Black Swan Green

by David Mitchell

  What she said sounded true, but…

  ‘You think,’ Madame Crommelynck snorted smoke, ‘“This old witch is crazy! A magnolia tree exists already. Magnolias do not need poets to exist. In the case of a poem, a poem, I must create it.”’

  I nodded. (I would’ve thought that if I’d had a few minutes.)

  ‘You must say what you think, or else spend your Saturday with your head in a bucket and not in conversation with me. You understand?’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, nervous that ‘okay’ wasn’t okay.

  ‘Good. I reply, verse is “made”. But the word “make” is unsufficient for a true poem. “Create” is unsufficient. All words are unsufficient. Because of this. The poem exists before it is written.’

  That, I didn’t get. ‘Where?’

  ‘T. S. Eliot expresses it so – the poem is a raid on the inarticulate. I, Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck, agree with him. Poems who are not written yet, or not written ever, exists here. The realm of the inarticulate. Art,’ she put another cigarette in her mouth and this time I was ready with her dragon lighter, ‘fabricated of the inarticulate is beauty. Even if its themes is ugly. Silver moons, thundering seas, clichés of cheese, poison beauty. The amateur thinks his words, his paints, his notes makes the beauty. But the master knows his words is just the vehicle in who beauty sits. The master knows he does not know what beauty is. Test this. Attempt a definition now. What is beauty?’

  Madame Crommelynck tapped cigarette ash into a ruby blobby ashtray.

  ‘Beauty’s…’

  She relished my stumpedness. I wanted to impress her with a clever definition, but I kept crashing into beauty’s something that’s beautiful.

  Problem was, all this is new. In English at school we study a grammar book by a man named Ronald Ridout, read Cider with Rosie, do debates on fox-hunting and memorize ‘I Must Go Down to the Seas Again’ by John Masefield. We don’t have to actually think about stuff.

  I admitted, ‘It’s difficult.’

  ‘Difficult?’ (Her ashtray was in the shape of a curled girl, I saw.) ‘Impossible! Beauty is immune to definition. When beauty is present, you know. Winter sunrise in dirty Toronto, one’s new lover in an old café, sinister magpies on a roof. But is the beauty of these made? No. Beauty is here, that is all. Beauty is.’

  ‘But…’ I hesitated, wondering if I should say this.

  ‘My one demand,’ she said, ‘is you say what you think!’

  ‘You just chose natural things. How about paintings, or music. We say, “The potter makes a beautiful vase.” Don’t we?’

  ‘We say, we say. Be careful of say. Words say, “You have labelled this abstract, this concept, therefore you have captured it.” No. They lie. Or not lie, but are maladroit. Clumsy. Your potter has made the vase, yes, but has not made the beauty. Only an object where it resides. Until the vase is dropped and breaks. Who is the ultimate fate of every vase.’

  ‘But,’ I still wasn’t satisfied, ‘surely some people, somewhere know what beauty is? At a university?’

  ‘University?’ She made a noise that might’ve been laughter. ‘Imponderables are ponderable, but answerable, no. Ask a philosopher, but be cautious. If you hear, “Eureka!”, if you think, “His answer has captured my question!”, then here is proof he is a counterfeit. If your philosopher has truly left Plato’s cave, if he has stared into that sun of the blind…’ She counted the three possibilities on her fingers. ‘He is lunatic, or his answers are questions who is only masquerading as answers, or he is silent. Silent because you can know or you can say, but both, no. My glass is empty.’

  The last drops were the thickest.

  ‘Are you a poet?’ (I’d nearly said ‘too’.)

  ‘No. That title is hazardous. But, I had intimacy with poets when I was young. Robert Graves wrote a poem of me. Not his best. William Carlos Williams asked me to abandon my husband and,’ she uttered the word like a pantomime witch, ‘“elope”! Very romantic, but I had a pragmatic head and he was destitute as…épouvantail, a – how you say the man in a field who frights birds?’

  ‘Scarecrow?’

  ‘Scarecrow. Exactly. So I tell him, “Go to the hell, Willy, our souls eat poetry, but one has seven deadly sins to feed!” He consented my logic. Poets are listeners, if they are not intoxicated. But novelists,’ Madame Crommelynck did a yuck face, ‘is schizoids, lunatics, liars. Henry Miller stayed in our colony in Taormina. A pig, a perspiring pig, and Hemingway, you know?’

  I’d heard of him so I nodded.

