by A. S. Byatt
“Does anyone know of any spell made against Bo-Me’s family?” said Kun, then, looking not at A-Oa but at Cha-Hun, who also, stammering, seeing a chance, or a possible chance, in this moment of danger, began to confess. He confessed that he had been visited by spirits in his sleep, that he had seen an old woman perched on his pillow, that she had tied his will with strings, had spat in his mouth and subdued him to her evil desires. That he had gone to her, driven by this spell, and had been given a witchcake, which he had hidden in An-At’s porridge. That An-At, under the influence had … The whole household was cursed by this dry old woman’s terrible jealousy, of Bo-Me’s sons, of An-At’s youth and beauty; she had brought them down. Bo-Me sobbed in the dust.
“Answer,” said Kun, to A-Oa.
“I have no spittle,” said A-Oa, whispering.
The crowd began agitatedly to reminisce. She had looked at one, and that night he had had stomach pains. Another, coming to the water-tank after her, had seen a swimming snake vanish in its shadows. It was true that Cha-Hun had seemed possessed for some moons. They had remarked on it. An-At, who had stood with her arms crossed under her breasts during Cha-Hun’s recital, now gave A-Oa one look, one quick look of complicity, hostility, perhaps guilt, and abased herself deliberately beside her mother-in-law, crying out that she had sinned but not by her own doing, that she was guilty but the victim of witchcraft, that the village was under a spell …
Kun said, “This woman tempted her own brother-in-law to wickedness. He was so shamed that he could live no longer under the same roof, but ran away and threw himself from the high ridge into the gully. His bones were there white and unburied. No man can get down there. He has been eaten by birds and worms, under the sky. I saw this in a vision, and climbed up there, and saw that it must be true. Now she is old, and can do no more harm with her beauty, she has turned to making spells, as we all know, to invading our thoughts and our pillows. None of us are safe. We are all tainted by this woman. How shall we clean ourselves?”
They chattered, for a timeless time, discussing the ill-fortunes that the village had experienced, yellow worms and wilted kale, mould in a millet-crock, the sudden drying up of one man’s goat’s milk, the barrenness of a new and expensive wife. An-At, daring, fighting for her life, put her arms round Bo-Me and was not shrugged away. Her proud little face was bony with fear and attention. What shall we do, they asked each other uncertainly, whilst more complaints bubbled up and frothed like the gases in fermented beans stored in a badly-scoured jar. A-Oa stood impassively in her doorway, with the hen fussing at her feet. She did not think of speaking in her own defence: this had always been coming, and speech would be a puff of air to the conflagration. Kun said nothing, but she knew it depended on Kun. He was watching the boy, Cha-Hun, who knelt beside his mother, afraid of touching her in case he accidentally came into contact with the tenacious and desperate An-At. There was a kind of desperate pout to his lips, and a deep frown driving down to his eyes. Finally he turned to Kun, and said, sullen and smouldering, “What should we do then? What do you advise?” Kun made a quieting little gesture with his puffy smooth hands in the air above Cha-Hun, and moved a step or two towards him. He touched his shoulder and looked from Cha-Hun to An-At and Bo-Me and onwards to A-Oa. His answer was a question. “How have we done in the past, to clean the village?” And it was Cha-Hun who answered, “We sun the jinx. We put the jinx to dry in the sun.” “In the sun,” said Bo-Me’s voice, liquid with tears and wailing. She shook her swollen face from side to side and An-At moved with her, making their movements one. Kun said no more. It was taken up by the common voice. “We must sun the jinx. The sun will dry out the evil.”
