died.

Where Jane went to I don’t know. Not long afterwards the Recess ended, and the big government schemes came along and started up all the clocks and kept us too busy working off the lost time to worry about a few bruised petals. Harry told me that Jane had been seen on her way through Red Beach, and I heard recently that someone very like her was doing the nightclubs this side out of Pernambuco.

So if any of you around here keep a choro-florist’s, and have a Khan-Arachnid orchid, look out for a golden-skinned woman with insects for eyes. Perhaps she’ll play i-Go with you, and I’m sorry to have to say it, but she’ll always cheat.

Every afternoon during the summer at Ciraquito we play the screen game. After lunch today, when the arcades and café terraces were empty and everyone was lying asleep indoors, three of us drove out in Raymond Mayo’s Lincoln along the road to Vermilion Sands.

The season had ended, and already the desert had begun to move in again for the summer, drifting against the yellowing shutters of the cigarette kiosks, surrounding the town with immense banks of luminous ash. Along the horizon the flat-topped mesas rose into the sky like the painted cones of a volcano jungle. The beachhouses had been empty for weeks, and abandoned sand-yachts stood in the centre of the lakes, embalmed in the opaque heat. Only the highway showed any signs of activity, the motion sculpture of concrete ribbon unfolding across the landscape.

Twenty miles from Ciraquito, where the highway forks to Red Beach and Vermilion Sands, we turned on to the remains of an old gravel track that ran away among the sand reefs. Only a year earlier this had been a well-kept private road, but the ornamental gateway lay collapsed to one side, and the guardhouse was a nesting place for scorpions and sand-rays.

Few people ever ventured far up the road. Continuous rock slides disturbed the area, and large sections of the surface had slipped away into the reefs. In addition a curious but unmistakable atmosphere of menace hung over the entire zone, marking it off from the remainder of the desert. The hanging galleries of the reefs were more convoluted and sinister, like the tortured demons of medieval cathedrals. Massive towers of obsidian reared over the roadway like stone gallows, their cornices streaked with iron-red dust. The light seemed duller, unlike the rest of the desert, occasionally flaring into a sepulchral glow as if some subterranean fire-cloud had boiled to the surface of the rocks. The surrounding peaks and spires shut out the desert plain, and the only sounds were the echoes of the engine growling among the hills and the piercing cries of the sand-rays wheeling over the open mouths of the reefs like hieratic birds.

For half a mile we followed the road as it wound like a petrified snake above the reefs, and our conversation became more sporadic and fell away entirely, resuming only when we began our descent through a shallow valley. A few abstract sculptures stood by the roadside. Once these were sonic, responding to the slipstream of a passing car with a series of warning vibratos, but now the Lincoln passed them unrecognized.

Abruptly, around a steep bend, the reefs and peaks vanished, and the wide expanse of an inland sand-lake lay before us, the great summer house of Lagoon West on its shore. Fragments of light haze hung over the dunes like untethered clouds. The tyres cut softly through the cerise sand, and soon we were overrunning what appeared to be the edge of an immense chessboard of black and white marble squares. More statues appeared, some buried to their heads, others toppled from their plinths by the drifting dunes.

Looking out at them this afternoon, I felt, not for the first time, that the whole landscape was compounded of illusion, the hulks of fabulous dreams drifting across it like derelict galleons. As we followed the road towards the lake, the huge wreck of Lagoon West passed us slowly on our left. Its terraces and balconies were deserted, and the once marble-white surface was streaked and lifeless. Staircases ended abruptly in midflight, and the floors hung like sagging marquees.

In the centre of the terrace the screens stood where we had left them the previous afternoon, their zodiacal emblems flashing like serpents. We walked across to them through the hot sunlight. For the next hour we played the screen game, pushing the screens along their intricate pathways, advancing and retreating across the smooth marble floor.

No one watched us, but once, fleetingly, I thought I saw a tall figure in a blue cape hidden in the shadows of a second-floor balcony.

‘Emerelda!’

On a sudden impulse I shouted to her, but almost without moving she had vanished among the hibiscus and bougainvillaea. As her name echoed away among the dunes I knew that we had made our last attempt to lure her from the balcony.

‘Paul.’ Twenty yards away, Raymond and Tony had reached the car. ‘Paul, we’re leaving.’

