Part 2
2
Laura did not achieve the new way of living with her baby which she had wished. She had not reckoned with the sheer force of routine in a rich nineteenth-century household. Had she decided to live by herself with her illegitimate child—and this would have meant becoming a bohemian—she might have succeeded. As it was, in her mother’s house in Paris, her plans were defeated by nurse-maids, chambermaids, the housekeeper, her mother’s doctor. It was not possible for her to be with the child for more than a couple of hours a day. It was not possible for her to occupy herself with all the daily chores connected with looking after him—washing linen, ironing, cleaning the nursery, preparing his food, etc.; there were servants to do such jobs. The most that she could achieve was bathing him in the late afternoon under the eyes of the nurse and the maid who brought up the hot water.
Nor could Laura explain what she wanted. If she had said that she wanted to be always within sight and touching distance of her son and that for the next few years in her life everything else should take second place, that she wanted to live with him as an equal, crawling when he crawled, walking when he walked, speaking his own language, never being more than a few steps ahead of him, if she had said this she would have been treated as hysterical. An infant, like everything else in the nineteenth century, had its own place—which was unshareable.
Umberto implored her to let him see his son. Laura refused to answer his letters and told her mother that the boy’s father had gone out of his mind. Two years passed. Laura’s mother remarried and returned to the United States. Laura went to London and there, through some acquaintances who quickly became close friends, was converted to the cause of Fabian Socialism. It was arranged that until she had found a house, the boy should stay for a few months with Laura’s first cousins on a farm. Laura was to come down by train to visit him every other week. The cousins were in debt. Laura was able to raise money on their behalf through her mother. In London she became more and more involved in her political interests. The secret of life, she considered, was no longer hidden in her own body but in the evolutionary process. Her visits to the country to see her son became rarer and rarer. The boy appeared to thrive in the country. The French nurse was sent back to Paris and an English governess installed. The cousins (a brother and sister called Jocelyn and Beatrice) agreed that the boy should continue to stay with them. On that farm the boy spent his childhood.
Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companions. It is not that they will not race against each other, but this is of no consequence, for, back in the stable, the one who is heavier and clumsier does not on that account give up his oats to the other, as men want others to do to them. With animals virtue is its own reward.
At that place the minimum of flesh covers the bone of the skull, but even on this thin, thin soil the fur grows. The bone casing is almost concave. On either side of the space is an eye, large with its depths uncovered. It is the frontal centre of the head. In man there is no equivalent place. The sense organs are too concentrated, the eyes too close together, the face too sharp. By contrast the face of a man is like a blade with the cutting edge facing whoever approaches.
On this almost concave field of fur with its thin soil, you rub your hand and the animal nods in accord. But the palm of the hand is too soft: its pads muffle the contact. You clench your fist and rub again: this time with your knuckles grazing against the animal’s skull. His eyes remain open, placid and undisturbed because for him there can be no danger which is that close.
It begins like this in childhood. But grown men, overcome by grief or remorse, thrust their foreheads, skullbone to skullbone, between a cow’s eyes.
The term ‘dumb animal’ sinks deep into Beatrice’s mind. It implies neither condescension nor pity. But the animal’s inability to speak is somehow related by her to the almost concave field between the eyes.
Until puberty the horns mystify her: or rather, not so much the grown horns but their growing: the stumps which she feels with her fingers like rock beneath the fur. During adolescence they supply her with a model for what is happening to herself. The growth of the horn, she begins to understand, does not represent the animal’s mere submission to time passing: it has nothing to do with patience: it represents time acquired. Cattle carry their horns as men their years of experience.
Without the presence of animals (such as she has felt all her life) the farm would be intolerable to her. She does not coddle the lamb that has to be brought indoors. She has no regrets about a cow which has gone dry being sold. But without the animals the farm would oppose her as uninhabited and inert: time passing would claim it as it claims a hollow tree. It is the animals who stand and eat and (at night) sigh and graze and wait and breed between her and the lifelessness of the stars.
During her childhood the animals are owned by her father. His power is manifest in them. Like her, they do his bidding. And to them as to her he speaks softly. To everyone else he speaks roughly and is ill-tempered.
She is twenty-four. Her face tends to be laterally over-stretched—as though her ears are constantly pulling her mouth into a smile. In consequence her full lips are always slightly parted, her white teeth just visible.
At a garden party she may look to a stranger from London like a still eligible daughter of a country gentleman. (Though her father is dead and she keeps house for her brother.) Yet when she moves, she may surprise and slightly disturb him. All her movements and gestures are, despite her small size, curiously emphatic.
The neighbouring gentry describe her amongst themselves as hoy-denish and so explain why she has not married.
Her actions, whatever they may be—walking across a lawn, cutting a rose, opening the oven when supervising the cook, folding linen, stepping into her skirt and petticoat when dressing—all suggest this disproportionate force which is the result of her unusual sureness of decision. Once she has decided upon a course of action, any consideration which might modify it she instantly dismisses as a detail. There are no details within her life; they are all exterior to it.
Beatrice is a woman without morality or ambition because she is incapable of surprising herself. She can propose nothing unfamiliar to herself. This self-knowledge is not the result of prolonged introspection but, rather, of having always been familiar, like an animal, with the patterns of action and reaction necessary to satisfy her own unquestioned needs.
It is possible that I make her sound like an idiot. If so, I do her an injustice.
The farm is at the bottom of a valley with hills rising steeply up from it on three sides. The house, built about a hundred years earlier, is large with many chimneys. At one side is a walled fruit garden: and behind the house a steeply rising lawn. The stables and dairy and outhouses are laid out along the valley. Perhaps once when the condition of the farm was different, its situation suggested a well-chosen and protected site. Now the hills seem to overshadow it a little.
Since her father’s death both house and land have deteriorated. The brother’s interest is in his horses and little else. They have had to sell land. In the father’s time there were five tenant farmers on the estate: now it has been reduced to their own 500-acre farm.
The house still maintains standards. A pantry maid still spends two whole days a week cleaning the silver. Every winter afternoon a fire is still lit in the master’s bedroom. When the master is out hunting, a groom still acts as second horseman. Every June there is a well-attended garden party on the sloping lawn beneath the two magnificent copper beeches. But the house is becoming too big for the household. On the land jobs are deferred or postponed. Thus, because it is slightly under-inhabited and underworked, there has begun the slow process of depersonalization which will end, in twenty-five years’ time, with the place being turned into an Officers’ Convalescent Home.
Beatrice’s brother, Jocelyn, is five years older than she.
Large and handsome with very pale blue eyes. One’s first impression is of a man likely to be master of any situation. But this impression is quickly succeeded by another. Very little seems to impinge upon him. He has acquired a certain manner of reacting but behind this is an extensive passivity. One wonders why one’s first impression was so wrong. And then suddenly something occurs to him, his eyes sparkle and with the conviction of his whole large body he says: And that was a damned fine thing to have done! The authority of his judgement (even to a boy who knows no history) appears to be based on all that has been worth preserving from the past. And then—as if relapsing into that past itself—he becomes profoundly and secretly passive again. What is it that makes him so elusive?
To understand him closely we must consider him from afar. Towards the end of the last century the English upper class faced an unusual crisis. Their power was in no way threatened: but their own chosen image of themselves was threatened. They had long since accommodated themselves to industrial capitalism and trade, but they had chosen to continue the way of life of an hereditary, landed élite. This way of life, with its underlying assumptions, was becoming more and more incompatible with the modern world. On one hand the scale of modern finance, industry and imperialist investment required a new image of leadership; and on the other hand the masses were demanding democracy. The solution which the upper class found was true to their own character: it was both spirited and frivolous. If their way of life had to disappear, they would first apotheosize it by openly and shamelessly transforming it into a spectacle: if it was no longer viable, they would turn it into theatre. They no longer claimed (except purely verbally) justification by reference to a natural order: instead they performed a play upon a stage with its own laws and conventions. From the 1880s onwards this was the underlying meaning of Social Life—the Hunts, the Shoots, the Race Meetings, the Court Balls, the Regattas, the Great House Parties.
The general public welcomed the apotheosis. Like most audiences they felt that, to some degree, they owned the performing players. Their one-time rulers appeared to have become their romancers. Meanwhile during the diversion the upper class—at its class centre—habituated itself to its new and necessarily more disguised exercise of power. Like a phoenix it was to rise again from its own ashes, for the ashes were only those of its regalia, finally used as theatrical costume.
Jocelyn is an impoverished and peripheral member of this class. The Hunts and the Point-to-Point Races he goes to are comparatively undistinguished ones. But this increases his need to believe that the play is life and that the rest of life is a suspended empty interval. This is why he is elusive and why, when he is off-stage with no lines to speak or actions to perform, he becomes unusually passive. But let us be clear: it is not because he wants limelight or applause (on the contrary, he would consider them vulgarities), but because he believes that the play is reality.
His costume for the part: top boots with mahogany-coloured tops, spurs, cord breeches, a faded swallow-tailed pink coat, a white stock, a low-crowned top hat, a short leather crop with a long lash.
From November to April he hunts four days a week.
I must emphasize that I have used the word ‘play’ as a metaphor so that we can appreciate the essentially artificial, symbolic, exemplary and spectacular nature of the occasion. But the scene and the props are real. The winter weather, the hounds, the coverts to be drawn, the fences to be jumped, the country that is there to be ridden over, the drag of the fox, the fatigue of the man who has thrust all day—these are real: and the physical experience of these is all the intenser because of their symbolism which every hard-bitten hunting man feels.
To be mounted is already to be a master, a knight. To represent the noble (in the ethical as well as the social sense). To vanquish. To feature, however modestly, in the annals of battle. Honour begins with a man and a horse.
To get well away with the hounds is to be intrepid. To be ingenious. To be the respecter of nothing but the pace.
To hunt is the opposite of to own. It is to ride over. To dart in the open. To be as men as free as the straight-necked dog-fox is as fox.
To meet is to ride with others, who whatever their character know something of these values and help to preserve them. All that is opposed to these values appears to be represented by the invention of barbed wire. (The wire that, later, millions of infantrymen will die against on the orders of their mounted generals.)
Jocelyn is riding home early one December evening. The horse is caked with mud. He slips from the saddle and, although at first he is so stiff that he cannot stand upright but is bent like a man with a stick, he walks beside the horse’s head. Its ears are cocked well forward. Just two more miles old fellow, he says. The two proceed side by side. The man runs over in his mind the main incidents of the day. What happened to him and what his friends had recounted of their day. In the marrow of his tiredness is a sense of well-being, even of modest virtue. He is convinced that just as the consequences of a crime—an act of treachery, for example, or a theft—often spread outwards to involve more people and further actions, so, too, within a medium of cause and effect which he cannot name or quite visualize, the consequences of an act of honourable horsemanship must emanate outwards with tiny but endless effect. He looks up at the sky. A few stars. And in that vast space he feels the absence of gigantic horses that once darted through it.
The boy listens on the stairs to their talking in the bedroom. Later he will realize that the cadence of their two voices is like that of a couple talking in bed: not amorously but calmly, reflectively, with pauses and ease. (Some evenings his uncle goes to bed early, and on these evenings his aunt takes a hot drink up to his rooms. She calls it—with a laugh—a nightcap.) Their words are not decipherable to the boy on the stairs. But the manner in which the male voice and the feminine voice overlap, provoke and receive each other, the two complementary substances of their voices, as distinct from one another as metal and stone, or as wood and leather, yet combining by rubbing together or chipping or scraping to make the noise of their dialogue—this is more eloquent than precise overheard words could ever be, eloquent of the power of the decisions being taken. Against these decisions no third person, no listener, can appeal.
In the summer of 1893 there was a drought for three months. When at last it rains in a great storm, he runs out and the earth smells of meat.
On his hands is the smell of horse and harness. Its components derive from leather, saddle soap, sweat, hooves, horsehair, horse breath, grass, oats, mud, blankets, saliva, dung and the smell of various metals when moisture has condensed upon them.
He brings one of his hands to his face to savour the smell. He has noticed that sometimes a trace of it lingers until the evening—even when he hasn’t ridden since early morning.
The horse and harness smell is the antithesis of the cowshed smell. Each can only be properly defined by reference to the other. The shed smell means milk, cloth, figures of women squatting hunched up and small against the cow flank, liquid shit, mulch, warmth, pink hands and udders almost the same colour, the absolute absence of secrecy and the names of the cows: Fancy, Pretty, Lofty, Cloud, Pie, Little-eyes.
The horse and harness smell is associated for him with the eminent nature of his own body (like suddenly being aware of his own warmth), with pride—for he rides well and his uncle praises him, with the hair of his pony’s mane and with his anticipation of a man’s world.
He knows some of the terms of this world but he believes that all of them refer to something which nobody ever mentions. He assumes that the men around him have, for their own reasons, a need for secrecy comparable to his own. When he enters their world—and follows Captain Elwes’ hounds—he will learn their secrets.
MISS HELEN
Between the ages of two and five the boy has three governesses. The last one is called Miss Helen.
In the schoolroom in the wing of the farm furthest from the kitchen and the yard, there are no men; there is only the boy. He is sitting at the high desk, his feet dangling in the air, reading out loud. She is in an armchair which she has turned round so that she can gaze out of the window.
When it seems that her attention is entirely taken up by what she can see through the window, he deliberately makes a mistake so as to re-attract her attention. Sometimes his mistakes are unintentional.
… all thrush summer the birds were singing.
Thrush?
Yes, the speckly bird.
Thrush summer?
She gets up from the chair, smooths the front of her dress where it is pleated round her tiny waist and comes behind him to look at the book.
All through summer. Thrush indeed! OUGH not RUSH.
She laughs. He laughs and in laughing throws his head back against her dress.
It was a good mistake, a thrush is a sort of bird.
But not a sort of preposition.
Falling in love at five or six, although rare, is the same as falling in love at fifty. One may interpret one’s feelings differently, the outcome may be different, but the state of feeling and of being is the same.
A pre-condition is necessary for a five-year-old boy to fall in love. He must have lost his parents or, at least, lost any close contact with them, and no foster-parents should have taken their place. Similarly, he must have no close friends or brothers or sisters. Then he is eligible.
Being in love is an elaborate state of anticipation for the continual exchanging of certain kinds of gifts. The gifts can range from a glance to the offering of the entire self. But the gifts must be gifts: they cannot be claimed. One has no rights as a lover—except the right to anticipate what the other wishes to give. Most children are surrounded by their rights (their right to indulgence, to consolation, etc.): and so they do not and cannot fall in love. But if a child—as a result of circumstances—comes to realize that such rights as he does enjoy are not fundamental, if he has recognized, however inarticulately, that happiness is not something that can be assured and promised but is something that each has to try to find for himself, if he is aware of being essentially alone, then he may find himself anticipating pure, gratuitous and continual gifts offered by another and the state of that anticipation is the state of being in love. You may ask: but what does he have to offer in exchange? The boy, like a man, offers himself—not altogether impossibly. What is impossible, or at least very improbable, is that his beloved will ever recognize either his offer or his anticipation for what they are.
What—he asks—is a preposition?
A preposition is part of grammar. It’s always in front of a noun and it tells you what the noun is doing.
But—you protest (as she too would protest, with vaguer words)—a boy of five is not sexually developed and the basis of falling in love is sexual.
Every morning he hears her washing in her bedroom. Every morning he considers entering her room and surprising her. He could enter on the excuse of being frightened or of some fabricated need, but to do so would be to appeal, to claim as a child: and because he is in love with her, his lover’s pride prevents this.
At night in bed, alone, he examines his body part by part to discover the source of the mystery which inflames him. (Her presence, as now when she is standing behind him and he still has his head against her dress, makes his heart beat faster and his limbs feel weak, as after a bath that is too hot.) He examines his nose, his ears, his armpits, his nipples, his navel, his anus, his toes. Finally he arrives at his erect penis, which, he already knows, will afford him a half-answer. He caresses it to bring on the waves of familiar sweet pleasure. The frequency of the waves increases until suddenly they turn to pain. He categorizes the pleasure as a good pain because the only other sensations he knows which approach the intensity of this one are indeed pains.
Can we do some singing, he asks.
Unlike his previous governess, Miss Helen, who is unusually lazy, appears to have no strict programme for the lessons she gives to the boy. They do whatever suggests itself. Instead of having three distinct and formal lessons, they pass the morning together. For the boy this establishes a kind of equality between them. It allows her to moon.
She goes to the piano and sits down on the round stool that can twirl round like a roundabout.
Let me turn you, he says, let me turn you.
From behind her he puts a hand on either hip and pushes. She lifts her feet off the ground so that her shoes disappear beneath her skirts. Slowly she revolves.
He has a face like a monkey, darling, but with deep dark eyes. He’s a funny little fellow, he really is. He keeps on looking at you and in the end you have to turn away. I’ve no idea what goes on in his head. In two days’ time she is going to London for a week.
He has noticed (and considers it unique to her) that her clothes always feel warm.
She puts her feet down.
What would your uncle say if he could see us now?
He never comes to this end of the house. And if he did, he would come on his horse and look through the window.
Involuntarily she glances towards the window.
Let me turn you again.
No.
The no is almost petulant.
Then sing your song, he says, the one I always like.
Which one do you mean?
The one about Helen, your song.
She laughs and touches the side of his head.
Anybody might think that was the only one I could sing.
Her voice is thin, not dissimilar from a child’s. When she is singing, it seems to him that they are the same size and a well-matched couple. He no longer listens to the words of the song (‘I would I were where Helen lies…’) partly because he knows them too well and partly because he does not believe in them. The words thus discounted, he hears her singing her song, in the same sense as a bird sings its song. Whilst she sings, he might be asking her: Helen, will you marry me? And whilst she sings, she might be answering: Yes. But he would not believe it, because he is fully aware that in consideration of everything in the world, except themselves, it is impossible.
Her eyes are slightly lowered, as though she were reading music instead of playing by heart. Her rather heavy eyelids, half covering her eyes, are smooth, rounded and without a fold. Once he came upon her asleep in the hammock at the top of the lawn, and there was a fly on her face.
She imagines herself singing lightly and sweetly ‘her’ song to the boy she has been employed to look after, being overseen by Mr John Lennox, prospective Liberal candidate for Ross-on-Wye, and then his coming up to her and saying: I had not dreamt that amongst all your other gifts and accomplishments you had such a sweet voice.
The mystery which inflames him and at night in bed stiffens his penis leads the boy to ask a number of questions. But the questions are asked in a mixed language of half-words, images, movements of the hands and gestural diagrams which he makes with his own body.
Thus, the following are the crudest translations.
Why do I stop at my skin?
How do I get nearer to the pleasure I am feeling?
What is in me that I know so well and nobody else yet knows?
How do I let somebody else know it?
In what am I—what is this thing in the middle of which I have found myself and which I can’t get out of?
He is convinced that by means of the same mixed language in which he asks these questions, she can answer them. All the formal questions he asks her in the schoolroom and which she answers (What makes rain? What does a wolf really eat? etc.) are a mere preparation for this.
Her hands on the keyboard. Pale hands with thin fingers, and very short nails. On Sundays she wears white gloves: when they walk back from church he takes her hand. He is fascinated by an old fascination: her fingers touch the keys in two very different ways. Either they touch them so lightly that no sooner have they touched them than they desist and fly on; or else they descend heavily upon them, pressing the keys down and keeping them down, so that he can see the unpolished sides of the adjacent keys. It is then as though she forces her fingers through the piano. The last note dies away.
Now you play and I will sing for you.
What do you want to sing?
I’ll sing your song back to you.
Beyond the age of six or seven it is very unlikely for a boy to fall in love—at least until adolescence. He knows too many people. The world-that-is-not-himself begins to become multiple, to separate out into many different people, any one of whom may confront him as somebody different from himself. When he is five this may not yet have happened.
Lacking parents, he is still searching for one single person to represent all that he is not, to confront him as his other half and his opposite. If the person he finds is entirely distinct from him—in experience, in role, in background, in personal interests, in age, in sex, if the person is, in the most extensive sense of the word, a stranger to him and yet is continually and intimately with him, and if, in addition to all this, she is pretty and nubile, then he is liable to fall in love.
You may still insist that effective sexual passion is missing. You may present his naked five-year-old body to prove your argument. (Twice a week in his bath he offers the proof himself to his beloved.) But what little he lacks physically, he makes up for metaphysically. He senses or feels that she—by being all that is opposite and therefore complementary to him—can make the world complete for him. In adults sexual passion reconstitutes this sense. In a five-year-old it does not have to be reconstituted: it is still part of his inheritance.
He begins to sing, regardless of the words, intently watching her fingers on the keys. He takes the opportunity of stepping closer and resting his cheek on her shoulder.
Miss Helen is soon replaced by a tutor.
The boy seeks no explanation and is offered none. He is used to accepting decisions as indisputable facts. He has no sense of any ultimate authority residing in any one person: and consequently the idea of appealing against decisions does not arise.
With his ear to the bark, he listens to the tree. He has never yet dared to listen to a dead tree. There are quite distinct categories in his own mind into which he fits trees. Ones he likes and ones he does not like (without reason). Ones that are too easy to climb. Ones that frighten him a little to climb. Ones with a view at the top and ones without. There are also more complicated categories. Trees are alive but not alive as animals are. What is the difference? First, the tree is more accessible. Second, the tree is more mysterious. Third, the tree is immovable. Fourth, the tree can hide him. If he carves on the bark of a tree, he does not believe that the tree feels pain. If a large branch is lopped off there is neither the sound nor the smell of pain. Nevertheless when he is pressed against the bark of a tree, it feels alive to his own skin to a degree that is more comprehensive than his categorical reasoning. When he touches an animal, the animal’s will intervenes. There is a tree which, when he is as high as he dare climb, he kisses. Always in the same place.
The day, when once it is established, is barely noticed in itself; continuous interests claim us; only if there is a dramatic thunderstorm, a blizzard or a partial eclipse of the sun may we momentarily forget the pursuit of our own life. But at the beginning or end of the day, at dawn or at sunset, when our relationship with all that we can see is in process of rapid transformation, we are inclined to be as aware of the moment as of what we fill it with—and, often, more aware. In face of the dawn, even the supreme egotist is tempted to forget himself. Thus I assume that the experience of day breaking or of night falling is somewhat less subject to historical change than the experience of days themselves.
On certain days he is allowed to breakfast in the kitchen with the farm-hands. He has worked at the limits of this special licence, and slowly, week by week, he has extended them so that Breakfast in the Kitchen now signifies getting up as early as he wishes, going out, wandering where he likes, and making his appearance in the kitchen with the head cowman at 7.30.
On several winter mornings, a few months after Miss Helen’s departure, the boy has left the house when it is still dark and climbed the steep lawn to the copper beeches.
What he feels when he looks down at the lit windows of the house and dairy is the icy complement to the burning mystery of his own body in bed. Every lit window suggests to him the room within. Through each window he pulls out the drawer of the room. In it is warmth, safety and his own familiarity with the life he is living. But he himself is not in it. He is in the darkness by the beech trees. The range of his senses in this darkness and in the cold is so restricted that he has the sensation of standing in a little hut, scarcely larger than his own body, with one side open where he looks out. A question which this time he cannot even formulate in a mixed language resides somewhere between the house and his hut. In the field, higher up the hill, are sheep, slightly lighter than the dark, like breath on a windowpane giving on to total blackness. He is aware that the sheep will always remain exterior to the question he cannot formulate. As soon as there is enough light for him to see his own feet the hut disintegrates and with it the presence of the question he cannot ask.
He goes down to the yard and stands in the doorway of the cowshed where the head cowman and two dairymaids are milking. The boy pats the rump of each cow and calls it by its name.
The tea for Breakfast in the Kitchen is different from tea in the schoolroom. The cups too are different: thick-lipped and almost as large as basins.
The taste of the tea which he drinks as hot as he can bear to is a strong but thin taste. It lines the mouth with its thin covering: the surface of the covering non-absorbent and shiny like that of mica which they use for lantern slides. Within the mouth, so lined with the taste of tea, there is also the extra-strong exaggerated taste of sugar. This is a taste whose effects are not confined to the mouth. Sweetness is like Eurydice’s thread: it leads from the tongue down the throat and then, mysteriously, through the stomach to the sexual centre, to the tiny region (distinct in a male from the sexual organs themselves) where sexual pleasure accumulates before extending outwards in waves. It is sugar that first induces us to love life.
Honey may be either healthy or toxic, just as a woman in her normal condition is ‘a honey’ but secretes a poison when she is indisposed … in native thought, the search for honey represents a sort of return to Nature, in the guise of erotic attraction transposed from the sexual register to that of the sense of taste, which undermines the very foundations of culture if it is indulged in for too long.
The kitchen smells of bacon and labourers’ boots.
The cook, standing by the range, watches the seven men and three maids eating with an expression of apparent surprise on her face. If she is not harried, it is the expression she habitually wears when watching people eat the food she has prepared. The surprise cannot be at the fact that they eat it with such appetite—for this can surely no longer surprise her. Perhaps it is less personal: the elemental surprise provoked by watching anything being devoured and then apparently ceasing to exist.
His aunt strides into the room, ruffles the boy’s hair and then turns abruptly to walk to the low window by the dresser. The maids at the table glance at her timidly. She has gone to the window to see whether she can see her brother. When she is not occupied with the house or some aspect of farm management which her brother has negelected, as soon as she is unoccupied, she becomes anxious and impatient to see him. Like a newly-wed wife she becomes attendant upon him. She has observed that his growing up has disabled him, making him ineffective. What she admires in him is the unwounded boy of twenty years ago. It is to that boy that she has remained faithful.
The other boy, who is drinking his tea, watches her. Her face is close to the window-pane, almost touching it. He knows that she is waiting for his uncle. He has often seen her waiting like this. He slips away from the table and out of the door through the pantry and into the courtyard. Keeping close to the wall of the house, so as not to be seen from inside the kitchen, he creeps round until he is underneath the window at which his aunt is standing. He pauses a moment, a little excited and on the brink of laughter at the thought of the trick he is about to play.
She is waiting for my uncle and bo! it’s me!
He climbs on to a water trough, slowly straightens up and presses his nose against the window-pane. His head comes level with her midriff. For an instant she does not notice him: her eyes are still fixed on the middle distance where she expects her brother to turn into the yard. The boy has time to glimpse from below her face with its fixed gaze. Then he sees her lower her eyes, perceiving him. In changing focus her eyes brighten. As they do so, she smiles and he laughs. Bo!
NUMBERS
A blackboard has been installed in the schoolroom. It is no longer a woman’s sitting room or a nursery. There are schoolbooks on the bookcase. A map of the world, a large area of it pink the colour of a hunting coat to denote the Empire. A clock has been fixed to the wall. An era passed with Miss Helen and the boy recognizes that it is irrevocable. As irrevocable as the fact that he has no father. But the latter fact he has been told, the former he has told himself.
If I see you looking at the clock again, we shall continue our arithmetic this afternoon.
This afternoon I’m going to go riding with my uncle.
If necessary I shall speak to your uncle.
It will make no difference whatever you say.
I beg your pardon?
I’m going to go riding with my uncle.
Stand up!
The tutor also rises, and walks slowly across to the piano. It is a ritual walk, quite unnatural in its slowness, so that the boy may recognize it and foresee its meaning. From the wall above the piano he unhooks a cane.
What is the punishment for impertinence?
One stroke across both hands, sir.
He holds out his hands, palms up.
He has learnt how to come to terms with this punishment. After a stroke the tutor always stares intently into the boy’s face—as though searching for a proof. The boy’s determination to control his face must exactly balance the smarting of his hands. If he over-clenches his face, he becomes self-conscious of his expression and position, and, continuing from this, he may become self-pitying and so cry. If he under-clenches it, the sting in his hands may rise for expression to his eyes and throat quicker than he can control them. Thus he must estimate exactly on each occasion how hard the tutor is going to hit him. He gauges this by the tutor’s breathing and by how, beneath his waistcoat, he draws in his stomach. If his estimate proves correct so that he reveals nothing, so that the tutor searches his face in vain, the boy scarcely suffers at all.
The boy receives one stroke on his left hand if he persists in repeating the same mistake as the tutor was forced to correct on the previous day (e.g. until has one ‘l’ not two): for a mistake repeated more than three times on the same day, he receives a stroke across the right hand: for insubordination (as now) a stroke across both hands: for rank disobedience three strokes. At first this systematized tariff of punishment surprised the boy: by now it seems no more arbitrary than the time announced by the hands of the large clock on the wall. One hour can seem interminable: two hours out of doors can pass unnoticed.
Which is the larger, two thirds or three sevenths?
The boy stares out of the window at Basset’s Wood and senses that there is a trick in the question.
The tutor tells himself that he likes his new charge but that the boy’s wilfulness must be checked lest it be his undoing.
In the cook’s sitting room there is a grandfather clock. The ticking of this clock has a hypnotic effect upon the boy, alone in the room. Its promise of a seemingly endless time lulls him; but the way the ticking fills the time, whose passing it records, oppresses him. He has thought of smashing the round window in the clock through which he can see the brass bob of the pendulum, always continuing to swing slowly from side to side after he has abandoned the attempt to count two or three hundred swings.
The cook’s cat settles on his legs and increases the hypnotic effect. It purrs as he rubs its ears. His trance-like state is hung like a hammock between two branches of awareness: the endlessness of time within the house which he can never successfully imagine destroyed (he is seven and a half and he has lived in the house for over five years): and the unconcerned, categorically separate life of the animal on his lap. The warmth of the animal, permeating his breeches, paints the wall of his stomach and the tops of his legs hot.
TWO MEN
Descending to the house at dusk through the wood above the beech trees. An autumn evening. Puddles. A red sky. Smoke rising straight from the chimneys. The wooden noise of a pigeon flying from one copse to another. Cold rising from the ground: now at waist level. Having a dog with him changes his sense of distance. Objects and events impinge less persistently. There is more space around him. The dog, circling him, charges and worries the frontier of the unknown back: the opposite to what a dog does when it herds sheep together. The unknown is persistent. What is it that cannot happen? And the child answers himself: Nothing. What is it that can happen? And the adult answers himself: Nothing. He is a child and he walks through the wood like a child.
Twenty yards ahead of him the dog starts to bark. Poachers poaching? As with much else at this stage of his learning, the idea of poachers has led to a mystery. His uncle speaks of them as of murderous criminals: beings with whom and for whom there is no mercy because they stop at nothing. (Poachers are the equivalent in his uncle’s code of public danger to the city mob in Umberto’s.) Yet listening to the farm-hands talk and being quick to interpret their winks and sign-language laughter, he has learnt that some of their friends are poachers. A man said: If the magistrates had ever gone hungry … The boy asks himself, are all poachers hungry?
But the notion of being hungry, of being so hungry that you poach, is the most mysterious of all. Dogs jerk their heads eating when they are hungry. In the dusk he sees the possibility of men jerking their heads when they eat to satisfy their extreme hunger. He refuses either to run or to slow down. He knows the fear is inside him. He is carrying it like a full jug. Above all it must not be spilt, for then it will be uncontained and will flow over everything.
The dog stops barking and stands quite still, ears pricked, one front paw raised. There is the unmistakable wood-noise of a booted, two-legged walk: twigs, wet leaves, roots record the sound in their own manner. Two men appear. They have sacks draped over their heads and tied round their waists. In places the sackcloth is damp and dark. They are men he has never seen before. One of them has a bottle in his hands. Sonny! one of them shouts, and the other tells the boy there is no need to be frightened.
He stands absolutely still lest the jug spills. They have square heavy faces like the ones carved on the two top front corners of the wardrobe in the room where the dairymaids sleep. They ask him to come with them. We shan’t hurt you, the one with the bottle says. They speak to him as to a child. In this there is a certain kind of security. What is your name? they ask him. He tells them. They walk on. Nothing that has so far happened to him has prepared him for this walk through the wood beside the men in sackcloth: yet he is uncertain about how exceptional it really is. Will it turn out to be an incident that his uncle or his tutor will explain to him? Or is it already beyond their power to explain? Where are we going? he asks. The man with the bottle says: We have something to show you. We want you to see something. It is too dark to distinguish the faces of the two men.
Stop. Wait. One of the men goes off and comes back with an unlit lamp, like a carriage lamp. The man with the bottle pours from it into the lamp. The boy can smell the paraffin. When the lamp is lit and turned up they continue walking. The dog disappears whimpering into the darkness further along the track. Nobody says a word. The light from the moving lamp appears to cast shadows upwards into the sky.
The man in front stops and holds his lamp up above his head. What can you see? Peering into the darkness, the boy makes out three branches lopped from a tree, laid across the track; but the shape of these branches is entirely familiar and it is this which frightens him. He has already recognized them. They are horses’ legs. The man’s arm moves a little and one edge of a horse-shoe catches the light, like a nail in the branch. The legs are entirely still. What do you see? A horse on the ground. Only one? asks the man with the bottle whose voice is always gentler than his companion’s. I don’t know.
