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You were Jorge.
You looked just like Una, your sister, but with a twist that was indefinable and changed everything.
What was balanced in her face became unbalanced in yours.
What made you more than an ordinary man was that you were a worm and not a man.
When other people talked of self-aggrandizement or even self-improvement you would take a breath and scan that very self. Not theirs but yours.
It was moist, it was long and thin, it moved through the earth and disgusted the people who had to look at it. A worm nature.
Offensive to men. Beautiful to God. God felt an absence of repugnance for the worm, God even loved the worm.
Once you had been a human like the others. Una and you were children, living in the Garden of Orthodoxy.
Orthodoxy is not a set of beliefs, Orthodoxy is a place, a world, a realized wing. It is a place beneath the wing of God. One does not "behave well" there. One is close to God there and all behavior is intrinsically "well".
The wing itself shelters you from other kinds of living that you do not really even understand, the kinds of life that lead or unfathomably come to be led astray, de-winged, the flavors of existence that are no longer effectively attached to existence, which in effect shouldn't even be one of the possibles. Because the Garden was in fact everything and everywhere. And so in some sense the Garden still contained even the people who had simply walked away -- who had walked out of the garden one day, as if temporarily, casually, but fully intending to come back.
For Jorge and Una, the Garden of Orthodoxy was a place of sheer poetry, because God was there. They were little children, they took the bliss for granted. The taking for granted was itself the substance of bliss. One moved freely in the shelter of what was not anxious and would never need to be. For the garden thrived in the indifference of time -- not that time was absent or even suspended -- not that time ceased to do whatever it did -- but the concern was a thing that lived miles away, "in the next county", far on the other side of the stiles and hedges and small shimmering animals. There was not the constant bruising reference to time, the looking at one's watch that was said to be the definition of adulthood.
Only protected can one be free.
*
The light was horizontal like the branches of certain trees. How can it be like that? Una asked. Doesn't it come straight down. How are there shadows on these red barks instead of the ground.
I think the light comes oozing out of these dark places, Jorge said. The light comes second, the dark comes first, I think we see things in reverse -- the source is more mysterious than what we see.
The sunlight flows every which way from these dark places. The foundation is darkness -- light is like something placed on top. It's not as real.
Well, should we be scared? I'm not scared at all.
They would look back at the house. Sometimes the back door was open, sometimes Aunt Estelle, practically a widow, was standing on the porch. She wasn't monitoring them, she was simply there. She was always half doing something and half listening to the sound of children's voices. So it seemed.
Her little prayer book in her lap. The children turned and dismissed her from consciousness but not completely. Aunt Estelle. Warm and quiet. Touching the links of the chain on her neck as though it were -- almost a rosary or some such thing.
There was a pond in the back yard, the keeper of the moist stones. Tadpoles and the whiff of frogs. Fish who would surface for food and then suddenly sink into nonexistence, if existence is appearance. Beyond it, more fields and the touch of forest. The land was too still to belong to anyone. In hide and seek, so many hiding places, one had to make the effort to be found. Pine needles on the pathway, don't run barefoot. Smells of honey and tar.
There was the preternatural clarity of an intense single moment. Yes but it went on for years and years.
Look at the way those branches -- those pine branches, those branches of pine -- they almost make a square, the way they are posed in the clearing. And look at that three legged dog!
Una and Jorge wanted to catch the dog and make it a pet but -- oddly and wonderfully enough -- it ran too fast to be caught.
As though its piercing disfigurement needed to be -- here and only here -- caressed and furthered -- within the Garden of Orthodoxy that bound them all.
So the dog ran, free and free forever. And the 2 children knew better than to chase it into the infinity in which it lived.
For they knew -- and this was the Orthodoxy -- not to go too far.
Did they know? In fact, did they? Dusk would be falling, not the dusk, but the state just before dusk, a sort of tableau of clear glareless light, the anticipation of gloom. The outer woods were ahead of them, with the big campus on the other side. We'd better go back, Una said. Dinner will be waiting for us.
At the edge of the wood was where the feeling of rightness began to thin, like scarce oxygen on a mountain height.
Una, protected by an instinct her brother didn't have, would pull at his hand. The aunt would be waiting patiently for them at the back door. It was amazing how dark it suddenly was, how quickly the day's light had been sucked away. But oh how good existence was!
END OF PART ONE
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