The Drover's Wife & Other Stories

by Murray Bail

  2. At least one person who would rather be almost anyone else.

  A tall order this one, Huebler; but I have an architect in Barcelona, in the suburb of Campo del Arpo. His name is Jose Rivera. Most evenings he can be seen on the Ramblas strolling with his family, wife on one arm, his son aged eleven on the other. A short man, thin legs, he has an unusually large head. He wears a coat and tie, the coat buttoned up. With each step, he makes fluttering movements with his hands, adjusting himself, so to speak. Huebler, you can’t miss him.

  Jose Rivera is one in the army of small architects who seem to exist in any given city. His office is above a leather shop. His staff consists of students or old men with weak eyes. They complain he looks over their shoulders, shouting suddenly. He pays a pittance. And sometimes he’ll throw their work against a wall, or rip it into little pieces. In the same breath he’ll pick up the phone and bend over backwards to please a client—small businessmen, usually smaller than he is. He has neither their respect nor that of his staff. He is bitter when one of them leaves.

  It is not only lack of respect. Something in Rivera’s manner (and face) produces distrust in people. Approaching a group outside a cafe he’ll slap his hands as if it were cold. Men look away.

  Rivera never seemed to notice. Putting this another way, he was a man who took no notice of his surroundings. Of his faults, he had decided long ago they were minor and anyway so enmeshed in the problems of the day as to go unnoticed. That was his opinion until a few weeks ago.

  He was in a cafe one evening with his wife and son. His wife sat, half-smiling. Their son was looking around nonchalantly, arms on the table. Suddenly Rivera felt irritated. It was the boy’s manner. He looked at the face intently. It was like a camera, Huebler, suddenly focusing: almost immediately Rivera wanted to escape.

  It was his face. He saw his faults duplicated, smoothly growing. It was what other people must have seen. They were conspicuous: obviously father, son. For Rivera it was an intrusion; he felt like suddenly hitting his son hard across the face. He wanted to; strange, weak man. He went sullen and fiddled with a spoon.

  If he could sever, disassociate. That became his immediate, hopeless wish. To be someone—almost anyone—else. Then all the signs displayed in the young face opposite could not point to him.

  3. At least one person who is not afraid of life.

  Strikes me this as being a bit woolly (almost unworthy of being included, Huebler). However:

  Cyril Lindsay Roberts

  Age: 54

  Date of Birth: September 22, 1920

  Status: married

  Offspring: 3 daughters, 1 son

  Height: 5’9”

  Hair: left part; short back and sides; going grey

  Eyes: brown. Wears spectacles (black-rimmed)

  Teeth: false

  Skin: now wrinkling

  General Demeanour: grey

  Other Characteristics: shy; moderation in all things; flat feet

  Occupation: clerk, Lands Department

  Passport Number: H 221668

  Address: Melbourne, Australia

  Further details on request

  4. At least one person who may outlive art.

  For sheer ruthlessness, surely nothing can beat the efforts of Karl Schultz, the American ‘failure’. At present he is lying in a weakened condition in his home in Monroe, New York State. He is forty-six, but looks about sixty.

  Schultz arrived in America with his parents back in the thirties. An early photograph shows a thin serious boy, mouth open, and obsessive shadows like Kafka’s around the eyes. Who can know the pressures exerted by vast America on its European immigrants? Schultz’s father, a doctor, ruined his own health building up a practice, and although he gave young Karl expensive piano lessons, and encouraged him to draw, he forced him into an American medical school. From the first day, Karl found difficulty concentrating. He was either failing or barely passing the technical exams. His friends were not the other doctors, but art students, usually with similar European backgrounds. Their large, violent canvases would soon be taking the art world by storm.

  In the late forties, Schultz championed the work of those painters which then baffled, even angered, most people. He knew them all well. For example, apart from prescribing medicines at no charge, Schultz performed an abortion on a red-headed mistress of one Abstract Expressionist, who shall remain nameless, whose work hangs in every important museum in the world. Sometimes he went with them on sketching weekends, although no one took much notice of the stuff he carefully drew. Schultz was there, but on the fringe. He was never to marry. The artists’ wives and girlfriends found him humourless, strange.

