NO ONE BUT HIMSELF
1.
The midwife argued with the doctor who hauled him out with forceps anyway, and with a thunderclap he washed up on shore and the line was cut. The lights were so bright. He was abandoned, shipwrecked, a castaway who couldn’t stop talking, but for five days the best he could do was a half-dead fly in a swaying web in the white place while other babies who would not listen rolled around and howled.
When the nurse scooped him up and carried him down corridors, he met pirates and tried English, Dutch, French, African dialects, Indian dialects, American tribal dialects, Spanish. The nurse whispered she was a nun from Convent of Las Consebinas and warned him of the unhealthy air of Porto Bello.
Back at his mother’s breast he took a nipple in the afternoon, half listening to familiar rumbles from a man who had lost his rights to this dry harbour that tasted of home: “Amorous barbarous collusion, destitute epiphany.” He’d never seen such rain. The window was streaming. His mother’s breasts were streaming. All was black and white and blue.
The man smiled at him but blankly, and continued to rumble.
All manner of things and animals and people were gathered, waiting, and now would listen just to him. Except the foliage was in the way, as was concern for his mother, as was his own size and ability, as were walls and windows. He needed, among other things, to explain that he was no bird or copycat or urchin. Nobody should have doubts at this age. He turned from the nipple to question the man, but was shipwrecked again on the same hostile sterile promontory. He interrogated a castle owner about his scorched-earth policy. “Up the Chagre River west of Colon into the jungle with a force of twelve hundred.”
There were noise-like words and word-like sounds; he played with both but did not have the meaning knack, though he was beginning to grasp and manipulate the flashes when exhaustion hit him like a fleshy wall.
It went on like this, rescue and shipwreck, the nun carting him along riverbeds to his mother, back to the white place (floaty web in the window), to his mother, to the white place and web, to his rumbling father. He shaped his voice till it was full of plaint, a confession if that would do, an apology if that would do the trick, a summation of the events of his life so far, a comparative study of pre- and post-womb societies, attempts that he knew were going nowhere and which he should not expect ever to end. Nothing had prepared him. Each rescue took him past rows of faces and to each he pled his case: should a human soul be so treated? Was this capture and release? Was this the price to pay for an audience? Were they his wide continuous diverse family and he the sole performer? He tried the blue wheel, combustion, shuttle-cock, the reformation, re-priming the pump, binary fission, and was working on knitting when the egg cracked, the wind freshened and blew the roof off, and he was bouncing in his mother’s arms away from hospital smells and into new inter-locutions and challenging protocols.
He opened his mouth and spoke to a crow, a street, eight houses and a freighter. He spoke to heat and cold and his father’s prickly stinky friends, icicles and sunbeams and uncle’s fingers. What did he tell? It was a long unbroken description of all he’d seen before the time of wreckage and rescue, and it was nuanced and detailed, a portrait of God in a cosmic gallery, the flares and iridescent explosions from wars that must be recounted, for this was important, this was the prehistory of his species. The birth of fingernails, the right to choose, the mouthful of scavenged antelope, the loggia with a view, a baseball hat on a battlefield, the think-am man, the industrial revolution, the musical always of his mother’s voice singing on and on except at night, dreams that would open all the doors and windows, and angels lining up for the rickety roller-coaster that was being assembled and would soon take up all the space in the backyard and . . .
Creatures nodded and made trilling noises, but made no sign that they understood what he was telling them.
He kept extolling the epic. They kept interrupting. He grew desperate. It began to fade. Its vivid urgency diminished. And then at last he began to understand the level of their expectations of themselves and of him. At first disheartened with the paltry traffic they taught him to use in glory’s place, and then horrified, he talked ferociously, passionately, to everyone.
Then when he was two a woman with a large face and loose throat praised his foot.
“What a little foot,” she said. “Such a pretty foot.”
He was dumbstruck. He stopped talking in amazement.
She took his foot in her rough hand and held it to her cheek. The heat of her hand, the penetration of her stare. And he stopped and felt the simple separate pieces that he’d been noticing lately (but needed to ignore because he couldn’t connect them) fit together.
The new terrible confusions began with socks, which foot to which sock? which sock to which shoe? and proceeded through buttons and the discovery of size and order — his pants button would fit into his mother’s shirt’s torn buttonhole but that was wrong — and vehicles, which side? how turn? why was outside inside in transit? He was a vital tiny speck in the thrust of things who had been awarded a voice big enough to infiltrate every nook and mall and empyrean his senses butted up against, and the urge to describe such forays, and he was reduced to geography. He tried to please his mother but it was useless. She found him perfectly flawed. And as far as his dad was concerned he was a show-off.
Then came the period of cuts and stomach-aches and here is the potty (the summit of his tribe’s cultural accomplishments), do a Good One.
He spoke to everyone, adapting the plain system he’d inherited, and said nothing of interest, as far as he was concerned, until he was twenty-six and met his cousin Emma in the university cafeteria amid a blinding riot of silver slashing light, crash of crockery, chirping voices. He didn’t hear a word she said and none of her communication reached him, except for the way she leaned. The way she leaned, listening to him, shaped something similar, a kind of twirl, in him.
