A Dancer in Darkness by David Stacton Page A

staring at her. “Why should I not?” he demanded , and his voice made him older. He was not the harmless boy she had imagined after all. “Why should I not ?”
    He put his head in her lap. She could feel various parts of herself waking up. Abruptly she gave in to him. What harm could it do? It need happen only once, and there was no one to see.
    There was a soft patter all around them. She sat up and wiped her eyes. Now their tears extended into real rain, as though the world had taken their emotion up. She leaned back against the table-tomb. He lay with his head in her lap. Through the arcade they could see the veils of rain sweep across the valley and meet in the middle like curtains.
    Above them the candle spluttered, its wax rippling down its flanks and over the fancy stonework of the tomb. Its dim echo caught the needles of the rain and shimmered along them in waves of magic light.
    He lay there for a long time. They were waiting for the right moment, and then it came. He stood up.
    “Wait here,” he said. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them, he was gone. She turned and leaned upon the tomb, gazing earnestly at the candle burning brightly in its little sea of liquid wax. Her eyes snapped and she smiled.
    He came back again, with something over his arm. “Come,” he said. He held out his hand to her, and they moved among the tombs. Close to the arcade was an open place perhaps six feet on the side. He handed her the candle to hold and threw down the cloths he had over his arm. They were gorgeous albs and chasubles from the vestry, where they might have been locked in chests for forty years. The candle-light caught the green embroidery, the saints, paste jewels, seed pearls, andgold and silver threads. The open space became a metallic meadow. He took her in his arms and the candle went out as she sank down into darkness with him. The fall seemed infinite.
    Why are people so different by night and by day? His body was like his dancing. It had the same urgent, coherent suavity. She had slept only with Piccolomini, that vain old man who had had to be helped even to produce an heir, and to whom erotics were merely a branch of genealogy.
    She laughed. She had not known that the emotions could be so easy. She was utterly detached from her body, and watched it as a nurse would watch a happy child.
    In the darkness we begin to see with the finger-tips, and then the body has no shape, but only a meaning. It becomes transubstantiated into the nature of the thing it otherwise expresses only by its appearance. The thighs become a coast, the chest a platform, the navel an eager opening. How it clutches at the fingers when we put a finger there. Yet it was not the act that excited her. It was Antonio. His body was the symbol of himself , and that is why she loved it. People had no right to be so rare. There was a pathos in the way he bent his head, and his hair was like the feathers of some plaintive bird. And all that time they said nothing. What was there to say?
    Outside the double window the rain began to disperse. It had been sated, and fell now more fastidiously, so that clumps of fine rain hovered here and there about the hills, like silver trees. Then even they were gone. The world slowed down and settled into place. The stars appeared.
    They lay there quietly for a while. She noticed now, what she had not noticed before, that the studs, stones and threads of the copes had embossed her flesh cruelly.
    She stirred and pulled down her dress. He stood up, and when she looked around for him, he was over near one of the tombs, gravely doing a slow arabesque with his right foot. She watched, fascinated. He was utterly unaware of her. Slowly the rest of his body followed his foot, and he fluttered gravely against the shadows of the tomb behind him, like a wounded sparrow. It was spontaneous. It was beautiful. It was heart-rending . He did not even know he was doing it, and it was a little ode of joy. She could not