The Return of the Orange Virgin
by Rob Hunter
Oswaldo came to in a haystack. A square faced kindly-looking man with laugh
lines at his eyes and a bristly black mustache was handing him a flask.
"Here, try this. New arrivals are always disoriented. It helps."
Oswaldo took a swallow and gagged.
"Corn whiskey―make it myself. God only knows what the proof is." The man was
dressed in a turtleneck and blue cashmere blazer with patches at the elbows. He
reached over to recork the flask and took it from Oswaldo. "Blackburn. Paul
Blackburn. I admit to being a poet. You speak any Spanish?"
Oswaldo nodded through his spasms.
"Bueno, that will be of some help. I should have rightly asked if you knew any
Catalan, but nobody does these days, so I don't ask. Spanish is better than
French for getting by, though French is better than nothing. The lingo here is
Occitan, Old Provençal. At least as far as the middle of yon wheat field at
least. After that the Fata Morgana deals as she pleases."
"Fata Morgana..." The name the poet mentioned brought with it an evocation of
tarot decks, bayberry candles and juniper tea. The man was pleasant and not
overly effusive, but Oswaldo had a more immediate priority: bodily functions. He had
to pee. He was alive and his bladder was full.
The poet asked, "You have the usual impedimenta―a wife, children, on the Other
Side? Well, if you do, forget about them; the Fata Morgana has plans for them,
not you. We are hostages of compassion here. We are expected to have a jolly
good time while awaiting her pleasure, just lay about and decorate the
landscape. We are all going nowhere. This is a storage area, and we are none of
us ever to leave. And I'll bet you have to pee, too. That's the second thing new
arrivals have on their minds."
"I had made other plans," said Oswaldo.
"Plans," said the poet. "Ah yes, of course you have them. All our arrivals have.
Usually the first thing out of their mouths. There are plans, indeed, but you're
not in them and that is why you are here."
Oswaldo shakily stood and, catching
himself patting his legs in a search for broken bones, felt foolish.
"Oswaldo Patricio Melendez O'Rourke y Nuñez, how do you do. I have a
girlfriend..." He cast about in a panic and, finding his duffel with the packet
of money, relaxed. "My book," he explained weakly. That he
had thought first of Harriet gave small consolation for she must think him dead.
"This village was translated entire from the fourteenth century," said the poet.
"Our plumbing, too, is medieval. I'll turn my back if you would be more
comfortable. Peeing, that is. It's an opportunity too good to miss―being here,
not peeing, though that is likewise important. Just let fly; shows us we are
alive, eh? A book? You are a writer, then. I'm transcribing troubadour
ballads―you know, poems. You can give me a hand, scrivener Oswaldo."
On the world Oswaldo left behind molecules rushed in to fill the space so
recently vacated by a medium-sized young man with golden Inca eyes. This caused
a displacement felt by millions as a thump not unlike the impact after jumping
off a kitchen stool. There was jostling and exchange of invective as humanity
looked around for whomever had moved the cellar stairs or made a tree grow in
the driveway just as they were backing out. A ripple echoed through the
corridors of eternity.
The place Oswaldo had formerly stood, a location beyond even the poet's sphere
of competence, filled with air. There was a small bang.
Our universe bulged while all others down the line wobbled as each in turn
balanced its books by commandeering one-hundred-sixty-five pounds of anything
from its nearest neighbor. The foreseeable outcome of this caused alarm among
the overseers of the arithmetic of creation. Though vast, the number theory of
infinity is a biography of finite numbers: sooner or later the ripple cascading
thoughtlessly and undiminished, carrying with it all the destructive power of a
love struck young man who had hidden tainted money, would arrive back where it
had started, metamorphosed by the journey into the invisible apartness that is a
not-black hole, too small to notice, the singularity that flattens even
Eidolons.
"If language studies are not your métier, hang around a while; have a rest.
We'll get you placed somewhere. Should you decide to strike off by yourself,
there is a traveler's rest some twenty leagues off." Replacing the flask in a
jacket pocket, the poet wandered off singing wordlessly to himself. Oswaldo had
been dismissed. He curled up in a comfortable corner of Paul Blackburn's
haystack and waited on events.
When he awoke it was night and it was raining. "Señor Blackburn!" There was no
answer. He peered in the direction the poet had taken hoping to see a light,
some evidence of human habitation. There was none.
He started at a cough out on the in the rain-darkened stubble of last year's
pasturage. The cough was answered by a rising wail of alarm. A cat. His
ancestral memory shouted an alert and by starlight he made out a moving shape
too small for a cougar. A few yards distant was a fox homeward bound with a dead
rat twitching in its jaws. The yellow striped tomcat stood motionless where it
had blundered across the fox's path, its tail the size of a softball bat, a low
glottal warning in its throat. The fox dropped its prey and coughed again, its
tail up and bristling. The cat continued its stream of consonants, retreated
perhaps a foot and settled itself, conceding enough for safety but holding honor
intact. The fox picked up the rat and continued to its earth. Oswaldo breathed
again.
A harvest moon appeared from behind a cluster of high wind-driven clouds. Giving
his money a reassuring squeeze, Oswaldo hitched his pack and struck out on foot.
