This is how we see him now, in the light of the descending sun,
low and warm, behind him:
as if but muscle, overly tensed and quivering.
A man, getting to his feet, the mud that drips from his coat like
entrails,
his nose, hands far too big,
the sun spreads between his fingers.
And the woman’s eyes, suddenly they are the only thing in the frame:
her eyes,
we see her smoke-blue eyes,
heavy lashes motionless, then the shutter of the lids, closing and
opening over the orbs,
slicing everything in two. Everything you lost,
everything you never dreamed about.
We look into the woman’s glassy eyes, but instead of seeing our-
selves we see only the man.
The man, getting to his feet—
the man, again a body, parting the woman’s gaze as
a knife through fruit,
and the beauty his broken body must now accept.
Recurring dreams.
What became of the crab apple tree,
the one we planted in the back garden.
Disease killed it, she says aloofly, unmoved, as if having assumed
nature’s indifferent brutality, its indifferent
nurture of all things.
The dead, the living. A love of everything
in any form that might remind one of
indifference, but is the opposite: an attention to what there is.
In all new forms, in all the forms being may assume.
Forwards and backwards in time, the opposite of nostalgia, not
keeping anything for what it was,
but perhaps retaining something, or continuing to watch while
something dissolves,
so that something else might emerge in its place.
She considers it brutal, but at the same time rather elegant. She
says this out loud,
he nods.
In concentric rings originating from a central source, the disease
spreads through the garden.
And in concentric rings the creamy spores advance within the
fruit.
She forms an eye with four fingers.
The sound made by his shoes as he crosses the floor.
The sounds are ominous—a rummaging, rustling upheaval of his very being, like a clawing rake catching on a lower branch of the hedgerow, snagging in a tangle of brambles; a gashing of bark, sweat that starts to trickle, leaves crushed and crumpled. Looking down into the apartment from above is like peering into a shoebox furnished by a child, with tiny chairs and tables and rugs.
He is lying with his ear against the wall.
She paints her nails in the next room. He hears the drip of varnish onto the surface of nail, hears its application, counts each and every brush stroke. We view the two rooms as chambers of the heart, looking down from above.
All walls are thin, all sounds clear to him, and he is sharp, she thinks to herself. He can cut through a matter, grasp what things are about. Individual sounds, their significance. He knows everything, he sees it all from above.
Her glossy nails reflect the bulb of the blue halogen lamp. He hears all of this, and what she imagines too; what she plans.
To gaze at a glassy object and see the world reflected there without oneself being a part of that reflection; in that way to cease to exist as anything but the gaze of an eye; and yet to be that very gaze; a most peerless feeling indeed. The opposite of coming to a new and desolate town and seeing oneself in everything.
It may be the case that one comes to a new town, desolate and acutely visible to one’s own gaze; that one seeks refuge in a place where such an image exists in which to vanish; or that one finds a particular book and reads a poem, or simply the remains of a poem, and that one in that way vanishes, to become but a gaze.
The sun draws the colour from all things.
I remember thinking this and being assailed by the feeling of it being obviously correct. That this really was the way of things; the sunlight as a drain. Now I despair at ever having entertained the thought, how I ever could have felt that way, certain of something. One could also assume that light fills the world with colour. It would seem just as obvious, and today just as correct.
What then to trust.
What do we have other than the days, and in addition to them a gaze that on occasion might see. There are cracks and crevices, even in the laws of nature there are cracks and crevices; and there is light, entering and departing all things.
I don’t know if a person can take leave of something; I don’t know how it would help. I know that you are here, that you are here still.
The following day, on the instruction of her betrothed, the men came to drag Lucia away to a brothel; but the young woman stood firm as a mountain. They brought axes and roped her at the belly and knees. Still she stood firm. She bit her lip, her jowels trembled, and yet she stood firm as a deeply rooted tree, a mountain almost.
Stood.
Their axes were useless, the men conceded, wiping the sweat from their eyes with curses. Presently they came with firewood by which to burn her at the stake, but once again their efforts were in vain. A number of the strongest men then approached to bend her head backwards and she did not resist. The men put tongs to her gleaming eyes and wrenched them out with resolve, though not without several being compelled to vomit, their backs turned, the sound of a snapping branch, the sigh of bark under the blade surprised them perhaps. Or else she stood firm and gouged out her own eyes that no man ever again might desire them. Often, she is depicted with her eyes on a tray or in a small bowl. Or as here: on the stem of a flower held in her hand. She looks down at her eyes; there are six eyes in all: those on the stem; those in her sockets, by which she sees; and our own, in this instance mine, the two eyes I am forever lending out. One can pray to her, for she is Saint Lucy, the patron saint of the blind. No one else may desire them ever again. Such a thought.
There’s always someone who is parent to another. I have become mother to my mother. She phones again and I am gripped by a feeling of solicitude I imagine must be the same as a mother’s solicitude for her child. A recurrent feeling of her not being able to look after herself, me having to be there more often.
