write to summon her. She drifts up through
the page, swimming in words: first mist, as the letters that I
have so recently inscribed begin to blur and dim, shadowy in the
flicker of the lamp. Then the air above the page starts to
curdle and congeal. Her eyes are always the first to appear,
black as a nightjar's wing, rimmed with kohl. She knows how
little I can resist those eyes. She murmurs that all I need to
do is to stop writing, stop drinking, and then she cannot come.
But she knows, too, that I cannot stop.
* * * * *
The house is old. The current building is, so my patron told me,
Venetian, but the cellars are clearly more ancient: great blocks
of roughly cut marble, cool as snow in the summer, but icy to
the touch when the winter storms reach the Cyclades to lash up
the straits around the island and whip the olives into leafless
frenzy. I do not like to venture into the cold shadows of the
cellar in winter, but I am obliged to do so, for that is where
the wine is kept, and without the wine, I can no longer write.
My host and patron, whose name must not be revealed, was most
particular on the subject of wine, as befits a Venetian and an
aristocrat, no matter how far he may have fallen.
"You have my permission to broach any of the reds," he
instructed me when I first arrived, indicating the racks of
dusty bottles with a sweep of a languid hand. "Many are old
vintages, laid down by my ancestors in the last century, from
our vineyards here on Naxos. There is no limit to what you may
touch. Also, here - the rose, with which you may care to refresh
your palate. But these - the whites - these you must leave
alone."
I replied that this was in perfect accordance with my tastes,
which did not - as far as the matter of wine was concerned - run
to the light and delicate, but to the broodier heaviness of
claret and port. I explained this to my patron and thought that
I detected a distant flicker, deep within his gaze, of something
that I could not identify.
He said, "And your work - the stories, the poems... do these,
too, mirror darkness and blood, sweat and senses, rather than
the delicate, the pretty and the refined?"
I forced a laugh, answering, "That depends entirely upon your
own - predilections. If your literary desires are directed
toward the saltiness of the lash, seaweed odours, of musk and
pain, then I shall take care to tailor my work accordingly. But
if you prefer oblique imagery, the flutter of petticoats and the
revelation of an ankle, then this is what I shall take care to
give you."
In response, I received only a chilly, complicit smile. He
turned to go, then turned back. "You know why I have been
confined here, why I can never be permitted to leave, why I must
have some outlet, at least, for my desires?"
I nodded. I knew very well. The trial had been sensational and
its outcome had even reached London. I remembered reading a
pamphlet that depicted the case: the sketch of the woman, her
ruined face concealed behind the betraying charity of a veil,
had haunted my imagination for days. When I received the
invitation from the man who was to become my patron, I could not
resist. At summer's end I took a carriage for the swelter of
Athens, then a packet from Piraeus to Naxos. A mule, led by my
patron's ancient retainer, brought me here to the house named
the Khora.
Legend says that it was upon this island that Theseus abandoned
Ariadne, leaving her for another. I thought of her sleeping on a
summer shore, waking to find her lover gone...I thought of how
angry she must have been. But it was only a story, nothing more.
My first sight of the Khora was through seaspray and storm, a
shaft of sunlight striking down through the flying foam to
illuminate the mansion in a watery haze. High on the cliffs, a
graceful crumble, it seemed an unlikely prison. Now, of course,
I know better.
* * * * *
When I arrived, it was some time before I found myself able to
set pen to paper. The season did not help: it was, as I have
indicated, a time of storms. After the heat of the summer, such
an atmosphere was not conducive to the writing of erotica. After
a week, however, during which my patron grew increasingly
restless, the weather settled down into a false idyll of
cloudless days and chilly nights. Then, in a room lined with
crimson stained-glass windows and the stifling heat of a
brazier, I was finally able to work.
Fuelled by the fire of the reds from the cellar, I gave my
patron what he wanted. The first few pages, which I had taken
care to steep in a sultry atmosphere of violence and anguish,
were rejected for being 'too pretty.' I gritted my teeth and
recalled with an almost hallucinatory vividness the transcripts
of the trial: the details that had so clearly been omitted, the
lines between which I was forced to read, the torment driven by
a patient and watchful calculation. It was not, let us say, to
my own tastes, but the results were pronounced by my patron to
verge on acceptability.