There was a cawing of far off crows, nothing special, just afternoon bird talk. The afternoon had settled in, hot, close and heavy. Despite the feeling of impending rain, the sky was a clear, piercing blue and except for a pair of high fluffy storm riders, cloudless. The buzzing of passing insects was intense in the pollen-laden air. A path worn by use rather than design wound down the hill from her stile through a blue haze that hung about the valley floor. A thread of smoke rose from just inside some trees at the edge of a cultivated area; in the air was a sweet unfamiliar smell of burning. The traveler's rest the poet had promised with its peat fire. Oswaldo Patricio Melendez O'Rourke y Nuñez swung a leg over the stile and started down the hill. It was a long way down through waist-high undulations of grass gone to early brown with heavy seed heads. He followed the path and although the incline was easy work, he was soon sweating in the close, heavy air. It felt like there was a thunderstorm brewing. A trick of distance―from the top of the hill, the blue mist thinned out the closer down the valley floor he came. A small river wound among occasional cattle, an hopeful, reassuring presence. Near the bottom he paused to catch his breath where clusters of trees, outriders from the approaching forest, offered shade. Past a line of broad-beamed black spruce, their lacy needles a filigree of dripping moisture, a thicket of larch and honey locust framed a house. It looked good. Oswaldo realized he was thirsty and very hungry.
There was a crack like a rifle hot and he jumped.
"Shoo, boss. Shoo, boss... Scat!" Another crack! A thin blonde young woman was chasing cows out of a garden patch, shouting and popping their haunches with the business end of a rolled-up wet towel. Crack! The cows―two of them, eyes wide and white, udders flying―went galloping up the hill Ozzie had just come down. Victorious and flushed, the young woman walked over. She wore cut-off jeans and had her hair up in a red spotted kerchief.
"Hi. I'm Val, Valerie Hatt, and my cows have a taste for asparagus." She extended a hand. "You must be Oswaldo Patricio Melendez O'Rourke y Nuñez. We've been expecting you." She looked after the departed cows. Being chased was something they were used to; they had stopped to browse the hillside a few yards farther up. When the towel had stopped, so had they. Val sighed, "Onion grass up there, we'll have onion-flavored milk for a week. The kids won't drink it but it makes a great cheese."
As they shook hands Ozzie said, "Expecting me? Things happen fast here. I didn't know I was coming until a few minutes ago. A red-haired woman told me..." Had there even been a red-haired woman? "A treasure too
rare to be spent all at once..." the words appeared as if he actually had heard them, the voice reassuring―his mother tending his childhood sickbed with platters of ice cream with honey and crushed walnuts over the top, a favorite. "Excuse me; I do not seem able to remember. I was shot..."
"That's Morgana―she doesn't miss a trick. Come on, I'll show you around. You'll be happy here."
"Oh?" As with the poet, there was permanence implicit in Val's easy statement that Ozzie found disturbing. Furthermore the girl's face had a haunting familiarity. He started to ask but was interrupted with the words half formed.
"We have a room all ready for you. Here, let me help you with your stuff." She
reached for his duffel which he pulled close to his chest. He squeezed the box
wrapped with duct tape and felt the outline of a running shoe. He flushed. The odor of archival
sneakers wafted upwards.
He shook his head to clear it. His ancestors
carried a secret knowledge. With the passing of careless generations this had
been lost. Almond eyes pouchy with sleep denied by fever dreams of avarice and
the night sweats of free trade, their descendants had departed from the roots of
faith, the roots of wonder. Hints and whispers were all that remained. He could
not shake off the disorientation brought on by the events of the last few hours.
He had been shot ¿Verdad? His vision had the fish-eye distortion of a fever
dream.
"Stuff? Uh, that's all right,
I don't have anything except what I'm standing up in. I left rather suddenly."
This is an arrival and a departure, for it is important to know that Oswaldo has
come to no harm, for death is relative. The haystack, the poet, the whole place,
had the smell of wild raspberries from a thermos of yesterday's tea flushed out
with tap water. With the evocation of the familiar, Oswaldo Patricio Melendez
O'Rourke y Nuñez was home. Shot by the roadside, dumped and forgotten is not the
way of the Fata Morgana with her stray cats. The poet is important also, but in
his time, not here. Suffice it that Oswaldo Patricio Melendez O'Rourke y Nuñez,
whose thread might have ended riddled by police bullets on a deserted upcountry
road, could have prospered in Languedoc and thriven under the poet's tutelage.
Oswaldo had jumped into the clear air of a Europe untouched by Huns, plague or
industrial revolution to land in a haystack, a guest of the Queen of Heaven. A
parachutist out of time, he geronimoed to a happy splat in the Lady's back yard,
his knickers in a knot.
In another tale, Oswaldo might live on in place to a wise and fruitful dotage,
fathering many crackling-eyed, black-haired babies. The fourteenth century was
like that and, after all, he now is the poet's assistant, a place not without
honor. Oswaldo might do many good works while corrupting the language and
culture hereabouts; he might coach Little League and bring his Morgantowners to
first place in many championship seasons. But that is another tale.
copyright 1993, 2007 Rob Hunter