In the Shape of a Boar

by Lawrence Norfolk

  They were always there, disguised behind his tusks and foaming mouth, peering out through his own fiery eyes. Little by little, in his first awakening moments and days in the cave, he feels a plausible boar's body tighten about his frame. Next, the victims appropriate to such a creature draw nearer.157 His own particular victims will follow.158 He is all but perfect for the role which awaits him in Kalydon. Anger rises in his throat until it can no longer be contained; the inevitable acidic foam, his unstoppable hooves, the descending red mist. Almost ready.

  There are initial propositions: that the father of Meleager omit sacrifice to Artemis; that the heroes gather for the hunt; that the flocks and herds of Kalydon be numerous and its soil rich; that the trees in the orchards groan under the weight of their fruit and grapes swell on the vines, promising wine.

  And there are final propositions: that the vines be torn up by the roots, the wine never made; that the orchards be cut down and the fruit rot where it falls; that the bellies of the sheep and cattle be slashed so that they stumble over their viscera as they run in panic down the hillsides; that some of the hunters live while others die, gored or trampled; that Artemis be satisfied in the end.

  Their middle term is the boar.

  The hunters pursue him and surround him, as they must. There was never a chance of victory or escape. Atalanta's first arrow was loosed even before his conception. The dense fat armouring of his back puckers and sucks the shaft into its rightful sheath. Must he first open his eye to admit the spear of Amphiaraus? The flesh of his flank prickles and itches, waiting for the weapon that will finish him. He senses his purpose as something alien and inevitable inside him: a waiting wound. The events which must now take place have no use for his life. His purpose is to be killed.

  He stands his ground to that end. The two hunters advance with slow steps, weapons twitching. He may not move. He thinks of his high meadow, its breezes and softness. They have seen him now. They will suspect his stillness. He counts seconds. He breathes in and then out. His events are done, all but one.

  Meleager's spear-thrust comes at him, its force snapping off the crosspiece and spitting him along the length of the shaft. Gut, lungs, heart, throat. Cold bronze inside him. His eyes roll up into his skull like her hands disappearing into Meleager's hair. They will skin him now.159 They will hack off his head160 and snap off his tusks.161 Alive, his fate is to be their justification for killing him. Dead, he becomes their trophies.162 They will divide him among them and carry him off. His tracks163 henceforth will be the footprints of men and their scrawled handiwork will be his markings.164 The boar's bestial mutations – his rages, his appetites, his strangest shapes and outgrowths–must all accord with familiar needs, for we are the authors of our monsters.165

  ***

  First, the sounds of strife had dulled, as though the combatants were battling their way deeper into the mountain. Then they had grown intermittent, with longer and longer intervals between the outbreaks of noise. Meilanion's straining ears had supplied the faint sounds which he sought, hearing his blood's popping and pulsing in his veins as the boar's dark and fatal flood, the hissing fall of his lungs as the gasps and grunts of his assailants .

  . . . with naked feet should they travel who study the dim tracks of wild beasts, lest the noise of their sandals grating under their sleek feet drive sleep from the eyes of the wild beasts . . . 166

  Then the cave was silent. He thought of waterfowl scrambling into the sky with their wings grasping for air and their feet dashing up water until the last beat and kick took them clear of the lake's surface and they rose into the sky. The birds shrank to specks and then they were gone with no trace to mark the fact that they had been there. Water was a surface which offered no more record than stone of what took place upon it. The night-hunter must fumble his way over both as a blind man might.

  Even in the dark they slay wild beasts by the rays of the moon . . . 167

  Whatever figure might yet be fashioned from his own flesh and blood, and whatever shape that figure's quarry might take, they would be ‘Meilanion’ and the object of ‘Meilanion's pursuit’. The youth who stood alone in the void formed by the surrounding mountains listened to the dull clap of his heart. Sinews stitched his flesh to its scaffold of bones. His weight pressed on the balls of his feet. His throat burned. His skin puckered from the cold.