I found myself drinking more and more of the claret, resulting
each morning in a head stuffed with cotton wool, a mouth filled
with mossy velvet, a feeling of claustrophobic malaise. Every
time I ventured into the cellar I became increasingly aware of
the rack of the whites, cool and luminous, seeming to beckon
from the edges of my vision.
Eventually, I began to dream of those pale, forbidden wines. At
first, the dream came once a night, a clockwork nightmare.
A slender girl, dressed in white, stood beside a pond among a
gnarled tangle of vines. She regarded me gravely, with no
discernible emotion, then reached out and plucked a single lily
- moon-coloured and tinged with pink - from the depths of the
pond. She took it in her hands and wrung its wan neck, then
crushed the petals. A bead of moisture dripped into a bronze jar
that stood at the fountain's rim.
Each time I awoke, feverish and damp, on the brink of climax. I
became obsessed with the identity of the girl, certain that she
was real. The dream began to prey upon me. I was sure that it
was connected to my desire for the white wines. Moreover, I was
awaking every morning with a pounding, thunderous headache, the
onset of some inner storm. I forced myself to give up drinking
for three long days and did not write so much as a word. My
patron's thin Venetian mouth began to grow narrow, like a
lizard's before the sudden quick snap of the tongue.
And so it was that, on the evening of the fourth day, I took the
long, chilly flight of stone steps down to the wine cellar and
laid my trembling hand upon a bottle of the white.
I did not know what I half-expected to happen: perhaps a shriek
to ring out, or a great bell begin to toll. Needless to say,
nothing of the kind occurred. I stood in the clammy depths of
the cellar, clasping an innocent bottle of wine.
Making sure that my patron had been bolted into his rooms for
the night, I took the wine back up to my room and set it upon
the desk. It seemed almost to glow within the dusty glass and I
glanced up at the window, expecting to see the moon. But the
night was starless, coated with cloud. Taking hold of the
bottle, I uncorked it with difficulty. There was a sound like a
sigh as the cork finally pulled free. I poured a glass of the
vintage. It was a very pale gold, like the petals of the
marguerites that filled the ruined garden, but it smelled
strange: a musky, subtle odour that I could not identify. It
occurred to me that the bottles had been left there for too
long, the wine had spoiled, and this was why I had been
forbidden to touch it. But in that case, why had my patron not
simply remarked upon it? I took a cautious sip. My mouth filled
with fire. I gasped, and the wine slid down my throat with an
oystery smoothness, leaving exhilaration in its wake. The next
sip tasted of molten gold, warming me from head to toe. The wine
had not spoiled. It was a superb vintage, a world away from the
heavy ports and clarets, and I felt then that I had never truly
tasted wine before.
Sitting down at the desk, I started to write with a feverish
burn of inspiration, aroused to a degree to which - jaded as I
perhaps was - I had become unaccustomed. In the early hours of
the morning, the latest pages complete, I fell back exhausted
onto the bed.
Next day, I slipped the pages beneath my patron's door. He
retired to his rooms and I did not see him again until the early
evening. He came to find me in the kitchen, eyes alight. I had
rarely seen him so animated.
"Magnificent," was all that he said. "More." Turning on his
heel, he strode from the room, which was just as well. I felt
that my face flamed with guilt: the forbidden wine rising like
thin and delicate blood in my veins. But the prospect of some
unknown penalty was hardly enough to act as a preventative.
Later that evening, I retrieved another bottle from the cellar
and settled down to work. It was not until I took the first
astonishing sip that I realised something: last night had been
the first night for a week in which I had not experienced the
dream. It was as though the wine had burned it away.
I worked like this for three days, and although I drank twice as
much again as I had imbibed of the reds, I did not suffer from
the same heaviness on the following morning. Instead, I felt
filled with a light, blazing clarity of vision, as in the
aftermath of sickness when a precarious health is starting to
return. I felt like a hollow reed, through which the breeze of
inspiration has no choice but to travel.
And then she came.
