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Candas Jane Dorsey Biography

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“He had slowed the melody now to a sad, reflective circle of notes. Behind this basic structure, Elta was piling an increasing weight of harmonies, circling again and again to augment them. He thought it was like the weight of the past, the weight of memory, building and building until it seemed almost unbearable, and yet there was always room for more: another repetition, another variation. The clapping had long since died away and the audience was rapt and silent. Suddenly a clutch of despair squeezed his heart. How would he survive the rest of his long life? He was not yet very old, and yet he felt old. Like the Essa with the gray-streaked hair who had been carried raving off the ship at Avanue, and whose limp and pallid shape he’d tended unconscious until the day she woke to say ‘Minh’ to him in the same rich voice he remembered. “I feel so old, she had said to him once. How will I live the rest of my life? Then, he hadn’t really known what she meant, though he had understood. Now, he both understood and knew.”

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Book:Black Wine
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“The rest of the evening was a blessed blur. She spent it mostly in a chair alone, near the door, waiting, drinking the red wine and trying to forget the taste of the black mixed with whiskey coming back up. At home, she fell into bed and passed out immediately. She wakened with a headache, hours into the next day, angry with herself for her sullen behavior the night before. But her hand hadn’t noticed, and although their headaches were as bad as her they bore them cheerfully: the price, said Gata, of a good party. “Everything seems to have a price, thought Essa, and I seem to be broke all the time.”

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Book:Black Wine
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“That peculiar light just before sunset, before gloaming: it is then that Essa sees for the first time the famous dunes at Avanue, which roll like fat people in their sleep, and shift restlessly forever. “They cast long shadows, these sleeping giants, and Essa shivers. She has walked too far—after the trip north she was so grateful to be out of hospital—her hands and feet are cold, and she is dizzy with exhaustion. She sits down on the ragged grass at the edge of the bluff which overlooks the dunes, and tries not to hate them. “Her mother’s words, remembered in a dream, sound like water flowing in her thoughts. There is no water here. The grasses under her are dry and stiff, and they grow in sand so fine it grits through her clothing against the skin of her ass. The sea is too far away to see or smell. But at least she is alone. “Though she is shivering, it is still a hot day, and the sun has warmed the sand. The ground radiates heat into her body. She lies down flat on her belly, her head to one side so that she can still see the dunes, and puts her hands beneath her; gradually they warm. “Gradually her body comes back into balance and she starts to see an eerie beauty before her. The sun is fully down when she sits up, brushes the sand away as well as she can, and hugs her knees to her chest. She puts her chin on her knees and watches darkness descend over the low rolling landscape. “This is unlike any cliff on which she has rested yet. It is low and gives no perspective. The dunes come up almost to her feet. Yet the demarcation is quite abrupt: there is no grass growing anywhere after this brief crumbling drop-off, and she can see as the land-breeze begins to quicken that ahead of her the sand is moving. In fact, she realizes, she can hear it, a low sweeping sound which has mounted from inaudibility until it inexorably backs every other sound: sounds of grasses moving, insects scraping, birds calling from the invisible sea far beyond her viewpoint are all subsumed in one great sand-song. “It is a sound so relentlessly sad that Essa can hardly bear to listen, but so persistent that she cannot ignore it now that she has become aware of its susurration. She pulls her sweater—the one her mother made by her knitting—around her and waits. “When it is fully dark and the wind has died again, she rises and begins the long walk back to town in the dim light of stars and crescent moon.”

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Book:Black Wine
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“Were they taken apart like this? But they seemed to be able to function after, though I couldn’t imagine how we would. We clung to each other. After a while I started to cry. Annalise held me. “‘In the book,’ she said, ‘they say that after fucking one is omnivorously sad.’ “‘It’s not that.’ “‘What then?’ “‘It’s so easy for you.’ “‘Easy?’ She looked at me and her grin slipped off, right off into nowhere. ‘Easy? We could die of this. Don’t you feel it? Right now, we could be dying of each other. How do you think that feels, when I could be thrown out like garbage any day? And you, you are the heir to everything.’ “She had never talked about it before. Now I was so far into my own fear that it took me time to realize they were the same fears. We lay in silence, holding each other tight, until I caught up to it and passed ahead. “‘How can she hurt them?’ I said finally. ‘What if…?’ “‘You are not her,’ said Annalise, which she had said before, but now, she took my shoulders fiercely and held me so she could look into my face. ‘You are not hers,’ she said. The difference was immense, and she struck my fear away easily. I was washed with gratitude, relief. ‘Stop it,’ she said. ‘You never cry.’ “‘I never knew stuff before,’ I said. ‘How this changes everything. How it’s full of fear. In the books I read, it’s full of joy. In the books you read, it shows you how to put your hands into me and pull my heart out.’ “‘Poor princess,’ she said. ‘And what have you done with mine heart? You have eaten it all up.’ “After that we were shy and had to start to make stupid jokes, though I could not imagine ever seeing the light of day again, I felt so different.”

