Light Action in the Caribbean Read Online Free PDF Page B

the Ocean Green room, each was a single piece of micaceous granite. As well as I could guess, these massive but consoling walls were founded first and the rest of the house then builtaround them. How they were erected or squared I could not imagine. As was true elsewhere in this prefecture, a question was received as an impolite gesture, a condition under which I chafed, but only slightly. I was content to see and listen.
    I was informed that in the Ocean Green room the evening meal was always the flesh of a winged animal.
    From the Ocean Green room I was walked through a round orchard of loquat trees to see a Lantern Red room. The floor here was of clear larch, the walls of charcoal-gray basalt. The evening meal was the meat of a grazing animal. The empty basin of the hearth, the absence of candle stands, contributed to a feeling of repose or suspension in these rooms. On our way from there, in a southern portion of the grounds, we passed the entrance to a Poppy Yellow room, pointed out through a single lattice row of kumquat. Its dark floor was of mahogany and the pale walls were of a fossiliferous sandstone. The evening meal there, it was explained, was of vegetables, intentionally bland. The final rooms, the Persian Blue rooms, had floors of
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oak. The outer wall of the one we walked up to was standing open and I saw within walls of brindled marble, the color of a flock of pigeons. The evening meal here was of carp or other freshwater fish.
    In the courtyard of each house the Lords grow some flowers and vegetables, as they are inclined.
    I was not permitted to look into any room that was in use—a Lantern Red room in one house, two Poppy Yellow rooms in other houses—so again must rely for these descriptions upon my companions. When a Lord steps into a new room at Change of Season, he finds lying neatly upon the tables several dozen bound and unbound Texts (in the Dobrit and otherlanguages), along with dictionaries, paper, and pencils. The books, manuscripts, and folios of drawings all bear on a single culture—here my younger host volunteered that the Lords were then reading, respectively, of Quechua, Tomachan, French, and Xosha peoples. It is the determination and desire of each Lord to have at the end of three months enough of an understanding of the culture in which he is reading to be able to make up a single story, one that gives evidence of his study and reflects his respect, but demonstrates no enthrallment. On each of the four evenings before Change of Season, the Lords gather at the center of the gardens to listen to one story each night, recited before a fire kept by two of the attendants. When the Circle of Women speaks of the Prayer, it is to these stories told at the end of each season that they are referring.
    My hosts pointed out that the Texts are not chosen solely on the basis of impeccable scholarship but consist, instead, of a variety of printed materials—novels, treatises on natural history, biographies of politicians, works of reference, ethnographic documents, hydrographic records, works of architectural theory. It is, too, a collection chosen to match the strengths in language and metaphor of an individual Lord.
    I chanced here one question: Were the stories the Lords told ever written down? No, the stories were only spoken once, said my elder host. She said, further, that in their reactions to the stories, the Lords tried to reinforce in one another a desire to do well. And it was this desire—to perform their tasks well, to read carefully, to give in to the manuscripts, to think deeply—as much as the Litany of Respect that the Lords produced, she believed, that kept War at bay.
    As we walked toward the Gate of Entry, my younger hostsuggested I might wish to be alone for a few moments. I was grateful for her kindness, and walked some steps back along our gravel path to sit on a ginkgo-wood bench. In my six years of travel, I knew I had never before been in a place so peaceful, so eloquent.