The Waiting Room

by Wilson Harris

  The Waiting Room

  WILSON HARRIS

  For Margaret,

  Mario and Valerie Carboni

  and

  Denis Williams

  It is a wretched thing to confess; but it is a very truth that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature—how can it, when I have no nature?

  JOHN KEATS

  (from a letter to Richard Woodhouse, October 1818)

  The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours,

  The sentimentalist himself, while art

  Is but a vision of reality.

  W. B. YEATS

  … a moment of exhaustion, of appeasement, of absolution, and of something very near annihilation….

  T. S. ELIOT

  … in a dream with strange new speech:

  Yourself you are as unaware as I

  And fertile is the silence we endure.

  MARTIN CARTER

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Author’s Note

  Book 1. The Void

  One. Image of Conviction

  Two. Thief. Thief

  Three. Apple of the Eye

  Four. Silence Please

  Five. The Operation

  Six. Thing

  Book 2. The Vortex

  One. Image of Conquest

  Two. Watchman. Watchman

  Three. Fruit of the Lips

  Four. Blast

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  THE WAITING ROOM is based on the disjointed diary of the Forrestals which came into my hands many years ago. Susan Forrestal described this diary in one section as “her husband’s log book” but it would appear that she and possibly others were engaged in an art of fiction peculiar to themselves.

  By fiction I do not mean to deny certain literal foundations but rather to affirm these absolutely as a mutual bank or living construction of events; those who collaborated accepted the enigma of such self-proportion and sought therefore to discover themselves concretely, as well as brokenly, in the mystery of a common vanishing life, day to day, year to year.

  Susan suffered from an incurable complaint of the eyes and after three operations became almost totally blind at the age of forty. She was the mistress of a man who left her suddenly, it would appear, after a violent quarrel, and disappeared without trace. He remained nameless in the log book, though he may have, at one time, contributed certain entries which give details of his remarkable collection; ornaments and pieces of interest. Susan actually married someone else some time after this, who—from all that can be gleaned—was extremely solicitous for her well-being, but her original lover (with whom she obviously had had much in common) continued to haunt her (to put it in her own words) and to arouse within her a “living” crew or presence. And in fact “he” became—according to a peculiar entry in the diary—“hieroglyph and vessel of experience, the supreme positive fiction for me of nothingness.” By which she seemed to imply that a fiction which appears to grasp nothingness runs close to a freedom of reality which is somethingness.

  Susan and her husband (mention of whom does not clearly occur until BOOK 2) died in an explosion which wrecked their home and much of their belongings, antiques, ornaments, etc. The log book survived, though certain sections were half-obliterated…. But this—while apparently depleting continuity—only served to enhance the essential composition of the manuscript that involved accidental deletions or deliberate erasures, reappraisals, marginal notes, dissociations of likely material (as well as associations of unlikely material) to confirm, and blend into, a natural medium of invocation in its own right.

  And this disproportionate, sometimes shocking, condition, was the world in particular of Susan Forrestal, whose “operations” led her to accept her own “weakness” as a normal state which needed to confess its own broken existence to plumb and visualize its true relationship to a capacity for freedom.

  I am only too well aware of my own shortcomings in attempting to uncover the curious unity I myself felt as existing between essential spirit or form and actual content of the log book.

  W.H.

  Postscript: In the text following I have used inverted commas around “he” to emphasize that the lover in Susan’s memory was indeed sheer phenomenon of sensibility rather than identical character in the conventional sense. Where I have neglected, however, to use such commas I trust the distinction is one which speaks for itself.

  Book 1 The Void

  ONE

  Image of Conviction

  Susan Forrestal was blind. She drew the palm of her hand slowly across her face as if to darken her own image, and to discover therein another sun of personality. “He” it was whom she began to discern like the ancient seal—the ancient soul of love.

  The sun fell on the slumbering brickwork of her flesh. Through the blind or curtained window where “he” sat and watched FROM WITHIN HER SKULL, the tops of vehicles could be seen as they passed, and still beyond—upon the pavement at the opposite side of the street—passersby were reflected in a shop window.

  The life of one’s time affected one, “he” thought, like a restless image or span which seemed to pass within and beyond oneself and overlap each flickering stalemate of apprehension.

  The sun burned and faded like a rag on fire, intensity, luminous paint, stone, canvas: a shred of emotion which gleamed for an instant and grew into an address one felt one had made or actually deciphered in the heart of chaos. It was a borrowed shelter of vision, flaked, holed, animated façade, instinctive shock of recognition, number, letter of gravity. It was the minted incongruous mask one wore, whose features as they stared through glass into the street were equally stamped with a bodily and ghostly design shared by immediate figures of acquaintance and remote figures of antiquity. This was “his” main legend and business, the business of preserving someone (like and unlike himself), of disguising someone whose proximity to himself was as nebulous as dust and adamant as stone.

