Beautiful Mutants and Swallowing Geography

by Deborah Levy

  This is a frightening place. His hand on her belly. More frightening than walking the city late at night, alone, in clothes that make running away difficult. Than the crazy gaze of bureaucrats in uniform, thin youths with knives, the violent hands of a commuter in pinstripes.

  ‘I hope,’ H says, ‘that when I touch you, you can feel everything I feel for you.’

  Mother. The word is full of pain and rage and love. Her children play in small city parks. Cut their feet on glass. Howl into pillows. That’s what children do. They howl into pillows. Howl for justice, for beans, for God, for love.

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  After a while he says:

  ‘I’ll drive you to the airport.’

  She is walking past a cement factory, straw hat on her head, books under her arm. J.K. knows she will have to collect ten 100-peseta coins to phone H from a call box. She knows she will have to find out what the international dialling code is and she will have to find a voice to talk to him with. She could say, why are you there and I’m here? She could say, I’m learning the language, I’m brown and strong, the scar on my forehead is completely gone, every day I dive into the sea and every day is full of you. And then she remembers the eyes of a woman in her early fifties irrigating her garden in Southern Europe, drinking a glass of home-made lemonade at the end of the day after she had scrubbed the soil from her fingernails. What was that look in her eyes? Betrayal. J.K. knew she had been betrayed. Utterly. And the woman knew J.K. knew so she felt humiliated and when their eyes met J.K. had to pretend not to know. She had to find a way of meeting her eye dispossessed of knowledge. What does J.K. know? She knows that no one is innocent. Only the privileged and sentimental can afford to be unknowing.

  J.K. is guilty. She buys the black-haired waitress at the local bar a beer and asks her to describe her room and all the things in it. And who do you love? And how do you survive on your wages? And how is your life different from your mother’s life? And then, much later, she asks her for some 100-peseta coins for the telephone box.

  Telefonica-dialling codes:

  COLUMBIA 07-57

  RASIL 07-55

  EMIRATOS ARABES-UNIDOS 07-971

  CHILE 07-38

  YUGOSLAVIA 07-38

  INDONESIA 07-62

  J.K. studies codes. A code is a collection of laws. A system of rules and regulations, of signals and symbols. So now, as she drops the coins into the steel slot of the telephone, she is thinking about rules, signals and symbols. H says, ‘Is that you J.K?’

  My precious.

  My sweet.

  My darling.

  My lovely.

  What is German for ‘the twentieth century’?

  Das zwanzigste Jahrhundert.

  And how do you say ‘enigma’?

  Enigma.

  J.K. has two coins left. She rolls them into the slot.

  And how do you say, ‘the open mouth’?

  Der offene Mund.

  6

  Swallowing Geography

  She is the wanderer, bum, émigré, refugee, deportee, rambler, strolling player. Sometimes she would like to be a settler, but curiosity, grief and disaffection forbid it. She is however in love with the settler X, he being all that she is not.

  Today she found two birds’ eggs, pale blue, one in a field and one on the pavement of a city. She buys an envelope in a post office so she can send them to a friend who will appreciate them. The clerk is intrigued that she is wrapping two small cracked bloody eggs in a sheet of white tissue paper and putting them into an envelope. This same envelope will be stamped, inscribed with the name of the place she has posted it from. The receiver will now be able to imagine the sender in that place and make a picture of it in her mind’s eye.

  The wanderer Y is not without purpose, but the purpose is not wholly revealed. Sometimes she imagines the layout of land before she has actually seen it. Instead of following a map, she has made a map. Sometimes she is visible and sometimes she is invisible. This is not because she is a ghost or a mystic, but because some people want to see her and some people do not. The word absence suggests non-presence, loss, being nowhere, non-appearance, lacking. That’s what the Turkish worker on a German tram told her, fanning out his hands for her so she could see the offal under his fingernails. ‘This is the liver of a cow,’ he said. ‘We at the slaughterhouse carry the inner organs of beasts, carry their bodies on bits of our bodies.’

