We see her features like a sky behind him. Her weightless hair exudes from her scalp and is as kindled by the harsh light.
The white surfaces we know must be the teeth.
Removed and icy, he seems, the way nature can be: indifferent and dramatic at the same time. Pupils darting beneath the thinnest eyelids, partially translucent, the soft wafer-thin hull like the membrane of an egg, quite as thin and yet not as strong—fragile.
THE MAN:
You knew all along.
THE WOMAN:
That there was so little time.
THE MAN:
It’s easy for you. You hardly noticed a thing.
Hesitation, revealing a kind of solicitude for him. Or for herself.
The crowns of the trees absorb nourishment from the sky. They too are roots; and roots become crowns in the earth-sky, the worms are insects there.
THE WOMAN:
Do you think that’s how it is. That the journey itself exhausts a person. I think it’s everything but the journey. In fact, it’s more the parting. That, and revisiting what you left behind. The journey is nothing, really.
Your paranoid look.
The woman’s throat.
The sweep of the collarbone towards the arm. Goose bumps.
Throat, rising and falling.
And the skin, contracting around the body, the hairs as they rise. The skin breathes, the body in exchange with its surroundings.
SCENE 2
A tall barstool with shiny, black-varnished legs. A high table in front of the window facing the garden. She sits on the stool, erect: the light is summer’s, it is summer, the breeze from the garden tugs at the white curtains that brush the floor like a hand passing over a knee, a disruption inside the room. Summer. The light falls in flat bands through the leaky walls, ribbons of light like swords plunged from all sides into a blade-box: that image, fleeting. And then again: the light, falling in through slats, slicing up the room.
There are no colours. Sun draws the colour from all things. A dimness is all there is, and this insistent light that seems to want in to everywhere. Like jealousy, the way it works things open. It seeps between the woman’s teeth, the narrow gap between her teeth. Light floods into the room like piercing jets of water, the shutters holding together the body of light, allowing only so much to pass.
A kitchen, afternoon. Summer.
The tall stool with the delicate, curving legs.
Her hair hiding her face.
The crown of the weeping willow, the one by the lake, hangs like a woman’s hair at the water’s edge. These lightest of touches, the sun. All the tiny hairs.
A thought that may occur: that this must be the place.
Closer and closer.
A close-up of the woman’s eye. It is half-closed, the eyelid covering exactly half the front of the orb.
Her eye, the collarbone, the chest with its ridges. An image of a flower losing a petal. And another. Withered. The two images superimposed.
Nature declared incapable, cheated, for the most part, she too. This is the way we sense her strength. A tough membrane.
Her fingers are greasy, their tips are moist and we glimpse an eye. It glistens in the light.
Her eye, and then her hands.
Only the hands. Cuticles large and white. Fingers wet, vaguely orange.
We search for an explanation in the image. An explanation in simple terms, a sphere colliding with the next.
We find nothing.
Our thoughts make our eyes homeless, our eyes beginning to wander. First within the image itself, then back within our thoughts, and into the image again, for we are unable to escape from the image into abstraction, not here.
We search outside the image and yet within what is seen. We try expanding the space by means of thought—a still larger image. Thinking by visualising.
We find her, for we have marked the place we left her, though not exactly, not the stool, but her body.
A small blue mark, occupation of a country, a flag or a stamp—this is how we occupy her, by leaving our mark on her body. The woman looks up.
We can find our way back to the marked body.
Her hands are placed before her on the table like fish.
She looks out at the garden.
We see the garden as she sees the garden, through the double French doors. They have stayed open all afternoon.
Shimmering warmth, something sugary that makes the dark green seem sticky. We turn our gaze towards her again, study her eyes to see if we saw the same as she.
Her expression is concentrated. She stares into the distance, a very particular concentration that makes us think that she does not see the garden at all. Her expression is that of a person looking out to sea.
A rhythm tapped out by a finger on the edge of a bathtub, the edge of a table, a hard and shrivelled fruit. Waves cross-hatch the sea, the way people cross-hatch landscapes and bodies.
The sea seems to go on for ever. The work of cross-hatching goes on forever.
The rhythm of the work, reminding us of states, other occasions, the memory of something repeated many times, the way you remember a season or a way of existence.
One of her eyes.
And the image of the sea.
We see the two images superimposed.
The two images are equal, there is no hierarchy. Time and place are unimportant, nothing is more imagined than anything else, her eye and the sea are equal because of their salience for us, here.
The image of her eye gradually becomes clearer, more distinct. It seems almost to soften the sea. And behind it: the image of the garden.