Turning my back to them, I looked up at the great bleached hulk of Lagoon West leaning into the sunlight. Somewhere, along the shore of the sand-lake, music was playing faintly, echoing among the exposed quartz veins. A few isolated chords at first, the fragments hung on the afternoon air, the sustained tremolos suspended above my head like the humming of invisible insects.

As the phrases coalesced, I remembered when we had first played the screen game at Lagoon West. I remembered the last tragic battle with the jewelled insects, and I remembered Emerelda Garland…

I first saw Emerelda Garland the previous summer, shortly after the film company arrived in Ciraquito and was invited by Charles Van Stratten to use the locations at Lagoon West. The company, Orpheus Productions, Inc. – known to the aficionados of the café terraces such as Raymond Mayo and Tony Sapphire as the ‘ebb tide of the new wave’ – was one of those experimental units whose output is destined for a single rapturous showing at the Cannes Film Festival, and who rely for their financial backing on the generosity of the many millionaire dilettantes who apparently feel a compulsive need to cast themselves in the role of Lorenzo de Medici.

Not that there was anything amateurish about the equipment and technical resources of Orpheus Productions. The fleet of location trucks and recording studios which descended on Ciraquito on one of those empty August afternoons looked like the entire D-Day task force, and even the more conservative estimates of the budget for
Aphrodite 80
, the film we helped to make at Lagoon West, amounted to at least twice the gross national product of a Central American republic. What was amateurish was the indifference to normal commercial restraints, and the unswerving dedication to the highest aesthetic standards.

All this, of course, was made possible by the largesse of Charles Van Stratten. To begin with, when we were first co-opted into
Aphrodite 80
, some of us were inclined to be amused by Charles’s naive attempts to produce a masterpiece, but later we all realized that there was something touching about Charles’s earnestness. None of us, however, was aware of the private tragedy which drove him on through the heat and dust of that summer at Lagoon West, and the grim nemesis waiting behind the canvas floats and stage props.

At the time he became the sole owner of Orpheus Productions, Charles Van Stratten had recently celebrated his fortieth birthday, but to all intents he was still a quiet and serious undergraduate. A scion of one of the world’s wealthiest banking families, in his early twenties he had twice been briefly married, first to a Neapolitan countess, and then to a Hollywood starlet, but the most influential figure in Charles’s life was his mother. This domineering harridan, who sat like an immense ormolu spider in her sombre Edwardian mansion on Park Avenue, surrounded by dark galleries filled with Rubens and Rembrandt, had been widowed shortly after Charles’s birth, and obviously regarded Charles as providence’s substitute for her husband. Cunningly manipulating a web of trust funds and residuary legacies, she ruthlessly eliminated both Charles’s wives (the second committed suicide in a Venetian gondola, the first eloped with his analyst), and then herself died in circumstances of some mystery at the summer-house at Lagoon West.

Despite the immense publicity attached to the Van Stratten family, little was ever known about the old dowager’s death – officially she tripped over a second-floor balcony – and Charles retired completely from the limelight of international celebrity for the next five years. Now and then he would emerge briefly at the Venice Biennale, or serve as co-sponsor of some cultural foundation, but otherwise he retreated into the vacuum left by his mother’s death. Rumour had it – at least in Ciraquito – that Charles himself had been responsible for her quietus, as if revenging (how long overdue!) the tragedy of Oedipus, when the dowager, scenting the prospect of a third liaison, had descended like Jocasta upon Lagoon West and caught Charles and his paramour
in flagrante
.

Much as I liked the story, the first glimpse of Charles Van Stratten dispelled the possibility. Five years after his mother’s death, Charles still behaved as if she were watching his every movement through tripod-mounted opera glasses on some distant balcony. His youthful figure was a little more portly, but his handsome aristocratic face, its strong jaw belied by an indefinable weakness around the mouth, seemed somehow daunted and indecisive, as if he lacked complete conviction in his own identity.

Shortly after the arrival in Ciraquito of Orpheus Productions, the property manager visited the cafés in the artists’ quarters, canvassing for scenic designers. Like most of the painters in Ciraquito and Vermilion Sands, I was passing through one of my longer creative pauses. I had stayed on in the town after the season ended, idling away the long, empty afternoons under the awning at the Café Fresco, and was already showing symptoms of beach fatigue – irreversible boredom and inertia. The prospect of actual work seemed almost a novelty.