Charles decided that from then on he’d speak as if he belonged to a race of speakers who would only speak to those who knew how to listen. And Emma was the queen of listeners. The twirl turned into a squirm. Be careful, he said to himself. Conserve.
2.
The girl who listened began with geese. Because she was born in spring their loud arrival heralded hers, but by September all her friends were flying south and she heard for the rest of her life in all voices only endings, farewells. She lay on her back as still as she could and listened to her mother’s stories of going away. The Genesis list of au revoir; Moses on the lam; Noah and all the animals, the lamb with the key, poor Satan and the end of time.
Dear Emma, your grandmother is going away soon and you will never see her again, she is my mother and I came out of her tummy just like you came out of my tummy and one day . . . well never mind that now . . . it is time to listen to what she has to say before she leaves. Dear Emma, these are your older brothers and they need all our help to get started in the world, and I still love you but will have to spend a lot of time with them and, look there’s Daddy going to work! Dear Emma, off you go down the steps, go play with the big children on the beach before they go to school, and your cousin? Just ignore him, he’s just teasing, go on, wave bye-bye to the sun, stay away from the waves, they want to take you to Neptune’s Cave. Dear Emma, kiss Daddy, he is going to live with his graduate student in a snake pit and will visit you on weekends. Dear Emma, I won’t tell you again, this is the last time, I’ve had it up to here, don’t cling! you are always underfoot!
Flap flap flap. Honk honk honk.
The girl who listened to everything felt safe in vehicles, and travelled the world in perambulator and wagon and wheelbarrow and tricycle and school desk and library carrel, with and to and from her mom, smiling at everyone and then laughing, and a smile would hook a smile, a laugh would wake a laugh as pleasing as a pigeon coo. Listen. Those are mice feet; that’s a crow; that’s footsteps. That’s a disposal unit; that’s a sucker truck; that’s a jet. Each
crackle and scuff told her she had all the time in the world to practise words, round and fluid conversations in her head.
Because one day a boy would come, a poet explorer done with his travels, a boy with a mysterious illness, and he would be so familiar and he would give her long unhurried sentences as they crossed the Atacama, Patagonia, the Serengeti, the Rift Valley, the Gobi, Archangel on the Dvina, Tasmania, the Ghats, Bhutan, and the Olympic Peninsula, places whose names would wrap around her, impenetrable, words to hold her and catch the attention of passing hunters and gatherers pausing to tie their horses and camels and oxen and goats to stakes in remote outposts in order to converse as they traversed the plain from cities to villages.
It would take years and all her time and energy, but she wanted more than anything to find the perfect listening stance to hear such words and names, and although she did not at first recognise her long-lost cousin when he stood before her and spoke, she closed her eyes and listened, and found him, and finding him, she found it, the way to be in the speaking universe. Breath, breath, breath. Basket of ducks, basket of geese, destined for market. A herd of wild ponies. A dog backed into an alley. Her foremost self leapt. It was him! She was his! This was possible! And then she was running, running, never stopping for more than a heart-thundering breath. The Tao of Running, Zen of Track and Field, her feet slap-slapping winter sidewalks and red-gravel circuits. It was him and she was skinny, hard, muscled and through the applause she would only smile and bow, smile and bow. Her background chorus of tragedy, last days, cellular exile, still sang in her blood, but now Greek was Latin, Latin was French, French was English.
Dear Emma, the desert is not empty, but he has come a long way and you only get to say the briefest hello. And these quickly erected buildings? These scaffolds, libraries, universities, museums and galleries, factories and collieries? Don’t trust them, don’t believe in them. They will crumble, and you will be under the sun again. Dear Emma, this is Charles. He is possible. Speak a perfect greeting. Do not stop listening and do not get fat.
Slap slap slap. Honk honk honk.
All sounds as last words. All thoughts as warnings and instructions. Charles!
3.
“Hello,” he said, blocking all the light in the university cafeteria.
“Hello,” she said.
“I have an olive for you,” he said, and offered a plastic tub of black glistening ovals.
He was strange. He was big, tall, blue, and loud. Already he shimmered. He carried olives and a bundle of books. One book was in Latin, another in Sanskrit.
“I feel I can’t say anything to you I’ve said before,” he said, sitting down.
She was frozen. His dust in her eyes, his smell in her nose. She heard something in the soft edges of his voice that she reached for and it powdered like rust from iron, red and dry and crystalline.
“Do you want to dance?” he said.
“Here?” She felt her word waver in his direction, a wagon train, a hunting party.
“Everything seems smaller now I’m home,” he said. “I’ve wanted to talk to you for such a long time, ever since we were children. Have another olive. What’s wrong?”
She shrugged. His purple shirt was unbuttoned to show a white chest with dark springy fur, and his eyes, light blue, already danced as he leaned forward across the table. She watched him deftly shape each dangerous word, “Biology, ornithology, geology,” as he stared at her. “Galapagos? No, no.” He laughed and waved out of the cafeteria windows toward students on the concourse. “Or maybe I should tell you in order what has happened to me?”