  When she meets a stranger and they tell each other stories, she notes that it is always the people she leaves out of the stories that interest the stranger most. If she talks about her brother, sister and father, the stranger wants to know all about her mother. Therefore she learns that absence is often more interesting than presence.

  Although she is walking forwards, one foot in front of the other, she is also walking backwards. This is because she is thinking of her past. Beginnings and endings curl into each other like a snake with its tail in its mouth. There was a man who wept and said, ‘I can’t remember myself. I see and recognize myself in the bodies and voices of other people. I know that we once worshipped in the same temple. I know that the same priests blessed us with basil leaves and water. I know we fought the same revolutions, told the same jokes and went to the same schools. I have been described somewhere but I don’t know where to find myself.’

  The settler X kisses the wanderer Y on lips that are cracked from wind, and says, this is the statue of my local poet, engineer, architect, painter, banker, philanthropist, scientist, mayor, and here, a statue of the local martyr. He takes her by the arm and points; this is my park, my shop, my dentist, doctor and baker. She is eating a burger and chips. Always be ready to eat a burger and chips, a Czech refugee said once, in a television studio. All the while he had a kitten on his lap and he stroked it. He said the cat wandered into the studio and he wanted to be filmed stroking it whilst talking about exile, so it would not seem as if he was in pain.

  X and Y make love in her hotel room, the shutter open, a breeze on her left thigh. Someone is jangling keys in the corridor outside, and upstairs someone is singing a pop song. X says, I have to go now. His head is resting on a pillow inscribed with the name of the hotel; blue thread sewn into white cotton.

  Is the settler X privileged and the wanderer Y deprived? For X and his partner Z, settled in the country of each other, there is something called a future.

  For the deprived there is no word called future.

  For the privileged there is only the future.

  For the deprived the present is full of the absence of privilege.

  For the privileged the present is full of the absence of deprivation.

  Or is the wanderer Y privileged? Both intimate and alien, she can touch the world with a phantom hand.

  X returns home to a chicken cooked by Z. Y eats takeaway pizza on her balcony and washes her hands with a tiny square of perfumed soap inscribed with the hotel’s name.

  She packs her bag.

  Each new journey is a mourning for what has been left behind. The wanderer sometimes tries to recreate what has been left behind, in a new place. This always fails. To muster courage and endurance for a journey, it has to be embarked on with something like ambivalence. To retreat is to wane, fade, shrink, get less. This suggests that the privileged, who are not used to retreating, swell, expand and get more.

  X rings through to the hotel and asks Y to stay one more night.

  She, the wanderer, bum, refugee and rambler, drinks scotch on the rocks in a long glass, sitting in the corner of a bar. She smokes a cigarette bought in a small kiosk whilst changing trains at the last border she crossed. A border is an undefined margin between two things, sanity and insanity, for example. It is an edge. To be marginal is to be not fully defined. This thought excites her.

  Although she is drinking whisky and smoking tobacco in a crowded bar in a strange city, and although she spends most of her time in cities, she often wants to be near water, to be under the stars, to feel the
wind on her cheeks and wrists, to collect cones and kernels, shells, fossils, pebbles. She returns to the city with a bag full of these things. When she empties them out on to a carpet or floorboards or the wooden surface of a table, she puts her hand over them and they pulse into her palm. It is then she wonders if these are the things that give her health and special endurance. Some become mementos, some gifts, and the most special become talismans.

  So now in the palm of her hand is a small brown feather.

  X walks towards her. They drink more whisky. He tells her how glad he is she’s stayed on an extra night. He talks and she listens. He says, ‘I feel very sad tonight.’ In fact she too is feeling sad, but he has not considered that this might be so and tells her a tale. While she is hearing why he is sad, she is also hearing voices from the radio blaring behind the bar. There has been an earthquake somewhere. A man is weeping. He is saying through an interpreter, ‘I lost my wife’s mother, my four children and my house. They are all gone.’ The interpreter describes objects buried in the rubble. X does not hear these voices and he does not hear the unspoken sad voice of Y.

  ‘Let’s go for a swim.’

  ‘It’s dark,’ he says.

  ‘I know.’