’Aphrodite 80
,’ Raymond Mayo explained when he returned to our table after a kerb-side discussion. ‘The whole thing reeks of integrity – they want local artists to paint the flats, large abstract designs for the desert backgrounds. They’ll pay a dollar per square foot.’

‘That’s rather mean,’ I commented.

‘The property manager apologized, but Van Stratten is a millionaire – money means nothing to him. If it’s any consolation, Raphael and Michelangelo were paid a smaller rate for the Sistine Chapel.’

‘Van Stratten has a bigger budget,’ Tony Sapphire reminded him. ‘Besides, the modern painter is a more complex type, his integrity needs to be buttressed by substantial assurances. Is Paul a painter in the tradition of Leonardo and Larry Rivers, or a cut-price dauber?’

Moodily we watched the distant figure of the property manager move from café to café.

‘How many square feet do they want?’ I asked.

‘About a million,’ Raymond said.

Later that afternoon, as we turned off the Red Beach road and were waved on past the guardhouse to Lagoon West, we could hear the sonic sculptures high among the reefs echoing and hooting to the calvacade of cars speeding over the hills. Droves of startled rays scattered in the air like clouds of exploding soot, their frantic cries lost among the spires and reefs. Preoccupied by the prospect of our vast fees – I had hastily sworn in Tony and Raymond as my assistants – we barely noticed the strange landscape we were crossing, the great gargoyles of red basalt that uncoiled themselves into the air like the spires of demented cathedrals. From the Red Beach – Vermilion Sands highway – the hills seemed permanently veiled by the sand haze, and Lagoon West, although given a brief notoriety by the death of Mrs Van Stratten, remained isolated and unknown. From the beach-houses on the southern shore of the sand-lake two miles away, the distant terraces and tiered balconies of the summer-house could just be seen across the fused sand, jutting into the cerise evening sky like a stack of dominoes. There was no access to the house along the beach. Quartz veins cut deep fissures into the surface, the reefs of ragged sandstone reared into the air like the rusting skeletons of forgotten ships.

The whole of Lagoon West was a continuous slide area. Periodically a soft boom would disturb the morning silence as one of the galleries of compacted sand, its intricate grottoes and colonnades like an inverted baroque palace, would suddenly dissolve and avalanche gently into the internal precipice below. Most years Charles Van Stratten was away in Europe, and the house was believed to be empty. The only sound the occupants of the beach villas would hear was the faint music of the sonic sculptures carried across the lake by the thermal rollers.

It was to this landscape, with its imperceptible transition between the real and the superreal, that Charles Van Stratten had brought the camera crews and location vans of Orpheus Productions, Inc. As the Lincoln joined the column of cars moving towards the summer-house, we could see the great canvas hoardings, at least two hundred yards wide and thirty feet high, which a team of construction workers was erecting among the reefs a quarter of a mile from the house. Decorated with abstract symbols, these would serve as backdrops to the action, and form a fragmentary labyrinth winding in and out of the hills and dunes.

One of the large terraces below the summer-house served as a parking lot, and we made our way through the unloading crews to where a group of men in crocodile-skin slacks and raffia shirts – then the uniform of avant-garde film men – were gathered around a heavily jowled man like a perspiring bear who was holding a stack of script boards under one arm and gesticulating wildly with the other. This was Orson Kanin, director of
Aphrodite 80
and co-owner with Charles Van Stratten of Orpheus Productions. Sometime
enfant terrible
of the futurist cinema, but now a portly barrel-stomached fifty, Kanin had made his reputation some twenty years earlier with
Blind Orpheus
, a neo-Freudian, horror-film version of the Greek legend. According to Kanin’s interpretation, Orpheus deliberately breaks the taboo and looks Eurydice in the face because he wants to be rid of her; in a famous nightmare sequence which projects his unconscious loathing, he becomes increasingly aware of something cold and strange about his resurrected wife, and finds that she is a disintegrating corpse.

As we joined the periphery of the group, a characteristic Kanin script conference was in full swing, a non-stop pantomime of dramatized incidents from the imaginary script, anecdotes, salary promises and bad puns, all delivered in a rich fruity baritone. Sitting on the balustrade beside Kanin was a handsome, youthful man with a sensitive face whom I recognized to be Charles Van Stratten. Now and then,
sotto voce
, he would interject some comment that would be noted by one of the secretaries and incorporated into Kanin’s monologue.