The Whirling Girl Read Free Page A

fear.”
    But there’s always something to fear, Clare thought.
    It comes creeping up from inside if nowhere else.
    IN RAINFORESTS OF THE upper Rio Negro, Clare, the imaginary traveller, had not been afraid. She had watched the ruby eyes of caimans gliding by, as her guide poled the dugout through dark waters. She had eased past giant anacondas on the trail. She had calmly gathered up her painting materials and slipped back to camp, when she heard the crashing of a jaguar in the brush.

Where The Bull Was Kept
    HUDDLED INSIDE HER UNCLE’S hunting coat, on his dark bed, Clare listened to a little wind slipping through some unfamiliar Italian trees. She heard the rushing of a stream. In the rafters, night thoughts roosted. She tried to concentrate on just the whispers of air as they played through twigs and leaves, pretending this could be a new discipline, identifying growing things not just by leaf and bract and stem but by the sounds they made as the wind played through.
    Then the moon reached in and said,
Hush now little Clare. Your mother’s name was Selene, another name for the moon. You will never be an orphan, Chiara, because your mother will always be shining down on you.
    On nights when she couldn’t sleep, he used to comfort her with these words.
    To the sound of the stream, Clare began drifting back and back to the true place, the good place, and darkness gave way to the full rich green of a coastal morning rising, where a man and a little girl were heading to a stream full of cutthroat, the man carrying his own rod and the girl’s new one as he helped her through the fence into the field where the bull was staked, below the folly of a west coast farmhouse with an Italian tower. The bull was raising its head, shaking its chain. The man said, “Stand tall; show him that you are not afraid.”
    â€œAre you afraid?”
    â€œI would be. But he’s staked, Chiara.”
    They were playing hooky from a long list of chores. In his pocket were two hard buns with slabs of cheese, and in his other pocket was Volume One of
Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria
. They had only just started on these travels, which he would take her on whenever they managed to escape for the next brief years, Volume One illustrating the map of a city with its ancient gates and streets and ruins and the cemetery that held tombs like small brilliant houses, and such paintings on the walls. All this was described in a way so grownup that Clare let a lot of it flow over her. Bit by bit the pictures formed. Her uncle said they would go there together.
    This was the prelude. Now, to inhabit the crucial moment that exploded some days later, to be truly there, she needed to summon up the smell of burning sun on clay, the glitter of Oregon grape against the cliff that dropped from the farmhouse to the field. And then little Chiara, digging, digging — in danger and hot young jealousy and fury — into that steep cracked wall of clay.
    If she is quick — but has left enough clues — he will come and find her.
    It turns out she is nothing in that house. He doesn’t care that she did the drawing of the foxgloves just for him. She signed the drawing with the tiny upright fork shape he’d explained made a k sound in the Etruscan alphabet, “as in your name, Chiara,” signed it with the symbol only he would understand, to show how she absorbed everything he said. But he had left her picture on the table where her aunt could come and crumple it and throw it on the fire. Now Clare has the butcher knife and she is carving a place to disappear.
    â€œOh, what our Etruscans could have done with this cliff face, Chiara,” he’d said when they came back across the field the week before, his face lighting up in that way that made her feel peculiar power. “We’ll pretend the cliff is limestone, shall we? Its location would have been ideal for our Etruscan friends to carve tombs.”