  “His” relationship then to himself (and to her) was baffling. And if it appeared at times to spark into being a certain solid community, there were other times when it all seemed to hang together by the veriest shred of fellowship, emotional relief as well as entanglement. It was a question of the marriage of roots as well as branches and arms of dispersal.

  The day was now darkening as “he” appeared to reside within and yet adventure throughout her skull of the world. The mushroom of an umbrella swam within the shop window above the pavement. And thus—almost against “his” will—began “his” transportation into her subject and object, alteration in the proliferate colour of living and dead relationships, animation and inanimation, the shadow within the moved stone and without the immovable flesh. “He” had been seized by her fear of “him”. As if “he” stood naked and receptive within the room above the thoroughfare. And the growing shelter and embrace he began to suffer turned, as the clock died and still ticked, into a total presence he regained and knew. Like a garment—necessary and binding and absurd—“he” had forgotten he still carried or wore, whose pliant arms held him in the void of time until they became charged with constriction and feeling. To be naked and still clothed (as he felt himself to be) was to cling to a stem … extremity….

  She sat now beside him in the waiting room (Susan drew the palm of her hand slowly across her face as if it had turned to stone) naked as he in the poverty of existence. *She drew him closer still within the skin of another incongruous skeleton they shared, flesh or wood, swimming in the glass of their shop window within and without. Antique display. Waiting room.*

  It was the ornamental structure of her calves and a curiou
s gravity of frame which appeared to strip her and give him bone and currency, blunt shadow, pregnant reality…. He felt he was being drawn into a revelation of unique and terrifying possession on entering the room and taking his place beside her. Was it the most curious rigidity of the past or most intimate fantasy of the present she fought and entertained?

  The truth was she now believed he had been cornered and pursued by something or someone which paradoxically seemed to have vanished long before in the dust of the waiting room but now came trailing after. Ancient flesh or newborn shadow? Mushroom of sensibility? Or insensibility? He shuddered a little turning to glance at her…. Susan Forrestal. He spoke her name aloud as he endeavoured to keep her still at arm’s length. Arm’s length. Duel of the emotions. Thrust and counterthrust. He had last touched her ten or twelve years ago as if she had been indeed a painted cornerstone of wood. She was changed (Susan drew a rigid hand across the marble of her eyes) but not so changed he did not partly remember her. If he had failed to answer or come it might have been different but now it was too late. She drew him into her twin apparition, embodiment of hate and of love she felt he still imposed upon her—deformity of all conception—from the world within and the world without (one man’s tax of despair, another’s theft of love).

  The extraordinary thing was that on seeing a reflection for sale—“he” himself had once skilfully engineered—pause for an instant in the shop window within and without, he could hardly believe his eyes that she was his and could have sworn it was a trick, livid brush stroke of imagination—invention of the waiting room. Why should it be … indeed if it were the one endless skull why should “he” dream that it—his own fiction, disembodied light ning feature—was intent in the heart of the street on finding “him” half-cowering in this shell of a room?

  The staring rims of her dark glasses as she retreated within the waiting room were endowed now with devastation in turning toward him and he was on the point of protesting when he realized…. BLIND. He should have known but he had forgotten so many things which pinned him still to her in agony or relief. It flashed on him now why she had paused at the edge of memory (street of memory) as if to solicit him, head bowed a little so that he failed to detect in the uneven spaces of light the blank focus of her gaze … sightlessness he dreamed was sight: each fold of her flesh was but the inhibition of another garment drawn around her in bitter community of fantasy. BLIND. There was now no shade of uncertainty about it. He had forgotten so many landmarks he once knew.

  TWO naked women she seemed to him now—one, signal of flesh he had himself half-forgotten and endured, the other, despair of stone he had himself long projected and dreamt. Blind tall hallucinated mistress or sail and intimate squat fetish or deck plunged and addressed each other as if they shared a drunken tide of self-commiseration—running in the veins of their world—for “him,” the substitute gender and vessel whose stern and transported shadow they now were, standing, it seemed, both above and below to crush him ultimately into any shape they desired.

  But surely it was “he”, stone-deaf and forgetful within the maelstrom of years, who would crush “them” to vanishing point or silence, even though, in the self-same instant of immersion, he discerned the finger of lightning protest, conviction and conversion on every reflective line and lip.

  Mill of the gods, storm, cripple, address, wrist of fog, fist of cloud: chemistry of fury which curled and singed the appearances of conceit and the shattered memory of the waiting room. For they—the naked women of dead fantasy—were staring at him now from within vanishing point, beam, pole, inflicted on them long, long ago. It was he, they declared, who was drunk and obscene, solipsistic. Not they. In fact it was he who had robbed them and broken them down into “his” image and crew and engrafted likeness. Ironic displacement. Thief. Thief. Thief of their womanhead. Metallic. Flinty. Their parts may have been glued to “his” person for all they knew. And yet he would have them believe he was indestructible. Erect. Capable of overshadowing them and offering them the only accommodation they desired, tangent and repose, liaison with a god.

