Forests of the Heart

  She’d never known how hard an artist’s model had to work until she’d become one herself. She soon discovered that the human body had never been designed to be held motionless for long stretches of time, protesting the abuse with cramps and aches where she’d never even known she had muscles. But she also enjoyed the meditative aspect of it, the way she could let her mind range free while she listened to the sounds the artist made at the easel. The scratch of pencil or charcoal on paper during the preliminary sketches and, later, on canvas. The scrape of the brush, loaded with pigment. The small, inadvertent sounds the artists made as they worked— everything from grunts and sighs and snatches of melodies to Lisette’s habit of stepping back and sucking air in through her teeth as she studied the work.

  Lisette Gascoigne was a tall woman, lean rather than slender, and fine-featured, with short black hair and eyes almost as dark as Bettina’s. Not so much attractive as handsome. She was one of the artists who’d propositioned Bettina the first time they’d met—during Bettina’s first week of living in Kel-lygnow. Bettina had been nervous about sitting for her later, but Lisette was all business once they were in her studio. Still, Bettina had to wonder why Lisette even required a model, never mind a nude one, unless it was that she simply liked to look at what she couldn’t have while she worked. Lisette always had her pose in the nude, and the watercolor and pencil studies she did were absolutely wonderful, detailed realistic work that rivaled anything done by the great masters of portraiture and life drawing. Bettina had one that Lisette had given her taped up to the wall in her room, a loosely rendered figure study that she could never show to her mother even if her features were hidden behind the curtain of her dark hair.

  But once Lisette took up her brush and began to fill the canvas, Bettina felt she might as well have been a handful of colored scarves, hanging over the back of the chair where she was sitting. The finished paintings were swirls of pigment—fascinating pieces for how the colors pushed against one another, but they bore no resemblance to anything even vaguely recognizable, never mind the human form.

  Still Bettina wasn’t one to complain. If posing for Lisette’s abstracts were part of what allowed her to live at Kellygnow free of charge, then she was happy to do it.

  “Good, good,” Lisette said finally.

  She stepped back to look at her canvas, whistling faintly as she drew the air in through her teeth. Bettina slipped on the silk kimono that one of the artists had given her on her first week and began a series of brief stretching exercises to get her circulation flowing once more. She looked out the window as she loosened up. It was sunny today, if cold. A new blanket of snow covered the lawn where los lobos had gathered last Sunday evening. The untouched drifts looked so inviting that she was tempted to take Chantal up on her offer to go cross-country skiing except that she’d promised Salvador she’d help him this afternoon. Earlier today a couple of loose cords of firewood had been delivered to the house and it all needed to be split, carried back to the woodshed, and stacked.

  After working out a final tight muscle in the nape of her neck, she came around to Lisette’s side of the easel where she was surprised to find a rough likeness of herself looking out at her from the canvas.

  Lisette smiled at her. “I can paint realistically,” she said.

  “I never … that is …”

  Flustered, Bettina gathered the front of her kimono closer to her throat with one hand and let her words trail off.

  “I know,” Lisette told her. “You never said a thing. But I could tell by the look on your face every time you’ve come around to see what I’ve been painting.”

  Bettina shrugged. “I wondered …”

  Lisette reached forward and brushed a lock of hair away from Bettina’s brow. Bettina tensed, but the gesture was friendly, not flirtatious.

  “I can see you in all the others,” Lisette said. “But in this piece—” She indicated the painting on her easel. “I want others to see you, too.” She smiled again. “It’s early yet, but the likeness will come.”

  Some of the paintings from earlier sessions hung on the wall of the studio and Bettina turned to look at them. They were unframed, the paint on many of them still not quite dry. Their colors seemed to leap out from the canvas toward the viewer, barely tamed to Lisette’s will, pigments laid on with thick brush strokes, complementaries pulsing against each other. Try though she might, Bettina could see nothing of herself in even one of them.

  “What is it I’m missing when I look at them?” she asked.

