The Garden of Deceit

It fell through the skylight spattering the multi-colored floor with its blood. The pattern was contained, defining its space in the atrium. Small tiles crisscrossed the garden forming a labyrinth beneath a canopy of exotic trees. The air was humid with the odor of earth, fruiting plants and spoiling foliage trapped within the garden’s walls. The garden lay beneath a riveted iron structure sustaining an empyrean ceiling of opaque glass panes, performing as antediluvian scales trapping the solar heat of the sun, nourishing the obscure life within a re-created reptilian mechanism.

The creature was small, slightly larger than the Admiral’s delicate hand. It was dull black and wrinkled with dark matted hair, eyes pinched shut with sour facial features, an insensible visage with no teeth. Tiny frozen limbs protruded from it at disconsolate angles rubbery with unformed bone. Dark purple veins marked its surface, about it mucus, ooze and translucent membrane separated the intermittent blood.

Two witnesses hid in the diffused light of day. A light that hung oppressed in the air turning the sun’s rays into a white and colorless presence pressing upon the skin.

The Admiral stood alone in the enclosed atrium, oblivious of the shadow in the surrounding portico. He toed at the creature with his boot then surveyed the false sky above him, squinting, imagining the movement of dark wings in the light.

Taking a spade from his gardener’s tools, the Admiral parted the earth of the flowerbed gathering the creature’s remains folding them into the loam, a shallow grave. Grabbing the maid’s mop and bucket, he slopped the blood and ooze from the tiles, washing it into the soil. When he was finished, the Admiral admired his handiwork, proud of the rare and elegant trees and the incandescent flowers scattered throughout this private space: constructed and managed greenery leaping from the carefully husbanded patio. He strode from the courtyard prim and naval, denying the death within him, the decay clinging to his boot and the shade that hung about him. The Admiral was content with his absolute control.

The Admiral was a man accustomed to his place, self-mandated and earned. He was the most dangerous of beings, with the capabilities of physical charm, unlimited lust: omnisciently non-sentient. He was certain and deliberate in his thought with no memory of hunger, generations before him had passed ignorant of its knowledge. Desire was his grail and it held sway over the remains of his existence. He could swallow the world in a yawn.

Marta observed everything from her station in the portico where she retreated when the Admiral came to investigate the scream, a sour cry she would always remember. Marta’s eyes, normally bright and inquisitive, were now a bit frightened. Long black hair tied in a knot at the back of her head forced a severe oval outline around her attractive face. A face trimmed with a desperate exertion, glowing with the small and brilliant daisies, she had plucked from the garden and strung in her hair. Her diminutive body, hidden in the work smock, had ripened giving her the appearance of a woman-child. She was young but still a woman, although she had yet to put away childish things. Her appearance was, in the fashionable view of the old world, extremely new world, indigenous of a sort.

Marta resumed her sweeping of the atrium, clearing the accumulated dust, cobwebs, fallen fruit, exoskeletons of insects and everything that gave the appearance of Nature’s untidiness. The scratch of her broom echoed in the atrium that absorbed it. She hummed an unintelligible melody as she swept. The heat and light of the atrium surrounded her as a gel forcing her to exert herself beyond the natural. Her tune was mixed with the sound of water that dripped from faucets poured from fountains flowed from pools, warm and languid feeding the flowers and trees of the garden. The water was not cool. Rather, it was the temperature of blood as it flowed through the arteries of the atrium.

Putting away the broom and cleaning rags Marta picked up the bucket refilled it and began to mop the patio tiles. She was awhile about it lost in her thoughts of the Admiral.
As Marta approached the place where the carcass hid, she imagined a shadow pass over it. She looked to the skylight as had the Admiral searching for a body that obstructed the light. Still, there was nothing but trees, branches and lush leaves. No wind moved them and there was no direct light for them to limit. The enclosed ceiling pressed down constricting the garden. There were insects but no birds.

