Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black

gregor

ANYONE who is a reader knows that what you have read has influenced your life. By ‘reader’ I mean one from the time you began to pick out the printed words, for yourself, in the bedtime story. (Another presumption: you became literate in some era before the bedtime story was replaced by the half-hour before the Box.) Adolescence is the crucial period when the poet and the fiction writer intervene in formation of the sense of self in sexual relation to others, suggesting — excitingly, sometimes scarily — that what adult authority has told or implied is the order of such relations, is not all. Back in the Forties, I was given to understand: first, you will meet a man, both will fall in love, and you will marry; there is an order of emotions that goes with this packaged process. That is what love is.

For me, who came along first was Marcel Proust. The strange but ineluctable disorder of Charles Swann’s agonising love for a woman who wasn’t his type (and this really no fault of her own, he fell in love with her as what she was, eh?); the jealousy of the Narrator tormentedly following a trail of Albertine’s evasions.

Swept away was the confetti. I now had different expectations of what experience might have to take on. My apprenticeship to sexual love changed; for life. Like it or not, this is what love is. Terrible. Glorious.

But what happens if something from a fiction is not interiorised, but materialises? Takes on independent existence?

It has just happened to me. Every year I re-read some of the books I don’t want to die without having read again. This year one of these is Kafka’s Diaries, and I am about half-way through. It’s night-time reading of a wonderfully harrowing sort.

A few mornings ago when I sat down at this typewriter as I do now, not waiting for Lorca’s duende but getting to work, I saw under the narrow strip of window which displays words electronically as I convey them, a roach. A smallish roach about the size and roach-shape of the nail of my third finger — medium-sized hand. To tell that I couldn’t believe it is understatement. But my immediate thought was practical: it was undoubtedly there, how did it get in. I tapped the glass at the place beneath which it appeared. It confirmed its existence, not by moving the body but wavering this way and that two whiskers, antennae so thin and pale I had not discerned them.

I proceeded to lift whatever parts of the machine are accessible, but the strip of narrow glass display was not. I consulted the User’s Manual; it did not recognise the eventuality of a cockroach penetrating the sealed refuge meant for words only. I could find no way the thing could have entered, but reasoned that if it had, shiny acorn-brown back, fine-traced antennae, it could leave again at will. Its own or mine. I tapped again overhead on the glass, and now it sidled — which meant, ah, that it was cramped under that roof — to the top limit of the space available. This also revealed bandy black legs like punctuation marks. I called a friend and she reacted simply: It’s impossible. Can’t be.

Well, it was. I have a neighbour, a young architect, whom I see head-down under the bonnet, repairing his car at weekends; there was no course of action but to wait until he could be expected to come home that evening. He is a fixer who can open anything, everything. What to be done in the meantime? Take up where I left off. Send words stringing shadows across the body. Indeed, the disturbance might hope to rouse the intruder somehow to seek the way to leave.

I am accustomed to being alone when I work. I could not help seeing that I was not; something was deliberately not watching me — anyway, I couldn’t make out its eyes — but was intimately involved with the process by which the imagination finds record, becomes extant.

It was then I received as I hadn’t heard in this way before; Can’t be.

Night after night I had been reading Franz Kafka’s diaries, the subconscious of his fictions, that Max Brod wouldn’t destroy. So there it all is, the secret genesis of creation. Kafka’s subconscious was nightly conducting me from consciousness to the subconscious of sleep.

Had I caused that creature.

Is there another kind of metamorphosis, you don’t wake up to find yourself transformed into another species, wriggling on light-brown shiny back and feeling out your space with wispy sensors, but the imagining of such a being can create one, independent of any host, physical genesis; or can imagination summon such a live being to come on out of the woodwork and manifest itself?

What nonsense. There are no doubt the usual domestic pests living clandestinely among and nourished by whatever there is to be nibbled from piles of paper and newspaper cuttings. Who else eats the gilt lettering on book jackets? Next morning he/she/it was still there, no ectoplasm of my imagination, flattened under the glass and moving, with long intervals of watchful immobility, a little way laterally or vertically as the machine warmed in use.

My neighbour had come and studied the situation, or rather Gregor’s — I had come to think of the creature that way, never mind. The young architect found that the array of tools he owned were too clumsy for the Italian finesse that had gone into the making of the machine. He would try to borrow a jeweller’s tools. Two more days passed and I continued not to be alone as I wrote. At first I wanted the thing in there to die; how could it exist without water, food — and air. As the glass display seemed hermetically sealed, wouldn’t any oxygen trapped within be exhausted. Even a beetle, a roach, whatever, must have lungs. Then I began to want it released alive, a miraculous survivor, example of the will to live evidenced beyond its humble size and status in the chain of life. I saw myself receiving it from the deliverer and releasing it on some leaf in the garden. I called the firm from which I had bought the typewriter two years ago to ask for the visit of a know-how mechanic and was told they didn’t service obsolete business machines any more, handled only computers.

He, my creature, didn’t die; when I would pause a moment to acknowledge him, there under my words, and he was perfectly immobile, I would think, he’s gone; that other sense of ‘gone’, not escaped. Then the remaining antenna would sway, the other had broken off, no doubt in patient efforts to find the secret exit by which he came in. There were times when he hid — I had seen him slip into what must be some sliver of space below where the glass window was flush with its casing. Or I’d glance up: no, not there; and then he’d appear again. My young neighbour had warned, I hope it doesn’t lay eggs in there, but I thought of the prisoner as male — maybe just because I’m a woman, assuming the conventional partner I’ve had in intimate situations faced together. On Friday night I happened to go back into my work-room to fetch a book, turned on the lamp, and there he was, moving up his inch of vertical space and then arrested, frustrated that what he seemed to have forgotten, the way he got in, the way he might get out, was not found. He looked darkened, flat and shiny beetle-black, but that aspect was by lamplight.

Saturday mid-morning my young neighbour arrived with German precision tools arranged like jewellery in a velvet-lined folder. The tenant of the display window was not to be seen; tapping on the glass did not bring him up from his usual hiding-place in that interstice below level of the glass. My neighbour studied more informedly than I had the components of the typewriter as described in Italian, German, French, Japanese and English in the User’s Manual and set to work. The machine slowly came apart, resisting with every minute bolt and screw and the rigidity of plastic that threatened to snap. At last, there was the inner chamber, the glass display. It would not yield; the inhabitant did not rise into view despite the disturbance. We halted operations; had he found his egress, got out; then he might be somewhere in the cavern of the machine exposed. No sign. My neighbour was not going to be defeated by the ingenuity of Italian engineering, he tried this tiny implement and that, managing to unwind the most minute of pin-head screws and disengage complex clamps. With one last thumb-pressure the glass lifted. The shallow cavity beneath, running the width of the machine, was empty. Where was he who had survived there for five days? Had he freed himself and was watching from among papers and newspaper cuttings instead of on a garden leaf. We continued to search the innards of the typewriter. No sign. Then I ran a finger tracing the narrow space where certainly he had been, existed, hadn’t he, and felt a change in the surface under my skin. Peered close, and there he was.

His own pyre. Somehow consumed himself.

A pinch of dust. One segment of a black leg, hieroglyph to be decoded.