Different things being placed in small bowls. Beads in a bowl. Grain. Some colourful candy and raw red meat with a white marbling of fat. It’s as if the sounds trail on. The images are more sound than image.
The high panelling, the three bright rooms facing out towards the mouth of the harbour; the storm and the rain lashing the trees, no one ventures out today. The siren sounds; you say we’re safe here, we’re safe here. The rising water is cause for concern, the canal swelling still, and they listen to the radio as it rains.
They have been cooped up indoors for some time now; they have begun to mark off the days on the wall by the door—one mark for each day, the fifth diagonal. It was amusing to begin with, a kind of joke, but now it’s different. They try not to look when they pass through the hall on their way to and from the kitchen. The balcony is under water, the plants have lain down in their pots and troughs, and three scrawny pigeons have set up camp there, looking ever more wretched in their sorry plumage. Their eyes have dulled and become milky, in contrast to the glassy surface of the water that is disturbed only by the rippling eyes that are made by raindrops. The choppy waters of the canal rise up under the bridge, fat liquid slabs pressed up between the slats, sheets of spray and salt. She awakens slowly on the sofa, has dreamt, something about her sister, her sister being angry with her and shoving her backwards, causing her to fall. In the dream she decided to punish her sister, and pretended her fall to be serious. She lay there on the floor, as if she were unconscious. From the darkness behind her eyelids she watched as her sister fell silent and became gripped by fear, then to run away and fetch some men who lifte
d her up; that’s her lying there, be careful with her. And they took her to the hospital, where the doctors had to operate right away. They shaved her skull, and she knew as she lay there that she would have to let them operate on her brain even though there was nothing wrong with her—she knew she had to go through with it. She sensed her sister’s distress and deep regret, the way it mingled with her own, and yet all the time she felt that little dash of pleasure at seeing justice to be done. Having to pay for one’s sins. The meting out of punishment.
She lies with the old white throw covering her, the one they can’t discard even though it’s worn thin and frayed. Light falls through the clouds. Razor-finned spheres fly through the air, slashing their way through everything, furniture, bodies—you’re bathed in sweat, you’ve been dreaming, he says. He grips her and lifts her head as if she were an infant or the victim of some accident, a casualty. He pulls her up towards him, kissing her on the mouth, as if a kiss in some way counted in his favour. She is limp with sleep, the sleep that courses through her body. She is draped over his shoulder and stares out through the windows, out across the sea, another Venice entirely now; and the sheets of salt water thrusting up from under the bridge are a glassy arcade, ten thousand mirrors, the city rebuilt here in the midst of its demise. The harsh facades of the new buildings on the other side of the canal. No one ventures out, a single face in a window, but that was earlier. Not many windows can be opened anymore, no one left with cigarettes to smoke and windows to open in order to do so, and the last of the daredevils who took to the waters for a swim have either vanished or given up. He took hold of her knee and lifted her leg over the edge of the sofa, pushed her beneath him. The sea is rising, swallowing the bridge, suffocating the columns, its waves unfolding across the harbour area, the cobbles, consuming the old wooden sleepers, the tables, flooding the lawn, dissolving the trampled-down turf, thinning the soil that now begins to float, little scraps of bark and tiny stones filtered through the blades that stand like bristles, wave like bristles beneath the water, the calm beneath the surface, the rush of the waves drawing back, the grass bending with the movement, mimicking, then upright again; the next wave, and the next, and another. The sky contracts and tightens, different strata of cloud separating in bands, revealing something white beyond, light from somewhere, only then it is gone, fading away into grey. Where they are most compact, these grey ribbons shaft towards the ground in dark violet, a negative light, darkness decimating all things before it, sealing the view from the windows of this apartment. Everything closes in on them, the occasional chinks of brightness in the clouds are passages opened to allow something through. Metallic curtains of purple-grey rain. They exist inside this cubicle. An impending light, approaching like a calendar date or a saturation point; reactions, implosions, matter expanding and contracting. His back is turned and he cannot look into her eyes; if he looked at her now, he would see what was behind him reflected, but he looks at the wall, the splendid high panelling, the door leading out.
Who is most hopeless. Who is most in need of drawing on some addiction, drawing on the other.
A boat torn from its moorings in the storm, the darkness of the prow; the darkness that lingers about the beds and bodies, the hands folded and slid beneath the pillow, or the hands that hold another body, the cheek pressed against the throat of the other, the warmth between the two bodies; seaweed caught and then extracted like her hair as she drowsily opens the catch in the bedroom and the wind wrenches the entire window from her hand with a bang, like a sudden wound, or a garment of leather ripped open at the seam; horse riders tumbling like hail from the sky.
