Mouroir

Hanging on to Life

It took place in London and it must have been after the war since a soft wind, tepid, warm nearly, was now sweeping over everything and curving the grassplumes. The grass was not yet dry. There was just a touch, a whiff, of melancholy in the air. Blue-glass sky. Actually incomprehensible toppling over into the void of course. My wife and I, in the company of K and his family, approached the city from the west in his powerful car. During the autumn you enter the city by a highway nosing all along the hem of the ocean and which at times has to hang on to breathtaking high bridges connecting the crests above the chasms. Hanging above the cracking of seabirds and the tinkle of wavelets against the rocks. The bridges are the skeletons of rotted-away hills. Down below in the lie of the gorges then the brilliant flash of water in the fiords. Within the city walls too you may from such an elevated bridge squint down a declining crevasse to a floor covered with bushes, tall grass, shrubs without berries. (Dry now, because inside the circle of walls.) Seen from up high the few houses isolated down there are the doll constructions of children, the excrescences of the imagination, faults in glass. Near those vague houses (neglect has taken over) are parked the cabs and the caravans of gypsies with padded leather jerkins, of fortune-hunters and fortune-tellers, of cattle farmers with gaiters who camp there when they have to bring their animals for slaughter to the city’s abattoirs. To that place the couples who have entered upon a short-lived agreement will come then for hasty intercourse with casual implications of the flesh (the dryish barking coughs, the stainless-steel tongues), probably assuming that down in the coppice and virtually on top of the garbage dumps they will be invisible to the eye of the traffic. And who cares. Yet, everything is very evident from up here, revealed like the sweaty lifeline of the hand: the brown jackets with turned-up collars of men with black side-whiskers, the rusted mudguards of some obsolete lorries, pantyhose like a love letter on a bent twig, the naked buttocks competing half moons in the grass where tails and tracks have already been trodden and a whitish substance forms a crystalline crust over the stalks.

All along the ridge of the hill blocking off one end of the valley the city is strung. Cream? Froth. In the first rank the buildings stand precariously on the very lip of the abyss. Crumbling away. There are palaces with broad paved terraces receiving the sun like some luxurious inundation, the sun a benevolent torrent, streaming from the glass-blue jar, and steps leading to vaulted porches with decorations and flourishes moulded in the stucco. There are other buildings with multiple storeys, the cream layers of a cake; and some are sober of colour and of others only the posturing façades remain. Here, in the central circle, an exclusive quarter of the city, the front doors have keys of solid gold, there is a structure of grey concrete like a bunker or a fort sunk into the protecting red earth. Over the walls and ramparts showing above ground, plants and tussocks of grass started growing. The semblance accorded by green creepers, by trails — the appearance of dilapidation (watch out!) is deceptive however, and in fact it is intended only to allow this ultra-modern complex to blend with its background in such a fashion as not to disturb the historical atmosphere. From close up you see the extensive glass windows, and behind those panels full of clouds American tourists with binoculars and cameras bobbing on the extravagantly stained bellies and with highballs in their hands slowly cruise hither and yonder, flipping their tails. Sharks’ teeth snigger. Shark people. “Hi there!” One knows too that there are subterranean swimming pools and the most up-to-date recreation facilities, massage parlours, cocktail bars, quivering dance floors, one-armed bandits, an artificial cherry orchard vibrating a wind, whorestalls, exchange offices, turntables, map readers, chemin de fer and other bagatelles, as also counters for airlines (including that of Nomansland). It is in reality a hotel from where the plebeians — with low profiles, it is true — may have a peek at the aristocrats. On the one grey wall are fixed discreetly the letters: BUCKINGHAM PARK. Conspicuously different and as if pushed aside, there is, in the last line of the circle of buildings, a simple single-roomed farmhouse with a roof of sods — but this house is so situated that it has an unimpeded view on the west where in the fading light the folds and the heights of a distant green land (a medal) can be seen to be glowing like wave-crests. (Deeper in the city, on a more intimate square, I later see in the display window of an art gallery a painted reproduction — 40cm x 75cm, canvas on stretcher, in a gilded frame, origin guaranteed — of this same little house, stark now in simplified lines and volumes, but imbued with a tremendous light — one may say a searchlight — pouring forth from the heart of the structure through its windows, and with underneath a caption, on a copper plate, reading: “From this house the light was switched off over Ireland during the last war”. There was something heroic — shall I say manful? — and at the same time tragic about the painting as also about the dark and uninhabited house. But I suspected that this was a circumstance we could sense and yet not elucidate to our satisfaction. Like listening to the mournful song of a survivor from an earlier generation, ancient and with blunt teeth: a life-wrecked person. And in the language of that generation — with alternative forms, other types of diphthongs, whistling w-sounds, constructions foreign to the ear, contaminations, an upwelling: “voor wat meer coper ende tabacq als andere hottentoos genieten”.) (I have many suspicions.)