Come on, says the other man, what are you stopping for? He climbs up on to a bank and holds the lamp still higher. There are two horses, both on their sides. Massive dray horses. Their positions contorted, as though they had fallen on to their knees, broken their legs and then rolled over. The only sound now is the dog Sniffing at one of their mouths. Are they dead? asks the boy? The man with the bottle, the man with the gentler voice says: Wait. What do you mean? demands the one with the lamp. You were always a fool, says the other and turns to the boy. Look, sonny, I’m going to kill them now. You can see they can’t get up can’t you. So I’m going to kill them.
The man on the bank lowers the lamp. You’d better watch him if he says so, he says to the boy. The man goes to the head of the first horse, bends over and strikes it. The boy can’t see what he strikes with. Perhaps it is the bottle. He does the same to the second head. Not one inch of the horses’ flesh such as the boy can see in the lamplight so much as quivers from either blow. The man stands upright, nothing in his hand. So I killed them, you saw I killed them, didn’t you? The boy knows he must lie: Yes I saw you. The man approaches him, evidently pleased, and pats him on the shoulder. There is blood on his hand which reeks of paraffin. So you saw, he says. Yes I saw, says the boy, you killed two horses. He is aware that it is he who is now talking to the man as to a child. You killed them very well, he hears himself saying again.
We will take you back now, says the man, and if anybody asks you, you tell them what you saw me do. We’ll light you back with the lamp.
Can I go? says the boy.
We’ll take you back, sonny.
I know my way, says the boy, even at night.
No terror on the way can match the disgust he feels for the man in front of him: it is a disgust to the point of nausea. In a moment the smell of paraffin will force him to vomit.
Can I go?
Don’t ever forget what you saw me do.
Away. The lamp invisible. The smell of paraffin present but now imaginary. He feels his way between the trees.
His fear is overcome, both his fear for himself and (for it is different) his fear of the unknown: not overcome by an appeal to will-power or the summoning up of courage—how often can such direct appeals of a purely formal morality ever work?—but overcome by another, stronger, revulsion. It is beyond me to create a name for this revulsion: the ones I can think up all simplify. It has nothing to do with the slaughtering of horses or with the sight of blood. It is a revulsion not uncommonly felt by children and men, but one that quickly disappears never to recur if systematically ignored. With him it was always to remain stronger than his fears, for he never ignored it.
He emerges from the wood at the top of an incline above the farmhouse. The slope, far too steep to plough, has been left uncultivated and is overgrown with bracken. As he comes down it in the dark his foot catches in a skein of bracken and he falls forward. Unhurt, he begins to roll down the slope. It would be simple for him to stop himself; he has only to grasp at some roots. But he has no wish to. He will roll to the bottom. Each time his legs come over his head it is as though for an instant the side of the hill is a flat plain and the lights in the windows of the farmhouse below are mysteriously large lights on the distant horizon. Each time his head comes off the ground it is as though he is falling across the sky. The dog, running behind him, begins to bark excitedly and to nose the ground. Each turn is like a door opening and shutting. Plain shut sky shut plain shut sky and the smell of the wet bracken on either side of the door. Bang, shut, bang, shut. The level. The sound of hosing in the dairy.
After the incident in the wood that autumn night he not infrequently climbs up to the near edge of the wood and deliberately rolls head over heels down the bracken slope.
The cook sees him one late afternoon.
You’ll break your neck, she says.
My neck won’t break.
TAKING A FALL
He saw the branch as though it were created to sweep him from his pony. All consequential reasoning, all the speculation which pertains to being able to choose among possibilities, was swept away in the same moment that it became clear to him that the branch must inevitably sweep him off the pony.
Time is measured not by numerals on a clock face but by the incidence of our apprehended possibilities. Without these—in face of the branch already above the galloping pony’s ears, time suffers an extraordinary change. The slowness of it cannot be imagined.
The boy lies on a bed in a farm-labourer’s cottage, calm, waiting for the pace of time to revert to normal. When it does, he may moan.
The old man moves about the room. It is like an outhouse with a bed in it. There is a window with very green leaves outside it: on the sill is a candle. The bed on which he is lying is covered with rags and an old horse blanket. It smells of damp foul cloth.
The old man is lighting a fire beneath a blackened kettle. The ceiling of the room is stained brown and in places the plaster has fallen off and the laths are visible. The brown of the ceiling is the colour of tea. The old man moves slowly and with difficulty. The boy believes that he is an old man of whom he has heard his uncle speak. His uncle said that he would die in the Workhouse.
He can feel how swollen his mouth is. With his tongue, cautiously, he feels the holes from which his teeth have been knocked out. (What will come to be known as his leer has been born.) The pain in his chest breathes in and out like the old man blowing into the fire on his knees.
Who are you? he asks the old man.
The old man comes to the bed and sits on it. In face of the arrested time just ending, the boy may be as old as the man.
What the old man says I do not know.
What the boy says in reply I do not know.
To pretend to know would be to schematize.
Meanwhile development is so retarded, progress and consequence so slow that the determination not to cry out is left inviolate. It can endure for hours.
The branch struck him on the chest and face. It may be like this at the instant of being shot. The violence of the impact is so great that the self withdraws from all further contact. This is not the same phenomenon as unconsciousness. He was conscious, but suddenly his own body, its sensations and acquired memories became a vast estate in which he could wander without concern about his means of locomotion. Far away from where he was in his estate he saw a dark mass, composed of stone surfaces and water. He was approaching it fast. He entered it as his back struck the pony’s haunches. He lay vertical in a fissure of a cloud-like substance as his feet shot up into the air above the pony’s withers. When he hit the ground, curtains of whole fields were drawn back to reveal the blue sky without any land but him beneath it. Then he lost consciousness.
His courage on the bed, when he regains consciousness, derives from his original decision, when he first saw the branch, not to cry out. That was an hour ago and before the old man found him. On the bed he is still deciding. In time as he now experiences it, sustaining his decision is not what demands courage: on the contrary, it is the making of the decision which never ends.
(It is in order to break and destroy the concession of this experience of time which the body invents to protect itself, that torturers alternate torture with comfort.)
Everything you write is a schema. You are the most schematic of writers. It is like a theorem.
Not beyond a certain point.
What point?
Beyond the point where the curtains are drawn back.
Come back to the boy.
Who says that?
The old man does.
What does the boy feel?
Ask the old man.
Look at him, says the old, man, poor bugger. Not a cry out of him.
The last barrier against consequence is the home. This is why the dying want to die at home.
The boy is not dying.
But he is in a home in bed with the bedclothes that smell of damp foul cloth over him.
In the time which his fall and his pain arrested, he found a home.
The old man was there as the boy emerged from his estate.
They met as equals. No rules governed their encounter. Bone to bone.
But when the boy’s sense of time began to revert to normal, he became young again.
That was a nasty toss you took, sir. Don’t fret yourself. Lie quiet.
Your uncle’s coming to take you home in the buggy.
I don’t want to move.
You can’t stay here can you?
Why not? Whose is it?
Whose what?
Whose bed is this I’m on?
It’s mine, sir. I found you on the edge of Hawk’s Rough, and I carried you back and laid you on the bed.
Whose home is it?
He will look through the windows of other labourers’ cottages and he will climb up to the window of the dairymaid’s room. He will try on her aprons. He will strap on one of Tom’s leather leggings and it will come to the top of his thigh. To be another!
Don’t fret. I’m going to see to the fire. We must keep you warm mustn’t we?
What else did you do?
I cleaned the blood off you and laid you down.
Am I badly hurt?
Nothing that won’t mend itself.
It hurts when I talk.
Don’t fret.
Stay with me.
The sound of the buggy, and his uncle is in the doorway. His uncle makes the old man look almost as small as a dwarf. Jocelyn looks down at the boy and speaks gently to him, smiling. To Jocelyn it is a form of initiation that his ward has undergone. The curtain has gone up on his life.
He confers with the old man and gives him a two shilling piece. The boy sees the money change hands, and the old man continually tapping his forehead to convey gratitude.
His uncle lifts the blanket, lets it fall to the floor, and takes up the boy in his arms. The pain in his chest is such that he screams and loses consciousness.
Jocelyn whispers tenderly to soothe, to propitiate.
You’ve the making of a real thruster my boy.
Carrying the boy through the door, he hisses quietly, mollifyingly, as a groom does grooming a horse.
A thruster, my boy, a hard-bitten thruster.
All history is contemporary history: not in the ordinary sense of the word, where contemporary history means the history of the comparatively recent past, but in the strict sense: the consciousness of one’s own activity as one actually performs it. History is thus the self-knowledge of the living mind. For even when the events which the historian studies are events that happened in the distant past, the condition of their being historically known is that they should vibrate in the historian’s mind.
Laura did not achieve the new way of living with her baby which she had wished. She had not reckoned with the sheer force of routine in a rich nineteenth-century household. Had she decided to live by herself with her illegitimate child—and this would have meant becoming a bohemian—she might have succeeded. As it was, in her mother’s house in Paris, her plans were defeated by nurse-maids, chambermaids, the housekeeper, her mother’s doctor. It was not possible for her to be with the child for more than a couple of hours a day. It was not possible for her to occupy herself with all the daily chores connected with looking after him—washing linen, ironing, cleaning the nursery, preparing his food, etc.; there were servants to do such jobs. The most that she could achieve was bathing him in the late afternoon under the eyes of the nurse and the maid who brought up the hot water.
Nor could Laura explain what she wanted. If she had said that she wanted to be always within sight and touching distance of her son and that for the next few years in her life everything else should take second place, that she wanted to live with him as an equal, crawling when he crawled, walking when he walked, speaking his own language, never being more than a few steps ahead of him, if she had said this she would have been treated as hysterical. An infant, like everything else in the nineteenth century, had its own place—which was unshareable.
Umberto implored her to let him see his son. Laura refused to answer his letters and told her mother that the boy’s father had gone out of his mind. Two years passed. Laura’s mother remarried and returned to the United States. Laura went to London and there, through some acquaintances who quickly became close friends, was converted to the cause of Fabian Socialism. It was arranged that until she had found a house, the boy should stay for a few months with Laura’s first cousins on a farm. Laura was to come down by train to visit him every other week. The cousins were in debt. Laura was able to raise money on their behalf through her mother. In London she became more and more involved in her political interests. The secret of life, she considered, was no longer hidden in her own body but in the evolutionary process. Her visits to the country to see her son became rarer and rarer. The boy appeared to thrive in the country. The French nurse was sent back to Paris and an English governess installed. The cousins (a brother and sister called Jocelyn and Beatrice) agreed that the boy should continue to stay with them. On that farm the boy spent his childhood.
Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companions. It is not that they will not race against each other, but this is of no consequence, for, back in the stable, the one who is heavier and clumsier does not on that account give up his oats to the other, as men want others to do to them. With animals virtue is its own reward.
At that place the minimum of flesh covers the bone of the skull, but even on this thin, thin soil the fur grows. The bone casing is almost concave. On either side of the space is an eye, large with its depths uncovered. It is the frontal centre of the head. In man there is no equivalent place. The sense organs are too concentrated, the eyes too close together, the face too sharp. By contrast the face of a man is like a blade with the cutting edge facing whoever approaches.
On this almost concave field of fur with its thin soil, you rub your hand and the animal nods in accord. But the palm of the hand is too soft: its pads muffle the contact. You clench your fist and rub again: this time with your knuckles grazing against the animal’s skull. His eyes remain open, placid and undisturbed because for him there can be no danger which is that close.
It begins like this in childhood. But grown men, overcome by grief or remorse, thrust their foreheads, skullbone to skullbone, between a cow’s eyes.
The term ‘dumb animal’ sinks deep into Beatrice’s mind. It implies neither condescension nor pity. But the animal’s inability to speak is somehow related by her to the almost concave field between the eyes.
Until puberty the horns mystify her: or rather, not so much the grown horns but their growing: the stumps which she feels with her fingers like rock beneath the fur. During adolescence they supply her with a model for what is happening to herself. The growth of the horn, she begins to understand, does not represent the animal’s mere submission to time passing: it has nothing to do with patience: it represents time acquired. Cattle carry their horns as men their years of experience.
Without the presence of animals (such as she has felt all her life) the farm would be intolerable to her. She does not coddle the lamb that has to be brought indoors. She has no regrets about a cow which has gone dry being sold. But without the animals the farm would oppose her as uninhabited and inert: time passing would claim it as it claims a hollow tree. It is the animals who stand and eat and (at night) sigh and graze and wait and breed between her and the lifelessness of the stars.
During her childhood the animals are owned by her father. His power is manifest in them. Like her, they do his bidding. And to them as to her he speaks softly. To everyone else he speaks roughly and is ill-tempered.
She is twenty-four. Her face tends to be laterally over-stretched—as though her ears are constantly pulling her mouth into a smile. In consequence her full lips are always slightly parted, her white teeth just visible.
At a garden party she may look to a stranger from London like a still eligible daughter of a country gentleman. (Though her father is dead and she keeps house for her brother.) Yet when she moves, she may surprise and slightly disturb him. All her movements and gestures are, despite her small size, curiously emphatic.
The neighbouring gentry describe her amongst themselves as hoy-denish and so explain why she has not married.
Her actions, whatever they may be—walking across a lawn, cutting a rose, opening the oven when supervising the cook, folding linen, stepping into her skirt and petticoat when dressing—all suggest this disproportionate force which is the result of her unusual sureness of decision. Once she has decided upon a course of action, any consideration which might modify it she instantly dismisses as a detail. There are no details within her life; they are all exterior to it.
Beatrice is a woman without morality or ambition because she is incapable of surprising herself. She can propose nothing unfamiliar to herself. This self-knowledge is not the result of prolonged introspection but, rather, of having always been familiar, like an animal, with the patterns of action and reaction necessary to satisfy her own unquestioned needs.
It is possible that I make her sound like an idiot. If so, I do her an injustice.
The farm is at the bottom of a valley with hills rising steeply up from it on three sides. The house, built about a hundred years earlier, is large with many chimneys. At one side is a walled fruit garden: and behind the house a steeply rising lawn. The stables and dairy and outhouses are laid out along the valley. Perhaps once when the condition of the farm was different, its situation suggested a well-chosen and protected site. Now the hills seem to overshadow it a little.
Since her father’s death both house and land have deteriorated. The brother’s interest is in his horses and little else. They have had to sell land. In the father’s time there were five tenant farmers on the estate: now it has been reduced to their own 500-acre farm.
The house still maintains standards. A pantry maid still spends two whole days a week cleaning the silver. Every winter afternoon a fire is still lit in the master’s bedroom. When the master is out hunting, a groom still acts as second horseman. Every June there is a well-attended garden party on the sloping lawn beneath the two magnificent copper beeches. But the house is becoming too big for the household. On the land jobs are deferred or postponed. Thus, because it is slightly under-inhabited and underworked, there has begun the slow process of depersonalization which will end, in twenty-five years’ time, with the place being turned into an Officers’ Convalescent Home.
Beatrice’s brother, Jocelyn, is five years older than she.
Large and handsome with very pale blue eyes. One’s first impression is of a man likely to be master of any situation. But this impression is quickly succeeded by another. Very little seems to impinge upon him. He has acquired a certain manner of reacting but behind this is an extensive passivity. One wonders why one’s first impression was so wrong. And then suddenly something occurs to him, his eyes sparkle and with the conviction of his whole large body he says: And that was a damned fine thing to have done! The authority of his judgement (even to a boy who knows no history) appears to be based on all that has been worth preserving from the past. And then—as if relapsing into that past itself—he becomes profoundly and secretly passive again. What is it that makes him so elusive?
To understand him closely we must consider him from afar. Towards the end of the last century the English upper class faced an unusual crisis. Their power was in no way threatened: but their own chosen image of themselves was threatened. They had long since accommodated themselves to industrial capitalism and trade, but they had chosen to continue the way of life of an hereditary, landed élite. This way of life, with its underlying assumptions, was becoming more and more incompatible with the modern world. On one hand the scale of modern finance, industry and imperialist investment required a new image of leadership; and on the other hand the masses were demanding democracy. The solution which the upper class found was true to their own character: it was both spirited and frivolous. If their way of life had to disappear, they would first apotheosize it by openly and shamelessly transforming it into a spectacle: if it was no longer viable, they would turn it into theatre. They no longer claimed (except purely verbally) justification by reference to a natural order: instead they performed a play upon a stage with its own laws and conventions. From the 1880s onwards this was the underlying meaning of Social Life—the Hunts, the Shoots, the Race Meetings, the Court Balls, the Regattas, the Great House Parties.
The general public welcomed the apotheosis. Like most audiences they felt that, to some degree, they owned the performing players. Their one-time rulers appeared to have become their romancers. Meanwhile during the diversion the upper class—at its class centre—habituated itself to its new and necessarily more disguised exercise of power. Like a phoenix it was to rise again from its own ashes, for the ashes were only those of its regalia, finally used as theatrical costume.
Jocelyn is an impoverished and peripheral member of this class. The Hunts and the Point-to-Point Races he goes to are comparatively undistinguished ones. But this increases his need to believe that the play is life and that the rest of life is a suspended empty interval. This is why he is elusive and why, when he is off-stage with no lines to speak or actions to perform, he becomes unusually passive. But let us be clear: it is not because he wants limelight or applause (on the contrary, he would consider them vulgarities), but because he believes that the play is reality.
His costume for the part: top boots with mahogany-coloured tops, spurs, cord breeches, a faded swallow-tailed pink coat, a white stock, a low-crowned top hat, a short leather crop with a long lash.
From November to April he hunts four days a week.
I must emphasize that I have used the word ‘play’ as a metaphor so that we can appreciate the essentially artificial, symbolic, exemplary and spectacular nature of the occasion. But the scene and the props are real. The winter weather, the hounds, the coverts to be drawn, the fences to be jumped, the country that is there to be ridden over, the drag of the fox, the fatigue of the man who has thrust all day—these are real: and the physical experience of these is all the intenser because of their symbolism which every hard-bitten hunting man feels.
To be mounted is already to be a master, a knight. To represent the noble (in the ethical as well as the social sense). To vanquish. To feature, however modestly, in the annals of battle. Honour begins with a man and a horse.
To get well away with the hounds is to be intrepid. To be ingenious. To be the respecter of nothing but the pace.
To hunt is the opposite of to own. It is to ride over. To dart in the open. To be as men as free as the straight-necked dog-fox is as fox.
To meet is to ride with others, who whatever their character know something of these values and help to preserve them. All that is opposed to these values appears to be represented by the invention of barbed wire. (The wire that, later, millions of infantrymen will die against on the orders of their mounted generals.)
Jocelyn is riding home early one December evening. The horse is caked with mud. He slips from the saddle and, although at first he is so stiff that he cannot stand upright but is bent like a man with a stick, he walks beside the horse’s head. Its ears are cocked well forward. Just two more miles old fellow, he says. The two proceed side by side. The man runs over in his mind the main incidents of the day. What happened to him and what his friends had recounted of their day. In the marrow of his tiredness is a sense of well-being, even of modest virtue. He is convinced that just as the consequences of a crime—an act of treachery, for example, or a theft—often spread outwards to involve more people and further actions, so, too, within a medium of cause and effect which he cannot name or quite visualize, the consequences of an act of honourable horsemanship must emanate outwards with tiny but endless effect. He looks up at the sky. A few stars. And in that vast space he feels the absence of gigantic horses that once darted through it.
The boy listens on the stairs to their talking in the bedroom. Later he will realize that the cadence of their two voices is like that of a couple talking in bed: not amorously but calmly, reflectively, with pauses and ease. (Some evenings his uncle goes to bed early, and on these evenings his aunt takes a hot drink up to his rooms. She calls it—with a laugh—a nightcap.) Their words are not decipherable to the boy on the stairs. But the manner in which the male voice and the feminine voice overlap, provoke and receive each other, the two complementary substances of their voices, as distinct from one another as metal and stone, or as wood and leather, yet combining by rubbing together or chipping or scraping to make the noise of their dialogue—this is more eloquent than precise overheard words could ever be, eloquent of the power of the decisions being taken. Against these decisions no third person, no listener, can appeal.
In the summer of 1893 there was a drought for three months. When at last it rains in a great storm, he runs out and the earth smells of meat.
On his hands is the smell of horse and harness. Its components derive from leather, saddle soap, sweat, hooves, horsehair, horse breath, grass, oats, mud, blankets, saliva, dung and the smell of various metals when moisture has condensed upon them.
He brings one of his hands to his face to savour the smell. He has noticed that sometimes a trace of it lingers until the evening—even when he hasn’t ridden since early morning.
The horse and harness smell is the antithesis of the cowshed smell. Each can only be properly defined by reference to the other. The shed smell means milk, cloth, figures of women squatting hunched up and small against the cow flank, liquid shit, mulch, warmth, pink hands and udders almost the same colour, the absolute absence of secrecy and the names of the cows: Fancy, Pretty, Lofty, Cloud, Pie, Little-eyes.
The horse and harness smell is associated for him with the eminent nature of his own body (like suddenly being aware of his own warmth), with pride—for he rides well and his uncle praises him, with the hair of his pony’s mane and with his anticipation of a man’s world.
He knows some of the terms of this world but he believes that all of them refer to something which nobody ever mentions. He assumes that the men around him have, for their own reasons, a need for secrecy comparable to his own. When he enters their world—and follows Captain Elwes’ hounds—he will learn their secrets.
MISS HELEN
Between the ages of two and five the boy has three governesses. The last one is called Miss Helen.
In the schoolroom in the wing of the farm furthest from the kitchen and the yard, there are no men; there is only the boy. He is sitting at the high desk, his feet dangling in the air, reading out loud. She is in an armchair which she has turned round so that she can gaze out of the window.
When it seems that her attention is entirely taken up by what she can see through the window, he deliberately makes a mistake so as to re-attract her attention. Sometimes his mistakes are unintentional.
… all thrush summer the birds were singing.
Thrush?
Yes, the speckly bird.
Thrush summer?
She gets up from the chair, smooths the front of her dress where it is pleated round her tiny waist and comes behind him to look at the book.
All through summer. Thrush indeed! OUGH not RUSH.
She laughs. He laughs and in laughing throws his head back against her dress.
It was a good mistake, a thrush is a sort of bird.
But not a sort of preposition.
Falling in love at five or six, although rare, is the same as falling in love at fifty. One may interpret one’s feelings differently, the outcome may be different, but the state of feeling and of being is the same.
A pre-condition is necessary for a five-year-old boy to fall in love. He must have lost his parents or, at least, lost any close contact with them, and no foster-parents should have taken their place. Similarly, he must have no close friends or brothers or sisters. Then he is eligible.
Being in love is an elaborate state of anticipation for the continual exchanging of certain kinds of gifts. The gifts can range from a glance to the offering of the entire self. But the gifts must be gifts: they cannot be claimed. One has no rights as a lover—except the right to anticipate what the other wishes to give. Most children are surrounded by their rights (their right to indulgence, to consolation, etc.): and so they do not and cannot fall in love. But if a child—as a result of circumstances—comes to realize that such rights as he does enjoy are not fundamental, if he has recognized, however inarticulately, that happiness is not something that can be assured and promised but is something that each has to try to find for himself, if he is aware of being essentially alone, then he may find himself anticipating pure, gratuitous and continual gifts offered by another and the state of that anticipation is the state of being in love. You may ask: but what does he have to offer in exchange? The boy, like a man, offers himself—not altogether impossibly. What is impossible, or at least very improbable, is that his beloved will ever recognize either his offer or his anticipation for what they are.
What—he asks—is a preposition?
A preposition is part of grammar. It’s always in front of a noun and it tells you what the noun is doing.
But—you protest (as she too would protest, with vaguer words)—a boy of five is not sexually developed and the basis of falling in love is sexual.
Every morning he hears her washing in her bedroom. Every morning he considers entering her room and surprising her. He could enter on the excuse of being frightened or of some fabricated need, but to do so would be to appeal, to claim as a child: and because he is in love with her, his lover’s pride prevents this.
At night in bed, alone, he examines his body part by part to discover the source of the mystery which inflames him. (Her presence, as now when she is standing behind him and he still has his head against her dress, makes his heart beat faster and his limbs feel weak, as after a bath that is too hot.) He examines his nose, his ears, his armpits, his nipples, his navel, his anus, his toes. Finally he arrives at his erect penis, which, he already knows, will afford him a half-answer. He caresses it to bring on the waves of familiar sweet pleasure. The frequency of the waves increases until suddenly they turn to pain. He categorizes the pleasure as a good pain because the only other sensations he knows which approach the intensity of this one are indeed pains.
Can we do some singing, he asks.
Unlike his previous governess, Miss Helen, who is unusually lazy, appears to have no strict programme for the lessons she gives to the boy. They do whatever suggests itself. Instead of having three distinct and formal lessons, they pass the morning together. For the boy this establishes a kind of equality between them. It allows her to moon.
She goes to the piano and sits down on the round stool that can twirl round like a roundabout.
Let me turn you, he says, let me turn you.
From behind her he puts a hand on either hip and pushes. She lifts her feet off the ground so that her shoes disappear beneath her skirts. Slowly she revolves.
He has a face like a monkey, darling, but with deep dark eyes. He’s a funny little fellow, he really is. He keeps on looking at you and in the end you have to turn away. I’ve no idea what goes on in his head. In two days’ time she is going to London for a week.
He has noticed (and considers it unique to her) that her clothes always feel warm.
She puts her feet down.
What would your uncle say if he could see us now?
He never comes to this end of the house. And if he did, he would come on his horse and look through the window.
Involuntarily she glances towards the window.
Let me turn you again.
No.
The no is almost petulant.
Then sing your song, he says, the one I always like.
Which one do you mean?
The one about Helen, your song.
She laughs and touches the side of his head.
Anybody might think that was the only one I could sing.
Her voice is thin, not dissimilar from a child’s. When she is singing, it seems to him that they are the same size and a well-matched couple. He no longer listens to the words of the song (‘I would I were where Helen lies…’) partly because he knows them too well and partly because he does not believe in them. The words thus discounted, he hears her singing her song, in the same sense as a bird sings its song. Whilst she sings, he might be asking her: Helen, will you marry me? And whilst she sings, she might be answering: Yes. But he would not believe it, because he is fully aware that in consideration of everything in the world, except themselves, it is impossible.
Her eyes are slightly lowered, as though she were reading music instead of playing by heart. Her rather heavy eyelids, half covering her eyes, are smooth, rounded and without a fold. Once he came upon her asleep in the hammock at the top of the lawn, and there was a fly on her face.
She imagines herself singing lightly and sweetly ‘her’ song to the boy she has been employed to look after, being overseen by Mr John Lennox, prospective Liberal candidate for Ross-on-Wye, and then his coming up to her and saying: I had not dreamt that amongst all your other gifts and accomplishments you had such a sweet voice.
The mystery which inflames him and at night in bed stiffens his penis leads the boy to ask a number of questions. But the questions are asked in a mixed language of half-words, images, movements of the hands and gestural diagrams which he makes with his own body.
Thus, the following are the crudest translations.
Why do I stop at my skin?
How do I get nearer to the pleasure I am feeling?
What is in me that I know so well and nobody else yet knows?
How do I let somebody else know it?
In what am I—what is this thing in the middle of which I have found myself and which I can’t get out of?
He is convinced that by means of the same mixed language in which he asks these questions, she can answer them. All the formal questions he asks her in the schoolroom and which she answers (What makes rain? What does a wolf really eat? etc.) are a mere preparation for this.
Her hands on the keyboard. Pale hands with thin fingers, and very short nails. On Sundays she wears white gloves: when they walk back from church he takes her hand. He is fascinated by an old fascination: her fingers touch the keys in two very different ways. Either they touch them so lightly that no sooner have they touched them than they desist and fly on; or else they descend heavily upon them, pressing the keys down and keeping them down, so that he can see the unpolished sides of the adjacent keys. It is then as though she forces her fingers through the piano. The last note dies away.
Now you play and I will sing for you.
What do you want to sing?
I’ll sing your song back to you.
Beyond the age of six or seven it is very unlikely for a boy to fall in love—at least until adolescence. He knows too many people. The world-that-is-not-himself begins to become multiple, to separate out into many different people, any one of whom may confront him as somebody different from himself. When he is five this may not yet have happened.
Lacking parents, he is still searching for one single person to represent all that he is not, to confront him as his other half and his opposite. If the person he finds is entirely distinct from him—in experience, in role, in background, in personal interests, in age, in sex, if the person is, in the most extensive sense of the word, a stranger to him and yet is continually and intimately with him, and if, in addition to all this, she is pretty and nubile, then he is liable to fall in love.
You may still insist that effective sexual passion is missing. You may present his naked five-year-old body to prove your argument. (Twice a week in his bath he offers the proof himself to his beloved.) But what little he lacks physically, he makes up for metaphysically. He senses or feels that she—by being all that is opposite and therefore complementary to him—can make the world complete for him. In adults sexual passion reconstitutes this sense. In a five-year-old it does not have to be reconstituted: it is still part of his inheritance.
He begins to sing, regardless of the words, intently watching her fingers on the keys. He takes the opportunity of stepping closer and resting his cheek on her shoulder.
Miss Helen is soon replaced by a tutor.
The boy seeks no explanation and is offered none. He is used to accepting decisions as indisputable facts. He has no sense of any ultimate authority residing in any one person: and consequently the idea of appealing against decisions does not arise.
With his ear to the bark, he listens to the tree. He has never yet dared to listen to a dead tree. There are quite distinct categories in his own mind into which he fits trees. Ones he likes and ones he does not like (without reason). Ones that are too easy to climb. Ones that frighten him a little to climb. Ones with a view at the top and ones without. There are also more complicated categories. Trees are alive but not alive as animals are. What is the difference? First, the tree is more accessible. Second, the tree is more mysterious. Third, the tree is immovable. Fourth, the tree can hide him. If he carves on the bark of a tree, he does not believe that the tree feels pain. If a large branch is lopped off there is neither the sound nor the smell of pain. Nevertheless when he is pressed against the bark of a tree, it feels alive to his own skin to a degree that is more comprehensive than his categorical reasoning. When he touches an animal, the animal’s will intervenes. There is a tree which, when he is as high as he dare climb, he kisses. Always in the same place.
The day, when once it is established, is barely noticed in itself; continuous interests claim us; only if there is a dramatic thunderstorm, a blizzard or a partial eclipse of the sun may we momentarily forget the pursuit of our own life. But at the beginning or end of the day, at dawn or at sunset, when our relationship with all that we can see is in process of rapid transformation, we are inclined to be as aware of the moment as of what we fill it with—and, often, more aware. In face of the dawn, even the supreme egotist is tempted to forget himself. Thus I assume that the experience of day breaking or of night falling is somewhat less subject to historical change than the experience of days themselves.
On certain days he is allowed to breakfast in the kitchen with the farm-hands. He has worked at the limits of this special licence, and slowly, week by week, he has extended them so that Breakfast in the Kitchen now signifies getting up as early as he wishes, going out, wandering where he likes, and making his appearance in the kitchen with the head cowman at 7.30.
On several winter mornings, a few months after Miss Helen’s departure, the boy has left the house when it is still dark and climbed the steep lawn to the copper beeches.
What he feels when he looks down at the lit windows of the house and dairy is the icy complement to the burning mystery of his own body in bed. Every lit window suggests to him the room within. Through each window he pulls out the drawer of the room. In it is warmth, safety and his own familiarity with the life he is living. But he himself is not in it. He is in the darkness by the beech trees. The range of his senses in this darkness and in the cold is so restricted that he has the sensation of standing in a little hut, scarcely larger than his own body, with one side open where he looks out. A question which this time he cannot even formulate in a mixed language resides somewhere between the house and his hut. In the field, higher up the hill, are sheep, slightly lighter than the dark, like breath on a windowpane giving on to total blackness. He is aware that the sheep will always remain exterior to the question he cannot formulate. As soon as there is enough light for him to see his own feet the hut disintegrates and with it the presence of the question he cannot ask.
He goes down to the yard and stands in the doorway of the cowshed where the head cowman and two dairymaids are milking. The boy pats the rump of each cow and calls it by its name.
The tea for Breakfast in the Kitchen is different from tea in the schoolroom. The cups too are different: thick-lipped and almost as large as basins.
The taste of the tea which he drinks as hot as he can bear to is a strong but thin taste. It lines the mouth with its thin covering: the surface of the covering non-absorbent and shiny like that of mica which they use for lantern slides. Within the mouth, so lined with the taste of tea, there is also the extra-strong exaggerated taste of sugar. This is a taste whose effects are not confined to the mouth. Sweetness is like Eurydice’s thread: it leads from the tongue down the throat and then, mysteriously, through the stomach to the sexual centre, to the tiny region (distinct in a male from the sexual organs themselves) where sexual pleasure accumulates before extending outwards in waves. It is sugar that first induces us to love life.