She turned her attention back to the earth, marveling at how quickly it healed accelerated by the decomposition of the creature within. It was as though it had obediently accepted its fate, surrendering itself to a different hypogeal alliance. Sprouts of grass and weeds began to prickle the surface. The garden pulsed with the nutrients, seeming to reach out to her. The beauty of the manufactured nature about her elicited the beginnings of terror and wonder. The song on her lips and the thoughts in her mind blurred her reality, an opiate to her pain and foreboding. The need held her infused: a desperate yearning in her breasts, a longing in her heart, and a heat in her loins.

Then the rotting of fruit and flesh overcame her. The mop clattered to the tile floor as she fled to the safety of her small quarters and the tiny bath, where she began to shiver, sweat and retch.

###

Memory served Marta feebly. She would selectively remember the distant past more clearly than the events of the past few minuets. She could remember the pain of birth. She lived vividly in memory but only at a distance. She had difficulty finding the door she had just passed through. Marta was in constant training.

“I was plucked from the rivers mouth as a tiny babe.” She would tell Edna. “The handsome sea Captain found me at the edge of the riptide stranded up to my waist in the freezing water.” She shivered remembering still, the cold in her lower body that had plagued her life.

“Um, um.” Edna murmured, condescendingly joining the child’s banter and wondering absently what new imagery would change her tale this time. Imperceptibly Shifting, in the folds of her heavy body that now only echoed a faded and flabby vibrancy listening dully to Marta’s chatter.

“It’s true.” Marta exclaimed even though Edna had not expressed any disbelief. As a child, Marta would weep until she remembered the cause of her pain and her savior. Memory for her was a salve and because of it, she could not remember when she was relieved of her suffering.
“Aye, its true,” Hal said from outside the kitchen door “he gave her to me as I stood in the surf, freezing it was. She, swaddled in seaweed, and flecked with the spume and crust of the oceans refuse, screaming like a wee barnyard animal prior to slaughter. The Admiral’s son handed her to me before returning to the sea.”

“Yes,” said Edna “you carried her here tucked under your arm, kicking and squealing as if you were carrying a piglet.” Adding derisively under her breath, “The manners of a swine heard.”
Hal heard her, turned and contemptuously eyed her allowing the scars on his face to speak for him, and abandoned them to continue his work of hauling wood for their stove.

Three servants tended the Admiral’s household. Marta shared a tiny room next to the kitchen with Edna, the housekeeper and cook. Hal, the gardener and handyman, lived outside next to a building that served as a livery and barn in a lean-to that doubled as a garage and workshop.
Disfigured and burnt across numerous parts of his body. His features scored by the malevolence of sun and sea as well as the unknown will of the past. They permitted him into the house for the necessary heavy chores and repairs to tend the garden and the Admirals table or for long enigmatic conversations with the Admiral. Hal did only the Admirals bidding. He was generally sullen, reclusive and abhorrent to Marta and Edna.

Edna, a large and warm woman, was Marta’s confidante her immediate friend and family. At least, she was the only family or friend Marta could remember. Edna kept watch over Marta and the household loyal to the Admiral’s absent wife, his mad daughter, walled off in another wing of the house, and the Admiral’s son, who was constantly at sea. She thought of herself as their guardian, their protector. Thus, she tried to insulate them from the Admiral, with little success. She was a woman who kept in her room and about the many folds of her person the various and sundry charms that would protect her and others from fate and destiny. For Edna nothing was either undetermined or subject to choice. She was Creole a blend of the entire world. The crucifix about her neck and the Hebrew prayer shawl around her shoulders belied the other charms hidden about her: salts, herbs, cloves and garlic a veritable rack of spices to aid in Fortune’s service. In her crowded room, altars stuffed with the figures of Shiva, Vishnu, Christ, Buddha, virgins, saints, and Tibetan mandalas protected her. African masks adorned the walls, Greek statues on the shelf and images of a Sufi mystic, native weavings, rabbit’s feet and skins from every world bore testimony to her all-inclusive faith and belief. All were crowded into the small space of the bedroom they shared, her cathedral.