A-Oa had seen this done to others, in her time. They took her outside the village, pummelling her a little, but not much, made uneasy by her dogged silence. They tied her with linen bands and hemp cords to a dead stump of a tree in the middle of the dust and mud, in the space outside the village where they danced on sacred days. They tied her sitting down, in the hot sun, looking across at the row of thorn trees and the distant mountain slopes and rim, dancing with unreal blue and white. Three days, the time was. If she was still alive after three days, they could fetch her in and the evil would be judged to have been searched out by the sun and shrivelled away. The heat this year was the worst in living memory, and had gone on unduly long. The rains might come. It was possible that A-Oa might have braced, or stilled her spirit and flesh to endure, to wait quietly, quietly, to live on, for the rain, for the end of the boiling and bubbling which she had seen on other flesh and knew she must expect. Dried old women had been brought in again, blistered and baked like badly-cured leather, given sips of honey-water. One had had no mind, fried brains, the children called her, and one had babbled like a child of times long forgotten and children long dead. She found no such tenacity in herself, considering her plight, in the first few lucid hours. Nor did she find fear, even animal fear, a need to scrabble at her bands and moan for pity. The truth was, she had known when she had seen the glistening life of Cha-Hun’s prick, its blind, swaying need, that she had no answering need, not for anything, she was finished. She wondered if they would behead An-At. She would not know what they did. She thought briefly of her hen, and its little pleasures, its conceited expectant trotting. Perhaps they had wrung its neck already. Her mouth twisted with pain for the hen.
Before the sun was at its height she did look about her, at the black, sooty-barked thorn trees, so baked that their leaves were gone and no one knew whether they would come again in the spring or stand like wet skeletons when the rain came. The mountains were cold and slightly glassy, on the high snow, smoky and slaty lower down. The sky was not yet heavy: it was blue, angry blue and dry. It moved with dryness as water moves finely in deep rivers, a surface always the same but with a shimmer of shifting depth. The sun came up behind her, stood over her, and went down behind the thorns in front of her. At first sweat came, more moisture than she’d thought she had, standing fleetingly on the hair on her upper lip, vapouring away. Parts of her body hurt in turn. Her eyelids: a last desperate prickle amongst the lashes and then the fine skin began to lift away into blisters as she saw her own veins boil bloody on her retina. Her tongue, huge, a weightless boulder, cracking against her teeth. Heat ran down her spine and killed and fetched up the colourless scales and cushions of skin above the vertebrae, where it was thin, where it flaked back to expose raw wet flesh that dried, fast. A sound came in her ears, a hissing and squeaking, the contents of her skull writhing and shrinking like intestines in a frying pan.
Pain is one thing when it is local, a smashing or bursting of healthy flesh, an arm cracked by a falling boulder, a narrow passage ruptured by the huge head of a child. Pain everywhere, eating drily inwards, diminishing the body, turning it into part of the air, of the surrounding sky, as the snake, the egg, the rat stain had shrunk and departed on her altar, is something else. She was it, and she watched it, with her whole attention, and when cold night came she shivered at its cessation, reluctant to return to her sore self. All her body desired water, in the night. She thought of wet cloth, pressed on her brow when the doomed sons were struggling into the world: she thought of lingering dregs in the rice bowl when the wet breakfast rice had been supped up. She thought of water on leaves when the rains had begun, running, collecting, hanging, falling. She thought of her hen, sipping puddles in the rainy season, turning its beak up to swallow. She was tormented by very small quantities of water, in drops rather than in cups. The thought of the tank would have been insupportable, annihilation by too much. In the night her bones hurt, the marrow creaking in them, her knees and ankles hideous knobs. She slept, some of the time, or fell into the pain, hurrying the end.
On the second day, in the morning, before the heat of the day, she saw them vaguely, watching her from between the thorn trees. Their shapes were outlined in excruciating flame, they burned on the air as they moved, with such fluent ease, gesturing with an arm, planting a foot, as
though this was natural and possible. She could see only through slits, could not tell who they were or what they were. As the sun rose, a kind of merciful oven-black rose inside her, a black not of shade but of heated iron into which nevertheless she dipped for respite, for loss of herself, as one might dive into a pool. Long sores snapped open in her arms and legs, peeled back blackly and darkened. She saw dark, dark, and round it like beads in dark hair, blue flashes of the uniform but splintering sky.