  But ‘Meilanion’ felt none of this, being insubstantive, convenient, accomodating even of his quarry: a swift-footed woman fleeing him, or the huntress whose arrows sought out the Boar of Kalydon, or even the beast himself. His role was to pursue, to approach, to yearn. But never grasp, for then all three would glove his hands like the silvery-grey gossamer of spider's webs which tent the dew-soaked grass and are lit by the rising sun of the poets.

  He was at the fork in his trail. Behind him lay the possibility of his maintenance among the cloudy ghosts of the hunters whose path he had quit on the slope of Aracynthus. To rejoin them now would be to preserve himself as they were preserved and be strung between them as the figure necessary to their stories. His acts would subsist in the traces of those acts, which were the swerves and inflections of the hunt for the Boar of Kalydon. To quit their number meant the cave. He looked to the dark mouth which had swallowed the huntress and her consort.

  It is the night-hunter who takes the boar . . . 168

  There was no ‘soft ground’ to record his passage, but stone and the darkness of the cave. The rays of the moon would not penetrate there; he would be blind and helpless with the boar, whose tracks went unrecorded, as his own would, and the two who had preceded him. How many before them, he wondered. How many after?

  Did he stand then, his knees cracking, his muscles stiff from inaction? Did he turn away from the narrow opening of the gorge and advance instead towards the cave? There was no means to mark his choice, nor any witness to recall it. And so no one to see him climb the rock-strewn slope, and no record of his pausing at its entrance, to look back for a moment or two, no more. And, once he had taken his first hesitant steps forward into the darkness, no sign betrayed his existence or its passing. A dwindling disturbance stirred the darkness of the opening, then sank within it. He was beyond record, if these events were indeed those that would later prove to have been his fate: to walk into lightlessness and silence, leaving nothing. To be among the lost.

  ***

  A fragment of Palaephatus's De Incredibile surviving in a later epitome of that work first records the fates of Meilanion and Atalanta,169 which are summarised by Apollodorus in his Bibliotheca: ’So Meilanion married her. And once upon a time it is said that out hunting they entered into the precinct of Zeus, and there taking their fill of love were changed into lions.’ Hyginus reproduces and augments this tale, as do Nonnus and Servius in his commentary on Virgil's Aeneid.170 Later mythographers, following Hyginus, explained the metamorphosis as punishment for the lovers’ incontinence and cited Pliny for the fact that lions mate not with their own kind but with leopards. The transformation prevented them from repeating their sacrilegious act.

  But Pliny nowhere states this fact and the other authorities for their fates are contradictory or incomplete. Theognis claims that Atalanta flees her father's house and marriage, takes to the mountains and eventually ‘comes to know the end’.171 The end of love, one presumes. But with whom? Sons–all called Parthenopaeus – are fathered on her by Meilanion,172 or by Meilanion but not on Atalanta,173 or on Atalanta but by Meleager,174 or by Talaos of Argos,175 or Hippomenes,176 or by persons unknown.177

  There the record halts. The trails of ‘Atalanta’, ‘Meilanion’ and ‘Meleager’ run out. Their footprints chum the ground to an illegible palimpsest where all three are reduced to the evidence for their existences, collections of plausibilities, fleeting intersections between the different versions of their history, which meet as collusive armies to battle among themselves.178 Their bloodless warriors wield soundless weapons as they round the grass-flooded slopes, axes high, cased in black in
human armour. There . . .

  . . . in the cave: Meilanion's sandal scraping over stone . . .

  And yet for every history limping along the trail of its confused posterity there is another which consumes itself. Here they leave no mark at all. The prows of their ships cut the surfaces of seas whose waters close behind them and wash up the beach to sweep away the footprints of their crews. They march inland and the terrain preserves the trace of their passing only as the country which overlies an underground river maintains the deep secret of the subterranean course beneath it. The shrouds of their lives are draped over them and their features raise short-lived terrains of ridges and gorges. But the mountains dwindle. The basins fill. The countries of their lives settle over their bodies and smooth the heroes away.

  . . . heard the sound of breathing. Not his . . . guarded by the boar. The Anaurus-crossing spear of Me[leager179 Lay] broken at his feet as sign that they had passed [this way. And the] rough stone rasped his skin and [cut him He left his own] dark mark [on the walls of the cave With those of] yellow-haired [Meleager and Atalant]a . . . 180

  PART II

  Paris

  ‘Close your eyes.’