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Edna feared the patio garden and there was little that she did not fear. She avoided the atrium the heart and belly of the mansion perched on the bluffs at the oceans edge as a giant bird of prey. She would not enter it.

Marta or Hal performed all the work necessary in the atrium. Edna always received visitors for the Admiral in other parts of the mansion and treated with them in the anterooms, living rooms and foyers. Marta or Hal always attended to them and the Admiral in the atrium.
The visitors were many and varied from all pursuits, the lowly and the humble, the powerful and the proud. Bishops and beggars invited to fill the Admiral’s hours and wonder at the imagination that had created the atrium. They came singly or in pairs but never more than three at one time. Caliphs and kings, prelates and politicians attested to the gardens feigned nature. They all were entertained in the garden and feasted on its bounty. Scientists marveled at the creations they consumed. Learned professors and representatives of science, philosophy, law, religion, ethics and all the disciplines of study became fascinated with the garden’s delights. They all left different from when they entered, some were frightened, some were excited others happy or sad but all had in some manner been affected by the garden and/or the food. The Admiral’s manipulated universe enchanted all.

Edna was strict with Marta, especially when it came to language.

“Sí,” Marta would say.

“Shss Inglés,” Edna would reprimand.

“Ouí,” said Marta
.
“Angliás,” hissed Edna.

“Always English, never the other words, never with the strangers,” Edna was most emphatic. She would shake the crucifix at her neck or rubbing her earring or the special talisman that she had chosen for the day. All the time the folds of her body would vibrate and different charms would pop out, a brass thimble or small woven gods eye, a saints medal or a plastic replica of the baby god Jesus, even a small Buddha. Sometimes she threw a special salt or herb in the air so that there was an odd or different odor depending upon the choice of the moment, lilac, lavender, garlic or pepper, an indiscriminate attempt at influence.

Their facility with language was all encompassing but Marta was in constant need of direction and did not always follow the proscribed needs of the house. Those outside their special circle must not know the source of their knowledge. They must never speak the language that the strangers do not know.

“Mon Deus!” Marta would say in the privacy of their chambers “Why must I always do the boring chores in the garden and the stables? I don’t mind the work so much but all the strange tools and mechanisms of Hal and the Admiral are very worrying. Especially the barn and shed, they are always filled with the refuse of the animals and machines. The smell of bitter straw that Hal and the animals use for their bedding disgusts me. It’s not at all like the garden or the laurel grove you showed me, so sweet and open.” She complained.

“The household is large,” Edna would sigh “and the necessary things we do must be done.” Edna’s wisdom could be most obtuse even philosophical, especially to Marta. “The tools and mechanisms perform for them as the kitchen does for us.” Boredom creped in to the edges of her conversation. Edna smiled at the thought of the laurel grove beyond the estate, her solitary place of escape.

Hal’s workshop, shed and sleeping quarters attached to the barn and garage held all the implements needed for the repair of the harnesses, vehicles and machines of the estate. It contained the necessary tools for the repair of the various scientific instruments and those required to maintain the garden. Gyroscopes, sextants, shipwright’s gear as well as auto mechanics tools, farming implements, and writing mechanisms filled his realm.

“All this is such a mess,” Marta observed one afternoon in the yard, Addressing Hal in her unwary manner, “Not at all like the order you keep in the garden.”

It was a genuine museum of mans extensions all in the disarray of use. Strewn about among the oil, straw, and the offal of the animals were the tools of every trade needles and knives, bodkins and hammers in confusion, wrenches, pencils, styluses, and pens. With these, Hal practiced his acquired ability to heal as well a butcher.

There was also a danger in this disorder as Marta once encountered to her glee, though she did not recall the source of her pleasure for a considerable period after the incident.
“I was pricked by a bodkin in the fodder on the floor of the workshop,” she suddenly revealed to Edna one afternoon in the kitchen “and all the pain that I can remember vanished.” Memory and fact as always with Marta was fleeting and many times confusing.