  He, the settler, present, visible and somewhere, is reluctant to swim with the wanderer at a strange hour. He has a home and he has Z to return to. He will return wet and Z will ask him why. How is he to relate the small intimate moments of his day to his co-settler? ‘I drank whisky in a bar with my lover, and then we went for a swim.’

  After a while he says, ‘I’ll watch you.’

  While she swims and he watches her, she, like the privileged, will be perceptible, observed, present to the eye, witnessed. What she does not know is that he will watch her swim, and he will make her up. To him at that moment her eyelashes are blue, her wrists jangle with silver bands of alchemy and her hair is oiled with jasmine. In this way he will have stripped her of the possibility of being sad, needing things, having a past, present and future.

  The sound of men and women wailing, and interpreters murmuring above them, leaks out of the radio.

  They leave the bar. Sweepers in orange jackets clean the gutters. He puts his arm through hers and she strokes it with the small brown feather she has been holding all night. They walk out of town, across a road and then under a small bridge. Swans sleep on the river, necks tucked under their wings, floating silently under the moon.

  She takes off her clothes. He watches her some of the time and he watches the swans. She is standing on the muddy bank. She is naked. He is clothed. X the settler has chosen not to swim. Y the wanderer is going to dive into the water and she is going to swim.

  ‘Take off your earrings.’

  She gives them to him.

  ‘Don’t swallow the water,’ he shouts.

  She swallows and swallows the water. And as she swallows she swallows the possibility she will always be alone. Swallows the river that will flow into the sea that is made from other waters that have flowed from mountains and hills, that will leak into oceans. She swallows geography, learns to swim in changing tides and temperatures, learns different strokes of the arms and legs, learns to speak in many tongues. She does this because she has no choice but to do so, and she comes out of the river to find him there, holding her earrings in his hand, and he says, ‘But they don’t fit. Who are you?’

  ‘Who are you?’ he said, backing away from the creature that emerged, streaked in mud, speaking a language he did not understand. ‘Lie with me a while,’ she murmured, and he, entranced by her golden fur drying under the moon, understood the request and consented. They lay together on the river bank while the swans, curved into themselves, slept on, both thinking how odd the fragrance of the other was, the texture of their skin and hair, the way their lips and tongues met, the way their bodies joined together. Both kept trying to find something recognizable, familiar in the other, but they could not. This was frightening but it was also arousing, and they experimented shyly with ways of pleasing each other. All the while he held a pair of earrings in his hand and would not let go. ‘Take me to meet your family,’ she said, lying on top of him, her golden belly rising and falling. At that moment he lost his desire and tried to separate himself from her, and at that moment the swans swam to the bank of the river to watch them.

  ‘Why do you hate me?’ she said, staring into his very blue eyes.

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘You do.’

  ‘I want you to be someone else.’

  After a pause, he said again, ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I am the stranger who desires you and I have come to convince you it is truly you, in all your particularity, whom I desire.’

  This made him sob, great gulping tears that made him ugly, mouth open, face crumpled until he found that he was howling and had to press his face into the mud to stifle his cries.

  She said again, ‘It is truly you, in all your particularity, whom I desire,’ and he looked up into the black snout of her nose, at her golden paws and pink eyes, and vomited, spewed out the contents of his stomach, mostly chicken, into a little pool by his feet.

  X wakes up from this short dream to see Y come out of the water, naked, and he says, ‘Hi. I’ve been waiting for you. Here are your earrings.’ He gives them to her. The wind blows and her breath tastes of whisky and mud.

  As she dries herself Y asks X what he did while she was swimming.

  ‘I watched you swim and then I fell asleep,’ he says. And then he tells her he must go because Z will be waiting up for him.

  ‘Stay,’ she says.

  He is silent.

  She knows that by asking him to stay, she has invited him to tell her about his politics, ceremonies, poetry and food. She has broken a rule. She knows that though she has wandered through the country of his person, Z has permanent residence there. She knows this because she, the wanderer, has to know her heart and she has to know his heart. She has broken a rule and she runs the risk of being deported.

  ‘Why do you hate me?’ she asks.

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘You do.’

  After a while he says, ‘I want you to be someone else.’