  The girl dabbed cold cream on his cheeks and forehead, wiped it down the bridge of his nose, then smoothed it over his face. Quick strokes of her fingers worked around his jaw and down as far as his collar. The paper ruff she had tucked there rustled. He heard the rattle of little pots and compacts, the soft rasp of tissues being pulled from their box. She blotted the top of his head, then paused. Bristles brushed his expectant skin, coating it in powder. Cheekbones, nostrils, the tops of his ears. She raised his chin to tilt back his head. He felt a tissue settle and cling. Her fingers pressed it to the skin of his neck then peeled it away.

  ‘There.’

  His head sat on a sagging plate. Its bloodless face regarded him from the mirror. He recognised the widow's peak, a drooping around the eyes. An unexceptional mouth set above an unremarkable chin. His face had lengthened in his late teens, when his appearance had been described as poetic by some. Equine, he recalled, by another. You sad horse.

  His thirties had rounded him out again and since then this face had been his. Tonight, painted, it would appear on television screens all over the country. Its encrusted forehead would crease with thought. Its grey lips would answer questions. He would wear a clown's face, drained of colour.

  ‘I appear to have died,’ he said.

  ‘The studio lights change the shape of your face. It's how the shadows fall.’ The girl tried to show him with her hands. ‘It's normal to wear make-up. Everybody does.’

  Her brush darted at a smudge above his eye. Sol blinked and nodded. This was the most she had said to him since his arrival. He had been escorted in by the producer, who had paid him elaborate courtesies before leaving him in the hands of the make-up girl. She had indicated silently the chair in which he should sit. Then she had set to work. He had assumed that she was nervous. She was young enough to know his work from school. It was part of the syllabus in France.

  The door behind them opened and a woman looked in. He watched in the mirror as her head turned left and right, then withdrew. She was the third person to have done this. Sol had looked up expectantly each time, but none of them had been Ruth. She would be somewhere in the building now, submitting to this same process in a room identical to this one. The heads popping around her door would be equally indistinguishable. But she would ask them in a Californian twang who they were, or who the hell did they think they were?

  The paper ruff was pulled away. The girl crumpled it noisily into a ball and tossed it into a corner of the room. How odd her days down here must be, he thought, painting the priests of the over-lit temple upstairs. She would tell her friends of moles and warts, of pustules and acne-pitted skin. Even one's skin had secrets. He had never appeared on television. He had not given an interview in almost twenty years.

  ‘The Americans have a phrase,’ said a voice behind him, which then adopted a mock-American accent. ‘"You look a real picture. "’

  This time he had not noticed the door opening. A buzz of noise billowed in from the corridor. Slava's face poked its way into the room, grinning nervously.

  ‘Faucher's asking if you'll join him in the Green Room,’ he continued. ‘Shall we?’

  He directed the question as much to the girl as to the man sitting before her. She nodded: all done. Sol straightened his tie.

  No,‘ he said.

  Slava pursed his lips. He had conducted most of the negotiations with Faucher's people, arguing over details in endless telephone calls. Moderssohn had involved himself too. Ruth, on the other side of the Atlantic, had deputed equivalent figures, Sol assumed. But Slava's interest was obscure. Securing Solomon Memel for Faucher's show was a coup of sorts. Slava's stock would rise, as a man who could secure things. As a fixer. That would be Slava's recompense perhaps. People do things for you, thought Sol. But why?

  ‘Everything's settled already,’ Sol said. Let's have a cigarette in the corridor. Then we'll go up.’ He took a last look in the mirror. His old grey suit. White shirt. Tie. He pushed himself out of the chair.

  The girl extended her hand. ‘Goodbye Monsieur Memel. Good luck tonight. I read all your work. I wanted to say earlier.’

  Smiling, he gave silent thanks that she had not. He took her hand in both of his. Slava hovered, then reached for his cigarettes and offered one to Sol.

