Titus Awakes

4

Titus’s Awakening

A WARMTH OF body lit up his whole spirit. His eyes opened willingly, for the first time since his incarceration in the freezing barn.

He knew himself to be in a room that was a room of poverty. His eyes searched and saw it all. There was so little to see. A rafter with a ham that brought back to him other rafters in vaster places, with a rat that had been crunched to death by a man so vile that he closed his eyes to forget.

When he opened them again, at the side of his pallet bed he saw an old woman holding a bowl to his lips, urging his mouth to open. Her eyes were red-rimmed by age, and as he opened his mouth to receive the blessing of food, she smiled and her toothless gums were sweeter at that moment than any young woman’s lips. Liquid from the rough-hewn wooden bowl was gently poured down his throat by means of an equally rough spoon. Thus cared for, Titus enjoyed the sense of peace of an infant at its mother’s breast, although this was something that had not been his to know. How could he remember being suckled by Keda, his wet-nurse from the ‘Outer Dwellings’ of Gormenghast? He could only recall the insatiable, unsatisfied love he had felt for her daughter – his own foster sister – the ‘Thing’, and the world of Gormenghast to which he clung, hated and loved.

As the last spoonful trickled down into his whole being, he closed his eyes and a sigh of more than physical satisfaction broke the silence of the poor room. As a blind man could sense, so did he. He knew that in this room was another being, apart from the old woman, who also needed succour. ‘I must open my eyes. I must be a part of everything.’

The back of the old woman hid from view what he wished to see. He could only discern her movements. The old black-robed arm moved with the regularity of a tin soldier hitting his drum, up and down, but noiselessly. When the old woman ceased and moved from where she had been crouching, succouring another being, the light fell on two dark burning eyes, luminous as the snow had been. Eyes, huge and as yet unseeing. Titus felt such a yearning that his stomach, which had been hollow for so long, turned over, and the sickness he had hitherto known as lust he realised was some kind of love.

‘Who are you? We were in the barn together. Your hair is still shaved, but your eyes are beautiful. They’re burning me. Somewhere in my memory is a story of burning – but what it is I cannot remember. Perhaps I never knew, perhaps it is only a memory that never existed except in my own mind – or something that Fuchsia . . .’

Titus closed his eyes to recall the sister who could only love with her whole being, and then only a few chosen people, and of the few, her brother most of all. ‘I’ll never see her again – I’ll never know again the ardour of a love that knows no physical desire.’

Daylight shone through the small latticed window, and it seemed as though there was nothing in the room but those two huge identical midnight pools of water, with twin half-circles of light that searched him out. The light from the pools shone with such brightness that Titus could not but be charged by them. The eyes continued their search and found his face and his eyes, so different, so knowledgeable. He wanted them to smile, and he wanted the smile to be returned. Four eyes searching.

Why was it that now, as he lay immobilised, his past returned to him in the memory of a girl called ‘Black Rose’? She was a victim, and she shared the same look, the translucent skin and enormous black globes, and who, he had been told, died as her head touched the white pillow, and her emaciated body lay between virgin sheets. Titus asked himself if he would for ever only be able to see things present in terms of his own past. Would he never free himself?

Those black brilliant eyes hunted him out, concentrating on him like the sun’s rays burning a piece of glass. He felt his cheeks flush, his mouth open, and a spasm of desire rendered him nearly insensible.

‘My name is Titus,’ he said in a cracked voice.

The eyes continued without blinking to search his face.

‘I am Titus Groan.’

‘I am Titus – I am Titus,’ and his voice became shrill with impotence.

He pushed all the bed coverings away from him in a determination to move. He looked at himself and did not recognise what he saw. Two stick insects to support his torso, and at their furthermost end a pair of feet, white, unused and wrinkled. He threw the insects over the bed and, as his feet touched the cold stone, he fell ignominiously. There was no strength in him.

He raised his head to the eyes that were impelling him – the head raised upon an arm so thin that he knew his own incarceration was as nothing compared to what had reduced the once-rounded whiteness of flesh to the pathetic bone-covered skin he saw opposite him.

He had intended to violate that flesh. He had wanted to hurt, because of his own hurt, but his weakness forbade him, and instead of the insolent virility of young manhood, he felt his body rendered down to the feebleness of age, and he no longer cared that he was a ludicrous sight.