She leaned away. “Sure. Everything.”
“No. Not yet.” He stirred a finger in the air, his eyes closed. “Let me think.”
Everything because everything was swimming in silver. She wiggled her toes in the green rainy light coming through the window. She felt like dancing. She was dancing. Wiggling her toes in hard sand, the sky full of butterflies, and Charles, across from her, was explaining the dangers of mercury, the overpopulation of the world, climate change, refugia, and the near extinction of mountain gorillas and the big cats.
4.
They fixed up his house above the river where Charles watched Emma give birth to a girl, Anne, and two years later to a son, George. On the train home from the city after George, he had a dream. He and Emma were walking outside in springtime. The familiar road was wet, empty except for a gull striding along the yellow line, screaming. When he woke to the porter asking for his ticket it had rained and the sky was overcast and the woodland running the length of the tracks contained many ragged trees. He tried to make a calculation on live versus dead branches. He got stuck between separate branches and possible lives.
5.
There was a new bay window. They liked to stand together in its compass and watch the sky and the fields. Today the fields lay below a steel-grey sky. Two crows were strutting along the path. Wind scuttled rain against the window while a line of cloud brightened to the south. Emma observed and behind her Charles strode the room.
This grasp at a moment wants to make visible the transition between niche and cloister. They (we) call it a crossroad. Remission or decline, extinction or rebound? How can all that has been not be? How can faith be beside the point? What is about to happen? Repetition, like the scattered rain hitting the window, will carry them forward. Once the next scene is upon them there will be no window or rain or crows strutting or clouds brightening. The horizon may be blue to the south, but Emma will be watching her son and Charles will be climbing the stairs to the attic, where Anne, wide-mouthed and feverish, will become Annie, treacherously asleep on a galleon, free of her parents’ out-loud promises, and indentured to something invisible.
6.
On Anne’s first morning at school Charles got up before dawn and sat with a candle at his father’s desk in the garden study and made a fist and looked at it. And God remembered Noah. Had God forgotten the man with all the animals? Charles looked up at his face in the window-glass. His head was never straight, it was always cocked to one side; now it was smiling. He looked like his dad. He took paper and pen out of the drawer and made a list of four things he wanted to know about himself. When he studied the list, he saw that these were not questions his wife should see even if she could answer them. He felt older than thirty-six. His face looked raw. “Why am I anxious?” was the first question. “Why do I talk like a river?” “Why do I love my daughter more than my son?” “When will I tell the thing I can’t tell?”
Light showed in the east. The questions were of no use. They were unscientific. Also, the answers would stand for nothing if he answered them with no one listening. The golden September light came on snail’s pace and made him feel melancholy. Human events happened too suddenly. He wanted to slow things down, live in motion slow as this light. He listened to the house. He was on a promontory, his children sleeping behind him, above him, while the travelling sun bent its patient light through the atmosphere. Over the fields, in the city, were his busy readers. He was exhausted. A moth lay dead on the floor in the dust under the desk. Of his grandparents, their parents, theirs and theirs, he knew almost nothing — only what he knew of their presence in him. The things in the room were gaining colour and edges and ordinariness. He was aware of his place among them. These things had been collected and moved from place to place through some inconceivable effort. They were his things, his and Emma’s, and they would pass on to Anne and George. The light was amazing. He had built a fluid exchange between inside and outside. He could imagine his kids walking separately away into this hot darkness, through the willows into careers and mates and their own children.
After breakfast Emma and Charles walked Anne along the highway to the bus stop. The girl sat down in the shelter and would not speak and refused to stand up. Emma began to cry. Charles said he would carry the girl back to the house and drive her to school, there was time, or they could say goodbye there, or Emma could ride the bus with Anne, or
— ”
“It doesn’t matter,” Anne said. She sat straight.
Emma looked at him as if she was waiting for him to say or do something.
“One of us should go back to George,” he said.
When the bus rumbled into sight Anne stood up and waved, waved the bus on, but it stopped anyway.
Emma scooped the thin girl into her arms and Charles felt stiff and upright as he watched them struggle. Eventually Emma set Anne on her feet by the rattling bus. They stood there, the three of them, in the long shadows. That’s what we do, thought Charles, we turn that struggle with those we love inwards.
“I’m going to school by myself,” said Anne.
She boarded the bus and Emma and Charles watched through the dirty rear window as she made her way down the aisle clutching seats to either side for balance.
7.
Emma yawned and wondered why Charles insisted on order in everything. January was the “month of our wedding,” “our anniversary month,” February was his birth month, and so on; and every new year she posed the question that their lives perhaps no longer fit them, expecting a discussion to follow, and perhaps a decision to pack up and move or at least a plan to travel, and all Charles did was build onto the house — his study jutting into the garden when his first book took off, last year the bay window, and what would it be this year? They were comfortable, but she was restless.
Travellers May Still Return Page 6