Honey may be either healthy or toxic, just as a woman in her normal condition is ‘a honey’ but secretes a poison when she is indisposed … in native thought, the search for honey represents a sort of return to Nature, in the guise of erotic attraction transposed from the sexual register to that of the sense of taste, which undermines the very foundations of culture if it is indulged in for too long.
The kitchen smells of bacon and labourers’ boots.
The cook, standing by the range, watches the seven men and three maids eating with an expression of apparent surprise on her face. If she is not harried, it is the expression she habitually wears when watching people eat the food she has prepared. The surprise cannot be at the fact that they eat it with such appetite—for this can surely no longer surprise her. Perhaps it is less personal: the elemental surprise provoked by watching anything being devoured and then apparently ceasing to exist.
His aunt strides into the room, ruffles the boy’s hair and then turns abruptly to walk to the low window by the dresser. The maids at the table glance at her timidly. She has gone to the window to see whether she can see her brother. When she is not occupied with the house or some aspect of farm management which her brother has negelected, as soon as she is unoccupied, she becomes anxious and impatient to see him. Like a newly-wed wife she becomes attendant upon him. She has observed that his growing up has disabled him, making him ineffective. What she admires in him is the unwounded boy of twenty years ago. It is to that boy that she has remained faithful.
The other boy, who is drinking his tea, watches her. Her face is close to the window-pane, almost touching it. He knows that she is waiting for his uncle. He has often seen her waiting like this. He slips away from the table and out of the door through the pantry and into the courtyard. Keeping close to the wall of the house, so as not to be seen from inside the kitchen, he creeps round until he is underneath the window at which his aunt is standing. He pauses a moment, a little excited and on the brink of laughter at the thought of the trick he is about to play.
She is waiting for my uncle and bo! it’s me!
He climbs on to a water trough, slowly straightens up and presses his nose against the window-pane. His head comes level with her midriff. For an instant she does not notice him: her eyes are still fixed on the middle distance where she expects her brother to turn into the yard. The boy has time to glimpse from below her face with its fixed gaze. Then he sees her lower her eyes, perceiving him. In changing focus her eyes brighten. As they do so, she smiles and he laughs. Bo!
NUMBERS
A blackboard has been installed in the schoolroom. It is no longer a woman’s sitting room or a nursery. There are schoolbooks on the bookcase. A map of the world, a large area of it pink the colour of a hunting coat to denote the Empire. A clock has been fixed to the wall. An era passed with Miss Helen and the boy recognizes that it is irrevocable. As irrevocable as the fact that he has no father. But the latter fact he has been told, the former he has told himself.
If I see you looking at the clock again, we shall continue our arithmetic this afternoon.
This afternoon I’m going to go riding with my uncle.
If necessary I shall speak to your uncle.
It will make no difference whatever you say.
I beg your pardon?
I’m going to go riding with my uncle.
Stand up!
The tutor also rises, and walks slowly across to the piano. It is a ritual walk, quite unnatural in its slowness, so that the boy may recognize it and foresee its meaning. From the wall above the piano he unhooks a cane.
What is the punishment for impertinence?
One stroke across both hands, sir.
He holds out his hands, palms up.
He has learnt how to come to terms with this punishment. After a stroke the tutor always stares intently into the boy’s face—as though searching for a proof. The boy’s determination to control his face must exactly balance the smarting of his hands. If he over-clenches his face, he becomes self-conscious of his expression and position, and, continuing from this, he may become self-pitying and so cry. If he under-clenches it, the sting in his hands may rise for expression to his eyes and throat quicker than he can control them. Thus he must estimate exactly on each occasion how hard the tutor is going to hit him. He gauges this by the tutor’s breathing and by how, beneath his waistcoat, he draws in his stomach. If his estimate proves correct so that he reveals nothing, so that the tutor searches his face in vain, the boy scarcely suffers at all.
The boy receives one stroke on his left hand if he persists in repeating the same mistake as the tutor was forced to correct on the previous day (e.g. until has one ‘l’ not two): for a mistake repeated more than three times on the same day, he receives a stroke across the right hand: for insubordination (as now) a stroke across both hands: for rank disobedience three strokes. At first this systematized tariff of punishment surprised the boy: by now it seems no more arbitrary than the time announced by the hands of the large clock on the wall. One hour can seem interminable: two hours out of doors can pass unnoticed.
Which is the larger, two thirds or three sevenths?
The boy stares out of the window at Basset’s Wood and senses that there is a trick in the question.
The tutor tells himself that he likes his new charge but that the boy’s wilfulness must be checked lest it be his undoing.
In the cook’s sitting room there is a grandfather clock. The ticking of this clock has a hypnotic effect upon the boy, alone in the room. Its promise of a seemingly endless time lulls him; but the way the ticking fills the time, whose passing it records, oppresses him. He has thought of smashing the round window in the clock through which he can see the brass bob of the pendulum, always continuing to swing slowly from side to side after he has abandoned the attempt to count two or three hundred swings.
The cook’s cat settles on his legs and increases the hypnotic effect. It purrs as he rubs its ears. His trance-like state is hung like a hammock between two branches of awareness: the endlessness of time within the house which he can never successfully imagine destroyed (he is seven and a half and he has lived in the house for over five years): and the unconcerned, categorically separate life of the animal on his lap. The warmth of the animal, permeating his breeches, paints the wall of his stomach and the tops of his legs hot.
TWO MEN
Descending to the house at dusk through the wood above the beech trees. An autumn evening. Puddles. A red sky. Smoke rising straight from the chimneys. The wooden noise of a pigeon flying from one copse to another. Cold rising from the ground: now at waist level. Having a dog with him changes his sense of distance. Objects and events impinge less persistently. There is more space around him. The dog, circling him, charges and worries the frontier of the unknown back: the opposite to what a dog does when it herds sheep together. The unknown is persistent. What is it that cannot happen? And the child answers himself: Nothing. What is it that can happen? And the adult answers himself: Nothing. He is a child and he walks through the wood like a child.
Twenty yards ahead of him the dog starts to bark. Poachers poaching? As with much else at this stage of his learning, the idea of poachers has led to a mystery. His uncle speaks of them as of murderous criminals: beings with whom and for whom there is no mercy because they stop at nothing. (Poachers are the equivalent in his uncle’s code of public danger to the city mob in Umberto’s.) Yet listening to the farm-hands talk and being quick to interpret their winks and sign-language laughter, he has learnt that some of their friends are poachers. A man said: If the magistrates had ever gone hungry … The boy asks himself, are all poachers hungry?
But the notion of being hungry, of being so hungry that you poach, is the most mysterious of all. Dogs jerk their heads eating when they are hungry. In the dusk he sees the possibility of men jerking their heads when they eat to satisfy their extreme hunger. He refuses either to run or to slow down. He knows the fear is inside him. He is carrying it like a full jug. Above all it must not be spilt, for then it will be uncontained and will flow over everything.
The dog stops barking and stands quite still, ears pricked, one front paw raised. There is the unmistakable wood-noise of a booted, two-legged walk: twigs, wet leaves, roots record the sound in their own manner. Two men appear. They have sacks draped over their heads and tied round their waists. In places the sackcloth is damp and dark. They are men he has never seen before. One of them has a bottle in his hands. Sonny! one of them shouts, and the other tells the boy there is no need to be frightened.
He stands absolutely still lest the jug spills. They have square heavy faces like the ones carved on the two top front corners of the wardrobe in the room where the dairymaids sleep. They ask him to come with them. We shan’t hurt you, the one with the bottle says. They speak to him as to a child. In this there is a certain kind of security. What is your name? they ask him. He tells them. They walk on. Nothing that has so far happened to him has prepared him for this walk through the wood beside the men in sackcloth: yet he is uncertain about how exceptional it really is. Will it turn out to be an incident that his uncle or his tutor will explain to him? Or is it already beyond their power to explain? Where are we going? he asks. The man with the bottle says: We have something to show you. We want you to see something. It is too dark to distinguish the faces of the two men.
Stop. Wait. One of the men goes off and comes back with an unlit lamp, like a carriage lamp. The man with the bottle pours from it into the lamp. The boy can smell the paraffin. When the lamp is lit and turned up they continue walking. The dog disappears whimpering into the darkness further along the track. Nobody says a word. The light from the moving lamp appears to cast shadows upwards into the sky.
The man in front stops and holds his lamp up above his head. What can you see? Peering into the darkness, the boy makes out three branches lopped from a tree, laid across the track; but the shape of these branches is entirely familiar and it is this which frightens him. He has already recognized them. They are horses’ legs. The man’s arm moves a little and one edge of a horse-shoe catches the light, like a nail in the branch. The legs are entirely still. What do you see? A horse on the ground. Only one? asks the man with the bottle whose voice is always gentler than his companion’s. I don’t know.
Come on, says the other man, what are you stopping for? He climbs up on to a bank and holds the lamp still higher. There are two horses, both on their sides. Massive dray horses. Their positions contorted, as though they had fallen on to their knees, broken their legs and then rolled over. The only sound now is the dog Sniffing at one of their mouths. Are they dead? asks the boy? The man with the bottle, the man with the gentler voice says: Wait. What do you mean? demands the one with the lamp. You were always a fool, says the other and turns to the boy. Look, sonny, I’m going to kill them now. You can see they can’t get up can’t you. So I’m going to kill them.
The man on the bank lowers the lamp. You’d better watch him if he says so, he says to the boy. The man goes to the head of the first horse, bends over and strikes it. The boy can’t see what he strikes with. Perhaps it is the bottle. He does the same to the second head. Not one inch of the horses’ flesh such as the boy can see in the lamplight so much as quivers from either blow. The man stands upright, nothing in his hand. So I killed them, you saw I killed them, didn’t you? The boy knows he must lie: Yes I saw you. The man approaches him, evidently pleased, and pats him on the shoulder. There is blood on his hand which reeks of paraffin. So you saw, he says. Yes I saw, says the boy, you killed two horses. He is aware that it is he who is now talking to the man as to a child. You killed them very well, he hears himself saying again.
We will take you back now, says the man, and if anybody asks you, you tell them what you saw me do. We’ll light you back with the lamp.
Can I go? says the boy.
We’ll take you back, sonny.
I know my way, says the boy, even at night.
No terror on the way can match the disgust he feels for the man in front of him: it is a disgust to the point of nausea. In a moment the smell of paraffin will force him to vomit.
Can I go?
Don’t ever forget what you saw me do.
Away. The lamp invisible. The smell of paraffin present but now imaginary. He feels his way between the trees.
His fear is overcome, both his fear for himself and (for it is different) his fear of the unknown: not overcome by an appeal to will-power or the summoning up of courage—how often can such direct appeals of a purely formal morality ever work?—but overcome by another, stronger, revulsion. It is beyond me to create a name for this revulsion: the ones I can think up all simplify. It has nothing to do with the slaughtering of horses or with the sight of blood. It is a revulsion not uncommonly felt by children and men, but one that quickly disappears never to recur if systematically ignored. With him it was always to remain stronger than his fears, for he never ignored it.
He emerges from the wood at the top of an incline above the farmhouse. The slope, far too steep to plough, has been left uncultivated and is overgrown with bracken. As he comes down it in the dark his foot catches in a skein of bracken and he falls forward. Unhurt, he begins to roll down the slope. It would be simple for him to stop himself; he has only to grasp at some roots. But he has no wish to. He will roll to the bottom. Each time his legs come over his head it is as though for an instant the side of the hill is a flat plain and the lights in the windows of the farmhouse below are mysteriously large lights on the distant horizon. Each time his head comes off the ground it is as though he is falling across the sky. The dog, running behind him, begins to bark excitedly and to nose the ground. Each turn is like a door opening and shutting. Plain shut sky shut plain shut sky and the smell of the wet bracken on either side of the door. Bang, shut, bang, shut. The level. The sound of hosing in the dairy.
After the incident in the wood that autumn night he not infrequently climbs up to the near edge of the wood and deliberately rolls head over heels down the bracken slope.
The cook sees him one late afternoon.
You’ll break your neck, she says.
My neck won’t break.
TAKING A FALL
He saw the branch as though it were created to sweep him from his pony. All consequential reasoning, all the speculation which pertains to being able to choose among possibilities, was swept away in the same moment that it became clear to him that the branch must inevitably sweep him off the pony.
Time is measured not by numerals on a clock face but by the incidence of our apprehended possibilities. Without these—in face of the branch already above the galloping pony’s ears, time suffers an extraordinary change. The slowness of it cannot be imagined.
The boy lies on a bed in a farm-labourer’s cottage, calm, waiting for the pace of time to revert to normal. When it does, he may moan.
The old man moves about the room. It is like an outhouse with a bed in it. There is a window with very green leaves outside it: on the sill is a candle. The bed on which he is lying is covered with rags and an old horse blanket. It smells of damp foul cloth.
The old man is lighting a fire beneath a blackened kettle. The ceiling of the room is stained brown and in places the plaster has fallen off and the laths are visible. The brown of the ceiling is the colour of tea. The old man moves slowly and with difficulty. The boy believes that he is an old man of whom he has heard his uncle speak. His uncle said that he would die in the Workhouse.
He can feel how swollen his mouth is. With his tongue, cautiously, he feels the holes from which his teeth have been knocked out. (What will come to be known as his leer has been born.) The pain in his chest breathes in and out like the old man blowing into the fire on his knees.
Who are you? he asks the old man.
The old man comes to the bed and sits on it. In face of the arrested time just ending, the boy may be as old as the man.
What the old man says I do not know.
What the boy says in reply I do not know.
To pretend to know would be to schematize.
Meanwhile development is so retarded, progress and consequence so slow that the determination not to cry out is left inviolate. It can endure for hours.
The branch struck him on the chest and face. It may be like this at the instant of being shot. The violence of the impact is so great that the self withdraws from all further contact. This is not the same phenomenon as unconsciousness. He was conscious, but suddenly his own body, its sensations and acquired memories became a vast estate in which he could wander without concern about his means of locomotion. Far away from where he was in his estate he saw a dark mass, composed of stone surfaces and water. He was approaching it fast. He entered it as his back struck the pony’s haunches. He lay vertical in a fissure of a cloud-like substance as his feet shot up into the air above the pony’s withers. When he hit the ground, curtains of whole fields were drawn back to reveal the blue sky without any land but him beneath it. Then he lost consciousness.
His courage on the bed, when he regains consciousness, derives from his original decision, when he first saw the branch, not to cry out. That was an hour ago and before the old man found him. On the bed he is still deciding. In time as he now experiences it, sustaining his decision is not what demands courage: on the contrary, it is the making of the decision which never ends.
(It is in order to break and destroy the concession of this experience of time which the body invents to protect itself, that torturers alternate torture with comfort.)
Everything you write is a schema. You are the most schematic of writers. It is like a theorem.
Not beyond a certain point.
What point?
Beyond the point where the curtains are drawn back.
Come back to the boy.
Who says that?
The old man does.
What does the boy feel?
Ask the old man.
Look at him, says the old, man, poor bugger. Not a cry out of him.
The last barrier against consequence is the home. This is why the dying want to die at home.
The boy is not dying.
But he is in a home in bed with the bedclothes that smell of damp foul cloth over him.
In the time which his fall and his pain arrested, he found a home.
The old man was there as the boy emerged from his estate.
They met as equals. No rules governed their encounter. Bone to bone.
But when the boy’s sense of time began to revert to normal, he became young again.
That was a nasty toss you took, sir. Don’t fret yourself. Lie quiet.
Your uncle’s coming to take you home in the buggy.
I don’t want to move.
You can’t stay here can you?
Why not? Whose is it?
Whose what?
Whose bed is this I’m on?
It’s mine, sir. I found you on the edge of Hawk’s Rough, and I carried you back and laid you on the bed.
Whose home is it?
He will look through the windows of other labourers’ cottages and he will climb up to the window of the dairymaid’s room. He will try on her aprons. He will strap on one of Tom’s leather leggings and it will come to the top of his thigh. To be another!
Don’t fret. I’m going to see to the fire. We must keep you warm mustn’t we?
What else did you do?
I cleaned the blood off you and laid you down.
Am I badly hurt?
Nothing that won’t mend itself.
It hurts when I talk.
Don’t fret.
Stay with me.
The sound of the buggy, and his uncle is in the doorway. His uncle makes the old man look almost as small as a dwarf. Jocelyn looks down at the boy and speaks gently to him, smiling. To Jocelyn it is a form of initiation that his ward has undergone. The curtain has gone up on his life.
He confers with the old man and gives him a two shilling piece. The boy sees the money change hands, and the old man continually tapping his forehead to convey gratitude.
His uncle lifts the blanket, lets it fall to the floor, and takes up the boy in his arms. The pain in his chest is such that he screams and loses consciousness.
Jocelyn whispers tenderly to soothe, to propitiate.
You’ve the making of a real thruster my boy.
Carrying the boy through the door, he hisses quietly, mollifyingly, as a groom does grooming a horse.
A thruster, my boy, a hard-bitten thruster.
All history is contemporary history: not in the ordinary sense of the word, where contemporary history means the history of the comparatively recent past, but in the strict sense: the consciousness of one’s own activity as one actually performs it. History is thus the self-knowledge of the living mind. For even when the events which the historian studies are events that happened in the distant past, the condition of their being historically known is that they should vibrate in the historian’s mind.
3
In the Piazza San Michele on the waterfront at Livorno there is a statue of Ferdinand I. At each corner of the pedestal on which the archduke stands, a bronze figure of a naked African slave is chained. For this reason the statue is often referred to as I Quattro Mori. There is an inscription on the pedestal, the last part of which reads in Italian as follows:
‘…made in 1617 after the death of Ferdinand. Later (between 1623 and 1626) Pietro Tucca added his admirable slaves, the models for which he chose from the local prison.’
THREE CONVERSATIONS OVER THE YEARS ABOUT HIS FATHER
Why don’t I have a Papa?
Your Papa died.
Dead? Yes.
In the cemetery he’s dead?
If you are good, you go to heaven when you die.
Was Papa good?
I’m sure he was.
Always?
We didn’t know him. I don’t think your uncle or aunt knew him either.
But Maman—
Your mother met him in Italy I think.
What was he doing in Italy?
He had something to do with ships.
Was he English?
I think he was Italian.
What did Maman call him?
Now finish your soup and no more silly questions.
Was he run over by a train?
Who?
Papa when he was dead.
I don’t know.
Couldn’t Maman stop him?
Finish your soup.
I’m dead too! Ha! Ha! Dead! Dead!
Finish—
Why will nobody tell me anything about my father? Whenever I ask about him, you change the subject.
I never saw him. Nor did your uncle. You must ask your mother about him.
You are only pretending not to know. Please who was he?
He was a merchant from Livorno in Italy.
Was he Italian?
Yes, an Italian merchant.
Were they married long before he died?
A very short time.
And did he really die in an accident with a train?
Who told you that?
That’s what Cook used to tell me.
I didn’t know.
Was he very old when he died?
He was much older than your mother.
Am I like him?
I’ve told you I never saw him.
But guess.
Perhaps your dark eyes. You certainly don’t get them from her.
Would you like to go to Italy?
When?
Next week—to Milan.
Is Milan near Livorno?
It’s quite a long way.
I should like to visit Father’s grave in Livorno.
Who told you he had a grave?
Nobody told me. All dead people have graves.
I meant why did you think it was in Livorno?
Because that’s where he lived.
What would you say if your father was alive?
He can’t be.
And supposing I told you he was?
You told me he was dead.
It was a terrible mistake. We thought he was dead.
But why didn’t you hope he was alive?
It was all a terrible mistake.
You mean he’s alive.
Yes.
The train didn’t kill him.
Would you like to visit him? The two of us together.
Us? If he’s alive, I’d say the question is whether you want to see him.
There’s no need for impertinence.
The train journey to Paris, two days spent there with friends and then the journey on to Milan comprise the longest period that the boy has spent with his mother since infancy. She is unlike anybody else he knows: yet he has known about her ever since he can remember. She is both strange and familiar. With her he has the sensation of playing a part in a story which concerns a life he might have led. Everything about her suggests an alternative.
She talks a lot to him, but not as one talks to a child. (From the moment she abandoned him to her cousins she has wanted to think of him as grown up, as formed: then pride in him could supersede her guilt. Now that he is eleven she thinks of him proudly as a man: a man to whom she can refer for support and justification: a man who, in many respects, is like a father to her.) She talks to him about Socialism, the importance of Education, the future of women, about art—they will see Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper in Milan—about her friend Bertha Newcombe who is in love with Bernard Shaw, about the different nations of Europe and their characteristics.
Some of what she says he does not fully understand. But all of it seems to pass by like the views seen through the train window: distant, continuous, almost disembodied. It is the same with her voice which is unlike any other he has heard (she still talks incessantly), but which does not seem to belong to her. When he returns to their compartment having walked along the train corridor, the fact that his mother is still there in the same place half surprises him. He had half expected her to disappear. When she falls asleep he presses her arm, presses it hard until he can feel how solid it is. He is mystified by this solidity as he might be by an image in a mirror moving of its own accord.
She has certain characteristics by which he recognizes her instantly in his dreams and thoughts. The smallness of her plump hands, and their surprising lightness of touch; the way she opens her hazel eyes very wide (like the china eyes of a doll); her large bosom and square body (like a silk sack stuffed); the firmness with which she says certain words—RIGHTS, IDEAL, DISGRACE; a scent, hyacinth-like which covers, as lightly as tulle, another (for him) unnamed but older smell. But these characteristics do not create a person in his mind: they remind him of the fact that his mother happens to have these characteristics.
When, through the train window or the carriage window in Paris, a woman for some reason or another attracts his attention—it happens rarely—and he has time to observe her, he plays a game of imagining her as his mother. The game is impossible if the woman is in the carriage and likely to talk to him or to Laura: she must be and must remain a stranger. The woman there with a tiny waist, wearing blue satin, who is shaking with laughter and whose screams first attracted his attention and separated her from the crowd, what would it be like, he wonders, to have her as a mother? Or the fat woman who is carrying too much away from the market and who looks as though she is too fat to climb up into the train: or the woman in the landau with ostrich feathers, wearing narrow trousers beneath her slit skirt? He does not compare these women with the woman beside him. If the game were just one of judging between them, of deciding which mother he would prefer, it would soon pall: furthermore, if his judgement were to go against Laura, he would be assuring his own unhappiness. The imaginary mothers he sees through the window are candidates for filling the absence which Laura represents. The game is always to try to imagine more about having a mother. It is the first time he has played the game. It is Laura’s presence which supplies the necessary sense of absence from which to begin.
It is more than eleven years since Laura and Umberto have met, and their son is there in breeches and a cap to remind them both of how long eleven years may be.
On a platform in Milan railway station the son sees his father for the first time: the father sees his son for the first time: the lover sees his ex-mistress as mother to his son, and the mother sees her ex-lover as her child’s father. On the platform beneath the distant and extensive glass roof of the station the three of them assemble as a family group: prosperous and to be envied. Mother and father do not kiss, but the mother proffers her son (who is as tall as she) for the embrace of the father. For an hour or so the three of them seem to each other to be huge, improbable, giant apparitions—like faces drawn on kites.
Laura explains to herself how Umberto has changed. He has become like a caricature of a capitalist. Her Fabian friends in London would find it hard to believe that he was the father of her child. He must have taken advantage of you, they would say, taken advantage of your naivety and your good heart. He is heavier and more stupid than before. She sees in his face the obstinacy and stupidity of all the letters he has written to her. His skin has become darker and coarser. He has huge bags under his eyes. She compares him with her son. It is far easier, she has already decided, to talk intelligently and naturally with him than with Umberto. Umberto is like a rich fat old child. He is incoherent: his eyes become tearful: his massive fat hands bang and grasp and he keeps on repeating phrases like All my life! All my life!
Umberto scarcely notices how Laura has become shapeless, how she clenches her small hands when walking, how she has acquired the habit of baring her teeth in an ironic smile when she is impatient. These are all details beside the single transformation he was expecting: she has become the mother of his son who is no longer a child. He has eyes only for the boy.
The hotel is full of rumours according to which Italy is on the brink of Revolution. It is said that shooting has already begun in the industrial suburbs of the city.
To Umberto the red leather furniture, the winter garden plants, the lifts with gilded cages, the dragooned maids in white suddenly seem absurd. His long-cultivated taste for grand hotels ends in disgust. He wishes to take his son home. In such a hotel intimacy (except sexual intimacy in bed) is impossible. The staff carry messages from guest to guest. There is nothing of his own which he can show his son. The grandeur is anonymous and false. It seems to him that his one-time mistress and his son hide from him in their rooms behind innumerable doors: he has the sensation that everyone in the hotel is being forced to wear a disguise. And so, for a few hours, and despite his hatred of Revolution, Umberto listens to the rumours with a kind of anticipation. Because he is conscious, now that he has found his son, that nothing will ever be the same again for him, his fear of violent change is momentarily reduced. He sees the nervousness in the eyes of some of the other hotel guests and he distinguishes between himself and them: they need their disguise whereas he does not. For a few hours he feels an uncertain correspondence between the violence of his emotion, to which he cannot in this hotel give proper expression, and the violence threatened by the crowds already gathered in the northern suburbs.
When he explains the political situation to his one-time mistress, he does so with unaccustomed vehemence. He speaks of the senility of Crispi: the impotence of Rudini ‘the gentleman’: the genius of Giolitti. There are only two choices, he says, Giolitti or the anarchists! Progress or revolution! We may even need a little revolution to strengthen Giolitti’s hand! He raises his own large hand and opens it wide in front of Laura’s face. Dimly (because without any emotive associations) she remembers that she used to think of him as a bandit. She feels her own motives for coming to see him generally confirmed by his manner and by the events he is describing. She too has come to demand—not for herself, but for her son—the share which is his right. The word JUSTICE, silently spoken in her mind, is spoken with the characteristic intonation which her son has noticed.
Why hasn’t your government a plan for solving the problem of poverty? All over the world people—
The problem of poverty! Umberto interrupts, repeating the words very loudly and laughing. In our country, he says, poverty isn’t a problem. It’s a life. There is only one way of being rich but there are a thousand ways of being poor.
And look what happens! snaps Laura.
Both parents frequently glance at their son as though appealing for his support. His father looks at him protectively, his mother seeking protection. The boy senses that the three of them have met too late; he is no longer the child who can receive what each of them, independently, wishes to give, and what he might once have welcomed. In the history of his own life he is older than they: about the history of his own life their innocence makes them like two children.
As he watches his parents, he returns again and again to the same question: what was his mother like before she was so shapeless and his father was so fat? How is it that she, who rejects him in every word she utters, every gesture she makes, must once have accepted him? What force then disarmed her? Or could she have yielded of her own accord? He cannot find the answer.
Meanwhile they talk of the alternatives to Revolution.
Towards evening clouds mass above the city. The leaden light makes the cathedral look like a gigantic piece of shrapnel. The canals in the suburbs appear to turn black. The open spaces are airless as though the whole city had been placed in a box.
Milan is noted for the violence of its thunderstorms and during the moments preceding them one can experience this strange sensation of a distorted, inconsistent size-scale. The scale of the buildings and the extent of the city remain overwhelmingly large in relation to one’s own size; one feels dwarfed; and yet, simultaneously, one has the sensation that the city—with oneself in it—has been reduced to the size of an exhibit in a glass case in a museum. The experience may be related to dramatic changes in air pressure. This evening the sensation of distortion is particularly strong.
In the hotel more and more electric lights are switched on. The bulbs are a sulphuric yellow. The colonnade of the Scala is visible from the first-floor hotel lounge. The colonnade is lit up; evidently the evening’s performance has not been cancelled.
Guests stand at the tall windows looking out. There is the sound of distant shouting. The Piazza is unusually empty. A man wearing a stock runs his hand up and down the velvet curtain at his side; the texture of the material reassures him.
The Head Porter hurries up the stairs and into the lounge with the news just delivered to the Junior Porter at the front entrance. He whispers to an old man in an arm-chair who, having received the news, raises his head and announces in a high voice: Signore, Signori! Whereupon the Head Porter delivers the news in the manner of a Master of Ceremonies. The workers of the Pirelli factory have seized a police barracks. A column of insurgents from Pavia is marching upon the city. The anarchist leaders are inciting the workers to attack the centre. They have already set fire—
Another old man shouts out to his two sons standing near by (one of them is in officer’s uniform): The cavalry! Don’t delay! Martial law and the cavalry! The sons shrug their shoulders.
A few seconds later thunder rattles the tall windows and the force of the rain is such that it sounds like fire. The guests look towards the streaming dark windows. The lights on the colonnade of the Scala have gone out. Laura whispers to Umberto that she wishes to lie down in her room.
The boy stares at the dark life-size portraits on the opposite wall: they represent Piedmontese notables of the Risorgimento. Alone with his son for the first time in his life, Umberto wants to make a ritual gesture. He approaches his son from behind and lays his hands upon his head in the manner of a bishop. The boy remains motionless. He is more aware than he has ever been of the question he cannot formulate when he looks down at the farmhouse before daybreak.
It is now as if the rain is beating upon the glass case in which the city is being exhibited. From a stair-well at the back of the hotel there ascends a woman’s long-sustained scream.
A waiter hurries to the heavy wooden door with brass fittings which opens on the corridor leading to the back of the hotel. But the scream (the scream of a new kitchen-maid from the country who fears lightning and thunder because they are a sign of the wrath of God) has already had its effect. It has already reminded many of the guests that they have been awaiting such a scream in such circumstances—with dread or with inexplicable expectation—for years. For them the scream is a signal.
The immediate effect of the storm is to disperse the open-air meetings of workers and demonstrators. It achieves what Turati, the socialist leader, failed to achieve in his appeals for order and calm.
But there are other effects. It is not only the country kitchen-maid whom the storm has frightened. Those responsible for law and order in Milan have been reminded of the ineluctable nature of storms when once they begin. In the flashes of lightning which, although they emanate from the sky, appear to light up the piazza from below, in the rolls of thunder echoing between the far mountains and the near buildings, in the incontestable force of the downpour and in the hysteria of the electrical tension, they have seen the spectre of their working population in revolt. Two workers and one policeman have been killed during the day. After the storm the spectre looms larger than the facts. The forces of order must immediately take the most extreme measures against the least provocation: only thus can the revolutionary storm, of which the natural one that has just passed was only a harmless symbol, be averted. The massacre of the following days is assured.
Dinner in the hotel dining-room is well attended. The guests wear evening dress. Thus the male diners and the waiters, both wearing black and white, are distinguished by their positions and actions rather than by their appearance, and one has the impression that all the men in the large room are attendant upon the women in their multi-coloured dresses. A fountain plays, and around it are arranged lemon trees and oleanders in wooden tubs. On the tables are roses.
Umberto takes a white rose from the chalice on his table, carefully trims its stem, wipes it with his folded handkerchief, stands up and, holding the barely open white rose in front of his vast, untidy face, the colour of yellow clay, bows to Laura, pouting his mouth in the vulgar Italian manner which, describing a kiss, denotes appreciation. Yet Umberto modifies the vulgarity of the gesture: the symbolic kiss is restrained and he holds the rose in front of his mouth—as though the flower were the word which his lips were forming.
Please, dear Laura, accept—
Put it down, she says, furiously embarrassed by his theatricality and by the implication of present courtship: an implication which, in her mind, unpardonably confuses the past with the present.
Umberto gently hands the rose to his son who is seated between the two of them.
You give it to her, he says.
The boy places the rose by his mother’s soup spoon.
Suddenly she is reassured. She considers it possible that Umberto has understood what she wishes to establish: namely that all his dealings with her must be made by way of her son. Picking up the rose she slowly twirls it between her fingers, raises it to her eyes, and lays it down again on the table in front of the boy.
Umberto, noticing the sudden change in her attitude and incapable of not exploiting an unexpected success, says: Shall we eat Pollo alla Cacciatore? If I am not wrong, dear Laura, you always liked Pollo alla Cacciatore.
This is the first time that he has mentioned the past. The boy is immediately alerted. Laura is momentarily touched by his remembering. The remark confirms what she wishes to be confirmed: the fact that, a long time ago, Umberto was in a position to be the father of her child. Unaware of the eloquence of her expression, she half smiles at Umberto. The boy, intercepting the glance, recognizes it. He has seen Beatrice look at Jocelyn with a similar expression. It is a look which confesses a secret common interest deriving from some past experience from which, by its nature rather than by its timing, he is conscious of being inevitably excluded. It is a look which makes him conscious of being the third person.
What does Pollo something mean? he asks.
It is a chicken cooked in wine with mushrooms and peas and young vegetables. Pollo alla Cacciatore.
But is that what it means?
It means chicken cooked like hunters cook it.
The look and the dish henceforward became associated in his mind. It is the look of the Pollo alla Cacciatore.
