"Describe, old man, your life for me. Life in the Cult of Virility." So he drew up with his left hand a red rosewood chair. The roses of Ovid, for they are the only roses that are red. It was with grace that he drew – perfection – the chair. Old slow movements. Old cogs. Old gears.
The old woman brought the wine and now the bread. The old man ate no meat. We drink wine, though it is too hot to drink wine, and think of sailing to the Indies. Sailing on salt and savage waves. Sailing on the Ornitottero. "For the wings of a Greek bird." Redtiles, moss, bamboo, the Indies.
He is a man. An old man granted, but a man none the less. He lives life but the thread he grasps grows thinner and thinner. Now a thread, soon a filament and then nothing. Nothing to speak of the man who sits now in a rosewood chair speaking of life. He speaks fondly of Kirsty.
"When she smiles," he says, "I bite into cherries and my soul is a bird. Freed. No longer trapped in the bastille of my body. Free to sail the oceans of the world. Persian capes and Mongol inlets. The Aegean Sea. While up above, I wheel and dive with the shorebirds of the Archipelago as they circle the linen sails."
His hand touches his capelin, his new linen sails.
"All women are flowers, all girls. I am married to a sunflower." The memory of his fecund wife, flushed with cheeks of roses, brings a grin to his weary face.
"When she talks," he says "I am a butterfly tossed upon the trade winds, floating upon a zephyr to a place where the roads are paved in gold." He thinks to when she was a Madonna in a dress of flowers. At a place where the grass grows up the stones, up the road. There were flowers in the grass like the flowers on her dress. She smiles, touching his foot with hers. He traces the buttons on her white shoes. She loosens her stays and sundress and shyly steps out of the frilly heap they make around her buttoned shoes.
After, they walk down over the stones, down the road. Bells ring for the nuns, for the girls. Then it is quiet. Gutta cavat lapidem.
He breaks the challah and hands it to me. The plaited bread, first given to him in Israel by a Chalutz when he worked the kibbutzim.
"It should only be consumed on the Sabbath" he whispers. Old shoulders shrug, "I care not. God will have His way."
He has no heir. He fell while climbing the ash, Yggdrasill. The old man found him lying atop a bronze fall of leaves. His beautiful face; white, his eyes, still open; crushed silver and spun glass. He cannot remember the day. Cannot, will not. He remembers, however, the perfume of resin and dust and old soil. He remembers the dark earth, moist beneath his bare feet. He remembers his sadness.
"I care not. God will have His way." Another glass of wine?
"Old men forget, and all shall be forgot." But he remembers.
He remembers what feats he and his falchion performed against the godless hordes that threatened to tread on the honour of Spain. A Yeoman of the Guard, the King's own. The officers sit in their leather saddles.
A bugle sounds and the ground soaks in crimson to match the scarlet flags. It is an old way with men. His scarlet, his crimson. He remembers bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots. He mended, but it wasn't the same.
"The birds," he says, "suffer their suffering in a lifetime, forgetting it as they endure. We remember suffering from years and years ago" Carpe diem. Then there is no time I say, no time but now.
"Not," he says, "if you can hear as I can the bugles and see the scarlet flags."
Those who scour the sea, change their sky not their mind. He set sail anyway, set sail through squalls in the Strait of Saccapane, through tempests of the Peninsula of Sirocco and through the soughing of his mind. The old man sailed to Gantima and the Isle of Tirkap, and then eastward out from Cesrin around the Cape of Onteer and back across the Atlantic. He sailed until the wind died. He sailed until the young man died and then, catching Favonian winds, he sailed westward to his home.
"Can you see," he asks gently, "can you see what it is to be a man?" I nod. "It is there to be seen." he says. That is the answer, I say. It is also the question.