  “You’re searching for form,” Lisette said, “where I’ve painted only the impression of what the form clothes.”

  Bettina shook her head, still not getting it, but before she could speak, Lisette went on, saying, “How can I explain this better? You carry yourself with a languid grace, as though nothing matters, but one has only to look in your eyes to see that for you, everything matters. Under the skin, intense fires burn. Standing near you, I can almost feel the heat.” She made a motion with her hand, encompassing the abstracts that hung on the wall. “These are about the fire. Now I want to clothe the fire with your skin.”

  Bettina glanced at Lisette, then turned back to regard the paintings in a new light. Bueno, she thought. This would teach her to make assumptions. Because now she understood. Lisette hadn’t been simply playing with color. Instead, she saw la brujería and that was what she had been painting. Her abstracts were like small windows looking into la época del mito. They captured images of myth time, how the trace of it hung from Bettina’s shoulders like a cloak, vibrant, but puzzling in all its mystery and confusion.

  “I see it now,” she said. She turned away from the paintings and smiled. “But we all carry that light inside ourselves. I’m not special.”

  “Perhaps,” Lisette said. “Perhaps not. But in you it seems more intense. More tightly focused.”

  Bettina almost laughed, thinking what her abuela would have thought to hear this. The most-used phrase in her grandmother’s vocabulary had been, “¡Presta atención!” It was always, “pay attention.” “¡Presta atención, chica!” Because Bettina’s mind had always been wandering, her attention captured by everything and anything and not always the task at hand. There was no place in the mysteries for a soñadora, a daydreamer. Only for true dreamers. “Remember this one small piece of advice,” Abuela would say. “You must always be focused. You must see everything at once, as it is, or you will lose yourself in all the possibilities of what might be, and for you and I, who can so easily slip into la época del mito, that could take us a very great distance indeed. It could take us so far we might never return.”

  “You’re amused,” Lisette said, bringing Bettina back to the studio from that place where her memories had taken her.

  Bettina nodded. “I was thinking of my grandmother. When I was young, her one complaint to me was always that I wasn’t focused enough.”

  “Something you’ve outgrown, I assume.”

  “So it would seem,” Bettina agreed, though she wasn’t entirely sure. Sometimes she felt she was still too much the soñadora, not the true dreamer. Not serious enough. Though, she remembered, Abuela could be anything but serious, too. If the fancy happened to take her, she could readily play la tonta loca, the crazy fool.

  Lisette walked back behind her easel and picked up a brush.

  “Do you have time for one more twenty-minute session?” she asked.

  “Sí,” Bettina said.

  But she paused as she passed the window, her gaze caught by a stranger she saw standing on the lawn by the tree line. Something in his stance reminded Bettina of that part of la época del mito where el lobo had taken her last weekend, of the priest she’d seen by the salmon pool whose existence ellobo had denied. The figure wore a dark overcoat with an old-fashioned cut and stood with his back to them, facing the forest.

  Even from this distance Bettina could see how la brujería clung to him, like shadows to the branches of the trees beyond him. It was n
ot a healer’s magic, not quite witchcraft either, but something new to her. Potent and strange.

  “Ah,” Lisette said, joining her by the window. “The Recluse is back,”

  “The who?”

  Lisette shrugged. “I don’t know her name, but she winters every year in the old cottage—you know, the original one that Hanson’s supposed to have built and lived in. She usually moves in again around the end of November, the beginning of December.”

  Bettina remembered seeing smoke rising from its chimney the other night, but that hadn’t struck her as odd. She’d thought that one of the writers was living in it.

  “This is the first time I’ve seen her this year,” Lisette went on. “I wonder where she spends her summers?”

  Bettina turned to look at her. “You keep saying ‘her’ and ‘she,’ but… ?”

  Lisette smiled. “Oh, I know she looks butch, but she’s a woman, the same as you or me.” Her smile broadened a little. “Well, probably more like me than you, if you know what I mean.”