  Schultz by then had developed a furtive manner. This along with a number of suspect cases made it difficult for him to get work, even as a relief-doctor. Several New York hospitals unaccountably struck him off their registers. Meanwhile, as the fame of his painter-friends grew, they made their excuses and saw less and less of him. His opinion of their work suddenly changed. Most people think Schultz was filled with insane jealousy at their success. Others say he genuinely found their work timid, over-decorative. The truth almost certainly lies in between.

  In 1969, his father died and Schultz no longer had to work. Shortly after, he held his first one-man show in Manhattan’s most avant-garde art gallery.** At first, people thought he had met with an accident. They noticed one hand bandaged, the fingers missing. The word soon shot around. His ‘work’ consisted of five jars, each with a finger suspended in a clear formalin. It carried the title, FINGER PRINTS: FIVE WORKS BY KARL SCHULTZ. The exhibition notes explained how Schultz had spent ‘all his life creating these works of art’. As a practising surgeon he had come to realise conventional painting could never equal the beauty, or the statement of, The Body. ‘Art is usually nothing but cardboard.’

  Predictably, it was denounced as a gimmick, soon to be forgotten. His former friends professed to be shocked. Only when the extent of his ambition became clear did people, the critics especially, attempt to take him seriously.

  Schultz next exhibited an ear in a revolving jar. He called it VAN GOGH HERE. Most critics (subdued now) thought that was rather obvious; but it was quickly followed by his dramatic Los Angeles show—one of his legs, amputated, bent slightly at the knee, more compelling than one of Rodin’s marble imitations. Other exhibitions followed. Only a few more (for reasons which must be obvious) are possible.

  Schultz is in a weakened state, virtually incapacitated. Between exhibitions he has to rest for long periods and give himself sedatives. Visitors say he is remarkably clear-headed; they say he talks like a sane person. It was announced the other day his last work will consist of his suicide. An invited audience (of art lovers) and a movie camera will then watch his stubble grow for five or six hours after death. The body creating after death! Hence the subtle title of this last work: STILL LIFE.

  For a person to outlive art: it is a barbaric notion. Yet if there is to be a person, Karl Schultz must stand a chance. For he is preserving himself as art; and when there is no art his body, or our shocked memories of it, will remain.

  5. At least one person who is pathologically modest.

  There is an American industrialist (his name we all know) who has not been photographed, nor has he been seen in public, for the last…twenty-three years. But that doesn’t help Huebler, the photographer. My ‘pathologically modest’ person is a woman aged about fifty-five, an American like Howard Hughes. She’s easily photographed.

  No one knows why Katherine White took it into her head one ordinary day back in the forties no longer to show her face to the world, to retire behind locked doors. People are quick to talk in small American towns. Miss White never married and it was loudly assumed she had been jilted again. But no one in the town had seen such a man; and no one stepped forward.

  Among her friends the experienced ones thought it wise to leave her. Soon she would get over it. People would then crowd around, all solicitous; per
haps this was her melodramatic plan? Months passed. No sign from her. The postman reported her mail had dwindled to almost nothing. The front garden had become overgrown. Certain individuals prone to exaggeration swore the paint was peeling off the fence, the boards of the house. Katherine White’s determination gradually dawned on the town.

  Here it is interesting to note a linguistic switch. Kathy, as she was generally called, was now referred to as Katherine. And it wasn’t long before this became ‘Miss White’—more remote, abstract. Her friends now no longer felt sorry for her. Her behaviour seemed to insult them. She always did have airs, some recalled. Sometimes she had lapsed into cranky silences. When a group finally assembled on her porch determined to bring her to her senses, forcing entry, if necessary, they found a note on the door, unmistakably her hand:

  WOULD EVERYONE LEAVE MISS WHITE ALONE

  The years passed in a proliferation of undergrowth and peeling paint. Occasionally she was seen at night in the garden, or as a shadow behind the blinds. Small boys naturally hid for hours to catch a glimpse; more though left a ball if one ever landed in Miss White’s tangled garden. The house was pointed out to visitors. It was perhaps inevitable her story travelled beyond the town. She had become a small legend—civic property.