The Mediterranean breaks along the long coasts of Italy. In places the waves are phosphorescent in the dark. Between the coasts millions are hungry. In the south they riot without hope.
An assault on the town hall, devastation and destruction of the tax registers; then the arrival of police or soldiers, volleys of stones from the crowd, opening of fire by the troops. The crowd retreats, cursing, leaving its dead and wounded on the ground. In a few months in another commune the story repeats itself.
The tax on flour is over 50 per cent: on sugar 300 per cent, on meat and milk 20 per cent. Salt is so highly taxed that many peasants never taste it. Meanwhile it is an offence against the excise for those who live by the coast to draw salt water from the sea. Guards have shot at women coming down to the beaches with buckets. It is safest at night. Phosphorescent drops form for a moment along the rim of the bucket, in whose illegal water she will cook tomorrow’s pasta.
I FATTI DI MAGGIO 1898
The boy wakes early, as he intended to do. He slips out of the hotel before either of his parents are astir.
Because the people in the streets are speaking a language which he cannot understand, the significance of most of what he sees is ambiguous. The commonplace and the exceptional are mysteriously confused. Is the gentleman who flings himself into a carriage and shouts at the driver frightened or late? The six girls advancing with linked arms (and their hair tied up in scarves)—do they sweep the other pedestrians off the pavement every morning as they are doing today? A man by the kerb is reading out loud from a newspaper. Is it a tram stop? The men who gather round him begin to shout. Are they shouting in approval or anger? A jeweller has closed his shop and pinned a piece of paper with writing on it to the shutters.
There are so many people that the carriages and trams can pass through only with difficulty. The wheels of the trams screech against the rails. He wonders whether they always screech like that.
A young very short man with a beard is puzzled by the presence of the boy, whose clothes make it clear that he comes from a rich bourgeois family. The entire crowd is made up of workers on strike, assembling to listen to their speakers near the Giardini Pubblici.
What are you doing here, he asks in Italian, this has nothing to do with you!
The boy, almost as tall as the young man, shakes his head and shrugs his shoulders. This increases the suspicions of his questioner.
It won’t help you spying on us, he says.
I do not understand, says the boy in English.
So you’re not an Italian.
They try to talk but the boy understands nothing. The young man puts his arm round the boy’s shoulders. Within a few seconds his whole attitude is reversed. If the boy cannot understand their language, he is immune to the hypocrisy of deception of words and thus can be the pure witness of their actions. The boy’s wordlessness now appears to him, in an unclear paradoxical way, to be comparable with the universality of the Revolution in which he believes. He calls to his sister in a nearby group of mill-girls: Come and meet our pulcino, he says. Ecco il nostro pulcino.
Despite his diminutive shortness, the young man with a beard has a wide flat brown chest. His face is like a ferret’s. He works as a maintenance mechanic in a cotton mill. Since 1894 he has twice been arrested and deported under Crispi’s law of Public Security (the decreto-legge).
Let him stay with you, he says to his sister, he can’t speak our Italian.
Out of the six mill-girls to whom the boy has been entrusted, he notices particularly a Roman girl, only two or three years older than himself, whose face is pock-marked and who already has a growth of black hair above her upper lip. He notices too—for she wears a white short-sleeved bodice—that her arms are unnaturally thin, like long brown handles to her hands. Her moustache intrigues and embarrasses him.
To them he is a fascinating enigma. They can talk about him as though he were not there.
He has beautiful eyes.
Look at the leather of his shoes.
Where does he come from?
Yet they can also approach him, touch him, study his reactions. Half child and half man, he appears to them as an ambassador between the romantic dreams of their own childhood and the men from whom in reality they must soon choose. (The eldest of these girls earns less than Iod a day).
Let us call him my affianzato, cries the Roman girl, made brazen by the excitement, her acknowledged ugliness and the fact that the boy will never understand.
The crowd in and around the Corso Venezia numbers fifty thousand. Some are organized into columns and contingents from particular factories; other groupings are smaller and less organized. They do not know exactly how many they are; but all of them sense that they represent the majority. This majority can claim what each has felt but cannot say when alone: Look at this head, this body—ill-taught, badly-fed, poorly-dressed, overworked. It deserves the best the world is able to offer.
Near the edge of the Giardini Pubblici, the boy sees the young man with a beard standing in a tree and addressing the crowd. He is giving them directions about where to go.
The crowd see the city around them with different eyes. They have stopped the factories producing, forced the shops to shut, halted the traffic, occupied the streets. It is they who have built the city and they who maintain it. They are discovering their own creativity. In their regular lives they only modify presented circumstances; here, filling the streets and sweeping all before them they oppose their very existence to circumstances. They are rejecting all that they habitually, and despite themselves, accept. Once again they demand together what none can ask alone: Why should I be compelled to sell my life bit by bit so as not to die?
Of the reality of politics most of the crowd are ignorant. Politics are the means by which they are kept suppressed and impoverished. Politics are the means by which they are deceived and disarmed. Politics is the State which oppresses them. In the heart of each there is a desire to challenge the entire political armoury of their oppressors with the single and simple weapon of justice: the justice of their own cause, crying out to the sky above Milan and to the future. Yet justice implies a judge. And there is no judge and no judgement.
The cavalry charge as the first shots are fired. The shots are above the heads of the crowd.
They ride out in lines of five or six. After a line has passed, sections of the crowd appear to re-form—not in order to resist, for resistance at this instant is unthinkable, but because in order to avoid the horses they have pressed themselves into unimaginably tight units which, as soon as the danger has momentarily passed, inevitably enlarge again. The lines of cavalry turn and wheel. Sections of the crowd repeatedly contract and expand like pumping hearts. Screams ascend and dissolve. Shouts persist.
A line of cavalry approaches. The nearest horse rears above a huddled group. The boy has never as yet seen from the ground a horse used as a weapon. Like his uncle he has always been a rider. The under-side of a rearing horse seen from below is awful in a very particular way. The body is large and heavy with four metal-shod hooves on legs whose pounding power is utterly evident. But the physical threat is compounded with something else. The horse too is made of sinews, bones, flesh and blood. It is breathing hard and is frightened. The rider’s violence has already distorted its nature. The horse shares your defencelessness as it is about to crush you. It is as though your fear has uncontrollably entered the horse which threatens you.
The eyes of the rider stare fixedly into the middle distance, with only quick furtive glances downwards. His back teeth are clenched so hard that he cannot swallow. His head is like a head strung through its eyes on a line five feet above the faces of the crowd: the line of his orders. His spurred boots kick out blindly at the hands and arms trying to grab them. Repeatedly his spurs jab into the horse’s flanks to force it forward.
Hypnotized by the sight of horse and rider, the boy does not move until the Roman girl pulls his arm so abruptly that he almost falls. Then they begin to run. With her free hand she holds up her skirts as she runs. He notices again how unnaturally thin her arms are; but her hand is big and encloses his. She does not hesitate about where to run—towards the trees in the Giardini Pubblici.
They pass a group carrying a wounded man. Others are running. Screams gush in accompaniment to the blood—but not always from the same person. Blood runs down a woman’s face, the eyes behind the blood tightly shut. An enormously fat man is half lifting her, his arm round her back. The cleared spaces enable the cavalry to charge more rapidly against those who remain. A middle-aged man alone in the middle of the Corso, fists in the air, curses the soldiers. Cowards! he shouts, Rinnegati! He advances towards a line of horsemen drawn up in stationary formation awaiting orders. An officer behind the line orders him to stop. He continues to advance. When he is shot he falls on his face.
Butterflies the colour of grey sandstone, others the colour of honeysuckle. Grass and wild flowers as high as the knee. Petals faded by the sun so that they are almost white, but not clay white like the miniature snails to be found in places on the dusty earth. Delicate wild gladioli the colour of amethysts, transparent and smaller than a finger joint. The red of poppies—the colour in which a child pictures fire. Fading poppies, damp, their fallen heads the colour of wine stains. Shallow outcrops of flat rock smooth and grey like the sides of dolphins. The whole field surrounded by ilex trees. To die in that field, blood flowing into the dry earth. To be shot, to fall across the tram lines, blood making the cobbles slippery. I picture the first death to make a wreath for the second.
She leads him across the gardens to the railyards and the streets near the station of the Piazza della Republica. She never lets go of his hand. She holds it neither amorously nor protectively but impatiently as if to make him run or walk fast, or, when they stop, as if to make him understand more immediately what they are watching. Occasionally she speaks to him in Italian although she knows that he cannot understand what she says. Shock, the strangeness of their situation and perhaps an innate desperation make her develop the fantasy which began as a joke. Soon she is pretending that one day they will get married. This pretence is no more unlikely than the events taking place round them. And so she establishes, intuitively, a balance between the violence of their circumstances and the violence of her imaginative preoccupation, and this balance enables her to become quite calm.
They watch a tram being overturned to make a barricade. As it falls the glass of all its windows is smashed. Having unharnessed the horse, men and women drag a carriage to overturn beside the tram. A line of railwaymen are carrying picks and crowbars from a railway depot. The news has spread that the army has been ordered to clear the city, street by street, and to hunt down every ‘insurgent’. Another group of railwaymen are dismantling the track.
Everything is about to be transformed.
Imagine the blade of a giant guillotine as long as the diameter of the city. Imagine the blade descending and cutting a section through everything that is there—walls, railway lines, wagons, workshops, churches, crates of fruit, trees, sky, cobblestones. Such a blade has fallen a few yards in front of the face of everyone who is determined to fight. Each finds himself a few yards from the precipitous edge of an infinitely deep fissure which only he can see. The fissure, like a deep cut into the flesh, is unmistakably itself; there can be no doubting what has happened. But there is no pain at first.
The pain is the thought of one’s own death probably being very near. It occurs to the men and women building the barricades that what they are handling, and what they are thinking, are probably being handled and thought by them for the last time. As they build the defences, the pain increases.
A man from the rooftops shouts that there are hundreds of soldiers at the corner of the Via Manin.
Umberto and four of the hotel staff whom he has specially paid and to whom he has offered a further reward of a hundred lire if they find his son, are searching in the streets behind the hotel where there are neither soldiers nor barricades.
At first, says the Roman girl in Italian, we’ll live in Rome because I think we’ll be happier there.
Whenever she speaks, he looks at her in the same way as he would if he understood her. The meaning of her words seems unimportant to him; what is important is that what he is seeing, he is seeing in her presence.
And you will buy me, she says in Italian, some white stockings and a hat with chiffon tied round it.
At the barricades the pain is over. The transformation is complete. It is completed by a shout from the rooftops that the soldiers are advancing. Suddenly there is nothing to regret. The barricades are between their defenders and the violence done to them throughout their lives. There is nothing to regret because it is the quintessence of their past which is now advancing against them. On their side of the barricades it is already the future.
Every ruling minority needs to numb and, if possible, to kill the time-sense of those whom it exploits by proposing a continuous present. This is the authoritarian secret of all methods of imprisonment. The barricades break that present.
The Roman girl leads him into a doorway a few yards from a barricade. We will wait here a little, she says in Italian, like a wife to an elderly husband on the occasion of a cloudburst.
The soldiers draw nearer. The last doubt that the action may be deferred disappears. Kneeling at one end of the barricade with his back against a basement grille is a white-haired man with an old pistol across his knee. It is loaded; he has one other bullet in his pocket. Younger men and women are still dismantling the road and adding to the pile of cobbles. Others are armed with bars and sticks.
Everyone falls silent. There is a distant noise of hammering from the yards and, nearer, regular as the sound of a clock (its promise of a seemingly endless time lulls him; but the way it fills the time, whose passing it records, oppresses him) the noise of marching feet. La Rivoluzione o la morte! shouts the white-haired man into the silence. And then: Sing, damn them, sing! They must hear us singing.
When he first commanded Sing! the Roman girl went forward to the step of the doorway, simply, as to the footlights, and began to sing the ‘Canto dei Malfattori’.
It is hard not to romanticize her voice. At first I thought it frail like her arms which so impressed him. But it is full and coarse. For a moment nobody in the street joins in, the better to appreciate how her voice fills the street and seems instantaneously to soften every surface and edge.
The soldiers fire their first volley into the barricade.
The first volley simplifies, its echo killing every distraction. Nothing remains but what is in hand. A few men throw stones towards the soldiers; they fall short. A shutter bangs and an officer fires with his revolver at the window of the house. On the road between the soldiers and the barricade, absolutely still, are the seven stones that have fallen short.
Behind the barricade women get down on their knees to gather stones along the perimeters of the holes already made and to feed them to the men. A railwayman, still wearing his cap with a red and gold braid round it, shouts: Wait! Wait till we can break their heads in! Wait! And when I say—all of us at once! Wait! He has a bony, quick face and he is smiling.
The soldiers close up. A second volley. For the second time nobody is hurt. Nobody believes it, yet nobody fails to consider that the justice of their cause may be a protection. Now! Twenty men hurl their stones through the air. The soldiers edge back. A woman jeers at them: Faccie di merda!
A youth in an apron says of the railwayman: That one is like an officer of the artillery. On the word ‘fuoco’ there is the crack of a single shot and the railwayman falls. The shot came from an upper window, not from the street. The bullet is in his face. The bullet belongs, he believes, to the past, preceding his own childhood. The wound in his face, attended by three women, gives birth to his death.
A cubic metre of space; empty it of your conception of that space; what remains is like death.
The soldiers advance again, and are driven off in the same way. But this time they withdraw a hundred yards, and there is a lull whose quiet deceives no one. Behind the barricade it is probably the moment of greatest fear. The enemy have taken the measure of the defenders’ defiance and are re-planning the attack accordingly; the defenders can do nothing but tend their dead comrade and wait, hopelessly out-armed and outnumbered.
In Italian she whispers to him: I promise you if a soldier lays hands on me, I’ll drive a knife down between his shoulders. She touches him lightly with her finger where the blade will strike. As if he had understood what she said and were pretending to die, he lets his weight lean against her. I promise, she says. His head falls on to her shoulder. His legs are trembling and he fears that he is about to lose consciousness. With her arm round him she leads him through the passage of the house to a yard where she splashes his face with water from a tap and tells him to drink. The water is sharply cold and as he gulps it, he hears another volley of shots from the street. The sound in his ears and the swallowing of the cold water in his throat become a single sensation. He sees her face, her heavy eyebrows meeting in the middle, her heavy mouth and moustache, a squashed blemished face with slow eyes; he sees her expression; never before has a second person’s expression appeared to express what he is feeling.
Che Dio li maledica, she says.
Along the street several riflemen have been posted in the windows of upper rooms from where they can fire, over the barricade, at its defenders. Under their covering fire the soldiers in the street are advancing. Already three defenders have been wounded.
Let me speak of one of the wounded. The bullet has entered just beneath his right collarbone. If he keeps his right arm still, the pain is constant but it does not move: it does not lunge out and devour his very consciousness of what remains unhurt. He hates the pain as he hates the soldiers. The pain is the soldiers in his body. He picks up a stone with his left hand and tries to throw it. In throwing it he inadvertently moves his right shoulder. The stone goes crooked and only hits a wall.
Write anything. Truth or untruth, it is unimportant. Speak but speak with tenderness, for that is all that you can do that may help a little. Build a barricade of words, no matter what they mean. Speak so that he can be aware of your presence. Speak so that he knows that you are there not feeling his pain. Say anything, for his pain is larger than any distinction you can make between truth and untruth. Dress him with the words of your voice as others dress his wounds. Yes. Here and now. It will stop.
There is no judge.
When the soldiers are twenty yards away, two women climb up the iron bars, which are meant to prevent people or animals falling under the tram, onto its side. As they emerge into view as targets at point-blank range, they scream at the soldiers: Shoot us! Why don’t you shoot us? Several rifles point at them but nobody fires. They stand upright, straddling the broken tram windows. They continue to scream at the soldiers. Figli di putana! And then: Castrati! Castrati! The boy in the street stares up at them from behind. The heel of one of them protrudes through a large hole in her stocking. On the ankle of the second, who is without stockings, is a smear of blood. Castrati! Castrati! More women are climbing the bars to join the first two.
An officer notices a man on a sixth-floor parapet, further down the street, behind the barricade. The man is gesticulating. The officer orders a section of soldiers to fire at him.
The man on the parapet sees the soldiers bring their rifles to the shoulder and aim at him. If I jump, he thinks, they will kill me before I hit the ground. He jumps.
To the officer the young women swearing and prancing on the tram are sluts whom he will later have arrested. But for some of the soldiers, sons of peasants or workers from other cities, they evoke childhood memories. The women’s voices show that their rage is solemn and passionate, precluding all answers. For these soldiers the women on the tram seem to have attained, whatever their actual age, the authority of elders; their rage is inseparable from judgement; before such rage one must ask for pardon.
The soldiers are ordered to advance. This order re-establishes the sense of manhood they were for a moment in danger of losing. Obediently they move forward, rifles at the ready: some to round up the men, others to drag the women off the tram.
Castrati! Cowards!
The words concentrate into a yell. It is not a yell of fear but of total refusal. They are like women yelling on behalf of the stillborn.
I cannot continue this account of the eleven-year-old boy in Milan on 6 May 1898. From this point on everything, I write will either converge upon a final full stop or else disperse so widely that it will become incoherent. Yet there was no such convergence and no incoherence. To stop here, despite all that I leave unsaid, is to admit more of the truth than will be possible if I bring the account to a conclusion. The writer’s desire to finish is fatal to the truth. The End unifies. Unity must be established in another way.
Between 6 May, when martial law was declared in Milan, and 9 May one hundred workers were killed and four hundred and fifty wounded. Those four days marked the end of a phase of Italian history. Socialist leaders began to lay more and more stress on parliamentary social democracy and all attempts at direct revolutionary action—or revolutionary defence—were abandoned. Simultaneously the ruling class adopted new tactics towards the workers and the peasantry; crude repression gave way to political manipulation. For the next twenty years in Italy—as in most of the rest of Western Europe—the spectre of revolution was banished from men’s minds.
In the garden in Livorno the fountain is playing. The fountain, the palm trees, the hibiscus and flowering shrubs have not been allowed to deteriorate since the death of Umberto’s wife, three years ago in 1895. He employs two gardeners. He travels specially to Settignano to order rare plants. Each year his memory of his wife approximates more closely to the picture of her preserved by her acquaintances and friends. He no longer disputes that his wife was a person of great spirituality.
Occasionally there is a noise which suggests a marble dropped into water. It is made by a perch, basking on the surface of the water, abruptly plunging. Umberto cannot enjoy the peacefulness of the garden alone. Alone he feels old and nervous. He will agree to anything Laura asks in exchange for being able to have his son in Livorno.
Umberto thinks that his son is not like a modern Italian but like a youth painted during the Renaissance; his face is like a window onto his soul. He finds the gaps in the boy’s teeth a little disconcerting when he smiles, but these he will have stopped with gold. He tells Laura of all the advantages which the boy would enjoy if he lived in Livorno. Laura does not say what she thinks. Instead she complains, hints, contradicts herself. The more persuasive Umberto becomes, the less encouraging she is. He pleads with her, he begs her on his knees.
No, No, she cries, holding his arms to make him get to his feet.
He reminds her of times they have spent together.
Ah my little one you were mad, quite quite mad.
Italy, she insists, is not a country for a child.
Come with him, says Umberto becoming more agitated, I’ll buy a house. I’ll buy you …
The father’s sentimentality will ensure that the mother has her way.
Whilst his unknown mother and newly-discovered father argue about where he should live and with whom, the son returns again and again to his memory of being led into the yard where the water-tap was. Again the Roman girl throws water on his face. Again he is amazed by her expression. Again something is revealed to him. The revelation is as wordless as the water she threw was colourless.
Where he is (in the garden in Livorno) or where he was (in the Via Manin) is unimportant; what he sees in front of him (his mother’s round face and her hair impeccably arranged in a bun) or what he saw (the Roman girl’s blemished open mouth) belongs to the particular moment; what he hears (the sound of the fountain playing) or what he heard (screams and curses of women) are simple alternatives; what matters is what her expression in the yard confirmed but what, until this moment, was wordless. What matters is not being dead.
In the Piazza San Michele on the waterfront at Livorno there is a statue of Ferdinand I. At each corner of the pedestal on which the archduke stands, a bronze figure of a naked African slave is chained. For this reason the statue is often referred to as I Quattro Mori. There is an inscription on the pedestal, the last part of which reads in Italian as follows:
‘…made in 1617 after the death of Ferdinand. Later (between 1623 and 1626) Pietro Tucca added his admirable slaves, the models for which he chose from the local prison.’
THREE CONVERSATIONS OVER THE YEARS ABOUT HIS FATHER
Why don’t I have a Papa?
Your Papa died.
Dead? Yes.
In the cemetery he’s dead?
If you are good, you go to heaven when you die.
Was Papa good?
I’m sure he was.
Always?
We didn’t know him. I don’t think your uncle or aunt knew him either.
But Maman—
Your mother met him in Italy I think.
What was he doing in Italy?
He had something to do with ships.
Was he English?
I think he was Italian.
What did Maman call him?
Now finish your soup and no more silly questions.
Was he run over by a train?
Who?
Papa when he was dead.
I don’t know.
Couldn’t Maman stop him?
Finish your soup.
I’m dead too! Ha! Ha! Dead! Dead!
Finish—
Why will nobody tell me anything about my father? Whenever I ask about him, you change the subject.
I never saw him. Nor did your uncle. You must ask your mother about him.
You are only pretending not to know. Please who was he?
He was a merchant from Livorno in Italy.
Was he Italian?
Yes, an Italian merchant.
Were they married long before he died?
A very short time.
And did he really die in an accident with a train?
Who told you that?
That’s what Cook used to tell me.
I didn’t know.
Was he very old when he died?
He was much older than your mother.
Am I like him?
I’ve told you I never saw him.
But guess.
Perhaps your dark eyes. You certainly don’t get them from her.
Would you like to go to Italy?
When?
Next week—to Milan.
Is Milan near Livorno?
It’s quite a long way.
I should like to visit Father’s grave in Livorno.
Who told you he had a grave?
Nobody told me. All dead people have graves.
I meant why did you think it was in Livorno?
Because that’s where he lived.
What would you say if your father was alive?
He can’t be.
And supposing I told you he was?
You told me he was dead.
It was a terrible mistake. We thought he was dead.
But why didn’t you hope he was alive?
It was all a terrible mistake.
You mean he’s alive.
Yes.
The train didn’t kill him.
Would you like to visit him? The two of us together.
Us? If he’s alive, I’d say the question is whether you want to see him.
There’s no need for impertinence.
The train journey to Paris, two days spent there with friends and then the journey on to Milan comprise the longest period that the boy has spent with his mother since infancy. She is unlike anybody else he knows: yet he has known about her ever since he can remember. She is both strange and familiar. With her he has the sensation of playing a part in a story which concerns a life he might have led. Everything about her suggests an alternative.
She talks a lot to him, but not as one talks to a child. (From the moment she abandoned him to her cousins she has wanted to think of him as grown up, as formed: then pride in him could supersede her guilt. Now that he is eleven she thinks of him proudly as a man: a man to whom she can refer for support and justification: a man who, in many respects, is like a father to her.) She talks to him about Socialism, the importance of Education, the future of women, about art—they will see Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper in Milan—about her friend Bertha Newcombe who is in love with Bernard Shaw, about the different nations of Europe and their characteristics.
Some of what she says he does not fully understand. But all of it seems to pass by like the views seen through the train window: distant, continuous, almost disembodied. It is the same with her voice which is unlike any other he has heard (she still talks incessantly), but which does not seem to belong to her. When he returns to their compartment having walked along the train corridor, the fact that his mother is still there in the same place half surprises him. He had half expected her to disappear. When she falls asleep he presses her arm, presses it hard until he can feel how solid it is. He is mystified by this solidity as he might be by an image in a mirror moving of its own accord.
She has certain characteristics by which he recognizes her instantly in his dreams and thoughts. The smallness of her plump hands, and their surprising lightness of touch; the way she opens her hazel eyes very wide (like the china eyes of a doll); her large bosom and square body (like a silk sack stuffed); the firmness with which she says certain words—RIGHTS, IDEAL, DISGRACE; a scent, hyacinth-like which covers, as lightly as tulle, another (for him) unnamed but older smell. But these characteristics do not create a person in his mind: they remind him of the fact that his mother happens to have these characteristics.
When, through the train window or the carriage window in Paris, a woman for some reason or another attracts his attention—it happens rarely—and he has time to observe her, he plays a game of imagining her as his mother. The game is impossible if the woman is in the carriage and likely to talk to him or to Laura: she must be and must remain a stranger. The woman there with a tiny waist, wearing blue satin, who is shaking with laughter and whose screams first attracted his attention and separated her from the crowd, what would it be like, he wonders, to have her as a mother? Or the fat woman who is carrying too much away from the market and who looks as though she is too fat to climb up into the train: or the woman in the landau with ostrich feathers, wearing narrow trousers beneath her slit skirt? He does not compare these women with the woman beside him. If the game were just one of judging between them, of deciding which mother he would prefer, it would soon pall: furthermore, if his judgement were to go against Laura, he would be assuring his own unhappiness. The imaginary mothers he sees through the window are candidates for filling the absence which Laura represents. The game is always to try to imagine more about having a mother. It is the first time he has played the game. It is Laura’s presence which supplies the necessary sense of absence from which to begin.
It is more than eleven years since Laura and Umberto have met, and their son is there in breeches and a cap to remind them both of how long eleven years may be.
On a platform in Milan railway station the son sees his father for the first time: the father sees his son for the first time: the lover sees his ex-mistress as mother to his son, and the mother sees her ex-lover as her child’s father. On the platform beneath the distant and extensive glass roof of the station the three of them assemble as a family group: prosperous and to be envied. Mother and father do not kiss, but the mother proffers her son (who is as tall as she) for the embrace of the father. For an hour or so the three of them seem to each other to be huge, improbable, giant apparitions—like faces drawn on kites.
Laura explains to herself how Umberto has changed. He has become like a caricature of a capitalist. Her Fabian friends in London would find it hard to believe that he was the father of her child. He must have taken advantage of you, they would say, taken advantage of your naivety and your good heart. He is heavier and more stupid than before. She sees in his face the obstinacy and stupidity of all the letters he has written to her. His skin has become darker and coarser. He has huge bags under his eyes. She compares him with her son. It is far easier, she has already decided, to talk intelligently and naturally with him than with Umberto. Umberto is like a rich fat old child. He is incoherent: his eyes become tearful: his massive fat hands bang and grasp and he keeps on repeating phrases like All my life! All my life!
Umberto scarcely notices how Laura has become shapeless, how she clenches her small hands when walking, how she has acquired the habit of baring her teeth in an ironic smile when she is impatient. These are all details beside the single transformation he was expecting: she has become the mother of his son who is no longer a child. He has eyes only for the boy.
The hotel is full of rumours according to which Italy is on the brink of Revolution. It is said that shooting has already begun in the industrial suburbs of the city.
To Umberto the red leather furniture, the winter garden plants, the lifts with gilded cages, the dragooned maids in white suddenly seem absurd. His long-cultivated taste for grand hotels ends in disgust. He wishes to take his son home. In such a hotel intimacy (except sexual intimacy in bed) is impossible. The staff carry messages from guest to guest. There is nothing of his own which he can show his son. The grandeur is anonymous and false. It seems to him that his one-time mistress and his son hide from him in their rooms behind innumerable doors: he has the sensation that everyone in the hotel is being forced to wear a disguise. And so, for a few hours, and despite his hatred of Revolution, Umberto listens to the rumours with a kind of anticipation. Because he is conscious, now that he has found his son, that nothing will ever be the same again for him, his fear of violent change is momentarily reduced. He sees the nervousness in the eyes of some of the other hotel guests and he distinguishes between himself and them: they need their disguise whereas he does not. For a few hours he feels an uncertain correspondence between the violence of his emotion, to which he cannot in this hotel give proper expression, and the violence threatened by the crowds already gathered in the northern suburbs.
When he explains the political situation to his one-time mistress, he does so with unaccustomed vehemence. He speaks of the senility of Crispi: the impotence of Rudini ‘the gentleman’: the genius of Giolitti. There are only two choices, he says, Giolitti or the anarchists! Progress or revolution! We may even need a little revolution to strengthen Giolitti’s hand! He raises his own large hand and opens it wide in front of Laura’s face. Dimly (because without any emotive associations) she remembers that she used to think of him as a bandit. She feels her own motives for coming to see him generally confirmed by his manner and by the events he is describing. She too has come to demand—not for herself, but for her son—the share which is his right. The word JUSTICE, silently spoken in her mind, is spoken with the characteristic intonation which her son has noticed.
Why hasn’t your government a plan for solving the problem of poverty? All over the world people—
The problem of poverty! Umberto interrupts, repeating the words very loudly and laughing. In our country, he says, poverty isn’t a problem. It’s a life. There is only one way of being rich but there are a thousand ways of being poor.
And look what happens! snaps Laura.
Both parents frequently glance at their son as though appealing for his support. His father looks at him protectively, his mother seeking protection. The boy senses that the three of them have met too late; he is no longer the child who can receive what each of them, independently, wishes to give, and what he might once have welcomed. In the history of his own life he is older than they: about the history of his own life their innocence makes them like two children.
As he watches his parents, he returns again and again to the same question: what was his mother like before she was so shapeless and his father was so fat? How is it that she, who rejects him in every word she utters, every gesture she makes, must once have accepted him? What force then disarmed her? Or could she have yielded of her own accord? He cannot find the answer.
Meanwhile they talk of the alternatives to Revolution.
Towards evening clouds mass above the city. The leaden light makes the cathedral look like a gigantic piece of shrapnel. The canals in the suburbs appear to turn black. The open spaces are airless as though the whole city had been placed in a box.
Milan is noted for the violence of its thunderstorms and during the moments preceding them one can experience this strange sensation of a distorted, inconsistent size-scale. The scale of the buildings and the extent of the city remain overwhelmingly large in relation to one’s own size; one feels dwarfed; and yet, simultaneously, one has the sensation that the city—with oneself in it—has been reduced to the size of an exhibit in a glass case in a museum. The experience may be related to dramatic changes in air pressure. This evening the sensation of distortion is particularly strong.
In the hotel more and more electric lights are switched on. The bulbs are a sulphuric yellow. The colonnade of the Scala is visible from the first-floor hotel lounge. The colonnade is lit up; evidently the evening’s performance has not been cancelled.
Guests stand at the tall windows looking out. There is the sound of distant shouting. The Piazza is unusually empty. A man wearing a stock runs his hand up and down the velvet curtain at his side; the texture of the material reassures him.
The Head Porter hurries up the stairs and into the lounge with the news just delivered to the Junior Porter at the front entrance. He whispers to an old man in an arm-chair who, having received the news, raises his head and announces in a high voice: Signore, Signori! Whereupon the Head Porter delivers the news in the manner of a Master of Ceremonies. The workers of the Pirelli factory have seized a police barracks. A column of insurgents from Pavia is marching upon the city. The anarchist leaders are inciting the workers to attack the centre. They have already set fire—
Another old man shouts out to his two sons standing near by (one of them is in officer’s uniform): The cavalry! Don’t delay! Martial law and the cavalry! The sons shrug their shoulders.
A few seconds later thunder rattles the tall windows and the force of the rain is such that it sounds like fire. The guests look towards the streaming dark windows. The lights on the colonnade of the Scala have gone out. Laura whispers to Umberto that she wishes to lie down in her room.
The boy stares at the dark life-size portraits on the opposite wall: they represent Piedmontese notables of the Risorgimento. Alone with his son for the first time in his life, Umberto wants to make a ritual gesture. He approaches his son from behind and lays his hands upon his head in the manner of a bishop. The boy remains motionless. He is more aware than he has ever been of the question he cannot formulate when he looks down at the farmhouse before daybreak.
It is now as if the rain is beating upon the glass case in which the city is being exhibited. From a stair-well at the back of the hotel there ascends a woman’s long-sustained scream.
A waiter hurries to the heavy wooden door with brass fittings which opens on the corridor leading to the back of the hotel. But the scream (the scream of a new kitchen-maid from the country who fears lightning and thunder because they are a sign of the wrath of God) has already had its effect. It has already reminded many of the guests that they have been awaiting such a scream in such circumstances—with dread or with inexplicable expectation—for years. For them the scream is a signal.
The immediate effect of the storm is to disperse the open-air meetings of workers and demonstrators. It achieves what Turati, the socialist leader, failed to achieve in his appeals for order and calm.
But there are other effects. It is not only the country kitchen-maid whom the storm has frightened. Those responsible for law and order in Milan have been reminded of the ineluctable nature of storms when once they begin. In the flashes of lightning which, although they emanate from the sky, appear to light up the piazza from below, in the rolls of thunder echoing between the far mountains and the near buildings, in the incontestable force of the downpour and in the hysteria of the electrical tension, they have seen the spectre of their working population in revolt. Two workers and one policeman have been killed during the day. After the storm the spectre looms larger than the facts. The forces of order must immediately take the most extreme measures against the least provocation: only thus can the revolutionary storm, of which the natural one that has just passed was only a harmless symbol, be averted. The massacre of the following days is assured.