Deeper inside the city we decided to fortify the inner man in a restaurant (situated in a tower) noted for its delicate dishes, the clusters of crystal grapes in small bowls of ice water, the steamed napkins impregnated with the odour of myrrh, its stock of Nuits-Saint- Georges Grand Cru. This tower, encircled by a rank growth of shadow trees and gardens beautiful as if trimmed with velvet set out on several levels, this tower then was on a rather steep slope so that the diner with the spoon in the right hand (a feeling of silver under the fingertips) could look through the window over the bay with its babbling little waves, could sink away in his own ruminations, a thread of angel’s hair stuck to his lower lip. Now the environment has been rendered desolate and the brown varnish of the tower has started peeling away in strips and curls, the rooftiles have become lustreless. Perhaps a dead pigeon in a gutter somewhere. (Watch out!) There was the unseasonly pollen of dust in the trees. And the tower’s doors were barred. We still knocked against the wooden panel. Knock knock knock. After some minutes the latch was lifted and the door pulled open from the inside by an elderly man dressed in the somewhat slovenly clothes of a head waiter, maybe even a maître d’hôtel, and with a dark blue apron reaching to just above the shoe-caps. On the forehead, hard above the bridge of his nose, he had a rose-coloured birthmark like a blossom pressed between the pages of a complete encyclopaedia. Next to his left eye was a mole. He let us in and invited us to sit at a large table in one of the rooms off to the side. In the distance a canonnshot puffs. Like a heavy bell broken loose from its beams and ropes would plunge down the campanile. We are the only guests in the eating place, it would seem. The panes are full of bee tracks. Below us a schooner walked in a stately fashion over the water to the security of a cove or a bay — who will know? — with the evening sun’s book of flames in the sails a crimson contrast with the green shiver of the sea. It is a delegation of burning trees — the light a thin layer of snow or silver fur over the yards and the rigging and a shiny dampness in the water as also from the pendulum of the bow — all of this in an inexplicable way continuing to burn in the water — it is a delegation bringing the light of civilization to a dark region. The old man with the birth-flower came to lay the table with utensils of the finest silver. We are served several kinds of salad. (That which I missed so badly in prison.) Water pellets like fishscales glistening in the fleshiness of the leaves, and the walls of the room were tinted red by the silent flame-tower far below us on the sea. Only the crepitation of dry twigs being broken somewhere in the hills. The old man has one very slow foot. A flapping sole maybe? There’s no icecream on the menu: always a bad omen. I think the glasses were crystal.