  In the late sixties, during the boom in colour gravure printing, a magazine from New Orleans sent out a photographer. He was an untidy young man with red hair. The mayor, for one, told him, ‘If we haven’t seen her face in fifteen–twenty years, son, you sure won’t.’

  Here then is where the ‘pathology’ creeps in. The photographer sent a note, and after waiting a week presented himself. A small crowd watched. The door opened. He was allowed in.

  Miss White too, it seems, saw herself as an example of an Old Recluse. The photographer told of how she sat silent and trembling before the lens. She had become entwined, poor thing, in her own legend. She not only allowed herself to be photographed but continues to do so; by appointment only. Apart from the occasional eager photographer her life remains the same. She sees no one, remaining inside.

  6. At least one person who is beautiful but dumb.

  The sad facts are as follows:

  Part of our brain is connected to the central nervous system to which examples of beauty are offered. Either they ‘fit’, or are rejected. With Marilyn Duncan, even women express no reservations. She should therefore be a model for neurologists. A male admirer, who happens to be her doctor, had casually pointed out her name is a combination of the two most memorable beauties of modern times.***

  Yet Marilyn is unaware of her beauty. Men touching her are met with laughter, uninterest or worse, a childish tolerance. She knows nothing else! She was taken from her parents at ten and placed among lawns and silent verandahs. Compliments never register. She probably has no knowledge of comparisons. She was born deaf and dumb. I heard her story from the doctor. She is astonishingly beautiful, Huebler, but totally dumb. Is that what you wanted?

  7. At least one person who thinks words are as concrete as objects.

  Much has already been written about Zoellner in literary papers both in England and Australia. ‘Zoellner’s mother (whose name was also Zoellner) decided to call him Leon. His father preferred “Max”, but today on the birth certificate (and other records stored in cabinets in scattered buildings) he is identified as Leon—Leon Zoellner…

  ‘Whenever he thinks of the shape of himself he sees the word Zoellner.’

  Further information recently unearthed would not go astray.

  Parents were Swiss. This has been established beyond doubt. Jung mentions Zoellner’s grandfather in Memories, Dreams, Reflections. A clue to Zoellner’s thinking, perhaps it is specious, interesting though, is the news that his father was a wood carver in Berne, one who carved store names and even whole sentences for outdoor display. 1968 in England: Zoellner’s wife died from a blood clot in the leg. They were out in a meadow (field or paddock) trudging. Zoellner prefers not to think about it.

  Another Zoellner apart from R. L., the unrelated architect, has appeared in the London telephone directory! She is a translator from Vienna; cold over the phone.

  At 30/11/72 he was 52.7 years old. Today he has advanced to 54.2. Age. A period of existence. The whole or ordinary duration of life.

  ‘Zoellner is regarded as a small person.’ This still holds true. In London he moves around in a long overcoat, even in summer. A horizontal mauve scar runs across his knee, the right-hand knee; he fell down a mountain when a boy. This of course is normally invisible beneath the layer of cloth arranged in a vertical fashion (Trousers).

  Concrete. A composition of stone-chippings, sand, gravel, pebbles, etc. formed into a mass with cement; used for foundations, pavements, etc.

  His ears are larger (bulbous, bumpier too) than the ears of 30/11/72. Zoellner squeezes the lobes. How something can go on growing at his age interests him. More hair has fallen out. Muddy-grey in ’72 it is silver-grey now. Weight: little changed at 113 lbs (51.3 kilos).

  Zoellner sees his name, his shape, approaching along an avenue of objects, his body consisting of parts which operate also as words. To some critics, this line of thinking—Zoellner’s Definition, as it has come to be called—shows a belief in nothing. Glaring nihilism, in short. The critics of course are wrong. They should read again the carefully gathered evidence, all of it published.

  Words. Verbal expression; used in a language to denote a thing, attribute or relation.