Dinner in the hotel dining-room is well attended. The guests wear evening dress. Thus the male diners and the waiters, both wearing black and white, are distinguished by their positions and actions rather than by their appearance, and one has the impression that all the men in the large room are attendant upon the women in their multi-coloured dresses. A fountain plays, and around it are arranged lemon trees and oleanders in wooden tubs. On the tables are roses.
Umberto takes a white rose from the chalice on his table, carefully trims its stem, wipes it with his folded handkerchief, stands up and, holding the barely open white rose in front of his vast, untidy face, the colour of yellow clay, bows to Laura, pouting his mouth in the vulgar Italian manner which, describing a kiss, denotes appreciation. Yet Umberto modifies the vulgarity of the gesture: the symbolic kiss is restrained and he holds the rose in front of his mouth—as though the flower were the word which his lips were forming.
Please, dear Laura, accept—
Put it down, she says, furiously embarrassed by his theatricality and by the implication of present courtship: an implication which, in her mind, unpardonably confuses the past with the present.
Umberto gently hands the rose to his son who is seated between the two of them.
You give it to her, he says.
The boy places the rose by his mother’s soup spoon.
Suddenly she is reassured. She considers it possible that Umberto has understood what she wishes to establish: namely that all his dealings with her must be made by way of her son. Picking up the rose she slowly twirls it between her fingers, raises it to her eyes, and lays it down again on the table in front of the boy.
Umberto, noticing the sudden change in her attitude and incapable of not exploiting an unexpected success, says: Shall we eat Pollo alla Cacciatore? If I am not wrong, dear Laura, you always liked Pollo alla Cacciatore.
This is the first time that he has mentioned the past. The boy is immediately alerted. Laura is momentarily touched by his remembering. The remark confirms what she wishes to be confirmed: the fact that, a long time ago, Umberto was in a position to be the father of her child. Unaware of the eloquence of her expression, she half smiles at Umberto. The boy, intercepting the glance, recognizes it. He has seen Beatrice look at Jocelyn with a similar expression. It is a look which confesses a secret common interest deriving from some past experience from which, by its nature rather than by its timing, he is conscious of being inevitably excluded. It is a look which makes him conscious of being the third person.
What does Pollo something mean? he asks.
It is a chicken cooked in wine with mushrooms and peas and young vegetables. Pollo alla Cacciatore.
But is that what it means?
It means chicken cooked like hunters cook it.
The look and the dish henceforward became associated in his mind. It is the look of the Pollo alla Cacciatore.
The Mediterranean breaks along the long coasts of Italy. In places the waves are phosphorescent in the dark. Between the coasts millions are hungry. In the south they riot without hope.
An assault on the town hall, devastation and destruction of the tax registers; then the arrival of police or soldiers, volleys of stones from the crowd, opening of fire by the troops. The crowd retreats, cursing, leaving its dead and wounded on the ground. In a few months in another commune the story repeats itself.
The tax on flour is over 50 per cent: on sugar 300 per cent, on meat and milk 20 per cent. Salt is so highly taxed that many peasants never taste it. Meanwhile it is an offence against the excise for those who live by the coast to draw salt water from the sea. Guards have shot at women coming down to the beaches with buckets. It is safest at night. Phosphorescent drops form for a moment along the rim of the bucket, in whose illegal water she will cook tomorrow’s pasta.
I FATTI DI MAGGIO 1898
The boy wakes early, as he intended to do. He slips out of the hotel before either of his parents are astir.
Because the people in the streets are speaking a language which he cannot understand, the significance of most of what he sees is ambiguous. The commonplace and the exceptional are mysteriously confused. Is the gentleman who flings himself into a carriage and shouts at the driver frightened or late? The six girls advancing with linked arms (and their hair tied up in scarves)—do they sweep the other pedestrians off the pavement every morning as they are doing today? A man by the kerb is reading out loud from a newspaper. Is it a tram stop? The men who gather round him begin to shout. Are they shouting in approval or anger? A jeweller has closed his shop and pinned a piece of paper with writing on it to the shutters.
There are so many people that the carriages and trams can pass through only with difficulty. The wheels of the trams screech against the rails. He wonders whether they always screech like that.
A young very short man with a beard is puzzled by the presence of the boy, whose clothes make it clear that he comes from a rich bourgeois family. The entire crowd is made up of workers on strike, assembling to listen to their speakers near the Giardini Pubblici.
What are you doing here, he asks in Italian, this has nothing to do with you!
The boy, almost as tall as the young man, shakes his head and shrugs his shoulders. This increases the suspicions of his questioner.
It won’t help you spying on us, he says.
I do not understand, says the boy in English.
So you’re not an Italian.
They try to talk but the boy understands nothing. The young man puts his arm round the boy’s shoulders. Within a few seconds his whole attitude is reversed. If the boy cannot understand their language, he is immune to the hypocrisy of deception of words and thus can be the pure witness of their actions. The boy’s wordlessness now appears to him, in an unclear paradoxical way, to be comparable with the universality of the Revolution in which he believes. He calls to his sister in a nearby group of mill-girls: Come and meet our pulcino, he says. Ecco il nostro pulcino.
Despite his diminutive shortness, the young man with a beard has a wide flat brown chest. His face is like a ferret’s. He works as a maintenance mechanic in a cotton mill. Since 1894 he has twice been arrested and deported under Crispi’s law of Public Security (the decreto-legge).
Let him stay with you, he says to his sister, he can’t speak our Italian.
Out of the six mill-girls to whom the boy has been entrusted, he notices particularly a Roman girl, only two or three years older than himself, whose face is pock-marked and who already has a growth of black hair above her upper lip. He notices too—for she wears a white short-sleeved bodice—that her arms are unnaturally thin, like long brown handles to her hands. Her moustache intrigues and embarrasses him.
To them he is a fascinating enigma. They can talk about him as though he were not there.
He has beautiful eyes.
Look at the leather of his shoes.
Where does he come from?
Yet they can also approach him, touch him, study his reactions. Half child and half man, he appears to them as an ambassador between the romantic dreams of their own childhood and the men from whom in reality they must soon choose. (The eldest of these girls earns less than Iod a day).
Let us call him my affianzato, cries the Roman girl, made brazen by the excitement, her acknowledged ugliness and the fact that the boy will never understand.
The crowd in and around the Corso Venezia numbers fifty thousand. Some are organized into columns and contingents from particular factories; other groupings are smaller and less organized. They do not know exactly how many they are; but all of them sense that they represent the majority. This majority can claim what each has felt but cannot say when alone: Look at this head, this body—ill-taught, badly-fed, poorly-dressed, overworked. It deserves the best the world is able to offer.
Near the edge of the Giardini Pubblici, the boy sees the young man with a beard standing in a tree and addressing the crowd. He is giving them directions about where to go.
The crowd see the city around them with different eyes. They have stopped the factories producing, forced the shops to shut, halted the traffic, occupied the streets. It is they who have built the city and they who maintain it. They are discovering their own creativity. In their regular lives they only modify presented circumstances; here, filling the streets and sweeping all before them they oppose their very existence to circumstances. They are rejecting all that they habitually, and despite themselves, accept. Once again they demand together what none can ask alone: Why should I be compelled to sell my life bit by bit so as not to die?
Of the reality of politics most of the crowd are ignorant. Politics are the means by which they are kept suppressed and impoverished. Politics are the means by which they are deceived and disarmed. Politics is the State which oppresses them. In the heart of each there is a desire to challenge the entire political armoury of their oppressors with the single and simple weapon of justice: the justice of their own cause, crying out to the sky above Milan and to the future. Yet justice implies a judge. And there is no judge and no judgement.
The cavalry charge as the first shots are fired. The shots are above the heads of the crowd.
They ride out in lines of five or six. After a line has passed, sections of the crowd appear to re-form—not in order to resist, for resistance at this instant is unthinkable, but because in order to avoid the horses they have pressed themselves into unimaginably tight units which, as soon as the danger has momentarily passed, inevitably enlarge again. The lines of cavalry turn and wheel. Sections of the crowd repeatedly contract and expand like pumping hearts. Screams ascend and dissolve. Shouts persist.
A line of cavalry approaches. The nearest horse rears above a huddled group. The boy has never as yet seen from the ground a horse used as a weapon. Like his uncle he has always been a rider. The under-side of a rearing horse seen from below is awful in a very particular way. The body is large and heavy with four metal-shod hooves on legs whose pounding power is utterly evident. But the physical threat is compounded with something else. The horse too is made of sinews, bones, flesh and blood. It is breathing hard and is frightened. The rider’s violence has already distorted its nature. The horse shares your defencelessness as it is about to crush you. It is as though your fear has uncontrollably entered the horse which threatens you.
The eyes of the rider stare fixedly into the middle distance, with only quick furtive glances downwards. His back teeth are clenched so hard that he cannot swallow. His head is like a head strung through its eyes on a line five feet above the faces of the crowd: the line of his orders. His spurred boots kick out blindly at the hands and arms trying to grab them. Repeatedly his spurs jab into the horse’s flanks to force it forward.
Hypnotized by the sight of horse and rider, the boy does not move until the Roman girl pulls his arm so abruptly that he almost falls. Then they begin to run. With her free hand she holds up her skirts as she runs. He notices again how unnaturally thin her arms are; but her hand is big and encloses his. She does not hesitate about where to run—towards the trees in the Giardini Pubblici.
They pass a group carrying a wounded man. Others are running. Screams gush in accompaniment to the blood—but not always from the same person. Blood runs down a woman’s face, the eyes behind the blood tightly shut. An enormously fat man is half lifting her, his arm round her back. The cleared spaces enable the cavalry to charge more rapidly against those who remain. A middle-aged man alone in the middle of the Corso, fists in the air, curses the soldiers. Cowards! he shouts, Rinnegati! He advances towards a line of horsemen drawn up in stationary formation awaiting orders. An officer behind the line orders him to stop. He continues to advance. When he is shot he falls on his face.
Butterflies the colour of grey sandstone, others the colour of honeysuckle. Grass and wild flowers as high as the knee. Petals faded by the sun so that they are almost white, but not clay white like the miniature snails to be found in places on the dusty earth. Delicate wild gladioli the colour of amethysts, transparent and smaller than a finger joint. The red of poppies—the colour in which a child pictures fire. Fading poppies, damp, their fallen heads the colour of wine stains. Shallow outcrops of flat rock smooth and grey like the sides of dolphins. The whole field surrounded by ilex trees. To die in that field, blood flowing into the dry earth. To be shot, to fall across the tram lines, blood making the cobbles slippery. I picture the first death to make a wreath for the second.
She leads him across the gardens to the railyards and the streets near the station of the Piazza della Republica. She never lets go of his hand. She holds it neither amorously nor protectively but impatiently as if to make him run or walk fast, or, when they stop, as if to make him understand more immediately what they are watching. Occasionally she speaks to him in Italian although she knows that he cannot understand what she says. Shock, the strangeness of their situation and perhaps an innate desperation make her develop the fantasy which began as a joke. Soon she is pretending that one day they will get married. This pretence is no more unlikely than the events taking place round them. And so she establishes, intuitively, a balance between the violence of their circumstances and the violence of her imaginative preoccupation, and this balance enables her to become quite calm.
They watch a tram being overturned to make a barricade. As it falls the glass of all its windows is smashed. Having unharnessed the horse, men and women drag a carriage to overturn beside the tram. A line of railwaymen are carrying picks and crowbars from a railway depot. The news has spread that the army has been ordered to clear the city, street by street, and to hunt down every ‘insurgent’. Another group of railwaymen are dismantling the track.
Everything is about to be transformed.
Imagine the blade of a giant guillotine as long as the diameter of the city. Imagine the blade descending and cutting a section through everything that is there—walls, railway lines, wagons, workshops, churches, crates of fruit, trees, sky, cobblestones. Such a blade has fallen a few yards in front of the face of everyone who is determined to fight. Each finds himself a few yards from the precipitous edge of an infinitely deep fissure which only he can see. The fissure, like a deep cut into the flesh, is unmistakably itself; there can be no doubting what has happened. But there is no pain at first.
The pain is the thought of one’s own death probably being very near. It occurs to the men and women building the barricades that what they are handling, and what they are thinking, are probably being handled and thought by them for the last time. As they build the defences, the pain increases.
A man from the rooftops shouts that there are hundreds of soldiers at the corner of the Via Manin.
Umberto and four of the hotel staff whom he has specially paid and to whom he has offered a further reward of a hundred lire if they find his son, are searching in the streets behind the hotel where there are neither soldiers nor barricades.
At first, says the Roman girl in Italian, we’ll live in Rome because I think we’ll be happier there.
Whenever she speaks, he looks at her in the same way as he would if he understood her. The meaning of her words seems unimportant to him; what is important is that what he is seeing, he is seeing in her presence.
And you will buy me, she says in Italian, some white stockings and a hat with chiffon tied round it.
At the barricades the pain is over. The transformation is complete. It is completed by a shout from the rooftops that the soldiers are advancing. Suddenly there is nothing to regret. The barricades are between their defenders and the violence done to them throughout their lives. There is nothing to regret because it is the quintessence of their past which is now advancing against them. On their side of the barricades it is already the future.
Every ruling minority needs to numb and, if possible, to kill the time-sense of those whom it exploits by proposing a continuous present. This is the authoritarian secret of all methods of imprisonment. The barricades break that present.
The Roman girl leads him into a doorway a few yards from a barricade. We will wait here a little, she says in Italian, like a wife to an elderly husband on the occasion of a cloudburst.
The soldiers draw nearer. The last doubt that the action may be deferred disappears. Kneeling at one end of the barricade with his back against a basement grille is a white-haired man with an old pistol across his knee. It is loaded; he has one other bullet in his pocket. Younger men and women are still dismantling the road and adding to the pile of cobbles. Others are armed with bars and sticks.
Everyone falls silent. There is a distant noise of hammering from the yards and, nearer, regular as the sound of a clock (its promise of a seemingly endless time lulls him; but the way it fills the time, whose passing it records, oppresses him) the noise of marching feet. La Rivoluzione o la morte! shouts the white-haired man into the silence. And then: Sing, damn them, sing! They must hear us singing.
When he first commanded Sing! the Roman girl went forward to the step of the doorway, simply, as to the footlights, and began to sing the ‘Canto dei Malfattori’.
It is hard not to romanticize her voice. At first I thought it frail like her arms which so impressed him. But it is full and coarse. For a moment nobody in the street joins in, the better to appreciate how her voice fills the street and seems instantaneously to soften every surface and edge.
The soldiers fire their first volley into the barricade.
The first volley simplifies, its echo killing every distraction. Nothing remains but what is in hand. A few men throw stones towards the soldiers; they fall short. A shutter bangs and an officer fires with his revolver at the window of the house. On the road between the soldiers and the barricade, absolutely still, are the seven stones that have fallen short.
Behind the barricade women get down on their knees to gather stones along the perimeters of the holes already made and to feed them to the men. A railwayman, still wearing his cap with a red and gold braid round it, shouts: Wait! Wait till we can break their heads in! Wait! And when I say—all of us at once! Wait! He has a bony, quick face and he is smiling.
The soldiers close up. A second volley. For the second time nobody is hurt. Nobody believes it, yet nobody fails to consider that the justice of their cause may be a protection. Now! Twenty men hurl their stones through the air. The soldiers edge back. A woman jeers at them: Faccie di merda!
A youth in an apron says of the railwayman: That one is like an officer of the artillery. On the word ‘fuoco’ there is the crack of a single shot and the railwayman falls. The shot came from an upper window, not from the street. The bullet is in his face. The bullet belongs, he believes, to the past, preceding his own childhood. The wound in his face, attended by three women, gives birth to his death.
A cubic metre of space; empty it of your conception of that space; what remains is like death.
The soldiers advance again, and are driven off in the same way. But this time they withdraw a hundred yards, and there is a lull whose quiet deceives no one. Behind the barricade it is probably the moment of greatest fear. The enemy have taken the measure of the defenders’ defiance and are re-planning the attack accordingly; the defenders can do nothing but tend their dead comrade and wait, hopelessly out-armed and outnumbered.
In Italian she whispers to him: I promise you if a soldier lays hands on me, I’ll drive a knife down between his shoulders. She touches him lightly with her finger where the blade will strike. As if he had understood what she said and were pretending to die, he lets his weight lean against her. I promise, she says. His head falls on to her shoulder. His legs are trembling and he fears that he is about to lose consciousness. With her arm round him she leads him through the passage of the house to a yard where she splashes his face with water from a tap and tells him to drink. The water is sharply cold and as he gulps it, he hears another volley of shots from the street. The sound in his ears and the swallowing of the cold water in his throat become a single sensation. He sees her face, her heavy eyebrows meeting in the middle, her heavy mouth and moustache, a squashed blemished face with slow eyes; he sees her expression; never before has a second person’s expression appeared to express what he is feeling.
Che Dio li maledica, she says.
Along the street several riflemen have been posted in the windows of upper rooms from where they can fire, over the barricade, at its defenders. Under their covering fire the soldiers in the street are advancing. Already three defenders have been wounded.
Let me speak of one of the wounded. The bullet has entered just beneath his right collarbone. If he keeps his right arm still, the pain is constant but it does not move: it does not lunge out and devour his very consciousness of what remains unhurt. He hates the pain as he hates the soldiers. The pain is the soldiers in his body. He picks up a stone with his left hand and tries to throw it. In throwing it he inadvertently moves his right shoulder. The stone goes crooked and only hits a wall.
Write anything. Truth or untruth, it is unimportant. Speak but speak with tenderness, for that is all that you can do that may help a little. Build a barricade of words, no matter what they mean. Speak so that he can be aware of your presence. Speak so that he knows that you are there not feeling his pain. Say anything, for his pain is larger than any distinction you can make between truth and untruth. Dress him with the words of your voice as others dress his wounds. Yes. Here and now. It will stop.
There is no judge.
When the soldiers are twenty yards away, two women climb up the iron bars, which are meant to prevent people or animals falling under the tram, onto its side. As they emerge into view as targets at point-blank range, they scream at the soldiers: Shoot us! Why don’t you shoot us? Several rifles point at them but nobody fires. They stand upright, straddling the broken tram windows. They continue to scream at the soldiers. Figli di putana! And then: Castrati! Castrati! The boy in the street stares up at them from behind. The heel of one of them protrudes through a large hole in her stocking. On the ankle of the second, who is without stockings, is a smear of blood. Castrati! Castrati! More women are climbing the bars to join the first two.
An officer notices a man on a sixth-floor parapet, further down the street, behind the barricade. The man is gesticulating. The officer orders a section of soldiers to fire at him.
The man on the parapet sees the soldiers bring their rifles to the shoulder and aim at him. If I jump, he thinks, they will kill me before I hit the ground. He jumps.
To the officer the young women swearing and prancing on the tram are sluts whom he will later have arrested. But for some of the soldiers, sons of peasants or workers from other cities, they evoke childhood memories. The women’s voices show that their rage is solemn and passionate, precluding all answers. For these soldiers the women on the tram seem to have attained, whatever their actual age, the authority of elders; their rage is inseparable from judgement; before such rage one must ask for pardon.
The soldiers are ordered to advance. This order re-establishes the sense of manhood they were for a moment in danger of losing. Obediently they move forward, rifles at the ready: some to round up the men, others to drag the women off the tram.
Castrati! Cowards!
The words concentrate into a yell. It is not a yell of fear but of total refusal. They are like women yelling on behalf of the stillborn.
I cannot continue this account of the eleven-year-old boy in Milan on 6 May 1898. From this point on everything, I write will either converge upon a final full stop or else disperse so widely that it will become incoherent. Yet there was no such convergence and no incoherence. To stop here, despite all that I leave unsaid, is to admit more of the truth than will be possible if I bring the account to a conclusion. The writer’s desire to finish is fatal to the truth. The End unifies. Unity must be established in another way.
Between 6 May, when martial law was declared in Milan, and 9 May one hundred workers were killed and four hundred and fifty wounded. Those four days marked the end of a phase of Italian history. Socialist leaders began to lay more and more stress on parliamentary social democracy and all attempts at direct revolutionary action—or revolutionary defence—were abandoned. Simultaneously the ruling class adopted new tactics towards the workers and the peasantry; crude repression gave way to political manipulation. For the next twenty years in Italy—as in most of the rest of Western Europe—the spectre of revolution was banished from men’s minds.
In the garden in Livorno the fountain is playing. The fountain, the palm trees, the hibiscus and flowering shrubs have not been allowed to deteriorate since the death of Umberto’s wife, three years ago in 1895. He employs two gardeners. He travels specially to Settignano to order rare plants. Each year his memory of his wife approximates more closely to the picture of her preserved by her acquaintances and friends. He no longer disputes that his wife was a person of great spirituality.
Occasionally there is a noise which suggests a marble dropped into water. It is made by a perch, basking on the surface of the water, abruptly plunging. Umberto cannot enjoy the peacefulness of the garden alone. Alone he feels old and nervous. He will agree to anything Laura asks in exchange for being able to have his son in Livorno.
Umberto thinks that his son is not like a modern Italian but like a youth painted during the Renaissance; his face is like a window onto his soul. He finds the gaps in the boy’s teeth a little disconcerting when he smiles, but these he will have stopped with gold. He tells Laura of all the advantages which the boy would enjoy if he lived in Livorno. Laura does not say what she thinks. Instead she complains, hints, contradicts herself. The more persuasive Umberto becomes, the less encouraging she is. He pleads with her, he begs her on his knees.
No, No, she cries, holding his arms to make him get to his feet.
He reminds her of times they have spent together.
Ah my little one you were mad, quite quite mad.
Italy, she insists, is not a country for a child.
Come with him, says Umberto becoming more agitated, I’ll buy a house. I’ll buy you …
The father’s sentimentality will ensure that the mother has her way.
Whilst his unknown mother and newly-discovered father argue about where he should live and with whom, the son returns again and again to his memory of being led into the yard where the water-tap was. Again the Roman girl throws water on his face. Again he is amazed by her expression. Again something is revealed to him. The revelation is as wordless as the water she threw was colourless.
Where he is (in the garden in Livorno) or where he was (in the Via Manin) is unimportant; what he sees in front of him (his mother’s round face and her hair impeccably arranged in a bun) or what he saw (the Roman girl’s blemished open mouth) belongs to the particular moment; what he hears (the sound of the fountain playing) or what he heard (screams and curses of women) are simple alternatives; what matters is what her expression in the yard confirmed but what, until this moment, was wordless. What matters is not being dead.
4
It has begun, the struggle unto death against what is.
The veil of St Veronica: a kerchief with the image of Christ’s head wearing the crown of thorns imprinted upon it.
I see another image miraculously printed on cloth. Her body with her head thrown back and her eyes shut. The image is naturalistic, quite unstylized. Dark areas of hair. Her pale skin almost indistinguishable from the colour of the linen sheet on which she lay.
Again and again two pigeons fly into the wood and out of it: the male always in pursuit. As the pair approach the wood with the hen bird in the lead, she checks herself in mid-air by holding herself vertical, with her tail down and her outstretched wings now acting as a brake. Her head is thrown back, her beak points to the sky. She hangs there motionless and yet not falling. The male bird finds himself at her side. She begins to drop, puts her head down and her tail up, dives, and they enter the wood together. A moment later they emerge from the far side of the wood to circle once more and repeat the same flight.
The description so far as it goes is accurate. But my power to select (both the facts and the words describing them) impregnates the text with a notion of choice which encourages the reader to infer a false range and type of choice being open to the two pigeons. Description distorts.
On an afternoon in late May 1902 (a few weeks before the end of the Boer War), Beatrice seduces him. What happens happens like an undescribed natural event.
When Laura and her son returned from Milan at the end of May 1898 they found that Beatrice was engaged to be married to Captain Patrick Bierce of the 17th Lancers. The boy was sent to a boarding school. During most school holidays he stayed alone with Jocelyn on the farm. (Beatrice accompanied her husband when he was posted to South Africa.)
The type of school to which he was sent has been frequently described. Its daily routine was spartan: its ideology imperialistic and religious: its social life authoritarian and sadistic. The purpose of the education which the school offered was to produce empire-builders.
Like many other boys he adapted himself to school life. A certain aloofness reinforced what his companions immediately recognized as his foreignness. He was not, however, unduly persecuted. His very indifference was a kind of protection. He was nicknamed Garibaldi because he claimed that his father was Italian. He spent an unusual amount of his free time playing the piano in the school music rooms. His interest in music was entirely disproportionate to his small talent.
At the age of fourteen his face was no longer that of a child. The change is sometimes thought of as a coarsening process; this misses the point. The change—which may occur any time between fourteen and twenty-four—involves a simultaneous gain and loss in expressiveness. The texture of the skin, the form of the flesh over the bones, become mute; their appearance becomes a covering, whereas in childhood it is a declaration of being. (Compare our response to children and to adults: we give to the existence of children the value we give to the intentions of adults.) However, the openings in the covering—especially the eyes and mouth—become more expressive, precisely because they now offer indications of what lies hidden behind.
The process of maturing and, later, of ageing involves a gradual but increasing withdrawal of the self from the exterior surface of the body. The skin of the very old is like a garment. The mouth of the man next to the boy—it was Jocelyn—was already inexpressive; he had withdrawn from his mouth: his lips were no more than a flange of the outer covering. This covering offered a certain amount of information: country gentleman, outdoor life, taciturn, disappointed. It was only through his eyes that one could still sometimes glimpse that part of his self still capable of response.
They were walking up a steep winding path with high hedges on either side. It was a late November afternoon (1900), very similar to the one when the men in sack-cloth had shown the boy the dead dray-horses. He had spoken to nobody of this incident. He remembered it vividly without seeking any explanation. It had acquired the isolated absoluteness of a vision. For him his experiencing it was its explanation.
It had been raining hard during the day. Beside the path water was running fast downhill along a stone-bedded ditch, overgrown with grass. They could hear but not see the water. Both carried guns under their arms.
Earlier, the boy had been telling Jocelyn about a dream he had had.
… I was down in the Martin and it was very hot, like it was last summer. I was swimming and there were big birds flying very low over the water—not predatory birds. Sometimes a bird’s foot touched my hair. Then more and more birds came so that I was forced to swim to the bank and climb out.
Tedder was telling me it’s going to be an exceptional year for duck on the estuary, said Jocelyn.
I started looking for my clothes. But somebody had changed them. They weren’t the same clothes as before. They were a uniform, a soldier’s uniform. It was a perfect fit—I mean it must have been a uniform made for me.
Do you remember what regiment? asked Jocelyn.
I didn’t know in my dream what regiment it was.
Were you a cavalry officer? I didn’t know.
Perhaps the Eighth Hussars, said Jocelyn. They had arrived at a gate. Jocelyn put his hand on the barrel of the boy’s gun to remind him to break it before climbing over. As he did so he looked at the boy, and was suddenly overwhelmed by how foreign he looked. He looked like an Italian: he looked like the son of his Italian shopkeeper father. His rigid mouth hardly moving, but in a kindly tone, he said: No, not the Eighth Hussars, even when you are dreaming.
I put my hand into the tunic pocket, continued the boy, and inside was—a crab! A large crab and it nipped me. I pulled out my hand and the extraordinary thing was that my hand was the crab! I had an arm, a wrist, and a crab for a hand.
What a preposterous dream! Why do you tell it to me?
I think it means that if I join the army I shall be wounded.
A light wound perhaps.
No, severely.
I saw a sow badger this morning, said Jocelyn, you should have come with me.
I heard you go off. You shouted at Tedder about the mare being under-bitted.
I haven’t found the key to that mare’s mouth yet, said Jocelyn.
Then they had both fallen silent.
In the narrow steep lane the boy asked: Have you heard from Aunt Beatrice?
Jocelyn appeared not to hear. The boy glanced sideways at him.
The man’s eyes were screwed up and his face was thrust forward into the damp, increasingly cold air. He could have been trying to spot something in the light which was beginning to fail. Or he could have been a man leaving his house with the determination never to return, a man thrusting his face forward so that it might the sooner be immersed in the unknown and the indifferent.
Several minutes later he said: She says they’re saying in Durban, that the war is as good as over. Lord Roberts is on his way home.
She’ll be here soon then.
You forget that she’s married, said Jocelyn.
Where will they live?
I’ve no idea.
Why are all the things still kept in her room?
Because it is still her room.
Will they both come here?
Again Jocelyn appeared not to hear. They emerged from the lane into a spinney. At the end of the lane Jocelyn’s dog was awaiting him. A springer spaniel called Silver.
Do you know why you have bad dreams, said Jocelyn, it’s because you spend too much time indoors. You don’t exercise yourself enough. Too much in the house. It’s a woman’s life that. Not a man’s. You should come out with me more.
I’m sorry if I disappoint you, said the boy. He said it insolently as though it were inconceivable that the man could have any real grounds for disappointment. When I give my first concert you’ll be proud of me.
We’ve only got about twenty minutes more in this light, said Jocelyn, let’s clear the wood and cross the quarry field. You work the left and I’ll take the right below. Silver, come here Silver!
His voice changed when he spoke to the dog, becoming both firmer and softer. To the boy be spoke more loudly and yet hesitantly.
They separated and began to go forward through the wood. The trees and the slope of the ground made it impossible for them to keep in sight of one another.
Hup! Hup! cried Jocelyn to show how far forward he was.
Hup! Hup! replied the boy to show that they were advancing in level line.
It is a cry which is thought not to alert the birds. It sounds more like a wooden stick striking a hollow wooden vessel (the wood of the vessel water-logged) than a voice speaking.
Nothing stirred in the wood. The tree trunks looked grey. The spaniel was seeking half-heartedly as if it found the damp entirely vegetable odour of the wet leaves disagreeable.
Hup! Hup!
For Jocelyn the cry belonged to a language which was theoretically infinite. Those two repeated wooden monosyllables filled the spinney with the splendour of a tradition as no sentence or speech or music ever could. Through the cry and the response to it, was invoked the understanding of honourable men acting in concert, disinterestedly, to experience certain moments of pure style.
Hup! Hup!
This time Jocelyn’s cry was addressed gently and specifically to the boy. He was talking to the boy, including him in the tradition. The boy noticed the difference in the man’s cry, but he answered as before.
Hup! Hup!
The tradition envisages men in close but special contact with nature. The men are unspoilt by comfort yet they are free of the necessity of having to exploit nature. They enter into nature rather as a swimmer, who has no need to cross it, enters a river. They play in the current: in it and yet not of it. What prevents them being swept away are time-honoured rules to which they adhere without question. The rules all concern ways of treating or handling specific objects or situations—guns, boots, bags, dogs, trees, deer, etc. Thus the force of nature (either from within or from without) is never allowed to accumulate; the rules always establish calm, as locks do in a river. Such men feel like gods because they have the impression of imposing an aesthetic order upon nature merely by the timing and style of their own formal interventions.
Hup! Hup!
If Silver puts up a woodcock, thought Jocelyn, it will be almost too dark now.
The tradition envisages that at the end of the day tiredness finally forces the men to cease. They return home stiff, hungry, chilled or soaked, caked with mud. At home they offer to women and friends the invisible unmade masterpieces which they have fleetingly constructed in nature; they offer them in the soiled or torn clothes they throw off, in their stiff bodies, in their excited distant eyes, in the names they possess and the names of where they have been with whom.
Hup! Hup!
It was the boy’s turn to respond. He did so, as before, flatly—without the conspiratorial intensity of his uncle.
Advancing level with Jocelyn, doing what was expected of him, his presence indicated only by his prescribed responding cry, it occurred to him that he could be any man walking up with his uncle. Under cover he had entered the company of men.
They emerged from the wood and proceeded across the open quarry-field. The cries were no longer necessary for they could see one another. Jocelyn whispered urgently to his dog, checking him so that he should not get too far ahead. His way of talking to the dog was part of the same language.
A hare leapt from covert some twenty-five yards away. Jocelyn fired one barrel. The report and its echo from the quarry face momentarily supplied an axis to the uniform grey dusk, as though the two sounds were magnetic poles to which every particle of the dusk turned and pointed.
The hare ran on, the pulse of its leaps undisturbed. It was running cross-wise, offering the boy a broadside shot.
He saw it running. He saw it as a brown furry smudge. He saw the muscles along its shoulders and down its haunches flex as it zig-zagged. He was unaware of squeezing the trigger, unaware even—for a second’s delay—of the recoil: he simply saw the hare in mid-leap going small and falling.
Imagine an invisible net which can fly through the air but remains open-ended like a wind-sock: the net flies towards the hare, the hare leaps into the net whose neck is only wide enough to admit the animal’s head and shoulders, so that the hare, entering the net, has to bunch itself up as a rabbit does when scuttling into its burrow. As the hare bunches, the foot of the net is filled with lead. It drops immediately to the ground.