High up, against the neck of the hummock where the twisting ground track ends and runs to earth, K waited for me. We pulled up our pants a little higher, considered the possibility of sticking the trouser legs in the tops of our socks. Then we climbed further up the incline to a part of the hill with denser vegetation, away from the growl of the city, and we were glad to be out of the sun’s shuddering under the coolth of trees. Partly in shadow and partly in the sun an ancient milk cart stood as if it would never get going again, an emaciated nag slumping listlessly between the draught poles, the hide too thin and the bone structure etched, a pitiful old bag; also the driver with frayed waistcoat, ostensibly out of heart, he had a tin with tobacco in his trouser pocket and a knuckly hand on the lump formed by the tin in the pocket on the thin leg. A ridge-backed rock lizard lies breathing in the heat. Round the mouth line of the driver there is the blue of inkstains and a mobile hairiness, a fudged drawing, a nib stuttered stuck in the blotting paper. Sharply defined lie the shadows on the earth under the horse and the cart, under those parts which catch the sun, haunch and splashboard and nodules and belly and spokes and tail; the shadow Indian blue and lame and ungainly with clusters of meatflies, innards which burst open are splashed over the soil, anchoring the vehicle and its passenger now. At first there were only cypresses with dark ink blotches around the trunks but gradually the roof of leaves above our heads became denser and in places the narrow alleys were overgrown with ferns, thistles, sorrel. At once we are in a part of the forest where the ground is most uneven, strewn with rough boulders. First we notice nothing else, nothing remarkable, nothing out of the ordinary. Then, as with those games in the newspaper where you have to look closely at the drawing to suddenly descry all kinds of figures camouflaged in the thickets, then there are all around us among the trees and the shrubs or half hidden by rocks a great number of very old horses. Some are already paralysed and can barely move the heads ever so slowly, heads with skin stretched drumtight over the bones so that you may read the outline of the skulls quite clearly, an archaic alphabet. Others try again and again to stumble to their legs. Many have a red mucid moustachiness about the lips; a thin film of foam. It is as if they are transparent, of an ancient type of glass, pale rose and pale violet are the dominant colours, but inside the yawn-thin carcasses there is nearly nothing to see except, now and then, the absent-minded peristalsis of entrails. Some still attempt to eat of the grass and the leaves. When they try to move it is a most painful and clumsy struggle. It hurts you to watch. The eyes are opaque and white and infirm like things suffering even in the subdued green sheen of the forest; around the rims in the corners of the eyes, there is a white crust, an excretion, and minuscule white scrawlers gnawing at the very eyeballs. Maggots? Where the sun penetrates and floats down like a leaf, a pale flash, an eye is sometimes a mirror throwing back a dumb whiteness. Above and below the eyes the hollows of the sunken sockets are bruised and dark, as broad and as deep as the hand of a man. We were in the secret place where decrepit horses come to pass away but cannot; they can’t ever die because here everything is in a state of waiting. There were practically no sounds; occasionally the snap of a branch when one horse trying to get up flounders against another tired animal. Above, through the treetops, there was also at times the softly gnashing flight of a sea breeze. Those among the beasts which were already lying down tried stretching the heads, heavier than undeciphered hieroglyphs, as far as possible away from the bodies in order to catch some air, and then there was a thin trickle of ants, a crumbling black snottiness, from some hole in the ground to the nostrils. The broken attempts at breathing moved the grass blades. Over all of this there was the sweet clove-like smell of dying, the old odour of hairless horsehides, perhaps too the swooning scent of live decomposition. But not of death. Graviora quaedam sunt remedia periculis.

(After he tried for six years to attain enlightenment by living the life of an ascetic and by subjecting his body to all sorts of deprivations, the Buddha says — as written down in the Majjhima Nikā̄ya, Sutta 36, that is in The Sayings of Medium Length:

Because I ate so little my limbs became like the joints of dried-up creepers. . my buttocks were the hooves of a bull: my protruding spine like a string of balls. . my ribcage the crazy rafters of a tumbled-down barn. . the pupils of my eyes looked as if they were lying low and deep. . my very scalp was wrinkled and shrunken as a white calabash cut off before it could ripen is shrunken and wrinkled by a warm wind. When I think: “I shall touch the skin of my stomach” then it was my spine I took hold of. The skin of my stomach clung to my back. When I think: “I shall obey my natural needs”, then I fell over on my face just there. . When I. . stroked my limbs with my hand, the hairs, rotten at the roots, came away from my body.)

A while further we came to an opening in the ground down which we clambered, first K and then I. It is cool inside this labyrinth but very dangerous too because in places the passage is not only more restricted than the waist of a man but furthermore with a swivel or a crinkle in the narrowest section. It is not entirely in obscurity however and sometimes there’s a little more space so that one can stand bent over to remove the powder and the bits of wood from your knees and sleeves and then there are stalactites and stalagmites of a pearlgrey or a moth-white colour. The sides of the tunnel glimmer and are smooth as coral to the touch of the hand. The hand-palms are unsociable like toothless parliamentarians. Glass, you think, glass and alabaster; sweetness and thrashing. Often it was too alarming to breathe. Higher we crawled on our stomachs through the bowels and the belly of the hill — it is inevitable that I should use this image which is entirely symbolic of course — until we arrived again in a larger hall, spacious enough, and hewn from the living rock itself.