The wind breaks up the landscape in a raging clamour of lashing branches and rattling gates, bringing moisture to the eyes, sweeping across the open expanse between the boundary and the fringe of the woods, scraping and clattering over the frozen earth, over the tops and stubble. Winter lasts longer than summer because it reaches so far inside of everything. It counts and appropriates the ribs. It heaves the branches apart and hurls them together again. Time is bound in the movement, and winter paws and claws with its frost and its storms, ceaselessly altering the form of all things; frost and thaw and frost again, the same coat buttoned many times each day, done up and undone, sweaters and scarves drawn around the body, wrapping it up, the body flapping its arms to keep warm, or stamping the snow from its boots. A young man battles to light up a cigarette as winter batters the trees. A new layer of calcium with each passing day. Stargazer, horses chewing the bit, heads tossing back, the urge to move on in any direction, movement being enough; every street corner awaits a presence, shaped to accommodate anyone who lingers.
She could wake up to a mass of people staring in at the window; in the cold, their faces would be unclear, the pane steamed up by so much breath; a droplet of moisture could travel down and expose a section of chin, collarbone, or chest.
She often had to remind herself that nature possessed no will, that as such it was impersonal—unwanting of human contact, not meaning anything by snow. Unbelieving. The snow, glittering. The sea, glittering. The veins of her forehead are made conspicuous by frost, and she has noted that the long, almost invisible scar on her brow from the time she rode a horse under a low tree seems to emerge more clearly in the whiteness of such light. She takes off her gloves and holds them between her knees, feeling her brow with the tips of her fingers.
There’s nothing to feel.
The snow is dry.
The sounds are quick.
To sit and linger behind a stack of firewood and stand up as the horses come galloping by; they leap in the air and swerve away; fear creates empty spaces around that which is feared; the strange patterns of alarm, deposits of empty pockets of air incalculable as sea currents, plunging falls and hours spent alone, the body being unable to find a hold, connect itself. A lightbulb hanging from its socket on the ceiling. Getting up on one’s own to boil an egg, picking away its shell and running a hand over one’s arm. The dream of a summer cabin or a lighthouse.
Is the sun the same as the eye. Is sun.
To walk to the other end of the town, to the lock, like peeling a fruit and standing with something very bright in one’s hand.
An arrangment.
It is the height of summer and they are all together at last. The women and girls are standing in a row in the driveway, all five lined up between the two pillars. The men are at the sides, three on the right, three on the left. And then—this being the whole idea of the photo—on top of the two pillars that serve to mark the entrance of the driveway, the two tallest of the men stand holding each end of a long branch. From a distance it looks almost like a roof they are holding up above the females’ heads, or at least a canopy of some kind. The effect is that of a rectangular frame—the lower edge formed by the heads, the upper edge being the outstretched arms and the branch they hold between them, the sides are the pillars and the straight figures of the two tall men. The intended motif is thereby the field behind them, the photographer being positioned at the house rather than the road, as one might have expected. The rectangle frames the landscape and becomes as such an institution. A sorry mulberry bush steals the beholder’s attention and becomes the picture’s true subject, perhaps along with the dial of a watch worn by one of the men, which gleams in the sun. It, too, calls for attention.
All the females have dark hair and are wearing dresses with waistbands, though this is merely a part of the frame. In another photo—a family portrait—a sheep has found its way into the picture. It stands there, white as white with bulging eyes, yet there is nothing about such an animal that can disturb the image, no style of dress to signpost an era and thereby beguile the beholder. It is as if people who really feel things, their faces—the way they can make time burst open like ripened fruit out of which seeps the clearest liquid, a sense of our being here.
She is woken by him gripping her arm. You are innocent when you dream, live and let die, get yourself out on the ground, boys don’t
cry. Though he is the one running a temperature (40.2 degrees), it is she who feels hottest. Her breathing. She gasps for air. Dogs running out in front of cars, running away on crushed legs. A black metal anchor had embedded itself in the skull. It was a miracle in a way, that the boy wasn’t dead.
She looks at the painting of the track in the woods. It’s winter, the snow is blue in the shadows of the fir trees, yellow in the clearing further ahead. Stacks of firewood line the track, stockpiled like bundles of banknotes, a speech scribbled on a napkin and stuffed into a pocket for later use. A defence of some kind; a man comes walking as if on his way through the painting and out of it, and yet he is coming towards us, towards where we are in the picture.
To huddle together when all is calm and peaceful, the longest of days.
To step on one’s own toes.
The war passed like a sickness, I am always the same. Never any progression as such. Life runs the other way inside her, and thus she moves. Something inside her.
The sun is low in the sky, the way the moon was.
The wall is stuck to the picture like a playing card under a cup raised to the lips. The sky sticks to the eyes. Russia looks far too big on such a map. Too much of one thing. More than can be coped with. She runs her fingers over the painting. She cuts herself on the hole. Though no shard can be seen, she cuts herself. Blood trickles down her finger, drips to the floor in highly complex rhythm, a very poor kind of rain, a few drops is all. The sky collapses into the clouds, making them dark and heavy.
We go to church at Christmas, and he comes with us. Next year—this is what he says—we are going to spend Christmas with his family. In the USA, where they live. They sit there on the plane. She happens to suggest it might not be that important for them to go over every other year. His family being so easy and relaxed; your family being the way they are.
Of Darkness Page 7