  ‘Lecherousest pig in the entire farm! Cinematographers? Fffffft. Petits Zeus of their universes. The world is their own film set. Charles Chaplin also, he was my neighbour in Geneva, across the lake. A charming petit Zeus, but a petit Zeus. Painters? Squeeze their hearts dry to make the pigments. No heart remains for people. Look at that Andalusian goat, Picasso. His biographers come for my stories of him, beg, offer money, but I tell them, “Go to the hell, I am not an human juke box. Composers? My father was one. Vyvyan Ayrs. His ears was burnt with his music. I, or my mother, he rarely listened. Formidable in his generation, but now he is fallen from the repertory. He exiled at Zedelghem, south of Bruges. My mother’s estate was there. My native tongue is Flemish. So you hear, English is not an adroit tongue for me, too many – lesses and – lessnesses. You think I am French?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Belgian. The destiny of discreet neighbours is to be confused with the noisy ones next door. See an animal! On the lawn. By the geraniums…’

  One moment we were watching the twitch of a squirrel’s heart.

  The next, it’d vanished.

  Madame Crommelynck said, ‘Look at me.’

  ‘I am doing.’

  ‘No. You are not. Sit here.’

  I sat on her footstool. (I wondered if Madame Crommelynck’s got a butler ’cause something’s wrong with her legs.) ‘Okay.’

  ‘Do not hide in your “okay”. Closer. I do not bite off the heads of boys. Not on a full stomach. Look.’

  There’s a rule that says you don’t gaze too intently at a person’s face. Madame Crommleynck was ordering me to break it.

  ‘Look closer.’

  Those parma violets, I smelt, fabrics, an ambery perfume, and something rotting. Then something weird happened. The old woman turned into an it. Sags ruckussed its eye-bags and eyelids. Its eyelashes’d been gummed into spikes. Deltas of tiny red veins snaked its stained whites. Its irises misty like long-buried marbles. Make-up dusted its mummified skin. Its gristly nose was subsiding into its skull-hole.

  ‘You see beauty here?’ it spoke in the wrong voice.

  Manners told me to say yes.

  ‘Liar!’ It pulled back and became Madame Crommelynck again. ‘Forty, thirty years ago, yes. My parents created me in the customary fashion. Like your potter making your vase. I grew to a girl. In mirrors, my beautiful lips told my beautiful eyes, “You are me.” Men made stratagems and fights, worshipped and deceived, burnt money on extravagances, to “win” this beauty. My age of gold.’

  Hammering started up in a far-off room.

  ‘But human beauty falls leaf by leaf. You miss the beginning. One tells one, No, I am tired or The day is bad, that is all. But later, one cannot contradict the mirror. Day by day by day it falls, until this vieille sorcière is all who remains, who uses cosmetician’s potions to approximate her birth-gift. Oh, people say, “The old are still beautiful!” They patronize, they flatter, maybe they wish to comfort themselves. But no. Eating the roots of beauty is a—’ Madame Crommelynck sank back into her creaky throne, tired out. ‘An, how you say, the snail who has no house?’

  ‘A slug?’

  ‘Insatiable, undestructible slug. Where in the hell are my cigarettes?’

  The box’d slipped to her feet. I passed them to her.

  ‘Leave now.’ She looked away. ‘Return next Saturday, three o’clock, I tell you more reasons why your poems fail. Or do not return. An hundred other works are waiting.’ Madame
Crommelynck picked up Le Grand Meaulnes, found her place and started reading. Her breathing’d got whistlier and I wondered if she was ill.

  ‘Thanks, then…’

  My legs’d got pins and needles.

  As far as Madame Crommelynck was concerned, I’d already left the solarium.

  Druggy pom-pom bees hovered in the lavender. The dusty Volvo was still in the drive, still needing its wash. I didn’t tell Mum or Dad where I was going today, either. Telling them about Madame Crommelynck’d mean (a) admitting I was Eliot Bolivar, (b) twenty questions about who she is I can’t answer ’cause she’s an unnumbered dot-to-dot, (c) being told not to pester her. Kids aren’t s’posed to visit old ladies if they’re not grandmothers or aunts.

  I pressed the bell.

  The vicarage took ages to swallow up the chime.

  Nobody. Had she gone out for a walk?

  The butler hadn’t taken this long last week.

  I banged the knocker, sure it was useless.

