The Four-Gated City

by Doris Lessing

  Essential be conscious the moment thought comes into mind otherwise it is a lost thought.

  Here we go again:if you don’t know something you can’t know it. You can only learn something you already begin to know.‘I can’t tell you something you don’t know. ‘

  And again:Every attitude, emotion, thought, has its opposite held in balance out of sight but there all the time. Push any one of them to an extreme, and boomps-a-daisy, over you go into its opposite.

  I am good and kind and intelligent.I am bad and cruel and stupid.

  All right, all right, all right. You just keep off a minute.

  The young man in Virginia Woolf’s story who was mad. He heard the birds talking in ancient Greek.

  Onomataopoeia. Think about it!

  An emotion. Fear for instance. You can see how it converts into a thought-if you are quick enough.

  A body is a machine, for the conversion of one kind of energy into another.

  Here Martha succumbed again to the Devil.

  Hell (one of them?) is hot. It has a harsh light. There is a sticky clinging feel to it. MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL it has a beat. Both regular and irregular. Like a mad clock, like the way paraffin lamps flare up before going out, but it flares with a regular irregularity. A wild hysterical sort of beat yet regular. Yet at the same time small and unimportant. A harshness of black and white. A sticky feel. Light without shadow. Monsters. First you see just people, you and I. Then you see, they, we, are deformed, our faces twisted with greed and anger. Man from grocery, a portly slow-moving man, high-coloured in face. In hell he leers-you see that he has dogteeth, fangs, is sub-human. Faces like embryos, half-formed. A gallery of faces of people. Devils. Ordinary people. Faces are blanks which can take masks, good or bad. Hate, envy, greed, fear, slide over people’s faces so fast you can only just catch them.

  It was at that stage that Martha was conducted through the Stations of the Cross by the Devil. She knew nothing of this ritual, had never been instructed in it, nor had known well enough to affect her people who performed it. Yet it was as if she knew it, knew its meaning. From the moment when Pontius Pilate washed his hands to the time when she, Martha, who was also the Devil, prepared to be bound on the Cross, because of the (rightfulness of her crimes, she was as it were whipped through the ritual by the hating scourging tongue of the Devil who was herself, her hating, self-hating self. Yet though she was not able to refuse obedience to this ritual, she was quite able to protect herself from the boy who visited her during it: the boy who had killed, without meaning to, the baby he had said he would protect and who was now doing penance for the sin he had committed. He was a slight fair boy, who looked much younger than his nineteen years. He looked like an earnest schoolboy. He sat on the edge of the big four-poster bed, wringing his hands together and weeping, while he explained to Martha how God was punishing him out of love; and how if Martha was being punished, it was out of the love of God. When he had gone-he had to get up pretty early to be at his packing work at the chemical firm in Tottenham, Martha continued taking instruction from the Fiend, until the play was played out. ‘But I’ve done that, I’ve finished with that, ’ she said crossly to the Devil, refusing further instruction, and lay down to sleep for a while.

  Martha was now unable to leave Hell. So she thought. Exhausted, she would say ‘enough’, and lie down to sleep in Hell. In sleep the most dreadful nightmares followed her. But she remembered that when she was a child there had been a long period when she had been frightened to sleep because of nightmares, and had used all kinds of tricks and techniques to outwit them. She remembered these now, used them. It occurred to her that she thought she was finally lost, was cast for ever into this sea, but all the same she could say, I’m tired, I will sleep-and did. Or, asleep, say: I am in Hell, wake up, and did. Or performed the rituals before sleep that could ward off nightmares which she had learned through necessity as a child.

  This thought lessened the grip of the Devil and of Hell.

  But did not send them away: she was still curious.

  If all these sub-human creatures are aspects of me, then I’m a gallery of freaks and nature’s rejects.

  See above. Fool. Don’t you ever learn. These things are there. Always. I can choose to be them or not. I can collect them the way dust gets collected on a magnetically treated duster. Or not.

  In Hell the light is on all the time.

  In prison cells and in the torture cells and in the locked wards of mental hospitals light burns always.

  Man understands the devil very well. The devil has taught him all he knows.

  All dark or all light. Monsters and sadists create these conditions. Monsters and sadists live in them.

  The face of Bob Parrinder. He hasn’t grown into his own face yet. He is a self-important little boss. His face like a landscape before sun rises. Shadows and light will fill it. If I held the mask of self-importance in front of him, as last night when he said, Oh yes of course, I understand all that, he’d die with shame. Olive’s face: what she is.

  Mr. Briggs the Carpenter says: A letter for you, Mrs. Hesse. His face like a caulifíower going yellow and rotten at fringes. Underneath tired and very frightened.

  Paul’s face: Sally-Sarah’s little Paul, when he sucked his thumb and put his face on his mum’s silk breast.