  8. At least one person who may feel trapped by marriage.

  Of all the traps, most obvious is the onomatological trap, so obvious it is generally ignored. Onomatological? The German poet Christien Morgenstern thought all seagulls looked as if their names were Emma; Claudel detected a funnel and wheels in the visual shape of the word ‘locomotive’; a woman when she marries is expected to take an alien name, grin and bear it.

  Before she became a Snell, Mrs Irene Snell associated a red dripping nose with that name, buck teeth, a sort of small-eyed greed. It was repugnant to her, yet she fell for Brian—reliable Brian.

  Marriage bells.

  There was no escaping. Envelopes arrived in the mornings bearing the strange name. It seemed they were addressed to another woman, one she wouldn’t like. Often then she studied her face in the mirror. She was quiet, intelligent, with no buck teeth. But she projected her name out into the world, onto streets and into newspapers. What would a stranger picture on hearing her name? She found it embarrassing giving it over the telephone.

  Old Brian, busy climbing in a complex soap company, couldn’t understand it. Amazing when he arrived home the things his wife found in him to criticise, one thing leading to another. Then she would burst into tears. ‘I still love you though,’ she’d say afterwards. Uncertain he expressed the thought that it was time she had children. (They too would be called Snell, she thought.)

  Without driving them apart the word ‘Snell’ exerts its subtle pressure. It remains a yardstick for her, some would say an illogical one. It keeps interfering. Brian often finds her crabby, even with the children. This he cannot understand. They have 1) healthy children 2) nice house 3) appliances 4) big backyard 5) car, with radio and sunvisor 6) excellent prospects for further promotion. Mrs Snell will never be satisfied.

  9. At least one person who cannot keep a secret.

  below, two smaller holes,

  dark, and partially blocked as a result of a steady breeze. Dry debris visible clinging during this brief tilting. Below, wider terrain immediately widespread, a change, a sloping forest, regularly spaced, black all of it, razed regularly, adapting however to the contours. A horizontal slash there; a bright colour suddenly quarried. Its curving entrance marked by vertical scratches: emits warmth, vegetable odours. Peeling, its shape changes from ravine to skyscrapers in a blackened city beyond which is the tunnel, the void, sometimes a splashing river. Commerce is transacted. A downturn at one corner is worth closer examination. And those vertical scratches having been
constantly congregated are now permanently jammed. Both the downturn and the squashing of the scratches are the inevitable result.

  Ten minutes later.

  A silver circle being fastened to a lobule, a slender sheet of oval calcium obscuring the view, the movements also reversed making for clumsiness, minute confusion. Perseverance prevails. Waiting. The pinna, the meatus, the lobule are all shining. The tympanum and membrana tympani both cleaned all ready for fresh entries.

  Mr and Mrs Eugene Fletcher,

  Apt 21B, Lincoln Towers, Cincinnati, USA.

  Next!

  10. At least one person whose existence is normally uneventful.

  Gordon Ian Hume spends most of his time shaking his head. The place is Aberdeen’s Victorian gaol. Not long ago he stepped out a free man after twenty years, but was back in a matter of days, for life. He is trying to work it out.

  Local newspapers in 1952 splashed the story of the murder. Hume of course remembers it clearly. He and Neil (‘Scrag’) had gone out for their Friday drink together. It was late. Everyone tired. He and Neil were in their working clothes. The argument was over nothing, its origins remain obscure; but they were rolling on the floor, over bottles, cigarette butts, entwined like lovers, except for the thudding punches. In the spinning half-light a steak-knife glittered under a table. His hand found it. It touched the rising stomach. The knife went through the cotton shirt. A scream followed, then a collapsing hiss like gas escaping a moist bag. Someone’s feet whispered, ‘You better run. We didn’t see anything.’

  Hume entered the gaol wearing a beer-coloured moustache, and a narrow suit. He kept to himself. Time lost all meaning for him. The routine made the days the same. Inside the weather was the same. The faces, walls, colours, smells and men’s talk were the same. The different meals seemed to distinguish the days; but, combined, their pattern made the weeks and months the same; then the years. Constant were the images of his crime, unfolding regularly, without warning, in slow motion. He came out wearing the same narrow suit, a middle-aged man with grey hair in his ears. He was ruined, displaced, forgotten.