Here we could hear water flowing. One wall of this space is blocked off by a curtain hanging from the vaulted roof to the floor. The curtain is suspended by rings from a curtain rod which stretches from one end of the hall to the other so that one can easily slip the cloth open. From behind the partition we hear the lamenting of several pale voices, how they rise and disappear. In the hall, on a chair behind a desk sits a woman. When we enter she gets up. Her hair is as grey as sweet water in a dirty glass and the fire-resistant plastic frame of her spectacles is blue like that of an American tourist. It will be far-fetched and unreal and indecent to think that her breasts too might long ago have been blossoms (the firefree plastic), for now there is an ungainly bosom, an enormous goitre, a monstrous soft fruit, and adipose. Stains show under the arms. The lady invites us to return for a conducted tour of her catacombic domain whenever it may suit us. Outside the hall we found ourselves once again against the opposite slope of the traversed hill, in the parking lot under the coolness-trees of the flaking tower. Our wives and K’s children were there waiting for us. High in the tower, through a half-closed shutter, one sees fleetingly the visage of an aged person with a morose expression and a lighter-coloured fungus or spot — nearly luminous — slightly higher than the eyebrow; against the wall or the ceiling of the room behind the shutter one suspects the ruddy wash of glass-like or burning reflections; but the perceived person is immersed in old thoughts of his own, staring in another direction, towards the interior of the country, perhaps over a sudden depression in the earth where accumulated junk and discarded contracts turn in the wind, where farmers squat to scratch with twigs the encrusted cow dung from their gaiters, where women with thick lower limbs lie in the cool protection of a shrub, naked from the knee to the hip and the skin of the buttocks all puckered. We can smell the sea. It smells of rotten eggs.

The lady with the bosom which hangs twitching from her neck and shoulders, like a calf just born, too weak still to climb to its legs but already alive with awkward movements, sweet, thrashing — the lady, our guide — pulls aside the curtain covering one wall of the hall of stones. The space between curtain and wall is divided in separate cells. The grey curtain’s folds glisten with a phosphorescent sliminess where the eyes of moths watered, it brings to mind the veins in old glass, and the guide moves it to one side. In the first section there is a trough or a manger and in this crib lies an old woman. Her hair is curly and her face wrinkled and red and humid like that of an infant who has just been writhing and crying. She wears a home-knitted sweater, buttoned to just below the chin. Her gown is pushed up to above the hips. Her bare thighs like the skin of an old naked hen. On her one foot, the right one, there is a silk stocking. Through the stocking one may see that the foot is dark, as if exceptionally contused. But it is also shiny and smooth and from close up it is clear then that the foot, up to the ankle, is entirely covered (overgrown) with long, rough, thick, black hairs. The woman lay on her back, the eyes closed and her hands balled to fists, and she kept on repeating in a weeping voice: “Look at my foot, my foot. It’s all hairy. It’s the hair of the fairy. Look at my foot, my foot. . ”

In the other units, separated by wooden partitions, there was a bed here and a cradle there. And in each of these, under grey covers there were human figures stuffed into the rags of blankets and counterpanes, everyone wailing or lamenting with particular intensity at his or her own pitch. Watch out! They were all old, sometimes grey, sometimes without clothes. The eyes were either shut tight or staring blindly (staring at blindness) or else veiled by glassy tears — and a white matter in the corners of the eyes, around the lids. Where some of them have kicked away the bedcovers, as writhing babies sometimes do, you can see how smudged the thickly applied make-up has become, how fudged are the rouge and the corpse-white powder and the black accentuations. You will also notice the clown clothes, the costumes of fools, of augusts, of pierrots — blocked, striped, with dots, patched, too voluminous or too tight. Under the blankets, on the mattresses, there was sawdust — humid, mouldy, with insects. They were the weak of mind, those who have become children, the droolers, the Irish terrorists, the moribund members of a dismantled circus who washed up here, the orphan people, those who were rendered anonymous by war, gypsies without a fatherland, earlier clients of the eating tower which is now spoilt, retired police spies — all of them now in the care (or safekeeping? under observation?) of the lady with the glasses of fireproof blue plastic. Or were these tatters and folds the standard outfit for all admitted to this institution?

We continue inspecting and then decide to go down the maze again, to crawl on our bellies to the other exit, to the live burial ground of the horses. It is still autumn. I notice how the person crawling ahead of me gets stuck in a narrowing of the pipe and how she can neither advance nor retreat. I can look down her dress further than the hips. And I thought: by means of our bones the flesh clings to life, or, by means of the skeleton does the flesh adhere to life.