The dog was whimpering. In this light, said Jocelyn placing a hand under the boy’s elbow and holding the hare by its hind legs level with their two faces, I couldn’t have done that.
What does castrati mean? he had asked Umberto in Italy.
Castrati? Castrati!
Umberto was surprised but delighted by the question. It was the antithetical question to all that he wanted to tell the boy.
Un castrato cannot be a father.
Umberto began to explain at length and fulsomely. He poured out wine and insisted that his son drink. As he talked Umberto’s fingers chopped themselves off, made hooks of themselves, wagged.
The boy had seen Tom castrating lambs: a flick of the knife and then the two testicles sucked out into the mouth and spat upon the ground. But he had not connected the Italian word with the English.
Umberto cited himself as a father, and hit the lower part of his stomach with his flat hand. He leant across the table so that his huge face was close to the boy’s. But il castrato today, he said, is an insult. It does not mean it properly. It means a weak man, a man who is not capable, a feeble one. Him. Quest’uomo è castrato. He could be called that. Un Castrato. Umberto was so close to his son’s face that he could not resist touching it. Ecco my boy my boy, he said.
The gun room was small and square with a high ceiling. High on one wall hung a pair of mounted antlers, dusty and grey. An oil lamp was reflected in the black curtainless window. Jocelyn stood at a bench-like table on which his gun lay in three parts. The boy sprawled in a sagging arm-chair in front of the fireplace in which there was no fire.
Why, asked the boy looking towards the black window rather than towards Jocelyn, do you disapprove of Aunt Beatrice’s marriage?
It is not a subject we should discuss.
The boy took in the crowded room: boots, mackintoshes, fishing rods, baskets, piles of old copies of The Sportsman, two foxes’ masks, a pipe-rack, a ladder—and on everything pointing upwards an old hat or cap hung. He remembered the room as he had been aware of it as a child. He had never been allowed in. But he had noticed through a half-open door men in their shirt-sleeves, a fire burning and an unusual smell. After a pause, he re-started the same conversation.
Everything has changed since she went, he said.
Jocelyn was screwing together the brass joins of two lengths of a cleaning rod. The table smelt of gun oil. The smell reminded Jocelyn of his father. It was associated in his mind with the smell of cordite and metal—the smell of sport. It suggested to him the smell of food being prepared for company. This last was associated with returning home with friends after a shoot, but is perhaps inherent in the smell itself. The smell of gun oil, for all its graphite, has something about it of the smell of butter in shortbread or pastry when they are still very hot in an iron oven. It is the antithesis of the smell of lilac. In the chill fireless room, Jocelyn shivered and heard himself saying: There was no stopping her.
Did he sweep her off her feet, then? asked the boy.
He fawned at her feet like a dog.
Is she happy with him?
She couldn’t be happy with him, Jocelyn said and then, with the gesture of a romantic ’cello-player, drove the cleaning-rod through the barrel. The action always pleased him. He ran his hand along the bluish polished metal of the underside of the barrels. Again he was speaking before he had decided to do so. She has the highest standards, he was saying, that is how she is made.
He was handsome, said the boy in a tense intended to provoke.
He is a cad, said Jocelyn, his hand beginning to tremble.
Did you have it out with him?
I could not.
A cad you think?
Jocelyn put the barrels down and steadied himself with both hands on the table.
This is not a subject we should pursue, he said.
He was not thinking of the boy’s age. He wished to talk to nobody about this subject.
The boy, however, was determined to force Jocelyn to say more: not out of personal animosity but in order to claim his own right—and his ability—to know, to touch on no matter what subject. It seemed to him that nothing familiar now remained in his life: hence his right to pursue every question.
I doubt, said the boy, whether there are any marriages which the families of both parties are really happy about. There used to be.
One side always makes a sacrifice. Usually the side with the least money.
Surprised by the odd sense and wording of those remarks, Jocelyn turned to look at the boy who was leaning deep back in the arm-chair, his face in shadow. He could discover no insolence in his expression. When their eyes met, the boy said:
You didn’t approve of my mother and father did you?
That was a very different case.
You mean because they were never married?
Who told you that?
A boy at school called Charles Hay.
Jocelyn turned to the window. The whole of the boy’s upbringing, he considered, had been compromised by half-measures and his mother’s sudden whims.
The boy was still speaking: You can tell by looking at them that they’ve never been married. They don’t treat each other like husband and wife. They don’t possess anything in common—except me.
That is no way to speak of your mother and father.
Is lying better?
I find it regrettable that you should come across such stories at school.
They call me Garibaldi because they say my mother might have been his mistress too.
It is terrible.
I laugh.
Laugh?
Do you expect me to defend my mother’s honour?
Jocelyn wanted to tell the boy that he had argued many times with Laura that it was necessary to tell him the truth. Yet he felt that anything he said would now be incomprehensible because it belonged to a past which existed only in his own memory.
He turned back to the table and began wiping the stock of his gun.
Why is Captain Bierce a cad? asked the boy in a gentle, almost tender voice.
He’s a bullying Irish braggart—a mutton-fisted loud-mouthed pack-horse captain!
That’s no way to talk about your brother-in-law!
Having said this, the boy laughed. And Jocelyn laughed too. They laughed at the collapse of the formalities which had surrounded them. In face of this collapse they were for a moment equal. The boy got up from the chair and went over to the table. The man sat down and leant back in the arm-chair. He was trembling.
The boy, picking up the stock, noticed that the firing-pins had not been released. Pressing the front of the stock against the table top, he squeezed each trigger. The two sharp taps of the pins against the wood broke the silence. The surface of the table there was already scarred with thousands of tiny pock marks caused during the years by this method of releasing firing-pins so that their springs should not be weakened.
Jocelyn began to speak from the depths of the chair, staring at the fire grate, and softly as though almost to himself:
He tore her out of her own place. I know what she is like. She is as fine as china. She’s like that figure there with flowers around her waist. She needs to be protected and free.
The boy could not see the man for he was hidden by the back of the chair. Above the chair he could see the mantelpiece: on it were a dusty packet of envelopes, a ball of twine, a leather strap and a porcelain figure of a shepherdess, about eight inches high.
He tore her out of her own place. She was part of this place. She knew it. There were no secrets from her. She was the spirit of this place and this house. She was why I lived here.
The boy stared at the porcelain figure, its pink, almost white glaze shining in the lamplight.
I begin to be glad I’ve lived half my life. A fair part of it has been good. But from now on everything will get worse. Everybody is becoming ignorant and mutton-fisted and too busy judging everybody else. We’re going to have sermons and commerce. I hate this damned farm now. No one knows how to wait any more, because they haven’t anything worth waiting for. I don’t know how to wait myself. I used to wait for her.
The man stopped talking.
I’ll go and change, he said later, it’s cold here.
The boy approached the mantelpiece still staring at the porcelain figure of the shepherdess.
How did it happen that on 2 May 1902, Beatrice was in her bedroom, her hair loose, wearing only a nightdress and wrap, in the middle of the afternoon?
The previous day, walking through the walled vegetable garden, she had noticed that several boughs of lilac had come out on the tree in the north-east corner. She wanted to pick some to take into the house. But to get to the tree she had to cross a bed of wet earth and rotting brussel sprout plants. She took off her shoes and stockings and left them on the path. Her feet sank into the mud up to her ankles. When she reached the tree, she discovered she was not tall enough. A little way along the wall was a black, rotten ladder. (During her absence in South Africa the house and farm had deteriorated dramatically.) She tested the first three rungs and they seemed strong enough. She moved the ladder to the lilac tree and climbed up. A wasp, caught between her skirts and the wall, stung her on the instep of her foot. She cried out (a small cry like a child’s or a gull’s), took little notice, cut the lilac and went barefoot into the house to wash her feet. By evening, her foot was inflamed and during the night she slept badly.
The next morning she decided to stay in bed. She knew that it was not the kind of decision she would ever have made before her marriage, before she left the farm. Jocelyn expected her to run the house and keep an eye on the dairy: he was away at a point-to-point in Leicestershire. A surveyor who was coming that afternoon expected her to prepare papers for him. Everybody would expect her to treat a small, already less swollen wasp bite as though it were nothing. Before her marriage she did what was expected of her. Now she did not.
She gave instructions and took a bath. Still wet, she stood looking at herself in the tall tippable mirror in the bathroom.
She did not pretend that her gaze was that of a man. She drew no sexual conclusions as she stared at herself. She saw her body as a core, left when all its clothes had fallen from it. Around this core she saw the space of the bathroom. Yet between core and room something had changed, which was why all the house and the whole farm seemed changed since her return. She cupped her breasts with her hands and then moved her hands slowly downwards, over her hips, to the front of her thighs. Either the surface of her body or the touch of her hands had changed too.
Before, she lived in her body as though it were a cave, exactly her size. The rock and earth around the cave were the rest of the world. Imagine putting your hand into a glove whose exterior surface is continuous with all other substance.
Now her body was no longer a cave in which she lived. It was solid. And everything around, which was not her, was movable. Now what was given to her stopped at the surfaces of her body.
In nightgown and wrap she returned to bed. She lay back against a bank of pillows and imitated the cackling noise of a turkey. When she noticed the portrait of her father she stopped. Some women might have considered the possibility that they were going mad. She began to move her head from side to side on the bank of pillows, thus tilting her view of the room from side to side. When she felt giddy, she got out of bed and dropped on to her hands and knees: the carpeted floor was level and still. On the level ground in the free space she was conscious of being happy.
At her dressing table with a silver-backed mermaid-embossed hairbrush in her hand she asked herself as she had many times during the previous six months: Why do I feel no deep loss? Her way of answering the question was to search in her mind to make sure that its supposition was correct. Then her answer, which entirely satisfied her, was: Because I don’t.
Captain Patrick Bierce was killed on 17 September 1901, in the mountains north of the Great Karoo, Cape Colony. A British encampment was attacked by Boer commandos under General Smuts. The commandos were desperate, lacking both supplies and ammunition. In some close fighting among rocks Captain Bierce had half his head blown away. The Boer who shot him at close range had used an explosive Mauser cartridge (generally used for big game) because he had no other ammunition. Later, after the British had surrendered, the Boer found the mutilated officer whom he had shot dead, and was distressed at having had to use such ammunition. He argued to himself, however, that there was not a great deal of difference between killing a man with an explosive bullet and smashing him with a lyddite shell.
The colonel who broke to Beatrice the news of her husband’s death said: We soldiers count as our gains—our losses. Those men we love most to honour are those who die in a great cause.
What afflicted her was the shock which she imagined her husband feeling at his own death. She imagined him dying in mortal disappointment. But the fact that their life together was over impressed her too as a gain rather than as a loss. She could leave Africa. She could leave him. She could leave his brother officers.
I do not know for how long the relationship between Jocelyn and Beatrice had been incestuous.
I do know that Beatrice must have married Captain Bierce in order to simplify her life.
The power which Jocelyn exercised over his sister was essentially the power of the elder brother of childhood prolonged into adult life. He was protective and possessive; he was the moral arbiter in a world he knew better than she. Her virtue must lie in her obedience to him and her indifference to the judgement of others. Yet after adolescence this power of his over her depended upon her collaboration. More than that—this collaboration contributed more to their relationship than any adult ability on his part to be masterful. His domination was the result of her willing it for him. Hence the strangely circular nature of their moods and intimacy …
Into this circle stepped Captain Bierce, confident, huge, beaming, straight-speaking—simple and uncomplicated as only a man in uniform can appear to be. He courted her. He knelt before her and said he was her servant—her giant servant. He worshipped, he said, the very ground on which she trod.
He seemed to demand neither connivance nor complicity. Instead he asked her formally for the gift of her hand in marriage. The conventional metaphors became persuasive in their very simplicity. Leading her by the hand, he would show her the world.
She accepted his proposal.
They were married in the parish church of St Catherine’s.
They left for Africa.
The land surface of the earth is estimated to extend over about 52,500,000 sq. miles. Of this area the British Empire occupies nearly one quarter, extending over an area of about 12,000,000 sq. miles. By far the greater portion lies within the temperate zones, and is suitable for white settlement.… The area of the territory of the Empire is divided almost equally between the southern and northern hemispheres, the great divisions of Australasia and South Africa covering between them in the southern hemisphere 5,308,506 sq. miles while the United Kingdom, Canada and India, including the native states, cover between them in the northern hemisphere 5,271,375 sq. miles. The alternation of the seasons is thus complete, one half of the Empire enjoying summer while one half is in winter.
Within a few weeks of their arrival in Durban, Beatrice began to suffe: a delusion: she came to believe that everything was being tilted, that everything around her was taking place on an incline which was gradually becoming more acute. As the angle of incline increased, so everything on it began to slip downwards, nearer to its bottom edge. The inclined plane extended over the whole sub-continent, and the bottom edge gave on to the Indian Ocean.
One early afternoon in February 1899 in Pietermaritzburg she took a rickshaw despite the fact that Captain Bierce had recently been mysteriously insistent that she should not do so. However, she had few illusions left concerning her husband’s mysteries.
The Zulu rickshaw-boy wore a head-dress of tattered, dyed ostrich feathers which smelt of burnt hair. His long legs were crudely whitewashed. The previous night there had been a thunderstorm and the sky, cleared by the storm, was an unusually harsh blue. The frayed ostrich feathers above her, shaking as the Zulu between the shafts ran, appeared to brush the blue sky as though it were a tangible, painted surface.
They passed a company of marching British soldiers. Under the blue sky, in front of the low, shack-like hastily constructed buildings, along the unmysterious absolutely straight streets, each platoon looked like a box in which twenty or thirty men were helplessly vibrating.
Here, as in Durban, the activities of her countrymen never ceased. Every moment had its duty. The rickshaw passed some officers on horseback who bowed slightly without looking at her. To them she was an officer’s wife. She had selected among Captain Bierce’s brother officers those whom she would prefer to be killed at Ladysmith if a certain number had to be.
She began to stare at the running whitewashed legs, one, unflexing, continually giving place to the second, flexing. The movement was very different from that of a horse’s hind legs as seen from a trap; and the difference disturbed her. Yet her feeling led her to no conclusion. What separated her from the British wives with whom she was obliged to pass most of her time, was her lack of opinions. She had come to hate the sound of talking. She trusted certain feelings in herself precisely because they did not lead to conclusions.
They turned into a narrower but equally straight street which led past the backs of bungalows and some unused sites of land. Trees cast intermittent shade. They came upon a file of African women walking along the grass verge. By their costumes it was clear that they had walked to the city from a Location kraal. (For certain brief occasions women were allowed to come to the city to visit their menfolk employed there.) On their heads they carried immense gourds. The rickshaw slowed down. One of the women shouted something at the Zulu which Beatrice could not understand. Another made a gesture and laughed. None of the women looked at her. Two were old with withered breasts. Another carried a baby.
At the end of the narrow street they joined a busy avenue and reached her destination: the entrance gate to the botanical gardens. She climbed out and asked the rickshaw-boy what was in the gourds the women were carrying. Looking down at her—for she was much shorter—he told her that it was kaffir beer. It was then that everything tilted for the first time. She had to cling to the railings of the botanical gardens. She clung to them, facing them, her head thrust between two bars. The rickshaw-boy stared at her, dumbfounded, until a policeman arrived and started to threaten him.
The second time was in Durban at a dinner party given by the harbour master. She saw the dinner table tilting. She put out her hand to prevent a silver candelabra with candles burning in it from falling over. In making this abrupt movement (which was incomprehensible to those sitting around her) she knocked over a guest’s glass of wine.
Later that night, made tender and menacing by drink, Captain Bierce hissed at her affectionately: A clumsy slave, my dove, must be chastised, I have no choice but to tie you up again. Try to slip out, Beatrice, I must tighten the bindings. Speak to me, Beatrice. Declare your allegiance.…
As her delusion became more and more frequent, the physical sensation of everything being tilted gave way to a conviction that it was being tilted. She suddenly knew it instead of feeling it.
She is aware that there is another way of seeing her and all that surrounds her, which can only be defined as the way she can never see. She is being seen in that way now. Her mouth goes dry. Her corsets constrain her more tightly. Everything tilts. She sees everything clearly and normally. She can discern no tilt. But she is convinced, she is utterly certain that everything has been tilted.
Even when the delusion had passed, the idea of the sub-continent being tilted did not strike her as implausible; on the contrary it seemed to correspond with the rest of her daily experience and to make that experience more credible.
Gradually the anguish accompanying the delusion lessened. She consulted nobody. She ceased to be worried by its abnormality. She accepted it. She accepted it as the consequence of living first in Pietermaritzburg, then in Durban, and later in Capetown. She no longer wondered whether she was going mad; instead she awaited her chance to escape.
Beatrice’s disturbance was probably partly due to her discovery of what her husband was like out of his uniform. All that he demanded was that she should allow him to tie her up and gently maltreat her. The mere sight of her tied up was usually sufficient to bring him to a sexual climax; she suffered not from his violence but from her own shame and disappointment. The unfamiliar climate of Natal and Cape Colony may have further exacerbated her nervous condition. But there was another factor.
THE GREAT AMAXOSA DELUSION
On 23 December 1847, the British Governor of Cape Colony, Sir Harry Smith, summoned together the chiefs of the Amaxosa tribes on the Eastern Frontier. He told them that their territory—the most fertile in South Africa—was to be annexed and made a crown dependency: British Kaffraria. After a while it became clear that the Gaika tribe and their chief Sandila were determined to offer the most stubborn resistance. Sir Harry Smith re-summoned the chiefs. Sandila refused to come. Whereupon Sir Harry deposed him of his chiefship, and in his place, as chief of the Gaikas, appointed an English magistrate called Mr Brownlee. Convinced that they had now dealt with the matter masterfully, the two Englishmen ordered the arrest of Sandila. On 24 December 1850 the force sent out to arrest him was ambushed and the Gaika tribe rose in revolt. White settlers in the military villages along the frontier were attacked and killed whilst celebrating Christmas. Thus began the Fourth Kaffir War: the penultimate stage in the Amaxosas’ long defence of their independence, which had continued for sixty years.
By 1853 the British, with their prodigious military advantages (the war cost the Colonial Office nearly a million pounds), were able to impose a military defeat on the tribes. In 1856 there followed what the British were later to call ‘The Great Amaxosa Delusion’. This ‘delusion’ constituted the ultimate stage of the Amaxosa nation’s defence of its independence.
A girl named Nongkwase told her father that when going to draw water from a stream she had met strangers of commanding aspect. The father went to see them. They told him that they were spirits of the dead who had come to help their people drive the white men into the sea. The father reported to Sarili, an Amaxosa chief, who announced that the people must do what the spirits instructed. The spirits instructed the people to kill all their cattle and to destroy every grain of corn they possessed. Their cattle had become thin and their crops poor as a result of the land already stolen from them by the white man. When every head of cattle was killed and every seed of corn destroyed, myriads of fat beautiful cattle would issue from the earth, great fields of heavy ripe corn would instantly appear, trouble and sickness would vanish, everybody would be young and beautiful, and the white man, on that day, would perish utterly.
The people obeyed. Cattle were central to their culture. In the villages heads of cattle were the measuring units of wealth. When a daughter was married, her father, if rich enough, gave her a cow, an ubulungu—‘a doer of good’: this cow must never be killed and a hair from its tail must always be tied round the neck of each of the daughter’s children at birth. Nevertheless the people obeyed. They slaughtered their cattle and their sacred cows and they burnt their grain.
They built large new kraals for the new fat cattle that would come. They prepared skin sacks to hold the milk that was soon to be more plentiful than water. They held themselves in patience and waited their vengeance.
The appointed day of the prophecy arrived. The sun rose and sank with the hopes of hundreds of thousands. By nightfall nothing had changed.
An estimated fifty thousand died of starvation. Many thousands more left their land to search for work in Cape Colony. Those who remained did so as a propertyless labour force. (A little later many were to work as wage slaves in the diamond and gold mines further north.) On the rich, now depopulated, land of the Amaxosa, European farmers settled and prospered.
Who is that? asked the boy.
The Grand Duke: Ferdinando Primo. He was the father of Livorno.
He founded the city and he came from Firenze, said Umberto.
What is it made of?
I do not understand.
Is it made of stone? asked the boy.
It is made in bronze, a metal precioso.
Why are the men chained?
They are slaves. Slaves from Africa.
They look very strong.
They must be strong. They—how you say? Umberto mimed a man rowing.
Rowing a boat?
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Why did they want to make a statue of them?
Ma perché son magnifici. They are beautiful.
Beatrice laid aside the silver-backed, mermaid-embossed hairbrush and going to the window stopped by the vase of lilac.
When the boy came into the room she said: I cannot ever remember any lilac having a scent like this lot Then she asked him whether he would please find out whether the second cowman was still sick. After he had left the room, she thought: I am more than twice as old as he is.
POEM FOR BEATRICE
Continually mists change my size
Only territories on a map are measured
The sounds I make are made elsewhere
I am enveloped in the astonishing silence of my breasts
I plait my hair into sentences
Never let loose
I walk where I wish
My cuffs admit my wrists alone
Break
Break the astonishing silence of my breasts.
THE BOERS
‘Our century is a huge cauldron in which all historical eras are boiling and mingling.’
African civilization in South Africa was destroyed by the Boers. The Boers colonized South Africa for the later benefit of the British. The British intermittently aided them in this colonization but the essential relation between the colonizers and the colonized was created by the Boers. Yet the Boers were themselves fugitives—in both a geographical and a historical sense. They defeated in the name of defeat. When, in the eighteenth century, they began to penetrate into the High Veld, they did so to escape the controls of the Dutch East India Company in Cape Town, and as soon as they did so, they regressed historically. They abandoned fixed farms; they became nomadic herdsmen and hunters.
The Great Trek of 1835 which led the Boers into Natal, the Transvaal and Orange Free State was a retreat from the demands and disciplines in all spheres of social activity—productive, political, moral—of nineteenth-century Europe. Unlike other colonizers it could not occur to the Boers that they were taking ‘civilization’ into ‘the dark continent’: they themselves were withdrawing from that ‘civilization’.
Their productive means were no more advanced than those of the Bantu whose land they seized, whose crops they burnt and whose herds they stole. Their fire-arms, fast horses and wagons gave them the necessary tactical advantages. But they were incapable of developing what they seized. They were even incapable of exploiting the labour force of impoverished squatters which they created. With all their rights of mastery and property, which they held to be sacred and God-given, they could do nothing. They were impotent; and they were alone among those whom they had uselessly defeated.
In the rest of the world which Europe colonized, enslaved and exploited, native populations were massacred and destroyed (in Australia, in North America): deported elsewhere (from West Africa as slaves): or else they were accommodated within a moral, religious, social system which rationalized and justified the colonizations (catholicism in Latin America, the princely kingdoms and the caste system integrated into the imperial rule of India). In South Africa the Boers were unable to establish such a self-justifying ‘moral’ hegemony. They could accommodate neither victory nor victims. They could draw up no treaty with those whom they had dispossessed. There was no settlement possible, because they were unable to use what they had taken. There was consequently less hypocrisy or complacency or corruption among the Boers than among other colonizers. But it seemed to them that the existence of every African was an incitement to that great black avenging which they continually feared. And since no settlement was possible, the justification, the explanation of their position had to be continually reaffirmed through individual emotion. Day and night every Boer had to insure that his feeling of mastery was stronger than his fear. All that could relieve the fear was hatred.
Politics, so far as Beatrice was concerned, was one of the careers open to men: no more and no less. (She saw Laura’s devotion to politics as proof of her heartlessness.) She was interested in the stories and characters of Greek mythology—but not in history. She knew nothing of the fate of the Amaxosa. When people spoke, as they did continually in Musgrave Road, Durban, or at the Royal Hotel, of the ‘treachery of the Boers’ and the ‘Boer atrocities’, she had the impression that everyone was waiting their opportunity to compete, like singers at an audition, in saying the necessary phrases with their own individual gestures and signs of emotion. The competition never ended so long as there was a second person present. Other subjects included The Empire, The Character of the Kaffir, The Qualities of The British Soldier, The Role of the Missionary. She never questioned the assumptions which underlay the phrases. Both assumptions and competition bored her. She acquired the habit of appearing to listen whilst studying the speaker’s fingers, or looking out of the window or wondering what she herself would be doing in half an hour. Thus her time and her attention were frequently unoccupied. And this is what led to her disturbance, to the possibility of the sub-continent haunting her.
Precisely because she lacked the protection of ready-made generalizations and judgements, because she allowed her thoughts to wander aimlessly, because she lacked what all administrators and troops oppressing another nation must always maintain—a sense of duty without end, she began to feel, between the interstices of formal social convention, the violence of the hatred, the violence of what would be avenged.
In Pietermaritzburg she saw a loyal Dutchman (loyal to the Queen) beating his kaffir servant. As he beat him he made a noise in his throat like a laugh. His mouth was open and his tongue was between his teeth. His passion was such that he did not wish to stop until he had annihilated the body he was beating: yet however hard he beat it, he could not annihilate it. From this arose the necessity of his cry which resembled a laugh. His expression was like that of a small child deliberately shitting himself. The servant, absolutely silent, hunched himself against the blows.
Sometimes in the way an African ran she saw the defiance of all his race.
She could not explain her feelings to herself. There is an historical equivalent to the psychological process of repression into the unconscious. Certain experiences cannot be formulated because they have occurred too soon. This happens when an inherited world-view is unable to contain or resolve certain emotions or intuitions which have been provoked by a new situation or an extremity of experience unforeseen by that world-view. ‘Mysteries’ grow up within or around the ideological system. Eventually these mysteries destroy it by providing the basis for a new world-view. Medieval witchcraft, for example, may be seen in this light.
A moment’s introspection shows that a large part of our own experience cannot be adequately formulated: it awaits further understanding of the total human situation. In certain respects we are likely to be better understood by those who follow us than by ourselves. Nevertheless their understanding will be expressed in terms which would now be alien to us. They will change our unformulated experience beyond our recognition. As we have changed Beatrice’s.
She is aware that there is another way of seeing her and all that surrounds her, which can only be defined as the way she can never see. She is being seen in that way now. Her mouth goes dry. Her corsets constrain her more tightly. Everything tilts. She sees everything clearly and normally. She can discern no tilt. But she is convinced, she is utterly certain that everything has been tilted.
She sat down cross-legged on the rug by her bed to examine the wasp bite on her instep. There was still a pink circle, the size of a halfpenny; but her foot was no longer swollen. Her foot lay on her hand as though it were a dog’s head, whose gaze was concentrated upon the door. Abruptly unbuttoning her wrap and pulling her nightdress up over her knees, she lifted her foot and, bending her head forward, placed the foot behind her neck. The hair that fell over it felt cool. She tried to straighten her back as far as she could. After a while she lowered her head, lifted her foot down and sat cross-legged, smiling.
I see a horse and trap drawn up by the front door of the farmhouse. In it is a man in black with a bowler hat. He is portly and unaccountably comic. The horse is black and so too is the trap except for its white trimming. I am looking down on the horse and trap and the man who is so comically correct and regular, from the window of Beatrice’s room.
On the table between the window and the large four-poster bed is the vase of white lilac. The smell of it is the only element that I can reconstruct with certainty.
She must be thirty-six. Her hair, usually combed up into a chignon, is loose around her shoulders. She wears an embroidered wrap. The embroidered leaves mount to her shoulder. She is standing in bare feet.
The boy enters and informs her that the papers for the man in the trap were the correct ones.
He is fifteen: taller than Beatrice, dark-haired, large-nosed but with delicate hands, scarcely larger than hers. In the relation between his head and shoulders there is something of his father—a kind of lunging assurance.
Beatrice lifts an arm towards him and opens her hand.
Pushing the door shut behind him, he goes towards her and takes her hand.
She, by turning their hands, ensures that they both look out of the window. At the sight of the man in black on the point of leaving they begin to laugh.
When they laugh they swing back the arms of their held hands and this swinging moves them away from the window towards the bed.
They sit on the edge of the bed before they stop laughing.
Slowly they lie back until their heads touch the counterpane. In this movement backwards she slightly anticipates him.
They are aware of a taste of sweetness in their throats. (A sweetness not unlike that to be tasted in a sweet grape). The sweetness itself is not extreme but the experience of tasting it is. It is comparable with the experience of acute pain. But whereas pain closes anticipation of everything except the return of the past before the pain existed, what is now desired has never existed.
From the moment he entered the room it has been as though the sequence of their actions constituted a single act, a single stroke.
Beatrice puts her hand to the back of his head to move him closer towards her.
Beneath her wrap Beatrice’s skin is softer than anything he has previously imagined. He has thought of softness as a quality belonging either to something small and concentrated (like a peach) or else to something extensive but thin (like milk). Her softness belongs to a body which has substance and seems very large. Not large relative to him, but large relative to anything else he now perceives. This magnification of her body is partly the result of proximity and focus but also of the sense of touch superseding that of sight. She is no longer contained within any contour, she is continuous surface.
He bends his head to kiss her breast and take the nipple in his mouth. His awareness of what he is doing certifies the death of his childhood. This awareness is inseparable from a sensation and a taste in his mouth. The sensation is of a morsel, alive, unaccountably half-detached from the roundness of the breast—as though it were on a stalk. The taste is so associated with the texture and substance of the morsel and with its temperature, that it will be hard ever to define it in other terms. It is a little similar to the taste of the whitish juice in the stem of a certain kind of grass. He is aware that henceforth both sensation and taste are acquirable on his own initiative. Her breasts propose his independence. He buries his face between them.
Her difference from him acts like a mirror. Whatever he notices or dwells upon in her, increases his consciousness of himself, without his attention shifting from her.
She is the woman whom he used to call Aunt Beatrice. She ran the house and gave orders to the servants. She linked arms with her brother and walked up and down the lawn. She took him when he was a child to church. She asked him questions about what he had learnt in the School Room: questions like What are the chief rivers of Africa?
Occasionally during his childhood she surprised him. Once he saw her squatting in the corner of a field and afterwards he wondered whether she was peeing. In the middle of the night he had woken up to hear her laughing so wildly that he thought she was screaming. One afternoon he came into the kitchen and saw her drawing a cow with a piece of chalk on the tiled floor—a childish drawing like he might have done when younger. On each of these occasions his surprise was the result of his discovering that she was different when she was alone or when she believed that he was not there.
This morning when she had asked him to come to her bedroom, she had presented a different self to him, yet he knew this was no longer a matter of chance discovery but of deliberate intention on her part. Her hair was loose around her shoulders. He had never seen or imagined it like that before. Her face seemed smaller, much smaller than his own. The top of her head looked unexpectedly flat and her hair over the flatness very glossy. The expression of her eyes was serious to the point of gravity. Two small shoes lay on their sides on the carpet. She was barefoot. Her voice too was different, her words much slower.
I cannot remember, she said, any lilac ever having a scent like this lot.
This morning he was not surprised. He accepted the changes. Nevertheless this morning he still thought of her as the mistress of the house in which he had passed his childhood.
She is a mythical figure whom he has always been assembling part by part, quality by quality. Her softness—but not the extent of its area—is more familiar than he can remember. Her heated sweating skin is the source of the warmth he felt in Miss Helen’s clothes. Her independence from him is what he recognized in the tree trunk when he kissed it. The whiteness of her body is what has signalled nakedness to him whenever he has glimpsed a white segment through the chance disarray of petticoat or skirt. Her smell is the smell of fields which, in the early morning, smell of fish although many miles from the sea. Her two breasts are what his reason has long since granted her, although their distinctness and degree of independence one from the other astonish him. He has seen drawings on walls asserting how she lacks penis and testicles. (The dark beard-like triangle of hair makes their absence simpler and more natural than he foresaw.) This mythical figure embodies the desirable alternative to all that disgusts or revolts him. It is for her sake that he has ignored his own instinct for self-preservation—as when he walked away, revolted, from the men in sack-cloths and the dead horses. She and he together, mysteriously and naked, are his own virtue rewarded.
Mythical familiar and the woman he once called Aunt Beatrice meet in the same person. The encounter utterly destroys both of them. Neither will ever again exist.
He sees the eyes of an unknown woman looking up at him. She looks at him without her eyes fully focussing upon him as though, like nature, he were to be found everywhere.
He hears the voice of an unknown woman speaking to him: Sweet, sweet, sweetest. Let us go to that place.
He unhesitatingly puts his hand on her hair and opens his fingers to let it spring up between them. What he feels in his hand is inexplicably familiar.
She opens her legs. He pushes his finger towards her. Warm mucus encloses his finger as closely as if it were a ninth skin. When he moves the finger, the surface of the enclosing liquid is stretched—sometimes to breaking point. Where the break occurs he has a sensation of coolness on that side of his finger—before the warm moist skin forms again over the break.