  I’d pedalled like mad over here ’cause I was thirty minutes late. Madame Crommelynck’d have a field marshal’s attitude to punctuality, I reckoned. All for nothing, it appeared. I’d got The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway from the school library, just ’cause Madame Crommelynck’d mentioned him. (The introduction said the book’d made Americans burst into tears when it was read on the radio. But it’s just about an old guy catching a monster sardine. If Americans cry at that they’ll cry at anything.) I rubbed some lavender in my palms and snuffed. Lavender’s my favourite smell, after Tipp-Ex and bacon rind. I sat down on the steps, not sure where to go next.

  A July afternoon yawned.

  Mirage-puddles’d shimmered on the Welland road as I rode here.

  I could’ve gone to sleep on the baked doorstep.

  Little naked ants.

  A bolt slid like a rifle and the old butler opened up. ‘You are back for more.’ Today he wore a golf jersey. ‘You may remove your shoes.’

  ‘Thanks.’ As I prised off my trainers I heard a piano, joined by a quiet violin. I hoped Madame Crommelynck didn’t have a visitor. Once you have three people you may as well have a hundred. The stairway needed fixing. A knackered blue guitar’d been left on a broken stool. In the gaudy frame a shivery woman sprawled in a punt on a clogged pond. Once again, the butler led me to the solarium. (I looked ‘solarium’ up. It just means ‘an airy room’.) The sequence of doors we passed made me think of all the rooms of my past and future. The hospital ward I was born in, classrooms, tents, churches, offices, hotels, museums, nursing homes, the room I’ll die in. (Has it been built yet?) Cars’re rooms. So are woods. Skies’re ceilings. Distances’re walls. Wombs’re rooms made of mothers. Graves’re rooms made of soil.

  That music was swelling.

  A Jules Verne hi-fi, all silvery knobs and dials, occupied one corner of the solarium. Madame Crommelynck sat on her cane throne, eyes shut, listening. As if the music was a warm bath. (This time I knew she wouldn’t be speaking for a while, so I just sat down on the armless sofa.) A classical LP was playing. Nothing like the rumpty-tump-tump stuff Mr Kempsey plays in Music. Jealous and sweet, this music was, sobbing and gorgeous, muddy and crystal. But if the right words existed the music wouldn’t need to.

  The piano’d vanished. Now a flute’d joined the violin.

  An unfinished letter going on for pages lay on Eva Crommelynck’s desk. She must have put on this LP when she couldn’t think of its next sentence. A fat silver pen rested on the page she’d stopped writing. I batted off an urge to pick it up and read it.

  The stylus-arm clunked in its cradle. ‘The inconsolable,’ Madame Crommelynck said, ‘is so consoling.’ She didn’t look very pleased to see me. ‘What is that advertisement you are wearing on your chest?’

  ‘What advertisement?’

  ‘That advertisement on your sweater!’

  ‘This is my Liverpool FC top. I’ve supported them since I was five.’

  ‘What signifies “HITACHI”?’

  ‘The FA’ve changed the rules so football teams can wear sponsors’ logos. Hitachi’s an electronics firm. From Hong Kong, I think.’

  ‘So you pay an organization to be their advertisement? Allons donc. In clothes, in cuisine, the English have an irresistible urge to self-mutilation. But today you are late.’

  Explaining the ins and outs of the Mr Blake Affair would’ve taken too long. I’ve lost count of how many times Mum and Dad and even Julia (when she’s feeling vicious)’ve said We’ll say no more about it, then dredge it up five minutes later. So I just told Madame Crommelynck I’ve got to do the washing-up on my own for a month to pay for something I’d broken, and it’d been a late lunch ’cause Mum’d forgotten to defrost the leg of lamb.

  Madame Crommelynck got bored before I finished. She gestured at the bottle of wine on her pearly table. ‘Today you drink?’

  ‘I’m only allowed a thimbleful, on special occasions.’

  ‘If an audience with me does not qualify as “special”, pour my glass.’

  (White wine smells of Granny Smiths, icy meths and tiny flowers.)

  ‘Always pour so the label is visible! If the wine is good, your drinker should know so. If the wine is bad, you deserve shame.’

  I obeyed. A drop dribbled down the bottle’s neck.

  ‘So. Do I learn today your true name, or do I still give hospitality to a stranger who hides behind a ridiculous pseudonym?’

  Hangman was even stopping me saying ‘Sorry’. I got so het up and desperate and angry I blurted out ‘Sorry!’ anyway, but so loud it sounded really rude.

