Then he was gliding through the indoor courtyard. He came into the kitchen and immediately sensed the dog in the dark, caught it and tied it with a rope to the table. He picked up the condensed milk from the kitchen shelf and returned to the glass room in the indoor courtyard. He ran his hands along the base of the door and found the small sticks leaning against it. He entered and closed the door behind him, at the last moment snaking his hand out to prop the sticks up against the door again. In case she had seen them. Then he climbed down into the well. There was a cross-plank three feet down he knew was firm. He closed the lid over himself and crouched there, imagining her searching for him or hiding herself. He began to suck at the can of condensed milk.
She suspected something like this from him. Having made her way to the library, she turned on the light on her arm and walked beside the bookcases that stretched from her ankles to unseen heights above her. The door was closed, so no light could reveal itself to anyone in the halls. He would be able to see the glow on the other side of the French doors only if he was outside. She paused every few feet, searching once again through the predominantly Italian books for the odd English one that she could present to the English patient. She had come to love these books dressed in their Italian spines, the frontispieces, the tipped-in colour illustrations with a covering of tissue, the smell of them, even the sound of the crack if you opened them too fast, as if breaking some minute unseen series of bones. She paused again.
Caravaggio lay on the carpet at the far end of the library. From his darkness it seemed that Hana’s left arm was raw phosphorus, lighting the books, reflecting redness onto her dark hair, burning against the cotton of her frock and its puffed sleeve at her shoulder.
He came out of the well.
The three-foot diameter of light spread from her arm and then was absorbed into blackness, so it felt to Caravaggio that there was a valley of darkness between them. She tucked the book with the brown cover under her right arm. As she moved, new books emerged and others disappeared.
She had grown older. And he loved her more now than he loved her when he had understood her better, when she was the product of her parents. What she was now was what she herself had decided to become. He knew that if he had passed Hana on a street in Europe she would have had a familiar air but he wouldn’t have recognized her. The night he had first come to the villa he had disguised his shock. Her ascetic face, which at first seemed cold, had a sharpness. He realized that during the last two months he had grown towards who she now was. He could hardly believe his pleasure at her translation. Years before, he had tried to imagine her as an adult but had invented someone with qualities moulded out of her community. Not this wonderful stranger he could love more deeply because she was made up of nothing he had provided.
She was lying on the sofa, had twisted the lamp inward so she could read, and had already fallen deep into the book. At some point later she looked up, listening, and quickly switched off the light.
Was she conscious of him in the room? Caravaggio was aware of the noisiness of his breath and the difficulty he was having breathing in an ordered, demure way. The light went on for a moment and then was quickly shut off again.
Then everything in the room seemed to be in movement but Caravaggio. He could hear it all around him, surprised he wasn’t touched. The boy was in the room. Caravaggio walked over to the sofa and placed his hand down towards Hana. She was not there. As he straightened up, an arm went around his neck and pulled him down backwards in a grip. A light glared harshly into his face, and there was a gasp from them both as they fell towards the floor. The arm with the light still holding him at the neck. Then a naked foot emerged into the light, moved past Caravaggio’s face and stepped onto the boy’s neck beside him. Another light went on.
The two bodies on the floor looked up at the dark outline of Hana above the light. She was singing it, “
Her foot pressed down harder onto the boy’s neck. “Give up.
Caravaggio began to shake within the boy’s grip, sweat already all over him, unable to struggle out. The glare of light from both lamps now on him. He somehow had to climb and crawl out of this terror.
They were in darkness again. “Where are you?” she asks. Then moves quickly. He positions himself so she bangs into his chest, and in this way slips her into his arms. She puts her hand to his neck, then her mouth to his mouth. “Condensed milk! During our contest? Condensed milk?” She puts her mouth at his neck, the sweat of it, tasting him where her bare foot had been. “I want to see you.” His light goes on and he sees her, her face streaked with dirt, her hair spiked up in a swirl from perspiration. Her grin towards him.
He puts his thin hands up into the loose sleeves of her dress and cups her shoulders with his hands. If she swerves now, his hands go with her. She begins to lean, puts all her weight into her fall backwards, trusting him to come with her, trusting his hands to break the fall. Then he will curl himself up, his feet in the air, just his hands and arms and his mouth on her, the rest of his body the tail of a mantis. The lamp is still strapped against the muscle and sweat of his left arm. Her face slips into the light to kiss and lick and taste. His forehead towelling itself in the wetness of her hair.
Then he is suddenly across the room, the bounce of his sapper lamp all over the place, in this room he has spent a week sweeping of all possible fuzes so it is now cleared. As if the room has now finally emerged from the war, is no longer a zone or territory. He moves with just the lamp, swaying his arm, revealing the ceiling, her laughing face as he passes her standing on the back of the sofa looking down at the glisten of his slim body. The next time he passes her he sees she is leaning down and wiping her arms on the skirt of her dress. “But I got you, I got you,” she chants. “I’m the Mohican of Danforth Avenue.”
Then she is riding on his back and her light swerves into the spines of books in the high shelves, her arms rising up and down as he spins her, and she dead-weights forward, drops and catches his thighs, then pivots off and is free of him, lying back on the old carpet, the smell of the past ancient rain still in it, the dust and grit on her wet arms. He bends down to her, she reaches out and clicks off his light. “I won, right?” He still has said nothing since he came into the room. His head goes into that gesture she loves which is partly a nod, partly a shake of possible disagreement. He cannot see her for the glare. He turns off her light so they are equal in darkness.
There is the one month in their lives when Hana and Kip sleep beside each other. A formal celibacy between them. Discovering that in lovemaking there can be a whole civilisation, a whole country ahead of them. The love of the idea of him or her. I don’t want to be fucked. I don’t want to fuck you. Where he had learned it or she had who knows, in such youth. Perhaps from Caravaggio, who had spoken to her during those evenings about his age, about the tenderness towards every cell in a lover that comes when you discover your mortality. This was, after all, a mortal age. The boy’s desire completed itself only in his deepest sleep while in the arms of Hana, his orgasm something more to do with the pull of the moon, a tug of his body by the night.
All evening his thin face lay against her ribs. She reminded him of the pleasure of being scratched, her fingernails in circles raking his back. It was something an ayah had taught him years earlier. All comfort and peace
