Sexing the Cherry (5 page)

I used to get up an hour early and comb my hair, which normally I would do only at Christmas-time in honour of our Saviour. I decked myself in my best clothes like a bullock at a fair, but none of this made him notice me and I felt my heart shrivel to the size of a pea. Whenever he turned his back to leave I always stretched out my hand to hold him a moment, but his shoulder-blades were too sharp to touch. I drew his image in the dirt by my bed and named all my mother's chickens after him.

Eventually I decided that true love must be clean love and I boiled myself a cake of soap...

I hate to wash, for it exposes the skin to contamination. I follow the habit of King James, who only ever washed his fingertips and yet was pure in heart enough to give us the Bible in good English.

I hate to wash, but knowing it to be a symptom of love I was not surprised to find myself creeping towards the pump in the dead of night like a ghoul to a tomb. I had determined to cleanse all of my clothes, my underclothes and myself. I did this in one passage by plying at the pump handle, first with my right arm and washing my left self, then with my left arm and washing my right self. When I was so drenched that to wring any part of me left a puddle at my feet I waited outside the baker's until she began her work and sat myself by the ovens until morning. I had a white coating from the flour, but that served to make my swarthy skin more fair.

In this new state I presented myself to my loved one, who graced me with all of his teeth at once and swore that if only he could reach my mouth he would kiss me there and then. I swept him from his feet and said, 'Kiss me now,' and closed my eyes for the delight. I kept them closed for some five minutes and then, opening them to see what had happened, I saw that he had fainted dead away. I carried him to the pump that had last seen my devotion and doused him good and hard, until he came to, wriggling like a trapped fox, and begged me let him down.

'What is it?' I cried. 'Is it love for me that affects you so?'

'No,' he said. 'It is terror.'

I saw him a few months later in another part of town with a pretty jade on his arm and his face as bright as ever.

In the morning the young girl, whose name was Zillah, told me she had been locked in this tower since her birth.

This is not a tower,' I said. 'It is a house of some stature but nothing more.'

'No,' she said. 'You are mistaken. Go to the window.'

I did as she asked, and looked down a few feet over a street setting up for market. Women in leather aprons were piling radishes on wooden stalls, a priest was blessing a cargo of Holy Relics, while a saintly man, come early, was arguing over the price of a rib.

It was a fine morning; the air smelt of lemons.

As I looked down a stallholder turned his face and stared directly at me. I waved and smiled but he gave no sign of recognition. It did not trouble me; people are nervous of strangers.

'Is it not terrifying?' said Zillah.

Then I knew she must be having a game with me and I went and pulled her to the window.

'Come and see this steeple of radishes.'

She was silent. I noticed how pale her face was, and that her eyes were unnaturally bright. I leaned over to point out anything that might please her but the words stuck to the roof of my mouth. She was gazing down. I followed her gaze, down and further down. We were at the top of a sheer-built tower. The stone cylinder fell without relief to a platform of bitter rocks smashed by foaming waves. The coastline winding away was desolate of living things. No hut or sheepfold broke the line of tangled rosemary bushes. There was nothing but the wind and the slate-blue sea.

She pulled away from me and went to sit down on the bed.

With my back to the window I asked her what it was that kept her here.

'It is myself,' she said. 'Only myself.'

It was then I realized the room had no door.

'Is there anything for me to eat?' I asked her.

She smiled, leaned under the bed and pulled out two rats by their tails.

She laughed, and walked towards me, the rats in each hand. Her eyes were clouding over, her eyes were disappearing. I could smell her breath like cheese in muslin.

I did not think of my life; I somersaulted out of the window and landed straight in the pile of radishes.

The woman in the leather apron hit me over the head, but someone behind her, pulling her off, took me by the shoulders and urged me to tell him where I had come from so suddenly.

'From the tower,' I said, pointing upwards.

The market stopped its bustle and all fell to the ground and made the sign of the cross. The purveyor of Holy Relics hung a set of martyrs' teeth round his neck and sprinkled me with the dust of St Anthony.

The story was a terrible one.

A young girl caught incestuously with her sister was condemned to build her own death tower. To prolong her life she built it as high as she could, winding round and round with the stones in an endless stairway. When there were no stones left she sealed the room and the village, driven mad by her death cries, evacuated to a far-off spot where no one could hear her. Many years later the tower had been demolished by a foreigner who had built the house I saw in its place. Slowly the village had returned, but not the foreigner, nor anyone else, could live in the house. At night the cries were too loud.

The villagers were kind to me, and I helped them through the day with their stalls of exotic fruit and speckled fish, and at night the men filled their pipes and sat on the sea wall and asked me where I had come from, and why.

I did not tell them the strange means of my arrival, but I explained the destination of my heart.

The world is full of dancers,' said one, blowing the smoke in circles round my head.

'And you have seen this one only by night,' said another.

'And escaping down a wall,' said his wife, who was scraping crabmeat into a pot.

The philosopher of the village warned me that love is better ignored than explored, for it is easier to track a barnacle goose than to follow the trajectories of the heart.