  Susan Forrestal indicted him out of her sightless eyes. Every other creature of consciousness moved and turned away into one ground of buried existence. But she—invested now by a phenomenon of illusion and uniform reserve or strength—put him, or raised him with her hand, into the dock … convertible void of the waiting room … harbour … courtroom….

  TWO

  Thief. Thief

  The early afternoon faded and turned to gloom and twilight, faint ash, dust. The waiting room was now apparently empty save for its own instinctive burden of settlement: was it the blindness of Susan Forrestal which remained like a stumbling block upon which one fell and was stunned into deafness, archaic lover, sound proof wall? Was it absence, an absent mind one endured or a third nameless person still, voluminous cloak, clinging arm, whose abstract presence now encircled one in the ruin of all atmospheres? The waiting room was saturated with warm blood and chill: the dim senses of birth, the remote senses of death, the cold and hungry senses of love. A room one shared with the thief of all ages whose passage now was but a reflection one sees and even hears—the most intimate light footfall of nature; winter and spring. Thief. Thief. One stopped and listened to the emergent, the enraged, outcry of one’s blood, the blow of love, the transport of terror and reason by which one had been affected. Thief. Thief. One stopped again and stumbled upon feather and flood and listened for another disposition of assault. But now all was silent as the grave. One stretched one’s fingertips into the dark upon the flesh of things, animate wood or stone it seemed. Thief. The cry came shrill and clear like a whistling kettle on the boil within one’s skull. A faint tremor shook the room as if one’s naked metallic flesh had begun to glow against another’sp ark violent skin into the very thief of such brilliancy and harsh light, selfsame features of concussion. Thief. The cry spent itself again but the vapour of longing in each dying accent to appropriate (or steal) new breath, impulse, was everywhere in the grip of hollow memory. It was a holy, unholy alliance in which one had begun to lose and find oneself—looking, as it were, in all directions of the universal waiting room for the master thief of love, whose tool one was, the master stroke one had experienced of absent bitterness and ancient fury. One had tripped and been robbed of senseless sight and sound it seemed. Thief. Thief. One found oneself repeating the mechanical outcry as if one stood perhaps within true measure of overcoming all echo of catastrophe…. It was as if one were beginning to emerge at last out of the wild intransigent impulses of the waiting room (which had been clothed in numbness and loss) into the spirit of an age that was ONE (but how could one dare to breathe of such intimacy, flesh and unity…?)

  THREE

  Apple of the Eye

  For Susan Forrestal the intimate waiting room she discerned as she touched the walls around her carried “his” reflection: blur, unpredictable stove, hot, sometimes cold to touch. She occasionally shrank from herself (or himself), started or stopped … sparks of fire…. Three eye operations within the past seven years left her upon a curious threshold, ledge of night, edge of dawn. The waiting room became his cinder of imagination and this alphabet of flame shone where she drew each outline with her darkest pencil.

  All things and persons—however remote and apprehensive—now grew to be tipped by his spirit. Whether indeed it was he who had stolen the blaze of light from her, or she who had stricken him down unawares so that he tasted unconscious rage, like the truly anthropomorphic deaf and dumb, was the blunt issue on which they were joined. Constellated. Like blotting paper, eaten at the edges with black absorption but lucid in the middle where it soaked the drawn film of the sky, astronomical book, discontents of air, earth, water.

  Pregnant silhouette. He saw she now addressed him—in fact accused him of being the one who had raped her. The One…. It was grotesque quarry, coincidence, feature of conception, line and riddle, hunter as well as hunted, down the years.

/>   Pregnant. He read the self-portrait of accusation with acute difficulty. For she drew him and yet appeared, at the same time, to draw away from him into the very reticence of fury. Pregnant, thief, love.

  Susan lit a cigarette, burnt a hole in the page. She felt the fertile ash on her fingers (and of her fingers), primitive and mnemonic device like seed or grain which clung to her even as it fell on the floor into instinctive shapes or presentiments, intricate design, flower and leaf. Potent violent mysterious plunge…. She tried to conceive her almost intangible cloud of images as a dense broadcast in which she too was minutely and remotely involved, until this seemed to glow again into the sun inadvertently planted upon her own flesh: naked brilliancy and hollow illusion, outward presence and sunken conviction—a sliced apple which had been cut to remove declivities in the surface. Susan felt all at once the sharpest prick of the knife and with each drop of blood there grew a transfusion of energy from her veins into his stamp or die. She wanted to conceive such an extreme but true vision of him. And in point of fact—there it was—Pregnant again after all these years.

  She recalled the entry she had herself made in the log book a long time ago. One signal word: pregnant. to which now she added … again after all these years. Pressure of a fingernail upon a blank sheet … after all these years.