  ‘Who do you want me to be?’

  An hour later, X will sit in front of a log fire with Z.

  ‘Tell me about your day,’ he says.

  Z runs her fingers through her short-cropped hair and stares into the fire. With her other hand she strokes the cat on her lap. ‘Today we got a postcard from B. Look.’ She shows him the card, an image of a date palm on the edge of a desert, and in the distance, white thorns.

  ‘It is as if the desert has been posted through our front door,’ she says. ‘All day I have been tasting and smelling the desert, imagining its light and scale. And when I did my shopping, I imagined B there, sitting on ripples of sand.’ She looks at X, her co-settler. ‘What did you do today?’

  ‘I went to the office early and left late. Then I came home and ate chicken with you. Then I had a whisky in a bar and went for a walk by the river.’ Her hand moves slowly across the cat on her lap. The half moons of her fingernails glisten in its fur. ‘Come here,’ he says and pulls her towards him. He kisses her eyelids and tickles her neck with a small brown feather.

  ‘You’re wearing your hair down,’ she says, winding a silver strand round and round her finger. ‘I’ve never seen it loose before. You look like a stranger.’ And then she says, ‘Why do you hate me?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘You do.’

  After a while he says, ‘I want you to be someone else.’

  Z takes the feather from his hand and strokes her wrist. She is feeling homesick, here in her own country, in her own home, in the bosom of her family, with her co-settler X.

  Y is wringing water from her hair.

  ‘Who do you want me to be?’ she asks.

  He shrugs and unwinds the green ribbon from his pony-tail. His hair falls down past his shoulders to his waist. He pl
aits her wet hair and ties it with the ribbon.

  ‘I’m missing someone I’ve never met.’ He smiles. And then he looks away.

  Y puts on her thick wool jacket.

  ‘Who are you anyway?’ he asks, watching her put heavy gold hoops into her ears.

  ‘I am a country disguised and made up, offering itself to tourists.’

  She gives him her small brown feather.

  ‘Here. A souvenir to take home with you.’

  She is the wanderer, bum, émigré, refugee, deportee, rambler. But most of all she is the strolling player.

  XYZ.

  To name someone is to give them a country.

  To give them a country is to give them an address.

  To give them an address is to give them a home.

  To give them a home is to give them a wardrobe.

  To give them a wardrobe is to give them a mirror.

  What does Y see in her mirror?

  Her hair is wet and it is tied with a green ribbon. She wears golden hoops in her ears. If she is a character, is she dressed for the part? What part is she going to play? Or perhaps she is dressed out of character? Dressed in a way one would not expect her to be. What is going to happen to Y?

  The wardrobe with the mirror inside it belongs to the EUROPA HOTEL. Y can see she is shivering in a woollen jacket. If she is a persona, has she adopted a system, constructed a voice to speak through? Is Y a first, second or third person? A first person does the speaking. A second person is spoken to. A third person is spoken about.

  What are Y’s voices? The telephone rings and the receptionist puts through the call.

  At this moment Z is re-arranging the furniture in her front room. Her co-settler X is at work. He is in a public place and she is in a private place. So now she is re-arranging the unspoken patterns of their privacy. First she moves the sofa away from the wall and places it by the window. Now she picks up objects that have fallen under the sofa over the years. Coins, a cigarette lighter, a Biro, receipts, buttons, an elastic band, two magazines, bus tickets, keys, shopping lists, and lastly, a piece of paper folded into a neat square. She unfolds it and sees her co-settler’s handwriting. He has written down the name of a hotel, the name of a bar, and a time. Z puts this into her pocket. Now she moves the rug from the centre of the room and places it at a diagonal somewhere else. She moves a table, chairs, three pictures, objects that have become so familiar she and her co-settler X have ceased to notice them, and places them somewhere unfamiliar. All the time she finds small things, long-lost and forgotten, out-of-date postage stamps, X’s cufflinks, an old lipstick. They have lived a life together and Z collects it like evidence. Her short-cropped black hair is covered in dust. The cat, upset by the re-arranging, runs across the room and back again, looking for places to hide. Z calls out to it. And then B walks in.