There followed a discourse on love, some of which I will reveal to you.

On the one side there were those who claimed that love, if it be allowed at all, must be kept tame by marriage vows and family ties so that its fiery heat warms the hearth but does not burn down the house.

On the other there were those who believed that only passion freed the soul from its mud-hut, and that only by loosing the heart like a coursing hare and following it until sundown could a man or woman sleep quietly at night.

The school of heaviness, who would tie down love, took as their examples those passages of ancient literature which promise that those driven by desire, the lightest of things, suffer under weights they cannot bear. Weights far more terrible than to accept from the start that passion must spend its life in chains.

What of the woman who finds herself turning into a lotus tree as she flees her ardent lover? Her feet are rooted to the earth, soft bark creeps up her legs and little by little enfolds her groin.

When she tries to tear her hair her hands are full of leaves.

What of Orpheus, who pursues his passion through the gates of Hell, only to fail at the last moment and to lose the common presence of his beloved?

And Actaeon, whose desire for Artemis turns him into a stag and leaves him torn to pieces by his own dogs?

These things are so, and may be laid out in a solemn frieze to run round the edges of the world.

Then I stood up and reminded the company of Penelope, who through her love for one man refused the easy compromise of a gilded kingdom and unravelled by night the woven weight of a day's work to leave her hands empty again in the morning.

And of Sappho, who rather than lose her lover to a man flung herself from the windy cliffs and turned her body into a bird.

It is well known that those in the grip of heavy enchantments can be wakened only by a lover's touch. Those who seem dead, who are already returning to the earth, can be restored to life, quickened again by one who is warm.

Then, it being night, and the twin stars of Castor and Pollux just visible in the sky, I spoke of that tragedy, of two brothers whose love we might find unnatural, so stricken in grief when one was killed that the other, begging for his life again, accepted instead that for half the year one might live, and for the rest of the year the other, but never the two together. So it is for us, who while on earth in these suits of lead sense the presence of one we love, not far away but too far to touch.

The villagers were silent and one by one began to move away, each in their own thoughts. A woman brushed my hair back with her hand. I stayed where I was with my shoulders against the rough sea wall and asked myself what I hadn't asked the others.

Was I searching for a dancer whose name I did not know or was I searching for the dancing part of myself?

Night.

In the dark and in the water I weigh nothing at all. I have no vanity but I would enjoy the consolation of a lover's face. After my only excursion into love I resolved never to make a fool of myself again. I was offered a job in a whore-house but I turned it down on account of my frailty of heart. Surely such to-ing and fro-ing as must go on night and day weakens the heart and inclines it to love? Not directly, you understand, but indirectly, for lust without romantic matter must be wearisome after a time. I asked a girl at the Spitalfields house about it and she told me that she hates her lovers-by-the-hour but still longs for someone to come in a coach and feed her on mince-pies.

Where do they come from, these insubstantial dreams?

As for Jordan, he has not my common sense and will no doubt follow his dreams to the end of the world and then fall straight off.

I cannot school him in love, having no experience, but I can school him in its lack and perhaps persuade him that there are worse things than loneliness.

A man accosted me on our way to Wimbledon and asked me if I should like to see him.

'I see you well enough, sir,' I replied.

'Not all of me,said he, and unbuttoned himself to show a thing much like a pea-pod.

'Touch it and it will grow,' he assured me. I did so, and indeed it did grow to look more like a cucumber.

'Wondrous, wondrous, wondrous,' he swooned, though I could see no reason for swooning.

Put it in your mouth,' he said. 'Yes, as you would a delicious thing to eat.'

I like to broaden my mind when I can and I did as he suggested, swallowing it up entirely and biting it off with a snap.

As I did so my eager fellow increased his swooning to the point of fainting away, and I, feeling both astonished by his rapture and disgusted by the leathery thing filling up my mouth, spat out what I had not eaten and gave it to one of my dogs.

The whore from Spitalfields had told me that men like to be consumed in the mouth, but it still seems to me a reckless act, for the member must take some time to grow again. None the less their bodies are their own, and I who know nothing of them must take instruction humbly, and if a man asks me to do the same again I'm sure I shall, though for myself I felt nothing.

In copulation, an act where the woman has a more pleasurable part, the member comes away in the great tunnel and creeps into the womb where it splits open after a time like a runner bean and deposits a little mannikin to grow in the rich soil. At least, so I am told by women who have become pregnant and must know their husbands' members as well as I do my own dogs.

When Jordan is older I will tell him what I know about the human body and urge him to be careful of his member. And yet it is not that part of him I fear for; it is his heart. His heart.

Here at Wimbledon we have a French gardener named Andre Mollet who has come specially to teach Tradescant the French ways with water fountains and parterres.

Like most Frenchmen he is more interested in his member than in his spade and has made amorous overtures to every woman on the estate, with the exception of myself. In honour of his tirelessness we are to have a stream shooting nine feet high with a silver ball balanced on the top. The cascading torrent will mingle with a wall of water like a hedge, dividing the fish-ponds from the peasantry.