She holds his penis with both hands, as though it were a bottle from which she were about to pour towards herself.
She moves sideways so as to be beneath him.
Her cunt begins at her toes; her breasts are inside it, and her eyes too; it has enfolded her.
It enfolds him.
The ease.
Previously it was unimaginable, like a birth for that which is born.
It is eight o’clock on a December morning. People are already at work or going to work. It is still not fully light and the darkness is foggy. I have just left a laundry, where the violet fluorescent lighting bleaches most stains out until you unwrap the washing and look at it in your own room. Under the fluorescent lighting the girl behind the counter had the white face of a clown with green eye shadow and violet almost white lips. The people I pass in the rue d’Odessa move briskly but rigidly, or hold themselves stiff against the cold. It is hard to imagine that most of them were in bed two hours ago, languid, unrestrained. Their clothes—even those chosen with the greatest personal care or romantic passion—all look as though they are the uniforms of a public service into which everybody has been drafted. Every personal desire, preference or hope has become an inconvenience. I wait at the bus stop. The waving red indicator of the Paris bus, as it turns the corner, is like a brand taken from a fire. At this moment I begin to doubt the value of poems about sex.
Sexuality is by its nature precise: or rather, its aim is precise. Any imprecision registered by any of the five senses tends to check sexual desire. The focus of sexual desire is concentrated and sharp. The breast may be seen as a model of such focus, gathering from an indefinable, soft variable form to the demarcation of the aureola and, within that, to the precise tip of the nipple.
In an indeterminate world in flux sexual desire is reinforced by a longing for precision and certainty: beside her my life is arranged.
In a static hierarchic world sexual desire is reinforced by a longing for an alternative certainty: with her I am free.
All generalizations are opposed to sexuality.
Every feature that makes her desirable asserts its contingency—here, here, here, here, here, here.
That is the only poem to be written about sex—here, here, here, here—now.
Why does writing about sexual experience reveal so strikingly what may be a general limitation of literature in relation to aspects of all experience?
In sex, a quality of ‘firstness’ is felt as continually re-creatable. There is an element in every occasion of sexual excitement which seizes the imagination as though for the first time.
What is this quality of ‘firstness’? How, usually, do first experiences differ from later ones?
Take the example of a seasonal fruit: blackberries. The advantage of this example is that one’s first experience each year of eating blackberries has in it an element of artificial firstness which may prompt one’s memory of the original, first occasion. The first time, a handful of blackberries represented all blackberries. Later, a handful of blackberries is a handful of ripe/unripe/over-ripe/sweet/acid, etc., etc., blackberries. Discrimination develops with experience. But the development is not only quantitative. The qualitative change is to be found in the relation between the particular and the general. You lose the symbolically complete nature of whatever is in hand. First experience is protected by a sense of enormous power; it wields magic.
The distinction between first and repeated experience is that one represents all: but two, three, four, five, six, seven ad infinitum cannot. First experiences are discoveries of original meaning which the language of later experience lacks the power to express.
The strength of human sexual desire can be explained in terms of natural sexual impulse. But the strength of a desire can be measured by the single-mindedness it produces. Extreme single-mindedness accompanies sexual desire. The single-mindedness takes the form of the conviction that what is desired is the most desirable possible. An erection is the beginning of a process of total idealization.
At a given moment sexual desire becomes inextinguishable. The threat of death itself will be ignored. What is desired is now exclusively desired; it is not possible to desire anything else.
At its briefest, the moment of total desire lasts as long as the moment of orgasm. It lasts longer when passion increases and extends desire. Yet, even at its briefest, the experience should not be treated as only a physical/nervous reflex. The stuff of imagination (memory, language, dreams) is being deployed. Because the other who is palpable and unique between one’s arms is—at least for a few instants—exclusively desired, she or he represents, without qualification or discrimination, life itself. The experience = I + life.
But how to write about this? This equation is inexpressible in the third person and in narrative form. The third person and the narrative form are clauses in a contract agreed between writer and reader, on the basis that the two of them can understand the third person more fully than he can understand himself; and this destroys the very terms of the equation.
Applied to the central moment of sex, all written nouns denote their objects in such a way that they reject the meaning of the experience to which they are meant to apply. Words like cunt, quim, motte, trou, bilderbuch, vagina, prick, cock, rod, pego, spatz, penis, bique—and so on, for all the other parts and places of sexual pleasure—remain intractably foreign in all languages, when applied directly to sexual action. It is as though the words around them, and the gathering meaning of the passage in which they occur, put such nouns into italics. They are foreign, not because they are unfamiliar to reader or writer, but precisely because they are their third-person nouns.
The same words written in reported speech—either swearing or describing—acquire a different character and lose their italics, because they then refer to the speaker speaking and not directly to acts of sex. Significantly, sexual verbs (fuck, frig, suck, kiss, etc., etc.) remain less foreign than the nouns. The quality of firstness relates not to the acts performed, but to the relation between subject and object. At the centre of sexual experience, the object—because it is exclusively desired—is transformed and becomes universal. Nothing is left exterior to it, and thus it becomes nameless.
I make two rough drawings:
They perhaps distort less than the nouns. Through these drawings, what I have called the quality of firstness in sexual experience is perhaps a little easier to recall. Why? Being visual, they are closer to physical perception. But I doubt whether this is the explanation. A skilful Roman or Renaissance pornographic painting would be still closer to visual perception and yet, for our purpose, it would be more opaque.
Is it because these rough drawings are schematized and diagrammatic? Again, I doubt it. Medical diagrams are sometimes more schematic—and again more opaque. What makes these drawings a little more transparent than words and sophisticated images is that they carry a minimal cultural load. Let us prove it obversely.
Take the first one. Put the word big above it. Already it is changed, and the load increased. It becomes more specifically a message addressed by writer to reader. Put the word his in front of big and it is further changed.
Take the second one and put the following words above it: Choose a woman’s name and write it here. Although the number of words has increased, the drawing remains unchanged. The words do not qualify the drawing or use it syntactically. And so the drawing is still relatively open for the spectator’s exclusive appropriation. Now carry out the instructions. Write the name of, say, Beatrice. Once again the increase of its cultural load renders the drawing opaque. The name Beatrice refers the drawing to an exterior system of categories. What the drawing now represents has become part of Beatrice, Beatrice is part of an historical European culture. In the end we are left looking at a rough drawing of a sexual part. Whereas sexual experience itself affirms a totality.
Take both drawings and put the word I above each one.
I am writing about the lovers on the bed.
Her eyes refocus upon him. Their look is for him something as specific and permanent as a house or a particular door. He will find his way back to it.
It is a look for which the Roman girl’s prepared him four years ago. Behind such a look is a total confidence that at that moment to express something—without thought, without words, but simply through one’s own uncontrollable eyes—is to be instantaneously understood. To be, at that moment, is to be known. Hence all distinctions between the personal and the impersonal disappear.
Do not let us even by a hair’s breadth misinterpret the meaning of this look. The look is simultaneously and in absolutely equal terms appealing and grateful. This does not mean that Beatrice is grateful for what has passed and is appealing for what is to come.
Don’t stop, my sweet, don’t stop, is what she may have said or will do: but not with this look.
Such an interpretation implies that eventually, if all is well, her look will be transformed into one which is purely grateful. An interpretation particularly dear to the male as provider and master. But false.
The look in Beatrice’s eyes being in equal measure appealing and grateful is not the result of these two feelings co-existing. There is only one feeling. She has only one thing to say with her uncontrollable eyes. Nothing exists for her beyond this single feeling. She is grateful for what she appeals for; she appeals for what she is already grateful for.
To follow her look, we enter her state of being. There, desire is its satisfaction, or, perhaps, neither desire nor satisfaction can be said to exist since there is no antinomy between them: every experience becomes the experience of freedom there: freedom there precludes all that is not itself.
The look in her eyes is an expression of freedom which he receives as such, but which we, in order to locate it in our world of third persons, must call a look of simultaneous appeal and gratitude.
A little later she strokes his back and whispers: You see. You see.
The world is not as we have subsided into it. Within us there is the keenness, the sharpness to perform surgery. Within, if we have the courage to wield it, is the cutting edge to sever the whole world as it is, the world that pretends to be part of us, the world to which by compromised and flabby usage we are said to belong. Say now to me. Now to me say to me.
She places her hand so that his testicles may rest upon the palm.
From the long tight bud the longer petals loosen: their tips begin to separate so that at the far end of the flower there is an open mouth. Then, freed, the petals slowly revolve like propellers: in eight hours one may turn between forty-five and ninety degrees. As they revolve they retreat till they are pointing backwards from their small round calyx which is now thrust forward.
Thus a cyclamen opening. And thus too, greatly accelerated, the sensation of his penis becoming erect again and the foreskin again withdrawing from the coronal ridge.
The clocks keep another time.
I was walking through a forest with a woman, smaller than I and blonde. We were happy but not specially preoccupied with one another.
We came to a dead animal’s head, half detached from its body. The animal might have been a fox, a donkey, a deer. The head was hollow like a mask or a glove. The sight should have been disturbing, but it was not. On the contrary it encouraged us. The mouth of the animal seemed to be grinning, its eye peaceful. The tattered skin of its neck was like a wide tattered sleeve. This sideways-lurching grinning severed head of an average-sized animal did not signify the death of that animal; it was purely a sign, put there to encourage us to continue.
We came out of the forest on to a large plain. The sky there was dark and purple but the plain was pale gold. The beauty of this plain, shimmering, many degrees lighter than the sky, made me (and I think her too) entirely happy. Quite near us were two rows of wooden buildings, like stables except that each was separate from the rest like very small wooden Russian houses. Around these buildings were men and women dressed in long whitish clothes. They were buying and selling cattle. (The people were not rich buyers and sellers: they were nomadic herdsmen.) We saw a herd of white cows (bison?) charging over the plains and vaguely in our direction. They were kicking up clouds of golden dust against the blackish sky. Suddenly she was frightened. I was not—perhaps because of the sign in the forest. I put my arms around her and pressed her against me. The intense pleasure of doing this became indistinguishable from that which I derived from what was happening around us. Be still, I said to her, if we are absolutely still, they will avoid us. The cattle thundered past, covering us, pressed tightly against one another, with gold dust. Not a single tail touched us.
They lie abandoned, side by side. The air from the open window cools their bodies and makes them aware of how damp they are, on the front of their stomachs how wet.
It should go on for ever, she says. It is not a complaint. She grips two fingers of his hand. She knows that the pace of time is reverting to normal. She crossed a threshold beyond which space, distance, time were meaningless. The threshold was warm, damp and quivering: animate to a degree for which the inanimate has no qualitative equivalent—unless it be jurassic mountains: animate to a degree at which it seemed that substance became sound alone.
It should go on for ever.
They lie on their backs. He has a sensation of being extended horizontally. He is conscious of the flatness of the bed, the floor, the earth under the house. Everything that is standing looks incongruous and incomplete to him. He is on the point of laughing. Suddenly he notices the portrait of her father on the wall opposite the bed. It is a provincial clumsy painting so that the image of the man oscillates between being a likeness and a childish stereotype of a ruddy-faced country gentleman at an inn. The face looks as though it has been tinted pink. The eyes are blankly fixed. Looking at this portrait of her father, he waves a hand.
POEM FOR HIM
éblouir to dazzle
like silk
her body is borderless
its centre a mouth of earth
liquid throat
(o nightingales of 19th century verse)
passage of unprotected being
cul de sac
to have reached there
to dazzle the earth
éblouir
It has begun, the struggle unto death against what is.
The veil of St Veronica: a kerchief with the image of Christ’s head wearing the crown of thorns imprinted upon it.
I see another image miraculously printed on cloth. Her body with her head thrown back and her eyes shut. The image is naturalistic, quite unstylized. Dark areas of hair. Her pale skin almost indistinguishable from the colour of the linen sheet on which she lay.
Again and again two pigeons fly into the wood and out of it: the male always in pursuit. As the pair approach the wood with the hen bird in the lead, she checks herself in mid-air by holding herself vertical, with her tail down and her outstretched wings now acting as a brake. Her head is thrown back, her beak points to the sky. She hangs there motionless and yet not falling. The male bird finds himself at her side. She begins to drop, puts her head down and her tail up, dives, and they enter the wood together. A moment later they emerge from the far side of the wood to circle once more and repeat the same flight.
The description so far as it goes is accurate. But my power to select (both the facts and the words describing them) impregnates the text with a notion of choice which encourages the reader to infer a false range and type of choice being open to the two pigeons. Description distorts.
On an afternoon in late May 1902 (a few weeks before the end of the Boer War), Beatrice seduces him. What happens happens like an undescribed natural event.
When Laura and her son returned from Milan at the end of May 1898 they found that Beatrice was engaged to be married to Captain Patrick Bierce of the 17th Lancers. The boy was sent to a boarding school. During most school holidays he stayed alone with Jocelyn on the farm. (Beatrice accompanied her husband when he was posted to South Africa.)
The type of school to which he was sent has been frequently described. Its daily routine was spartan: its ideology imperialistic and religious: its social life authoritarian and sadistic. The purpose of the education which the school offered was to produce empire-builders.
Like many other boys he adapted himself to school life. A certain aloofness reinforced what his companions immediately recognized as his foreignness. He was not, however, unduly persecuted. His very indifference was a kind of protection. He was nicknamed Garibaldi because he claimed that his father was Italian. He spent an unusual amount of his free time playing the piano in the school music rooms. His interest in music was entirely disproportionate to his small talent.
At the age of fourteen his face was no longer that of a child. The change is sometimes thought of as a coarsening process; this misses the point. The change—which may occur any time between fourteen and twenty-four—involves a simultaneous gain and loss in expressiveness. The texture of the skin, the form of the flesh over the bones, become mute; their appearance becomes a covering, whereas in childhood it is a declaration of being. (Compare our response to children and to adults: we give to the existence of children the value we give to the intentions of adults.) However, the openings in the covering—especially the eyes and mouth—become more expressive, precisely because they now offer indications of what lies hidden behind.
The process of maturing and, later, of ageing involves a gradual but increasing withdrawal of the self from the exterior surface of the body. The skin of the very old is like a garment. The mouth of the man next to the boy—it was Jocelyn—was already inexpressive; he had withdrawn from his mouth: his lips were no more than a flange of the outer covering. This covering offered a certain amount of information: country gentleman, outdoor life, taciturn, disappointed. It was only through his eyes that one could still sometimes glimpse that part of his self still capable of response.
They were walking up a steep winding path with high hedges on either side. It was a late November afternoon (1900), very similar to the one when the men in sack-cloth had shown the boy the dead dray-horses. He had spoken to nobody of this incident. He remembered it vividly without seeking any explanation. It had acquired the isolated absoluteness of a vision. For him his experiencing it was its explanation.
It had been raining hard during the day. Beside the path water was running fast downhill along a stone-bedded ditch, overgrown with grass. They could hear but not see the water. Both carried guns under their arms.
Earlier, the boy had been telling Jocelyn about a dream he had had.
… I was down in the Martin and it was very hot, like it was last summer. I was swimming and there were big birds flying very low over the water—not predatory birds. Sometimes a bird’s foot touched my hair. Then more and more birds came so that I was forced to swim to the bank and climb out.
Tedder was telling me it’s going to be an exceptional year for duck on the estuary, said Jocelyn.
I started looking for my clothes. But somebody had changed them. They weren’t the same clothes as before. They were a uniform, a soldier’s uniform. It was a perfect fit—I mean it must have been a uniform made for me.
Do you remember what regiment? asked Jocelyn.
I didn’t know in my dream what regiment it was.
Were you a cavalry officer? I didn’t know.
Perhaps the Eighth Hussars, said Jocelyn. They had arrived at a gate. Jocelyn put his hand on the barrel of the boy’s gun to remind him to break it before climbing over. As he did so he looked at the boy, and was suddenly overwhelmed by how foreign he looked. He looked like an Italian: he looked like the son of his Italian shopkeeper father. His rigid mouth hardly moving, but in a kindly tone, he said: No, not the Eighth Hussars, even when you are dreaming.
I put my hand into the tunic pocket, continued the boy, and inside was—a crab! A large crab and it nipped me. I pulled out my hand and the extraordinary thing was that my hand was the crab! I had an arm, a wrist, and a crab for a hand.
What a preposterous dream! Why do you tell it to me?
I think it means that if I join the army I shall be wounded.
A light wound perhaps.
No, severely.
I saw a sow badger this morning, said Jocelyn, you should have come with me.
I heard you go off. You shouted at Tedder about the mare being under-bitted.
I haven’t found the key to that mare’s mouth yet, said Jocelyn.
Then they had both fallen silent.
In the narrow steep lane the boy asked: Have you heard from Aunt Beatrice?
Jocelyn appeared not to hear. The boy glanced sideways at him.
The man’s eyes were screwed up and his face was thrust forward into the damp, increasingly cold air. He could have been trying to spot something in the light which was beginning to fail. Or he could have been a man leaving his house with the determination never to return, a man thrusting his face forward so that it might the sooner be immersed in the unknown and the indifferent.
Several minutes later he said: She says they’re saying in Durban, that the war is as good as over. Lord Roberts is on his way home.
She’ll be here soon then.
You forget that she’s married, said Jocelyn.
Where will they live?
I’ve no idea.
Why are all the things still kept in her room?
Because it is still her room.
Will they both come here?
Again Jocelyn appeared not to hear. They emerged from the lane into a spinney. At the end of the lane Jocelyn’s dog was awaiting him. A springer spaniel called Silver.
Do you know why you have bad dreams, said Jocelyn, it’s because you spend too much time indoors. You don’t exercise yourself enough. Too much in the house. It’s a woman’s life that. Not a man’s. You should come out with me more.
I’m sorry if I disappoint you, said the boy. He said it insolently as though it were inconceivable that the man could have any real grounds for disappointment. When I give my first concert you’ll be proud of me.
We’ve only got about twenty minutes more in this light, said Jocelyn, let’s clear the wood and cross the quarry field. You work the left and I’ll take the right below. Silver, come here Silver!
His voice changed when he spoke to the dog, becoming both firmer and softer. To the boy be spoke more loudly and yet hesitantly.
They separated and began to go forward through the wood. The trees and the slope of the ground made it impossible for them to keep in sight of one another.
Hup! Hup! cried Jocelyn to show how far forward he was.
Hup! Hup! replied the boy to show that they were advancing in level line.
It is a cry which is thought not to alert the birds. It sounds more like a wooden stick striking a hollow wooden vessel (the wood of the vessel water-logged) than a voice speaking.
Nothing stirred in the wood. The tree trunks looked grey. The spaniel was seeking half-heartedly as if it found the damp entirely vegetable odour of the wet leaves disagreeable.
Hup! Hup!
For Jocelyn the cry belonged to a language which was theoretically infinite. Those two repeated wooden monosyllables filled the spinney with the splendour of a tradition as no sentence or speech or music ever could. Through the cry and the response to it, was invoked the understanding of honourable men acting in concert, disinterestedly, to experience certain moments of pure style.
Hup! Hup!
This time Jocelyn’s cry was addressed gently and specifically to the boy. He was talking to the boy, including him in the tradition. The boy noticed the difference in the man’s cry, but he answered as before.
Hup! Hup!
The tradition envisages men in close but special contact with nature. The men are unspoilt by comfort yet they are free of the necessity of having to exploit nature. They enter into nature rather as a swimmer, who has no need to cross it, enters a river. They play in the current: in it and yet not of it. What prevents them being swept away are time-honoured rules to which they adhere without question. The rules all concern ways of treating or handling specific objects or situations—guns, boots, bags, dogs, trees, deer, etc. Thus the force of nature (either from within or from without) is never allowed to accumulate; the rules always establish calm, as locks do in a river. Such men feel like gods because they have the impression of imposing an aesthetic order upon nature merely by the timing and style of their own formal interventions.
Hup! Hup!
If Silver puts up a woodcock, thought Jocelyn, it will be almost too dark now.
The tradition envisages that at the end of the day tiredness finally forces the men to cease. They return home stiff, hungry, chilled or soaked, caked with mud. At home they offer to women and friends the invisible unmade masterpieces which they have fleetingly constructed in nature; they offer them in the soiled or torn clothes they throw off, in their stiff bodies, in their excited distant eyes, in the names they possess and the names of where they have been with whom.
Hup! Hup!
It was the boy’s turn to respond. He did so, as before, flatly—without the conspiratorial intensity of his uncle.
Advancing level with Jocelyn, doing what was expected of him, his presence indicated only by his prescribed responding cry, it occurred to him that he could be any man walking up with his uncle. Under cover he had entered the company of men.
They emerged from the wood and proceeded across the open quarry-field. The cries were no longer necessary for they could see one another. Jocelyn whispered urgently to his dog, checking him so that he should not get too far ahead. His way of talking to the dog was part of the same language.
A hare leapt from covert some twenty-five yards away. Jocelyn fired one barrel. The report and its echo from the quarry face momentarily supplied an axis to the uniform grey dusk, as though the two sounds were magnetic poles to which every particle of the dusk turned and pointed.
The hare ran on, the pulse of its leaps undisturbed. It was running cross-wise, offering the boy a broadside shot.
He saw it running. He saw it as a brown furry smudge. He saw the muscles along its shoulders and down its haunches flex as it zig-zagged. He was unaware of squeezing the trigger, unaware even—for a second’s delay—of the recoil: he simply saw the hare in mid-leap going small and falling.
Imagine an invisible net which can fly through the air but remains open-ended like a wind-sock: the net flies towards the hare, the hare leaps into the net whose neck is only wide enough to admit the animal’s head and shoulders, so that the hare, entering the net, has to bunch itself up as a rabbit does when scuttling into its burrow. As the hare bunches, the foot of the net is filled with lead. It drops immediately to the ground.
The dog was whimpering. In this light, said Jocelyn placing a hand under the boy’s elbow and holding the hare by its hind legs level with their two faces, I couldn’t have done that.
What does castrati mean? he had asked Umberto in Italy.
Castrati? Castrati!
Umberto was surprised but delighted by the question. It was the antithetical question to all that he wanted to tell the boy.
Un castrato cannot be a father.
Umberto began to explain at length and fulsomely. He poured out wine and insisted that his son drink. As he talked Umberto’s fingers chopped themselves off, made hooks of themselves, wagged.
The boy had seen Tom castrating lambs: a flick of the knife and then the two testicles sucked out into the mouth and spat upon the ground. But he had not connected the Italian word with the English.
Umberto cited himself as a father, and hit the lower part of his stomach with his flat hand. He leant across the table so that his huge face was close to the boy’s. But il castrato today, he said, is an insult. It does not mean it properly. It means a weak man, a man who is not capable, a feeble one. Him. Quest’uomo è castrato. He could be called that. Un Castrato. Umberto was so close to his son’s face that he could not resist touching it. Ecco my boy my boy, he said.
The gun room was small and square with a high ceiling. High on one wall hung a pair of mounted antlers, dusty and grey. An oil lamp was reflected in the black curtainless window. Jocelyn stood at a bench-like table on which his gun lay in three parts. The boy sprawled in a sagging arm-chair in front of the fireplace in which there was no fire.
Why, asked the boy looking towards the black window rather than towards Jocelyn, do you disapprove of Aunt Beatrice’s marriage?
It is not a subject we should discuss.
The boy took in the crowded room: boots, mackintoshes, fishing rods, baskets, piles of old copies of The Sportsman, two foxes’ masks, a pipe-rack, a ladder—and on everything pointing upwards an old hat or cap hung. He remembered the room as he had been aware of it as a child. He had never been allowed in. But he had noticed through a half-open door men in their shirt-sleeves, a fire burning and an unusual smell. After a pause, he re-started the same conversation.
Everything has changed since she went, he said.
Jocelyn was screwing together the brass joins of two lengths of a cleaning rod. The table smelt of gun oil. The smell reminded Jocelyn of his father. It was associated in his mind with the smell of cordite and metal—the smell of sport. It suggested to him the smell of food being prepared for company. This last was associated with returning home with friends after a shoot, but is perhaps inherent in the smell itself. The smell of gun oil, for all its graphite, has something about it of the smell of butter in shortbread or pastry when they are still very hot in an iron oven. It is the antithesis of the smell of lilac. In the chill fireless room, Jocelyn shivered and heard himself saying: There was no stopping her.
Did he sweep her off her feet, then? asked the boy.
He fawned at her feet like a dog.
Is she happy with him?
She couldn’t be happy with him, Jocelyn said and then, with the gesture of a romantic ’cello-player, drove the cleaning-rod through the barrel. The action always pleased him. He ran his hand along the bluish polished metal of the underside of the barrels. Again he was speaking before he had decided to do so. She has the highest standards, he was saying, that is how she is made.
He was handsome, said the boy in a tense intended to provoke.
He is a cad, said Jocelyn, his hand beginning to tremble.
Did you have it out with him?
I could not.
A cad you think?
Jocelyn put the barrels down and steadied himself with both hands on the table.
This is not a subject we should pursue, he said.
He was not thinking of the boy’s age. He wished to talk to nobody about this subject.
The boy, however, was determined to force Jocelyn to say more: not out of personal animosity but in order to claim his own right—and his ability—to know, to touch on no matter what subject. It seemed to him that nothing familiar now remained in his life: hence his right to pursue every question.
I doubt, said the boy, whether there are any marriages which the families of both parties are really happy about. There used to be.
One side always makes a sacrifice. Usually the side with the least money.
Surprised by the odd sense and wording of those remarks, Jocelyn turned to look at the boy who was leaning deep back in the arm-chair, his face in shadow. He could discover no insolence in his expression. When their eyes met, the boy said:
You didn’t approve of my mother and father did you?
That was a very different case.
You mean because they were never married?
Who told you that?
A boy at school called Charles Hay.
Jocelyn turned to the window. The whole of the boy’s upbringing, he considered, had been compromised by half-measures and his mother’s sudden whims.
The boy was still speaking: You can tell by looking at them that they’ve never been married. They don’t treat each other like husband and wife. They don’t possess anything in common—except me.
That is no way to speak of your mother and father.
Is lying better?
I find it regrettable that you should come across such stories at school.
They call me Garibaldi because they say my mother might have been his mistress too.
It is terrible.
I laugh.
Laugh?
Do you expect me to defend my mother’s honour?
Jocelyn wanted to tell the boy that he had argued many times with Laura that it was necessary to tell him the truth. Yet he felt that anything he said would now be incomprehensible because it belonged to a past which existed only in his own memory.
He turned back to the table and began wiping the stock of his gun.
Why is Captain Bierce a cad? asked the boy in a gentle, almost tender voice.
He’s a bullying Irish braggart—a mutton-fisted loud-mouthed pack-horse captain!
That’s no way to talk about your brother-in-law!
Having said this, the boy laughed. And Jocelyn laughed too. They laughed at the collapse of the formalities which had surrounded them. In face of this collapse they were for a moment equal. The boy got up from the chair and went over to the table. The man sat down and leant back in the arm-chair. He was trembling.
The boy, picking up the stock, noticed that the firing-pins had not been released. Pressing the front of the stock against the table top, he squeezed each trigger. The two sharp taps of the pins against the wood broke the silence. The surface of the table there was already scarred with thousands of tiny pock marks caused during the years by this method of releasing firing-pins so that their springs should not be weakened.
Jocelyn began to speak from the depths of the chair, staring at the fire grate, and softly as though almost to himself:
He tore her out of her own place. I know what she is like. She is as fine as china. She’s like that figure there with flowers around her waist. She needs to be protected and free.
The boy could not see the man for he was hidden by the back of the chair. Above the chair he could see the mantelpiece: on it were a dusty packet of envelopes, a ball of twine, a leather strap and a porcelain figure of a shepherdess, about eight inches high.
He tore her out of her own place. She was part of this place. She knew it. There were no secrets from her. She was the spirit of this place and this house. She was why I lived here.
The boy stared at the porcelain figure, its pink, almost white glaze shining in the lamplight.
I begin to be glad I’ve lived half my life. A fair part of it has been good. But from now on everything will get worse. Everybody is becoming ignorant and mutton-fisted and too busy judging everybody else. We’re going to have sermons and commerce. I hate this damned farm now. No one knows how to wait any more, because they haven’t anything worth waiting for. I don’t know how to wait myself. I used to wait for her.
The man stopped talking.
I’ll go and change, he said later, it’s cold here.
The boy approached the mantelpiece still staring at the porcelain figure of the shepherdess.
How did it happen that on 2 May 1902, Beatrice was in her bedroom, her hair loose, wearing only a nightdress and wrap, in the middle of the afternoon?
The previous day, walking through the walled vegetable garden, she had noticed that several boughs of lilac had come out on the tree in the north-east corner. She wanted to pick some to take into the house. But to get to the tree she had to cross a bed of wet earth and rotting brussel sprout plants. She took off her shoes and stockings and left them on the path. Her feet sank into the mud up to her ankles. When she reached the tree, she discovered she was not tall enough. A little way along the wall was a black, rotten ladder. (During her absence in South Africa the house and farm had deteriorated dramatically.) She tested the first three rungs and they seemed strong enough. She moved the ladder to the lilac tree and climbed up. A wasp, caught between her skirts and the wall, stung her on the instep of her foot. She cried out (a small cry like a child’s or a gull’s), took little notice, cut the lilac and went barefoot into the house to wash her feet. By evening, her foot was inflamed and during the night she slept badly.
The next morning she decided to stay in bed. She knew that it was not the kind of decision she would ever have made before her marriage, before she left the farm. Jocelyn expected her to run the house and keep an eye on the dairy: he was away at a point-to-point in Leicestershire. A surveyor who was coming that afternoon expected her to prepare papers for him. Everybody would expect her to treat a small, already less swollen wasp bite as though it were nothing. Before her marriage she did what was expected of her. Now she did not.
She gave instructions and took a bath. Still wet, she stood looking at herself in the tall tippable mirror in the bathroom.
She did not pretend that her gaze was that of a man. She drew no sexual conclusions as she stared at herself. She saw her body as a core, left when all its clothes had fallen from it. Around this core she saw the space of the bathroom. Yet between core and room something had changed, which was why all the house and the whole farm seemed changed since her return. She cupped her breasts with her hands and then moved her hands slowly downwards, over her hips, to the front of her thighs. Either the surface of her body or the touch of her hands had changed too.
Before, she lived in her body as though it were a cave, exactly her size. The rock and earth around the cave were the rest of the world. Imagine putting your hand into a glove whose exterior surface is continuous with all other substance.
Now her body was no longer a cave in which she lived. It was solid. And everything around, which was not her, was movable. Now what was given to her stopped at the surfaces of her body.
In nightgown and wrap she returned to bed. She lay back against a bank of pillows and imitated the cackling noise of a turkey. When she noticed the portrait of her father she stopped. Some women might have considered the possibility that they were going mad. She began to move her head from side to side on the bank of pillows, thus tilting her view of the room from side to side. When she felt giddy, she got out of bed and dropped on to her hands and knees: the carpeted floor was level and still. On the level ground in the free space she was conscious of being happy.
At her dressing table with a silver-backed mermaid-embossed hairbrush in her hand she asked herself as she had many times during the previous six months: Why do I feel no deep loss? Her way of answering the question was to search in her mind to make sure that its supposition was correct. Then her answer, which entirely satisfied her, was: Because I don’t.
Captain Patrick Bierce was killed on 17 September 1901, in the mountains north of the Great Karoo, Cape Colony. A British encampment was attacked by Boer commandos under General Smuts. The commandos were desperate, lacking both supplies and ammunition. In some close fighting among rocks Captain Bierce had half his head blown away. The Boer who shot him at close range had used an explosive Mauser cartridge (generally used for big game) because he had no other ammunition. Later, after the British had surrendered, the Boer found the mutilated officer whom he had shot dead, and was distressed at having had to use such ammunition. He argued to himself, however, that there was not a great deal of difference between killing a man with an explosive bullet and smashing him with a lyddite shell.
The colonel who broke to Beatrice the news of her husband’s death said: We soldiers count as our gains—our losses. Those men we love most to honour are those who die in a great cause.
What afflicted her was the shock which she imagined her husband feeling at his own death. She imagined him dying in mortal disappointment. But the fact that their life together was over impressed her too as a gain rather than as a loss. She could leave Africa. She could leave him. She could leave his brother officers.
I do not know for how long the relationship between Jocelyn and Beatrice had been incestuous.
I do know that Beatrice must have married Captain Bierce in order to simplify her life.
The power which Jocelyn exercised over his sister was essentially the power of the elder brother of childhood prolonged into adult life. He was protective and possessive; he was the moral arbiter in a world he knew better than she. Her virtue must lie in her obedience to him and her indifference to the judgement of others. Yet after adolescence this power of his over her depended upon her collaboration. More than that—this collaboration contributed more to their relationship than any adult ability on his part to be masterful. His domination was the result of her willing it for him. Hence the strangely circular nature of their moods and intimacy …
Into this circle stepped Captain Bierce, confident, huge, beaming, straight-speaking—simple and uncomplicated as only a man in uniform can appear to be. He courted her. He knelt before her and said he was her servant—her giant servant. He worshipped, he said, the very ground on which she trod.
