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PARTISAN REVIEW
the musicians are peasants, not that their faces and feet and
necks and wrists are blown grass and red earth. An enlighten–
ment comes on her: she sees what is eternal: before the Madonna
there was Venus; before Venus, Aphrodite; before Aphrodite,
Astarte. Her womb is garden, lamb, and babe. She is the river
and the waterfall. She causes grave men of business-goatherds
are men of business-to cavort and to flash their gold teeth. She
induces them to blow, beat, rub, shake and scrape objects so that
music will drop out of them.
Inside Lucy's illumination the dancers are seething. They
are writhing. For the sake of the goddess, for the sake of the
womb of the goddess, they are turning into serpents. When they
grow still they are earth. They are from always to always. Nature
is their pulse. Lucy sees: she understands: the gods are God. How
terrible to have given up Jesus, a man like these, made of earth
like these, with a pulse like these, God entering nature to become
god! Jesus, no more miraculous than an ordinary goatherd; is a
goatherd miracle? Is a leaf? A nut, a pit, a core, a seed, a stone?
Everything is miracle! Lucy sees how she has abandoned nature,
how she has lost true religion on account of the God of the Jews.
The boys are on their bellies on the ground, digging it up with
sticks. They dig and dig: little holes with mounds beside them.
They fill them with peach pits, cherry pits, cantaloupe rinds.
The Sicilians and Neapolitans pick up their baskets and purses
and shopping bags and leave. The benches smell of eaten fruit,
running juices, insect-mobbed. The stage is clean.
The living room has escaped altogether. It is very high and
extremely small, no wider than the moon on Lucy's thumbnail.
It is still sailing upward, and the voices of those on board are so
faint that Lucy almost loses them. But she knows which word it
is they mainly use. How long can they go on about it? How
long? A morbid cud-chewing. Death and death and death. The
word is less a human word than an animal's cry; a crow's. Caw
caw. It belongs to storms, floods, avalanches. Acts of God.
"Holocaust," someone caws dimly from above; she knows it
must be Feinhold. He always says this word over and over and
over. History is bad for him: how little it makes him seem! Lucy
decides it is possible to become jaded by atrocity. She is bored by