  For a week Martha wrote nothing. She was too far gone in Hell. Yet not so far that she didn’t watch the days pass: five days, four days left, and so on. Inside her head hammered the enemy: or, voices might come from a wall or a chair (not accidentally, she began to see; she directed this, but did not yet know how. But there was no time to learn how). She had wished to return to the house in Radlett Street in a shape of competence, but would have to do so still undermined by the Devil. At this stage she believed she would never lose him-that, like poor Lynda, she would carry him with her for always. She thought that the last few weeks had taken her right over the edge into a permanent stage of being plugged into the sea of sound; and that its main, persistent, hammering, never-sleeping voice, was the Devil’s, the voice of the self-punisher.

  She bathed. Drank tea. Ate toast. She tidied the room which looked as if a cyclone had been through it. She dressed and examined herself.

  She was again much too thin. She looked haggard. However, there were three weeks before Maisie’s daughter arrived and in the meantime doubtless Mark and Lynda would put up with her. She would go to the hairdresser’s tomorrow … thinking these practical thoughts, hell retreated a step or two.

  She collected all her notes and scribbles together and before bundling them into a box for future examination she wrote:

  1. This sort of thing is not only very dangerous, but extremely inefficient. There must be other ways of doing it. And not drugs either. I’ve sent myself over the edge.

  2. If a dictator wishes to control a Party, or a country; if a hierarchy of priests wish to control their flock; if any power-seeker anywhere wants to create a manipulated group-he, she, has to embody the self-hater. It is as easy as that. And it is very easy to do.

  3. I’ve been turned inside out like a glove or a dress. I’ve been like the negative of a photograph. Or a mirror image. I’ve seen the underneath of myself. Which isn’t me-any more than my surface is me. I am the watcher, the listener …

  Finally the central fact. If at any time at all I had gone to a doctor or to a psychiatrist, that would have been that. I’m over the edge. But even if I stay here I can manage (like Lynda). Why? Because I know just that small amount about it not to let myself be stampeded. If at any moment I’d given in during this session I’d have been swept away. Without knowing what I know, through Lynda, I’d not have been able to hold on. Through hints and suggestions in all the books, through my own experience, through Lynda-but without these, a doctor or a psychiatrist would have needed only to use the language of the self-hater and that would have been that. Finis, Martha! Bring out your machines. Bring out your drugs! Yes, yes, you know best, doctor, I’ll
do what you say: I’m too scared not to.

  Classic definition of Paranoia: ‘A feeling of being slighted … favours the secret nurturing of ideas of great power … such an individual may come into conflict with the law, either as a direct actionist (e.g. murder) or as a petitioner (law suits) a development which he regards as the natural outcome of his great but unrecognized importance, and of the envy and malice of an indifferent world … an impressive façade of reasonableness, earnestness and “normality” may cloak this psychopathology to an alarming degree. ’

  The house was empty. Lynda had left a note that she was staying with Jill and Francis. Jill believed she was pregnant again, she did not know by whom. Mark’s message said he had taken Elizabeth to Nanny Butts’s: the doctors said a few weeks of rest on the drugs prescribed would probably send her back to her husband and children in a reasonable frame of mind.

  There was a letter from Maisie, giving the date of Rita’s arrival, in about a month’s time.

  On Mark’s desk was The Memorandum to Myself now rather longer.

  ‘… it will be the responsibility of individuals to forecast, plan, make provision for contingencies whose outlines are already visible.

  1. We are all hypnotized by the idea of Armageddon, the flash brighter than a million suns, the apocalyptic convulsion, the two-minute war, instant death. Populace more than government; but governments as well. Everyone is stunned by an approaching annihilation like an animal hypnotized by the powerful dazzle of an approaching car.

  ‘2. This prevents preparation, psychological, and physical, for what is likely. Which will be local catastrophic occurrences-the poisoning of a country, or of an area; the death of part of the world; the contamination of an area for a certain period of time. These events will be the development of

  ‘3. What is already happening. A bomber carrying nuclear warheads crashes in Spain. All kinds of denials, evasions are made. It can be taken as an axiom that all governments everywhere lie-it is inevitable. Naive people think that conspiracies are seven men around a table in a Machiavellian plot: a conspiracy is an atmosphere, or a frame of mind in which people are impelled to do things, perhaps those things that they could never do as individuals, or couldn’t do at other times when the atmosphere is different. Ever since the last war governments have stockpiled every conceivable weapon of attack and defence, and there have been innumerable accidents, mostly minor ones, or threats of accidents-but the populace have never heard of them, nor would they find out except by accident, or by a member of the “conspiracy” (government department, commission, factory, etc.) not being sufficiently brainwashed into secrecy and spilling the beans, or when something happens like a bomber crashing carrying radioactive live warheads. What will happen is a development of what is already happening and what has been accelerating, out of control, since 1914 and the green light for mass extermination. Areas of the world are already being poisoned, contaminated, threatened, etc. In five years, ten, fifteen, twenty, something “unforeseeable” will happen, such as that a mysterious disease will decimate a country, emanating from a factory which manufactures disease, or that a container full of some poison, or destructive material sunk in the sea-bed in an (indestructible) container will be washed up or explode or release its contents, or that in a moment of extreme crisis between countries one side will by accident, in a fit of hysteria, release weapons which will totally destroy its oppponent or even itself-something like that.