We see the three images as one, each superseding the next by turn.
The garden, vanishing.
The garden, vanished.
Her eye now fills the screen and is the only image we see: her eye. A black pupil, mottled green iris, the white of the orb, the only part of the body that is truly white—apart perhaps, in certain cases, from the teeth. Almost invisible, these tiny capillaries; and at the same time we see the ocean reflected in the eye.
We understand: she is looking out across the sea.
We understand: the garden is the sea. The door is not merely a door leading out into the garden, but a door leading out to the sea, both existing at once. The sea, waves.
And then once more: they are bright, a heap of rose hip on the table in front of her.
Not a single stain on her white blouse with its ribbons and lace. Preparing rose hip in such attire. An old-fashioned blouse, it may be very old, an item kept and cared for.
Then the three colours. The green of the garden, the blue of the sea, the orange of the rose hip. The three colours can borrow from each other, her skin borrows colour from it all. And at the same time we realise: in such light, in such heat, colours cannot exist. Everything is either black or white, the season of calligraphy. Not winter, as one might think.
We hear the breeze. We see her ear—now we see only her ear. The image changes, we see the rose hip dissected. The white seeds like teeth.
Her collarbone. And we see the bark of the birch tree up close. The two images melt together and she rises, her chest ridged like the bed of the sandbank, the same metal gleam.
Green eyes.
She has risen and moves towards the door. We see her from behind. We see the garden outside, and at the same time her eye, the sea reflected in its sheen, not distinctly, we sense it to be a kind of disharmony, the kind that is always present in the world.
We see the garden, but then the sea.
The sound is of the sea.
The shift has occurred imperceptibly, the sound of the garden has become the sound of the sea, imperceptibly, and yet within minutes the sound alters again and becomes once more the sound of the garden. Trees. The wind in the birch trees and the aspen. The sound of light and wind passing through foliage. Through tall grass that has not been cut for a whole summer and a whole spring. This is the movement that carries the shift in sound, from the gard
en to the sea, the trees, that are the sound of both, always. And then: the heap of rose hip.
The halved rose hips, rinsed and cleansed, in a bowl of black enamel that is matte on the outside, shiny inside.
The colour of rose hip dulls the senses.
SCENE 3
A wide beach, the sky. And the sea, slicing the image in two, as a revelation might, or an involuntary insight into the way something hangs together.
To lose something one never thought could be lost.
There are no sounds from the sea, but a person breathing. A sound from a body breathing—lungs, skin, breathing in and out. The beach has emptied, no one remains there, but we hear a person breathing.
At first the breathing of one.
Then two.
Two bodies, breathing.
First the breathing, then voices.
What are you doing here.
The sound of the sea surges in, as if until now it has been contained within a cloth, and then the deluge as the taut fabric is slashed with a knife.
We hear the voice distinctly.
The way it comes in over the sound of the sea, the sound of sand swept by the wind.
The man and the woman move into the frame, they enter the frame, appearing on the screen from the right. They walk on the beach. The steps they take are many.
We watch them walk. We watch them from afar. And then: the heel as it strikes the sand, the release of the toe, the knee reaching its apex, bent, stretched. Again, we see them from afar.
Their voices remain distinct, as if we are very close to them. They make no special effort in speaking, the rush of the sea is a voice apart. In this way the voices stand out, rather like an unfamiliar black wallet left on a dining table. Something on top of something else and shining almost. Now and then a seagull cries, or else we hear the wind at our backs. The wind, buffetting the vegetation, the noise of leaves rustling above their words, allowing us to hear only fragments:
THE WOMAN:
…to get away. It’s like there’s no room for thoughts when my head is blown full of sand, and that sound, the waves.
She gestures, throwing up her hands, pointing or whatever.
THE MAN:
…the body casts, of the mother and child.
THE WOMAN:
…like that…Pompeii…you know…
We move closer to the beach, venture some metres out into the open space, some metres out into the sand.
THE WOMAN:
The heat there—it’s like your throat filling with sand.
She grips her throat with both her hands, forming a collar that rises towards the jaw.
THE MAN:
They were so small.
THE WOMAN:
Something they weren’t meant to see, something stolen, something you steal your way into seeing, but which maybe you …
THE MAN:
…which maybe you shouldn’t have. They look like children dressed up as adults. And the children look like animals dressed up as human beings.
THE WOMAN:
What do you remember.