  ‘There's a problem,’ he told Sol outside. ‘Ruth's been delayed.’ Clusters of people passed the two men, each group composed of a single figure cased in a subordinate shell of assistants. The attendants were thin young men and slightly older women, all smartly dressed. Their conversations spilled times and places to which the central figures either nodded or shook their heads, their faces hidden behind pale bronze masks of powder. Identical, Sol saw, to his own. He pulled on his cigarette and raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Her flight got in only forty minutes ago. Faucher thinks it best to start without her. They'll bring her in when they can.’

  ‘She's not in the building? When are we on air?’

  But beneath his irritation he felt a strange relief. There were answers he could give more freely with Ruth snug and distant in the plush capsule of her limousine. He thought of her falling in and out of sleep in its velvety calm while it nosed its way through the backstreets. There was something unstoppable about limousines.

  ‘Twenty minutes,’ said Slava.

  Beams of light descended in columns from the darkness of the studio's roof. A technician bent back his head and shielded his eyes, pointing to the top of a luminous pillar. It wavered obediently then disappeared. Sol followed the man's gaze up.

  Black metal lamps hung like bats from gantries high in the cavernous roof. They spread or folded their wings as directed, producing changes in the fall of electric light. Squinting through the glare, Sol made out human shapes clambering in the darkness above. The lights intensified then began to throb.

  ‘There's Max,’ said Slava, standing beside him. The man raised his arm in greeting to someone on the far side of the studio.

  Hot after-images glowed and floated in Sol's vision. Across the floor he saw the presenter moving in a barrage of drifting flares. White, yellow, ember-red. They faded and the familiar figure emerged.

  He had first known Maximilian Faucher as a little-regarded writer for the cultural pages of Paris-Soir. The presenter had been one of the many whose requests for interviews Sol had turned down during the controversy over his first book. Faucher had written his piece on the ‘Memel Affair’ regardless. Favourable, Sol recalled. That seemed long ago. Now, Max Faucher was better-known than most of his guests. Every Thursday night at eight o'clock, his face stared out from television screens across the country. He wore his hair swept back and would comb it with his fingers while he listened to those who appeared on his show. He bore a great resemblance to an Italian pianist Sol had once seen perform in Vienna and whose name he ha
d never afterwards been able to recall.

  Sol had encountered the critic from time to time. Faucher would nod to him at gallery openings or wave across restaurants and stride up to his table. Prompted by Faucher's attention, other diners would glance across, or stare at him, and a gradual recognition would relay itself among the tables: ‘It's the poet, the one who . . . ‘or, if they were younger, ‘Don't you remember reading his poem at school?’ Someone might quote a line, dredged from a half-forgotten lesson. It was of a piece with the shy students who sometimes approached him in cafés, or the mad ones who turned up on his doorstep, or the mail he received in languages he could not read, page after page, each incomprehensible except for the laboriously transcribed quotations. Who did they think they were writing to, or talking to? He was forty-nine. The lines they quoted had been written half a lifetime ago. The youth who had crawled into the darkness of the cave had emerged a different creature. His life was no longer the life recorded in those lines and he was no longer the man who had written them: the lines which made him the different being he had become. A long time ago, he had killed a man. The man had been dying. But he had killed him.

  That would not be mentioned. The ‘Memel Affair’ would not be mentioned. If asked he would stand up and walk out, Ruth or no Ruth. She was here to make a film of his poem. He was here for her. Not himself.

  Sol watched from the far side of the studio as Faucher made his final preparations. A little world of attendants and assistants revolved about him, dabbing at him, touching his elbow and murmuring in his ear. Clipboards were carried and boxes ticked. One held up a small mirror and Faucher angled his head to left and right. The presenter nodded, satisfied.

  A young woman walked over to Slava and himself, introducing herself as the production assistant. She talked over her shoulder to Sol as she led him back across the studio. Cameras were manoeuvred forward on soundless rubber wheels. Thick black cables snaked about the concrete floor, fixed at intervals by crosses of tape. They converged on a pool of light where two chairs confronted each other across a low table. Faucher was already seated. A microphone was being pinned to his lapel. Its wire was threaded carefully through his jacket to emerge behind and be plugged into a squat box bristling with other such plugs and wires. The presenter rose to shake their hands, Slava first, a perfunctory tug, then himself.