* * * * *
It was on the fourth evening after I had first discovered the
whites. The autumnal storms had scoured the coast clean and the
sky was cloudless. A thin new moon rose in the west, hanging low
over the distant bulk of the islands. There was a purity about
the night, somehow, and this provided me with added inspiration.
I sat at my desk, and wrote, and drank, and wrote some more. The
moon sank down. Beyond the window, all was silent apart from the
sudden sharp cry of a vixen, across the water. It startled me
and I glanced up from the page.
She was there in the window, reflected behind the circle of
lamplight. At first, I could see nothing but two dark eyes,
wells of blackness against the night. I thought I was imagining
it. Then I looked back. The eyes were below mine, hanging in the
air just above the page, gazing at me. I stumbled up. She began
to take form from the page, the words that I had so recently
inscribed swimming up from the parchment in inky veils, until
she stood before me in a luminous swathe of indigo. It concealed
her as greatly as any Persian maiden: I could see nothing of her
face except her eyes. But gradually, one by one, the veils began
to peel away. I could see individual words and phrases, dropping
like petals to the floor and fading into ash.
She reached out a pale hand and beckoned. Tottering, nothing
more than a puppet, I went forward with the wine firing my
veins.
I do not remember much of what happened next, but it does not
really matter, for when I woke, or came round, that morning, I
found that details of what I vaguely recalled as our encounter
had been written down. I read through it with arousal and
longing and shame. I had never done such things before, and some
of them I had never imagined. But I gave the account to my
patron anyway, with some small adjustments.
"It is the best you have written yet," he hissed at me, the next
evening.
"More like this, do you hear me? More!"
Despite the taint that now clung to me, faint as the breath of
wine from a freshly opened bottle, I needed little urging. Once
more I raided the rack of the whites, and once more, she came.
I spent the nights with her murmur in my ear, her voice echoing
about the room like the sound of the sea.
"Do me justice," she hissed and whispered. "Justice, for me..."
And at last I thought I knew who she must be, and what I must
accomplish on her behalf. I began to make plans.
* * * * *
Of course, however, it could not go on. The wine was not
limitless, after all, and it was only a matter of time before
the loss would be noted. My patron came to me in a rage, on a
day not long before the winter solstice.
"The whites!"
"What of them?" I asked, as indifferently as I could, though it
was pointless to deny it, since a bottle of the wine stood on
the table between us with its lambent, betraying glow.
"You know perfectly well!" He raised a hand, but before he could
strike, I caught him by the arm.
"Do not touch me! Do you think I am no more than a girl? No more
than her, whom you so abused? Whose spirit talks to me in the
darkness? The ghost of the girl you tortured, murdered, raped?"
His thin mouth tightened. "'No more than her', you say? Oh, but
I think you are much, much more." Wrenching his arm free from my
grasp, a tiny knife appeared from his sleeve. "You really
believe that she is the ghost of the girl I murdered? You truly
think that? Then think again...But I see that my mistress has
already made her mark upon you." His face contorted with a
jealousy that I did not, at that moment, understand. "Let me,
then, make mine."
I felt a razor's slash across my cheek. I snatched at the bottle
and clubbed him with it. He reeled back, and I struck again. The
bottle shattered into a hundred pieces. Each drop of the
remaining wine seemed to catch the light as it flew outward. I
held a shard of glass and I did not stop. I sliced at his
throat, until the red drops mingled with the white. It would
make, I thought later as I looked down upon the mess, a perfect
rose if one could only bottle it.
* * * * *
I buried his corpse beneath the flagstones of the Khora. I did
not think he would be greatly mourned or even missed, but there
might have been awkward questions on the part of the old
retainer. With him, I took the time to be a little more
creative. It seemed the right thing to do, though I could not
have said why.
Now, it is still the depths of winter. The storms confine me to
the house, but soon it will be spring. I have had to be a little
sparing with the wine, but once the warmer weather comes, I
shall seek out the lily-filled vineyards of Naxos, island of
dark goddesses, of abandoned, angry Ariadne, and insist upon a
further pressing. I think that it will soon be time for
something more adventurous than erotic literature. I think that
I have written enough.