He seemed to demand neither connivance nor complicity. Instead he asked her formally for the gift of her hand in marriage. The conventional metaphors became persuasive in their very simplicity. Leading her by the hand, he would show her the world.
She accepted his proposal.
They were married in the parish church of St Catherine’s.
They left for Africa.
The land surface of the earth is estimated to extend over about 52,500,000 sq. miles. Of this area the British Empire occupies nearly one quarter, extending over an area of about 12,000,000 sq. miles. By far the greater portion lies within the temperate zones, and is suitable for white settlement.… The area of the territory of the Empire is divided almost equally between the southern and northern hemispheres, the great divisions of Australasia and South Africa covering between them in the southern hemisphere 5,308,506 sq. miles while the United Kingdom, Canada and India, including the native states, cover between them in the northern hemisphere 5,271,375 sq. miles. The alternation of the seasons is thus complete, one half of the Empire enjoying summer while one half is in winter.
Within a few weeks of their arrival in Durban, Beatrice began to suffe: a delusion: she came to believe that everything was being tilted, that everything around her was taking place on an incline which was gradually becoming more acute. As the angle of incline increased, so everything on it began to slip downwards, nearer to its bottom edge. The inclined plane extended over the whole sub-continent, and the bottom edge gave on to the Indian Ocean.
One early afternoon in February 1899 in Pietermaritzburg she took a rickshaw despite the fact that Captain Bierce had recently been mysteriously insistent that she should not do so. However, she had few illusions left concerning her husband’s mysteries.
The Zulu rickshaw-boy wore a head-dress of tattered, dyed ostrich feathers which smelt of burnt hair. His long legs were crudely whitewashed. The previous night there had been a thunderstorm and the sky, cleared by the storm, was an unusually harsh blue. The frayed ostrich feathers above her, shaking as the Zulu between the shafts ran, appeared to brush the blue sky as though it were a tangible, painted surface.
They passed a company of marching British soldiers. Under the blue sky, in front of the low, shack-like hastily constructed buildings, along the unmysterious absolutely straight streets, each platoon looked like a box in which twenty or thirty men were helplessly vibrating.
Here, as in Durban, the activities of her countrymen never ceased. Every moment had its duty. The rickshaw passed some officers on horseback who bowed slightly without looking at her. To them she was an officer’s wife. She had selected among Captain Bierce’s brother officers those whom she would prefer to be killed at Ladysmith if a certain number had to be.
She began to stare at the running whitewashed legs, one, unflexing, continually giving place to the second, flexing. The movement was very different from that of a horse’s hind legs as seen from a trap; and the difference disturbed her. Yet her feeling led her to no conclusion. What separated her from the British wives with whom she was obliged to pass most of her time, was her lack of opinions. She had come to hate the sound of talking. She trusted certain feelings in herself precisely because they did not lead to conclusions.
They turned into a narrower but equally straight street which led past the backs of bungalows and some unused sites of land. Trees cast intermittent shade. They came upon a file of African women walking along the grass verge. By their costumes it was clear that they had walked to the city from a Location kraal. (For certain brief occasions women were allowed to come to the city to visit their menfolk employed there.) On their heads they carried immense gourds. The rickshaw slowed down. One of the women shouted something at the Zulu which Beatrice could not understand. Another made a gesture and laughed. None of the women looked at her. Two were old with withered breasts. Another carried a baby.
At the end of the narrow street they joined a busy avenue and reached her destination: the entrance gate to the botanical gardens. She climbed out and asked the rickshaw-boy what was in the gourds the women were carrying. Looking down at her—for she was much shorter—he told her that it was kaffir beer. It was then that everything tilted for the first time. She had to cling to the railings of the botanical gardens. She clung to them, facing them, her head thrust between two bars. The rickshaw-boy stared at her, dumbfounded, until a policeman arrived and started to threaten him.
The second time was in Durban at a dinner party given by the harbour master. She saw the dinner table tilting. She put out her hand to prevent a silver candelabra with candles burning in it from falling over. In making this abrupt movement (which was incomprehensible to those sitting around her) she knocked over a guest’s glass of wine.
Later that night, made tender and menacing by drink, Captain Bierce hissed at her affectionately: A clumsy slave, my dove, must be chastised, I have no choice but to tie you up again. Try to slip out, Beatrice, I must tighten the bindings. Speak to me, Beatrice. Declare your allegiance.…
As her delusion became more and more frequent, the physical sensation of everything being tilted gave way to a conviction that it was being tilted. She suddenly knew it instead of feeling it.
She is aware that there is another way of seeing her and all that surrounds her, which can only be defined as the way she can never see. She is being seen in that way now. Her mouth goes dry. Her corsets constrain her more tightly. Everything tilts. She sees everything clearly and normally. She can discern no tilt. But she is convinced, she is utterly certain that everything has been tilted.
Even when the delusion had passed, the idea of the sub-continent being tilted did not strike her as implausible; on the contrary it seemed to correspond with the rest of her daily experience and to make that experience more credible.
Gradually the anguish accompanying the delusion lessened. She consulted nobody. She ceased to be worried by its abnormality. She accepted it. She accepted it as the consequence of living first in Pietermaritzburg, then in Durban, and later in Capetown. She no longer wondered whether she was going mad; instead she awaited her chance to escape.
Beatrice’s disturbance was probably partly due to her discovery of what her husband was like out of his uniform. All that he demanded was that she should allow him to tie her up and gently maltreat her. The mere sight of her tied up was usually sufficient to bring him to a sexual climax; she suffered not from his violence but from her own shame and disappointment. The unfamiliar climate of Natal and Cape Colony may have further exacerbated her nervous condition. But there was another factor.
THE GREAT AMAXOSA DELUSION
On 23 December 1847, the British Governor of Cape Colony, Sir Harry Smith, summoned together the chiefs of the Amaxosa tribes on the Eastern Frontier. He told them that their territory—the most fertile in South Africa—was to be annexed and made a crown dependency: British Kaffraria. After a while it became clear that the Gaika tribe and their chief Sandila were determined to offer the most stubborn resistance. Sir Harry Smith re-summoned the chiefs. Sandila refused to come. Whereupon Sir Harry deposed him of his chiefship, and in his place, as chief of the Gaikas, appointed an English magistrate called Mr Brownlee. Convinced that they had now dealt with the matter masterfully, the two Englishmen ordered the arrest of Sandila. On 24 December 1850 the force sent out to arrest him was ambushed and the Gaika tribe rose in revolt. White settlers in the military villages along the frontier were attacked and killed whilst celebrating Christmas. Thus began the Fourth Kaffir War: the penultimate stage in the Amaxosas’ long defence of their independence, which had continued for sixty years.
By 1853 the British, with their prodigious military advantages (the war cost the Colonial Office nearly a million pounds), were able to impose a military defeat on the tribes. In 1856 there followed what the British were later to call ‘The Great Amaxosa Delusion’. This ‘delusion’ constituted the ultimate stage of the Amaxosa nation’s defence of its independence.
A girl named Nongkwase told her father that when going to draw water from a stream she had met strangers of commanding aspect. The father went to see them. They told him that they were spirits of the dead who had come to help their people drive the white men into the sea. The father reported to Sarili, an Amaxosa chief, who announced that the people must do what the spirits instructed. The spirits instructed the people to kill all their cattle and to destroy every grain of corn they possessed. Their cattle had become thin and their crops poor as a result of the land already stolen from them by the white man. When every head of cattle was killed and every seed of corn destroyed, myriads of fat beautiful cattle would issue from the earth, great fields of heavy ripe corn would instantly appear, trouble and sickness would vanish, everybody would be young and beautiful, and the white man, on that day, would perish utterly.
The people obeyed. Cattle were central to their culture. In the villages heads of cattle were the measuring units of wealth. When a daughter was married, her father, if rich enough, gave her a cow, an ubulungu—‘a doer of good’: this cow must never be killed and a hair from its tail must always be tied round the neck of each of the daughter’s children at birth. Nevertheless the people obeyed. They slaughtered their cattle and their sacred cows and they burnt their grain.
They built large new kraals for the new fat cattle that would come. They prepared skin sacks to hold the milk that was soon to be more plentiful than water. They held themselves in patience and waited their vengeance.
The appointed day of the prophecy arrived. The sun rose and sank with the hopes of hundreds of thousands. By nightfall nothing had changed.
An estimated fifty thousand died of starvation. Many thousands more left their land to search for work in Cape Colony. Those who remained did so as a propertyless labour force. (A little later many were to work as wage slaves in the diamond and gold mines further north.) On the rich, now depopulated, land of the Amaxosa, European farmers settled and prospered.
Who is that? asked the boy.
The Grand Duke: Ferdinando Primo. He was the father of Livorno.
He founded the city and he came from Firenze, said Umberto.
What is it made of?
I do not understand.
Is it made of stone? asked the boy.
It is made in bronze, a metal precioso.
Why are the men chained?
They are slaves. Slaves from Africa.
They look very strong.
They must be strong. They—how you say? Umberto mimed a man rowing.
Rowing a boat?
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Why did they want to make a statue of them?
Ma perché son magnifici. They are beautiful.
Beatrice laid aside the silver-backed, mermaid-embossed hairbrush and going to the window stopped by the vase of lilac.
When the boy came into the room she said: I cannot ever remember any lilac having a scent like this lot Then she asked him whether he would please find out whether the second cowman was still sick. After he had left the room, she thought: I am more than twice as old as he is.
POEM FOR BEATRICE
Continually mists change my size
Only territories on a map are measured
The sounds I make are made elsewhere
I am enveloped in the astonishing silence of my breasts
I plait my hair into sentences
Never let loose
I walk where I wish
My cuffs admit my wrists alone
Break
Break the astonishing silence of my breasts.
THE BOERS
‘Our century is a huge cauldron in which all historical eras are boiling and mingling.’
African civilization in South Africa was destroyed by the Boers. The Boers colonized South Africa for the later benefit of the British. The British intermittently aided them in this colonization but the essential relation between the colonizers and the colonized was created by the Boers. Yet the Boers were themselves fugitives—in both a geographical and a historical sense. They defeated in the name of defeat. When, in the eighteenth century, they began to penetrate into the High Veld, they did so to escape the controls of the Dutch East India Company in Cape Town, and as soon as they did so, they regressed historically. They abandoned fixed farms; they became nomadic herdsmen and hunters.
The Great Trek of 1835 which led the Boers into Natal, the Transvaal and Orange Free State was a retreat from the demands and disciplines in all spheres of social activity—productive, political, moral—of nineteenth-century Europe. Unlike other colonizers it could not occur to the Boers that they were taking ‘civilization’ into ‘the dark continent’: they themselves were withdrawing from that ‘civilization’.
Their productive means were no more advanced than those of the Bantu whose land they seized, whose crops they burnt and whose herds they stole. Their fire-arms, fast horses and wagons gave them the necessary tactical advantages. But they were incapable of developing what they seized. They were even incapable of exploiting the labour force of impoverished squatters which they created. With all their rights of mastery and property, which they held to be sacred and God-given, they could do nothing. They were impotent; and they were alone among those whom they had uselessly defeated.
In the rest of the world which Europe colonized, enslaved and exploited, native populations were massacred and destroyed (in Australia, in North America): deported elsewhere (from West Africa as slaves): or else they were accommodated within a moral, religious, social system which rationalized and justified the colonizations (catholicism in Latin America, the princely kingdoms and the caste system integrated into the imperial rule of India). In South Africa the Boers were unable to establish such a self-justifying ‘moral’ hegemony. They could accommodate neither victory nor victims. They could draw up no treaty with those whom they had dispossessed. There was no settlement possible, because they were unable to use what they had taken. There was consequently less hypocrisy or complacency or corruption among the Boers than among other colonizers. But it seemed to them that the existence of every African was an incitement to that great black avenging which they continually feared. And since no settlement was possible, the justification, the explanation of their position had to be continually reaffirmed through individual emotion. Day and night every Boer had to insure that his feeling of mastery was stronger than his fear. All that could relieve the fear was hatred.
Politics, so far as Beatrice was concerned, was one of the careers open to men: no more and no less. (She saw Laura’s devotion to politics as proof of her heartlessness.) She was interested in the stories and characters of Greek mythology—but not in history. She knew nothing of the fate of the Amaxosa. When people spoke, as they did continually in Musgrave Road, Durban, or at the Royal Hotel, of the ‘treachery of the Boers’ and the ‘Boer atrocities’, she had the impression that everyone was waiting their opportunity to compete, like singers at an audition, in saying the necessary phrases with their own individual gestures and signs of emotion. The competition never ended so long as there was a second person present. Other subjects included The Empire, The Character of the Kaffir, The Qualities of The British Soldier, The Role of the Missionary. She never questioned the assumptions which underlay the phrases. Both assumptions and competition bored her. She acquired the habit of appearing to listen whilst studying the speaker’s fingers, or looking out of the window or wondering what she herself would be doing in half an hour. Thus her time and her attention were frequently unoccupied. And this is what led to her disturbance, to the possibility of the sub-continent haunting her.
Precisely because she lacked the protection of ready-made generalizations and judgements, because she allowed her thoughts to wander aimlessly, because she lacked what all administrators and troops oppressing another nation must always maintain—a sense of duty without end, she began to feel, between the interstices of formal social convention, the violence of the hatred, the violence of what would be avenged.
In Pietermaritzburg she saw a loyal Dutchman (loyal to the Queen) beating his kaffir servant. As he beat him he made a noise in his throat like a laugh. His mouth was open and his tongue was between his teeth. His passion was such that he did not wish to stop until he had annihilated the body he was beating: yet however hard he beat it, he could not annihilate it. From this arose the necessity of his cry which resembled a laugh. His expression was like that of a small child deliberately shitting himself. The servant, absolutely silent, hunched himself against the blows.
Sometimes in the way an African ran she saw the defiance of all his race.
She could not explain her feelings to herself. There is an historical equivalent to the psychological process of repression into the unconscious. Certain experiences cannot be formulated because they have occurred too soon. This happens when an inherited world-view is unable to contain or resolve certain emotions or intuitions which have been provoked by a new situation or an extremity of experience unforeseen by that world-view. ‘Mysteries’ grow up within or around the ideological system. Eventually these mysteries destroy it by providing the basis for a new world-view. Medieval witchcraft, for example, may be seen in this light.
A moment’s introspection shows that a large part of our own experience cannot be adequately formulated: it awaits further understanding of the total human situation. In certain respects we are likely to be better understood by those who follow us than by ourselves. Nevertheless their understanding will be expressed in terms which would now be alien to us. They will change our unformulated experience beyond our recognition. As we have changed Beatrice’s.
She is aware that there is another way of seeing her and all that surrounds her, which can only be defined as the way she can never see. She is being seen in that way now. Her mouth goes dry. Her corsets constrain her more tightly. Everything tilts. She sees everything clearly and normally. She can discern no tilt. But she is convinced, she is utterly certain that everything has been tilted.
She sat down cross-legged on the rug by her bed to examine the wasp bite on her instep. There was still a pink circle, the size of a halfpenny; but her foot was no longer swollen. Her foot lay on her hand as though it were a dog’s head, whose gaze was concentrated upon the door. Abruptly unbuttoning her wrap and pulling her nightdress up over her knees, she lifted her foot and, bending her head forward, placed the foot behind her neck. The hair that fell over it felt cool. She tried to straighten her back as far as she could. After a while she lowered her head, lifted her foot down and sat cross-legged, smiling.
I see a horse and trap drawn up by the front door of the farmhouse. In it is a man in black with a bowler hat. He is portly and unaccountably comic. The horse is black and so too is the trap except for its white trimming. I am looking down on the horse and trap and the man who is so comically correct and regular, from the window of Beatrice’s room.
On the table between the window and the large four-poster bed is the vase of white lilac. The smell of it is the only element that I can reconstruct with certainty.
She must be thirty-six. Her hair, usually combed up into a chignon, is loose around her shoulders. She wears an embroidered wrap. The embroidered leaves mount to her shoulder. She is standing in bare feet.
The boy enters and informs her that the papers for the man in the trap were the correct ones.
He is fifteen: taller than Beatrice, dark-haired, large-nosed but with delicate hands, scarcely larger than hers. In the relation between his head and shoulders there is something of his father—a kind of lunging assurance.
Beatrice lifts an arm towards him and opens her hand.
Pushing the door shut behind him, he goes towards her and takes her hand.
She, by turning their hands, ensures that they both look out of the window. At the sight of the man in black on the point of leaving they begin to laugh.
When they laugh they swing back the arms of their held hands and this swinging moves them away from the window towards the bed.
They sit on the edge of the bed before they stop laughing.
Slowly they lie back until their heads touch the counterpane. In this movement backwards she slightly anticipates him.
They are aware of a taste of sweetness in their throats. (A sweetness not unlike that to be tasted in a sweet grape). The sweetness itself is not extreme but the experience of tasting it is. It is comparable with the experience of acute pain. But whereas pain closes anticipation of everything except the return of the past before the pain existed, what is now desired has never existed.
From the moment he entered the room it has been as though the sequence of their actions constituted a single act, a single stroke.
Beatrice puts her hand to the back of his head to move him closer towards her.
Beneath her wrap Beatrice’s skin is softer than anything he has previously imagined. He has thought of softness as a quality belonging either to something small and concentrated (like a peach) or else to something extensive but thin (like milk). Her softness belongs to a body which has substance and seems very large. Not large relative to him, but large relative to anything else he now perceives. This magnification of her body is partly the result of proximity and focus but also of the sense of touch superseding that of sight. She is no longer contained within any contour, she is continuous surface.
He bends his head to kiss her breast and take the nipple in his mouth. His awareness of what he is doing certifies the death of his childhood. This awareness is inseparable from a sensation and a taste in his mouth. The sensation is of a morsel, alive, unaccountably half-detached from the roundness of the breast—as though it were on a stalk. The taste is so associated with the texture and substance of the morsel and with its temperature, that it will be hard ever to define it in other terms. It is a little similar to the taste of the whitish juice in the stem of a certain kind of grass. He is aware that henceforth both sensation and taste are acquirable on his own initiative. Her breasts propose his independence. He buries his face between them.
Her difference from him acts like a mirror. Whatever he notices or dwells upon in her, increases his consciousness of himself, without his attention shifting from her.
She is the woman whom he used to call Aunt Beatrice. She ran the house and gave orders to the servants. She linked arms with her brother and walked up and down the lawn. She took him when he was a child to church. She asked him questions about what he had learnt in the School Room: questions like What are the chief rivers of Africa?
Occasionally during his childhood she surprised him. Once he saw her squatting in the corner of a field and afterwards he wondered whether she was peeing. In the middle of the night he had woken up to hear her laughing so wildly that he thought she was screaming. One afternoon he came into the kitchen and saw her drawing a cow with a piece of chalk on the tiled floor—a childish drawing like he might have done when younger. On each of these occasions his surprise was the result of his discovering that she was different when she was alone or when she believed that he was not there.
This morning when she had asked him to come to her bedroom, she had presented a different self to him, yet he knew this was no longer a matter of chance discovery but of deliberate intention on her part. Her hair was loose around her shoulders. He had never seen or imagined it like that before. Her face seemed smaller, much smaller than his own. The top of her head looked unexpectedly flat and her hair over the flatness very glossy. The expression of her eyes was serious to the point of gravity. Two small shoes lay on their sides on the carpet. She was barefoot. Her voice too was different, her words much slower.
I cannot remember, she said, any lilac ever having a scent like this lot.
This morning he was not surprised. He accepted the changes. Nevertheless this morning he still thought of her as the mistress of the house in which he had passed his childhood.
She is a mythical figure whom he has always been assembling part by part, quality by quality. Her softness—but not the extent of its area—is more familiar than he can remember. Her heated sweating skin is the source of the warmth he felt in Miss Helen’s clothes. Her independence from him is what he recognized in the tree trunk when he kissed it. The whiteness of her body is what has signalled nakedness to him whenever he has glimpsed a white segment through the chance disarray of petticoat or skirt. Her smell is the smell of fields which, in the early morning, smell of fish although many miles from the sea. Her two breasts are what his reason has long since granted her, although their distinctness and degree of independence one from the other astonish him. He has seen drawings on walls asserting how she lacks penis and testicles. (The dark beard-like triangle of hair makes their absence simpler and more natural than he foresaw.) This mythical figure embodies the desirable alternative to all that disgusts or revolts him. It is for her sake that he has ignored his own instinct for self-preservation—as when he walked away, revolted, from the men in sack-cloths and the dead horses. She and he together, mysteriously and naked, are his own virtue rewarded.
Mythical familiar and the woman he once called Aunt Beatrice meet in the same person. The encounter utterly destroys both of them. Neither will ever again exist.
He sees the eyes of an unknown woman looking up at him. She looks at him without her eyes fully focussing upon him as though, like nature, he were to be found everywhere.
He hears the voice of an unknown woman speaking to him: Sweet, sweet, sweetest. Let us go to that place.
He unhesitatingly puts his hand on her hair and opens his fingers to let it spring up between them. What he feels in his hand is inexplicably familiar.
She opens her legs. He pushes his finger towards her. Warm mucus encloses his finger as closely as if it were a ninth skin. When he moves the finger, the surface of the enclosing liquid is stretched—sometimes to breaking point. Where the break occurs he has a sensation of coolness on that side of his finger—before the warm moist skin forms again over the break.
She holds his penis with both hands, as though it were a bottle from which she were about to pour towards herself.
She moves sideways so as to be beneath him.
Her cunt begins at her toes; her breasts are inside it, and her eyes too; it has enfolded her.
It enfolds him.
The ease.
Previously it was unimaginable, like a birth for that which is born.
It is eight o’clock on a December morning. People are already at work or going to work. It is still not fully light and the darkness is foggy. I have just left a laundry, where the violet fluorescent lighting bleaches most stains out until you unwrap the washing and look at it in your own room. Under the fluorescent lighting the girl behind the counter had the white face of a clown with green eye shadow and violet almost white lips. The people I pass in the rue d’Odessa move briskly but rigidly, or hold themselves stiff against the cold. It is hard to imagine that most of them were in bed two hours ago, languid, unrestrained. Their clothes—even those chosen with the greatest personal care or romantic passion—all look as though they are the uniforms of a public service into which everybody has been drafted. Every personal desire, preference or hope has become an inconvenience. I wait at the bus stop. The waving red indicator of the Paris bus, as it turns the corner, is like a brand taken from a fire. At this moment I begin to doubt the value of poems about sex.
Sexuality is by its nature precise: or rather, its aim is precise. Any imprecision registered by any of the five senses tends to check sexual desire. The focus of sexual desire is concentrated and sharp. The breast may be seen as a model of such focus, gathering from an indefinable, soft variable form to the demarcation of the aureola and, within that, to the precise tip of the nipple.
In an indeterminate world in flux sexual desire is reinforced by a longing for precision and certainty: beside her my life is arranged.
In a static hierarchic world sexual desire is reinforced by a longing for an alternative certainty: with her I am free.
All generalizations are opposed to sexuality.
Every feature that makes her desirable asserts its contingency—here, here, here, here, here, here.
That is the only poem to be written about sex—here, here, here, here—now.
Why does writing about sexual experience reveal so strikingly what may be a general limitation of literature in relation to aspects of all experience?
In sex, a quality of ‘firstness’ is felt as continually re-creatable. There is an element in every occasion of sexual excitement which seizes the imagination as though for the first time.
What is this quality of ‘firstness’? How, usually, do first experiences differ from later ones?
Take the example of a seasonal fruit: blackberries. The advantage of this example is that one’s first experience each year of eating blackberries has in it an element of artificial firstness which may prompt one’s memory of the original, first occasion. The first time, a handful of blackberries represented all blackberries. Later, a handful of blackberries is a handful of ripe/unripe/over-ripe/sweet/acid, etc., etc., blackberries. Discrimination develops with experience. But the development is not only quantitative. The qualitative change is to be found in the relation between the particular and the general. You lose the symbolically complete nature of whatever is in hand. First experience is protected by a sense of enormous power; it wields magic.
The distinction between first and repeated experience is that one represents all: but two, three, four, five, six, seven ad infinitum cannot. First experiences are discoveries of original meaning which the language of later experience lacks the power to express.
The strength of human sexual desire can be explained in terms of natural sexual impulse. But the strength of a desire can be measured by the single-mindedness it produces. Extreme single-mindedness accompanies sexual desire. The single-mindedness takes the form of the conviction that what is desired is the most desirable possible. An erection is the beginning of a process of total idealization.
At a given moment sexual desire becomes inextinguishable. The threat of death itself will be ignored. What is desired is now exclusively desired; it is not possible to desire anything else.
At its briefest, the moment of total desire lasts as long as the moment of orgasm. It lasts longer when passion increases and extends desire. Yet, even at its briefest, the experience should not be treated as only a physical/nervous reflex. The stuff of imagination (memory, language, dreams) is being deployed. Because the other who is palpable and unique between one’s arms is—at least for a few instants—exclusively desired, she or he represents, without qualification or discrimination, life itself. The experience = I + life.
But how to write about this? This equation is inexpressible in the third person and in narrative form. The third person and the narrative form are clauses in a contract agreed between writer and reader, on the basis that the two of them can understand the third person more fully than he can understand himself; and this destroys the very terms of the equation.
Applied to the central moment of sex, all written nouns denote their objects in such a way that they reject the meaning of the experience to which they are meant to apply. Words like cunt, quim, motte, trou, bilderbuch, vagina, prick, cock, rod, pego, spatz, penis, bique—and so on, for all the other parts and places of sexual pleasure—remain intractably foreign in all languages, when applied directly to sexual action. It is as though the words around them, and the gathering meaning of the passage in which they occur, put such nouns into italics. They are foreign, not because they are unfamiliar to reader or writer, but precisely because they are their third-person nouns.
The same words written in reported speech—either swearing or describing—acquire a different character and lose their italics, because they then refer to the speaker speaking and not directly to acts of sex. Significantly, sexual verbs (fuck, frig, suck, kiss, etc., etc.) remain less foreign than the nouns. The quality of firstness relates not to the acts performed, but to the relation between subject and object. At the centre of sexual experience, the object—because it is exclusively desired—is transformed and becomes universal. Nothing is left exterior to it, and thus it becomes nameless.
I make two rough drawings:
They perhaps distort less than the nouns. Through these drawings, what I have called the quality of firstness in sexual experience is perhaps a little easier to recall. Why? Being visual, they are closer to physical perception. But I doubt whether this is the explanation. A skilful Roman or Renaissance pornographic painting would be still closer to visual perception and yet, for our purpose, it would be more opaque.
Is it because these rough drawings are schematized and diagrammatic? Again, I doubt it. Medical diagrams are sometimes more schematic—and again more opaque. What makes these drawings a little more transparent than words and sophisticated images is that they carry a minimal cultural load. Let us prove it obversely.
Take the first one. Put the word big above it. Already it is changed, and the load increased. It becomes more specifically a message addressed by writer to reader. Put the word his in front of big and it is further changed.
Take the second one and put the following words above it: Choose a woman’s name and write it here. Although the number of words has increased, the drawing remains unchanged. The words do not qualify the drawing or use it syntactically. And so the drawing is still relatively open for the spectator’s exclusive appropriation. Now carry out the instructions. Write the name of, say, Beatrice. Once again the increase of its cultural load renders the drawing opaque. The name Beatrice refers the drawing to an exterior system of categories. What the drawing now represents has become part of Beatrice, Beatrice is part of an historical European culture. In the end we are left looking at a rough drawing of a sexual part. Whereas sexual experience itself affirms a totality.
Take both drawings and put the word I above each one.
I am writing about the lovers on the bed.
Her eyes refocus upon him. Their look is for him something as specific and permanent as a house or a particular door. He will find his way back to it.
It is a look for which the Roman girl’s prepared him four years ago. Behind such a look is a total confidence that at that moment to express something—without thought, without words, but simply through one’s own uncontrollable eyes—is to be instantaneously understood. To be, at that moment, is to be known. Hence all distinctions between the personal and the impersonal disappear.
Do not let us even by a hair’s breadth misinterpret the meaning of this look. The look is simultaneously and in absolutely equal terms appealing and grateful. This does not mean that Beatrice is grateful for what has passed and is appealing for what is to come.
Don’t stop, my sweet, don’t stop, is what she may have said or will do: but not with this look.
Such an interpretation implies that eventually, if all is well, her look will be transformed into one which is purely grateful. An interpretation particularly dear to the male as provider and master. But false.
The look in Beatrice’s eyes being in equal measure appealing and grateful is not the result of these two feelings co-existing. There is only one feeling. She has only one thing to say with her uncontrollable eyes. Nothing exists for her beyond this single feeling. She is grateful for what she appeals for; she appeals for what she is already grateful for.
To follow her look, we enter her state of being. There, desire is its satisfaction, or, perhaps, neither desire nor satisfaction can be said to exist since there is no antinomy between them: every experience becomes the experience of freedom there: freedom there precludes all that is not itself.
The look in her eyes is an expression of freedom which he receives as such, but which we, in order to locate it in our world of third persons, must call a look of simultaneous appeal and gratitude.
A little later she strokes his back and whispers: You see. You see.
The world is not as we have subsided into it. Within us there is the keenness, the sharpness to perform surgery. Within, if we have the courage to wield it, is the cutting edge to sever the whole world as it is, the world that pretends to be part of us, the world to which by compromised and flabby usage we are said to belong. Say now to me. Now to me say to me.
She places her hand so that his testicles may rest upon the palm.
From the long tight bud the longer petals loosen: their tips begin to separate so that at the far end of the flower there is an open mouth. Then, freed, the petals slowly revolve like propellers: in eight hours one may turn between forty-five and ninety degrees. As they revolve they retreat till they are pointing backwards from their small round calyx which is now thrust forward.
Thus a cyclamen opening. And thus too, greatly accelerated, the sensation of his penis becoming erect again and the foreskin again withdrawing from the coronal ridge.
The clocks keep another time.
I was walking through a forest with a woman, smaller than I and blonde. We were happy but not specially preoccupied with one another.
We came to a dead animal’s head, half detached from its body. The animal might have been a fox, a donkey, a deer. The head was hollow like a mask or a glove. The sight should have been disturbing, but it was not. On the contrary it encouraged us. The mouth of the animal seemed to be grinning, its eye peaceful. The tattered skin of its neck was like a wide tattered sleeve. This sideways-lurching grinning severed head of an average-sized animal did not signify the death of that animal; it was purely a sign, put there to encourage us to continue.
We came out of the forest on to a large plain. The sky there was dark and purple but the plain was pale gold. The beauty of this plain, shimmering, many degrees lighter than the sky, made me (and I think her too) entirely happy. Quite near us were two rows of wooden buildings, like stables except that each was separate from the rest like very small wooden Russian houses. Around these buildings were men and women dressed in long whitish clothes. They were buying and selling cattle. (The people were not rich buyers and sellers: they were nomadic herdsmen.) We saw a herd of white cows (bison?) charging over the plains and vaguely in our direction. They were kicking up clouds of golden dust against the blackish sky. Suddenly she was frightened. I was not—perhaps because of the sign in the forest. I put my arms around her and pressed her against me. The intense pleasure of doing this became indistinguishable from that which I derived from what was happening around us. Be still, I said to her, if we are absolutely still, they will avoid us. The cattle thundered past, covering us, pressed tightly against one another, with gold dust. Not a single tail touched us.
They lie abandoned, side by side. The air from the open window cools their bodies and makes them aware of how damp they are, on the front of their stomachs how wet.
It should go on for ever, she says. It is not a complaint. She grips two fingers of his hand. She knows that the pace of time is reverting to normal. She crossed a threshold beyond which space, distance, time were meaningless. The threshold was warm, damp and quivering: animate to a degree for which the inanimate has no qualitative equivalent—unless it be jurassic mountains: animate to a degree at which it seemed that substance became sound alone.
It should go on for ever.
They lie on their backs. He has a sensation of being extended horizontally. He is conscious of the flatness of the bed, the floor, the earth under the house. Everything that is standing looks incongruous and incomplete to him. He is on the point of laughing. Suddenly he notices the portrait of her father on the wall opposite the bed. It is a provincial clumsy painting so that the image of the man oscillates between being a likeness and a childish stereotype of a ruddy-faced country gentleman at an inn. The face looks as though it has been tinted pink. The eyes are blankly fixed. Looking at this portrait of her father, he waves a hand.
POEM FOR HIM
éblouir to dazzle
like silk
her body is borderless
its centre a mouth of earth
liquid throat
(o nightingales of 19th century verse)
passage of unprotected being
cul de sac
to have reached there
to dazzle the earth
éblouir
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