The second night was the worst time, cool enough to restore locality to splits and fissures, to make her want to move the immovable hummock of her tongue, to want to raise a bound wrist and brush at her terrible many-pustuled eyes. She thought of herself: so this is where I was coming: and everything that had once belonged to herself seemed small and husked, dust to sweep, a stain to be wiped from the grid of the cooking-stove where something had spilled, and been baked blackly on, and had tenaciously adhered. Why begin, thought A-Oa, if we come here so quickly?
On the third day, she was two. Her mind stood outside herself, looking down on the shrivelling flesh, with its blues and umbers, on the cracked face, the snarling mouth, the bared, dry-bone teeth. Her mind moved in its own shape, stepping rapidly, so it had feet of a kind, looking out of angled vision, so it had eyes of a kind, at the poor thing tied to the tree trunk, at the thorns in their dusty blackness, at the blue bowl of the hot sky through which power and heat rippled uninterrupted and through her shape too, bathing in the heat, scooping up the heat with mental hands as one might scoop spring-water in the bathing-pool in the river, after the rains, when the river wasn’t dry. After a time, she thought, she would step away from the thing altogether, and the dry snort and rattle would go out of its throat. Meanwhile she stepped this way and that testing the dryness, displacing heat and light as though she was what they were, but more dense. A flicker of life came and went in the thorn trees. She could not see clearly who was there: the moving bodies were sluggish blots on her quick, hot vision, humped and awkward. There was a thing she could do, she thought, to make them skip and jump: she turned her bright, airy head towards them and gathered a long stream of heat and dryness, which coiled round the thorn trees like a flung rope, like a garment, and here and there the thorns in their turn flickered into a new life, little points of silver and gold and dusky red rose on the twiggy fingers and danced along the dry black arms, and the heat and dryness could be seen for what they were, a translucent but visible veil of moving air, and then the whole tree was one huge head of flaring hairs, rising and crying. So it was true, she thought, I can set trees alight, and she danced a little, to the cracking and rushing sound of the conflagration. Small figures scuttled away like woodlice out of cut straw and she watched them with satisfaction as a child might watch ants run from a smashed nest. The eddies of heat from the burning swirled out across the muddy ground and took her with them, away from the strapped and cracking thing, away.
LOSS OF FACE
They travelled, every day, three sides of a rectangle. Down eighteen floors of one rectangular tower, under the wide motorway, with its moving belts of fast cars, up nineteen floors of a fatter, less glittering tower on the other inaccessible shore of the throughway. It was possible to get lost, like rats in an orientation maze, and perform several journeys in the polished grey subways, but these zigzags were straightened out as though a line had been jerked taut, and up they came, to the nineteenth floor.
In front of them, as they stood briefly beside the melancholy roar of the motors, reared a brown tower whose purpose seemed to be the raising and display of a rectangular number, made up of hot little red lights like so many brakelights up above the city. The first day the number was 379. On the second, 378. By the third, they had established, tentatively, the hypothesis that it diminished by one, each day. One of them had hazarded the guess that the number might be the stock exchange closing price, perhaps in Tokyo, perhaps in Singapore. They could not tell how many regular descending steps the figure would have to take to be statistically unlikely to be a closing price. They were lecturers in English literature. They could have asked, on the nineteenth floor, where the conference was, but their brief conversational breaks were hectic with serious oriental questions about Kristeva’s views on Desire and Harold Bloom’s map of misreading. Celia Quest, who was speaking on John Milton and George Eliot, was also puzzled by the liquid red numbers above the lifts that translated them from ground to air. In the smaller, lecture tower, there was no fourth floor. In the larger, where she slept under oyster satin and ate a New World version of a Continental breakfast, there was no thirteenth. Her room was 1840, which Professor Baxter said was easy to remember, since that was the year of publication of Browning’s Sordello. When he said Sordello Celia’s inner eye was visited by an irrelevant but very clear image of the curious mediaeval tall turrets of San Gimignano in Tuscan sunlight, threatening, slit-eyed, ramshackle fortresses in another world in another time. And beyond these Brueghel’s vertiginous, cracking Tower of Babel. Out of the heavily mesh-curtained window of 1840 could be seen only the deep ravine between massive, graceless erections, in daylight all muddy, liverish brown and khakis, indistinct in the thick petroliridescent air. At night it was a black gulf where lights ran in bright streamers. Out of the window across the road, on the nineteenth floor, could be seen the veined and rounded chalky knobs of intractable mountains, whose black on white clefts descended into a line of trees before the towerscape intervened. This sunny chalk, and an occasional pungent smell, partly garlic, partly something unidentifiably fishy, rising from odd gratings in the pavement, were the only indications that they had come halfway round the world, crossing above deserts and mountain-ranges, typhoon-whipped yellow waves and spicy cities, outside which they had sat confined in their metal-cigar prison, circumspectly confined for fear of turbaned terrorists.