“Humph,” responded Edna “a what?” Edna’s noises were as varied as her charms, specifically when doubt overtook her while listening to Marta.

“It’s a tool used in mending leather,” said Marta.

“Ooooh” said Edna, cooing like a dove “I see” noncommittally acquiescing to Marta’s uncertain knowledge. Edna was never certain of Marta’s ken and distrusted her recollections about the same.

In the kitchen, Edna would instruct Marta in the simple arts of pots and pans especially the different sounds that were necessary to create the recipe desired. She would turn up the flame of the stove, rap the pot or pan with a heavy spoon and demand.

“Listen,” of Marta.

“This is how the porridge is made”, taking down her favorite ginger jar and peering into it Edna would remove some favorite spice and ad it to the gruel while rapping a steady beat with her large spoon on side and rim of the pot. Lucky coins jingling and falling from the holes in her pockets and flaps in her skin made lyrical sounds that ricocheted off the stone tiled floors. The bells, chimes and cymbals that adorned her clothes and hung from her ears or clung to her hair would ring and clash. The pots, pans and kettles of the kitchen would bubble and hum combined with their banter and the chop of their knives on the wooden blocks laced together with horseshoes.

It was here and in the bedroom or toilet that they could speak their language safe from the prying ears of others. It was a finite hum almost a murmur, their special Patois. The sounds they made between them, the raping of the pots and pans, coins falling on the floor created a music that prepared and cooked the food for the household. The flames of the stove could scorch and blacken but never burn, and there was usually an acrid smell of smoke and charred fat in the air when meals were being prepared. The fruits and vegetables were ordinary and unexceptional taken from the garden daily by Hal or Marta. Hal provided the meat, fish, poultry and any protein that was not otherwise readily available. Edna seasoned all.

Such was the sustenance that fed them and entertained those who attended the Admiral’s table in the garden. On those occasions when special dishes were to be prepared to the Admiral’s specific indifference the activity in the kitchen and house was such that the air choked with sound, feathers, smoke, spice and the odor of cooking flesh. The three servants pressed their limits to deliver the food to the garden table where it achieved its flavor. The singular and surprising attribute of the food that Edna and Marta cooked was that for all their art and effort it had no taste, none what so ever until it reached the Admiral’s table in the garden. The food while retaining the nutrients and vitamins necessary to sustain life had absolutely no flavor and was close to unpalatable even to the starving.

Hal dumped the food taken directly from the kitchen into the animal sty for the pigs to feed upon and even they would not consume it unless it had been furrowed and rooted into the soil. Marta would taste the porridge and soups and immediately spit them in to the sink. Edna would throw up her arms and shower the kitchen with four leaf clovers and perspiration all to no avail. They waited and anticipated with hope and with dread the request either that the Admiral would eat alone in the garden or that both he and his guests, no mater how abhorrent or mighty, would be dining in the atrium. It was then and only then that the special h’ordurve, salads and tender meats that were left over from the meals were devoured by the servants even the bones, seeds, skins and husks were guarded for days or until the Admirals next meal in the garden.

It was always their misfortune that the Admiral, unconcerned, passed days without eating. This also insured that the Admirals table was always full to overflowing with much, much more than could be consumed by him or his guests. His guests marveled at the food and the garden commenting upon the preparation of the food and the luxuriant atmosphere of the garden. The food appeared to be quite normal the size, shape and color of the fruits or vegetables were not unusual, nor were the vines, trees or plants themselves.

The gardens' quiescence, however, produced without season. As soon as one crop had been harvested another would begin there was no dormancy in any part of the atrium. It fruited and flowered continually. It was Hal's constant endeavor to harvest, compost, prune and weed the garden.