  ‘Your elegant apology does not answer my question.’

  I mumbled, ‘Jason Taylor,’ and wanted to cry.

  ‘Jay who? Pronounce it clearly! My ears are as old as me! I do not have microphones hidden to collect every little word!’

  I hated my name. ‘Jason Taylor.’ Flavourless as chewed receipts.

  ‘If you are an “Adolf Coffin”, or a “Pius Broomhead”, I comprehend. But why hide “Jason Taylor” under an inaccessible symbolist and a Latin American revolutionary?’

  My huh? must’ve shown.

  ‘Eliot! T. S.! Bolívar! Simón!’

  ‘“Eliot Bolivar” just sounded more…poetic.’

  ‘What is more poetic than ‘Jason’, an Hellenic hero? Who foundationed European literature if not the Ancient Greeks? Not Eliot’s coterie of thiefs of graves, I assure you! And what is a poet if he is not a tailor of words? Poets and tailors join what nobody else can join. Poets and tailors conceal their craft in their craft. No, I do not accept your answer. I believe the truth is, you use your pseudonym because your poetry is a shameful secret. I am correct?’

  ‘“Shameful” isn’t the exact word, exactly.’

  ‘Oh, so what is the exact word, exactly?’

  ‘Writing poetry’s,’ I looked around the solarium, but Madame Crommelynck’s got a tractor beam, ‘sort of…gay.’

  ‘“Gay”? A merry activity?’

  This was hopeless. ‘Writing poems is…what creeps and poofters do.’

  ‘So you are one of these “creeps”?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then you are a “pooof-ter”, whatever one is?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Then your logic is eluding me.’

  ‘If your dad’s a famous composer, and your mum’s an aristocrat, you can do things that you can’t do if your dad works at Greenland Supermarkets and if you go to a comprehensive school. Poetry’s one of those things.’

  ‘Aha! Truth! You are afraid the hairy barbarians will not accept you in their tribe if you write poetry.’

  ‘That’s more or less it, yeah…’

  ‘More? Or less? Which is the exact word, exactly?’

  (She’s a pain sometimes.) ‘That’s it. Exactly.’

  ‘And you wish to become an hairy barbarian?’

  ‘I’m a kid. I’m thirteen. You said it’s a miserable age, being thirteen, and you’re right. If you don
’t fit in, they make your life a misery. Like Floyd Chaceley or Nicholas Briar.’

  ‘Now you are talking like a real poet.’

  ‘I don’t understand it when you say stuff like that!’

  (Mum’d’ve gone, Don’t talk to me in that tone of voice!)

  ‘I mean,’ Madame Crommelynck almost looked pleased, ‘you are entirely of your words.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘You are being quintessentially truthful.’

  ‘Anyone can be truthful.’

  ‘About superficialities, Jason, yes, is easy. About pain, no, is not. So you want a double life. One Jason Taylor who seeks approval of hairy barbarians. Another Jason Taylor is Eliot Bolivar who seeks approval of the literary world.’

  ‘Is that so impossible?’

  ‘If you wish to be a versifier,’ she whirlpooled her wine, ‘very possible. If you are a true artist,’ she schwurked wine round her mouth, ‘absolutely never. If you are not truthful to the world about who and what you are, your art will stink of falsenesses.’

  I had no answer for that.

  ‘Nobody knows of your poems? A teacher? A confidant?’

  ‘Only you, actually.’

  Madame Crommelynck’s eyes’ve got this glint. It’s nothing to do with outside light. ‘You hide your poetry from your lover?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I, uh, don’t.’

  ‘Don’t hide your poetry or don’t have a lover?’

  ‘I don’t have a girlfriend.’

  Quick as a chess-clock thumper, she said, ‘You prefer boys?’

  I still can’t believe she said that. (Yes I can.) ‘I’m normal!’

  Her drumming fingers on the pile of parish magazines said, Normal?

  ‘I do like this one girl, actually,’ I blurted out, to prove it. ‘Dawn Madden. But she’s already got a boyfriend.’

  ‘Oho? And the boyfriend of Dawn Madden, he is a poet or a barbarian?’ (She loved how she’d tricked Dawn Madden’s name out of me.)

  ‘Ross Wilcox’s a prat, not a poet. But if you’re going to suggest that I write a poem to Dawn Madden, no way. I’d be the village laughing-stock.’