Celia gave two lectures. The first was on Milton’s figures of virtue. Milton was very sure what virtue was. Celia described the certainties of the incorruptible Christ in Paradise Regained, rejecting food for his hunger, world empire and the blandishments of literature, of the best that has been thought and said in the world. This Christ censored incessant reading with scriptural comment. “However many books/Wise men have said are wearisome.” He kept his balance on the dizzy pinnacle of the Temple. “Tempt not the Lord thy God, he said, and stood.” Celia’s students in the depressed English Midlands rejected John Milton. They would not suspend disbelief in his patriarchally predestined cosmology. They thought his characterization of Eve was sexist and his vocabulary élitist. Logocentric and phallocentric, the more sophisticated added for good measure. They had fed on the issues of social realist fiction, and would not hear his music. Here in the uniformly beige Press Centre the assembled oriental scholars listened quietly and politely. Their country, the guide book said, was Confucian, Buddhist, Catholic, residually shamanistic. The guide book was American, full of eclectic and egalitarian enthusiasm for all these cultural expressions. On the aeroplane Celia had learned their alphabet, an extraordinarily logical and lucid construction, devised in the Middle Ages of Europe by a scholarly ruler. It consisted of a series of discrete squares, in which the addition and subtraction of strokes and hooks represented a coherent system of sequential phonemes and dispositions of lip and tongue; plosive and susurrant. It was a language that would have delighted an artificial intelligence, or a less jealous divine artificer in the days of the Babel tower. It was reasonable. It represented, the guide book asserted, a series of sounds of which no other race was wholly capable, even after much practice. Did it, Celia wondered, proceed like Chinese dialects, in a versatile string of monosyllables? If it did, how did its speakers, its professors, hear Milton’s transitions from Latinate complexity to Anglo-Saxon plain speech? She did not know who she was talking to. She quoted the confidently absolute Lady in Comus.
Virtue can see to do what Virtue would
By her own radiant light, though Sun and Moon
Were in the flat s
ea sunk.
And in front a sea, a restricted sea of faces. Oriental faces, golden and clear-cut under fine black hair, thoughtful faces which were very simply inscrutable. Celia liked differences, large or minute. She could tell a Japanese face from a Chinese face and both from these faces, in general if not always in particular. No two faces are the same; this endless human diversity is one of the more hopeful things about the preponderant species on the planet. The human sciences predict, with varying accuracy, the behaviour of class, gender and money, as the biological sciences predict the chances of transmitting haemophilia, the self-destruction of lemmings and the heroic transatlantic crossings of certain butterflies. A psychologist had once told Celia that a man and a woman would have to engender eight hundred thousand children to have any statistical chance at all of producing identical offspring from different eggs. She had walked on the Great Wall of China on which, at any one time, one sixth of the workforce is likely to be taking exercise. All these men and women stroll calmly and busily in identical blue suits and peaked caps. All different. The uniformity of the black hair, to Western eyes, creates an illusion of greater similarity. Westerners must depend heavily on hair colour for their Gestalt of a stranger or an acquaintance. After the Chinese time, Celia found herself seeing her compatriots as unfinished monsters, pallid meat topped by kinky, lustreless, unreal hair.