  Bettina returned her gaze to the stranger who was walking along the tree line now, her face in profile. She still didn’t look like a woman to Bettina. Not with her short-cropped hair and strong jaw, the man’s gait and the masculine set to her features. Bettina thought of Kellygnow’s housekeeper Nuala. She might dress as a man, but for her it seemed more a choice of style and a man’s clothing could do nothing to disguise Nuala’s womanly shape. This woman Lisette had referred to as the Recluse appeared to be deliberately confusing the issue.

  And she still reminded Bettina of the priest by the salmon pool, though she wore no priest’s collar today. La brujería had been strong then, too, but she had put that down as their being in myth time.

  “Is she a writer or an artist?” Bettina asked.

  Lisette shrugged. “I don’t really know. She doesn’t mix with the rest of us. Someone told me a couple of years ago that she’s an old friend of the family— the Hansons, that is.”

  “I thought they were all dead and gone—that some foundation looked after all the business now.”

  “It does,” Lisette said. “But that doesn’t preclude special dispensation for certain individuals. Consider yourself. I don’t think there’s ever been a model in residence for as long as you’ve been—not that I’m complaining, mind you.”

  “And speaking of modeling,” Bettina said.

  Lisette nodded. “Yes. We should get back to it. I’m sure someone else has you booked for the afternoon.”

  Bettina shook her head. “Not today. I’m going to work with Salvador after lunch.”

  Lisette had been squeezing some paint onto her palette, but paused now.

  “Really?” she said.

  “Mmhmm.”

  “Lord, you even have the look of one who relishes the idea.”

  “Oh, I do. I love physical labor. It helps center me.”

  Lisette smiled. “I’ll take paint on my hands over dirt under my nails any day.”

  With that she went back to considering her palette. Bettina returned to the chair where she’d been posing. She lined up the chalk marks on the floor for her feet, on the arms of her chair for her hands, found the sightlines to get her head back in the right position once more.

  “Move your head a little more to the left,” Lisette said. “And bring your chin up just a touch. A little more. There. That’s it.”

  Bettina and Salvador had most of the wood split when Nuala came out to join them. Normally they would have had it all split and stacked by the end of summer, before the first snow fell, but Nuala’s intuition had told her that it was going to be a long winter so she had Salvador order in a couple of extra cords of seasoned wood just to be on the safe side.

  Bettina was always comfortable in Salvador’s company. He reminded her of the men on her mother’s side of the family: strong and tall, darkly handsome, good-humored and generous of spirit. Now in his sixties, he was still straight-backed and strong, his hair and moustache a grizzled gray. And like her uncles, he was forever teasing her.

  “Ah, chica,” he said today, his breath frosting in the cold air. He leaned on the hardwood handle of his splitting maul and gave her a very serious look. “If only I had the courage, I’d leave my wife and run away with you.”

  Having been to dinner at his apartment on the East Side and seen firsthand how much he loved his wife Maria Elena, Bettina knew he wasn’t being in the least bit serious. She might not have accepted his flirting so lightly if he’d been an Anglo, but he was too much like family for her to even consider taking offense. Instead she paused in her own work.

  “Where would we go?” she asked.

  “Mexico City.”

  “But you have relatives there. They would never accept me. They’d call me ‘la adúltera? or worse.”

  “Did I say Mexico City? I mean New Mexico. Santa Fe.”

  “Doesn’t Maria Elena’s cousin Dolores live there?”

  “¿Y bien? We would not have to visit with her.”

  “But still she would gossip about us. We couldn’t go anywhere without people talking.”

  “Then California.”

  “Too many earthquakes.”

  “Costa Rica.”

  “Too many monkeys.”

  And on it went. For every place he named, she had a reason why it wouldn’t be suitable. When Nuala joined them, they switched to English and new topics, but as usual, Nuala contributed little to the conversation. Bettina wasn’t offended. Last Saturday night’s talk notwithstanding, it was simply Nuala’s way. She wasn’t being unfriendly; she was only being Nuala. Quiet, soft-spoken, but with that spark of la brujería smoldering deep in her eyes. Bettina hadn’t exchanged more than a half-dozen words with her since Saturday.