THE MAN:
I remember the body casts, of course, the one of the mother and child. That’s mostly it. But then I come to think of all the living, draining their water bottles as they wait for the train back along the coast. Water bottles strewn all over the place. And their faces, the gravity written all over them, the understanding that it would be wrong to laugh, that gravity is the appropriate thing, to be weighed down like that. And they think: I’m glad to have seen this, and glad to be able to go home again and forget such images. The beach, the rocks, and the sea—I suppose that’s what they thought about. Tomatoes and lemon trees, lemon liqueur, lemon soap.
We see the sea. The two people have left the frame again, the man and the woman. They continue to speak, we hear their voices.
THE MAN:
A thin dog.
A lost child.
A despairing face.
THE WOMAN:
Did you see their mouths, the way they were open. You can almost hear them, can’t you.
They’ve been screaming for seventeen hundred years, interred in the form of cavities. Before eventually they were discovered and had plaster of Paris poured into their forms. I think of it like developing huge photographs, only in three dimensions. The plaster is the developer poured over the photographic paper in a darkroom. I don’t think you can deal with looking at them unless with that thought in mind—that they’re empty shells to us, reconstructions, like shadows of something you … you have to misrepresent, and see for what they are.
THE MAN:
They were all running, that’s what I remember best. I imagined the way they tried to run away from the cloud of ash. Children in their arms, legs bent, that kind of thing.
THE WOMAN:
I can’t think at all when I’m there, I’ll never learn how. It’s like everything dissolves as soon as I set eyes on the place, like it won’t present itself as something real, it’s a problem. All thoughts kind of disappear—whoosh—just like that, reduced to nothing.
We hear the clack of two pebbles and understand that she has paused to pick them up and throw them into the sea, or else keep them in her pocket, or walk with them in her hands.
SCENE 4
The boy sitting on that person’s knee, that must be him.
In the photo both his front teeth are missing. In another he is standing in cotton underwear, white underwear, on a quiet residential street. He’s got big leather boots on and in his hand is a leash that droops away in an arc towards a dog the same size as the boy himself. His eyes haven’t changed, but everything else has.
His face has shifted in some way, it’s the same face only different. Like the autumn, summer, death, is merely a passage, like all things. In the process of becoming the same only different. Nothing can be held up and compared. Contradictions don’t exist.
A beach, raked and made tidy in the night—next morning everything is different. He emerges from the mudroom.
She is the only family he has left.
His uncle and the others, who in a way vanished along with his father back then. They were in the boat.
The yearning for a time one no longer recalls. There is a white orchid in the window, its flowers are three quiet parasols in the sun. Muffled sounds of activity from the kitchenette. A sink with a visible drain that disappears into the wall, a bar of lavender soap, the smell issuing into the room, keeping its walls upright, the ceiling in place.
His rented room.
THE MAN:
Her cheek was gashed, she smiled out of her cheek. Her eye had been attached to its socket, but both eyelids, lower and upper [he points at the woman, puts his fingers to her eyelids, lower and upper at once], were kind of split open vertically and had retracted from the eyeball.
THE WOMAN:
A film about two women, an actress. She stops talking.
THE MAN:
I’ve seen it. It’s brilliant.
THE WOMAN:
Atonement, was that it.
THE MAN:
I think it was Persona.
Their bodies, skin against skin. The violet tinge of the shadows, where an arm angles like an Italian stone pine (the slender trunk with its dramatic twists, the way you turn your head away suddenly in horror, an arm resting on his abdomen; various details, dark hair, a nipple with surrounding lactiferous glands, a hand, tendons visible through transparent skin stretching across the back of the hand, a knee, the rear of the knee where veins run close to the surface of the skin.
THE MAN [looking at the plant]:
It’s doing fine. Look at the flowers, they’re still there.
He strokes her hair to reassure her or himself. She is nervous, thinking about their parting, thinking about the way it feels like a countdown; she is unsure as to whether she will miss him.
If he will mean anything to her.
THE MAN:
It’s fine, it needs watering, that’s
all.
They lie still and we see them from the side. Their legs look long. They are looking in the same direction, his hand comes to rest on her head like a shadow that won’t go away.
Some time passes. The sun moves across the sky, shafts of light escape through the layer of cloud and slant into the room. On the street outside, people pass by, a young woman with her grandmother, the obvious annoyance of having to take care of the aged.
THE WOMAN:
Are you asleep.
THE MAN:
Yes.
THE WOMAN:
I miss you already.
THE MAN:
You’re tired, that’s all. I’m right here.
THE WOMAN:
She fell through the window.
The line of her back against the sheet. A split image, like an eye bisected by an eyelid. The shimmering violet where sheet meets skin. The work of gutting a fish, the palm of a hand pressing it flat against the board.
Of Darkness Page 10