Marta would cut the flowers. These were unusual. They decorated the mansion with their brilliance. They could illuminate a dark room for many hours and performed throughout the house for the light they provided. They were vivid and lush and infused the mansion with a perfume that drove away the flies and mosquitoes or sucked them in and consumed them.
Daily she would harvest as many as she could and adorn the rooms and halls of the house with their false light. The following day she would replace them and throw the remains into the compost. Hal would gather the remaining flowers, form garlands of them and carry them to the outlook in one of the mansions turrets where the Admiral spent most of his days focusing his uncaring gaze out to sea combing the horizon in search of his son.

At night, the tower became a beacon for those at sea, warning of the cliffs at the oceans edge. An unnatural light, it would curve with the surface of the earth and seen as a point well beyond the horizon. This had the strange effect of attracting ships to dash them selves upon the shoals below the bluffs instead of avoiding them. Navigators and pilots mistook it for a star and found them selves off course in the middle of the ocean, hopelessly lost. This existed altogether and apart from the luminescent glow given to the night sky by the skylight. A ship at sea would think a great city existed beyond the crest of the horizon. The garden made of the mansion an apparent contradiction, a lighthouse of warning and a siren of attraction.

The garden sustained the life of the mansion with its bounty and the apathy of the Admiral. It pulsed and throbbed according to his will. Edna coped with her fear, as her wits would allow. Hal simply appeared and served commenting at length to the displeasure of others. Only the peculiarities of Marta drew danger and the experience of life to their attention, to Edna’s constant consternation. The three would often encounter each other in the kitchen, especially when there were guests.

“I don’t care, then,” said Edna, in the privacy of their rooms.

When arguing with Marta about the Admiral. Immediately she regretted her words, pressed her charms and attempted to redirect the conversation.

“You don’t understand the consequences,” she said.

Marta would pout. The look on her face would simulate listening but not hearing and definitely a refusal to accept or understand.

“You can’t perform for him as you will.” Edna pleaded. “For him it is not the same as it is for us. He does not feel as we do. His senses are for taking not for giving. What he demands of you he will not return to you.”

“You are only jealous,” replied Marta. Moving and shaking her body to indicate with her small dance the sensuality she felt. “He does me no harm and I enjoy him.”
She erotically flaunted the sheer garments the Admiral gave her. The bedroom and kitchen filled with the perfume of her wanting, over powering the incense of the altars, Edna’s spices, and the sent of the food.

“It’s more than joy he gives you.” Edna replied her heart welled with hurt at the accusation.
“What? Pleasure? And what’s wrong with that?” Marta’s vehement petulance stung Edna and she turned instead to the solace of her charms realizing that in the child she loved there was a woman who would not listen.

“Be careful with whom you would share desire,” Edna enjoined. “Hide in the woods among the laurel trees,” she begged. Dragging from her pocket a bundle of laurel leaves laced with silver and gold thread and adorned with tiny silver bells, offering it to her making strange signs and more pleadings. Every word felt hollow to her leaving with in her a deep exasperation.
“Don’t want your smelly bobbles,” Marta cried, hurling the bundle through the door of the bedroom into a recessed corner of the bath.

Marta would do as Marta would do. The supplications of Edna were of no avail, her charms and incantations ineffective. When the Admiral summoned, Marta would attend to his desires. The protestations of Edna grew dull and brought to her relation to the mansion an edginess that she could never control.

Edna even went so far as to poison the Admiral. Mixing a favorite plate consisting of papaya and anchovies, with some of the most astringent and vile flower petals from the garden, as well as the most potent fluids and powders from under her sink, she waited until the Admiral dined alone. He always finished this dish by himself and never allowed anyone else to sample it. She deftly and with all her craft folded all of the potential and real poison at her disposal into the dish. There was enough, she was certain to kill him and all his command.

There was absolutely no effect. The Admiral ate heartily if dispassionately and left no morsel. Edna was enraged. She had called upon all her luck, all the fate she could conger and it had failed her. She fell too silent mourning on Marta’s behalf. She brought upon herself a great melancholy. She rattled and she shook, used all the altars continuously, all her prayers, chants, incantations, orisons, petitions, and supplications could not aid her distress.