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Book:Black Wine
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“I could hear the roaring fill the air but I could not find a source. A waterfall around the bend, I thought, across these rocks. Ahead, I could see a small crack in the rock. I went forward prepared to leap it. As I took the step nearest it, I glanced down. “And nearly fell, two hundred feet I’m sure, into a boiling cauldron of water trapped in a deep, narrow chasm of stone so curled and convoluted by erosion that it seemed like some fantastic cloth. I can record all this now but at the time I had to fling myself back, and the navigator grabbed me and prevented me from sliding in. We both fell backward, and I lay there panting and sweating. “‘What?’ she said. ‘What?’ I gestured, and she crawled ahead. When she returned, her face was white, but she was laughing. “‘I can die now,’ she said, that Avanue phrase Annalise has read in books but I had never heard spoken before. The navigator lay beside me laughing until she calmed, while the others, including the merchanter, took their turn. He alone seemed unmoved. “When we jumped across the chasm (so narrow there was no effort to it)—and there is no easy way to say it—she jumped not across but in. I did not see it. No-one saw it but the merchanter. I only heard her falling laughter.… “Annalise tells me that if a northerner says that phrase ‘I can die now,’ it means great joy, but they mean it truly. Not many of them choose to actually die, but they do not grieve for those who do.”

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Book:Black Wine
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“Until now I didn’t dare say anything like the word ‘home,’ though when I saw this valley, I thought I must stay here. It is too perilous to hope for something as impossible as a home, and we both know it.… There will come a time when it is all shattered—by something we find out that makes us realise we are living in fool’s heaven, or by something—or someone—from outside, bringing our past along to catch us. It’s bound to happen. It’s only a matter of time.… “Can’t seem to forget the time when I was a child that I had my nanny beaten because she—I can’t remember. She never came back. I thought she died of it. She was old. All I remember is my triumph. This was my world and I knew how to manage it. My grandmother gave me a present then…I have it with me still. Brought it to remind myself that I am what I despise. Or have been. That kind of blood doesn’t wash off. “I have wondered why I stay alive. I ran away. I stayed away. I told myself there was nothing I could do. I just survive to spite them, to make them fear something at least. Certainly not because I love myself as they seem to do here, without lives and torture on their conscience. What does it mean to be good? Everywhere I go there is a different answer. * “I am tired of the pain of this. There are people all around me in these mountain towns who have not had a life of such pain. I am starting to hate on account of it. Hate them for their happiness. Hate my family, even my parents, for the kind of world they made and live in. Hate myself, I suppose, too, for being trapped here. In these mountains, in this body, in this life. “I cannot imagine, right now, why I stay alive. I never questioned it in the years of struggle: life justified itself. But now that I am safe and sitting in these gardens, living in these easy households, playing with these carefree children, I cannot bear to live like this. I am a twisted creature without merit.… “But here in the mountains they have names for the things I want to become: happy, secure, gentle, kind, good.… “Can someone so hurt—here they call it ‘abused’—be good?”

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Book:Black Wine
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“Someday…I will know that a new world has come into being, the world we dream could set us all free of tyranny, lies, injustice, prejudice, fear and sorrow. “When truth triumphs over all secrecy, we will all sail the silver ships, we will all know the joyful beauty of the Fjord of Tears in autumn, we will choose our families and loves and friends and no evil but only natural process will sunder us.”

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Book:Black Wine
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“It is a simple answer, really. It comes to Essa in the memory of XX’s old name. A fist is tight and tense, then it opens, relaxes, turns and flies up. It could mean Escape-from-bondage, but it could also mean: let it go. “Let it go. Let the past transform as it will, let the future unfold. XX was right in a way about her expectations: she has taken to worrying at the world, trying to get it to make sense. It is time to let go, whatever that may mean: daughter, lover, friend, past and future. “Simply let it all go. It will fly up.”

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Book:Black Wine
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“=Fierce-frightened,= Escape-from-bondage says to her. “‘What?’ “=A name for you. My name for you, in my thoughts.= “‘I have never had a name. Even the crazy old woman never gave me a name. She didn’t have any names to spare, I guess.’ “=She didn’t need to name you. You were the only one she had. But I know many. And I call you who you seem to me, fierce and frightened.= “‘Is that who I am?’ “=I don’t know who you are. Only who you seem to me.= “The difference makes her head start to ache.”