  While Salvador continued to split the remaining logs, Nuala and Bettina began to load the sled with split wood for the first of many trips to the woodshed where they would stack it. Despite the cold, the three of them were warm enough from their labor to be wearing only down vests over their shirts. The women made a half dozen trips to the shed before they started stacking the wood. This was the part that Bettina liked best, fitting the split logs together like uneven building blocks to make a stack along the back wall of the shed.

  They worked in a companionable silence for a while, raising one stack to the roof of the shed before going on to start the second. Alone with Nuala, Bettina decided to see if she could draw her out again, reclaiming the ease with which conversation had grown up between them last weekend. She meant to find out what Nuala could tell her about the woman that Lisette had called the Recluse. Instead she found herself asking about los lobos.

  “What are an felsos?” she said.

  Nuala paused with an armload of wood and gave her a look that Bettina couldn’t read.

  “Where did you hear that term?” Nuala asked.

  Something in her voice made Bettina hesitate.

  “I can’t remember,” she said finally. “I just overheard it one day. It might have been a couple of the writers talking.”

  She had no idea why she’d lied, why it seemed important to keep secret her conversation with that one lobo. She needn’t have tried.

  “Or perhaps,” Nuala said, “you heard it from a handsome, dark-haired man you met in the woods behind the house.”

  Bettina remembered the curtain in Nuala’s room, how it had moved when she’d returned to the house from her meeting with el lobo, as though someone had been watching her from inside. Who else could it have been but Nuala?

  “Perhaps,” she admitted.

  Nuala sighed. “I forget how young you are.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “When you are young,” Nuala told her, “you are immortal. Nothing can harm you. You see dangers, but know that they can only harm others, not you.”

  “I don’t think that way at all.”

  Nuala arched an eyebrow. “No? Then why do you spend time in the company of such a creature?”

  ??
?He doesn’t seem dangerous.”

  “Let me tell you what an felsos means. It’s from the old Cornish and translates to ‘the cunning friends.’ And they are indeed cunning, though rarely friends—at least to us. The term is used much in the way that faeries were referred to as ‘the good neighbors.’ Not because they were, but because such a reference was less likely to give offense.”

  “I thought you said they were Irish.”

  “They are. Irish, Breton, Cornish. The genii loci of the ancient Gaeltacht. In Ireland my people always referred to them as the Gentry.”

  Bettina frowned. Genii loci she understood. It was Latin; a genius loci was the guardian spirit or presiding deity of a place. But…

  “Gaeltacht?” she asked.

  “It’s what we called the Irish-speaking districts back home,” Nuala explained. “But I think of it as any home of the Gael—wherever the Celtic people gather and speak the old language, remember the old ways. Each of these places had a spirit, sometimes benevolent, sometimes not. More often they were neither good nor evil, they simply were—the third branch of the Celtic trinity, if you will.”

  “So these wolves that come to our yard,” Bettina tried. “En otro palabras—in other words. They are evil?”

  Nuala shook her head. “Not as you’re using the word. Long ago, they followed the Irish emigrants to the New World, but this land already had its own guardian spirits. So there was no place for them. But here they remain all the same. They are homeless, unbound, and they neither feel nor think the way we do. When the Gentry gather in a pack they can be like a wild hunt, ravening and hungry for blood, but even on an individual basis, they’re not to be trusted.”

  “Why not?”

  Nuala shrugged. “Mostly, I think, because they are jealous of us—the way the dead are jealous of the living. We have what they can’t have—we fit in, we have a relationship with our environment. We have homes. Most of us are comfortable in our own skins. They want this way we live. Some try to slip into our lives, pretending to be our friends, our family, our lovers, but never able to succeed because of their feral nature and their otherness. Some are only dangerous when we intrude into their lives, reminding them of what they can’t have. Others actively seek us out as prey, tearing us open to see where we have hidden our souls.