A Wild Swan Read Online Free Page B

envies him his rapaciousness, his insatiability. She who has let herself go, who prepares the meals and does the dishes and wanders, with no particular purpose, from room to room. She who finds herself strangely glad to be in the presence of someone avaricious and heartless and uncaring.
    *   *   *
    Are we surprised to learn that, a year or so later, Jack goes up the beanstalk one more time?
    By now, there’s nothing left for him and his mother to buy. They’ve got the car and driver, they’ve got the private plane, they own that small, otherwise-uninhabited island in the Lesser Antilles, where they’ve built a house that’s staffed year-round, in anticipation of their single annual visit.
    We always want more, though. Some of us want more than others, it’s true, but we always want more of … something. More love, more youth, more …
    On his third visit, Jack decides not to press his luck with the giantess. This time, he sneaks in through the back.
    He finds the giant and giantess unaltered, though it would seem they’ve had to cut back, having lost their gold and their magic hen. The castle has dissolved a bit—sky knifes in through gaps in the cloud-walls. The daily lunch of an entire animal runs more along the lines of an antelope or an ibex, sinewy and dark-tasting, no longer the fattened, farm-tender ox or bullock of their salad days.
    Still, habits resist change. The giant devours his creature, spits out horns and hooves, and demands his last remaining treasure: a magic harp.
    The harp is a prize of a different order entirely. Who knows about its market value? It’s nothing so simple as gold coins or golden eggs. It too is made of gold, but it’s not prosaic in the way of actual currency.
    It’s a harp like any harp—strings, knee, neck, tuning pins—but its head is the head of a woman, slightly smaller than an apple, more stern than beautiful; more Athena than Botticelli Venus. And it can play itself.
    The giant commands the harp to play. The harp obliges. It plays a tune unknown on the earth below; a melody that emanates from clouds and stars, a song of celestial movements, the music of the spheres, that which composers like Bach and Chopin came close to approximating but which, being ethereal, cannot be produced by instruments made of brass or wood, cannot be summoned by human breath or fingering.
    The harp plays the giant into his nap. That gargantuan head makes its thudding daily contact with the tabletop.
    What must the giantess think, when Jack creeps in and grabs the harp? Again? You’re kidding. You actually want the very last of our treasures?
    Is she appalled, or relieved, or both? Does she experience some ecstasy of total loss? Or has she had enough? Is she going to put an end, at last, to Jack’s voracity?
    We’ll never know. Because it’s the harp, not the giantess, who finally protests. As Jack makes for the door, the harp calls out, “Master, help me, I’m being stolen.”
    The giant wakes, looks around uncertainly. He’s been dreaming. Can this be his life, his kitchen, his haggard and grudging wife?
    By the time he’s up and after Jack, Jack has already traversed the cloud-field and reached the top of the beanstalk, holding firm to the harp as the harp cries out for rescue.
    It’s a race down the beanstalk. Jack is hampered by his grip on the harp—he can only climb one-handed—but the giant has far more trouble than Jack in negotiating the stalk itself, which, for the giant, is thin and unsteady, like the rope he was forced to climb in gym class when he was a weepy, lonely boy.
    As Jack nears the ground, he calls to his mother to bring him an axe. He’s lucky—she’s semi-sober today. She rushes out with an axe. Jack chops the beanstalk down, while the giant is still as high as a hawk circling for rabbits.
    The beanstalk falls like a redwood. The giant hits the