Miranda and Caliban(66)
One thing I do know, and that is that I have an urgent desire to speak to Caliban. When I first awakened from my affliction, it was his dear face I saw; my first memory is of Caliban seeing my confusion and reminding me of his name, oh, so gently.
Now I regret that I was short with him the other night, but it was a great deal to take in.
I did not want to believe.
But I do.
On the morrow, I manage to catch Caliban before he succeeds in evading me, and ask him nicely if he might procure fresh river trout for our supper. This he agrees to do with a curt nod, taking the pail with him as he leaves.
When Papa adjourns to his sanctum, I do not engage myself in contemplation and prayers to the Lady Venus. No, instead, I set out to find Caliban.
It is a beautiful spring morning on the isle, balmy and clear, the promise of afternoon’s coming heat alleviated by the lingering freshness of the night’s dew. The jacaranda trees are in bloom, great clouds of violet blossoms clinging to their limbs, and the tall rhododendrons offer up pink and white and purple clusters, such hues as make me long for my paints. In the courtyard where the sour orange trees grow, buzzing honeybees are already at work gathering the pollen of their delicate white blossoms that they might transmute it into golden sweetness. Papa says that bees are nature’s alchemists, and that as proof, honey is the only food that never spoils but retains the goodness of its essence in perpetuity.
The reminder of Papa gives me a pang of guilt, but I persevere, leaving the palace grounds behind me. The flowers that blossom in the wild are less spectacular, but no less lovely for it—myrtle shrubs with their pungent leaves, fields of scrubby yellow broom bright beneath the sun. A great fondness for the isle’s beauty fills me, and my heart aches to imagine that I should ever leave it.
There are two places where Caliban is wont to catch fish and I know them both, for I accompanied him thence on excursions many times in happier days. The first is a bend in the stream where the current slows as it rounds the reed-covered banks. In high summer or midwinter, the level of the water is no higher than the calves of his legs, but today the stream is swollen with snowmelt from the distant mountain peaks to the east.
It is at the second place, a place where the stream runs swiftly, but great rocks lying just below the surface break up its current and create eddying pools in which the speckled trout bask, that I find Caliban. He crouches low on one of the boulders, water running in a torrent over his feet. Translucent undines frolic in the stream around him, but he ignores them, crouching to gaze intently into the water, hands poised at the ready. The pail is perched precariously on another boulder nearby.
Not so very long ago, I would have been holding the pail for him and shouting encouragement from the banks, both of us laughing for the sheer joy of being young and alive.
With the advent of spring, Caliban has abandoned the coarse shirt I made for him and is clad only in worn and tattered sailcloth breeches. His bare skin gleams like polished wood in the sunlight. The muscles of his bent back fan like wings, reaching for his shoulders. Below the pointed ridge of black hair that descends from the nape of his neck, I can see the knobs of bone running down his spine.
I should like to touch them.
I should like to understand how a man is made.
It is a curious thought, and I am not sure if it is a thought of Miranda-the-painter who would stretch out the wing of a mummified bat to see how its tendons conjoin to the bone or … something else.
And then Caliban plunges his hands into the stream and catches a fish, its scales glistening silvery green as it thrashes in his grip.
“Oh, well done!” I cry, clapping my hands together like the child I had been; I cannot help myself.
“Miranda!” Caliban’s head comes up. He tosses the fish into the pail and glowers at me, straightening from his crouch. “Why are you here? You should not be here.”
“Forgive me,” I say to him. “But I would speak further to you of what you told me the other evening.”
“No.” Caliban lowers his head and shakes it like a goat balking at the rope. “You told me to let it be.”
I take a step toward the bank. “You caught me unawares.”
“There is nothing we can do,” Caliban says. “You did say it; I am no match for Master’s—for Prospero’s—magic.”
“We can seek to allay our own ignorance, Caliban!” I say. “Are you not weary of it?” I think I have him cornered on the rocks and he must stay and answer me, but I have underestimated both his agility and his determination to avoid my presence, for he abandons the pail and turns his back on me, leaping from boulder to boulder across the rushing stream.
Well, he has underestimated my determination, too. I am done with letting him flee my presence without ever once telling me what in the name of all that is holy troubles him so.
“Caliban!” I call after him, hoisting the skirts of my gown to my ankles. I step onto the first boulder. “I will follow you day and night until you stop and talk to me!”
Midstream, he pauses and turns to face me, his gaze filled with alarm. “Miranda, no! It’s too dangerous.”
The rocks are slippery, but Caliban is looking at me, truly looking at me without flinching away. True, ’tis with fear and concern, but for the first time in long months, I feel as though he is seeing me and not whatever it is I have become in his eyes that he cannot abide the sight of. It is a big step to the next boulder. I let go my skirts and flail my arms for balance, toes clinging to the surface of the slick rock beneath the shining rush of water. “Will you stay and talk to me, then? Else I will follow.”