The Secret History - Donna Tartt [82]
“No, Henry, I don’t.”
“That it’s incomprehensible to someone who isn’t a Christian? That if one is to read Dante, and understand him, one must become a Christian if only for a few hours? It was the same with this. It had to be approached on its own terms, not in a voyeuristic light or even a scholarly one. At the first, I suppose, it was impossible to see it any other way, looking at it as we did in fragments, through centuries. The vitality of the act was entirely obsfucated, the beauty, the terror, the sacrifice.” He took one last drag of his cigarette and put it out. “Quite simply,” he said, “we didn’t believe. And belief was the one condition which was absolutely necessary. Belief, and absolute surrender.”
I waited for him to continue.
“At this point, you must understand, we were on the verge of giving up,” he said calmly. “The enterprise had been interesting, but not that interesting; and besides, it was a good deal of trouble. You don’t know how many times you almost stumbled on us.”
“No?”
“No.” He took a drink of his whiskey. “I don’t suppose you remember coming downstairs one night in the country, about three in the morning,” he said. “Down to the library to get a book. We heard you on the stairs. I was hidden behind the draperies; I could have reached out and touched you if I’d wanted. Another time you woke up before we even got home. We had to slip around to the back door, sneak up the stairs like cat burglars—it was very tiresome, all that creeping around barefoot in the dark. Besides, it was getting cold. They say that the oreibasia took place in midwinter, but I daresay the Peloponnesus is considerably milder that time of year than Vermont.
“We’d worked on it so long, though, and it seemed senseless, in light of our revelation, not to try once more before the weather turned. Everything got serious all of a sudden. We fasted for three days, longer than we ever had before. A messenger came to me in a dream. Everything was going beautifully, on the brink of taking wing, and I had a feeling that I’d never had, that reality itself was transforming around us in some beautiful and dangerous fashion, that we were being driven by a force we didn’t understand, towards an end I did not know.” He reached for his drink again. “The only problem was Bunny. He didn’t grasp, in some fundamental way, that things had changed significantly. We were closer than we’d ever been, and every day counted; already it was terribly cold, and if it snowed, which it might have any day, we’d have had to wait till spring. I couldn’t bear the thought that, after everything we’d done, he’d ruin it at the last minute. And I knew he would. At the crucial moment he’d start to tell some asinine joke and ruin everything. By the second day I was having my doubts, and then, on the afternoon of the night itself, Charles saw him in Commons having a grilled cheese sandwich and a milk shake. That did it. We decided to slip away without him. To go out on the weekends was too risky, since you’d almost caught us several times already, so we’d been driving out late on Thursday and getting back about three or four the next morning. Except this time we left early, before dinner, and didn’t say a word to him about it.”
He lit a cigarette. There was a long pause.
“So?” I said. “What happened?”
He laughed. “I don’t know what to say.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that it worked.”
“It worked?”
“Absolutely.”
“But how could—?”
“It worked.”
“I don’t think I understand what you mean when you say ‘it worked.’ ”
“I mean it in the most literal sense.”
“But how?”
“It was heart-shaking. Glorious. Torches, dizziness, singing. Wolves howling around us and a bull bellowing in the dark. The river ran white. It was like a film in fast motion, the moon waxing and waning, clouds rushing across the sky. Vines grew from the ground so fast they twined up the trees like snakes; seasons passing in the wink of an eye, entire years for all I know.… I mean we think of phenomenal change as being