The flowers of the garden began to grow more brilliant and insouciant. The affect on his guests, their confusion, disorder and amazement became even more pronounced. His outward appearance belied his insensibility. He would bestow upon all who viewed him his phlegmatic smile and went out of his way to praise Edna’s efforts to prepare the food.

This added to Edna’s despondency. Again she made the dish and doubled all the ingredients and attempted to consume it herself, only to spew all of the goo into the sink. She made increasingly extra amounts and sent it to the Admiral’s table in the hope that some would return. She even sent it, cleverly disguised, to the guests. None ever returned and no one ever died of it.
Their lives and the Admirals unconcerned existence now became an interminable routine.
Hal served him, Marta adored him, his family constantly absent, Edna continually attempting to murder him and the garden flowers showed no interest what so ever.

###

Marta’s body convulsed in the toilet, she moaned an interminable tune. She wept on the floor shivering on the tiles trying to wrap the woven rug about and her alternately sweating profusely. Her skin highlighted with the flush of infection, seeking the coolness of the tiles. Edna found her withering and delirious. Immediately she brought a triptych from their room and began to draw the tepid water in to the bath adding, salts, and powder that turned the water murky. Making her perfunctory signs producing a feathered rattle and matching the tone of the afflicted to produce and unharmonious duet. Moistening clean rags from the cupboards, she stripped the wet work smock from Marta’s small frame. Beneath she was tightly wrapped, from her armpits to her knees with a jeweled gossamer sari its pale color now dark with the effuse of her nubile body. Her robust complexion that once glowed with an outpouring of warmth was now pallid in its interior heat. Her quickening arrested.

Edna began to unravel the sari squeezing water from a sponge across her forehead, hair face, cleaning the spittle and vomit from her mouth and rubbing lemon rind across her lips forcing what was left of the bitter juice against her teeth. She then applied her art to the back of her neck and continued down her torso striping the cloth from her back and breasts, sponging cleaning cooling. Applying the different remedies available to her, she washed and scraped the ill from the surface of Marta’s skin. Massaging into every crevice her mysterious oils, she chanted an incomprehensible refrain.

The once vibrant and alluring flesh appeared lose across her muscular feminine shape. Her taut belly, now flaccid with loss, was soft and tender to the touch. Cleaning, oiling, cooling, chanting she worked the muscles of Marta’s shoulders, back and buttocks. Unraveling the sari, a she proceeded with her song until reaching her matted mons venires she closed her eyes against the burning of her tears and sponged the coagulating mass that formed pistillate at the joining of her thighs.

Edna worked and cooed matching Marta’s cries. When she had finished her cleaning and anointing, she opened her eyes and spied her medicine bundle in a crevice where Marta had thrown it. Recovering it tenderly, she carefully unbound the threads that held the laurel bark and leaves. Taking the swaddling from the cupboards' recesses she pressed the bark, leaves onto the wound, and bound her gently in a girdle with a complicated Celtic knot.

The event had one necessary effect. The flowers of the garden grew transparent and then translucent. Before they had been brilliant and gave off an incandescent glow, now with the nutriments of the carcass their luminosity became resplendent their beauty florid. It was now next to impossible to be in the same room with them. Their light gave no heat the servants and guests found it necessary to shade their eyes from the unnatural rays. Only the Admiral was oblivious to them.
The household wore dark eyeshades day and night; the flowers were removed from the bedrooms as their luminescence prevented sleep. Soon the guests that had returned to the Admirals table began to make excuses for not attending. New guests left vowing never to return. Word spread until the Admiral dispassionately dined alone.
The bejeweled sari was now a shapeless bloody rag. Edna cradled Marta against her quietly remonstrating with her to flee from the light, as if they could escape providence and, even, the rays of the sun.