  ‘4. It can be taken absolutely as an axiom that the populace will not be told the truth, nine-tenths because the governments concerned won’t know what is the truth, will be as much in the dark as anybody else, and one-tenth out of panic, greed, hysteria, fear of their own citizenry.

  ‘5. Therefore groups of people aware of this situation should set themselves to …’

  Here the Memorandum broke off.

  Martha rang Lynda.

  Who said that Jill said she wouldn’t have an abortion again ‘just to please all of you’. Francis had said that she must do as she wanted.

  The point was, said Lynda, where was everybody going to live? There were Francis, Jill, the children. Gwen had moved in with her sister. There were two new campers or squatters. One was Nicky Anderson from the old Aldermaston days. He had had a bad breakdown after a spell in prison. He had been told that he was paranoic. This had seemed convincing at the time-the ‘classic’ definition of paranoia could scarcely fail to convince an unprepared person-and in any case he was very weakened by one thing and another. Then, coming out of the doctor’s hands into those of his old friend Francis, it occurred to him that after all there wasn’t a revolutionary or reformer in history who could not have been dismissed or discouraged by such methods. It had not been easy to maintain this rallying towards self-esteem except with Francis’s help, and he had asked if he could stay with the couple. He had a girl-friend who had been kind to him when ill, having been ill herself. His parents had cast him off (or so he felt-they would welcome him back into the bosom of the family as a penitent paranoic, but not otherwise), and he said he wished to live with this girl. She had moved in too. He had no money, so she had been keeping him. There seemed no signs of this couple leaving Francis’s and Jill’s flat.

  ‘They are really all so very sad, ‘ said Lynda. ‘But I suppose their teeth have been set on edge. And my teeth have been set on edge. Perhaps my poor papa’s teeth were set on edge too? He used to go on about that war all the time … But it’s not only Jill now, it’s Gwen. Gwen has a job as a bunny because she says she’s sick of sex. And Jill won’t sleep with Francis, she says she hates sex. And she says that something comes over her when she’s with some man in a pub, and then because she doesn’t have a contraceptive, she gets pregnant.’

  ‘Poor Francis, ’ said Martha.

  ‘And poor Mark, ’ said Lynda. ‘I’m a wicked woman, I know that.’

  ‘Lynda, are you sure you haven’t been doing too much? ’

  ‘How could I ever, ever, ever do too much-after all the misery I’ve inflicted on everyone? ’

  Martha went to fetch Lynda, to get her to come home and rest; she recognized only too clearly the person who was speaking through Lynda.

  Lynda did come, but said it would only be for a short time. If she was going to crack up altogether by staying out in the world, working, then she would. She was not going to live her life out on the terms that either Mark or Martha must look after her. She was violent, weepy, self-punishing.

  Martha’s devil-haunted head rang with echoes from Lynda.

  Soon, however, she noted that because she was very busy, very worried over Lynda, her own devil retreated. From being too terrified to listen too closely, in case she provoked him into worse, frightened to use or think words, phrases that might ‘bring him on’ (like an attack of malaria!), she became careless of him. Soon, the Devil, once histrionic, flamboyant, accusing, violent, had become a silly little nagging voice, which became swallowed in the sea of sound-was just one little voice among many. And soon, the thing was all over-finished. Her mind was her own.

  She was as sane as the next one.

  But before Rita’s arrival, there appeared the Maynards, in the form of a letter which Martha even now could not help seeing as a summons instructing her to meet them for lunch next day at such and such a restaurant in Chelsea. The letter was from a hotel: food for thought here, since the Maynards had so many relatives in England. And the choice of the restaurant too; for it was one of the half-dozen ‘in’ restaurants of swinging London.

  She had of course heard from time to time of the Maynards, but not much more than that Judge Maynard had retired, and that Binkie Maynard, who had remained married to his war widow, was an alcoholic, or not far from one, and was running an important government department.

  Facts: 1. They must be well over seventy by now. 2. There could be only one reason for wanting to see her-Rita. 3. Whatever they had heard of her way of life, they were bound to disapprove of it.

  The rest
aurant was called Charlie’s and Johnny’s Eataria: Charlie’s for short. When Martha went in, she saw the Maynards, two very old people sitting at a not very good table. They looked through her, not recognizing her. The thing was, she was making the most of her post-retreat thinness, and wore a ‘wand’ of white linen, with chestnut hair, and dark glasses.

  She went up to them, greeted them, sat down, putting on a pretence of ease to cover up their look of-not merely surprise but affront, which, Martha could see, was due not so much to her, personally, as to a London which produced so prodigally unpleasant phenomena.

  They were indeed old, and seemed more so in this scene set for youth, or for people who wanted to appear young, or who wanted to feed themselves on the aromas of youth. They were attended by a charming little waiter, probably Italian, wearing a strawberry-coloured cavalier’s muslin shirt, with ruffles, and a minuscule striped cotton apron with hills half-concealing, half-displaying what tight white pants were designed to emphasize. All the waiters had pretty little bums, glossy urchin hair, the look of well-used tarts in a good house.