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Book:Black Wine
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“They all know the chant except her. She tries to follow along but her signs are halting. Still, the people on either side of her smile at her. The silence in the room is overwhelming, broken as it is by nothing but the involuntary sounds of the deaf and the rustling of the sleeves of the signing people. The girl is about to start to cry when she hears around her a muted chuckling sound. Who’s laughing, she thinks furiously, only to realize that the sound was the sniffling of other people already weeping. At the realization, she is hard-put to suppress giggles instead. She thinks: maybe all ritual has mystery and absurdity, and maybe that is what it is for. It is a curious and complex thought and like most of her legacy from the madwoman it makes her head hurt. She concentrates then on her signing.”

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Book:Black Wine
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“It’s about…’ but there isn’t a word for it in a language he knows. “He makes the sign again, two hands intertwined. “‘Fucking?’ “His face darkens. He makes the sign for fucking. It is different. He pushes his hands away and apart. Then he says, =Not fucking. That we have to do for them. Something we do for ourselves. Because we—= and he makes a strange sign, which she does not understand, then spells it out, *love*, repeating afterward his hands-on-heart sign. “=Do we ‘love’?= she signs back, because she doesn’t know a word for it in the spoken language he knows.… “She pulls off her shift and sits naked before him. He puts a hand up, halfway. Her hand meets his. Later she is not sure who first pulled the other closer, even though it all happens very slowly.… “Suddenly, an unfamiliar and terrifying feeling mounts through her belly to the top of her head. It seems to spread in circles, like the concentric circles at the servants’ ritual, but spreads and spreads. She cries out, ‘What is it?’ but her voice is wild and she doesn’t know what language she has used. Suddenly she cannot bear his hand any more: she clasps it to her belly and pushes against him and he comes into her harder, comes with a ragged shout of his own which he later tells her would have been words if he hadn’t, so many years ago, had his words stolen away. “They lie down then, touching over more surface than she has touched anyone in her short life, and sleep entangled like his fingers were when he made the sign for this, for whatever this has been, this that they have done together.”

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Book:Black Wine
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“What in heaven’s name do you mean?’ “=Not the name of heaven. Just the place you come from.= “‘You don’t know anything about the place I come from.’ “=It is true I don’t know the place. But I know a great deal about the place now, after learning to know you. I know what kind of stories—not the stories themselves, mind you, but the kind of stories—they tell their children. I know what the children are led to expect from the world. Fair treatment. A happy life. Even that question you ask comes out of the mountains.= “‘Is there anything wrong with that? You make it look stupid.’ “=There is nothing wrong, and there is something wrong. There is nothing wrong with making a place where children can be safe. I can hardly imagine it myself, but it sits on the edge of my vision like a small sun. It’s a blinding glimpse of something. Safety. So very odd. And I suppose there’s nothing wrong with a modicum of safety, though I think my way one at least learns how to react quickly. But there is something wrong in the kind of complacency…= his sign is complicated: a cat after cream, a fat despot =…which lets you think you have a right to a happy life just because you can think of the idea.= “‘I don’t agree with you. Everyone should be able to be complacent in that way!’ As she speaks she illustrates the way by repeating the cat-with-cream sign. ‘But that other, that arrogance, I don’t think we are arrogant, in the mountains, like that—do you?’ “=Arrogant? I don’t know. Arrogant? A curious word. The arrogance of privilege. You had safety. That’s a privilege.=”

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Book:Black Wine
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“Would it be death? If so, she did not fear it, for she knew that her life would flow down the silver thread which always trailed her, to the Carrier of Spirits who would gather the rest of her in that vast sea of memory. Would she find her mother? She had found her mother. Would she go home? Where was home, anyway? “The trees were full of fireflies, and suddenly, as if a new goddess came to meet her, the moon, a vast-seeming golden sphere of light, softened at the edges by the thickness of the air, rose and came toward her. She ran in her own globe of golden radiance until she felt that like Skaalya in the legend she could learn to fly. She would fly up, she would dive into the Moon, she would know what this goddess knew, she would give herself to the light which had at long last returned itself to her. “She chased the moon toward her until they met at the doorway, the moon diving into the portal before Essa arrived. It was there, she knew, on the other side. Would she too pass through? “She stood in wonder before the doorway: was this what ‘wondering’ truly meant? She could spend her life wondering.… “Ahead of her was the bright doorway: green, iridescent, swirling, oval under the trees, lit from behind by the full moon.”

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Book:Black Wine
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